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There was no use explaining John’s condition. It would just alarm him. I went inside to examine my mother’s bottom.
The heart transplant article haunted me. I thought about it constantly. My version of the operation went something like this: I’ve had a major heart attack on Hollywood Boulevard. Christiaan Barnard is busy so they call in a trainee called Herb to do the job. Herb disconnects my heart before a donor can be found. He keeps the blood pumping through my body with a machine powered by a lawnmower engine, but time is running out. Still no donor can be found. Herb substitutes my heart with a defrosted chicken. The chicken refuses to pump. I regain consciousness with a Tender Choice broiler in my chest, still wet and cold from the defrosting process. Herb attaches electrodes to the chicken and turns on the juice. It jumps but flops back lifeless next to my lungs.
Dad regularly drank with a man called Herb. It was common knowledge that Herb didn’t wear socks. He simply blackened his ankles with shoe polish. This habit had been discovered when Herb crossed his legs and swiped the beige trousers of one of his neighbours. The owner of the trouser leg had then traced the origins of the black smudge back to Herb’s ankle. No one said anything about this habit, at least not to Herb’s face. They just gave him plenty of legroom in the public bar.
It was Herb’s socks that gave me the idea for the fishnets. I tried to tell my father this but he didn’t want to listen. He was too busy shouting at my mother about her brother Norman. I had performed the Olivia Newton-John show to cheer Mum up. Dad wasn’t even supposed to come home. It was race night at the pub. I was singing along to ‘I Honestly Love You’ into the handle of a hairbrush when he burst into the lounge and found me dressed in one of my mother’s frocks. It was when he noticed my legs that he started shouting. They were criss-crossed with ballpoint pen in the fashion of fishnet stockings.
I felt my heart again. It was still ticking, ticking like a time bomb. I could feel tiny ripples of pain each time a tick happened. I went to consult the house physician.
‘Mum, I think I’m going to have a heart attack.’
‘Really, Julian.’ Mum was peeling potatoes over the sink and didn’t turn round.
‘It’s got a funny tick. I think I’d better not do any phys. ed. tomorrow. Can you write a note?’
‘Physical Education is probably the best thing for a dicky heart.’
‘My situation is very delicate.’ My situation was that I hated sports.
‘All the more reason to build up your stamina.’
‘Ralph Waters says he’s going to smash my teeth in if I set foot on the rugby field. That sort of thing could ruin a stage and screen career. I’ll need a good set of teeth if I’m going to be a star.’ Ralph had done no such thing. He’d kept a respectful distance since the Stromboli incident but Mum didn’t need to know this.
‘Go find a pen and paper.’
5 (#ulink_7d31cf78-6f9d-5f8c-960b-cb46fbabc7c3)
My family generally didn’t do holidays. We didn’t own a caravan or tent and Dad didn’t want to rent a beach house. That would’ve been throwing good money away. My father liked to point out that there were plenty of decent beaches around Ulverston. He called our stretch of coastline the Tasmanian Riviera. If Ulverston’s sand was good enough for him when he was a kid, it was good enough for us. We could like it or lump it. Dad’s idea of summer fun was to get us throwing a cricket ball to each other while he drank beer and shouted from the back step. This was fine for Carmel and John who had an obscene attachment to balls but it was hell for me. Cricket balls made me carsick.
Summer holidays were difficult because they meant Dad was home during the day and this meant pressure to go outside and play. I was getting depressed about the post-Christmas period when he suddenly announced we were going to stay in a real holiday house on the east coast. Trevor Bland’s brother had a cabin and said we could use it for two weeks. We only had to pay for electricity. Mum was thrilled and began baking immediately. Even Dad got into the spirit of things. I overheard him telling Mum we should start getting used to candlelight.
The beach settlement had five cabins and a small shop that sold frozen and tinned food. Fresh milk and bread arrived every other day. Our cabin was a two-room wooden shack under gum trees. My parents put up camp stretchers in the main room and we took the bunks in the other room.
The beach was miles from the nearest town and didn’t have a sewage system. Our cabin had a septic tank for the kitchen waste and the run-off from the outside shower. The toilet wasn’t connected to the tank. It was a hole in the ground over which sat a small corrugated iron shed that could be moved when things reached maximum capacity. Inside was a makeshift bench seat with a hole to put your bum through. The stink of the shed would’ve been unbearable if the hole hadn’t provided such an interesting view of what was going on in the family.
