Press Escape

by Shaun Carney

  You know, when I came home from my first day at work, my dad didn’t ask me a thing about it. Didn’t say a word. A couple of weeks earlier he’d told me I was fifteen, I had my Intermediate, my schooling was over, and now I had to go out and get a trade. He didn’t do anything to help me find a job. I had to go knocking on doors of the local factories. I got my own job and of course most of my wage went to the household. But he never asked me anything about my work.

  Seeing him with his guard down was startling. I wanted to keep it going so I asked: ‘Why do you think that was?’

  He was an unhappy bloke. I don’t know what happened to him to make him that way. He hit the piss hard. Every Saturday afternoon he’d get a skinful and then go to the pictures around the corner—he loved the flicks, especially if they used tricks or special effects—then he’d come home and sleep it off. Sunday after mass a bunch of fellows would get together in this bloke’s back shed and talk bullshit while they finished off the bottles of beer they’d brought home from the pub the night before. It was such a ritual that the cut-off cross-section of a tree that my dad sat on—sort of like a stool—in this shed was shiny from where his arse had worn it down.

  This didn’t seem a million miles away from what I’d seen him do when I was a kid. During another talk, he opened up about his parents’ relationship.

  ‘They used to fight a lot. I didn’t think that was the way to behave. You know, Mum would lock him out and he’d be pissed and banging on the front door, “Annie, let me in!” and all the neighbours could hear it, they’d all know. The booze was a problem.’ At this point, his voice took on an exasperated tone.

  There was a St Patrick’s Day, I would have been fifteen or sixteen. St Pat’s Day was always a big day. I’d seen how he got before. There was this girl I was absolutely mad keen on: Rita. We’d gone out a few times and we had the day all planned. After the parade [the St Patrick’s Day parade was a big event for Melbourne’s Catholics back then] we were going to the pictures and then I was bringing her home for dinner. I’d organised it all with my mum, she was going to a bit of trouble. She liked Rita. And I said to him the night before, ‘Please don’t come home drunk, this girl means a lot to me’. Anyway, he showed up just before dinner. I’d brought Rita home and we were in the little sitting room halfway down the house, Mum’s further back in the kitchen. I heard him come through the front door and I knew straight away he was completely pissed. I ran up the hallway and I was so fuckin’ angry! Well, I got one punch in on him. He wasn’t tall but he was strong, with a bull neck. He had a go back at me and we fought all the way through the house—through the kitchen and out the back door into the yard. He just had to get pissed! I’d begged him not to. I said, ‘Please don’t do it’. That was the end of Rita. I wonder what happened to her. I should try and find her.

  It was one of the best talks we ever had. For once, he didn’t bother to cover up how hurt he’d been. I could empathise with him about having a father who couldn’t resist his compulsions, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. And I now understood why in his late teens he took up a sport that allowed him to hit the open road and ride hundreds of miles away on a bicycle—and why, eventually, he chose to join the army, which removed him to another state. He had a lot to escape from too.

  18

  FAMILIES

  AS CHRISTMAS 2009 approached, things started to go awry. When I arrived at my father’s house one morning to take him to a doctor’s appointment, he wasn’t in the lounge room or the kitchen or the bathroom or the backyard. I entered his bedroom to find him lying on his side on the bed, fully clothed. Christ, this is it, he’s dead. At least it was at home, probably happened quickly. I approached his body, put my hand on his arm and he rolled on to his back.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ he said, ‘I was just getting a bit of kip.’

  I could barely recognise his face—it was the size of a large wheel of cheese with vaguely reminiscent aspects of his features in the middle.

  ‘What the friggin’ hell is going on?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yeah, my face has blown up a bit,’ he said, appearing unperturbed.

  ‘More than a bit! Let’s get down to the doctor,’ I said.

  It turned out he was suffering from heart failure and this had caused him to be bloated. His heart wasn’t pumping and the fluid in his body was staying where it was. A course of tablets that made him pee almost continuously for the next few days alleviated the bloating but nothing was going to cure his damaged heart or his toe, which now looked dreadful.

