Must be the beans I ate this morning,
Quick, quick, the lavvy door,
Too late, it’s on the floor.
After my grandparents arrived, my mother, as usual, requested me to sing ‘Scotland the Brave’. I never reached the second verse. At the end of the chorus, my mother snatched me from the chair as my father spat his harmonica across the kitchen, bent double with laughter. She took me to my room and spanked me with the Macquarie Dictionary, to teach me not to say bad words. She seemed both angry and embarrassed. (My mother’s face never showed one emotion, but always a mixture of two, like a portmanteau word.) Later, my father crept into the room with a smuggled lollipop. He flicked through the dictionary and said, ‘This isn’t a proper dictionary. It doesn’t have any of the best words.’
And he took a pen and wrote Fart, in between Farrow and Farmer, with the definition to make a bad smell from the bottom.
I told my father much later that fart was one of the oldest English words, with many cognates in other languages. He found flatulence hilarious. One of his favourite tricks was to have pie and beans for lunch at work, then return home and close all the windows and doors in the living room. For twenty minutes he would sit and break wind, only then calling my mother in from the kitchen. I would hear her shout ‘Oh, Jimmy!’ and my father’s roar of laughter as she ran from the room, retching. He boasted that he had complete control of his bowels, and would challenge me to say ‘when!’, at which point he would instantly break wind. Sometimes I would wait for hours, then cry ‘when!’ and he would let out a loud fart. My mother would shake her head in disgust and run around the house, opening all the windows.
I wasn’t allowed to say fart, so my father taught me the Doric for it: braim. Doric was the dialect of Aberdeenshire, where my father grew up. Even as a child I was fascinated by the different sounds and meanings the words had, and I began to realise, dimly, that language was shaped by place. By the age of six I could talk to my father in dialect in front of my mother, and she would have no idea what we were saying.
My father rarely swore at home. Sometimes if he was talking about his bosses at work, he would say, ‘They’re a shower of bastards, the lot of them,’ and my mother would shoosh him. Even then, it was difficult to catch him swearing because his accent seemed to make even the mildest words profanities.
My mother and I glued together a little cardboard box and cut a slit at the top. This was the swear box, and my father had to put in twenty cents every time he swore. My mother made the mistake of promising me the money from the box when it was full, so I would try to provoke my father. The easiest way to do this was to break wind myself. Often I was unable to and just gave myself a sore stomach, but when I did my father would cry out in amusement, ‘Was that you, you dirty wee bastard?’
And twenty cents would go in the box.
Poof
When I started school, I had a pronounced lisp that my mother believed was due to all the strange sounds I made when practising Doric with my father. She was very worried about this lisp, but my father insisted I would grow out of it, as I did, in fact, a year or two later. But in my first week at school, a boy three years older than me caught me on the way home and, calling me a poof, punched me in the face. I ran home with a split lip. My father came home to find me sobbing in the bathroom as my mother dabbed cotton wool on my lip.
‘What happened, son?’ he said, putting down his newspaper.
‘Have you been drinking?’ my mother asked him, but my father ignored her.
I told him what the boy had done, which seemed to me the most serious part, and only as an afterthought what he had called me. My father’s face, normally red from the sun, turned pale.
‘Fucking bastard,’ my father said quietly. ‘Little fucking bastard. Calling my son a poof? No one calls my son a poof!’
‘Jimmy!’ my mother cried.
My father went out through the kitchen to the shed, and returned a minute later holding a hammer.
‘What’s his name?’ he asked me.
‘Stelio Grivas.’
‘A fucking wog, is it? Well, we’ll see what his father has to say about it. Come on.’
‘Jimmy, don’t,’ my mother said, holding on to me.
My father grasped my wrist so tightly that it hurt, and hauled me away from her.
‘Come on!’ he said, pulling me outside.
He began walking down the street, and I had to run to keep up with him.
‘Where does he live?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, holding my nose, which had started to bleed again. ‘Waratah, I think.’
‘Right, then.’
