You Never Met My Father (6 page)

Denny was so busy we hardly ever saw him. Just as I got up he went to work in summer pants and a pressed white shirt, always clean shaven and with Brylcreem in his hair, selling clotheslines. At least I thought he was. Sometimes he mucked up my hair in a fleeting, friendly farewell. My mother had a strict rule about early bedtime, so he usually came home after I went to sleep. He worked five days a week. Sometimes on a Saturday he was home, sitting in the living room, with a paper spread over his knees (a form guide, no doubt), but he got impatient with me when I wanted to be with him, shooing me away with a flick of his hand.

Pat warned me to keep away. She held my shoulders and looked at me in her usual sympathetic way. “Your poor father works very hard, darling,” she said with the briefest of smiles. “Let him rest.”

There were times when he was cross with her too and would raise his voice. Mostly she said nothing but sometimes I heard her arguing with him.

“You'll get caught, Denny,” I heard her say one day.

On another occasion she said, “I'm not a magician. I can't pull meals out of thin air, can I?”

When Jean, who was listening behind the door with me, explained in a whisper what a magician was, I wondered what my mother meant.

“And money doesn't grow on bloody trees either!” he retorted.

He had already told me that the jacaranda in our front yard was a money tree. He had stood at my side, his hand on my shoulder, and looked up at the tree for a few minutes, scanning for money. “Can you see that?” he said, pointing at something. “There's a tenner! I'll have to get up there and get that some time.”

I couldn't see it. He squatted next to me and kept pointing, urging me to follow his directions.

“Up higher. To the left. A little further. Yeah, that's it! See it? Are you blind?”

And then he biffed me, affectionately, and laughed.

“Get it now!” I cried.

“Can't. Too busy.” He nodded at me seriously and went away.

I cherished the times I shared with him but he was always too busy for more than a few moments. I kept an eye on the money tree, wondering when my father would return to pick the ten-pound note he could see, waiting for coins to appear like acorns.

Once or twice I came upon him doing something beneath the house, fiddling with a piece of apparatus whose purpose I didn't understand. I was eager to learn, especially from him, and when I inquired he answered, “It's a wigwam for a goose's bridle.” The second time I asked for its name and he called it a “thingummygig”.

When I told my mother what he had said, hoping for clarification, she just laughed and said, “Your father hasn't got time for the names of things, darlin'. His mind's too busy to stop and look for silly old words. He just races past them.”

Our lives revolved around, depended on, our steadfast mother, who fed us, washed and ironed our clothes, who taught us how to tie shoelaces and cut our nails. She made sure we were as clean and tidy as she was, made sure we had brushed our teeth after meals and went to bed early. She instilled in us the importance of sensible routines and respectability, while our father flitted in and out of our daily lives, a chimera whose jokes and commands were usually incomprehensible.

Once or twice we went on family outings, memorable because we were spending a few consecutive hours together.

Denny took us on a picnic to a park on a hill, where I saw some strange people. The men were dressed in shiny jackets and tight trousers that my mother called jeans, which we all thought was funny because it was like my sister's name. The women wore colourful slacks that brazenly showed the shape of their legs, and tight tops that showed the pointy shape of their bosoms. The cuffs of the men's jeans were rolled up enough to display their red socks and pointy shoes. All of them had their hair slicked into pompadours, held aloft with grease or spray. Denny told me they were called ‘Bodgies' and ‘Widgies'.

We moved well away from them and must have had a pleasant time because I remember little else about the day, except that my mother was happy—she was smiling a lot—and he threw a ball to me once or twice. Or am I being fanciful, wanting to believe my mother could be content and my father did play with me sometimes?

He did, after all, take Jean and I to a public pool. I remember this clearly! The pool had cool, unnaturally blue, strange-smelling water. My mother didn't come because she couldn't swim. In his bathers he looked like a gorilla: powerful and covered in thick hair. Even his legs were a bit bowed. Gorillas were scary monsters. And when they rushed forward, beating their chests, they were terrifying. He tried to teach Jean how to swim but she sank to the bottom, where, engaging the independent attitude for which she was later renown, she walked across the bottom to an underwater ladder and ascended. Denny was grinning so much that creases appeared on his cheeks and his ears fluttered. He reassured her he would have rescued her if she had been in peril, but he wanted her to learn the most important lesson of all: “look out for yourself; you can't trust anybody”. He held us both at the shoulders, first Jean and then me, and repeated the words and urged us to remember his advice.

Was this his oblique way of telling us we would soon be on our own?

A few weeks later I came home from school to find Pat distraught, packing everything, doing her best to avoid tears. She suddenly looked much older to me. Her face had lines I'd never seen before, like erosion along gullies after a downpour. She was calling me her ‘little man' again as I tried my best to help her shut a bulging suitcase. I pleaded to be told what was going on and where my dad was. And in a voice that sounded unnatural, as if it were about to rupture, she explained that he had to go away because of work, which was only a small white lie, and she was taking the rest of us back to Portland, and “don't worry about your father”, we'd see him again one day
.

It felt as if the earth was spinning out of control beneath my feet, and if I didn't run furiously I'd be bowled over and swept away.

All I wanted was to stand still with my father next to me.

Was Pat trying to protect us by keeping Denny's whereabouts a secret? If so, she made a grave error of judgment. Her silence filled me with dread and doubt.

I couldn't accept that he had left us simply for more work. After all, we had been following him along the eastern seaboard, shifting from city to city, house to house, school to school, as he sold rotary clotheslines. Why shouldn't that continue? I suspected something more serious had happened to him. Something bad, in fact—something shameful—that Pat wouldn't reveal to us. I suspected the various surnames we used had something to do with it. You would only change your name if you were ashamed of it or you didn't want someone to find you.

