But he brought havoc home anyway – on his tunic, in his limbs, and in midnight whispers. When he was out on the road I could read the fear of it in my mother’s face.
There’s a song in Ry Cooder’s back catalogue about a man stalked by misfortune. In the chorus the old trouper sings, ‘Trouble, you can’t fool me, I see you behind that tree/ Trouble you can’t fool me, tryin to get the ups on me.’ But the bloke’s kidding himself. He can’t forestall trouble, and that’s the charm of the song. Although trouble loves the careless and the impulsive, first seeking out the selfish and the intemperate, in the end it’s pretty democratic; it’ll jump anyone, really, for neither virtue nor prudence will inoculate you against it. Just as rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, trouble of some sort visits everyone eventually. But real trouble isn’t about inconvenience – it’s catastrophic. That’s how it felt the year I turned five, when it came to me and to my family.
In December of 1965, as he was riding back from a prang, the old man was hit by a driver who’d run a stop sign. The errant car slammed him into a brick wall with such force it crushed his chest, his shoulder and his hip. He suffered a massive concussion, and because his ribs were broken and his lungs had collapsed the paramedics found him suffocating and close to death. To save him they were forced to perform an emergency tracheotomy as he lay in the street.
When Mum was notified, she was told he’d been in a bingle but that it probably wasn’t serious, so she didn’t understand the gravity of the situation until she was mistakenly given the blood-soaked uniform that had been cut off him in Casualty. She had two small boys, five and three, and a daughter barely six months old. No one had prepared her for what was coming her way. Her husband, the sole breadwinner of the household, was in a coma. And she didn’t know it yet, but nobody fancied his chances.
For days he lay in the resuscitation room at Royal Perth Hospital. There was an unspoken understanding that he would never ‘be himself’ again, and so traumatic were his injuries that two of his colleagues resigned shortly after visiting him. Even when he finally regained consciousness, nobody could offer Mum much cause for optimism. I was not allowed to visit. I came to suspect he was actually dead and that no one had the nerve to tell me. Mum kept up a brave front, and she was genuinely courageous, but I was there to see the mess she hid from everyone else.
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 buoyancy 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, processing them physically.
I knew that a stranger had ruined my father. 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 her baby daughter, and with two 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 before.
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. The inside of the helmet smelt of my father, but it was as if you could almost smell death on the outside. This flimsy artefact had held my father’s living head, his brain, his memory, 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 most 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 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, the 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. He 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. 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.
That summer there were many visits from family and neighbours, but the person who distinguished himself above all others was a complete unknown. He showed up unannounced and uninvited and 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 relented and 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 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 one another. 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 actions taught me something new about strangers – that while they could wreck your life and do you harm they w
ere 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 some of what had gone on in that tiny bathroom. 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 ‘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 and lifelong Christians.
And I’ve thought a lot about this unlikely turning. Because, 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, for that’s a tough carapace to penetrate. 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 that I’d soaked up the fear and horror preceding his recovery, I absorbed the new energy and purpose that came into his life and into Mum’s as a result of this stranger’s compassion. 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 wreck-strewn intersections with his measuring tape and yellow crayon: the broken glass, the skidmarks, 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 returned to 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 other 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 his parents’ wellbeing is paramount to his own safety, even his sense of self. Mercifully, children are 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 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 were 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.
Fifteen years later, just before my first child was born, I wrote a short story, ‘A Blow, a Kiss’, about an incident very similar to that night’s. In the fictional version the boy behind the wheel can’t bear to watch the scene play out another moment. He leaps from the vehicle in defence of his father and king-hits the drunk with the lantern. In a sense I let the character do what I’d been 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 night came and went largely undiscussed. The experience wasn’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 ways 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. 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 eight years after that motorcyclist’s accident, and just 200 metres from where he 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 2-metre-high perimeter wall and the only thing that 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 of the accident, and 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. The whole thing was a garish sideshow, absurd and sinister. In that ugly flashback I heard myself laughing like a deranged clown. I was a university student but 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 spasm of recollection, 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 harrowing sense of déjà vu. For the rest I had to rely on the testimonies of others, as if I hadn’t even been at my own prang, and their accounts were contradictory. In general terms 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. Weeks into my convalescence I still felt like a ghost in my own body. I shouldn’t have been surprised; this is a typical after-effect of road trauma and major concussion. All your organs have been insulted, not just your brain. But while I should have known better, 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, been commissioned, you might say. At fourteen, alongside my father, I’d had to help 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.
It’s galling to lie in bed for weeks absorbing t
he results of someone else’s mistake. But the old man was right – convalescence does focus the mind. I was at that time halfway through my first year of university and drifting along a little bit. For quite a while I’d been thinking of myself as a writer, but I hadn’t knuckled down the way I’d planned to. I was in danger of becoming a bit of a pretender. Before the accident there seemed to be plenty of time in which to find my way, but now I thought differently. Suddenly time was precious. So once I recovered I went to work and by graduation I’d written three books. Havoc, it seemed, had leant in and set me running.
But I hadn’t emerged unscathed. Everyone told me writing was a hell of a way to make a living and they were right. Indeed it was hard to think of a vocation more uncertain or less likely, but I’d always figured I could supplement my income with physical work – on the deck of a crayboat or as a brickie’s labourer (after all, bricks seemed to run in the family). But in the wake of the accident my back was never the same. I still feel this legacy every morning when I wake – that stiff and fluky spine is the only thing I regret. With my plan B now shot, I had to rely on my wits alone or I was buggered. And in this sense I think the prang was a gift. It shaped my life, which is to say, of course, that it bound me. I was goaded into beginning what I’d dreamt of doing since I was ten years old. Because of that one sudden moment I went harder at the writing game than anybody could believe, myself included. It was as if I had Robert Johnson’s hellhound on my tail.
V
As a teenager I flirted with death. It was an irrational impulse, but a powerful one. Risky behaviour of all sorts gave me a buzz. I particularly enjoyed shallow-water apnoea diving, especially beneath low-slung limestone reefs. I’d crawl into underwater ledges, some of them hardly wide enough to accommodate my body and my snorkel, and I’d crab and squirm my way into the gloom, backing myself to eventually find a slim hole through which to shove the snorkel before my lungs gave out. I swam into narrow clefts whose geography was completely unfamiliar. The reefs were jagged and the passages beneath them as spidery and complex as the capillaries carrying the last oxygen in my blood. Pressed into the darkness, I inched along in search of a life-giving shaft of light. It was claustrophobic and dangerous. I got myself into situations that give me the cold sweats when I think of them now. But when I emerged into full daylight and fresh air, half poisoned with carbon dioxide, I felt newly charged. I knew I was truly alive. And the feeling was blissful.