You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (10 page)

Over the years, the club I had grown up with began to flounder. They won two games in two years. Ins and Outs nights became less a social gathering and more a place to mourn triumphant days of yore. My parents still determinedly attended games but left with sagging, defeated faces. Everybody looked tired and old, even the players. I was living a new life, running around town with goth girls and boys with facial piercings. I thought I was the shit. Every now and then my parents would try to make a connection and ring whatever slummy share house I was in and invite me to a game. For old times' sake. I would make somebody else answer the phone, pretend I wasn't home. When the telephone was returned to its receiver I would regale my stoned friends with embarrassing, self-deprecating stories about being in the cheersquad and turning up to training each week with my sunken little chocolate cake.

‘I used to
cry
when Fitzroy lost,' I would tell the room, to howls of delight and derision. ‘I used to go home and
talk to
the team poster
.'

In 1996 it just got too hard for Fitzroy and they crumbled, brought to their knees by heavy debts and bad management and a footballing body intent on expanding the game to a national level, leaving no prisoners in its wake. There were murmurs of a merger with North Melbourne, then Footscray, then finally some dreadful half-arsed deal was done with Queensland team the Brisbane Bears and, just like that, one hundred and thirteen years of history was over. No matter how many fundraising nights or tin-rattling doorknocks the dyed-in-the-wool supporters devoted themselves to, Fitzroy would fold at the year's end. There was a dull sense of inevitability about it all. Fitzroy was never built to last. It was the lame dog, a sentimental family pet who everybody knew would get taken into a paddock and shot eventually.

I was dating an ex-AFL player that year, and at an awards night he publicly noted my disloyalty to the club I'd once adored.

‘I'd like to thank my girlfriend for missing so many Fitzroy games to come and see me play,' he said in his speech, adding with a smirk ‘though to be fair she wasn't really missing much since they haven't won a match in about seventy years.'

It stung because it was true; I'd abandoned Fitzroy just like I abandoned broken romances and broken friendships and things that were difficult and awkward and took time to fix, like my relationship with my parents. I resented the implication and what it said about my careless personality.

Fitzroy played their last ever game of AFL in Fremantle, Western Australia, at the Subiaco oval, on 1 September, 1996. My father had to work in Melbourne, but my mother decided to fly four and a half hours to mark the moment. We had only just begun speaking again after another vicious round of bruisings and name-callings, but in an offhand moment she asked if I would like to come and in an offhand moment I said yes. I bought a plane ticket and we sat together uncomfortably, existing in that emotional limbo parents must suffer when a child has slipped from their discipline and grasp. She had long ago accepted that I would never come home again, and seemed determined to let this trip pass without incident or recrimination. She offered me a Fantail and we sucked in comradely silence.

Once in Western Australia we behaved like tourists. We went to the old Fremantle gaol and inhaled its bloody history. We had a beer and lunch on the water. We talked benignly about the climate and the passing trade, never really acknowledging aloud why it is we were there and what the end of the team meant to us personally.

The game was a disaster—of course, of course. Fitzroy were never a chance to win, not even with some big dumb sentimental stroke of luck involving all of Fremantle's players succumbing to severe food poisoning and being suddenly unable to stand up straight or function. They fumbled and sloped their way across the oval, missing opportunities, dropping marks, kicking the ball out of bounds on the full as though they'd recently suffered a serious stroke. They looked sorry for themselves and everyone in the crowd and clearly wanted it all to be over. The handful of supporters who had made the trip across clapped politely with heavy hearts. It was unclear who was hurting the worst.

When the siren eventually signalled the game's coming to a merciful end, my mother and I turned to each other and we were both weeping. There was an unspoken shared heartbreak, an overwhelming cavalcade of memory—of falling in love in the outer, tending to a blossoming pregnancy, agitating with the cheersquad, trotting around obediently after broad-shouldered icons. I watched the team shuffle down the race into the rooms, heads lowered, full of shame and disappointment and a dark, confusing grief.

