Dan wanted to throw his head back and explode into laughter — that would upset the bastard, that would make him hate him even more. Dan was tapping the table, wishing he could slide under his father’s steel-cold gaze — like a cobra’s, he thought; the old bastard was ready to strike, with hatred in those icy blue eyes. The two men stared at each other, across the table, neither moving, except for the tapping of Dan’s fingers on the table. His father gave way first. With a sneer; then he blinked and looked away.
He shook his head. ‘Are you going to say anything?’
There were words and sentences, arguments and explanations, justifications and resentments, they were all building inside him, in his belly, deep in his gut, syllables forming words forming sentences, and seeping into blood. But he sat still, looking straight at his father. He would not let the words betray him. Keep it in, Dan, he silently counselled himself. Don’t say a word.
His father exploded, ‘What the fuck do you mean you don’t care?’
The words were fighting to get out, they were shooting into his lungs, waiting to pitch from his throat. Keep it in, Dan, don’t say a word.
‘You were always a selfish little prick, always bloody Danny Kelly having to come first. It didn’t matter how tired your mother was from working all day, no, she had to drive you back and forth, wherever you wanted, whenever you wanted.’ His father had risen now, and was pacing around the small kitchen, the words tumbling out so fast that they collided into each other. ‘Did you ever ask about your brother, or your sister? No, you didn’t give a damn about anyone but your bloody self, all of us tiptoeing around the great Danny Kelly, all of us, me included.’
He kept returning to the same phrase, he couldn’t get the words out of his head, repeating them in anger, folding them into a question. What the fuck do you mean you don’t care?
Dan wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a response. He just raised an eyebrow and shrugged.
Dan’s father grabbed a shiny apple out of the fruitbowl and aimed it straight at Dan’s head, throwing it with such force that it ricocheted with the violence of a gunshot when it hit Dan’s temple, the apple cracking apart, the flesh exploding over the table, the floor. The juice splashed into Dan’s left eye, stinging, forcing tears.
Stricken by the ferocity of his own violence, his mouth opening and shutting, searching frantically in the sink for a dishcloth, his father, this pear-shaped, ageing man, his father was fumbling, dropping the cloth, picking it up and dropping it again. ‘I’m sorry, son, I’m so sorry.’ His father’s hair had gone white, Dan could see liver spots flecking the rough skin on the back of his hands.
Dan sat still as his father wiped his face, his hair, his neck, wiping the bits of fruit from around his shirt collar. He could have taken his father’s hands and bent them back so far that they broke.
His father was on his knees, scrubbing the floor, chasing bits of apple across the lino. Dan could have kicked him, Dan could have aimed his foot and brought it back into a kick that would have made the old man’s head and face and skull displode as completely and as messily as the fruit he’d just thrown at Dan. It would have been so easy to do, to walk away and never be forgiven. The thought of it, the simplicity of it, was like a bolt to his cock, like being famished for sex. His father was bent over, trying to scrub away the evidence. His pyjamas were falling around his buttocks; Dan could see the thin grey hairs disappearing into his arse crack, and had to look away in disgust. He sat still, smelling the juice of the fruit, he made himself stay there, not letting his body rise, because of what it could have done, what it was capable of executing.
Dan took in a deep breath. He could have killed his old man, the way he felt then he could have got up, unzipped, taken out his cock and raped his old man — that was how much he hated him. He breathed out. His father had clumped the sodden cloth in his hands and was wiping down the table. The basket of fruit shook. Dan breathed in but his body wouldn’t settle, the gaping ravenous hole inside of him would not retreat. Dan breathed out, grabbing at the sounds and syllables and fragments of words colliding inside him. He breathed in and let the words out.
‘You’re the ignorant one, Dad,’ he began, jerking his head at the refrigerator, at the multicoloured face of the US president, the blood-red earth and the night sky and the golden sun of the Aboriginal flag. ‘I don’t care about your fucking windbag American president, he isn’t saving the world, and I don’t care about the fucking Aborigines and they don’t fucking care about me and I don’t care about your fucking Labor Party and your fucking Greens — let the world burn and choke itself in greenhouse gases: no one wants to give up anything, no one wants to sacrifice anything for anyone else.
‘I’ve been to where you’re from, Dad, and the working class have gone, they’ve left the fucking building. The best of them got out long ago, they’ve moved on, and the worst of them are getting pissed and getting high and having babies for welfare cheques, and they’re exactly like everyone here, blaming immigrants and blaming refugees and blaming everyone else but themselves. There’s no difference, Dad — this is what the world is like now and you think you are so much better than the other truck drivers you know because you and Mum protest against the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, and you sign petitions protesting about refugees being kept in detention centres and you think that makes you special, you think that means your shit doesn’t stink, but really the refugees and the poor and the desperate, the blackfellas here and the blackfellas in the rest of the world, they don’t give a shit for any of that. They’re just trying to get ahead the best they can, and you’ve wasted all your years on caring about that shit and what have you given Regan? What have you given Theo? What have you given any of us? All I wanted was for you to support me. All I wanted was to be the greatest swimmer there ever was and you never once carried me, honoured me, supported me, did you? You didn’t, because you didn’t want me to get too big-headed, didn’t want me to succeed, didn’t want me to be anything but what you are, an old man with a chip on your shoulder about being working class and poor, banging on about your Irish roots and your working-class Scottish heritage as if that meant anything. As if anyone in Scotland or Ireland gives a fuck about you and where you’ve been and what you’ve done — I’ve been there, Dad, I’ve lived there, and if they were here, they’d say, what the fuck is this cunt whingeing about with his backyard and his four-bedroom house and his car and his truck and his family and his grandchild and all the fucking safety in the world? How dare you complain about anything, you fucking spoiled Aussie cunt, that’s what they’d say, that’s what they are saying, Dad.’
Dan stopped, and wiped spit from the sides of his mouth. His father was sitting again, opposite him, and Dan could see in his father’s swollen frightened eyes that he had succeeded, that the man was broken, that the man was split and torn. But Dan was not finished: one final blow had to be struck. ‘You failed me, Dad. You could have carried me, you could have supported me, you could have been there for me. I just wanted to be the strongest and the fastest — I wanted to be the best and you didn’t let me, you didn’t want that for me. I wanted to be a name, Dad, I didn’t want to be an ordinary decent good Aussie bloke, I never wanted that. You wanted me to be humble and grateful and kind and considerate and socially conscious and just and honest and good and instead I am nothing.’
Dan breathed out. ‘Do you understand now, Dad? That’s why I really truly don’t care. Do you understand, Dad, why I really don’t give a fuck?’