by Shaun Carney
‘Dad, I’ve got to go home but I’ll be back early in the morning,’ I said.
‘You do what you gotta do, old mate. I’ll be here,’ he murmured.
In the morning, Caroline and I headed back to Frankston, turned off the freeway and stopped at his house to pick up his car. We’d need two cars in the coming days. As we entered the side door into the lounge room, the door that I’d been unable to open after I escaped from school on my first day, everything was as it always was, except that he wasn’t there. And now we knew that he would never be there again. This first sighting of his little world eternally stripped of him caused Caroline to gasp. It did not seem right. We cried, just for a moment.
He was in good spirits when we arrived at the hospital. Freed of pain, he was able to enjoy a simple thing like a glass of fruit juice. After a couple of hours, Caroline returned home and I stayed. He talked about his childhood.
‘There was a lot of booze in the house. Mum wasn’t always in a fit state to make tea for Molly and me, so I’d have to do it. That’s why I became a cook in the army, because I’d learned how to do it growing up,’ he said. Some hours later I called his sister Molly to tell her that he didn’t have long to go and passed on this story, believing that she’d be comforted that he was speaking of her in his final days.
On the Monday, two days after treatment was discontinued, I was introduced to a coordinator of palliative care, Rae, as well as a doctor who was charmed by my father, who, when asked by the doctor how he was going, answered, ‘Good as gold’, and then declared a glass of juice he’d just consumed to be ‘nectar of the gods’. The doctor, a cultured, middle-aged fellow, asked me to tell him my father’s life story. I had to do some fast editing for taste and time as I went through the main points. Rae told me that it was likely but not certain that my father would be transferred to the palliative care facility a couple of kilometres south of the hospital; it would depend on how rapidly he declined. She asked if there were any religious arrangements that needed to be made. There weren’t. The one-time altar boy who was set up with a good education by the Christian Brothers while also experiencing their casual cruelty and who’d encouraged me to turn to God a few years earlier, had already told me the day before that he didn’t want anything to do with religion, either at his deathbed or in his memorial service.
I asked Rae how I should manage my time with my father. I wanted to be with him when he died. She said she’d seen people die days before expected and long after they were likely to go. ‘You can wait by someone’s side for twenty to thirty hours, nip off to the toilet and they’ll die in those few minutes. Sometimes people die when they know no-one else is there. They wait for that moment to slip away. My advice is don’t get too hung up about it,’ she said.
Meanwhile, my father was enjoying his morphine haze. I sat by his bed and he looked at me every ten minutes or so and smiled. He said several times, ‘It’s good to be here with you, Bud. Good to be together like this’. After an hour of this, he opened his eyes wide and focused hard on my face. ‘You know, when I went out to the Watsonia barracks with my bag slung over my shoulder, Private Jim Carney number VX502274, there wasn’t a soul within a hundred miles, not a single person I’d ever met, who knew me as Jim Carney, but that was who I was after that,’ he said. His voice carried a note of surprise, of wonderment that his life had taken that turn with the adoption of a new identity. The only other time he had ever spoken to me about this was grand final day in 1972, when he had revealed the whole story to me. This was his last good day. He was struggling by Wednesday, with longer periods of unconsciousness, and preparations were made to transfer him to the palliative care unit by ambulance. I wish it had never happened.
I do not know why the nurses at the hospital couldn’t let him stay plugged into the device that was keeping him pain-free and sedated. Perhaps there are problems with getting these machines back if they go to another campus of the hospital. For whatever reason, in the early afternoon he was unplugged, wheeled downstairs and placed in an ambulance that took him to the place where he was to die. I followed in his car. The trip, through the more middle-class, Liberal-voting sections of southern Frankston, took only a few minutes. The palliative care facility is a pleasant place, set in bushy surrounds, opposite a high school. It has private rooms and courtyards and is quiet. When my father was settled into his room, I asked a nurse if she could connect my father up to his mix of painkillers. ‘Well, I can’t do that until a doctor has seen your dad and has signed off on it,’ she said. ‘He has to be examined before we administer anything.’ I asked when a doctor would see him.
