‘How’s Ev getting on?’ he’d say.
‘Fine.’
‘She didn’t reply to my last letter.’
‘That’s probably because you asked her for money.’
I knew this because my mother always showed me his letters, or read them aloud to me, her outrage mounting. It was twenty-five years since their divorce and my father was still trying to wangle money from my mother any way he could.
‘He won’t stop until I’m dead,’ she said. In one particularly cruel missive, however, he suggested she leave him her unit in her will, offering to pay half of any legal costs that might entail.
I now think this obsession with money was a sign of the deeper malaise that was about to engulf him. But at the time I saw it as nothing more than vengeance. He had not forgiven my mother for divorcing him. He resented her hard-won financial independence. He’d always scoffed at her job: school teaching was so drearily middle class. It had transformed her from the adventuress with whom he had fallen in love into a suburban frump. Going right back, it was clear that he was aggrieved my mother had family money and he didn’t, even though, as my mother pointed out, it was her family money that had made all of his unfettered roaming possible.
‘That’s why he married me,’ my mother told me. ‘I was his meal ticket.’
The letters arrived more and more frequently, and were more and more upsetting for my mother. Not all of them were begging letters; some of them were newsy and contained cuttings he thought she might have missed from the paper. Some were long remorseful raves about their marriage and how it might yet be saved. But then along would come another demand for funds. ‘The twenty-five thousand that by my calculations you still owe me. After that I’ll call it quits.’
Foolishly, I decided to intervene. I called my father and told him to lay off. He didn’t react well. There was some yelling down the phone, a lot of it insulting. Hearing him, I was transported back to my teenage years when this sort of ranting had been commonplace. My heart raced as it had done back then, and I trembled all over. I could picture his face turning crimson with rage on the other end of the line, as he spat out his venomous barbs.
‘You’re a self-serving gold-digger who just wants the money for yourself,’ he said. ‘You see me as the competition.’
When I couldn’t listen to any more of his diatribe I hung up, hoping that would be the last of it.
It wasn’t. Over the next few months my father wrote me a series of increasingly irrational letters. He was going to take me to court, he said, if I didn’t allow him to see his grandsons, despite the fact that I’d never barred him from visiting and had no intention of doing so. But this was just a ruse: he liked to threaten people with the law. For years he’d been engaged in a fight with the Department of Transport over a decision regarding his pilot’s license. He argued, with some justification, that a bureaucratic whim had ended his professional life. His ‘case’ as he called it, had turned him into an amateur lawyer, with a lawyer’s taste for combat. I didn’t bother to reply to his letters, and eventually they stopped. Not so the missives to my mother. Every few months there’d be another letter. One day my mother simply stopped opening them and threw the envelopes straight into the bin with the other junk mail.
The last time I saw my father was at my brother’s house in East Blaxland. Dad was not long out of a psychiatric clinic in Canberra, where he had been treated for depression. Against his doctor’s advice, he had tried to wean himself off his anti-depressants; this had sent him into a black despair worse than anything he had experienced before. In the middle of the night he called Eliot to come and get him. My brother drove from the Blue Mountains through the night to Canberra and back again, then to work in the city the next day. After he called me, I rang my sister.
‘We should go down,’ I said.
‘No thanks.’
I expected as much. Sarah’s relationship with Dad was worse than mine, a history of mutual antagonism going back decades.
I flew to Sydney and caught the train to the Blue Mountains. Dad was waiting on the platform, unshaven and dishevelled, and relieved to see me. He embraced me affectionately, as if nothing untoward had ever happened between us. I had witnessed this often in the past. He could erase whole episodes from the record and pretend they had never taken place; whether this was calculated or genuine forgetfulness, I could never tell. It was particularly difficult now that his mind was in such disarray. After we had stopped at the butcher for some steaks, he led me home to Eliot’s place, a neat little bungalow my brother had bought to be close to his ex-wife’s place—and to Ben, who was then still a schoolboy. And for the next few hours Dad talked to me without pause.
It was nothing I hadn’t heard before, a chronicle of woe I had seen played out in front of me for my entire life, the great drama of my father’s rise and fall, to which all of us were witness whether we liked it or not. I am ashamed to say I didn’t listen very intently. I was hungry and, apart from the steaks, there was no food in the house. I was cold and I didn’t know how to work the heating. I was tired and I didn’t know where I was supposed to sleep that night as both bedrooms were taken. Looking around my brother’s kitchen, it struck me how lonely it must have been, when nobody else was there, and Ben was with his mother.
‘Your brother saved my life,’ said Dad. ‘I’d be dead if it wasn’t for him.’
It was probably true. I knew my father owned a gun. Now he told me that, the month before he went into the psychiatric clinic, he had taken the gun to be cleaned and never picked it up again.
‘I was afraid of what I might do with it,’ he said.
I could only stay one night. Shin needed me at home; at least that was what I told Dad. The truth was I wanted to get away as soon as possible, back to my boys. My father was out of danger. He was taking the proper dose of his medication and improving every day. When he wasn’t talking, he was sleeping, so there wasn’t a lot I could help with in a practical sense, and he was making an effort to shower now, so that was a good sign.
‘How are you?’ I asked my brother, once he arrived home from work, hoping to open up a conversation about his life. It was after dinner and Dad had gone to bed. My brother looked haggard from lack of sleep.
‘Fine.’
‘Work okay?’
‘Work’s fine.’
‘Ben happy?’
‘What’s happy?’ he said.
And there it ended, because it was too hard. We had never talked to each other about our lives before, so why even begin? But I can’t help thinking now how much it might have helped us. We, Sarah and Eliot and I, had a problem. Both of our parents were ageing badly. Things were unlikely to improve for them, or for us. It would have been useful to hatch some kind of plan together, even if it was just a promise to keep in touch and talk things over, to keep each other’s spirits up. But for some reason even that was beyond us. We seemed to be mired in the old familiar stalemate. Our default position was silence, but not of the harmonious kind. Silence for us was a form of accusation, an expression of mutual disappointment and rage, a substitute for violence.
My train wasn’t until lunchtime. Dad and I had a sandwich at a cafe near the station. It was good to see that he hadn’t lost his appetite. He talked and ate at the same time, dropping bits of food on the table and failing to notice, ordering more coffee than was good for him. He told me stories about some of the daredevil pilots he had known in his time, one or two who had died in spectacular crashes. He spoke of them wistfully, as if that was the ideal way to go. It was useless to try to interrupt his flow. I ate my sandwich, checked my watch and wondered what all this talk really meant. It wasn’t for me. I could have been anyone sitting there, a total stranger in fact, for all the interest he showed in my reactions. I assumed it was part of his illness, this utter disregard for the effect he had on others. But even at the best of times his self-absorption had been epic. His depression might well have worsened the problem, but I doubted it was the root cause.