The Crossroad

by Mark Donaldson, VC

  I was changing, and not always for the better, in Dad’s eyes at least. Once, when I was in trouble and he was coming at me, I put my hands up to him. He paused. His face was like, You’ve got to be kidding, right? I said, ‘Come on, let’s go!’ That was a bad move. He was a strong, wiry bloke, with powerful wrists and arms, and he just slapped me to the ground dismissively. He gave me a look that said, The day you knock me down will be a cold day in hell. It was a moment that put me back in my place. It’s not that I ever thought he was a cruel bastard. It was more me waking up to myself. I never raised my fists to him again.

  When I was about thirteen, my misdemeanours began to escalate. Brent had turned into a well-behaved high achiever, and I guess in my typical contrary way I was carving out my own identity. None of what I did sounds like very much individually, but it begins to accumulate, especially in a small town when people want to put you in a pigeonhole, and before long it was my persona to be one of the kids who got into trouble. When you’re thirteen years old and you understand that’s the way people look at you, you sort of drive yourself to live up to it, or down to it. If you’re going to take that opinion, I’ll show you and make it much, much worse than you thought. I was an extreme character. It didn’t matter what direction, I always wanted to see how far I could go, and teenage rebellion was one more opportunity to push the boundaries. When people see who I’ve become, they wonder what caused the turnaround. Certainly in Dorrigo there are a few people with long memories who can’t match up the Victoria Cross recipient with the feral nuisance kid who used to live there! But to me, there’s no incompatibility: I’ve always been drawn to adventure.

  I drifted into a different group in Dorrigo, known for more serious mischief. We rode our pushies to the railway museum, a glorified name for the shed and storage yard where an enthusiast kept some of the old steam trains. We opened the doors and started smashing some stuff up. Then we found these big silver canisters and threw one out the door. Boom! What were they? We didn’t care – there was a whole bunch of them. Awesome! Whatever they are, they explode when you throw them! They had a little red disc with two wire straps. We set a few off and egged each other on. I was up for how far could we push it – it didn’t matter what, that’s what I was all about – so I said, ‘Let’s take one into town and let it off and see what people do.’

  When we got into town, a bunch of kids were hanging out at the park. We told them we were going to set off one of these massive exploding things at the brick toilet. They said, ‘Nah, yous won’t do that.’ Feeling the peer pressure, not wanting to be seen to back away from a promise, I stepped up and said I’d do it.

  I tied some string around the wires and hurled it at the wall. It went off like kingdom come, and the kids bolted in all directions. I took off on my bike too, tearing down the laneways between the shops. I was scared but thrilled – I guess from that minute I knew that I loved exploding things.

  But taking risks came with a cost. A couple of days later at soccer training, I was putting my boots on. I saw the old man before he saw me. Someone said, ‘Your old man’s looking for you,’ but I already knew. He came over, unnaturally calm on the outside.

  ‘Get your stuff and get in the car.’

  ‘I’ve got training on.’

  ‘I’ve told you, get your stuff and get in the car now.’

  He drove in silence, but didn’t take the turn-off towards home. I thought, This is a bit different.

  Then he said, ‘Righto, where are they?’

  ‘Where are what?’

  ‘Your little mate’s told us you did everything, we know, so where are they?’

  There was no point fighting it. If I’d been dobbed in, I would only look silly by lying. I basically spilled the beans, took him to pick the canisters up where we’d cached them, and he took me to the police station. The constable read the riot act and told me I’d go to jail. My punishment in the end was to show up at certain times to help clean public areas, like a form of community service without the actual criminal process. At home, Dad grounded me for six months. I could only leave the house to go to school on weekdays and for sport on weekends, and after school I had to come straight home. If I went out, I had to stay with Brent and watch him playing guitar with his mates.