He became a negative presence in my life, a shadow without embodiment. I couldn't even bring myself to talk about him with Jean, much less Pat or anyone else. Except Carol, perhaps. She would have listened to me. But I thought she was too young to understand. So the shadow became my own secret, which set me aside from my mother and sisters, set me adrift, you might say. And that secret radiated shame. It was my first real experience of separation, isolation…individuality. My notion of self, who I am, I've come to understand had a morbid origin.

Years passed before I found out what had happened to Denny, although I was to learn much sooner of his whereabouts from an entirely unexpected source.

Bald, bespectacled Uncle Mick was my mother's eldest brother. He looked cantankerous but a more benevolent, easy-going uncle I couldn't have asked for. He lived with his wife, Aunt Gerty, and daughter, Brenda, in a fibro-cement-sheet house on the southern slopes of the hill that rose out of Fawthrop Lagoon. They were the Staggs and they took us in without complaint or any questions that I was aware of about Denny.

Conveniently our other relatives in Portland lived next door. The Stewarts: Aunty Barb, who was Pat's sister, her husband, Harry, and their only child, Don. Why my relatives were neighbours I had no idea and never thought to ask. I was simply grateful for my unexpected inclusion in this gregarious clan after the uncertainty of life with Denny. The Staggs and Stewarts had been in Portland for more than a decade, more than my lifetime. A more sedentary tribe I couldn't have hoped for. A gate had been installed in the side fence to reduce the number of steps between their back doors. And lest the journey be too taxing a private phone line linked their back porches so they could contact each other just by cranking an antique handset on the wall. All the adults had steady jobs. Uncle Mick worked for the post office as the teleprinter operator. Aunty Barb and Aunt Gerty worked as barmaids at the Mac's Hotel. Uncle Harry kept the books at a local automotive workshop. After work, within the constraints of six o'clock closing, the menfolk drank furiously as if to negate the monotony of their days. Occasionally, at night and on weekends, they went ocean fishing off rocky outcrops on the capes. They followed the local football team, went to matches and stood as close to the boundary as possible to vent their feelings towards oppositions, umpires, work, the world, or anything else that sprang to mind. But what they were fondest of (it was easy to tell) was sitting at home in beery confabulation, by the wood stove when the wind was cold or outside when the sun poked through, preferably in the company of others. In summer, if a fly happened to land on the froth in a glass of ale, one of them would inquire as to whether it was doing backstroke or dogpaddle. Then the luckless creature would be removed with an artful puff and a grateful comment on how little it had managed to drink.

The beer consumption amazed me. I had never seen either of my parents touch alcohol. The Staggs and Stewarts, both men and women, swallowed copious amounts, supplying them with enough raw material to build impressive bottle walls, which for a while I was fooled into believing was the purpose of all the consumption. They took offence at my suggestion they drank too much.

Aunt Gerty was my favourite. She was a stout woman (in dimension as well as her choice of beverage) with a majestic bosom and blue-rinse hair. I liked her thunderous farts as she got up every morning. Her beer farts, she called them nonchalantly, as if they were as natural as the rising sun. They put me in a good mood for the day. She was raucous and always had something outrageous to say that raised the hackles of her husband or whoever happened to be around. Often someone dropped by and stayed the whole day, or at least until the beer ran out, which was a rare, traumatic occurrence that was in danger of transforming the mood of the entire neighbourhood, unless like a miracle a guest had an emergency stock in a car boot. Sometimes, when the beer was flowing, Aunt Gerty would play ditties on the upright in the lounge room while others sang along. If I was around she would sneak me chocolates and kisses. She liked to ruffle my hair, tangle her bejeweled fingers in it and tug until I protested. For reasons that still elude me she used to call me ‘Butch' or ‘Butchyboy', so often that others in the tribe, including my mother, adopted it. Perhaps she misjudged my character or her intention was ironic, but usually when she said it, she put a sweaty hand around my neck, drew me into her bosom, where I was in danger of suffocating, and chuckled while I squirmed.

“You're a good kid, Butchyboy. You love your Aunt Gerty, don't you? Then you look after your mother now, for me, okay? You be strong, won't you? She's going to need a good man in her life, not like that mongrel father of yours. You know he's a no-hoper, don't you, Butchyboy? Good riddance to bad rubbish we say, don't we?”

She must have known something about my father that I didn't know. If she did, she never bothered to enlighten me. But ‘good riddance to bad rubbish' meant only one thing to me—gone for good. My heart constricted.

Aunt Gerty and Uncle Mick had three children. Rory and Ann had already left home and started families of their own. Brenda their baby was probably a mistake since she was more than ten years younger. She was about the same age as Jean but that was where the comparison ended. She was proudly dumb, conventionally pretty and immensely popular in the neighbourhood, especially amongst the boys who followed her around, played in the yard with her or went exploring in a thornbush paddock opposite the house.

Jean was pretty too but in a sisterly way. She and I often tagged along and were only tolerated because we were related. We could have played with our other cousin, Don, but he was a year younger than Carol and so of no consequence. Besides, he was an odd boy whose best friends lived inside his head. We weren't offered cigarettes or taken into secret cubby houses like Brenda but allowed to play hide-and-seek or Cowboys and Indians when they were short of Indians. And once, as a reward for dying several times in Custer's Last Stand, I was invited to spy on Aunt Gerty's bum through the nightsoil-man's portal at the back of the outdoor dunny, an offer I was too terrified to accept.