  On Christmas Day, which was the day he celebrated his eighty-third birthday, he drove to our house but his foot had hurt so much during the journey that after twenty minutes he had to stop the car in the emergency lane of the Eastern Freeway for a rest. When he made it to the lunch he was distracted, uncharacteristically quiet, and slipped most of what was on his plate to our dog, Toby, who spent lunchtime lurking under my father’s chair. At least Toby had a happy Christmas. After little more than an hour at the table, my father announced that he’d head back home, using the busy holiday traffic as an excuse for his early departure. I walked him out to his car. He was struggling with the pain.

  As much to himself as to me, he said: ‘Jesus, this thing is difficult to live with. I dunno, I’ve always been fit, never had any serious health problems. It’s a bloody disappointment’. We agreed to talk the next day. He drove off rather meekly, in the right direction this time. He never returned to my house.

  Two days later I was back in Frankston, taking him first to the GP clinic and then to the hospital. His motions were black, something to do with a combination of medications eating away at the lining of his bowel, and he was passing blood. During our five-hour wait in the hospital emergency department waiting area, he got weaker and more disoriented, and we were required to explain his health problems on four occasions: first, to a desk clerk and then to three members of the nursing staff. This was before treatment. Then finally, we had to go through it all with a doctor, who did not have the benefit of our four previous briefings.

  Now the stints in hospital got longer and his situation got more hopeless. He’d be in, then he’d be home. Then he’d be back in hospital. If it wasn’t his toe, it was his heart. After more than a month of this, he was told that the toe was gangrenous and that it would have to be amputated. He seemed calm in the face of that. At some level he knew what was coming. After it was removed, he spent time in a respite and rehabilitation centre in Mornington, twenty minutes south of Frankston, where he would be taught how to get by with only one big toe. He wasn’t happy about that. On the day after he was sent there I visited him and he was in a filthy temper.

  ‘I don’t want to be here for too long. I don’t see why I even have to be here,’ he said, ensconced in a pleasant upstairs room.

  ‘What, you don’t like it here?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s going to cost me something like thirty bucks a day to be here and I could be here for a week!’ he said.

  ‘But you need to do the rehab. You’ve just lost a big toe.’

  ‘Ah, be buggered. A couple of days’ll do it.’

  It was the money. And he couldn’t check himself out. This was part of the health network, so the medical staff would tell him when he could go. In any event, he suffered heart failure again while he was there and was bounced back to Frankston Hospital. When he finally made it home, he was determined to proceed as though nothing had happened. The doctors had told him to move around, but only moderately. Under no circumstances was he to overdo it by going for long walks. ‘A few metres at a time, Jim,’ one doctor advised him. When I’d settled him in, I reminded him of these instructions.

  ‘Don’t worry, old mate, I’ll be right,’ he responded with a smile and a half-wink. I should have realised what this meant. Stupidly, after fifty-three years of knowing him and thirty-one years of trying to determine whether people were telling me the truth for a living, I assumed that he was agreeing to these strictures. />
  The following day I phoned him to check on how his first day back had gone with his 1970s brown fabric armchair and A Current Affair on TV and the mice that seemed to thrive in his kitchen cupboards despite the big chunks of green bait he laid there.

  ‘I got myself a bit of a pakapoo ticket in the afternoon when I went for a walk,’ he said.

  ‘What sort of walk?’

  ‘Just around the block.’

  Fuck. The shortest walk around the block from his house was 700 metres.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I got about halfway and it started to hurt, so I had to stop.’ These were suburban streets with no shade, it was a summer’s afternoon. There was nowhere to ‘stop’.

  ‘So how did you get back home?’

  ‘I made it back slowly. Had to stop every now and then and rest on front fences.’

  ‘How is the foot now?’

  ‘I can’t go out today.’

