Mug Shots (21 page)

Slow fade

It was hard to get details of my father's illness because he and my mother rarely spoke. It had been thus for forty-five years. Their exchanges over all that time generally consisted of ‘your tomatoes are ready' (breakfast) and ‘your dinner's in the oven' (dried to a crisp by the time he came home).

It was only when I made my regular Sunday phonecall to my mother that I learned my father had gone into St Vincent's hospital the previous Tuesday. He had survived an aneurism operation, the surgeon told me, and must have had an iron
constitution
to have done so.

When I managed to get through to him he sounded weak and said he didn't want to keep going. He had developed pneumonia, and I flew down to Melbourne immediately. Had they moved him up to the ninth floor to die? He looked frail and exhausted, but unnervingly alert. He stared at me in a way he'd never done before (we'd never been close). It made me feel uncomfortable, and I looked away. ‘I've always taken the easy way out,' he said, referring to our unusual domestic arrangements.

Then I took the easy way out and changed the subject. I had the feeling my father wanted to talk to me about the double life we knew he'd led for so many years, and I didn't want to hear it. So I asked him about
his
father, who'd founded the estate agency. He said he'd worked him hard, and sent him round South Yarra on a bike collecting rents. I have no memory of him. He died in the early 1930s. His photograph rested on the mantelpiece in our house in Montague Avenue. He was walking along St Kilda pier, and looked as if he'd stepped out of John Brack's painting
Collins St., 5 pm
: the hat, the glasses, the grimness.

A fortnight later I returned to Melbourne to see my father again. He'd wasted away even more. There seemed only two dimensions to him. I hold his hand. It's withered and browned, like an autumn leaf. A diminutive, determined-looking woman comes in who I first took to be a nurse's aide. Then I realise it's Beryl, whom I'd last seen walking rapidly down our drive in 1944, carrying a cheap brown suitcase. My mother had ordered her out of the house. We exchange polite greetings, then, tactfully, she leaves.

A week afterward I'm in St Vincent's as well, the Sydney one, being wheeled into the operating theatre. I'd been referred to a Dr Carter, an orthopaedic surgeon—silver hair, face like a baked apple—about my right arm, which had been stiff and sore for months. He'd moved it up and down, had me raise it as high as possible as if Hitler had been in the room.

‘Frozen shoulder,' he snaps.

‘Will it have to come off?' I attempted, knowing he was grumpy and terse. He stared at me, puzzled (are there laughing, joking orthopaedic surgeons?). He was a heavy breather, and in need of an adenoid man himself.

‘Sign yourself in for a day in hospital on the way out.'

So I was trolleyed in (again) and noticing the silver hair above the surgeon's mask (was he smiling? looking forward to revenge?) I was unable to avoid irritating him again. ‘It's the right one, remember?' and then I passed out, after which the frozen arm was turned into a propeller, giving off loud pops as the glued tendons gave way. I woke up in agony, and it took weeks of numbingly tedious physiotherapy before I could manage a full Nazi salute.

While I was complaining of post-operative shoulder pain, my father was dying. I rang each day, and his voice became weaker and weaker, until he slurred that he couldn't hear me, and he died the next day, 24 February 1990, my birthday.

On the following Wednesday our family walked along the same path behind the Christian Brothers' residence that my father had dragged me down screaming fifty-two years earlier to begin my schooldays at CBC St Kilda. We took the front pews of St Mary's church, where I'd been confirmed by Archibshop Mannix, and where Carmel and I had married. Our mother is on my right, with my brother on her other side. She's looped with pearl necklaces, which give out a faint clink as she looks around, to see what the enemy is up to. One of my brother's daughters is letting her down. (Loudly) ‘Naomi is talking to Beryl.'

Our mother's upset because, the day after the family death notices were published, there appeared, in the same papers, the following: ‘Oakley, Harry. Thank you for the love we shared. Poppy.'

Though my father had swapped Catholicism for the Masons many years before (and had once horrified me as a schoolboy by lighting a cigarette in St Patrick's Cathedral), he had been received back into the Church in his last moments. As our mother had commented: ‘Your father's always been late for everything.' During the Requiem Mass, one image kept coming back to me—the dash he had once made from a Sorrento hotel to the gangway of the paddle-steamer
Weeroona
on one of its pre-war bay cruises. Though I would have been six at the time, it was still vivid—the ship's whistle, the engine's rumble, the crew releasing the mooring ropes, and the cheers of his estate-agent friends as he just made it aboard. Had he done the same with eternal life?

