by Luke Davies
Dan
FOR THE YEARS LEADING UP TO THE WEDDING IN 1968 Tess and Tom and Dan remained all but inseparable. Tom finished his medical studies and for two years was an intern at Concord Hospital. Dan moved with an erratic kind of inevitability from one girlfriend to another, never getting too close, and in a marginally less erratic way from one job to another, never quite finding the one he thought suited him the best. (‘That’d be a lifeguard on a deserted beach, wouldn’t it, Dan?’ Mum told me Dad said once.) Dan was a labourer, a warehouse storeman, a clerical assistant for one week—his first and last brush with the Public Service—and for a whole seven months in late ’66 and early ’67 a fibreglass sprayer in a factory at Ingleburn, far from the ocean in Sydney’s south-western suburbs, which manufactured kayaks and canoes. I would always associate my uncle with the ways of the ocean, a connection based almost entirely (the mermaid tattoo was the other factor) on the blue kayak, scratched by moves from house to house, that rested on the kayak shelf Dan constructed in each of his garages.
For Tess, the physicality of Dan and the disconnected grace with which Tom stumbled through the world came together in some mysterious way to form a complete unit.
Tess adored Dan for his sweetness and his rough humour, his bull-at-a-gate determination, the loyalty and admiration he showed for his big brother. But she loved Tom deeply and romantically, and desired his body also. At the wedding, the very notion of the phrase ‘from this day forward’ was to Tess the promise of the great bounty of life rolling into the future and the thrill of not knowing what comes next.
Then I was born, as I have said, in 1969, and for some years Tess was occupied with my raising, with a domestic life whose boredom was offset by the intense pleasure of watching me grow and change. And Tom was building his career from lowly beginnings, working hard at his small general practice. Dan delivered bread for a few months in 1969 and the pleasure of driving a delivery truck stayed with him so that three years later, when he decided to get more serious about long-term employment, it was the meat-truck job that stood out in the Saturday paper.
Initially Dan took to bringing me with him on the shorter runs, a few hours in the afternoons now and then, to allow Tess some time off. On a Monday in 1973—I was four years old and it was more than ten years since Dan had first met Tess—he came over to collect me. This must have been around the time I found the kitten. I’ve pieced this together, a little of it from conversations with Tess, and what I don’t know, I’ve imagined. Almost everything I tell here is fact. Very little is imagined. This next is imagined. Let’s just assume that having played all morning in the back garden with the next-door neighbours’ kids, I was taking my midday nap.
‘Have you got time for a quick coffee?’ asked Tess. ‘It’d be good if she sleeps as long as possible.’
‘A coffee, sure. I can spare a little while.’
When Tess dropped the teaspoon and bent over to pick it up and Dan’s hand gripped her arm just above the elbow, the frailest faltering ‘What?’ emerged from her mouth. Then she felt a surge like electricity move through her body, and her ears burned uncomfortably hot as she stood fully upright. For no more than a second they stared direct and hard at one another. There was no thought, on Tess’s part, of propriety, or loyalty. In the years that followed, the most surprising aspect of the whole thing for Tess was the absence of her consciousness of Tom for those first supremely physical moments.
They locked together, kissing. Tess loved sex with Tom, the languid abandon with which he grazed upon her neck, with which afternoon shadows fell, with which a new and delicious world opened out among the crumpled bed sheets. But she was not prepared for the urgency and the grasping for flesh that exploded there in the kitchen with Dan.
I’m imagining as I write this that she thought she might combust in the heat of it all, and that she experienced a moment of panic when she realised she hadn’t breathed for fifteen or twenty seconds. She clasped his strong arms. Beneath her palms she felt the slight give of the huge veins of his wrists. He smelled sweet, of blood and sawdust. She ran her hands over his biceps and squeezed them. Suddenly she was aware of the moisture down south. What was going on? Her body was leading her now. She felt herself beginning to swoop, from a high cliff, wind-sheared, towards some unbearably pleasurable valley.