  That incident was a catalyst for Dad to ask, What’s going on with my son? He and Mum began to worry that I was seriously going off the rails. At school I was beginning to be seen as one of the bad kids who’d wreak havoc and smoke cigarettes. I wasn’t one of the good kids whose parents were the pillars of the community – Mum and Dad hadn’t been there long enough for that. Everyone knew Dad worked at the abattoir and Mum was the secretary at the doctor’s and dentist’s. The locals would take great glee in telling her what I was up to, which was never good.

  The biggest tragedy in my grounding was that I’d been having a little love affair, and all of a sudden I couldn’t see her any more. You grow up pretty quickly in a town like that, and even at thirteen, as well as vandalism and experimentation with alcohol, cigarettes and everything else, I was trying to hook up with chicks. There was a lot of pine forest around the school, dropping down towards the river, and we’d skip classes and go down there to muck around. I never had a very serious girlfriend, though I felt strongly about all of them at the time! It was almost a rotational system, everyone hooking up with someone different from one week to the next.

  By the time I was fourteen, music had come into the centre of my life. Even when we were little, we painted our faces as Gene Simmonds from Kiss and poked out our tongues. Then we were into rap – outfits like NWA and 2 Live Crew, which had shocking words about shooting coppers and having sex. We immersed ourselves in basketball and American culture. We didn’t go all out and try to dress like gangsta rappers, but when we saw videos with rappers wearing Chicago Bulls gear, the same stuff we’d been given, we felt a kinship. In Dorrigo, there was no limit to your imagination!

  Brent wasn’t a big fan of me showing up at parties where he was playing, but once I was over my grounding I was hell-bent on having a good time. We were all getting right into death metal – the faster, the louder, the better. I was into Metallica and bands like Napalm Death, Cannibal Corpse, Gorguts and Pungent Stench. I had no idea what they were singing, I just liked the noise and the music. It excited me, ramped me up. My interest then rolled into the thrash-punk-metal bands like Rancid, Pennywise and Slayer. I didn’t know anything about the people who made the music but soon I would be growing my hair long, dyeing it black, and wearing a lot of the accoutrements of that world.

  Mum and Dad were watching all this with growing alarm. The evil-sounding music, the hair, the trouble I was getting into and the people I was hanging out with were all spelling bad news. They had what looked like a troubled kid on their hands, and when I was fifteen they had to handle me without Brent’s levelling influence.

  Brent wanted to study to be a physical education teacher, but didn’t get the HSC marks for the uni course. Dad was blowing up about it. He was big on us having what he didn’t have, and didn’t want us going down his road of getting an apprenticeship and being stuck with that forever. He was adamant that we had to do well in school. But on the other hand, he wouldn’t (or couldn’t) help us with homework. Anyway, Brent got into a computing course at Newcastle University, and planned to do a year of that before hopping across to teaching. I helped Dad move Brent to Newcastle, but when we returned home, his absence threw the household out of balance. Dad and I butted heads more than ever. I’d always been set on proving myself to him and Brent, but now that Brent had left, I felt that whatever I did, Dad would never be satisfied. I began to retreat into my own world, centred on music, friends and parties.

  Before school every morning, I developed a ritual. Mum and Dad both left for work early, and I had some time to kill while I waited for the bus. I went to the drinks cabinet, and stupidly thought that they wouldn’t notice i
f the tide went down a little. I cranked up the music and had a couple of shots of vodka and a couple of rolled cigarettes. That was my morning thing: listen to music, drink and smoke. I thought I was killing it! Everyone would live like this if they could!

  It nearly came unstuck one day. I was sitting out the back smoking. The old man had left at 5.30 am, but I heard a car coming up the driveway. It was 300 metres long, so I had plenty of warning. His blue jeep was tearing up the gravel. I thought, Shit, I’m fucked here. I stamped my rollie out and stayed outside and kept my distance from him. I poked my head around the corner of the house to say g’day. My heart was racing. He only had to pick something up, and didn’t stay long enough to come near me. The relief I felt was not a million miles from when you’re hiding in an ambush position and the other side walks right past you without noticing you’re there. Living with Mum and Dad was becoming an exercise in concealment.