‘I am the resurrection and the life,' intoned the priest, portly, empurpled. ‘If anyone believes in me, even though he dies, he will live.' I had the feeling that our father, trapped, lying only a few metres away, as he had done on an eternity of Sunday afternoons, was listening, possibly with gritted teeth.

Struggling up the rope ladder

By now I too had climbed aboard again. After the birth of our sixth child Kieran in 1970, rather than spend the rest of our married lives worrying about the discordancies of the rhythm method, we had left the Catholic Church.

But I felt directionless without it. When John Paul II came to Sydney in 1986, and said Mass at Randwick Racecourse before a huge crowd, I watched it on TV. Though in those days he was still vigorous, his address wasn't promising. ‘Tank you for your kind vords and locutions.' But then, wisely, he abandoned his notes, extended his arms, and said ‘Kahm Bach! Kahm Bach!' pleading for the lapsed to return. I was moved—he seemed to be talking to me—even more so when he walked over to the crowd: love made visible.

From that time I followed at a safe distance, like Peter and the arrested Christ. When the priest said the words quoted above at my father's Mass, a barrier collapsed, and I did believe that my father still lived (albeit in some transcendental version of his favourite haunt, the South Yarra Club).

And the Church I was now reluctantly approaching had travelled a distance itself. What was once called confession was now reconciliation, done in daylight, face to face with the priest. Fortunately, Sydney's St Mary's Cathedral still catered for cowards. One could confess there in the old anonymous dimness of the box with the sliding panel.

So one day I lined up with the other sinners, waited my turn, warned the priest that it was a long time since my last confession and unloaded twenty years of culpabilities onto his bald, bowed head. He took it calmly, made the absolving sign of the cross, gave me an undemanding penance, and I went out blinking into the light.

The real transformation came later, at the Easter Sunday Mass. The quiet nudgings that had urged me on now pushed me to the altar rails, to receive a pale circle of unleavened bread that at the consecration becomes, impossibly, the body of Christ. It feels uncomfortable to talk about this mystery—it's private, in the way married love is private—but after one has taken the Host there's a stillness: being (ours) invaded by Being; love (our meagre portion) by Love. It's food, and it's the secret life of the Catholic Church: lifeblood pulsing up from the parishes, not down from Rome. You receive a great gift, and when you take the gift, you taste the giver.

How can one believe it? How can one believe we're heading for fullness and not nothingness, a state of purer being, a spirit-marriage with God? I did then and I do now, to the bemusement of our children and the mockery of friends. ‘Faith without works is dead,' said St Paul. But faith
is
a work. Sometimes it carries you, and sometimes, in the face of derision and incre­dulity, you carry it.

Cripple kicked

Literary editorship might have been a sheltered workshop, but the lathes and pulleys never stopped whirring, and one had to be careful not to get caught in them. Frank Devine, to whom I'd been close, was replaced by David Armstrong, to whom I wasn't. Sometimes, when editors are replaced, section editors can go too. One morning, as I huddled into my primitive, hooded VDT hunting and pecking—was keyboard ineptitude a ground for dismissal?—I noticed Armstrong coming down our way from the executive end.

I huddled lower, but he was heading not for me but a neighbour, a sub-editor I'll call B. B was a gay, civilised but troubled man, whose breath smelt of alcohol when he arrived of a morning. B was ushered into an empty office, told how much the editor regretted having to do this, handed an envelope, and sacked. B came out stunned, his normally florid complexion as white as the envelope he was holding. ‘I've just been sacked,' he said to me. ‘On the spot. Just like that. His hand was shaking when he handed me the envelope.'

I walked up to the staffroom for a steadying coffee, while B collected his things. M, the travel editor, a grim, unsmiling man, looked equally stunned. ‘I've just been sacked. How'd you like a trip to India?' I accepted—though was it wise to turn one's back right now? Should I check to see if my job was safe? No—lie low in the hope one won't be noticed, like Mike Wellington, the drama critic in Howard Brenton's and David Hare's play
Pravda
, who escapes sacking by the carnivorous new proprietor because he lies drunk under the desk.

So I pressed on and worked hard, repelling boarders before they could get a grip on the rails. There was the man who rang to ask whether I could organise a review of a book he had just self-published—and would I also mind sending him a clipping of the review as he did not take the paper. There was Edwin Morrisby, whose voice locked onto you the moment you answered the phone, the words unspooling from somewhere deep in his head, relentless and uninterruptible, about a feature review he would like to do on medieval Bohemian glass. There was Bob Brissenden, a kind of friend, who insisted on seeing me. I feared the worst. Could there be an interview, when his crime novel came out? Could Geoffrey Dutton, his friend, review his book of poems? And could he, Bob, review the new Scott Turow? All this over a coffee, with Bob bent double under a huge hump, his hands shaking as he probes his wallet—‘I'll pay, I'll pay'—for the change. There was Sandy Yarwood, whose review I rejected, and when he rang to complain couldn't speak properly. ‘I've had a stroke,' he managed, and made me feel as if I were kicking a cripple. India, quickly!

