Dying Read online

  ‘Howdy,’ he’d say. ‘I was just in the area.’

  He’d proffer a shopping bag or two of groceries. ‘I didn’t want these to rot in my room while I was away.’

  He gave the boys volumes from his library about planes and the history of aviation and was miffed when they didn’t show proper appreciation.

  ‘I’ll take them back if you don’t want them,’ he said.

  As much as he enjoyed spending time with us all, he was really in Brisbane to see Mum. At that time she was living in an independent living unit a short walk from our house. Within minutes of his arrival he’d bring up her name.

  ‘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.

  ‘I better go,’ I told him.

  ‘So soon?’

  We crossed the road to the station, Dad still wearing the clothes he had slept in. We hugged on the platform. I brushed a few crumbs off the front of his sweater. He waved to me as my train pulled out, and that was the last I ever saw of him.

  By the time he died, attitudes had hardened significantly on all sides. There had been the letters to Mum and the screaming down the phone to me, and there had been a showdown with my sister that had started out as a friendly chat and ended up as a shouting match. In the end, my brother had been the last man standing, the only one of us still in my father’s good books, and the one he relied on for help. It couldn’t have been easy for either of them. I knew all about dementia from watching my mother’s disintegration. I can only imagine my brother was witness to the same degeneration in Dad, over about the same length of time, although Eliot never divulged as much. He didn’t even call to tell me Dad was dead. I found out later, in 2010, from Jenny, who liked to call me once in a while to catch up on my news, and to tell me how much she missed Mum.

  ‘I was so sorry to hear about Gordon,’ she said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘He died.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Three months ago. You must have been away in Japan.’

  ‘Sarah would have told me.’

  ‘I heard from Murray.’

  Murray was my cousin. He and Eliot saw a bit of each other in Sydney. Ben had told me Murray and Eliot sometimes played tennis together.

  I rang Sarah straightaway.

  ‘Dad’s dead,’ I said.

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  She was as incredulous as I was, not about Dad’s death, which we had been anticipating, but about the fact that it had taken so long for us to find out.

  There wasn’t a funeral as far as I was aware. My only informant in these matters was Ben and he never mentioned any plans. But he did tell me, much later, what had happened to my father’s ashes.

  ‘Dad went horse riding in Mt Kosciuszko National Park,’ he said, ‘and scattered the ashes there.’

  ‘Interesting choice,’ I said.

  I was perplexed by the way Eliot handled things, made decisions on his own that, by rights, belonged to all of us. I know he had his reasons. I’m certain he thought that Sarah and I had abandoned our father, which in a sense we had, but only after years of provocation. The truth was that my father didn’t really like us girls: we both knew it, and, over time, we both reached the conclusion that we didn’t really like him either. I was also immensely sad, because here was yet another missed opportunity for my brother and sister and I to reach some kind of reconciliation after all the years of conflict and dispute, to finally bury all the acrimony of our parents’ tempestuous marriage and make peace with each other. I pictured Eliot standing alone in the snow gums and pouring Dad out onto the ground at his feet, while his horse chomped greedily on the sweet alpine grass.

  For a year or so, when I was in primary school, Dad flew supply planes for the Snowy Mountains Authority. He was based in Cooma, and lived there in a company barracks during the week. Every Friday night he drove to Canberra where Mum had a job teaching in a high school. He seemed to enjoy the life, at least for a while. He said the barracks reminded him of air force life, and he liked the men he met on the job.

  ‘Fascinating chaps,’ he told me. ‘From all over Europe. The mess is like a meeting of the United Nations.’

  He gave me a picture book about the dam the men were building and about the wonders of hydro-electricity. I studied it dutifully but without much comprehension.

  I don’t know why he left Cooma so soon. Perhaps it was the driving to and fro, perhaps it was the winter weather closing in. It could be foul up in the mountains, he said, and dangerous.

  ‘You never know quite what you’re heading into when you set out in the morning,’ he said. ‘It can turn so fast.’

  Perhaps it was just his perennial restlessness, coupled with an irresistible job offer to fly for Fiji Airways.

  ‘It’s a dream come true,’ he told us. ‘Chances like this don’t come along too often.’