He hid the handle of the hammer up his sleeve, its head in one clenched hand, and my hand in the other. We walked in silence, except that every ten minutes or so he would mutter to himself, ‘Poof,’ and then spit on the ground. (He would not have cared that this word dated back to the nineteenth century and had begun as French slang for a prostitute.) When we finally came to Waratah I was exhausted, and my father lifted me on his back and asked what street the boy lived on. I told him again that I didn’t know.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll look for him. Tell me when you see him.’
My father walked with me on his back for four hours, peering into every garden and, if he could get close enough, every window of every house in every street in Waratah. After a long time it grew dark, and I fell asleep as he walked. When I awoke, we were at home again. I was lying on the couch, and my father was holding my mother, who was crying.
‘Stop greeting,’ he said. ‘Stop greeting, now. I couldn’t find him.’
‘And what if you had?’ she said, looking relieved and angry. ‘What would we have done with you in jail, for assault, or worse?’
‘All right.’ He kissed her cheek. ‘Will you not make us something to eat? We’re starving.’
The next day was a Saturday. My father got dressed for work as usual, as he said there was a chance for some overtime. While my mother was hanging out the washing, my father rummaged in a kitchen cabinet where we kept all sorts of odds and ends. After he left, I went and looked in the cabinet. Among all the old bills, receipts and blunt scissors, the phone book was open, with the page for Greene to Gruenwald ripped out.
No one at school ever called me a poof again.
Tits
Shortly before my twelfth birthday, a salesman came to our door selling volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. For a very reasonable rate, one of these thick volumes would be delivered to your home every month for a year. My mother, though she never bought anything from travelling salesmen, always invited them in, perhaps to make my father jealous. In fact, he arrived home from the pub that day when the salesman was having a cup of tea. I was lying on the floor, with the C volume open before me, so immersed in the dictionary that I didn’t notice my father until he nudged me with his foot.
‘Whatever it is, we can’t afford it,’ he said. ‘Give the book back to the man, son.’
My mother apologised to the salesman, and my father saw him to the door. When he came back into the room, he whispered something to my mother, and she smiled. A week later, for my birthday, I got A to Bea.
I would spend hours with the dictionary, learning all of the abbreviations, v.t. n. pl. colloq. def. MLG conj., and following words back in time to the places they were born. I discovered that many English words had come from other countries, like my father. I began to keep a notebook in which I would write down the new words I invented — umzob, caramot, grebulous — and their imaginary meanings. By the time that Ga to Hee was delivered, there were too many volumes for the bookshelf in my room, and my mother moved them into the garden shed, where they would be out of the way.
One afternoon, I went to look up carrion, a new word I had come across while reading The Count of Monte Cristo. Caf to Dar was kept on a low shelf beneath my father’s workbench. I kneeled on the floor and pulled out the volume. As I did so, a large loose square of chequered linoleum came awa
y. Underneath the lino was a magazine, and the front cover showed a topless woman cradling two gigantic breasts in her hands. The magazine was simply called Tits and was dated the month before. I began to look through it. After a few pages I was bored of the breasts, all of them huge and thick-nippled. But I read on to examine all the different words for breasts. There were Bristols, titties, jugs, boobs, boobies, funbags, mammaries, pillows, baps. (The word tits itself has an uncertain origin, but is similar to titten in German and tieten in Dutch.) I had never before seen so many synonyms for one word. I had just opened my notebook to write some of them down when my father came in. He looked at the magazine, then glanced away for a second, embarrassed, before he realised that it was only a pen that I held in my hand. I stood up, and he came towards me and kicked the linoleum back over the magazine.
Then my mother was at the door to the shed, holding a dishtowel. She was wearing a flowery yellow dress, and I noticed, for perhaps the first time, that she was flat-chested.
‘Dinner’s ready,’ she said. ‘What are you boys up to?’
My father said nothing.
‘I was just showing Dad some new words I learned,’ I said.
‘You can show him at the table.’