Wrong, all wrong. His electric hands on her thighs. They shuffled breathlessly backwards to the door, colliding with a corner of the fridge. They realigned the trajectory, down along the hallway to the bedroom. Tess stopped, pulled away. ‘Wait. Wait.’
She looked into the child’s room. My god, I’m talking about myself. She looked into my room. Lost to the world, I breathed softly, dreaming through goldness in the warm afternoon light, my eyes twitching. Tess turned back to Dan, pushing his chest to the bedroom door, fumbling with the buttons of his shirt.
And so began the affair. You want to know my opinion? Well, I wish it didn’t happen. What can you possibly expect me to say, to feel about the thing? It seemed to be fuelled by a furious turbine: driven by a reservoir of compulsion. It was to become an unstoppable sequence of violent, sporadic couplings (four, five, perhaps six times a year) marked by guilt. It became like a drug: their resolve to stop was always at its highest immediately after each illicit, breathless meeting. Weeks or months later, when the opportunity arose, a desperate panic would subsume their limbs and loins, and nothing then existed but the need to have sex.
Tess knew she could somehow justify the fact of having an affair. It was the fact of it being… ‘Fact’? I don’t know why I bother to use the word. It was the fact of it being her brother-in-law that was the problem. She knew she had stumbled into a taboo world. She found three slim justifications. One day a few years back she mentioned these. It was the day she first told me, directly, about the affair, during a slightly drunken conversation in the kitchen. She told herself that life is short. This didn’t mean that nothing mattered, only that when strange things happened there was often no turning back. She told herself that anyway it would end soon, and each time it happened she told herself this more firmly. She told herself that sleeping with both Tom and Dan Airly was really just like sleeping with two aspects of the same person, the softness and tenderness of her husband made whole by the compacted strength of his brother.
She told herself all this for six years and four months. Then she thought that the beginning of a new decade, the 1980s, and me soon to be a teenager, was as good a time as any to make changes, to begin again, to rediscover Tom, who by now was so lost in his work; who once had been her whole world, her love and her salvation and the vehicle of her flight away from Constance and towards the future. There came the day when Dan and Tess were alone, and when Tess said, ‘Dan. Danny. No. That’s it, forever’, Dan knew she was speaking a concrete truth. He felt, like her, a strange relief, as when a storm has lifted and the bruised trees flutter their leaves.
It seemed it had been hardly worth it. Six years of pretending, punctuated by moments—only moments—of an intensity beyond normal consciousness. All the barbecues, the dinners, the Christmas holidays at Avoca Beach, the way Tom and Dan related, taking the micky out of each other, good mates as always, the way Tess went to bed each night, the way Tom read her moods and caressed her, the way I finished my homework and knew nothing. Yes, in case you have been wondering: I feel I knew nothing. The way in which Tess never stopped loving Tom, never felt repulsed by him, never stopped desiring him and making love to him all those years, never felt anything lacking in Tom that Dan somehow replaced, other than that hard brute fact of their drowning, of sex, which was only ever real in the moment it occurred, and therefore seemed hardly worth it. I might as easily have written ‘seemed more worth it than anything’, for later I was to find that drowning place. Sometimes it’s hard to think of anywhere better.
Like I said: I feel I knew nothing. I knew nothing except what all children pick up who float unconsciously in the stream of time that is childhood, far below the s
urface currents of the adult world and illicit affairs: that love could be fractured and serve different purposes, and that intense love could be divided, between people just as easily as between moments of time. And this inner knowledge confused me, because it didn’t match what I saw all around me on TV and billboards and in books.
Dan never stopped loving me in that beautiful world called Uncledom. After everything had ended with Tess, he finally married, nearing forty, and began to have children. He was aware, with a sense of unease bordering on guilt, that I was his favourite, even compared with his own children. He never told me this but there are some things so clear they don’t need to be said. Nor did he ever stop loving Tess; indeed, it seemed to him that his love increased once the long affair ended, since it could continue from that point unimpeded by the burden of secrecy.