Dad had recently stopped trying to make Carmel play with dolls and started encouraging her interest in cricket. The sports desk at The Bugle was seeing more articles on women’s cricket. Dad still relegated these to an obscure corner of the sports pages but he’d realised that it was now almost respectable for a woman to play the game. He’d bought Carmel a bat and a new set of wickets for Christmas. John and Carmel pulled this equipment out of the Holden Kingswood not long after we arrived and headed down to the beach. While they were off making fools of themselves, I made friends with the kids from the next cabin, Donna and Dean Speck.
I’d noticed their Holden Statesman as we arrived and wondered whether they might be my kind of people. The car was brand new and fitted with snazzy hubcaps. The Speck kids exhibited the same kind of style as their car. They wore new beach outfits and spoke with a posh Hobart accent. Dean did all the talking. He was a strange boy, loud and aggressive, but I decided to overlook these faults when he said his father worked on radio. Mr Speck had been reporting on the sheep trials in Ulverston that morning. Any fool knew that radio was television without pictures. Mr Speck was more or less a star, just the sort of contact I’d need in the future. The Specks were building a hut out of tea-tree sticks when I leaned over the wire fence. I loved building forts and asked if I could help. Dean shook his head in a final sort of way and suggested a more interesting game called Disease. I was flattered.
‘You’ll love it. It’s really exciting.’ Dean said this with confidence as he picked up the long, wooden pole his mother used to prop up her washing line.
I followed him to the back of their cabin and watched as he poked it into the hole of their toilet.
‘Now run for your life or you’ll catch the disease!’ Dean had a violent smile on his face when he spun around, waving the damp end of the pole in the air.
Donna must’ve played the game before. She immediately disappeared inside the Speck cabin and slammed the door. I turned and ran as Dean charged at me, holding the pole in front of him like a jousting lance. I didn’t want anything to do with a game called Disease and headed straight for our cabin and the safety of my mother. As I rounded the corner of the fence, I slipped on the sandy soil and fell hard on my chest. I was face down struggling for breath when I felt the wet end of the pole poked under my chin. Dean was laughing.
‘Now you’ve got the disease. Ha, ha.’
I decided to avoid the Speck kids after that. There had to be a cleaner way to get on television. I washed my neck with the hose and went off to see how Carmel’s bowling arm was developing. It was the same arm she used for punching.
Mum had been talking to other mothers and discovered that the beach was located close to a scenic national park with a waterfall. One morning Dad told us the family was going to see some real Tassie bush. By the way he spoke, I knew it was the last thing he wanted to do. Neither was he happy about having an extra passenger in the car. John had invited his new best friend to come along. Dean Speck and John had a lot in common. They loved throwing balls and both got sadistic pleasure out of calling me names. Their name of preference was ‘poof’. I didn’t like them making a Gary Jings of me and made a point of keeping my distance. This was difficult in the back seat of a Holden Kingswood but at least I had Carmel as a buffer. I also had Mum in the front seat if push came to shove.
It was already hot when we arrived at the nature reserve. Dad parked under a tree and walked off to urinate behind some man ferns. It was a three-kilometre hike to the waterfall. I decided to retain all fluids until we reached our goal. Brother Duffy had described what dehydration did to the Australian soldiers in North Africa. I didn’t want old sneakers for kidneys.
I kept a wary eye on the boys as they prepared for the hike. John obviously looked up to Dean. He let him carry the cricket bat while he lugged the wickets. They ran on ahead with Carmel while I kept pace with Mum, Dad and the plastic picnic bin, silently agreeing with Dad as he griped about every step. It was the most physical activity I’d ever seen him do. My father was a sports maniac but only when other people played the game. I felt my heart at regular intervals to make sure it was still ticking.
At the base of the falls, we laid out the picnic on a wooden table and then ate while brushing flies off our egg sandwiches. When Carmel pulled out a cricket ball after lunch, I decided to do some exploring. I didn’t want to be roped into a ball game with a thug like Dean.
The track to the top of the falls was well marked and Mum said I was allowed to venture off on my own. I followed it for ten minutes until I reached the large pool above the waterfall. The picnic table was somewhere beneath the treetops below. The thrill of absolute power guided my hands to my fly. I was the source of the Ganges, the spring of Lourdes, the piddling bronze boy of Belgium. I urinated into the river with pride and calculated how long it would take to flow past my parents. I imagined my father scooping a plastic picnic cup into the stream and taking a drink.
As I descended, I could hear a strange noise filtering through the bush. It sounded like the high-pitched wail of an injured animal. I imagined a wombat being torn apart by a Tasmanian devil and hurried down the track to the picnic area.