After dinner, I wrote in my notebook: filicate n. a species of lie which a son tells for his father.
Piss
During my last few weeks at secondary school, my father had an accident. He was putting a new window in a house and was standing on some scaffolding ten metres up. It began to rain heavily. (‘Absolutely pissing down,’ my father said when he told the story, ignoring my mother’s frown.) As he hurried to finish the job, he slipped and fell onto the muddy ground below, breaking all of the ribs on his right side. He had to stay off work for two months. His employer was very good about it and continued to pay his wages. My father would lie in bed all day, smoking cigarettes and watching the television, which we had moved in from the lounge room. My mother took my room because her tossing and turning kept him awake at night, while I slept on the sofa.
My father never complained of the pain, though for the first couple of weeks getting up to go to the toilet was an agony for him. I had to support him as he urinated, hissing with the hurt. Often his workmates would visit with slabs of beer. My mother didn’t like drinking. We didn’t even have a corkscrew in the house. But she saw how the visits cheered my father, so she said nothing. She didn’t know that his friends would leave a dozen cans of beer under the bed, which my father would drink, one after the other, when my mother was out. He said they were better for his ribs than the painkillers, but I think he often swallowed down the pills with the beer. He relied on me to air the room, buy him breath mints, and dispose of the cans — and not to say anything to my mother. By now, I was very good at telling filicates.
One morning, my father sent me on an errand to his friend who ran the local bottle-o. (This word formerly meant a person who sold and collected bottles: it came from the cry, Bottle-oh!) After I paid him, he took me to the back of the shop and put a bottle of whisky in my bag.
‘Remember, not a word to anyone,’ he said. ‘I would lose my job.’
I rode back home on my bike and gave the whisky to my father. He sent me out to buy us some sausage rolls for lunch, and when I came back, the bottle was half empty. He saw me looking at it and said, ‘Don’t be such a pessimist. It’s half full. Now, what new words have you learned today?’
After drinking, he always enjoyed a good sleep, and I would hide the bottle away in my bedroom. It wasn’t long before my father was sending me to the bottle-o every other day. I tried to stay away from the house so he couldn’t ask me, but my mother wanted me to be near home in case she needed me. A few weeks later, my mother went to visit her sister. I was studying in my room but, after a while, I heard my father singing my name. I groaned, and ignored him until he began shouting. When I went in, he smiled and patted the seat beside the bed so I would sit down.
‘Do you have any new words for me today?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, still standing in the doorway. ‘Dipsomaniac.’
‘That sounds like … That sounds like a … good one. What does it mean?’
‘It’s from the Greek dipsa, meaning thirst; and the Latin mania, indicating an extreme desire for something. Its short form is dipso.’
‘I don’t understand. What does it mean again?’
‘You should know it,’ I said. ‘It means a drunk.’
My father nodded, and then as he understood what I had said, he tried to sit up in the bed.
‘You don’t know …’ he said. ‘You don’t know anything. How about you break a few of your ribs, see how you feel?’ He took another drink of the whisky. ‘Jesus Christ, you’re a poor excuse for a son,’ he muttered. ‘You and your books.’
I stared at him. Like a word that you look at for too long on the page, he began to lose any meaning for me.
‘Well, here’s a question for you,’ he said at last. ‘How many syllables are there in piss off?’
In fact, I knew that piss came from the Middle English pissen, itself linked to the French pissier, and descended from vulgar Latin. But I said nothing. In response, he shouted at me, ‘Go on, then. Piss off!’
I went out of the house to look at my books in the shed. An hour later, my mother came running from the kitchen.
‘Come quick!’
My father was unconscious on the bedroom floor. Having drunk the rest of the whisky, and all the beer left under the bed, he had vomited on the bedsheets and on himself. Then he had fallen out of bed. The carpet around him was soaked with urine.
‘Oh, Jimmy,’ my mother said, weeping. ‘Not again.’
(It was not until much later that my mother told me my father had had problems with drink before, but had gone teetotal when I was born.)
