Genetic Material
I SAY, ‘HI, DAD, HOW ARE you doing?’
His eyes snap in my direction, there is a sudden jerk of his body as he recoils from my voice, then he slumps back in his chair. There’s nothing in his eyes: no light, no emotion, no recollection. ‘Who are you?’ he asks me, his voice listless.
I’m your son, Dad, I’m your fucking son.
But I don’t say that, of course. My sister has instructed me — as is her way, not once but over and over—‘You have to remind him of who you are, you have to give him a narrative that he can make sense of.’
‘I am David. I’m your son. I’m Sophie’s brother.’
The eyes looking up at me are still blank. I resent my sibling’s use of the word narrative; I know she has gleaned it from the medicos and the social workers. I am irritated every time she uses the word, as if it contains a metallic core that whips against my ear as she says it. There’s no narrative for this old man: no illumination I can offer him, no characters he can identify with, no descriptions to orientate him, no plot strands for him to follow. I feel useless. Much worse, I think he is useless.
‘We’re living too long.’ Mick’s father is eighty-seven. He has a walking frame, has had his right knee reconstructed, his hips replaced. It takes him an age to walk to the coffee shop on High Street where he has his coffee with his Maco mates.
Every morning he wakes up and says, ‘Why didn’t the damn night take me? Who wants this useless body? We’re living too long.’
Mick’s mother, Adriana, mocks him, shouts, ‘Then why the bloody hell don’t you take your shotgun and blow your brains out?’ She is ten years younger than her husband, she is sprightly, still thin, will only ever eat half of the food on her plate, and rushes from the grocers to the supermarket to the butcher without having to stop for a rest or take a breath. At Sunday lunch she hovers over all of us, making sure we have enough food on our plates, and enough beer in our glasses.
Adriana is always on the go. ‘I walk,’ she admonishes her husband. ‘I have always walked; I walked ten miles to school and back every day as a child and I still walk every evening. If you walked,’ she yells at him in Macedonian, ‘if you had walked instead of coming home and sitting in front of the bloody television, you wouldn’t need a new hip, you wouldn’t need a new knee.’
I stand next to her, helping dry the dishes, listening to her abuse her husband.
Then she will lower her voice, and whisper to me in English, ‘But he’s right. We are living too long.’
My father, who doesn’t recognise me, who doesn’t know where I fit into the story, because he has no story left beyond his nursing-home bed and the slow shuffle to the canteen where he eats, is purposefully ignoring me. If he looks at me the fear returns. So instead he sits staring out of the window to the stretch of even mown lawn beyond. The grass is such a vivid green it seems plastic, as do the beds of hydrangeas. He is dressed in striped blue and white pyjamas, like the people in Auschwitz, I cruelly think, or Mauthausen or Bergen-Belsen. My father doesn’t recognise me and I think if only I had a shotgun I would put it on his lap. He’d take it and blow his brains out. That’s what he’d want to do, that’s how he’d want his narrative to end.
I place the newspaper on the bed. He glances up from his seat by the window and then quickly looks away. I know when I have left he will pick it up and turn straight to the sports section. The news of the world, the news from Australia, also scares him. But he remembers that he follows the Collingwood Football Club. He remembers that.
‘I am your son David,’ I repeat. ‘I am Sophie’s brother. And Sophie has just had another baby — you’re a grandfather again. His name is Nicholas. Sophie has named him after you.’
The old man is still staring out the window. He won’t look in my direction.
I wish Sophie was here, I wish my mother was here. My sister talks to our father as if he was another one of her children; my mother refuses to believe that her husband doesn’t know who she is, that forty years of marriage and sharing a home and arguing and raising children and sleeping together and loving each other can be erased from memory. She tells him what their neighbours are doing, what their grandchildren are saying, what they do at school, where they went on their holiday. She stares at his vacant expression and refuses to see the panic it is masking; she doesn’t see his struggle to resist the terror of this stranger invading his room, this woman who won’t stop babbling at him. What she sees is the man she married; she sees the man she loves.
I usually make sure to visit when Sophie or my mother are there, when I can stand in the corner and watch them chatter away over him, adjust his bed, wash him, feed him. The times he gets angry, his moments of fury, when he screams at them, throws his tray across the room, shouts at them to fuck off, just fuck off, those are the times I can’t help but feel vindicated. That’s the father I remember, the father I know. He won’t play your game, I want to tell them, he won’t submit to being a child for you. He is a man; you women don’t understand that this is all that matters to my father: that he be a man.
But now, alone with him in his room, I find myself prattling, treating him as I would my nephews, or Mick’s godchild. ‘Looks like the sun will come out, don’t you think, Dad? Maybe we can take a walk outside.’ The bitter look he throws my way reflects the contempt I feel for the empty words I am saying.
I walk over to the window. The trees along the edge of the car park are spindly and denuded of leaves; spring has yet to touch them. As I pass him I place a hand on his shoulder and he slaps it away. I catch the overpowering reek of urine. Sometime after his morning feed the old man has wet himself.
‘Dad,’ I say, my voice shaking so much it ends up slipping into a higher register, ‘I am going to wash you; will that be okay?’
His head flicks towards me again but now there is relief. ‘Are you the new nurse?’
I nod. ‘Yes,’ I answer, ‘I’m the new nurse.’
•
All my life it was said of my father that he was a handsome man. And it was true: his was a ravishing beauty, accentuated by a virility that cleaved from it any hint of effeminacy. He was raised on the land, and even though he was only an adolescent when he came to the city to start his apprenticeship, he always made time to return to the bush. As youngsters every weekend would be spent out of Melbourne; we would follow him into steep ravines, walk for hours in the forests behind the Great Ocean Road. There were times when we walked so far, walked so long, that all I wanted was to sit down on a rock and weep. But I never did. I knew I had to be as tough as him, I knew he would never love me if I wasn’t as strong as him. So I walked: I walked with blisters on my feet, I walked in the burning sun; I walked in the drizzle, in the sleet and in the rain.
My mother, my sister and I had always lived in the shadow of his good looks. Not that my mother wasn’t herself attractive, or that Sophie and I were ugly. Quite the contrary. However, my father was the kind of man who could walk into a crowded room and draw every set of eyes to him. Wherever he was, he would be the centre of attention. There were moments when I witnessed women literally draw in their breath at the sight of him. It was also his good fortune to be possessed of a disarming larrikin charm, a natural gift for telling stories and jokes, and a speaking voice that was both melodic and of a rich baritone timbre. He entered the room and everyone turned his way; everyone wanted to be close to him, to be captivated by him.
I wouldn’t have been more than six or seven when I first became aware of the power of such beauty. It was in the middle of summer, a wretchedly hot day, and our parents had decided to take us to Mordialloc Beach. My father had taught us to swim when we were very young and one of my earliest memories was of giggling while he held me over gently lapping waves. He would often swim out far from shore, outdistancing the other swimmers, his strokes carrying him so far that my mother would rise from her beach towel and come to stand beside my sister and me to make sure that he had not completely disappeared from view, that she could still make out the faint speck of him on the horizon. A smile would spread across her face once she glimpsed him returning to us through the waves, his strokes measured and unforced, his outline slowly gaining shape and solidity. She would lie back on the sand, return to her book, and await the moment his shadow would fall across her, the sea water dripping onto her body as he stood over her towelling himself dry, his eyes ablaze with the pleasure of the swim. Sophie and I would look up to see him fall to his knees on the sand, kiss our mother’s shoulder, put on his sunglasses and lie down beside her in the sun. It was one of the most comforting sights of my childhood.