  THREE

  Dad was what you’d call a stresser. His own father having died in his forties might have thrown up a red flag, but as Dad reached that age he was putting on weight and getting more highly strung. He blew up at me over every school report I brought home, and also lost his shit when Brent’s first uni results weren’t as good as he’d hoped. He was on medication for high blood pressure, and I guess our academic performance, or non-performance, wasn’t helping.

  At night, the dinner routine had become more silent and rigid since Brent had left. We had to shut up while Dad watched the six o’clock news, and he’d whinge at Mum about the size of the servings she gave him. ‘I can’t eat that, I’m not a teenager any more.’ The surprising thing was, when he was younger, he was thin and wiry and strong and always cleaned up his plate. Now, he was eating less but getting heavier.

  Maybe I was sensing that he was in some kind of trouble, because after that full-on rebellious period when Brent left, I came good again for a while, working hard at school and getting on better with Dad. I began to hang out with people he liked more. I think he understood that even if I wasn’t going to be dux of my year, I was never going to get stuck in the small-town mentality. Probably because Dad was a bit of an outsider, I shared his scepticism about small towns. I sensed that the guys with cars and hot girls, the awesome footy players, the local legends, were stuck. Maybe they didn’t want to get out, and that was fine for them, but I knew I was going to. I wanted to see the city, do something different. I was never going to accept the status quo and work for one of the local businesses that soaked up the young school leavers. There had to be something else out there. Dad saw that I was headed somewhere – still a bit of a mystery where, but somewhere better. For all our clashes, I hold on to the idea that he understood this about me before it was too late.

  In the early 1990s, after so many years of turning his back on the military, he began to get together with some of the vets from the local RSL. After twenty-five years, he was coming to terms with the bitter memories Vietnam had left him.

  The head of the Dorrigo RSL, Bob Denner, and a crew with Vietnam experience decided to meet up for a workshop over a few days in the Lookout Motor Inn in the spring of 1995. I guess a lot of the vets were like Dad, suffering from unacknowledged post-traumatic stress disorder for years, unable to talk about it at home, affected by memories they didn’t feel they could share with their families. The night he came home from the workshop, we hadn’t seen each other for a couple of days. Just before I went to bed, he came in and told me he loved me. It stuck in my mind because he’d never done that before, off his own bat. We’d tell him we loved him all the time when we were kids and he’d reciprocate, but for him to initiate it was odd. I can’t adequately explain how I felt. It was really nice, but because it was out of character it was also a bit confusing. I’m sure it was something let loose by that workshop.

  The next morning, he went back for another day of it. We had a school swimming carnival at the public pool, and I was walking from the high school to the pool with my best mate, Murray Steele, smoking cigarettes as usual. A big 4WD came belting along the road and pulled up alongside us. I put my cigarette out against the wall and put chewing gum in my mouth and thought, Here we go, I’m in trouble again. Dr Van Dyke, whose reception Mum worked at, opened the passenger window and said, ‘Get in.’

  I looked at Murray, thinking, What’s this about?

  The doctor said, ‘Just get in the car now.’

  I told Murray I’d see him later. I got in and said to the doctor, ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Just sit here, be quiet and you’ll find out in a minute.’

  I was thinking, Shit, I’ve been busted, but what for? I was racking my brain. All I’d done was smoking. I couldn’t think of anything else. I’d been getting on better with the old man and had cleaned up my act in the past couple of months. Maybe they’d just found out about something I’d done a while ago. I started coming up with plausible excuses for things I wasn’t even sure I’d done!

  We went to Dr Van Dyke’s house. Mum was sitting on the couch, in tears. I sat down beside her and didn’t say anything.

  ‘Mark, I wanted to find you before anyone told you,’ she said. ‘That’s why Peter came and grabbed you. Your dad’s just died.’

  I sat there like a statue. I felt distant from the scene, like I was watching it rather than being part of it. Mum was sobbing and shaking, and Dr Van Dyke was standing to the side. Every now and then Mum wiped her nose and took a few calming breaths and said to me, ‘Are you all right?’