  And so we went to Fiji, at least three of us went. Eliot and Sarah were left behind in Sydney boarding schools, which they no doubt resented for the rest of their lives, as I would have, too, if it had happened to me.

  If it had been my choice Dad’s ashes would not have been scattered in the mountains. Apart from that one year, he never spent any time around Mt Kosciuszko. It certainly wasn’t home for him, any more than Ceduna was home, or Armidale, in New South Wales, where we lived for a while, or Suva, or Nairobi, or any of the other places we followed him to over the years. The truth was he didn’t have a home. The closest he came to finding one was probably Glasgow, but by then it was far too late to make a difference. If it was a question of where he was happiest in his life, I’d guess it was in the cockpit of a plane flying somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He loved to explain to me the meaning of the point of no return.

  ‘If I’m flying between Nadi and, say, Port Vila,’ he told me, ‘I’m at the point of no return when I have enough fuel to reach Port Vila but not enough to get back to Nadi. In which case, I better hope I’ve read the charts right and Port Vila’s where I think it is.’

  Talk of crisscrossing the Pacific energised Dad in a way that nothing else could. Life on the ground was a chore by comparison, something to be suffered until the time came to take off again. If it had been my choice I would probably have scattered Dad’s ashes out of a light plane in mid-flight, somewhere out to sea, where they could have blown about in the wind currents for a while then sprinkled down over the waves. Who knows where he would have ended up then, in tiny bits and pieces spread anywhere and everywhere.

  I’m not sure what I want done with my ashes. My problem is that, like Dad, I’ve spent my life moving around, so I’m not sure where to call home. In the past, whenever someone has asked me where I’m from, I’ve always struggled to answer.

  ‘I was born in Queensland,’ I say. ‘But we left when I was a baby.’

  As if that means anything. Only that my mother came back to Queensland to have all her children, because my father was never home to look after her. I was actually born in a hospital in Southport, where Ril and Norman had a house they retreated to in the summer, and where all the families gathered for seaside holidays. Mum brought me back to the house after my birth and we were cared for by a nurse, which seems like an extravagance now, but these were boom years in the wool trade and such luxuries were apparently not unusual. I don’t know where Dad was at the time, flying for the old Trans Australia Airlines I think, out of Sydney. Or perhaps he had already quit TAA and taken up the crop-dusting job based in Armidale. In any case, I have no memory of Southport, so it can’t really count as home. I don’t even know why I mention it when I’m asked, only that you have to start your story somewhere, and what happened next is too convoluted to bother with.

  I should probably say I grew up in a car, crossing some interminable stretch of country, between a town I barely remembered, and a town I’d never heard of. It was the travelling that I recalled the best. Mum was usually at the wheel, Dad having gone ahead of us. In my memory, it was Mum who packed up all the houses, piled our belongings in the car, farmed out all the abandoned pets, then set of
f cheerfully down the road with hope in her heart that this might be the last time, the time we might finally settle and put down roots. But it was not to be, at least not for some years.

  For a while, Canberra became home, not on the first try, not even on the second, but on the third, after a disastrous year spent in Kenya, where my father had a job flying for East African Airways. That’s when Mum called it quits, when I was fifteen. In an act of sheer self-preservation, she dug her heels in and declared she’d had enough. She told me she was never going to move again. It turned out not to be true, of course, because Canberra was too small for the both of them once my parents had divorced. We did stay there long enough for me to finish school and university—only a few years, but it felt like an eternity to me. And I did develop a love of the place, not the city itself, which is stultifying, but of the rolling, empty landscape around it, and the broad skies above it. When I was old enough, I took my mother’s car and drove all those wide, loopy roads leading out of town, just to see the country. Maybe that was me going home, back to those childhood voyages through days and nights of unfurling plains under their canopy of sky.

  Nevertheless, I couldn’t wait to get out of the place. When I left for England, I thought I was putting as much distance between me and home as possible. Over the next few years, I kept coming back to Australia—to see Mum, to make money—but escape continued to be my main aim in life, possibly my only aim. How else to explain the insouciance with which I got on a flight to Tokyo in 1982 with no real plan in mind, except to run away from Sydney, a city to which I’d decided I could never belong. Now I see it was only what my upbringing had trained me to do: pack up and move on, and never mind the consequences.