The Best Australian Essays 2015 (9 page)

When I think of that long, hard summer, I remember the wordless heaviness in the house, the fog of dread we were all trapped in. My brother and sister were too young to understand what was happening. In a sense it was just Mum and me, and a kid in kindergarten can't offer his mother much by way of solace. She must have done a lot of hoping. All the same, there wasn't a hopeful air in the house. Even when they brought him home from hospital, a broken man – an effigy, really – there was no surge of optimism for any of us to ride. The grown-ups who visited spoke in riddles and whispers. I had to imbibe the gravity of our situation the way a dog will, reading the smells and the postures and hierarchies. You forget how much a child absorbs physically and then has to process unaided.

I understood that a stranger had ruined my father. And I was enraged. But I had no idea just how grim the prognosis was and how this might shape our future. My mother never let on, but it appeared that the police service was expecting to pension him off. Still breastfeeding my baby sister, and with two small boys not yet in school, she was now married to an invalid. Someone told her, correctly as it turned out, that insurance and compensation would take years to settle. I couldn't know the many ways in which the parameters of her life – and my own along with it – had been radically redrawn in an instant, but I did understand that the world had changed for us. My father's life had been spared and we were glad, but we were no longer the safe, confident people we'd been.

As a child I was always something of an eavesdropper. I was also an inveterate prowler with a peculiar fascination with the potency of certain objects. Sometime during that long convalescence, I came upon the helmet Dad had been wearing when he was hit. Made of laminated cork, it was cumbersome, and it felt unstable in my hands. The crazed pattern of cracks dulling its whiteness gave it an unnerving broken-eggshell texture. For a long time – for years, I think – I continued to seek it out, to turn it over in my hands, to sniff the Brylcreem interior, and try to imagine the sudden moment, the awful impact, and the faceless stranger behind all this damage. Inside it smelt of my father, but it was as if you could almost sniff death on the outside. This flimsy artefact had held my father's living head, his brain, his memory, all his jokes; it was all that had stood between him and the void – a crust no thicker than my finger. The older I got, the darker those conjectures became. By all accounts I was an intense little boy. Perhaps it was wise of my parents to get rid of the sacramental helmet when they did.

How quick children are to absorb the unexpressed anxieties of their parents; how fluent they become in the unconscious art of compensation, and how instinctive is their assumption of responsibility. The margins between coping and not coping, between psychological survival and total collapse, are so narrow and often so arbitrary, that it's uncomfortable to look back and consider what might have been. The long months of my father's convalescence had a lasting impact on me. By these events I was drafted into the world of consequences. I became ‘Mummy's little helper'. The little man. I was assigned the role of sibling enforcer and family protector. I was the keeper of grown-up secrets, the compensator and listener. I had to be ‘wise beyond my years', to assume an unlikely authority, to understand what I could not pronounce.

During this time Mum was stoic and subdued. Dad lived in bed and obediently swallowed the pills that would chew the holes in his guts. My parents' bedroom was perpetually dim, and the apprehension within it seemed to infect the rest of the house. With the curtains drawn against the heat, the place was infused with a faint amber light, and in that atmosphere of bewilderment there were times when the only signs of animation were the churn and swirl of dust motes. Since the crash Dad had lost a lot of weight but he was still too heavy for Mum to lift. There was no way she could get him in and out of a bath, so she had to wash him in bed.

That summer there were many visits from family and neighbours, but the person who distinguished himself above all others was a complete unknown. He turned up unannounced and uninvited. He offered to bathe my father. It was weird. But his unexpected arrival and strange proposal soon brought a new energy to the house. Also a new awkwardness. I didn't know what to make of this turn of events. I took my cues from Mum, who was hesitant at first, even a little resistant. But she was desperate for help and here was a helper, a volunteer from who-knew and who-cared-where. She let him in, and straight away he went to work.

