7.

The Absent Father

Everybody now dispersed, the mob that might have been his gone, ferried by trams out to the homes they left years before, Vic leaves the quiet city intersection and makes his way back into the rail yards, that part of the vast railway world of twisting tracks and idle engines called North Melbourne Loco. This is where he has left his bicycle. Even if there was petrol to be had, Vic, like practically everyone else in the city, could never afford a car. So Vic gets about on a bicycle. And with so little traffic around at this time of night (and it is not yet nine o’clock) it’s not difficult.

A whole chain of events has occurred since Vic sat down in the driver’s seat earlier that afternoon and brought his train and its sad cargo into the city. While he was travelling south, the photographer and the journalist drove north of the city to Katherine’s tent, Katherine suffered their intrusion, the article appeared in the evening newspaper, a painter was stirred by the story, and a short time ago, while Vic stood in the street contemplating this new world they were all about to enter, and the mob and the life that might have been his, Skinner stood gazing upon Katherine’s light, comforted by the simple fact that it was there.

But Vic is unaware of any of this as he cycles back through the dark western suburbs of the city and down to the wharves, to the bayside suburb of Newport where he and Rita rent a small house. Even if he were aware of his connection to the day’s events, his part in the chain, he wouldn’t give it too much thought. Vic has other things on his mind. For it is not just the great world that is about to change. Vic’s world is about to change too.

In the night, all across the city, and out there in the greater world, young men become fathers. Possibly at this very moment. And they enter this world of fatherhood (Vic has been watching this world of fathers and their children more keenly lately) with a casual ease that he can’t comprehend. And this is because it has always been something that other people did. But now he is about to become one of those people, and he knows he will not step into that part with the casual, almost practised air of those who were surely born to be fathers because he knows he wasn’t born to be a father. He wasn’t even born to be married. But there you are, he tells himself. He is married, he is about to become a father and his small world is about to change utterly, just as the greater world out there is already becoming something else, something vastly different from the one everyone’s known up until now.

Father — the word sits well on other people. But the thought of anyone calling him ‘Dad’ is difficult to imagine. And this is because Vic has rarely used the word. Even as a child. He never knew his father. His father was never there and so words such as ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ were never spoken because there was no one to speak them to. Unless, that is, in reference to somebody else’s father or dad. This is not because his father died tragically years before, succumbing to an unlikely accident, war or disease. No, his father simply didn’t think it was necessary to be present. Wasn’t sufficiently persuaded that there was reason enough to be there. In short, didn’t care. And so Vic learnt to live without a father, without using the words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’, which is why they don’t come naturally to him. And he contemplates this, all the time knowing that his father is, more than likely, still alive. That he is not dead. That in all likelihood he is out there, doing something incidental like pouring a cup of tea right now. But Vic has never met his father and would not know him if he were to pass him on the street or sit beside him on a tram or in a train. He is convinced his father is still out there, somewhere in the Western District countryside, in a large house on a farm, indifferent to the fact of Vic existing in the world. For Vic’s mother was a domestic on his farm and was silly enough to get herself knocked up. Silly enough to give in to the feeling that somebody might care for her. Or — and late in life (for she was forty-one when she had Vic) — silly enough to give herself leave to take a chance, to live, and to have something to look back upon apart from work and a life of what the world calls spinsterhood. Silly enough to try. What did she expect, he hears this absent father’s voice asking her, what did she expect, after all, apart from the fifty quid he gave her? He already had a farmer’s wife and children, thank you very much. He needed neither another wife nor another child. That was an impossibility. She and he had had their time. Their time was brief and now it was time she ceased to exist. And that was what the fifty quid was for. It wasn’t to provide help or comfort, nor was it even a sign of care. It was to make her go away. To make the child inside her go away and likewise cease to exist. And this is why when Vic tries to imagine a father doing something at this moment, as he cycles home from work, he sees only a vague shape, who a long time ago paid his mother a lot of money to go away. To vanish. For if something doesn’t exist it’s impossible for it to be on anybody’s mind, in a good or a bad way. No doubt he told her that there were places, institutions, for the child to be turned over to when it was born. And if she was wise, she would do exactly that and then just get on with her life. Everybody told her to farm the baby out: the father, her sisters and the priests. But she kept her boy, so that even though words such as ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ do not fall naturally from his lips, the words ‘Ma’ and ‘Mother’ come as naturally as breathing because they are the first words he ever learnt.

When the child who will become Michael not only opens his eyes upon this world but grows into it, when he goes to school and on to a university (for Michael will be the first of his family to go to university), he will, in his reading and his study, one day discover the phrase ‘the absent father’. It will pop out of a history book that has not been written yet, in the stuffy library of a university that has not been built yet. And as he reads about it he will also discover that his father’s father was not the only one who was absent. It is, Michael will discover in that sleepy library, a theme. A particularly sad little melody that not only played into the ears of his father but all those children who had been dispatched into non-existence, and who couldn’t trouble anybody’s minds because they weren’t there.

But the phrase ‘absent father’ has never entered Vic’s thoughts because it hasn’t been invented yet, and it hasn’t been invented yet because nobody talks about these things. Such phrases belong to a world of private shame and it will be left to others, more distant from the shame than those upon whom it falls, to invent the phrase. Even if it did wander into Vic’s thoughts (and Vic is currently turning the front wheel of his bicycle into his street), the phrase would not be welcome. The phrase would be shown the door and turned out, a thought not worth dwelling on, one that would be as unwelcome as the blurred, vague, absent figure it describes, who may or may not be, at this very moment as Vic stops at the front of his house, pouring a cup of tea, indifferent to the absence he has created.

And so, as much as the words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ ring strangely in his ears when he imagines them being spoken to him as they will be one day, this much he resolves, and it is a pledge offered to open sky and which the open sky takes in: the flaws of the absent father will not be visited upon his children, the words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ will not ring strangely in their ears, and absence will not be repeated. No, he decides, the sad little melody of absence will fade and cease to play from this very moment, as he nudges his bicycle through the front gate of his lighted house. However imperfectly he may be there, he will be a presence, not an absence.