Optical enjoyment

When I leave the plane at what was then called Madras, one of a small group of freeloading journalists, the heat, noise, and smells coalesce into a single overpowering entity, like a slap in the face. It's nearly midnight, but the airport's packed. It heaves, it babbles—especially the porters, who fight over our luggage, lead us ceremoniously to our taxis, and await our tip—the first of many.

We bump and honk into town along a road lined with people, stalls and shacks, the air heavy with cooking and sewage smells. Even at midnight, all India seems to be moving—medieval trucks, bullock wagons, impossibly overloaded handcarts, teetering motor scooters, cows—a river, a procession, a parade.

It's still going when I pull back the hotel drapes early next morning. When we join the flow in our minibus and visit a Hindu temple, the pressure seems to force its way through the entrance and push upwards, forming tier after tier of writhing figures. Gods by the hundred, rising up into the crow-circled sky.

There's life in Indian silences as well as sounds. We take the coast road to Mamallapuram, once the great port of the Pallava dynasty, then mysteriously abandoned. Huge granite sculptures are all that's left, rising up from the sand, with dim figures rippling along their sides. A wind from the sea blows around them. It seems to whisper in a language I'll never understand. As we leave, we pass a group of squatting women. One of them opens her basket, revealing a cobra. It's tired and old, and has to be cuffed before it will rear up. Then she produces an equally elderly mongoose in a tiny leather harness. ‘Photo? You want photo?'

We leave the state of Tamil Nadu to move on to Karnataka, whose capital is Bangalore (soon to become the centre of the Indian IT industry). Our guide takes us on a walk through the city (Panama Cigarettes—Good to the Last Puff, Ding Dong Ice Cream, Dr Cleatus: Diseases of the Bone) and we spend the evening in a Bangalore bar (Liquor Ruins Country, Family and Life).

Just before we leave the town, a magician performs in the shade by the side of our minibus. He wears a silver turban and a vest of silver and blue squares. He takes a deep breath, exhales fire and smoke, then disgorges batch after batch of nails. When he smiles, there's a hole where his teeth should be. All that firing and smoking have turned his mouth into an exhaust pipe.

Near Mysore, the landscape changes. Dryness gives way to rice paddies and greenness. This is the India we expected, and we stop so it can be photographed. One of the watching children scoops up water from the paddy field and drinks. ‘You must never do that,' our guide warns us. ‘They develop a resistance. You do it, and you are within forty-eight hours dead.'

The Maharajah's palace (‘Please leave your shoes here only and enter one by one') at Mysore is vast and vulgar, a Luna Park of domes, its endless marzipan corridors lined with portraits of past dignitaries, plump and glossy and rich. As we emerge, a beggar sees us coming and lies back to show off the stumps of his legs. The gap between the palatial and the impoverished seems unbridgeable, predetermined.

Our cross-country journey ends at Cochin, on the west coast—the Malabar Coast, centre of the old spice trade. From my hotel window there's an unforgettable view over the lagoon: high-prowed fishing boats chugging out to the Arabian Sea, rusty freighters coming in, overcrowded rowing boats propelled by a single straining oarsman, Edwardian ferries. In the distance, at the port's entrance, you can see the high spidery frames of the Chinese fishing nets, and from across the water come the wails of the
muezzin
. Vasco de Gama's grave is here, and down a mustard-coloured laneway there's a tiny synagogue, 400 years old.

The hotel brochure puts it well: ‘A walk down to the port composes optical enjoyment. We recommend your walk there with full moon.' After doing so, in our last South Indian twilight, heavy with the smell of Aerogard and make-up, we watch the
kathakali
, the classical dance of Kerala, in which Shiva, magnificent in black, gives the sacred arrow to Arjuna, robed in red. Cochin is as layered in history as the two young actors are in paint and silks: Hindu, Chinese, Portuguese, Jewish, Muslim.

For me, the symbol of India was a concrete building with steel reinforcing rods sprouting from the roof. No one has bothered to round it off. The finished look was not important. Everything, in the Hindu view of things, is in a state of becoming. We must live our worldly lives with an eye to
moksha
, release. The street and shops might decay, but for the holy person the outer world can't gain entry to the inner one. In the heart of the squalor lives a spiritual idea, which is why the memory of India refuses to
go away
.