Lost Voices Read online

His mouth twisted sideways in a way that it did when he was utterly disgusted. He didn’t move but stared at the floor and at me, and his voice remained ominously even.

  Look at this bloody mess. You’ve ruined that rug – and it’s one your mother’s fond of.

  I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t notice the cup.

  You thought you’d be the artist, didn’t you, having his cup of tea? You’re so much in the bloody clouds you can’t even see what’s around you.

  He sighed, and his voice became weary and resigned.

  Go into the kitchen and get a cloth from your mother. Tell her what you’ve done to her rug, and then try and clean up this mess.

  I saw now that he resented me; perhaps resented what I was. This was a shocking thing to realize about my father, and I turned away in silence and retreated from him.

  The next day, in the late afternoon, he approached me again.

  I was loitering on the railway bridge, leaning on the railings. It was calm and sunny, and long shadows lay across the lines. I heard a cough, and turned to find my father walking up to me, still wearing his weekend uniform of cardigan and slacks. He didn’t speak, but instead moved next to me at the railings and leaned on the top one as I was doing, staring up the line and smoking a cigarette. I stared in the same direction and waited, looking towards Moonah and the hills.

  I’ve been thinking, he said. I was probably a bit hard on you yesterday, son. I realize what happened was an accident. But it bothers me that you might fail your test to get into High School. And that’s because I want you to do well. I want you to be a success in life. You understand that, don’t you?

  I said that I did.

  I had a win at the races yesterday, he said. That’ll pay for some new drawing things for you.

  He looked at me with a faint grin, letting me know that things would now be all right between us.

  His one indulgence was gambling on the horses. Every Saturday afternoon he went to the Elwick race track in Glenorchy with his friend Les Harrington: a tall thin balding man who always wore a green felt hat and a loose, sagging cardigan, a hand-rolled cigarette permanently in his mouth and a folded racing paper tucked under his arm. He looked like a jockey, although he was too tall for one. My mother seemed not to be impressed with Les; I once heard her say that he wasn’t my father’s type. But she tolerated my father’s Saturdays at the races; it gave him a break, she said. I assumed that this tolerance was because he only betted small amounts; he never seemed to lose very much or win very much.

  I want you to understand that there are no second chances in life, my father said. Not unless you’re born rich. I learned that the hard way, in the Depression.

  I had only a vague idea of what was meant by the Depression. But I wanted him to go on talking, and prompted him.

  So you were poor, then.

  You could say that.

  He threw his cigarette over the rail on to the tracks below, where it lay smoking.

  I never had a penny to spare, he said. But at least I had a job. A lot of people didn’t. I was just a clerk, and I had to study at night to qualify as an accountant, and get promoted. Then I was a bit better off, and could afford to marry your mother.

  He was speaking now as though I were grown up, and I felt flattered. We’d not had a conversation like this before.

  But Grandpa Dixon’s a lawyer, I said. So he wasn’t poor, was he?

  My father’s mouth suddenly twisted, as though he’d tasted something sour, and his eyes went cold. It was an expression of great bitterness, which I’d seen before when Grandpa Dixon was mentioned.

  No – your grandfather wasn’t poor. Neither is my brother George, these days. That’s because my father sent George to University to study Law, so that he could join the family firm. But the old man couldn’t afford to send us both to University, because of the Depression. Or so he said. So I was put out to work at sixteen.

  That wasn’t fair.

  No, Hugh. That wasn’t fair.

  He continued to stare up the line to where a gold light was deepening on the hills, and fell silent. Then he took a breath and turned to me with a smile that was like a wince.

  Come on son, he said, and put a hand on my shoulder. Time to go in for tea.

  I’m able to see now that my father was never at home in the world.

  In his youth, a University education was only possible for those whose parents could afford to pay for it. And the chance came only once, at the end of secondary school; if it was lost then, it was lost for ever. Denied that chance, pushed at sixteen into a dead-end job in the office of a factory, my father had to depend on the same small salary as his workmates did, since my grandfather Dixon had no intention of supplementing what he earned. He was as poor as the other clerks at the factory; and yet he was seen as somehow privileged, without wanting to play such a role.