  ‘Why did you go out at all? It’s too far.’

  ‘I thought I’d be right. I felt okay at the start. I need to get my fitness up.’

  ‘Might have overreached there, don’t you reckon, Dad?’

  ‘Yeah, buddy boy, bit of a setback.’

  It was actually a big setback. What little chance the area around the amputation had of healing was gone now.

  There was another hospital stay, during which it was discovered that he had been infected by a superbug, which meant that he had to be isolated in a room and his other organs started to underperform too. His kidneys started playing up, causing him to hallucinate. His room in an upper storey of the hospital looked out to a multistorey extension that was under construction. Running along the roofline of the half-completed building, for the safety of construction workers, were guide wires attached to stakes, with pieces of fluoro ribbon tied on every couple of metres. One day he pointed to the window in the direction of the safety lines and said: ‘I’ve been watching that little girl since yesterday. I wonder what she’s doing up there. She doesn’t move and she’s been there for a long time’. I asked if he was talking about what was on the roof. He said: ‘Yes, can’t you see the ribbon in her hair? It’s fluttering in the breeze. It must be pretty windy up there’.

  I wasn’t going to disturb his illusion. ‘Yes, I wonder what she’s up to,’ I said. But he wasn’t completely away with the fairies. He looked me in the eye and said: ‘I really appreciate what you’ve been doing for me. You know that, don’t you?’ I’ve never known how to respond to compliments or expressions of gratitude. ‘That’s okay. What else would I do? There was never a chance I’d do anything else,’ I said. He had one more brief swing back home, one final attempt to be in control that convinced me we were reaching the denouement. When I got him settled, he thanked me again for helping him. ‘You’re missing out on work a lot because of me,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry about that. They don’t care whether I’m there or not,’ I replied, which I knew to be true. He was home for two days before an ambulance returned him to the hospital, in severe pain and fighting to breathe.

  He was drifting in and out of consciousness. After several days of this, with no change, I took a call on a Friday afternoon from the hospital. A doctor told me that something needed to be done, that my father couldn’t keep going like this and the only option was to amputate his foot. The blood flow was too poor. I was finishing off a column about the psychological warfare between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott—Rudd was about to abandon his desire to implement an emissions trading scheme, which would result in his defenestration as prime minister—so I couldn’t get to the hospital until the following morning.

  When I got there a young registrar explained that they needed to do the operation quickly, hopefully two days away on Monday. My father was unconscious—apparently a near-permanent state now. The registrar explained that he would send a more senior doctor to talk with me about the operation. I sat in the room for a couple of hours thumbing through the papers and looking at my father. Kooka. The funny one. ‘I must have been with twenty or thirty girls by the time I got married.’ ‘Always stay flexible.’ ‘I stayed for a while but then I defongerated.’ ‘Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t do something.’

  A slim doctor in his thirties entered the room and introduced himself. He spoke with what to my Anglophone, antipodean ears was a Middle Eastern accent. He explained why amputation was the only way to prolong my father’s life. I told him that I understood. If this was what was needed, it had to be. My father had never given any hint that he wanted to do anything but keep fighting, to the extent of stranding himself on a street. The doctor said he would try to explain this to my father. He looked again at my father’s details on his clipboard and asked me: ‘It says James here. Is that what he is called?’ I knew immediately that I was dealing with a competent, thoughtful operator. I explained that he was always Jim. The doctor stood over the bed and spoke loudly.

  ‘Jim! Jim! I’m your doctor. I have to talk to you about your situation. Jim! Your foot is very bad. To save you, we’re going to have to take it off.’

  My father opened his eyes slightly and said in a guttural whisper: ‘No, no, don’t do that. I don’t want you to do that’.

  The doctor said: ‘Why not, Jim?’

  My father, his head resting on a pillow, shook his head slightly: ‘It won’t do any good. I don’t want you to do anything’.

  At this, the doctor spun around and turned to me, seated in my typical vinyl-backed hospital visitor’s chair. ‘Did you hear that?’ he said quickly.

