by Jock Serong
This is what I feel, what I glean from interrogating Mum. I can’t know enough of him to care about him as a person, but I care a great deal about the idea of a father. A dad. So I collect the little clues she leaves. I go through private drawers sometimes, searching for his identity. I build him painstakingly from these twigs and straws, but the shape he takes always feels hollow.
I imagine she wondered how long he’d last, whether he’d end it with some horrendous flourish. Gas himself in the car, perhaps—the most suburban of exits.
Wally and I pass the house sometimes on our bikes, both trying to look at it without the other seeing. The Gallant Street house: behind its nature strip, a modest brick veneer off a government plan. It would’ve had a big backyard, we figure, after riding around the corner to assess the depth of the blocks.
It’s impossible for me to know whether my parents still talked in those days, whether Dad had retreated into glum silence. Whether they fought, even. Whether despite all this there were moments of bliss. At some stage he must have come up with the dopey idea that renting wasn’t enough, and that in order to sail his little ketch of family out of the fog he’d have to buy a house. Would Mum have passively agreed? She was more forceful than that, but maybe passivity was her mode before she became a single parent.
I picture an agent with massive sideburns reassuring them of their own great potential. Showing them the houses they could afford; explaining their shortcomings. Driving past the ones out of their reach, dismissing those too in a voice just above a stage whisper, as being for management-level couples. Go-getters. And Dad, taking the bait, asking him to stop the car.
So Mum put her name next to his on a mortgage that was spectacularly beyond their means. How else do you get anywhere? I imagine him saying.
But what if it was Mum who said it? What if it was Mum who loaded them both up?
They moved into Fernley Road in March 1969, and the repayments immediately started to bite. How do I know that? Because in my regular fingering through their belongings, I found a file with all the bank’s correspondence: the stern warnings, the official threats, the beginnings of recovery action as they missed one repayment after another. Dad emerged from his midlife cave for long enough to find himself a new job at the munitions plant in Footscray.
Heavily pregnant with me, Mum somehow started working in pubs: the Commercial in Yarraville, the Mona Castle in Seddon, the Prince Albert in Williamstown. She took buses between shifts while Dad had the family Zephyr parked in the lot at the factory. None of it made sense. Yet they clung to the house.
I’m intrigued by this other side of Mum’s life, the pub side. Wally isn’t. He consciously avoids it, as though it diminishes her to think of her in subservience to strange men. Occasionally she works a day shift that coincides with me being off school sick, and she takes me along and perches me like an exotic bird on a stool. The illness is treated with an endless stream of chips and post-mix lemonade. The framed pictures, the illicit adult smells of cigarette smoke and old beer. The races on a radio somewhere. Old men with flat-football faces, straining to listen, betting slips clutched in spotty hands.
The thermometer governs all of my phony fevers. Mum jams it in my mouth then rushes away to berate Wally about homework and make his lunch. Alone in the bunk, I’m holding it under the reading lamp. The searing-hot globe has burned me more than once and, if I don’t get it right, it will shoot the mercury up to indicate a life-threatening fever. I need it to say sick but not malarial. When Mum’s footsteps return, I whip the warm glass tube back under my tongue and look sorrowful. We’ll get through this together, Mum. I know I’m brave. Take me to work with you.
Seeing the world from what I presume to be its centre, I fail to notice that Mum’s happy to go along with the charade. Maybe it’s comforting for her to take a talisman of her home to whatever bar she’s working. Remind the world of men that she’s someone’s mother.
She’s an uncommon bartender, even from my small and simple perspective. I have no other bartenders to compare her to, I know. But she’s not buxom and flirty, not mean and defeated. Something else: dry, caustic, wise. She runs a very tight bar. There’s no muscle to back her up—she’s often said since that the pubs she worked were running on autopilot, owned by absentee investors. Mostly, she seems to find pubs where the regulars are old and frail. But from time to time, never seen by me, the balance must break down and their wilder instincts take over.