Nor did Uncle Dan ever stop loving Tom. Dan’s trick was to compartmentalise his feelings and actions. Though what he had to build was less a compartment than a concrete wall seven feet thick. Kissing Tess, making love to Tess, his mind was overtaken—a kind of alien abduction, really—by the greater forces of urgency. Being alone with Tom—prodding the sausages at a barbecue, say, a can of Fosters in his hand—it must have been as if his mind had expressly forbidden the forging of any connections between sex with this man’s wife and the man himself, dreamy and red-haired in the backyard sun as the barbecue trundled happily towards dusk. And as for being together with the two of them in the one place, which happened often enough, it was simple: Dan was like an actor in a trance. So those rare moments when he felt the frightening weight of his actions—I am betraying my brother’s trust—clustered only around the immediate aftermath of the sexual act. Say, thirty or forty times in less than a decade. I suppose it’s bearable.
And as for Tom, my gorgeous sad father, whose tragedy I am moving towards? There was something in his makeup that refused ever to confront a situation. I am piecing all this together backwards, retrospectively, hodge-podge. But I can state with absolute certainty, with the authority borne from being his daughter, that from the early days, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, he knew. Not the details, for he was operating on instinct, but the hard fact of the thing’s occurring. It tortured him, how much he loved both Tess and Dan. He simply adored them. Yet no matter how hard he tried to raise the affair to the surface of his consciousness, he could not budge it an inch, and he could not in any way turn his love into anger, far less hatred.
Instead he plodded on through the years, working harder and harder. Fear of the poverty of his working-class childhood was reawakened, and the hidden distress he felt for six years transformed itself into the idea that if he could just earn enough money then Tess’s love would return, fully, all of it to him alone. And this, perhaps, was the saddest part of it all. His search for money never repaired the love; rather it began the series of events that led to his final separation from us all.
The fraud began almost as an experiment. It was easy enough, in the beginning, a mere tick in the wrong box, to turn short consultations to long consultations on the Medicare claim form, and from there, very slowly, over months and years, to begin claiming for visits that didn’t actually occur. There would have been a time when I could not have believed this had happened, when I could not write these words. But everything in this book happened. At any rate, the court records speak for themselves. I read them once, years after the event. Mum somehow retrieved them from the lawyers. It was like reading Primo Levi: I wanted so desperately to believe I was reading fiction. It is hard to account for the difference between what I saw in my father and what had really been going on in his life. I only loved one part of Tom; I thought it was all of him. In the court records another Tom arrives to frighten me.
He didn’t particularly need the extra money; over the years he’d steadily built up the practice, and life had always been comfortable for us. Extra money meant better holidays, better cars, better dishwashers. Eventually it would mean a better house, which one day would become the house of whispers and of shadows, and in which, like an invisible rain of dust and darkness, my father’s madness would descend.
But extra money would not bring back the past. You could not go back to 1973, to that moment on a sunny afternoon, and take Dan’s hand away from my mother’s arm.
It was all a pointless form of self-destruction. My mother loved our family, the linkages and the tenderness between herself and Tom, between the two of them and me. The affair with Dan was an entirely separate thing, and she tried to deal with that as best she could. On that day I mentioned, when she was a little drunk, she said, ‘It was my problem. There was no reason for it and I don’t know why it ever happened. It was nothing to do with your father. He never spent anything on himself. I guess all the material things were for you and me.’
‘He gave us all this…stuff,’ I said. ‘But he lost his mind.’
‘He was the man least likely to ever go to jail. The man least likely to ever do anyone wrong. Even the government.’