I observed everything carefully, suspiciously. Here was some
bloke
entering my parents' bedroom, introducing himself to my father, who consented to be undressed, lifted from his sickbed and carried like a child to the bathroom. There, the door wasn't exactly shut in my face but it was pushed to, slightly ajar. My world was already out of whack, but this new set-up was discombobulating, especially when, after a few minutes, my mother decided to leave the men to it and get on with her many jobs. I stood outside in the narrow corridor listening to the sounds of water and the low, deep quiet voices. It was appalling to think of that guy kneeling at the bath and washing my father as if he were an infant. Mum caught me camped by the door and tried to shoo me away, but I drifted back. In the weeks ahead, every time that stranger returned, I was there at the door like a sentry, straining to hear, keeping tabs.

I couldn't really follow what the men said in the bathroom, as they slowly got to know each other. They always spoke quietly. There was none of the hearty blather you heard blokes falling into at the footy or across the fence. I was wary of this soft-spoken interloper. No doubt I was threatened by his presence. And yet his brief tenure in our home helped break down the anxious malaise that oppressed us. His arrival and his subsequent actions taught me something new about strangers – they could wreck your life and do you harm but they were also capable of mysterious kindness.

By autumn my father began to make progress. His recovery was faster and more complete than anyone had expected. He was a big, strong man, but his injuries were awful, and to some the speed of his improvement was unsettling. It was only as an adult that I learnt about some of what went on in that tiny bathroom. For instance there was a day when Dad's helper brought a bottle of oil with him. Olive oil, I gather, which wasn't common in a house like ours. He anointed the old man with it in the manner of ancient Christian tradition, and he ‘laid hands on him', as the saying goes, praying that Dad might be healed. Neither of my parents was ever keen to talk about this ritual, and they certainly made no special claims for its efficacy, but after the old man's recovery they became devout Christians.

I've thought a lot about this unlikely turning. Like the accident, it had a profound effect on my own trajectory. It's no small achievement to confound a copper's lowered expectations of humankind. Still, being unmanned by injury and sidelined from the world of action had to have been traumatic. Dad was an outdoor, hands-on bloke, a practical fellow. Later he said that during his convalescence he'd had a lot of time to think. Perhaps, like the rest of us in the house that summer, he was left without armour, maybe even without hope – I don't know. I don't set much store by signs and wonders, but I try to keep an open mind.

All I can say is that I witnessed Dad's swift restoration and renewal, and was grateful for it, and in much the same way I'd soaked up the fear and horror that preceded his recovery, I absorbed the new energy and purpose that came into his life and to Mum's as a result of this stranger's kindness. I think of it as an act of grace. Maybe that's just a fancypants way of appreciating the loving-kindness of humans. But when there's so much opportunity for people to be vile, it strikes me as a miracle that they choose mercy, restraint and decency as often as they do.

III

When he was well enough, the old man returned to light duties at Traffic. For a while he manned the Accident Desk. From there he went to the Plan Room, where he drew up schematic representations of major and fatal accidents for use in the courts. What it must have been like to return to such scenes of carnage, gimping out into intersections with his measuring tape and yellow crayon: the broken glass, the skid marks, the smells of blood and petrol. He said he was glad he had no memory of the prang. He loved his job and he certainly knew his way around a bingle. But it can't have been easy. At first he walked with a limp. Then he had a bone graft and got fit. He stayed on in Accidents, and even got back on the bikes. Now and then he rode me to school on his new BSA and I arrived like a princeling. As I waved him off he'd burn away, letting off a lairish blurt of the siren to impress the kids. I hoped no one saw my legs trembling. I'd always loved the Beezers, but now a pillion ride was a secret terror. I never let on.

After all the disaster and uncertainty, we were out of the woods. My dad was back. He was strong once more and I felt safe again. It was the best feeling ever.

