Father(s)

A reflection, at a distance

You’re no doubt expecting a story on ‘Fathers’. Perhaps you even want to hear about my ‘father’. You’d like some funny anecdotes, the odd serious incident, a few tall tales. All to make my father, and by extension me, explicable. That’s why you’re reading this piece. Of course, it’s Father’s Day in lots of places (although not, interestingly, Australia). In which case I’m sure you’re a savvy reader. You’re wise to the fact that publishers time themed collections to coincide with holidays and anniversaries. Anzac Day, Christmas, National Tiddlywinks Championships.

The problem, of course, is that I can’t give/tell my father to you. I write fiction. Will it be more agreeable if I write a fictional father, leaving the real one (whose ‘real one’ - mine? Yours?) to one side? My father has a limited, fictive existence in the pages of this country’s newspapers. Whose story is he? Theirs, or mine? By becoming a “public figure”, I’m told, I’ve forfeited any privacy. Is that why you want to “know” my father? Why not my brother’s father? Yes, my brother would “make” a different one, intimate and personal, it is true, but like mine, wholly constructed. And why should I speak at all? My books are for sale. I am not.

My father exists in a dozen ways in the world, but in only one way within this text. Those multiple ways of being in the world, however, resolve into one human individual. Meanwhile, the frozen words of this essay will shatter into hundreds, even thousands of “father(s)” when placed before the eyes of you expert textual decoders, my readers. The father(s) you readers construct are not copied, but invented, partly out of the words I write, mostly out of what you bring to the words I write. In any case, I can only represent so much of the private ritual of my family, and what little I do make representable resonates in ways entirely other for you, and you, and you over there.

Perhaps you will know him if I provide his vital statistics and a mug shot, detailed enough for police identification. Thinning but not bald. Hands unusually large and strong. Carriage very upright. Boxing scar over right eye. Slight limp. Aberdeen accent. Maybe a few tastes and attributes will help you along. Sceptical. Witty. Irreligious. A genuine autodidact. Got into Oxford but joined the Royal Navy instead (there was a war on). Listens to ABC Classic FM, but not the news or Karl Haas (“Karl Haas is a pain in the rhyming slang”).

It seems I am left with stories, the manufacture of imaginary moments. I must translate printed words (mankind’s most artificial form of artistic expression) into possibility.

Appropriately fatherly story #1

My father described and illuminated my world with pointillistic aphorisms. Meaning: dad had lots of funny one-liners.

A politician caught with his fingers in the till (remember, this is Queensland) always finished up “as popular as a pork chop in a synagogue.” Short, fat, officious public servants suffered from “duck’s disease.” An unsatisfied spoilt brat in the supermarket had “a face on him like a busted boot with the laces out.” I (six feet at sixteen) “stood out like a pimple on a round of beef” and had elbows “like knots in cotton.” My lower sixth classics teacher (who managed to lose the entire class’ end of term examination papers not once, but twice) obviously used “a tame black hole for a filing system.” Politicians spent much time “talking out of their alternative orifice.” In the paddock, dad was “as busy as a one-armed fiddler with the crabs.” When mum asked him to do something extra around the house, he’d tell her to “stick a broom up me arse and I’ll sweep the floor as well.” My hyperactive three year old nephew was “like a fart in a colander. Doesn’t know which hole to come out.”

Dad’s range of toilet humour always impressed. Maybe too much. One (admittedly badly behaved) farm dog was called “shit” so often he came to answer to it. If someone yelled “shit!”, the dog materialised, yodelling merrily and wagging his tail. Once we lost him and had to conduct a property-by-property search, calling here shit shit shit, here shit shit shit shit all the while. Come to think of it, it’s a wonder that incident didn’t make the newspapers.

Photo by Robin Jonathan Deutsch on Unsplash

There were yarns. I recall with particular vividness (meaning: it sticks in the mind) one about the “oozlum bird.” You see, I believed in the oozlum bird.

