Life is, it's never...

Diversity in Australian Literature student Blanche Clark explores the modern masculinity crisis through the lens of a grieving son.

How do we fill that hole left behind when they leave our lives? (Image: Blanche Clark)

Dad sits laughing with Mikey, the white paper in his fingers so fine. I want to steal a piece from the packet to make an aeroplane, watch it flutter to the floor. He coaxes the dried grass and seeds into a line, rolls the joint as tight as a fish’s arse. Smooths it with his lips, twists the ends and holds it up.

“’Tis a beautiful thing,” Mikey says.

“That it is.” He lights it, drawing in with a concentration that’s absent in every other part of his life except smoking and surfing. His face tenses, and he holds his breath. I hold mine.

***

“You okay?” Toula’s voice shifts time. Mikey is long gone - some fight over a stolen surfboard. A single indent in the three-seater corduroy couch speaks of nights alone, the velvety ridges on the box arm flattened and worn from picking. 

“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine.” I put the roach clip back down on the coffee table. 

“Do you want to go through the things in the bedroom?”

“Not particularly.”

“Just tidy up a bit, eh? I’m going to make the spanakopita.”

“What time’s Eleni coming?

“I told her noon, so don’t expect her until one.” She hesitates. “You sure you’re okay?”

I nod, all the while wanting to hide in her thicket of hair, smell her silky sweat, yield to her desires. She leaves the room without falling or swearing, her steadiness out of place.

Dad’s bedroom is dank. The blind rips as I jiggle the bottom slat, and the window gets stuck in its corroded frame. The lemon tree and rose bushes now crouch before an architecturally designed blackbutt fortress. No wonder the old man kept the blind down. I pick up his discarded clothing – T-shirts, worn-out undies, faded trackie daks – checking the pockets for loose change and memories of hot chips and chocolate bars.

When I told him that a bunch of year 10s were giving me a hard time for surfing at the Point, he called me “wet wipe” and suggested I sell them weed. I throw his laundry onto the twisted and blood-speckled sheets, remnants of his pain before he was admitted to the hospital. Did his illness feel like an endless wipe-out: disorientation, heart thumping, and fear with every toss? 

Among my cache of near drownings, I remember my father teaching me to surf: pushing me, pushing the board, yelling “Stand up, stand up,” and then “Fuck, yeah,” - elation that lasted seconds. He made me go again and again until I was cold and hungry, and he hissed: “Don’t be such a fucking nancyboy.” I didn’t know what nancyboy meant, but I knew it was bad. His mood changed when a nearby parent joked that I was a regular little rabbit. By the time I realised the man was referring to Wayne “Rabbit” Bartholomew, my mother had taken me away from my father and the coast, back to the city and the suburb where she grew up. She spent the next decade rehashing stories of my father’s shortcomings, ending with the same maxim: “Don’t end up a bastard like your father.”

But I came back. Year 9. 

I rifle through the shirts and jackets in his wardrobe, among them the Levi’s denim jacket that I used to hide in my bag to wear after school. I try it on but it’s too tight, makes me think of Eric Bana morphing into the monster in Hulk, and I rip it off. Dad’s surf school went into receivership that year, and everyone else was to blame. It was a relief when he went surfing in the mornings, and I escaped his criticism for an hour or so. I stuff the clothes into a black garbage bag, punching them until the bag tears and the clothes spill out into a pathetic heap.

“Where’d you put the garbage bags?” The walls are thin, but there’s no answer. I bypass my old bedroom, now filled with surfboards, wetsuits, old chairs, plastic tubs, coolers and boxes of paperwork. My Guns N’ Roses and Bon Jovi posters are gone, tell-tale rips in the geometric wallpaper. I preferred George Michael, but had to sing I gotta have faith softly at home and talk about hip-hop at school to avoid the gay tag.

Toula’s assembling the spanakopita, glassy-eyed, listening to an audiobook. I hear Eleni’s car in the driveway and check that she’s not too close to my car. Three months ago, Dad had stood on the sagging porch, spliff in hand, yelling: Ya fucking wanker, driving a Nazi car. Eleni would no doubt agree.  

“Gidday, Tiger.” She hunches as I cuddle her. 

“I can’t stay long.”

“What do you mean? You just got here.”

“You know why.”

A black-and-white keffiyeh frames the rainbow-coloured ‘HUMAN’ logo on her grey T-shirt.

“Are you protesting for peace, pride or Palestine?”

“Don’t joke about. You listen to all that stupid shit on Sky News and then parrot it.”

“All I was trying to say the other day was the issue is complicated.”

“It’s not complicated, Dad. Forty thousand dead is not complicated and anyone who’s not protesting is complicit.”

“You want me to start shouting ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’. Joseph is my business partner. The anti-Semitism….

“It’s not anti-Semitism. It’s ethnic cleansing and one day you’ll wake up and think, why the fuck did I let that happen?”

“She’s right, Len,” says Toula, putting the spanakopita in the oven. “No humanitarian aid has been allowed in the Strip since early March …ow!” She moves swiftly to the kitchen sink. The way she holds her fingers under the running water sparks a memory of my mother doing the same, except that time there was a broken plate on the floor surrounded by scattered peas, greasy mince, and lumpy mash - and my father calling her a useless piece of shit. 

“You’re right, it’s a humanitarian crisis, but what do we do?” I say. 

“Protest,” says Eleni. 

She takes her jacket off, and I notice the wavy lines dotted with tiny scabs on her arm, an oddment like the phoenix, feathers, Medusa, and cursive writing: “Life is, it’s never…” 

“New tatt?”

“In honour of Grandad.”

I want to yell: He doesn’t deserve your respect.

“Come into the lounge,” Toula says to Eleni. “There’s a lamp I think you’ll like for your flat.”