The façade of control is strengthened by her ability to absorb sporting trivia. It’s obvious to me now that this is a mark of an intelligent woman consigned to a menial job, but she absorbs the commentary drone of the front bar TV and somehow filters it from the jabber of the Lens, Larrys and Georges in front of her. From countless hours of telecast she builds a warehouse of knowledge. Our friends’ mothers look at her distastefully when she explains the slope of the grass at Lord’s or lays out the numbers that attest to Greg Chappell’s mid-career slump. The mothers of the 1970s weren’t supposed to know these things.
Mum’s pub years, and my role in them, are reduced in memory to brick walls in the sun, tattered live music posters peeling away. Graffiti, cold tiles and reflections in glass, voices as monotone noise.
Somewhere deep in these years, I first catch a glimpse of the future for me and Wally. It was available on telly at home I’m sure, but I know for a fact I see it on the big black-and-white Rank Arena behind the bar at the Commercial.
The future is Jeff Thomson. It’s him and Lillee bowling at the Poms that I see, so it must be the summer of ’74–’75.
The long, long run in.
And then somehow, the tipping of the right side of his body way back, slinging the ball into an unerring trajectory that ends at the terrified batsman. When they show it in slow motion his limbs contort to impossible angles. His eyes roll back in their sockets like a great white bringing death by dismemberment. The ball only becomes visible to the batsman at the last possible instant: Thommo’s spring-loaded body has obscured it almost until it’s released from his hand.
His yorkers shoot straight home into the base of the stumps. Bouncers spit viciously from the turf. And in the wreckage of the moment—batsmen on the ground, stumps all over the place, Thommo grins like the sales reps I’ve seen at Mum’s bars. This cricket thing’s a lark innit? says Thommo’s grin. I just do it to hang out with my mates.
Menace and charm. A potent mix.
I can now see, very distantly, a sketch of a man I could be. Laughing at my foes. Capable, casual, contemptuous.
The first time I see this vision I’m desperate to tell Wally, to share with him the prospect of what we could become. He scoffs: says he already knows about Thommo. And his scorn doesn’t matter. Larrikin Man has become my template.
Just as Thommo arrives in my subconscious, the role model in the foreground departs.
Dad simply doesn’t come home from work one Friday night. There’s been a pattern of absences, brushed off as roster changes at the factory. Then a Friday night absence becomes permanent. No tears, no scenes, no recriminations. He was there, and now he isn’t.
Wally’s the first to articulate what we all know. There’s a fathers versus sons cricket game the next week at school. He stands there in the kitchen, scuffed school shoes on the lino, and hands the note to Mum. She reads it in silence, puts it down and looks at him.
‘You wanna play?’ is all he says.
Mum makes a creditable sixteen that day, swiping consistently through mid-on. It’s where Wally and I have been making the bulk of our runs in the backyard, and I know she’s seen it. Bent double in the vegie patch pulling weeds, she’s been struck on the arse by this very shot. Instead of rising to her full height and cursing us, she responded by turning slowly under her sunhat and telling the striker—me, I think—to play it along the ground.
She also takes an outfield catch that day, running flat out to her left in Dunlop Volleys and a tracksuit as though it’s the most natural thing i
n the world. She doesn’t celebrate or carry on when she snares it. Just looks at some indeterminate point on the grass in front of her as her sprint dwindles to a walk. People at their barbecues around the boundary are cheering and tooting car horns. You know he shot through, they’d be muttering. So sad for the little ones.
Mum’s work means we’re at home unattended for long stretches of time. She tries to get the day shifts, but even then she’ll be at work until seven, and we’re home from school at three-thirty. This suits us fine—we know where to find enough food, and once it’s eaten we’ll wring out the remaining daylight into cricket or footy—in the winter months pushing as far into the gathering darkness as we can.
The evenings are long and quiet, and she fills them by reading.