My childhood shuffled off with them. My family rituals shuffled off with them. When they had all left the ground, trainers trudging behind, I heard something click shut in my heart.

At that moment I felt my mother reach across and take my hand.

People made a lot of noise about Fitzroy's euthanasia at first. Shook their heads and muttered about ‘the death of the game' and how stripping local football of its dignity was the beginning of the end. How there was no more heart in football. Corporate greed had taken over. Some drifted across with guilty expressions to Brisbane and quietly bought memberships, attending games when they could and trying to muster up the enthusiasm to follow a newer, flashier team that had essentially chewed up their little dreg of a team and spat out the remains in fleshy gobs.

A small but vocal group of supporters refused to say die, setting up a Fitzroy Football Club website and meeting regularly to discuss options for the future. They no longer had a team to follow. There were no games to attend. They were simply a club of members with an AGM and a photocopied newsletter. They were rudderless, a theatre without a play. They met in a church hall at first, then a function room, then downgraded to the odd beer garden as fewer and fewer people attended, feeling foolish at attempting to keep the dream alive.

In 2007 I penned a piece for
The Age
about Friday night football coverage and mentioned in passing my fondness for Tim Pekin's number 24.The same day it appeared in print he emailed me, for the first time in months. I asked him if he'd read the column. He replied that he'd not seen it, adding:
It
seems we have a rather intriguing way of communicating, beyond the
realm of ink on trees, and for that I am grateful
. He had grown into his boyish nickname, finally encompassed the soul of a poet.

I still have my tiny jumper with the iron-on 24 peeling from its back. I still believe in football and its sweeping passions. I just can't explain why I no longer have a team. How I miss the searing memory of ritual and family. And it still exists, sort of, kind of. In a different form. Or maybe I just need it to. Like those Fitzroy supporters, meeting once a year in some dusty pub, with worn-out photographs and A4 folders full of memories.

Excerpts from this story first appeared in
The Age.

Pour l'album

There is a secret unofficial age, it seems, when travel with one's family crosses over from being a unifying lesson in worldly concerns and open-mindedness, and is instead looked upon as a rather sad admission of defeat. Backpacking around Europe in a shitcan Kombi with your parents at the age of eight is life affirming and to be celebrated. Doing the same thing at the age of thirty-five is embarrassing and to be pitied. Have you not got a husband?

You escape your family by moving out of the home in which you grew up, in a wilful and pre-emptive display of misguided independence.
I can do what I want now
, you tell yourself as you stretch out on a bed fashioned from milk crates and foam cuttings, admiring your dream catcher and the stereo system you have made from a stolen Discman and a pair of speakers.
They don't own me anymore
. You ration out visits to your ex-home like an unfeeling kitchen hand from a pantomime orphanage might ration out gruel. Once a staple part of life around the noisy breakfast table you become instead an elusive figure, breezing in and out of the family house in a flurry of sorry-can't-stay excuses and pervasive hangovers. As you build your own life a necessary distance forms between you and your parents, through guilt-laden phone calls that end in petulant, regressive bursts, and your selfish inability to humanise them in any way.

‘They won't mind if I cancel their wedding anniversary dinner,' you tell your friends through a fairly brutal chemical aftermath. ‘They've got
things on
. They've got each
other
. They're probably just going to spend the night in front of the television watching
The Bill.
'

After a while a sense of nostalgia creeps in, like months after a break-up where you text a once-maligned ex a friendly but meaningful hello. You forget the deeply entrenched destructive patterns enmeshed in every family unit and start to see your parents as affable chums, comrades with a shared history and a secret language. They're not
really
like Debbie Reynolds and Peter Sellers. They're more like the Cosbys. You should go on holiday with them again. Nothing bad can possibly happen.