My mother was standing next to the picnic table hunched over Dean. She was pressing a damp cloth to his forehead with a worried look. Dean’s face was red and wet with tears. He was crying openly like a girl. Dad was packing up the picnic bin with his lips in a hard line. John was looking at his friend in an embarrassed, disappointed way. Only Carmel was smiling. Her eyes were on Dean but her hands were busy with the cricket ball. She was tossing it expertly from one hand to the other.
I was the first to be diagnosed with hepatitis A. Carmel followed within a week and a few days later Dad came down with the disease. We were told not to leave our house in Ulverston for four weeks. Dad wasn’t allowed to go to work or the pub and was forbidden to drink alcohol. He spent his days feeling sorry for himself in front of the television, swiping flies with the Punter’s Gazette. The disease wasn’t pleasant but it did have one very shiny silver lining. We were forbidden to engage in any physical activity. Television was out with Dad hogging the set so Carmel and I took up board games and poker. These we pretended to play while kicking each other under the table.
Mum and John miraculously didn’t get the disease. They were told to be very careful and to wash their hands with special soap after handling us. John held his nose and flattened himself against the wall whenever he met me in the hall. He even got a room on his own after Carmel and I were shunted in together. This was a temporary arrangement but a vast improvement on life with John. Carmel punched hard but at least she made me laugh. She also had imagination. Her eyes lit up when I suggested forming a singing duo.
‘You’d make an excellent back-up singer.’ Carmel had a keen eye for natural talent. ‘We could be the next Carpenters. We just need the charm of Val Doonican with the staying power of Andy Williams.’
I felt a glow of pride in the defrosted-chicken department of my chest. Carmel knew what she was talking about. She’d seen me perform often enough. Mum and I had been working on my voice since I was old enough to say Dick Dingle. I performed for my mother whenever she got something mysterious called her period. These unhappy periods occurred quite regularly and entailed tears and hot-water bottles. My job was to sing into the handle of a hairbrush and dance until she smiled and remembered where the family block of Shelby’s fruit and nut was hidden.
‘What about Frank Sinatra?’ I didn’t like the Carpenters and wasn’t particularly fond of Val or Andy. They appeared on Sunday-night TV music specials. I always felt slightly carsick before the start of the school week and associated these singers with a feeling of doom.
Carmel smiled. ‘Once every five years you say something intelligent.’
The chicken stirred again behind my ribs. This meant I’d said at least two intelligent things in my life.
‘Sinatra’s where the money is. You’re Dean Martin and I’m Ol’ Blue Eyes.’ Carmel examined her eyes in the mirror over the mantelpiece. She blew a kiss to herself.
‘No, I’m Sinatra.’ My voice had the whine that preceded tears and a tantrum.
‘OK, OK, we’re both Sinatra. I’m Frank and you’re Nancy.’
Carmel put together a routine of Frank Sinatra songs from Mum’s Sinatra records. My job was to do the harmonising vocals for every song except for a ‘You Make Me Feel so Young’ medley. For this number, I was allowed to sing the Nancy part unaided.
‘You have to sing it even higher and warble the end bits because it’s a girl’s part.’
‘But you sing Frank’s part in your normal voice.’
‘Yes, but my voice has a naturally deep timbre.’
I couldn’t argue with her on that point. People sometimes mistook Carmel for Dad when she answered the phone.
Carmel arranged an evening performance for the family in the lounge. My stomach was fluttery as we dragged the Aussiemica table in from the dinette and draped a red candlewick bedspread over it. Carmel placed three chairs in front of this stage but took one away after John refused to join. He said he had no intention of being showered with disease.
Mum and Dad were quiet for the first four songs, politely clapping at the end of each number and occasionally nodding. It wasn’t until the Frank and Nancy duet that we got the reaction Carmel had anticipated. Dad smiled for the first time in two weeks when I broke into Nancy. He was clapping wildly next to Mum by the time Carmel and I did our final harmony.
At the end of the show Mum handed us each a bar of Shelby’s. She ruffled my hair and whispered ‘Twinkle, twinkle’ in my ear before going into the kitchen to cut a cream sponge cake she’d baked for the occasion. Dad was still smiling when he came up to me. He pounded me on the shoulder in a manly but friendly way.
‘I needed that. The laugh’s done me the world of good.’
‘It wasn’t supposed to be funny, Dad.’
‘I was laughing with you. Did you think I was laughing at you?’
‘Yeah, I did.’
‘You think I’m the type of father who laughs at his children?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I was humouring you. It’s a form of encouragement. You’ll understand when you get older.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Don’t worry. In a couple of years you’ll lose that whinny.’ He walked away laughing to himself.