*

At some level every kid knows that their parents' wellbeing is paramount to their own safety, even their sense of self. Mercifully, a child is rarely forced to confront the fact consciously. I suppose this is why the minor prang and roadside scuffle I witnessed a few years later were so traumatic. Seeing all that blood and screaming and violence, any small child would be disturbed. And I imagine the twisted motorbike, a ghastly echo of the old man's smash, had an effect. But I wasn't just upset. I felt as if I was unravelling. I was in no physical danger, yet I feared that everything was about to fall apart again right in front of me, that I might die at any moment.

Twenty-five years ago, around the time my first child was born, I wrote a short story, ‘A Blow, a Kiss', about an event very similar to this. In the fictional version of events, the boy behind the wheel can't bear to watch this scene play out another moment. He leaps from the vehicle and king-hits the drunk with the gas lantern. In a sense I let the kid do what I was incapable of, and though I doubt it served any therapeutic purpose, I'd be lying if I said I took no pleasure in letting him off the leash on my behalf.

In real life, the events of that evening weren't so traumatic as to knock me out of kilter. But afterwards I knew the difference between calm and safety. Family life was good. In many senses we prospered. But now I knew that we were not – and never really would be – out of the woods. Everything you know and see is fragile, temporary, and if there's any constant in life it's contingency. Later I came to suspect that you don't just relive these sudden moments in your head and in your sense memories, you repeat them in fresh events, as if ensnared in a pattern.

IV

Barely nine years later, less than a kilometre from home and 200 metres from where the motorcyclist fell, I too went through a brick wall.

By then my father was the sergeant-in-charge of the local suburban police station, and I was eighteen, the sole passenger in a muscle car that smashed into a girls' school. The first witnesses on the scene said we'd ploughed through the two-metre-high perimeter wall and that the only thing that had prevented us from hitting the caretaker's house was the concrete foundation of the rotary clothes hoist in his front yard. The driver, a boy I'd known since infancy, escaped unhurt. But the Slant 6 engine was almost in my lap, and the rubble had crushed the car all around me. I was slumped against the seatbelt, my only visible injury a split chin from the brick that knocked me senseless. Apparently I regained consciousness as people laboured to cut me free, but it was years before I regained any memory. When a couple of brief sequences did come back to me, like a brutal ambush, I had cause to wish it had all stayed safely in the vault. Again, the old smells of petrol and blood. And the voices of paramedics, a haze of brick dust, the ghastly hysteria of strobing lights. It was all a garish sideshow, absurd and sinister. I heard myself laughing like a deranged clown. I couldn't even tell the ambos who the prime minister was. And in the ambulance I could not move a limb. Some bloke with hairy arms was holding me down. It wasn't a rescue – it was a kidnapping.

Until this nasty flashback, my only other memory of the night was a brief moment in Casualty in which Mum fainted and Dad caught her. Maybe she was upset by the seizures I was having. Or perhaps it was just the crushing sense of deja vu. For the rest I had to rely on the contradictory testimonies of others, as if I hadn't even been at my own prang. In a general sense I know what occurred. What I'm unclear about is how it happened.

After a stint in hospital I came home as weak and doddery as a crone. And weeks into my convalescence I still felt like a ghost in my own body. I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, this is a typical after-effect of road trauma and major concussion. All your organs have suffered an insult, not just your brain. Again, I should have known better, but I was unprepared for how long it took me to reconnect with the life I'd been living. I was feeble and mentally stuck.

I wondered if what I was feeling was a little like grief, or maybe shock. I'd seen both at work in others. I knew only too well what they did to a person, swinging down out of a clear sky. All my life I'd heard the old man talk about the dreaded midnight knock that every cop delivers sooner or later, bringing news of sudden death to some unsuspecting loved one. In fact, I'd done it myself. At fourteen, alongside my father, I'd had to break the news to a close mate that his father had been killed. The feeling is hideous. It's like killing someone. They go down like a water buffalo felled by an axe, and some part of you believes it's your fault.

But as a survivor, what I was feeling was not grief. Neither was it shock, whose physical effects recede soon enough. I just felt diminished. Not unmanned so much as bogged to the boards. Looking back I'd say I was depressed.