But all through the late seventies and into the eighties the momentum had continued to build for Tom, and each tick of the pen, each forged signature, each instance of fraud piled on the back of the other. When, in the mid-eighties, the Department of Health began their first great sweep of the Medicare system, Dr Tom Airly was, alphabetically, the first anomaly to appear on the graphs, the first radical flow against the general trends. He was a North Shore doctor—a silvertail, worse even than any Syrian doctor at Lakemba who systematically rorted the accounts—and the first of whom a thorough example was made. He was scrutinised for a year before the case was handed over from the internal fraud unit to the Federal police.
All the while Dan plodded along, driving the meat truck for nearly ten years until, at the age of thirty-six, the affair with Tess over, he too conceived of the idea that other changes might be possible. That’s when he took the big plunge, made his first buying trips to Indonesia, rented a warehouse in Tempe, turned it into a showroom and filled it with beds and mattresses. That’s how the bedding empire known as ‘Airly to Bed’ started, and that’s how Uncle Dan became famous, through the cheap, late-night television ads he starred in, as the Futon King of Sydney.
Crossbar
IN THE MEANTIME THERE WAS ME, AND MY OWN 1970S While you tumble through the undercurrents of other people’s lives, you start to grow yourself. Of all the girls in all my classes I always had the longest legs. On a baking spring day at the primary school sports carnival, nine years old, a collector of cicadas, a dreamer of eternal love with Luke Skywalker, I found myself falling upwards into my new obsession.
The high jump. Mrs Egan was merely rounding up numbers to fill out the event. ‘You, Isabelle…and you, Cathy Cleary there, and Helen. Come on, girls, you’re in the high jump.’
Everything else was fun on sports day—the break to routine under the sweltering sun, the cares of the world temporarily set aside in favour of a world hung with banners—so why not this?
Mrs Paul, the plump kindergarten teacher, was in charge of the high jump, a small cluster of activity in the centre of the field, well away from all the track events and the four camps of red, blue, green and gold Tshirts that lined the far side of the 100-metre track.
‘All right, now,’ she said, ‘under-nines.’
I lined up with my red team-mates. I had never attempted this before and the whole thing seemed absurd. I preferred the expanse of the running track, that sense of wind and a bursting heart as I raced to break the ribbon.
When my turn came I followed the lead of the others, running in sideways to the high jump and jumping over the crossbar with a scissor kick of the legs. It felt like nothing. But four jumps later, having won the under-nine girls’ high jump and having beaten the boys’ record as well, I was a little fonder of the whole event.
I lingered to watch the higher levels. During the undereleven boys event I watched Toby Collins, who did Little Athletics, win the high jump Olympic-style, lifting his w
hole body backwards off the ground and sailing over, backwards and sideways. It was an extraordinarily graceful moment. I knew that I had found my sport. I fell in love with Toby, too. He was my first love—my first love, that is, who wasn’t Luke Skywalker—though he was never to know it. In thirty seconds I had fantasised a complete life together: we travelled the world performing high jumps and being interviewed for television. We wore tracksuits on which were embroidered, in silver thread, ‘Toby and Isabelle’.
Then the high jumps were finished, Mrs Paul had marked all the results on her clipboard and the underelevens, Toby included, had dispersed.
‘What are you still doing here, young Isabelle?’ asked Mrs Paul, who had taught me three years earlier.
‘Miss, please,’ I said, ‘can I just try something?’ I pointed at the high jump. ‘What was my best jump?’
Mrs Paul ran a finger down the clipboard. ‘One metre, six. Why?’
‘I want to try it higher. I want to try it different.’
‘Isabelle, the event’s over.’
‘But Miss…’
‘The event is over, love.’
For me, it had only just begun. I couldn’t rest now. Something was expanding inside my head. The only way to stop it exploding was to get it out of the head and into the body.
‘Miss, I think I can get a lot higher.’
‘Hurry up, Isabelle. I’ve got to get these scores across to the tent. Here, quickly then. You take the other side. We’ll try you at one metre, twelve. No, no, unscrew that— that’s it. Now place the top at 1.12. Screw it tight again. The beam rests on that.’