6 (#ulink_c939125b-1f5c-530c-936d-5cae9906b31d)
The illness was ideal for receiving special treatment and avoiding sports, but it was bad news for Mum and Dad’s relationship. They’d always been a mismatched couple and never had the lovey-dovey sort of arrangement I saw on family TV shows. Mum and Dad didn’t exchange compliments or show open affection to each other. It was more businesslike than that. The arrangement became even less amicable after the beach trip. This lack of warmth transformed into hostility during Dad’s illness. While it had never been acceptable to show affection with children in the room, it was now fine to go at it hammer and tongs in front of us.
As the weeks dragged on, Dad got progressively more miserable and touchy. Even Carmel avoided the lounge where he’d taken up residence. My father spent his days not drinking and glowering at daytime television, which was dominated by cooking shows, farming programmes and reruns of old films. Even Dick Dingle produced boring daytime programmes. It was one of these, a Dingle documentary on the scouts of Tasmania, that finally stirred my father into action. He called John into the dinette and took out his chequebook. John waved the cheque at me to make sure I’d seen the sort of power relationship he had with our father before leaving on his bicycle.
That evening, a van arrived with a load of timber and chicken wire. Dad sat on the back step to avoid passing on his disease and called instructions to the man driving the van. The next-door neighbour started his lawnmower just as Dad began speaking. The bedroom I currently shared with Carmel was located at the back of the house and provided a view of the van and the back step. We watched from the window.
‘Just leave it under the plum tree, mate.’ Dad had to shout over the noise of the mower.
‘What’s that, mate?’
‘Under the plum tree, mate. Plum.’ Dad drew a plum in the air with two fingers but it may as well have been a heart or an upside-down bum.
‘Another bum treat? What the hell are you on about, mate?’
The man in the van had no way of knowing Dad was ill. Bum treat sounded poofy. To the driver, Dad was implying something unAustralian.
‘Under the fucking plum tree, you idiot.’
The mower stopped and Dad’s words hung over the neighbourhood. I imagined families frozen in front of their barbecues, sausages going silent on the grill. The F word had power. A thrill went through me. It was the first time I’d heard it from my father. I had to make the most of it.
‘You want to watch your mouth, mate. I’m not paid to be abused by some queer bastard who’s too lazy to get off his back step.’
Dad stood up and walked over to the van with long, deliberate strides. By the crimson of his neck I could tell that he was sizzling with anger. He poked his head in the van window and shoved it up close to the driver.
‘I’m not queer, mate. I’ve got hepatitis A. You can catch it from saliva spray. A microscopic speck is enough. Makes you as crook as a dog.’
The driver rolled up his window as soon as Dad had pulled his head away. He waited until my father had retreated to the step before hastily unloading the timber and wire. As he drove off, his wheels spun in the grass and left two long brown furrows under the plum tree.
Dad called the chicken coop a boys’ project and expected me to pitch in and help with its construction. He said it would teach us about building things, responsibility, life and death. I reminded Mum about my hepatitis and my father was warned not to let me lift a nail let alone a hammer. It took Dad and John three days to build. John was then sent on a mission to the local poultry farm, returning with ten chicks in an aerated shoebox on his bike carrier. The chicks were past the fluffy stage and had the beginnings of combs and feathers. Dad put them in the coop with some porridge. They pecked madly at the meal, spraying grey missiles in all directions. I ventured out to watch them feed. They were busy, funny things that took my mind off the miserable state of affairs inside the house.
We got the all-clear to rejoin the human race just as school started. The chickens began laying eggs a month later. A few months after that, Dad began introducing new chicks and culling the older girls. He bought himself a large metal chopper and placed a sawn-off tree trunk in the backyard.
I was supposed to take part in the slaughter but Dad ordered me to the back step when I refused to catch a chicken. I told myself that it wasn’t a big thing; chickens got killed every day. Carmel said they regularly got killed crossing the road. Dad put on a barbecue apron and sharpened the chopper. He wiped down the wooden stump and pulled the hose out to the backyard. John took his place next to him with a stupid grin.
Dad had prepared us for the slaughter by solemnly declaring that killing animals for food was natural to mankind. ‘We’re omnivores. That’s why we have molars and canine teeth. In nature, it’s survival of the fittest. It’s either them or us.’
I watched him run his finger along the chopper’s edge and began to sweat. ‘Them or us’ was a stupid idea. The chickens had no intention of pecking us to death.
