Chapter 6 It's dark and I'm in bed at last. I put the covers over my head and curl up in a ball. This is my time. I try to remember my mum's face but it's starting to lose definition. A memory of a memory. I think about my life in Sydney before she died. I was seven-and-a-half. Now I'm twelve. The house is quiet. I don't know what the time is but it must be after ten. I've been in bed for an hour or so when I hear my father's cab coming down the hill and turning into the drive. My stomach goes cold as the headlights show behind the curtains and pan across the ceiling. Familiar and dreaded sounds begin to filter through the thin walls. The heavy grade of blue metal he insisted on putting down on the driveway makes a familiar scrunching on the tyres with the occasional ping or clunk of a loose stone hitting the underside of the Holden. To this day I remember every square inch of the 1964 Holden and the 1964 Morris Oxford. My father drove them both as cabs at various times in the '60's and it was my job to keep them clean. People said he had the cleanest cab in the fleet. None of them would have had any idea what it cost to keep a car clean like that. Going over every square surface inch with an index finger wrapped in soft cloth and dipped in cutting and then polishing agents. Up at 5am to get it all done before school. Take them in a cup of tea. Set the breakfast table, put the dog out, make the beds as they become empty and get the milk and paper. They sound like little things and they are but they never ended. There was plenty of heavy work as well. I dug over the entire one fifth acre property to two spade depths when we first moved there and I got a hiding for not digging out every last brick from what must have been an old trash heap. I was eleven. All my Saturdays were usually spent lavishing my attentions on the Holden. I was supposed to do my stepmother's car as well but I usually ended up having to do it on Sunday. Mow the lawns, trim the edges and then afterwards there would invariably be the inspection. I was terrified by my father most of the time. To be fair he wasn't a well or a happy man but he treated me more like a personal assistant and slave than a son. This was thrown into sharp relief by the way my siblings were treated. Jason and Arnya had no idea about any of this, being protected from it by their innocence but at the same time they sensed that something was wrong and both left home as soon as they were able. I was never shown any real gratitude or affection for my unending labours. The hours of heavy work a grown man would normally have to do. I did it willingly, I wanted to help. I wanted to gain their love and affection but it was never offered. I sometimes mistook the few relatively calm intervals for small progress in this direction. Each time it happened I would have to climb back out of the disappointment. His inspections were like some perverse private school ritual. They usually culminated in a carefully organised beating. It involved letting me marinate in my own fear for at least a couple of hours. He'd wait until I was in my pyjamas and scratchy woollen dressing gown (pictured) then finally he'd call out for me to go and get the stick. When I first encountered my father's unique brand of corporal punishment it had been a soft leather slipper. By the time I left it was a man's cane walking stick with a bone or ivory handle. It had developed a permanent thirty degree bend in it and the varnish had vanished from the contact surface. Sometimes it took on the air of comic farce. My father would conduct the whole procedure in a relaxed and light hearted manner so as not to disturb the pervading mood of quiet domesticity for the rest of the family. Bend over, touch your toes, pause for back swing, thwack. Never more than six times. It sounds like something from the Goon Show or Monty Python. Except that I really did have to get up two hours before I went to bed if I ever wanted to do any homework or study for exams. Inspections were quite formal. My father would be dressed ready for work. if it was a car inspection he would prowl around the cab with a clean white handkerchief in one hand, wrapping it around his index finger and using it to illustrate his point that there was dirt 'here' behind the front bumper and 'here' at the back of the rear view mirror. I might have to wait until ten o'clock that night before the dreaded time came and I got to find out what my reward would be. It would depend on how things panned out. If I was lucky, they might get drunk and forget about it or it's just as likely I'd have to sit there until Joy went to bed. What happened next would depend on how drunk my dad got. He usually drank the same amount but it wouldn't always affect him the same way. He might give me the keys to the Holden and say "You drive" or he might fall asleep. What kind of favour is it to be let off a beating I didn't deserve in the first place? Was it my father's twisted way of trying to show me something like kindness? Perhaps. One Saturday morning I was cleaning the cab when my stepmother, Joy, came out to say my father wanted me to finish up and come inside. This was new. What had I done now? He explained when I got there that the skin on his feet really itched because the heat from the motor all day sort of cooked them. He wanted me to rub ointment into them. Oh, great, I'd rather be cleaning the fucking cab. After wearing myself out on his feet for an hour or so he asked me to move to his shoulder