(Narrative) 4 January 2012

For the last ten years of so, I've half-heartedly complained when the mood is right that I haven't had a week off work in 14 years.  I've felt it building the last twelve months or so; an awareness that I need to take a break.  So I did.  4 or 5 days around Christmas just passed, and a couple either side of New Year's.  As a result I feel reasonably rested, but restless too.

Maybe I knew that taking time off would harm me.  Without the eternal distraction of running a business, and bored with the computer for the first time in living memory, I've had to start looking around me.  And in me.  Weirdly, my thoughts keep turning to my father.

I don't normally write this kind of stuff but I need to get it out because I'm sick of it.  I need to do a Symbiosis-style purging of the demons, because it's holding me back and I need it out of my head.

He was not a kind man or caring.  I've never said that aloud, especially to my siblings who remember him much differently.  But then I was the last to be born, and six years after my nearest sister.  It is a very broken family and the gaps are due to age as well as attitude.  I'm closer in age to my oldest son that I am to half my siblings, and I grew up with my nephew as my brother.  Weird.

I think I was 3 or 4 when he left.  The one memory I have of him living with us was a hot afternoon in Rockhampton.  He took a blanket outside and spread it on the grass in the shade of the house, then fell asleep there.  I remember laying beside him and falling asleep too.  I remember nothing else of my infancy with him.

Mum took in boarders to make ends meet.  I only liked one of them.  Mister Rees.  I don't know what his first name was.  I asked him what I should call him.  He said, "Call me 'Sausage' ".  I laughed but I didn't understand until Mum explained it was a play on words - Mysteries versus Mister Rees - It's a mystery what goes in sausages.

A random memory.  He was a nice man, worthy of a mention, and the only one who entered our lives who didn't hurt us.

Dad moved down to Keppel Sands.  I hadn't seen him in a while.  I was 8.  I only remember because I took a friend down with me once, and we were both at the old convent school.  He was very good looking, I recall.  I think I had a crush on him.  My sister would come too.  She was six years older than me.  We got on as well as young siblings do, and despite our many battles, I have some fond memories of growing up with her, and she seems of kind nature as an adult.  I remember the car caught on fire one day.  It was put out easy enough.  And I remember my sister and her boyfriend at a bonfire on the beach.  And I remember my father listening to Kamahl records.  I found a football on the beach.  He told me to go find someone to play football with.  I said I don't like football.  He called me a pansy.  That's all I recall of him at Keppel Sands.

He went away again.  He sent me a card for my tenth birthday.  It read 'To Andrew from Dad.'  A thing of great affection.  Unfortunately for my curious mind, I was also very intelligent.  And a philatelist - I knew postage stamps.  This one didn't have a postmark, so it was hand delivered.  At the same time, one of my sisters was acting oddly.

I followed her on my bike one day - somehow I kept up with her car - I discovered she was visiting him in secret.  He was living in a boarding house.  The Palm Lodge.  It had a broken front door that was never closed and several men shared three rooms.  I started going there after school each afternoon.  I'd just sit in the hall, hoping that one day, he'd acknowledge me.  He wouldn't though.  He'd walk right past me, then lock the door to his room behind him so I couldn't follow.  I remember an old English guy made me a peanut butter sandwich one day.  He wore nothing but Y-fronts.  His name was Bill.  The bath was in the kitchen.  He told me to sit on a stool while he had a bath, so I did.  I remember that he was wrinkled from neck to toe.  He didn't try anything.  We talked after and then he went back to his room.  He left me sitting in the hall.  I got upset that a stranger could be nice to me while my father couldn't, and I cried as little boys might.  My father stormed out and called me a faggot pansy and told me to go home.

I remember that the bannisters on the stairwell had peeling paint; white over pale blue over red.  The carpet in the hall was one of those Persian types with ornate patterns in reds and grey.  Eighty years before at least.  Now it was faded pinkish-brown and the underlay fibres poked up like tiny tendrils that wriggled as the breeze passed over them.  I remember boxes of empty bottles in the entry hall that never seemed to get taken away.  And there was a cat.  It didn't like me, but I didn't like it either.  I turned up one day and the place was empty.  All the lodgers had been kicked out.  The English guy was arrested.  Years later, I learned he was a convicted sex offender.  Yet strangely, he showed me every courtesy, and a simple kindness my father never did.  Companionship.  I kept visiting for another week or so, in the hope Dad would return, but he didn't.  Eventually, Mum worked out where I was going each day.  She came and got me and told me he was gone.

He moved to Hervey Bay.  My mother was working two jobs as a pub cook to keep us afloat.  I remember how exhausted she always was.  Perhaps in need of a break, she forced me onto my father.  Two weeks a year, for the August holidays.  I was sent to his home - He couldn't ignore me now.  He was living in Pialba with a large bitter woman named Dot who hated children.  The house was wrapped in plastic.  Literally.  If I stepped off a carpet runner, I was locked outside in the yard all day, and only let in for dinner.  Then immediately to bed.  That was how it was.