  I wasn’t crying or doing anything. I asked some questions about where Dad was now. They explained that he was still up at the hospital. Then it struck me that I had to do something. I couldn’t sit there waiting for the emotions to hit me.

  ‘I have to go and tell my mates I won’t be seeing them tonight.’ We’d had something planned, I can’t remember what.

  Mum said, ‘Don’t worry about that.’

  But I had this overpowering urge to go and let them know. I walked from Dr Van Dyke’s house towards the school, which wasn’t far. It was surreal, walking down the same familiar path that just a few hours before had been completely different. I felt like I was walking in a void in space, a bubble. The world had changed, but I was the only person who knew about it.

  I couldn’t find the guys I was looking for, so I found a teacher and asked him to let Murray know I wouldn’t make it that night.

  I walked back to the doctor’s house. Mum was still in tears. When she saw me, she broke down again. I think she was finding it hard, and lonely, that I didn’t react at all. I was like an animal under attack, numb until I could understand what was happening and what would happen next.

  We got in the car and she drove us back home. I asked if she’d let Brent know, and she said she was going to call him. We got into the house, and I went to my bedroom. I sat on the bed staring at the V8 posters and photos of Kurt Cobain on the wall, but nothing was going in.

  *

  Dad had been at the workshop with the RSL guys when he’d had some sharp chest pains. He’d got into his car and driven to the doctor’s surgery, where Mum was working. His heart attack started there. They put him down on the dentist’s chair to chill him out, and Dr Van Dyke gave him some medication to thin his blood and relax his heart rate. He said he felt a lot better; the pain had gone away. Then all of a sudden he crashed, and died there on the dentist’s chair, in front of Mum. He’d been hit by a massive heart attack, and one of his lungs had collapsed. Mum and the doc had performed CPR for as long as they could.

  For the next three days, our house was filled with people. That first afternoon, I was sitting on the couch as all Mum’s friends and the wives of Dad’s friends came over with food and to console her. I was watching a TV show, kind of putting on a brave face but wanting to be somewhere else.

  The next afternoon Murray came over and took me to the old quarry behind the property where Dad and I had gone to trap rabbi
ts and foxes. Murray and I smoked a packet of cigarettes and talked all afternoon. It was a nice spring day in Dorrigo, clear blue skies, starting to get warm. Without realising it, Dad and I had been getting closer. Brent’s leaving had been a rupture, but after we’d got over that we’d begun to relate more as two blokes than as father and son. I felt cheated by losing him – I still feel cheated – because our relationship was beginning to change into something different and better. I often think that if he’d stuck around till I was in my early twenties, we would have got on really well.

  When I got back to the house it was still full of people, which kept Mum’s mind occupied. Brent eventually showed up from Newcastle, and he was rocked hard. The gutted look on his face hit me too. He was much more open about it than me. I was closed off. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, obviously, but my way of coping was to keep it all at arm’s length. I was trying to think, What’s next? I needed to focus on practicalities, anything other than letting the enormity of what had happened sink in.

  The funeral was a couple of days later. Everyone in the church was crying except me. Feeling everyone’s eyes on me, I tried to be tough. Always my way of winning Dad’s approval, now suppressing the tears was my way of honouring him. Then an unexpected thing happened. I was soon laughing at the great stories his mates were telling about him. He’d been president of the fishing club, and the kids liked him because he’d give them free soft drinks. The next president wanted to charge them, and the kids had started a protest about how he was nowhere near as good as Dad. One awards night, the other blokes played a trick on Dad by telling him it was suit and tie. He’d got done up, and when he showed up they were all in T-shirts and shorts. I was laughing at these stories, but everyone else was crying. It must have looked strange. But emotions are unpredictable in the way they come out of you. I was bursting inside, but when Dad’s mates told these stories, it unstoppered all that tension, which flooded out in laughter instead of tears. I’ve seen it in combat situations in myself and in others; in some extreme situations the human body can only laugh or cry, and when you’re not allowed to cry, all you can do is laugh.