A holiday with your parents when you are a fully grown adult is an exercise in patience, ego and humiliation. No longer a free agent, lying in bed 'til 3 pm reading newspapers and drinking champagne with a naked redhead, you're now beholden to the brisk, no-nonsense schedule of two health conscious over-60s who develop a quiet but significant panic when their sense of routine is in any way compromised.You must rise when they do (‘It's 6:30 am, what better time for a power walk! Here, you can borrow my intensely stupid-looking handweights'), eat what they eat (‘We're on Atkins! My colon has never felt better! Look, I have a photograph of my last bowel movement!'), and sit in the back of the car trying to tune them out as they bicker over whether
Brides
of Christ
was a miniseries or a novel. You are taken back to your seethingly hormonal teenage years when your parents were foolish enough to invite you with them on a trip to the States, possibly reasoning that if you were at least under their noses for the majority of the time you wouldn't be compelled to indulge in the sorts of behaviour that may result in a stint in juvie.

On that particular holiday you reward their invitation and goodwill by sneaking out of your LA hotel room and going out driving with some twenty-something college student you meet in a hamburger restaurant after insisting that your parents sit at another table on the other side of the room and pretend they've never met you before. This man may or may not be a rapist or a serial killer, you don't really bother to check his credentials before getting into his jeep and gaily taking off into the balmy Los Angeles evening. After returning miraculously unscathed and unpenetrated, you spend the remaining two months and seventeen days lurching from tourist mecca to glorious landscape with a surly expression and a faceful of Judy Blume. Hapless, hollow-eyed guardians forced for some incomprehensible reason—bribes, perhaps, or a death threat against other members of the family—to ferry shrieking infants on long-haul flights have nothing on the hellishness of travelling with a teenager.

I was five years of age when my parents had first decided I was ripe for a twelve-week overseas journey. ‘It will be good for her,' they told themselves whilst performing water aerobics and protesting against Reagan and drinking Tab and whatever else it was people did for amusement in 1981. ‘It will expand her mind and free her from her slightly bookish and eccentric fantasy world.' Obviously at some additional point they must also have shrieked in delighted unison, ‘AND SHE CAN BEGIN HER SCRAPBOOKING CAREER' as an unbridled demonic insistence on cataloguing our journey came hand-in-hand with the plane ticket.

Scrapbooks. Scrapbooks. They seemed to be obsessed with scrapbooks. Everywhere we went, every little road trip, every beach jaunt, there my parents were, pulling out the craft scissors and the Clag, collecting postcards from hotel lobbies, plane tickets, bus tokens, used tissues. They insisted I spend at least an hour a day carefully documenting the previous twenty-four hours in a combination of layered cuttings and prose, leaving no detail un-noted, no anecdote untold.

‘You can't sleep
yet
,' my mother would announce with horror as I crawled into the fold-out hotel bed, exhausted from a day of frolicking in the snow in Lucerne, or having my face garishly painted by a Dutch clown, or pretending I was Superman on the Eiffel Tower, ‘you haven't done your
scrapbook.
'

They even, god help them, tried to enforce the scrap-booking regime in those later years when the merest mention of a sit-down family activity was greeted with colourfully disrespectful displays of mimed vomiting. I did as I was told, though. My teenage travel scrapbooks may have been filled with derogatory snarls such as ‘Went to Centre Pompidou. Gay' or the more unintentionally apt ‘Went to San Francisco. Gay', but they were still duly filled and exist to this day as a memento of the trip.

Have you ever really experienced a road trip or holiday if it's not documented in some fashion? Modern roamers utilise Flickr accounts or blogs or Facebook as a sort of show-offy collection of look-at-the-fun-time-we're-having-while-you're-at-home-indulging-in-a-little-cry-into-your-biscuit photographs. Punk cabaret artist and prolific Twitter user Amanda Palmer once bemoaned, ‘It's a tragedy that my reaction to seeing something interesting is turning away to grab my camera. The first thought is that there is something beautiful happening, and the second thought is that it will be meaningless if I don't share it. Those are frightening moments. The ones when you go, “God, I've been living for everyone else.”' At the very least scrapbooking is a private exercise, or it is for most people who don't get drunk with a boyfriend and demand he sit on the living room floor reliving every precious memory and superglued serviette. (‘Look, and here's me accidentally touching Snoopy's testicles at Knott's Berry Farm.')