Characteristically, my father never dissuaded me from this belief. When I “got” the funny, years after I’d first heard him tell the story, the effect of having the penny so long in suspension made me hoot with laughter. In the middle of a primary school spell-a-thon, mind you. “The oozlum bird, which is very rare (somewhere in between imaginary and extinct)” he often said, “lives all over the world. It is distinguished by brilliant plumage and an ability to speak in tongues. A large and melancholy creature, it flies around and around in ever decreasing circles, very slowly and very sadly. Eventually, it disappears up its own fundamental orifice.”

There were serious one-liners, too. Not many, but enough. At the time they irritated me because he refused to explain them. “Only believe half of what you read and none of what you hear” he’d say after the news (even the ABC. We were barred from watching “crass commercials”). Kids at school told me “that’s the boring one no-one in their right mind watches.”

When I was four, my parents bought me a beautiful, life-sized baby doll, one of those so contrived that the eyes open when you sit it up. I played with it once. When I was five, mum donated it to a local shop noted for its annual nativity display.

Yes, I was one of those girls who could not only spell carburettor but knew how to fix one.

Homosexuals grow up in overwhelmingly straight social milieux. We’re isolated from each other, and as we age, we must find each other. This encourages hypervigilance and makes us more aware that things have built-in nature, which we don’t fit. My father had, as some parents do, worked it out. A girlchild obsessed with cricket statistics who played chess and built scale models from Meccano was never going to be straight. My mother, by contrast, was disturbed and upset.

In this, my experience repeated a pattern I’ve often seen, one where the gay kid’s opposite-sex parent is more accommodating. This is, I think, because a straight man understands what makes women attractive while a straight woman understands what makes men attractive. The same-sex parent, meanwhile, is baffled. My mother was upset about an absence of grandchildren; there were tears. My father told her there would be novels, or a cure for cancer, or bridges, or a gold medal.

“Those are as good as grandchildren,” he said.

Perhaps, too, my father was more used to diversity. Posh families are full of odd people who never marry and talk into the fireplace, who spend their lives obsessed with foxhunting or golf and never do anything else.

Of course, this “arrangement” couldn’t work at school, which was conservative in orientation and Christian in ethos. I finished up in a profoundly odd situation where everyone knew, but no-one said anything. Right down to being paired off with the only obvious gay bloke in the school for dances. We were pretty good, too.

This Father(s) piece, so people tell me, must be autobiographical. In which case I have a large admission to make. I think all autobiography (and biography, its close cousin) is quasi-fictional. Letters and diaries may help the biographer, but no biographer can enter the mind of his subject, especially if the latter is dead. Stories constructed external to that subject must suffice.

Letters and diaries may help the autobiographer, too, but every narrative written with publication in view is submitted to a rigorous series of personal tests based on what the writer/autobiographer chooses to share with the reader. If, by chance, any aspect of the writer/autobiographer concerned is contested in some way, then a vigorous (and entertaining) spat erupts soon after publication. Each of the many critical parasites on the master text does the utmost to establish his version of the narrative. Meanwhile readers (sensible people) create personal versions.

So some stories I tell concern my father. Others pertain to different, “other” fathers. Based on this, the parasites could argue that some are “real” and others “imaginary.” However, even those with good memories find that memory crafts the raw material of experience, giving it shape and texture. My patchy recollections of events from ten years ago are more likely to have the tenor and tone of fiction than anything I try to “make up” now.

Many people (historians in particular) forget that when sources/stories disappear, narrative itself is impoverished. We would like to know what Julius Caesar’s thoughts were on crossing the Rubicon, but are happy to admit (until physics provide us with an appropriate vehicle) the impossibility. However, living (and perhaps correcting or contradicting) narrative/recollections are daily destroyed by death. And, as a result, the remaining version(s) acquire in their turn a limiting, monumental quality.

Appropriately fatherly story #2

As a teenager, I hated my voice. Years later, at university, someone told me it was “rich and bluesy” but the comment didn’t help. These days I confine my singing to the shower and the car. My windows have dark tinting and no-one can see my lips moving. I’ve watched others (those with untinted windows) on the freeway picking their noses and singing away (often simultaneously). My father had the rare ability to lipread other motorists’ musical tastes.

“Meatloaf,” he’d say. “Badly dressed boomer, inside lane. Would-you-believe it he’s driving a Lemon”. He was good on car makes and models, too.

