He is dying, but maybe he was always dying? There’s too many moments to hold in my mind, but every now and then one escapes from its tomb and I am suddenly stifled for an instant or so. Then the only thing to do is try and grasp at it and let that emotion work its magic, for good or ill.
My window at work looks out onto the grounds of my institution, and today in the flat light of the violent rainstorms that have been flooding the world, the boxy hedges look like the faded carpet in the odd apartment we moved to on returning to Australia in the mid 90’s. That’s all it took to lead me here to the keyboard. This is why I come to work early – though I could never tell management that it helps me to spend a few minutes time travelling, feeling that sadness and yearning at what was and can never again be. It’s moments like those that empower me to live demonstratively again, but to talk about it would be professional self harm, if not suicide.
Sometimes it pays to realise that as unhealthy as co-dependent relationships may be, that as hateful as abuse and fear is; sometimes that’s all we have to hold on to
The apartment was a typical bizarre rental find by Mum; a huge 4 bedroom affair above a newsagency in a tiny suburb filled with a mix of low income government housing and first generation Italian and Indian families. You could go out on the huge balcony and see the ocean, though it was merely a blue line about the width of my pinky finger, you could taste the salt in the wind that rose up the plateau our suburb was in. The carpet was this dreadful faded green that looked like the sort of carpet they put in office buildings and schools; dense and hard, impervious to almost any damage. The walls in the living area were fake wood panelling which was bowed and buckled. After living in Austria a few weeks earlier where most homes were panelled in real wood that somehow suited the landscape and climate, these plastic things made me think of that other lost home far too often. I should have been delighted to come home, but looking back I think I was homesick for Austria almost immediately.
The green carpet started at the stairs. You went down a little alley through a locked gate between our building and the video rental shop next door and then unlocked the front door which revealed a tiny triangle of linoleum and a 90º turn to 18 green carpeted stairs. From the inside of the newsagency you could see the stairs from below, and it was alway curious to think that our whole life fit into that space. Strange options and choices; magazines, chilled drinks and birthday cards, or beds, kitchen, clothes, couches and tv? Pine wood, snow, mountains and odd ancient cultures or plastic trim, a thin blue ocean line and a vague sense that leaving Australia had stopped it feeling like home. I hadn’t yet realised that coming back could make everything feel so prosaic and that familiar could feel stifling.
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
The Old Man, my father was still travelling back to Austria every 9 months or so. He set up a workshop in the dining room and somehow put a shed on the balcony and would make jewelry to take back to Austria and sell. He would get more difficult to live with as the time for heading to Europe got closer, and we would be relieved when he was gone, because the house would become calm, quiet and predictable for a few months over Christmas. I would feel happy he was gone, then guilty at my churlishness, and throw myself into helping Mum as best possible. I was about 16 then, and would do as much cooking and cleaning as possible, as Mum was working long hours to keep the whole operation afloat (Dad never made much money as I can figure). One day I decided to clean up the workshop and shed for Dad.
The chaos in the workshop was palpable. The Old Man never put tools away as such, rather he allocated spaces on the table to put everything, and then could grab it without looking. The various forceps, files, tiny drill bits and countless other specialised tools nevel looked organised, but I suppose to him they were. Move one thing even a few inches and you would be guaranteed trouble. But the last minute frantic packing had disrupted everything so much that I knew he wouldn’t know I had been disturbing the place, and the dust was getting so bad.
It was about half an hour in when I dropped something and it rolled under the desk. Crawling under I found a wine cask; which to those unfamiliar with Australian culture, is a sort of cardboard box into which a foil bladder with about 4 litres of the most burning cat’s piss grape juice is placed. There’s a sort of tap device and the idea is that you pop the cask on a table and then can pour yourself a glass of wine without troubling with glass bottles, taste or dignity. The way the Old Man used casks was to lift the whole thing up and suck wine directly from the tap. I this way I now realise he could hide from himself the sight of the amount he was drinking from us. And maybe even from himself. Growing up I never thought there was anything unusual in your father pausing mid-sentence to lift a wine cask and drink for thirty seconds or more. It wasn’t until a friend mentioned it in a tone of shock that it occured to me that the Old Man might like drinking in a way I hadn’t considered.I just never had a basis for comparison.
This cask was empty judging by the weight, so I decided to pop it in the recycling bin. When I pulled it out I saw that the top had been torn off, and a whole bunch of other casks were carefully folded and pushed inside. There were 4 more inside, making for a total of 20 litres of cheap Cabernet-Merlot represented here.
When I got to the shed on the balcony I was sweeping it out when down one side of the bench I found a large stack of casks carefully pushed into the dark corner. I pulled these out and as before each box represented 5 casks in total. There were about 15 of these, representing about 300 litres of wine. I remember standing there in the afternoon light for a while, wondering what to do. Not about the casks, but what to do about my father. It was dawning on me that he had done this because he was ashamed; a feature that is common in trauma victims with any food or drink. I didn’t think the word ‘alcoholic’ but I knew at that moment that my father was afraid and alone. So I took the casks in three trips to the giant cardboard recycling bin that belonged to the Newsagency, where all the boxes and old newspapers and magazines were put, and buried them under a huge stack of paper. Then I went upstairs and finished cleaning the shed.
By the time the Old Man returned to Australia I had by and large forgotten the whole thing. He always came back so much happier and settled; and we were always happy to have him back – at least for the first few weeks. Sometimes it pays to realise that as unhealthy as codependence may be, as hateful as growing up abused and afraid is, sometimes that’s all we have to hold on to. The alternatives as a child simply don’t even exist. He never mentioned the removal of the casks, and he probably thought it was Mum. He kept drinking for the next twenty years, only giving up right at the very end of his life in those last dreadful weeks as he fought the battle to breathe through cancer riddled lungs, while the wounds from his surgeries opened and bled every day, and my sister, Mum and I sat in his care apartment back in Austria listening to him die so very slowly.
I just looked up now, after far too long spent writing this. The offices around mine are full now, the official workday is begun, and I’ve no doubt looked very dedicated and busy having been hunched over this keyboard busily typing. The rain started again, and the green hedges are lost in the layers of gray. My childhood feels the same, faded and distant, not quite real anymore. It’s so bizarre to reflect on how meaningless all those experiences really are in some way. No one but me and the five people who might read this whole piece will ever know that it happened, and it is not terribly noteworthy or unusual. The same sorts of stories have been playing out for people since there were people in one way or another. But here I am, nonetheless watching the world of my past become less than memory, watching the hedges fade to gray, hoping to live a little more in this odd little world I have been given until I too will become less than a memory, returned to the air, water and earth.
Blaze of Obscurity 