Early days, this takes place on the couch: Dr Seuss, Harry the Dirty Dog. Her reading evolves over the early months after Dad’s departure, as she hears her own words commanding the air in a bewildered house. She’s tentative at first, droning like we drone at school, but it’s her inexperience with us as an audience, not her ability, that’s holding her back. Sunburnt or cold, sticky with food, we drive our heads into each of her armpits and let the words wash over us. Sendak and C. J. Dennis, Enid Blyton, then Roald Dahl. She’s doing voices, the pitch rising and falling as the narrative swells and recedes, and calling an abrupt halt to the night’s reading just before a crucial event so we’ll anticipate the denouement all day.
But even if I’ve nodded off and been shifted to bed, I click the reading light on and the bulb burns yellow into the night. It’s my lighthouse, my beacon.
He might come home.
One spring evening comes an event that stands, like Dad’s disappearance, as a marker of history’s forward momentum.
It’s the week after the ’76 grand final, the one they called Crimmo’s Cup. We’re in the backyard. Mum’s at work, and we’re in a state of limbo because the Big Footy’s over and now it should be cricket. The garden’s bursting into a smash-up riot of flowers—you can smell it everywhere, that honey reek, hear the swarms of insects, the birds darting among them for the easy feed. The place is alive.
Wally’s fiddling with the bat, rolling a new grip onto it, pushing the rubber down over the coils of string wrapped around the handle. As he works, he’s coughing away, those little ones he always seems to do when he’s concentrating, when all of a sudden he sort of stops and chokes. He’s just—one minute he’s bent over the task, and the next he’s looking at me like he can’t comprehend what’s going on. He’s pointing at his throat, so that at first I think he’s choking on something, but I know he hasn’t eaten for hours. I wonder if he’s swallowed a bee, I wonder if he’s been poisoned, I wonder a dozen stupid and unhelpful things as he changes colour to a stricken white and begins to collapse, waving vaguely in the direction of his head as he lies on one side on the grass, legs kicking feebly while a hideous blank wall of panic rises in my gut, brick by brick cancelling any chance of clear thought.
He’s still breathing but shallow and fast, the breath of a small frightened animal. I’m standing above him, bending over him, hopping around and saying stuff about God and what’s wrong and somebody help and just saying them quietly and pleadingly and the dog’s turned up and he’s licking Wally’s face but not like he thinks it’s a game, not at all, and he’s started whimpering and he’s squatted back on his haunches in a tense weird way while he licks and snuffles and Wally’s lips have gone blue and his eyes are locked on me like I’ve got an answer and I don’t have an answer and now I’m screaming and screaming and screaming.
Right now I’m in a car boot with my hands and feet bound and a hole in my knee and all sorts of cracked and broken bones and I can feel the terror of that moment clear through all of it and the forty-odd years between. The white-hot searing horror of watching my brother dying on the ground in front of me.
The moment ends; it has to end somehow. It ends with old lady Apostoulos tearing across the yard at full speed and taking hold of Wally, without a word to me, without a question to him. She bundles him face-down across the shelf of her bosom and takes off with me in pursuit of her floral pinafore. As she runs down the drive, out, round the corner, past her own gate and further down the street, his arms and legs draping from her bouncing hips, I’m crying harder and sobbing what’s wrong with him? She hauls in a breath and whispers, ‘Asthma. He having asthma attack,’ and for some reason this infuriates me and I cry in response that Wally doesn’t have asthma.
‘Does now,’ she puffs.
Her big calves and ankles, pounding at the concrete like heavy machinery made flesh.
I stub my toe viciously on a raised footpath block as I run beside her but I can’t cry any harder.
She thumps up the garden path of a house about four down the road, a place I’ve never been.
Bangs on the door, bangs again.
Yells at the top of her lungs, Vera! Vera! Vera…turn off fucking television, come out! She shuffles Wally’s weight in her arms as she waits. A sleepy-looking woman in a dressing gown answers the door. Thick glasses, Jiffy slippers. Her eyes widen as she sees Mrs Aposta’s load.
‘Boy have asthma attack. Need machine.’