Photo by Morgan David de Lossy on Unsplash

Unfortunately, his facility for vehicle identification has never extended to vehicle repair (or any other sort of repair, either). Not so long ago my brother bought him a large mug for Father’s Day. The cup showed “Dad: The Incredible Mr Fixit” wandering through a rubble of broken furniture, disused electrical leads, nails, washers and coffee-stained owners’ manuals. “Mr Fixit” was clad in welders’ mask and overalls, clutched a plumber’s friend in one hand, and had his foot stuck in a bucket.

Dad broke tools, fell off ladders and routinely “hit the wrong nail.” Then there was the time my nephew (who was at the “button-pushing” stage) poked a sausage into the VCR and hit fast forward. Dad, of course, was supposed to be supervising. Once he screwed in the plate that holds the mower blades on upside down. Mum mowed the grass around our kitchen garden the next day and wondered why the Victa was exhibiting echidna like behaviour.

“Look, Helen,” she said. “The bloody thing’s trying to bury itself.”

Mum always maintained that the worst falling-off-ladder incident was due to what she termed dad’s “breast fixation.” My father had a special talent for growing paw-paw. Friends tell me that Queenslanders can grow paw-paws at will, and that this talent doesn’t really count. However, I do think it significant that when a particularly bad epidemic of bunchy top went through the district a few years ago, dad’s were the only paw-paws left unscathed.

He was perched up on the highest rung of the ladder, gently feeling up his beloved paw-paws, when the ladder, lodged in soft, mulchy soil, went from under him. Mum walked out onto the back verandah to see my father, a look of unfathomable surprise on his face, hugging the tallest paw-paw tree in the yard. He slid down it slowly.

“Harry,” she said. “Isn’t that going a bit far?”

Dad told the Mormons we were Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Jehovah’s Witnesses we were Mormons. Both groups walked past the house, eyes averted.

“We’ve been marked,” he said. “Religious equivalent of a white cross on the front door in plague time.”

“Everyone thinks Beethoven is better than an advertising jingle.” I told him once, sure of the absolute value of things.

“Everyone,” he said, “except an advertising executive.”

“You’re in Who’s Who,” he said to me once.

“I find that funny. Really.”

“If you’re so famous, why aren’t you rich?”

“Something to do with getting paid $1.39 a copy, dad.” I said. “There are times when I feel like hanging a sign on the front gate. Writer’s begging bowl. Please give generously.”

It would be easy to find unpleasant things to say about my father, and about father(s). It’s almost customary now for women (writers and others) to castigate the males in their familial world. Their stories (just as partial/partisan, if not more so, than this story) have a superficial narrative cohesiveness and realism that mine lacks.

But the “fatherly story” I choose to tell is not rooted in the simplistic urge to make real and familiar some small part of my life. For many centuries, the role of the storyteller was to make the familiar strange, and I prefer strangeness. Homer’s Achaean and Trojan warriors, read through the prism of modernity, are so utterly other that they take the breath away. Yet they were just as breathtaking in the eighth century B.C., because Homer made them somehow larger and stranger than the normal young men who fought and killed in battle and were some of his listeners around the campfire.

I expect you think I am strange. However, in an important sense that is really not your business. I don’t belong to my readers. But my stories don’t belong to me, either.

It’s only words, as the song says, and words are all I have.

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My father died in February 1998, twenty-six years ago. Historically, it was common for people to lose both parents in their twenties or thirties. I replicated this historical pattern, as my mother later died when I was in my early thirties. It’s now rare in the developed world, something of which I’m reminded whenever I encounter similar-age friends dealing with frail, elderly relatives.

A version of this piece was originally published in The Australian in 1997, on the first weekend in September (when Father’s Day is celebrated in Australia). At the time, my father was still alive and—importantly—hale and hearty, showing no sign of his impending early death. It had also become clear (and not just to me) that a large part of my ability to see off an attempted cancellation was rooted in my family, and especially my father’s attitudes. People wanted to know about him. In some respects, this piece was an attempt to refuse to provide information.

It did not wholly succeed.