My stomach tightened as Dad reached into the coop and grabbed a bird by the legs, carrying it to the stump upside down with its wings flapping. He asked John to hold the legs while he stretched out the neck. Bringing the chopper down fast, he sent the head flying off the stump at high speed. The chicken’s legs slipped out of John’s grasp as it gave its last jerks of life. Blood sprayed in an arc from the chicken’s neck, showering John and Dad with a line of bright red dots.
My stomach heaved. I ran to the bathroom and splashed cold water over my face until the carsick feeling eased. When my legs felt solid again I went to the kitchen to see Mum. She was boiling water to remove the chicken’s feathers.
‘Mum, I can’t eat that chicken. It was murder.’
‘I’m making a roast-chicken dinner, your favourite.’
‘I can’t eat it for religious reasons.’
‘OK, honey. Carmel can have the drumsticks and wings and John can have the juicy white meat from the breast. I’ll just have those two little flesh oysters from the hollows of its back. They’re probably Elizabeth Taylor’s favourite bits. Your father can have the skin and the pickings on the carcass. There, that’s settled then.’
They were welcome to it. I’d had a religious transformation. It was wrong to eat a murdered chicken. The only chickens I would eat from now on were those from a supermarket. Happy, bloodless things that came in sealed plastic wrappers.
Religion was a non-negotiable subject in our house. We were Sunday Catholics. We didn’t bother practising much of what the priest preached but we went to Our Lady of Miracles every Sunday like the other good Catholics of Ulverston. On the subject of church, Mum and Dad were in agreement. It didn’t matter how crappy things were in real life: once a week we had to pretend to be a normal family.
‘Dad, I can’t go to church today. I’ve had a religious transformation. I had a visitation. Like an archangel, only bigger and shinier.’
Dad was putting on his tie in front of the hall mirror. He looked at my reflection and tightened his lips. I pushed on.
‘I was sucked up into the clouds where I met a man sitting on a large Brazil nut.’
My father raised his eyebrows in the mirror.
‘He looked like Mr Patel from the fruit and vegetable shop but he had long hair.’
Dad frowned and tucked the tail of his tie into his shirt.
‘I’m being called by a higher voice, he said. I should follow the voice, wherever it leads me, even if I have to walk through the valley of death and all that.’
Dad turned from the mirror and gave me one of his looks. ‘I heard a higher voice on the radio this morning. It was Joan Sutherland. Put on your Sunday jumper and get in the car. I’m in no mood for one of your stories.’
Church services at Our Lady of Miracles were a complete waste of time. The priest should have looked good in his glittery frock but managed to completely ruin the effect with a tragic haircut and old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses. Father McMahon wasn’t just a frump. He had absolutely no talent for working a crowd. It wouldn’t have taken much to liven up his sermons: a few ‘A funny thing happened to me on the way to the church this morning’ starters, some audience participation, novelty giveaways. But when Father McMahon talked, people picked lint off their cardigans and dug holes into pews with car keys. The priest lacked showmanship. My mother and I called this quality ‘pizzazz’ and divided the world into those who had it and those who didn’t. Mum and I fell into the first category while Dad and John occupied the second. Carmel was impossible to categorise. Mum said I had so much pizzazz I glowed. This was an exaggeration but I knew what she meant.
A shiny ecclesiastical gown would not have been wasted on me but the priesthood held no appeal. The Catholic Church had too many nutty rules and not enough handsome role models. Father McMahon managed to be even less attractive than the Pope, which was saying something. The best way to get through the hour of what he managed to stretch into half a day was to squint my eyes at the other churchgoers and imagine them without clothes. I’d actually seen my mother naked once when I’d surprised her coming out of the shower and taken in a few crucial points. Ladies had the Stromboli mound, only it was covered by a thatch of what I now knew to be pubic hair. Carmel had explained the mechanics of this anatomical oddity. ‘It’s like Velcro. It helps keep your underpants up.’
I’d done more research and come a long way since the Ralph Waters field trip. I knew for a fact that women had something called the lady hole, hidden away below the Velcro line. Where John got the point on his head, however, was still a mystery.
My father had done nothing to help my research. I’d shared a bathroom and towels with him for over a decade but had never seen him naked, not a pubic hair, not once. I’d seen him with his shirt off a handful of times but no Velcro. The mystery of the adult male had been cleared up by Greg Bean, a boy with Down Syndrome who visited the Ulverston Municipal Baths every Saturday in summer. Greg had the body of a teenager but the smiley temperament of a six-year-old. He had absolutely no concept of modesty and walked around inside the changing shed without clothes, singing, while his brother Denny tried to get him to step into his bathers.
