Dying (10 page)

‘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.