and when I did he put his hand in my lap. As I massaged his shoulder his hand moved back and forth over my crotch but he just left it there. He wasn't asleep. I didn't like it. I felt preyed upon. I responded without wanting to. My body was being used and my mind was supposed to just take a back seat and shut-up. It felt as if I was undergoing unnecessary surgery for the enjoyment and satisfaction of the surgeon. My identity had been stolen. The first thing I did when I got the space was to reinvent myself. When we're still young, we're protected by our limited understanding of the grown-up world. It's a sacred trust that adults will not violate that innocence. Unfortunately, as the world has come to understand, they often do. I used to think about putting ooleander sap in their morning tea. It's quite poisonous and regularly kills children who accidentally eat the sap or the leaves. I couldn't think of a good way to make it look accidental. I couldn't have done it, anyway. I wasn't in a life or death situation. It was more like doing time. I only had a couple of years and I'd be free. I could wait. It's the first thing that you learn, after all. To his friends and neighbours my father was a good man. He was an SPCA inspector and the treasurer of the local primary-school committee. He would always take an active part in fund raising efforts like the annual school fair and he tried to help a local kid whose father was serving time for a particularly infamous and grisly murder. He was always impeccably clean and tidy. He looked a bit like Al Capone. Mediterranean features... olive skin and dark hair. Before I ever met him I asked my grandmother what he was like. She had never hidden her dislike for him and the way he treated my mother but she said that he had beautiful hands and that he was an excellent driver. I don't want to create the impression of some sadistic drooling moron. If you'd met Pat Sinclair in his cab you probably would have liked him. He was well liked by many people. I liked him. I learned a lot about myself and who I am from him but forty years later my mind still hasn't stopped putting down nacreous layers to protect itself from the anxious irritation the residue of those few years in Sunnyvale have left with me. The same neighbours who all thought my dad was a great guy thought I was the ideal son. Out working around the house at all hours of the night and day. Their kids must have hated my guts. I wonder if any of them ever heard or got a glimpse of what really went on at No.12. Joy had her best behaviour mode and telephone voice and my father could lie without blinking. Their combined efforts in "visitor mode" could be very convincing. Something I learned to my cost. One night things came to a head for me. My father was drunk and angry so Joy decided it was a good time to annoy him with her list of my transgressions for the day. Instead of his anger becoming a storm brewing on the horizon it flared up and he went straight to punching and kicking me around the little wash-house area just inside the back door. I was so surprised and scared. I had no time to think. Drunks out of control. I still can't relax around people getting drunk. People falling over drunk are like lambs to the slaughtering fire. Helpless party sheep. Their potential for sudden acts of morbid stupidity is everpresent. Either they don't have the courage to take decent drugs or they fail to treat themselves or their drug of choice with the respect they deserve. I could see no way of defending myself when Joy interrupted and said, "Don't do that here Pat, you'll wake the other children. Take him up the road or something". There were a couple of vacant lots further up the street. My father told me to go and wait in the car but things had deteriorated to the point that I wasn't going to take it any more. I walked past the car, up the drive and off up the black tar strip glistening bluish in the moonlight. After a couple of hours a cop picked me up. He wanted to know why I was wandering around New Lynn in the small hours of a week night and by way of explanation I told him some of what was going on. When I listened to myself talking I suddenly heard myself from his point of view and I didn't sound convincing. I didn't trust him enough to tell him everything. When he took me home the place was in darkness. The cop woke them up and I could hear the tone of their exchange. Visitor mode was in effect. I only wanted to make a point, maybe I'd succeeded. As soon as the cop went I knew I hadn't. I was going to be forced to join the navy and sign a withdrawal form for my bank account. A hundred dollars was worth quite a bit then. All those christmas and birthday presents and 2/6 a week for pocket money. I didn't care about that. I knew then that there would never be any happiness or love for me in that house and I resolved to wait a day or so and then leave permanently. I can hear his footsteps. Not straight away, it always takes a while for him to gather up his cigarrettes, lighter and log-book and unfold himself from the sitting position he's been in all day. He stands by the car brushing cigarette ash from his trousers, clears his throat and sniffs. Low clump, clump, clump along the back path and up the concrete steps. Keys rattle. The back door opens. Greetings are exchanged. Both voices are overpolite, his is tinged with guilt. I can hear thick caterpillar soles squelch across highly polished kitchen linoleum and then onto carpet. An exhausted sigh of relief