Dad did nothing, said nothing; just sat at the table in his shorts and singlet listening to the horse races.  He did this every day.  Off to the TAB at opening time, then the RSL for a drink, then the TAB again in the afternoon.  Sometimes he would buy me a sarsaparilla at the RSL.  I'd get bored quick, wishing I was back in Yeppoon.  Eventually some random old guy would offer me a game of pool.  Dad always pulled me out mid-game, then we'd drive home, eat dinner, and then he'd water the garden.  By 730, everyone would go to bed.  Two weeks every year, exactly the same ritual.

I went fishing one day off the Urangan pier.  I was 11.  I caught a bream on a handline, probably the biggest I've ever caught.  I took it home and showed him.  It was the first time I remember him expressing interest in anything I ever did.  We watched the cricket on TV.  It was a great match - the best match ever played.  And right at the end, Trevor Chappell bowled an underarm.  We both got angry together.  He took me out back and we fed the parrots with sugared water.  I returned home the next day.  "We'll go fishing next time," he said.

Somewhat elated, I returned to Rocky.  The sale of the house had gone through.  We're moving to Yeppoon, Mum informed me - She'd bought a pineapple farm on 100 acres.  It sounded pretty cool to me.  What wasn't cool though, is that Don was back.  Don the drunk, one of the lodgers I didn't like.  They were together now, like husband and wife.  I sucked it up, but I don't recall a time when I didn't hate him.

The farm lasted one day.  Drunk on sherry, Don decided to burn off some grass by the road.  It burnt everything, our entire crop, the shed, and 400 acres belonging to the neighbours.  Mum lost everything; everything but Don - he stayed.  We moved into a rented house in the hills.  My dog had a litter of puppies that day.  Don put them in a potato sack and ran over them.  We can't afford to feed puppies, he said.  He made me watch him do it.  I remember screaming and screaming and screaming.  Mum came outside and yelled shut up.  She was a drunk too by then.  I'd just turned 12.  I went through puberty young.  I had my first wet dream that night and thought I'd wet the bed.  It all seems surreal in hindsight.

We moved again, to a house looking over the bay.  I liked it there.  I could see Great Keppel from the veranda.  Then one unremarkable night, I became a man.  Don beat me so badly, I just wanted to die.  And then he bent me over the table and raped me.  It went on for six months or so.  "If you say a word, I'll kill your mother," he said.  So I took it, and I hid it, until I found a hero who scared Don away.

I was Grade 8, he was Grade 10, and we came together by chance.  And he loved me.  He put me on a pedestal so high.  To him, I was the most wonderful thing in the world.  I was in constant awe that someone could think so highly of me.  He gave me a ring, and I gave him my depths.  At age 13, I lost my virginity for the second time.  We lived in constant fear that the church or the police would find out.  We'd go to a cave at Wreck Point and make love every day after school, he to me, and I to him, then we'd make wild plans to run away and be together.  I needed no one anymore.  It was just him and me against the world.  With Don gone, my mother found another man in Jack.  He was a sanctimonious arse but it didn't faze me.  I was head over heels in love.  My father no longer mattered, and nor did my stepfathers.  And then suddenly, my hero's life was cut short.

I fell apart.  I was insane with grief.  I tried to overdose but failed.  I told no one what was wrong.  I didn't want anyone to know.  I didn't want to admit it myself.  Without him, I was disempowered.  I was nothing again.  There was no one to tell anyway.  No, it was better to pretend the past was a dream.  And so I did.  I regressed to a babbling teenager, taking snippets of those around me to form a template for how I should be.  Oddly, I became extremely homophobic.

My father blamed my shattered state on my mother.   Next holiday, he made an attempt to bond.  He went out of his way to prove he was the better parent.  Even the old crone Dot was nice to me.  He planned a camping trip at Toogoom.  I got eaten by sandflies.  I have an allergy.  Even my eyes were swollen - I couldn't see for three days.  Dad ranted.  Faggot pansy.  I ruined all his perfect plans to be the model father.  He whisked me away and dumped me with a progression of siblings in Brisbane. 

Thirty years later, my siblings still hold a grudge against me for the affair.  Strange that they despise me for that, and not because my removal from my mother sent her health and life into a downward spiral when her baby boy was taken away.  In hindsight, she needed me more than I realised at the time.

My father died soon after.  I'm not sure if we made progress towards the end or not.  At some point, he gave me a diary of poems from the war, so I guess that was something on his part - though Mum took it off me and [apparently] sent it to the war museum in Canberra.  He had also put aside some money for me - two grand, a princely sum for the day - though my sister says she used it to pay for his funeral expenses.  I never saw a cent.  I didn't care.  Whatever the truth of my father's moods in his later life, it had all come too late.  When he died, I had just turned 15, but I was already a very old man.  In this new life, I was off the rails.  Lying and stealing, school by day and stripping at the underground clubs in Elizabeth Street at night.