  This was because he had the wrong accent and the wrong sort of manners for the level he’d come to inhabit. Born in 1906, he’d grown up in a prosperous Edwardian household that employed domestic servants. He’d been educated at a private school which worked hard to instil in its pupils the style and speech of the English ruling class – seen as essential to refinement throughout the Empire. A casualty of colonial history, my father had little hope of fitting in as a poor clerk. It wasn’t for want of trying: he worked hard at sharing the jokes and manners of his workmates. But he never really succeeded; he’d been pushed out of the world where he belonged.

  After a few years he’d left the factory, and had taken a clerical job at J. & P. Fitzpatrick’s, where he’d stay. It was an old family firm, founded by an emancipated Irish convict in the nineteenth century and run now by his descendants, the two short plump and smiling Fitzpatrick brothers, John and Paul – pillars of the city’s establishment, who never acknowledged their convict ancestry. They often assured the members of their staff that an employee of Fitzpatrick’s was secure for life – and my parents, as children of the Depression, valued this assurance. Not long after being taken on there, my father began to study accountancy through a correspondence course, and ultimately qualified as an Associate of the Australian Society of Accountants. He was then put in charge of the office at Fitzpatrick’s, overseeing the clerical staff. He’d achieved the sort of authority which insulated him against rejection or ridicule, and he was valued and trusted by the brothers Fitzpatrick. He earned a salary that wasn’t large, but enough to support his family in reasonable comfort; and for a good deal of the time he was probably content.

  As a small boy, I would be taken by my mother to call on him at the store. Fitzpatrick’s stood in Elizabeth Street, the main street of the city, and was a stone-built, three-storey Georgian-style building of early nineteenth-century origin, conjoined with two others. The sign on the verandah awning over the footpath was in tall green lettering, and read: J. & P. Fitzpatrick. Hardware. My father’s office was upstairs on the first floor, where customers came to a counter to pay bills, or discuss their business. Many were farmers from the country; as well as being a retail store, Fitzpatrick’s manufactured such articles as water-tanks and roof trusses, and did a good deal of business with the bush. When my mother and I came up to the counter, I would see the book-keeper, grey-haired Mrs Harris, at work in a small cubicle; a little way off, my father sat in a big glass office, behind a desk stacked with files. Mrs Harris would go in there and let him know that we were here, and he’d emerge and walk briskly to the counter, youthful and immaculate in his three-piece suit, smiling with pleasure at seeing us.

  I saw very little of my paternal grandparents when I was young. My parents hardly ever visited them, and nor did they come often to our house in Tower Road. The law firm of Dixon and Dixon was run by my grandfather Charles and his brother Walter. My father’s brother George soon became a partner; and in contrasting himself with George, my father felt that he’d slipped below the level of his family. So he’d mostly ceased to socialize with his brother, and with the people he’d known in his youth
. Then a final rift occurred that would never be healed, so that I never saw my Dixon grandparents again. The breakdown had come, apparently, when Charles Dixon suggested that my father join Dixon and Dixon as their chief accountant. The old man thought of this as a favour; but so deep was my father’s resentment that he’d refused – and an already deep bitterness became deeper on both sides, ending in complete separation. By the time I was sixteen, both my father’s parents were dead. They were thus only half-real to me, existing in fragmented childhood memories.

  One or two friends from my father’s youth remained in contact with him; they and their wives would come visiting, and my parents would visit them in turn, and sometimes play tennis with them. But my father’s closest friend was Les Harrington, his companion at the race track.

  Les was a motor mechanic, and not the sort of man with whom my father would normally have had much in common. Nor was Les the sort of man who would generally have been in sympathy with my father. But this was how it was – unaccountably, they were friends. I had only to see them greet each other to know this. They would grin, and a genuine warmth would light up both their faces. They were an odd pair, but they were clearly comfortable with each other. This association was mysterious to me, as a child; but later I formed a theory about it.