and the sound of a heavy set man collapsing in a chair. Oh! great, I'd rather have been asleep when he got home. Then I remember the time I did fall asleep while I waited for a hiding. I woke suddenly to find the lights were on and my father was hitting me and yelling at me to get up. I always forget about that night. I often fell asleep while I was waiting for that sound. That particular exhaust note of the cab slowing as it comes down the hill and turned into the drive. No wonder I still prefer not to sleep too much forty years later. I like to enjoy sleepiness. I sleep the way an animal or a child does. I like to wrestle with it, to prolong the onset of sleep and enjoy its shadows and flashes of colour. When it comes I'm helpless and can't resisit it. I go into a few hours of deep dark oblivion and awaken to find my sleep batteries fully charged. Will I have to get up and wait around? That happens sometimes. I have to stand there in my pyjamas and wait until he gets around to me. It's like an awful game where alcohol is the dice. If Joy's in a good mood he might try to drink her into a stupor so that she'll go to bed. In that case I might escape the hiding I was probably going to get. If Joy requires paciification it could go in any direction. My father is a guilty drunk. As soon as he is properly pissed he starts acting as though there's an invisible accuser nagging at him and harrassing him unfairly. He sniffs repeatedly. He makes eye rolling gestures while winding the handle of an invisible grammophone and says things like "Pardon me, said the waiter"......then half under his breath....."pensively picking his nose". Sometimes it seems as if they use me to settle their arguments or at least to help clear bad air between them. If Joy is angry with me she doesn't trust herself to administer my punishment. Not long after I first arrived from Australia I threatened one of the neighbourhood kids who was bullying Jason in the park one day. His parents complained to Joy and when I got home she attacked me with her slipper. Her anger was terrifying. It must have scared her too, because she never did it again. She would make a list and show it to my father. So long as this arrangement continues a relative calm descends but sometimes when my father tries to stick up for me it all goes bad. Once I let my guard down with Joy and said "Don't be silly!" in passing about something. It was one of my Nan's expressions and she didn't even say bloody, unless she had to in a sentence, so I thought it would be safe. She went berserk. She seemed to take the severity of my father's punishment of me as a sign of devotion or at least loyalty towards her on his part. Like the time Joy got out my winter school shorts and pointed to the crotch, saying, "What's this? Can't you wait to go to the toilet?" as though I was a very bad dog. When she was out of earshot my father said that with a bit of self control I should be able to come into a handkerchief instead of just spoofing straight into the lining of my shorts and I should therefore make sure I always carried a clean handkerchief. I faced a whole night of this but my father was the one being pressured. He couldn't see that it was an offence worthy of serious punishment while she, the washer of clothes in the house, was apoplectic. It was at about this time that I began to realise just how completely deluded both of them were. I was constantly in a state of such nervous, physical and mental exhaustion and tension that I used to drip urine like a puppy. I fall asleep. Their voices as I strain to hear them become intermittent and then stop. I'm in a deep sleep when I start to wake up. There it is again. He's sitting on the edge of my bed with his cold hand trying to coax blood into my limp little twelve year old dick. Once he starts with this he just doesn't stop. I had managed to discover the pleasure of masturbation for myself before all this began. A moment of inspired imagination. I didn't like or trust my father's intrusion into that part of my life. I wondered if all father's supervised their son's sexual development so closely. I only had to imagine telling a friend my own age to guess what the answer was. Although these experiences cast a long dark shadow across the rest of my life I have to say I was lucky in some ways. I had seven and a half years of my mother's fond influence before she died. I carried those years in my heart and mind like embers all through the bad days. My father and stepmother had some serious problems but they clothed me and kept me well fed and paid for my school things. I was lucky that, when I told someone the truth about what was happening to me at home, they believed me. It was Mr Bean, my headmaster at school. He arranged for me to board with the family of a friend in my class and he arranged for the then Social Welfare to visit my parents. I'd love to have seen that. The DSW made up their mind very quickly that I should never have to go back. I wonder what they said. Years later I would learn that the average number of times someone in my situation asks for help before they're believed and they get it is nine. I moved in with the Jones's, the family of a friend at school. They were a relatively poor family. They lived in a great big old house. Mr Jones had bad asthma and a great sense of humour. Mrs Jones was a sharp stick with a heart as big as their house. Two or three times my father turned up late at night, drunk and complaining there was nobody to mow the lawns now. I wasn't tempted to return.