  I said I had.

  ‘And what do you think? Is that what you want?’

  Inexplicably, I smiled a little. ‘Well, you’re asking me to make a pretty big decision on the spot here.’

  ‘Yes! That’s what he wants. Is that what you want too?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If that’s what Dad wants, that’s what I want as well.’

  He turned back towards the bed. ‘All right, Jim. We won’t do that to your foot. We’re going to look after you, okay?’

  My father said: ‘Yep, thanks, cobber’.

  The doctor, having bestowed one of the greatest kindnesses ever extended to my father, turned to me and told me he would get things in motion. I thanked him. He walked out. I did not see him again.

  I rose from my chair and walked to the bedside. My father opened his eyes and looked at me. He said, ‘I don’t want any sadness about this. I’ll always be with you.’ He paused, just for a second or two. ‘The time’s come for me to say, “Buddy Boy, it’s been great but I’ve got to go one way and you’ve got to go another”.’ Another tiny pause. ‘We’ve had a good thing together. It’s surprising, because we’re so very different.’ As he said the last two words of that sentence, his eyes widened and he raised the volume of his voice. At this point, I’m ashamed to say, I became overwhelmed. I began to speak but found myself simultaneously gasping and weeping as the pathetic, inadequate words fell out.

  ‘Dad, I know you have to go but I can’t imagine life without you.’

  He spoke gently but directly. ‘I know you can’t. But you’ll be all right. I wasn’t sure about you until I saw how you handled Jane being sick. When you told me about it, I thought “Well, how is this going to go?” I really didn’t know. I thought it could go any way. But you handled it. You stood up. You never buckled. So I know you’re going to be okay.’ Then he closed his eyes. I returned to my chair.

  Five minutes later, he opened his eyes. I walked over. ‘I should have done more with the girls, for the girls.’ He was right, he should have done more for and with his granddaughters but he couldn’t help himself: he had to entertain them rather than listen to them or try to see the world through their eyes. It was the way he was made. His relationships could not, because of his nature or the way he was nurtured, run too deep. Perhaps the only truly deep relationship he had was with me and that was often uncomfortable, implicitly competitive and—by his own admission only a fe
w minutes earlier—uncertain. I was forty-nine when Jane fell ill, and even at that point of my life he’d been unsure of what I was made of. And our relationship would suffer into eternity a massive lacuna: a discussion of what had driven him to live a parallel life, separate from my mother and from me, which coincided with my first thirty-seven years. It was not good to see him going with these regrets. But I admired him on this day, this shitty, magnificent day. I was overwhelmed but he was not. His lip did not tremble. He was lucid. He knew what he wanted to say and he said it. How long had he been putting his deathbed message together? Years, as he drove up and down the freeway to see me? Months, as he suffered night after night of broken, pain-racked sleep? Days, as he drifted in a miasma just below consciousness? He had, in my eyes, failed many tests. But this test? Brilliant. Courageous. For all of my life, I’d compared myself with him and felt that I couldn’t measure up, an emotional exercise rather than a rational one. And here he was, setting one last test for me: would I be able to embrace my mortal departure with the same sangfroid?

  Soon after, the medical staff came in and hooked my father up to a small machine that pumped heavy-duty painkillers into him. His mood was positive. He was clearly relieved. This toe of his wouldn’t be hurting him any more. He’d be getting away soon. No more thrashing around and talking in his sleep, being chased by demons. A couple in their sixties, former neighbours of his, dropped by to see him. I didn’t tell them that he’d opted to die but they had some laughs with him and said goodbyes that appeared to be final anyway. I spoke to the nursing staff. How long would it take? Probably four or five days was their best estimate. They undertook to get me in touch with the palliative care staff on Monday. Go home, a senior nurse advised, nothing’s going to happen in the next day or so. Night had fallen. I re-entered his room and waited by his bed until he opened his eyes again.