‘Well, not straight away. The doctors are all in a meeting.’
‘How long will the meeting last?’
‘Oh, it goes for a while.’
‘He’s just been taken off his medication and he needs to go back on it’—the absurdity of me, who stopped studying science after Form Four, making this pronouncement to a medical professional ran through my mind—‘so could you please get a doctor to come out and see him?’
‘The doctors don’t like to be disturbed in their meeting. It won’t be too long.’
Yet again, being conflict averse, rather than making a fuss, I went along with it. I accepted the assurance. I believed it and banked on the sedatives continuing to work on my father’s debilitated system for a sufficient time. They didn’t. He stirred. He was alert. He complained that he felt uneasy. I walked out into the corridor and found a nurse behind a desk.
‘How much longer will a doctor be?’ I said firmly. ‘My father really needs a doctor. He needs to go back on the morphine.’
Not much longer, I was told. This silly dance was repeated a couple more times in the next hour. Progressively my father got more distressed. ‘I don’t feel right. It’s all wrong,’ he said.
‘What’s wrong, Dad?’ I asked.
‘I feel bad. This place is bad,’ he said.
‘What can I do for you?’
‘I don’t know. This is all wrong. I need a drink of water.’
I found a glass, filled it and gave it to him. He was fully alert, sitting up in his bed. He sipped from the glass, pulled a face and handed the glass back to me.
‘Urgh! That doesn’t taste right. Hold on to that. We’ll get it analysed later.’
It was much more technical language than I had ever heard from him before and sounded odd. He leaned back into his pillow so that he was semi-reclined. I felt shot by this whole experience. Everything had gone so well since he’d decided he didn’t want any treatment. He didn’t have long to go and here he was needlessly in distress, paranoid. I sat down.
Then the door opened and Rae walked in, smiling. She looked at me and said: ‘What’s wrong?’ I explained. Her face hardened. She said, ‘Right! I’ll be back’, and walked out. Within five minutes, she returned and just behind her was a man in a lab coat, with a stethoscope hanging from his neck. He swept into the room, clearly angry. He looked at my father, pulled back the covers, moved my father’s damaged foot around, checked him some more and spat out some instructions to a nurse. Then he left the room. My father moaned and looked down at his bandaged foot, ‘Ohhh, he touched it.’ I wanted to run out into the corridor and sock the bloke in the eye but I was relieved that at last this was going to come to an end. I thanked Rae for intervening. She apologised for what had happened.
After she had gone, I took a couple of steps to my father’s bedside and before I could speak he looked at me, his eyes blazing and sharper than I’d seen them for years. He jabbed his right index finger at me, just the way he had when I was fifteen and had told him I didn’t want to sit for the Form Four Commonwealth Scholarship exams because I didn’t think I was smart enough and he insisted that I never talk that way again (I did as I was told, sat the exams and got a scholarship), and said: ‘Don’t. You. Leave me here!’ I sought to calm him down, telling him that he’d be feeling better soon. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. How many thousands of times had he sai
d that to me when I was young? Then the medical staff came in and hooked him up to the machine that would pump the medications into him and tame his anger. He lost consciousness soon after.
By 9 o’clock that night the day’s dramas were taking their toll on me. I asked a nurse what she thought might happen. She said it was too hard to say. I needed to sleep and my father wasn’t going to wake up. He was taking long, steady breaths. I told him I was leaving and drove home. Around four in the morning, my mobile rang. A nurse announced herself, ‘Shaun, I’m calling to tell you that I’m sorry but your dad has just passed away. Would you like to come down?’ I threw some clothes on and headed down the freeway yet again. I was shown into his room, where he lay on his back on the bed, his skin waxen and yellowed. I didn’t know what to do. I walked up to his body and said, ‘Oh, Dad’. Then I sat on a chair against the wall to get a different physical perspective. I could see that the energy and jokes and sayings and determination to do everything his way had gone somewhere else. Then I wondered how long would be a decent period of time to stay in the room before leaving. I didn’t want the nurse sitting outside to think I didn’t care. I gathered up his belongings and sat down again. After another five minutes, I stepped over to his side and said: ‘See you, Dad’. It was still dark when I left for home on this April Fools’ Day and Maundy Thursday.