Chapter 7 When I was six and a half I was living in Roseville in Sydney's northern suburbs with my mother and stepfather. We didn't live far from the river. It was one of my primary obsessions to become an aborigine. My friend David Jaffray said that he had been taken by a tribe when he was a baby in Western Australia. That was why he had brown eyes and slightly darker skin. I looked at him more closely. I hadn't noticed anything different about him. We were in our "tunnel". We weren't allowed to have a real tunnel because Mr.Jaffray said the ground wasn't suitable and we'd be buried alive. I liked the sound of being buried alive, so long as we had a torch. Candles use up all the air and you can't breathe. We used to talk about getting an old telephone battery. We were allowed to have a trench covered over with assorted pieces of scrap timber and the dirt we took out of the hole. It worked quite well. We had two entrances and a small turn-around space in the middle. We lay on our stomachs in the earthy dark. Dust swirled in the little shafts of afternoon sunlight peeking through the cracks above us while we lied to eachother as outrageously as we knew how. David was pumping his dad, an anthropology lecturer, for quality information and passing it on to me. I was living from one instalment to the next. I had an insatiable curiosity for all things indigenous. I might have had an idea somewhere that it was all a tall tale but it was such a good one. One day I just couldn't hold it in any longer. I decided I just had to confide in my Nan that David had been taken by aborigines for a few months when he was a baby. When she burst out laughing and said "Oh fiddlesticks, Graham!" I was disappointed and a bit hurt. It seemed unexpected and out of character to me but I knew she was good friends with Mrs.Jaffray so I had to accept the validity of her views. I remember my mum getting quite angry about it when she found out. Not long afterwards I was given a big coffee table book that was a sort of photographic story about an aboriginal boy and girl in Arnhem land. It was all about their idyllic life in the outback. Wandering naked from barramundi for breakfast to lizard for lunch. I think it only served to feed my illusions of a tribal utopia. Aboriginal life has always been much harsher than that. I would have learned more if I'd just kept my mouth shut the way David asked me to. Once my Nan and I went to the Jenolan caves. I'd been wanting to go there for years. Caves were another fascination of mine, like coral reefs and free flight. I wanted to fly but I didn't want to be a pilot. I wanted to fly like superman. I stood on the roof of the garage and looked down at the ground for a very long time. Why was there always such a huge chasm between what we can imagine and what we can actually achieve? "Between thought and expression, there lies a lifetime" It seemed to me then that there had once been less of a gap. That a kind of magic had once been prevalent that enabled us to defy many of those troublesome laws of physics. It was as though I held a vestige of it in my mind that I knew would inevitably fade. It didn't really make sense. I couldn't have experienced anything before I was born, could I? Needles to say I didn't jump. I asked my mother if she would make me a wetsuit. For some reason I knew or imagined that pyjamas wore out and needed replacement on a fairly high rotation basis. I asked her if she would please be able to put elastic in the wrists and ankles of the next pyjamas to wear out so that I could use them to go skin-diving in. Thankfully my mum had the sense to avoid the issue by some cunning means and I was saved from what could well have been one of those embarrassing occasions when reality fails miserably to measure up to expectation. Lloyd Bridges has much to answer for. What kid growing up in fifties Australia didn't want to be able to enter the water backwards from a sitting position. I could never do it. Just like I didn't have the courage or stupidity to jump from the garage roof. We often used to go to Katoomba to visit Uncle Gert and Aunty Dick but it didn't ever snow and we only went to the Jenolan caves once because it was so horrifically expensive. The bus stopped off along the way somewhere for a cup of tea and a look at the souvenir shop. I remember that I was the last to get back on again and that the passengers had all been waiting patiently for me because they couldn't or didn't want to disturb me from my deep conversation with the aboriginal guy behind the counter. For years I kept the bullroarer with its "human hair" string that I bought at that shop. That's the way I remember it, anyway and I have an excellent memory. I can clearly recall in the finest detail all sorts of things that can't possibly have happened. When I was sixteen and I'd returned to Sydney for the first time, the one burning question I had in my mind was about "the Peter Pan window". I asked my grandmother about it. Every time I had been lucky enough to see it, my Nan had been there in the room with me. I told her the whole story and I asked her what she thought it was I'd seen. She said "Oh,Graham! You're mad!" I guess she was right in a way. I'm not really as clever and sophisticated as I sometimes like to think. I know what knives and forks to use and how to order the wine but I've never been out of Austranzia. Never really had the urge to travel. The only time I ever heard London calling was when the Clash