With Dad on his death bed, and my sibling-guardian unable to bear her irascible brother any longer, she sent me out to Longreach to live with Mum.  It was revenge - she made no secret of it.  I said goodbye to him, and I was truthful.  I told him why I was going.  I almost told him the truth about my past, aware that he couldn't hurt me any more.  But he was frail in body and mind.  In Longreach, I received the news by telegram.  I got shit-faced and tore up the Lyceum Hotel.  I got kicked out then I tore up the Commercial as well.  The police locked me up.  Mum came and got me.  Three years later, my nephew told me that my name was the last thing Dad said.  I'm not sure I believe him.  I can't ask him now.  He's dead too.

Still 15, I returned to Brisbane and found it just as empty as I'd remembered.  I waited for the city to fall asleep one night and tried to drown myself in the fountain at King George Square.  Some Hare Krishnas dragged me out.  But instead of palming me off to the police, or lecturing me on my stupidity, they took me away to a temple at St Lucia.  They fed me and gave me a room in which to stay.  And that was all.  For a few weeks I found some sort of peace with them, and I will always be grateful for the immensity of their kindness.  To this day, I cannot light a stick of incense without remembering them.

A few months later, I got a girl pregnant.  She was two years older than me.  A baby son was born and soon after, she was pregnant again, by which time, the small amount of affection I felt for her had turned to bitterness, for her nature was not kind.  At 17 she told me if I ever left her, she would take away my children and I'd never see them again.  And so it was.  That was the foundation of my life for the next two decades.  Determined to find an ally of some sort to help me cope with a loveless life, at 19, I moved the family to Rocky to be near Mum.  She was slipping by this stage, and often lost in drink.  Enraged one day, she blurted out that I was hated by everyone because they knew I was a rape child.  Everyone knew but me, it seems.  Whether it be true or not, apparently my father raped her one night after an absence of sex for years.  I was conceived.  Maybe that simple act of my being born ruined their marriage; I was a reminder every day of what had happened.  I don't know, and frankly, I don't care.  You can't pin that guilt on a child, and to my credit, I never wore it.

Sometime during my 20s, Mum rang me to complain that Jack was harrassing her.  I found him.  I tracked him down and I beat the living shit out of him.  And throughout the assault, it was Don's face I saw.  Don was dead - I couldn't avenge myself on him, and Jack was little better, so i figured he would do.  Jack died about a year later.  Scirosis - no surprise there.  Mum started going downhill.  She went into a nursing home a few months later.

In my late 30s, with Mum well lost to dementia, she told me that she knew what Don had done to me but she didn't find out until afterwards.  She asked me to forgive her.  I did.  Then out of the blue, she asked me if that sweet boy from Bungundarra still comes to visit.  The question caught me off guard.  Then she searched her memory as old people do then clicked her tongue as it returned.  She said his name.  She remembered the house in the hills, and picking me up on Sundays.  I was shattered by the barrage of memories - They came like a blow to the guts.  He was my secret, mine alone - No one was supposed to remember him but me.  But I was so glad she did.  I told her yes; he still comes to see me every night.  And then I told her that he's more than just a friend, that I love him and he loves me.  She patted my hand and smiled and said I know.  She lasted another year or so then drifted off in her sleep.  I look back on her with utter fondness.  She was the very best mother a boy could ever have.  With her passing, my last link to those days was severed.  Perhaps that's why I moved back to Yeppoon; to see if any part of me still exists.  I don't trawl the streets and beaches revisiting all my memories - I did that many years ago.  I'm searching for that element of belonging.  I just feel that this is home, where my spirit and those of the people I've loved are happy and free.  I guess it's the aboriginal in me.

People tell me I view the past unfairly (without them knowing the fullness of the tale).  In this sterile age of political correctness and social conformity, people love cliches.  Yes, the old man was in Changi, a prisoner of war, and I don't doubt that was awful beyond comprehension.  God knows, I've used that excuse for his behaviour all my life.  Indeed, when my life was at its worst, I used that knowledge that he had suffered more than me, in order to keep the razor from my wrist.  But in the end, it all comes down to this - He raised five children before me, and they have nothing but fondness for him.  Changi didn't stop him being a good father to them.  I could handle his loathing for me, if he had been an utter bastard to all of us.  So here I am, midway through my adult life, armed with the wisdom and logic that comes with age, and I realise that I have no other option than to take it personally.  So I respond personally. 

Wherever you are Dad, you were a cunt to me.  I've wanted to say that all my life.  I thank whatever gods exist that I did not use you as a role model for raising my own children.  They have turned out well, and not one of them doubts their father's love.  I no longer have your war medals or a single photo of you.  I gave them away to others who have fonder memories of their father.

And with the writing of this page, I purge you from my history.  Like all other stages in my life thus far, it's time to move on and pretend that the past never happened, for only then can I live the rest of my life with something akin to normalcy.