I helped her strip him and wash him. He groaned but didn’t wake up. Between the two of us, we got him back on the bed after my mother changed the sheets, and we took turns watching him through the night to make sure he didn’t choke on his own vomit.
When he awoke, he was penitent. Tears in his eyes, he swore to my mother that he wouldn’t touch drink again. For the next two weeks I spent a lot of time with my father. Playing Scrabble kept his mind off the pain, he said, and we had endless games together, though when we changed the rules to allow Doric, he won every time. In a while he was able to walk again without much pain, and within another month he was back at work.
On my way back from school soon after, I saw my father sitting at the window of the pub, drinking whisky. I rode home, and searched my bookshelves until I found a particular notebook. I opened the notebook and crossed out filicate. Then I went to tell my mother what I had seen.
Slut
I was in my second year at university when my mother left my father. In the past three years his drinking had gotten worse. If my mother begged him, he would stop for a week or so, then start again. He was a good drunk for a long time, in that he was never violent and not usually unpleasant. Very often, if my parents were with other people, it would just be my mother who would notice he was drunk. The only outward indication of the alcohol was a certain jerkiness as he talked. As he told all his old stories (including, inevitably, the one about the cock) his body seemed to react, giving physical representations to parentheses, commas and question marks. By the end of an anecdote, he was often on his feet, clapping his right hand against his leg to mark full stops, and stamping his feet for exclamation marks.
The only place I could study etymology was in Brisbane, so I wasn’t able to come home often. During the holidays, I rarely had enough money for travel; even if I did, I still made some excuse not to visit home. At Christmas, however, there seemed to be no avoiding it, and as it turned out, this would be the last time we were together before my mother left.
Christmas morning was quiet, my mother cooking an enormous lunch, my father watching television, while I boxed up some books I wanted to take back to Brisban
e. I found the dictionary that my mother had spanked me with all those years ago. When I showed my father the words he had written there, he was delighted.
‘I mind that day well,’ he said, and he began to hum ‘Scotland the Brave’.
My mother heard him from the kitchen and laughed.
After lunch, my father said, ‘I’m going for a walk.’
As soon as he left, my mother said simply, ‘He’ll come back drunk. I never thought I’d have a drunk for a husband.’
I realised then how little I knew about my mother. I had often thought that the only way to truly understand a word was to know its past, but I knew almost nothing about my mother’s.
‘Who did you think you would marry?’ I asked her.
For the next two hours, we talked about the boys she had been in love with before my father; about her own mother and father, whom I barely remembered; and about the good times she had had when my father was courting her. It was then that my father came home. He was, as my mother predicted, drunk. Having overheard her talking about my birth, he said, ‘Yes, that was some day, some day. The best day of my life,’ and my mother smiled at him.
‘Almost as good was the day we conceived you,’ he continued, winking at me.
‘Jimmy! Don’t!’ my mother said, but my father had already started tapping his hand against his thigh as he told the story. ‘And it was the first time we did it. I remember you blushed, didn’t you, Mary, and I said, “But you’ve seen my cock before,” and then you laughed. Of course, we had to get married after that, when your father saw your belly. You said it was your first time, didn’t you, Mary? But that wasn’t what I’d heard. You see, son, your mother was a bit of a slut in those days, and —’
My mother slapped him. It must have been the first time she had struck him since that afternoon in my grandparents’ garden all those years before, and the result was the same. The blood started leaking out of my father’s nose, but this time my mother left the room and didn’t come back, and it was I who fetched a dishtowel for him. Without a word, my father took the towel, held it to his face, and went out again, probably back to the pub. I found my mother in the shed, sobbing against the fourth volume of the dictionary, Caf to Dar, a place where I had always found comfort. In the volume Ske to Tar, it was noted that slut was first recorded in English in 1402, originally meaning an untidy woman. It was only later that the word developed a sexual connotation. I tried to tell my mother this, but she wouldn’t listen. So I put my arms around her, and for a long time neither of us said a word.
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