sang it. Why do NZ women all have to go there? I'm really very naive. A little while back I listened to a documentary on the radio about Max's Kansas City and I was surprised to find that it was actually in New York. When I heard, back in the 80's, that William S Burroughs had moved to Kansas I thought "oh, good, he won't have as far to go now to get to Max's". I pictured Lou and Mo and Sterling riding down there on the bus in the old Velvet days. Cut in scenes from Midnight Cowboy. Andy would have gone by limo, I guess. As the documentary went on I found myself having to fit Robert Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor in there as well. Then, when I heard Iggy talking about Jimi and Billy Cobham popping in for lunch, I was seriously confused, until I remembered that his Electric Ladyland studio is in New York. I have no idea why but the door to the studio has a large brass 52 on it. It's not on the fifth floor and it's not in 52nd Street. I saw it in an old FM magazine. It wasn't always a case of him burning with lysergic optimism. He hit a bad patch and fled south while reading "The Lord of the Rings". Wellington looked like a hobbit city. Years later when he saw Peter Jackson's film, the scenes that were set in the Aro Valley area and up into Kelburn and Brooklyn made perfect sense. It was as though the movie was tailor made for him. Things looked up and then down again. He found it a disturbing time. It began with such promise. His little music group had flowered, withered and died. His marriage had done the same and so he faced those gloomy days of debt and loss. It was a heyday for many, or so it seemed then. It looked that way from hindsight too, but differently. One day there was a knock on his door. He could hear Robert Wyatt singing "I'm a believer". He didn't sound very convinced though. He sounded as though there was plenty of doubt in his mind. It's strange the way we are shaped by absence and emptiness. Iggy talks about it well in "Some Wierd Sin". Everything was starting to look as though it had all been left outside too long. People had looked at everything too hard and too much and now it all looked worn out. Everyone had pimples and smelly feet. The daze of Bob had started. He thought about the deepest ocean with its flashes of luminescent brilliance and its crushing icy stillness. Black smokers pouring inky clouds into the darkness. Red tubeworms like the internal organs of the earth itself clinging perilously to the narrow edge of opportunity between scalding and freezing. He thought about the way humanity was like coral. Aggregate colonies of various cell types that manipulate elements within their environment and arrange them to make life more comfortable for themselves. He thought about wanting and the way we always seem to get what we want whether we want to or not. Why does no good deed go unpunished? He thought about all the monuments to human cruelty and stupidity. For years he thought that one day he would find happiness in certainty. He would arrive at enlightenment as though it were a destination. A truth so potent that it put him beyond thought. It was the age old dream of a life without responsibility. Be careful what you wish for.
He found himself trying to wish away evil. Why was it there? Out damned spot! Ambivalence and prevarication are all most of us can manage in the face of it. "Well, who am I to say what's right?". Don't you hate that? Everybody seems to think your life is something going on somewhere else and that you'll get back to it when you feel like it. You won't ever feel like it. If you're lucky you might get to feel appropriate. The only time we will ever reach some optimal state and remain that way is when we die. Up and down the river it's the same for everyone. That's what they tell me anyway. I'm staying with my Nan in Maroubra for the weekend. I'm about four. I want to go swimming but the beach is closed. We decide to go down there and have a look anyway. I put my togs on saying that I might just paddle a bit. We get to the beach and there's not a soul in sight. We walk along the wet sand. I haven't learned to swim yet but I have a rubber ring. The waves are enormous and angry looking. I bravely run through the ankle deep water as the foamy brine rushes up the sand. I turn around to see where my Nan is but I'm looking in the wrong direction. A bigger wave comes up from behind and knocks me forward onto my hands and knees. I can see Nan now. She looks worried but she doesn't move. The water is pulling on me and it grags hold of my stupid rubber ring. I dig my hands and feet into the sand but the water keeps washing it away so that I get pulled out to sea a few metres before I can regain purchase. After what seemed like hours the wave has retreated sufficiently that I can clamber to my feet and run for safety and dry sand. "Why didn't you help me Nan? I thought I was going to be washed out to sea." She puts a warm dry towell around me and she says, "I didn't want to get my stockings wet, dear" He is roused by the sound of Split Enz's "Give it a whirl" wheeling and spiralling out of the radio. He is suddenly stricken with an awful acheing attack of TIMESICKness. For the love of Bob, it's a wierd world we live in. We spend the first half of our lives wishing we were in the second half and we spend the second half of it wishing we were still in the first. We seem completely unable to believe ourselves and yet we believe other people as easily as if we were children.
