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A COWARD WHO PROMISED TO DEFEND ME
There is no courage inside him. He is not courageous enough to take responsibility for his own health. As far as protecting his teenage daughter over the years, he was like a big bag of hot air. After mum left him he used to have all these blokes stay at the house he was squatting in at Rose Street - deros, addicts and other company of a questionable nature. One by one they tried to have a turn at fucking me, to see who could get into my pants first. I was fifteen and the triers were in their twenties and already burnt out. I told them all to go to Hell. 'You are fucking scum,' I said, 'Brains the size of fucking sultanas and fifty different diseases.' I had my own self-hatred to contend with, which was to make me an expert fighter.
I felt a struggle inside myself, as if something good was always trying to get out, but that if it did, nothing would reward it. One night we were all stoned and we had the munchies. We were frying cheese, tomato and onion sandwiches on white bread under the griller, and Dick said to dad, 'She's a slut and I want to fuck her.' I looked up over the kitchen bench to dad, my eyes flashing. I was furious that this had been said about me by that scumbag, who I had partially trusted. I wanted dad to smash him, or at least to boot him out of the house, or to stop shouting him beers or fucking something. But dad just looked at me then looked at him and said 'yeah.' Then he looked to the blue carpet and his mind went off with the Gumnut Criminals and the Banksia men, before it grasped onto the next thought. 'Hey mate, any more beer left in that glass?
'Dad,' I persisted, 'He called me a slut. Why don't you do something?' 'It's alright,' he said. My father wouldn't hit him. 'You hit fucking mum,' I screamed, 'why don't you fucking hit him?' But it appeared to me that he only hit women and children. He only hit me when I was under fifteen. At fifteen he had invited me around and then said, 'Come in and sit down mate.' It was almost as if it was he who was forgiving me. I frowned into the scar between my eyes. After two years of threatening to kill me and fifteen years of being the hater of me and therefore my enemy, I had came back to the house still wanting a father. But it was the same father that I had been sent from two years before in order that he wouldn't kill me. Or so my mother had said. Both man and environment were dilapidated, but I wanted to salvage what was left. I wanted to begin the slow excavation, the struggle through the wreckage of my life, fighting off fifteen years worth of ghosts on the old haunted ship.
At fifteen I gave him one last chance. I said, 'If you ever hit me again, the only time I will come back will be to spit on your grave.' I won't be going to his grave now, that was just a metaphor for how dramatic I felt inside. I visited his grave the night he became violent to me again, as he was dying before my very eyes. As it turns out he was already dead and the graveyard was my kitchen and the other bloke who had wanted to fuck me at Rose Street had spiked my drink with acid or something and then dad and one of the other no-hopers, greedy for my grog, grabbed my glass off the table and said, 'Don't you want this?' I didn't answer the scumbags, pissed off and broody inside. Instead I kicked the wire flyscreen door open and sat out on the back verandah. Fuck that. I needed some black block in my back pocket. I would kill or die for some good quality hash.
The dogs' tails fanned my face with their loud panting. They were glad that I had finally come to my senses and come out to join them. It didn't feel like my childhood house anymore. It was as though childhood itself had gone away in disgust and might return after the no-hopers had all moved out. At least my father didn't want to kill me anymore, which was something. I didn't bother to turn and catch a glance of the men consuming my drink from inside the lit kitchen, but I heard Little Dirk who fought dad for it, saying 'Gary ... give me the last bit, mate.' Dad said, 'fuck you.' They may have spilt some on their dirty shirts or broken flys and thongs or had a bit of a tumble on the carpet as true mates might, for all I cared or knew.
Either way the drink was gone and my father, who had made it his purpose to down the largest portion, stayed in bed for the next three days with violent stomach pains and hallucinations. As for me, 'the little virgin slut' who hadn't been fucked yet, I went back to my mother's townhouse for a while and took the dogs with me. I needed a sensible interlude and at least I could smoke my hash in peace without having it bludged or pinched. I thought I heard Dick say to dad as I left, 'She needs some breaking in. Is she frightened to fuck or what? Is she a dyke?' I liked them better when they didn't think about women and when they forgot that I was one. When they weren't cunt struck and horny and when they were all doped out and when they had plenty of hash, that's when I liked them best.
Dick said, 'Your daughter is a little slut.' As it turned out he and dad were both giggling drunk beneath the insect crazy street light outside the corner shop, in the humid summer night of Liverpool. They had boiled up some oelander leaves torn off in large clumps from the curbside council trees. They simmered in an aluminium hot plate at Rose Street. The men were taking turns at tasting the new concoction, by placing the thick green liquid on a tea spoon and in a schooner glass with some tequilla and pineapple juice. They were successful in partially poisoning themselves. Meanwhile the oleander trees grew in abundance, like triffids in winter, blossoming pink and white flowers beneath the street lights the length of Gill Avenue.
Fifteen minutes of poison from the spiky leaves running through Dick's body was enough to make him feel as tough as a car so that he ran into a telegraph pole, like that time in New Zealand where after drinking a litre of frigate overproof rum, I had run again and again into a deadfall thinking it was friendliness and hospitality, that stood all by itself out there in the night bush. At the same time as feeling pretty sure I had knocked my front tooth out, I had already blackened my eye and grazed my neck. Often New Zealand wasn't very tolerant of drunken Australians and this was one such time.
But still something automatic went to work inside me. It kept me picking myself up from the ground and mechanically running into it. Despite the persistent dizzy warmth of blood inside my cheek and mouth, I was to remain mainly isolated, lost and anxious inside the darkness of my own amber vision. I had been in good training for this simple self annihilation from the day I was born. For instance, going back to my father, to try and love him after all he had done, was just like this. He was unsalvaged wreckage. The harder I ran into the wilderness of him, the more chance I had of destroying myself. |