Driving on the southern part of EastLink, which runs through paddocks, the blackness seemed especially thick. I was sad but I also felt free, as close to total liberation as I’ve ever experienced. I was not exhilarated. It did not feel good, but a weight had lifted. I wouldn’t have to worry about him. I wouldn’t have to watch him keep falling apart. All of the comparisons that I made of myself with him, as irrational as they were, would be more pointless than ever. I also felt myself taking another step along life’s gangplank. Shit, my mother’s gone, my father’s gone, I’m next. That’s what liberation brings with it.
I turned on the radio, to my father’s beloved 3MP, playing the hits of the seventies, eighties and nineties. After all, it was his car, which he’d had converted to LPG some years earlier. In the early morning stillness, the radio sounded delicate, intimate. ‘At Seventeen’, a 1975 hit by Janis Ian, came on. It was a song that I liked, grudgingly, when it was released (it was a girl’s song about having acne and being unpopular). It was recorded as a light bossa nova piece with upright bass, acoustic guitar, trumpets and the drummer using brushes. The arrangement is full of air. Every instrument, every delicate touch of the players can be discerned. The depth of the sound, the gentleness of the playing, seemed immense. And then in the single edit the radio was playing, which omits the trumpet solo from the album version, there was the acoustic guitar solo, just a two-bar figure repeated once but so lovely. I thought of other records of the early and mid-1970s and how frequently they boasted dexterous instrumental solos, so different from this century’s hit records. Mostly it was guitars—Steely Dan’s ‘Rikki, Don’t Lose that Number’ and ‘Reelin’ in the Years’, Mick Ronson’s sensational effort on Ian Hunter’s ‘Once Bitten, Twice Shy’, Maria Muldaur’s ‘Midnight at the Oasis’. Even Wings’ ‘My Love’, a song I could never stand, had a great guitar solo. But there was also the swirling soprano saxophone solo on Carole King’s ‘It’s Too Late’. I recalled a Sunday afternoon in 1970 when I was playing The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s on our first stereo, an HMV portable, in the lounge room. My father was on his recliner, half asleep, resting his head on his right hand as he sought recovery from his weekly exertions of trying to live two lives. As the trebly, fuzzy solo on ‘Fixing a Hole’ concluded, with George Harrison resolving a downward run on his Fender Stratocaster by taking the final note up, my father did not move, did not open his eyes. From the left side of his mouth he said: ‘Gee, they’re good musicians, those boys’, and returned to his slumber.
By now, I had descended into the Melba Tunnel, which runs for more than a kilometre under the eastern suburbs’ Mullum Mullum Valley. As the road rose gradually towards the tunnel’s exit, the car started to lose power. It backfired once, then twice. Was I going to be stranded in the tunnel, triggering a morning-peak road traffic alert? Cars behind me started to change lanes. Slowly, slowly I made it out and once I was on an even surface again, the car was fine. Then I remembered how my father had told me several years earlier that he had done a special deal with a mechanic to convert his car to LPG. ‘Hardly cost me anything,’ he said. He got what he paid for and now I had it. I resolved to get rid of the car as soon as possible.
It was light by now. When I parked the car outside my home, I saw my neighbour David walking out of his front door on his way to work. I wondered if I should tell him that my father had just died and decided I shouldn’t. It would have been awkward. As I approached my front door I checked myself: what day was this? My father had decided he was ready to die only four and a half days earlier. It felt like two weeks. I had never lived life so intensely.
In the next few hours I made all the necessary calls. I called my Aunty Molly to tell her that her brother was gone. She seemed resigned to it. Before we closed the call, she said: ‘Oh, and, love, that business that your dad told you about Mum not making us dinner, well, people say strange things when they’re on the morphine. It just wasn’t true. I never saw Jim cook ever. And if Mum wasn’t able to cook dinner for us, well, we’d go up to the street to buy pies. He talked to you about going into the army but, you know, it was all right for him. He went off and left me with Mum and Dad. I got left behind.’