Vera throws the flywire screen open with a clang and we charge in, Wally’s limp head smacking on the doorjamb as he passes through. In a front room he’s dumped on the bed. On the bedside table, under a lamp, is a strange device, brown and beige with a power cord plugged into the wall and a white plastic tube running out of the front end.
Vera flicks a switch on the box and the machine hums into life. She uncoils the plastic tube and finds a clear facemask on one end, which she places over Wally’s mouth and nose. For a long, agonising moment, nothing at all happens. Then his chest rises, falls. His fingers uncurl.
She holds the facemask in position while Mrs Aposta goes to a telephone on the other bedside table and calls an ambulance. She’s made to repeat herself, over and over. Now I can see that a Greek woman in late-seventies Altona would have suffered this indignity many times a day. Once she’s satisfied with the call, she hangs up and dials another number, says my mother’s name hesitatingly and, realising she’s got her on the first try, explains what’s happened.
‘No, Missus Keefe, he fine. He resting. I call ambulance to make sure. I meet you there, yes. Yes. Good. Yes.’
She hangs up, looks at me solemnly and says, ‘You be good boy, run home and get he pyjamas and toot-brush. Put in bag and run back here, yeah? Quick, before ambulance come…’
I take one last look at him before I leave, the steady swell and fall of his chest, the colour coming back to his face. He raises a thumb, feebly.
When the ambulance has come and the men have done their thing and they’ve carted Wally off to hospital, Mum and I follow in our car. Mum’s thrown her hair back into a half-arsed bun and packed a bag. I see Wally’s Bradman book go in, from the desk next to the bunks. He loves that book.
In the hospital he’s sitting up in bed, looking perfectly fine. It’s Mum who looks like she needs a doctor.
She unpacks his things, helps him into the pyjamas while he wriggles with embarrassment, and then climbs onto the bed as I get up on the other side of him. This terrifying day, like all of our days, must end with a book.
Mum, in her halo of old pub tobacco. I’m picking the dried blood from the stubbed toe. I’m picking my nose. Mum drones through a few pages before falling asleep mid-sentence.
I look at Wally and he’s asleep too. It’s just me and two valves on the wall with hard blank signs that say OXYGEN and SUCTION.
For the next week I refuse to be separated from him for any reason.
Club
It’s pointless, this. Clinging to memories. Rewinding them, replaying them. But it’s compulsive: I feel them rushing forward to be counted, the people and occurrences whose very existence depends on me recalling them.
The dark, the prickling carpet. The small clanks and knocks of loose things in the co
mpartments. I’m a child again, I’m myself again, the whole self without all the punctures and bruises. The self I was before everything became so tawdry.
I’m thinking about love, because this place is a vacuum where love does not exist. It can be summoned into recollection, turned over in the hands and examined, but it cannot exist.
It’s the night before our first game for All Saints Parish CC. Mum’s lined it up—we’ve heard her on the phone to the club secretary.
They’re really very good…
No, both of them…
He’s a lefthander. Yes, it’s very young but I can assure you, that won’t be a problem.
Tough as nails, our mum. Wally’s a sure thing at ten, but the old girl has to tell them I’m nine, and even then she has to beg. Their lowest level is under-twelves, kids who tower over me. We’ve done the two net sessions ahead of the opening round, and neither of us is even slightly troubled by the bowling. There’s a transition to be negotiated, from taped tennis balls to hard plastic balls and the protective equipment that goes with them. In my hunger I can only see this change in a positive light: when I hit the plastic missiles, they rocket away from me twice as hard.
What gets it over the line with me being underage is, the coach knows I can hit. He finds out the hard way—chatting to a parent when I smack a straight drive into his shins, eliciting a full-volume fuck! and a lot of irate hopping. He won’t be forgetting me.
In the bunkroom, we’re each engaged in the rituals of pre-match preparation. Noises from the top bunk, twangs from the little springs that form a roof over me. Wally’s doing his stretches.
‘You’re not gonna pull a hammy,’ I tell him.