The tap screeches as I fill the jug. A cockroach pops out of the swollen chipboard, possibly a descendant of the cockroaches that resided here 35 years ago. How many generations now? 1300? 1700? Surely, you’d have a sense of belonging after all that time. The real estate agent emailed the recommended advertising copy yesterday: A rare chance to secure a substantial block of land in a highly sought-after location. Maybe the cockroaches will fuck off to the blackbutt fortress next door when this house is pulled down. I put away last night’s Laphroaig next to the home-made bong – a Fanta bottle with a tube taped to its side. Another cockroach darts out and I kill it.

Eleni’s laughter from the lounge reminds me of the way a magpie’s song makes early mornings bearable. “Can I take it? Can we roll it up?”

“It stinks, darl.”

“It’s vintage.”

When I walk in, they’re lying on the carpet, their hair caught in the swirls of brown and orange. Eleni amplifies her mother’s brown eyes, her head so close to a discoloured patch - hard to see unless you were the one who vomited there. 

“The ceiling is the colour of piss,” Eleni says.

“Tea?” I ask.

“Green, please,” Toula says.

“Peppermint for me.”

“There’s only Lipton’s black.”

“Bloody hell, Grandad.”

The teapot is syrupy. Clumps of mould splatter around the sink. What was he living off? The brown sugar and crackers in the cupboard? Lying in the hospital bed, his cheeks were sucked in like he was taking one last drag. When the nurse turned him, I saw the bones of someone’s arse for the first time. I put their teas on the coffee table. Eleni holds up a photo, a group of young men hugging upright boards, wearing striped T-shirts and tight boardshorts, one looking directly at the camera. 

“Is that Grandad?”

It’s hard to reconcile that tousled blond hair with the dirty grey strands pulled so tightly into a ponytail that it looked like he was scalping himself. 

“That was taken at the surf titles in Manly, 1964. His glory days.”

I want to tell her about the year I lived with Dad, how Mikey would come around, and they’d choof and talk about hanging out with surfing legends Midget Farrelly and Mike Doyle, breathing in fame like second-hand smoke. But the words don’t come.

Eleni thumbs through the vinyl, sliding out Dad’s albums: The Beatles, Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder, The Kinks, Leonard Cohen and Boy George – my heart lurches. Boy George was a poofter. I was a poofter for buying it. Dad said the word so often it was like a childish refrain rather than a serious slur.

“Why did we always stay at the caravan park and never come here?” Eleni asks.

“Look at the state of the place,” I say.

“It’s so close to the beach.” 

“It was your great-grandparents’ house, but, you know, they died before you were born, and your grandad just let the place go to rack and ruin. Told everyone he couldn’t renovate the place because of the asbestos, but he was just lazy.”

“Grandad said I could have the record player and vinyl,” Eleni says.

“What? When?” 

“When I visited him a few months ago, before he got really sick. "

“You didn’t tell me you saw him.”

“I knew you’d overreact.”

The pang is instant. I can see Dad carrying her, she’s all of two, sucking her thumb and twirling his ponytail with her other hand. He had a rhyme: Eleni penny in my pocket, light her fuse and she’s a rocket, which made her laugh, and he would chase her and throw her into the air. She trusted him to catch her. I walk out of the room to get some fresh air. Standing on the sagging balcony, I can hear the ocean in the distance, muted but reassuring. The security door clangs behind Toula.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey,” I say. “The spanakopita’s ready.” She leans into my shoulder, and I put my arm around her.

“Why did you marry me, Touls?”

“I was pregnant, remember. My father threatened to kill you.”

“At least he worked for a living.”

“That’s not the measure of a man. Come on, the pie will get cold.”

We settle down at the Formica table, slabs of spanakopita on chipped plates: the filo crispy and brown, the spinach flecked with creamy fetta. I cut my slab into nine pieces and load my fork, then hesitate: “If you want the record player, of course you can have it. But I’ll take the Boy George record.”

Toula hums a few lines of Karma Chameleon and I smile. 

“He was sad you went back to the city,” Eleni says. 

The pie burns the roof of my mouth. “I find that hard to believe. He was an arsehole.” 

“He was depressed after his business failed.” 

“Is that what he told you? Well, he should have seen a therapist like everyone else and stopped smoking pot; it made him paranoid.”

There are flecks of filo caught in Eleni’s hair that remind me of how messy she was as a child. When did she grow up into this capable, strong woman?

“Did you know Mikey?” she asks.

“Yeah, sure, Mikey used to come around all the time. What about him?”

“Grandad asked me to track him down, see if he was on Facebook.”

“Mikey stole one of Dad’s surfboards and took off up north.”

“That’s not what happened,” says Eleni. Her fingers tap her phone on the table and flick across the screen. 

“What then?”

“Mikey told Grandad he was gay, and Grandad told him to fuck off.”

“That’d be right.”

She holds up her phone, a photo on Facebook of Dad and Mikey, arms over each other’s shoulders. I thought they were so old when I was 15, but they must have only been in their late 30s.

“You must have known how the surfing community was back then,” Eleni says. “If you were openly gay, you risked being intimidated on the waves, losing sponsorships, or even getting beaten up. Grandad was worried about his business, worried about what people would think.”

“His business failed because he didn’t know how to manage money, not because of Mikey.”

“Mikey was his soul mate.”

“He said that? What a bullshit artist. He never loved anyone but himself.” 

But even as I say it, that scene of him and Mikey plays out. I see how close they sat together on the couch, the way their hands touched and lingered as they passed the joint. 

“Did you find out what happened to Mikey?” Toula asks.

I close my eyes and hold my breath, feel the answer burn like smoke at the back of my throat.

“Mikey died in 1993.”

I don’t even need to ask how.