Families.
19
THE GREAT LETTING GO
ON THE DAY after my father died, I drove to his house to make sure that it was secure and to check if there were any valuables that I needed to take away. There wasn’t much there but the place had been broken into while he’d been in hospital. I couldn’t see that anything had been stolen, although I wouldn’t really have been able to tell. For all I knew, he’d stashed a wad of bills in a drawer or a shoe and some local kids had found it. He’d secreted money away before. In the afternoon, I returned home and switched on my PC. I hadn’t checked my emails or read a paper for a couple of days. A bit after midday, Caroline Overington, a former Age colleague who had moved across to The Australian after a very successful time with Fairfax, culminating in a stint as New York correspondent, had sent me an email headed ‘Your father, and my sincere regret’.
In the email, Caroline told me that my friend and Age colleague Roslyn Guy had taken her to task for writing an item in The Australian’s Strewth! column—which is a sharply written, old-fashioned daily diary section—about me on the day my father had died. Caroline told me she was desperately sorry, she’d tried and failed to call me, and that the item was meant to be lighthearted and a bit of ‘friendly, cross-cultural rivalry’. I had no doubt she was sincere. But I didn’t know what she was talking about. Caroline took no prisoners with her journalism but I’d always admired her work ethic and the way that she took advantage of every opportunity within her reach. We had always got on well. The inevitable Google search turned up an item in the previous day’s Australian.
In it, Caroline asserted that I’d written ‘recently’ about Australians relying heavily on their cars, had received a truckload of angry mail, and had ventured back into print to highlight the car-dependent nature of outer suburbs such as Carrum Downs. She set out to ridicule me, suggesting that I was clueless about life in the far reaches of suburbia because those places were ‘a long way from the Age building’.
This was bizarre. Not only was her item relating to the controversial—the word is used loosely—columns about cars I’d written almost two years earlier, it was a misrepresentation of my argument. As for the timing, I didn’t care. Every time you sit down to write something you can’t wonder if the individual you’re going to write about has just lost a close relative. All the same, I wasn’t of a mind to hide my annoyance.
I really did dislike this stuff, which had become so common in the Australian
media in the previous ten years. It didn’t seem to be a coincidence that inter-journalistic sniping had become more intense and widespread as the legacy media’s future became less certain. The need to hold on to audience is powerful but does slagging off other publications achieve that? I wouldn’t think that readers give much of a toss. And anyway, is a journalist a genius because he works in the same office as you and a pretentious twit if he works somewhere else? Not in my view. So I replied to Caroline, telling her that I appreciated her apology regarding the timing of the item, but that it wasn’t necessary. However, I told her that I did require an apology and a correction for her suggestion that I was clueless about the outer suburbs, having been born and raised in Frankston. I also told her that the pieces she was referring to had been published almost two years earlier. I closed off with ‘I don’t know why these stories have come across your radar this week and frankly, with what’s going on, I can’t be bothered finding out. We’ve known each other for a long time, so look after yourself’. I didn’t bear Caroline any ill will. The following Thursday, when Caroline next wrote Strewth!, she ran an item headed ‘Carney Correction’. She confessed to being mortified by running the previous week’s item, which she described as a bit of ‘friendly jousting’, on the day my father died. ‘Carney insists we owe him no apology, but we do owe him a correction: he’s no inner-city luvvie. He was born and raised way outside the city’s outskirts, and never pretends otherwise,’ she wrote.
Eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I searched around on the Internet to try to discover how this had come about. Somehow, my old column, after lying dormant for twenty months, had found its way on to a blog and bubbled up, with its meaning and intent reversed, into Australia’s national daily. No skin off my nose, and it was just a column item, but it did get me wondering if this world of journalism that I’d loved inhabiting for so long was where I wanted to be.