  My father had two sides: two personalities. The dominant personality was the one that went every weekday to Fitzpatrick’s, wearing his suit, collar and tie and the grey felt hat that nearly all men wore then like a uniform: an Akubra, set at a rakish angle – the only give-away, perhaps, to his other personality. This personality was the one that had wanted to escape to the War: the one that longed for adventure, and whose principal reading for relaxation was crime thrillers. In this incarnation, clad in a golf jacket and slacks and an open-necked shirt (but still wearing his hat), he enjoyed the risk involved in his modest bets, as well as the slightly disreputable nature of the race track, and of racing people. It was an escape from Fitzpatrick’s; an escape from respectability.

  Les Harrington was a racing man through and through: apart from his job, his life was horse-racing. My father had probably met him when he took his car in for repairs at the garage where Les worked. Les knew a wide circle of trainers, jockeys and owners – and this meant that, through him, my father penetrated the inner circles of the racing world. He and Les had beers with racing people in the bar under the grandstand, and sometimes visited them in the stables, gaining information as to whether a jockey was going to throw a race, or whether a horse was off-form. Talking to me about it – which he did when I was older – he would hint at such things with a smile that made him resemble a boy getting into mischief. Being with Les won him acceptance by the racing crowd – which could never otherwise have happened – and I guessed that Les enjoyed being guide and mentor to a man of Jim Dixon’s type: a man whom he perhaps saw as cleverer and more educated than himself, but less worldly-wise, and certainly less knowledgeable about horses and the arcane world of racing.

  Through the open door of my room on the back porch, I would often see Les arrive on a Saturday afternoon in his eternal loose cardigan, green hat pushed back on his high, balding forehead to free a strand of lank dark hair, his racing guide under his arm, a hand-rolled cigarette in the corner of his mouth. When my father appeared in answer to Les’s knock on the back door, Les’s narrow face would break into a sly grin.

  G’day, Jim. Picked any likely ones?

  There was a faintly mocking tone to this; and yet there was also a fondness, like that of a master speaking to a favourite apprentice. My father’s eyes would warm with pleasure, and he would push back his thinning, straw-yellow hair with a gesture of anticipation.

  Let’s go, he would say.

  Then they’d drive off in Les’s big Studebaker to the Saturday adventure of the track: territory of release and exuberance; territory of ruin and disaster.

  Descending into the 1940s, that archaic time before my eighteenth year and my father’s disgrace, I find far, fine-spun webs of happiness. The flowering back garden of summer – irises, roses, marigolds, foxgloves – and the music of those days drifting from the radio through the open dining-room window. Paul Robeson singing ‘I Still Suits Me’; Richard Tauber singing ‘You Are My Heart’s Delight’; Bing Crosby singing ‘Please’. Pieces of star-shaped thistledown floating through the blue: children called them robbers, because they came through windows. My mother in the kitchen singing snatches of songs by Noel Coward and Stephen Foster, no doubt recalled from her youth. The mild, sunny air full of melody. Farther off, the voices of my friends along the street, calling me out to meet them in the road. Voices that the past makes ghostly, since the faces are half-forgotten.

  It’s 1944, and I’m eleven years old. Bob Wall waits for me on the corner of Main Road and Hopkins Street, at the entrance to Dickenson’s Arcade. His white face is expressionless, his white-blond hair like dried grass in the sun. As I come up to him his glance shifts, as though he expects someone more important to be coming along behind. I smile, but he doesn’t smile back. That’s Bob’s way.

  We walk up Main Road together: the highway that’s brought me here from the corner of Tower Road, taking me over the frontier of New Town and into the suburb of Moonah.

  Moonah, southernmost suburb in the district of Glenorchy, is a zone of mythical possibilities. Skirted in the east by the spaces of the river, and on the west by the barrier of the hills, it’s a poorer district than the one I live in, and is seen by my parents as less respectable; yet for me it’s a territory of veiled promise. A wide, extending flatland of teeming bungalows, train lines, shops and small factories, with plumes of white smoke drifting in its distances, it’s also the home of Bob Wall. I’ve previously caught the tram to school, but now that Bob waits to meet me, I come on foot. It’s not very far to the school from here, and I suspect he has no money for tram fares.

  He stares straight ahead as we walk, his dark blue eyes fearless and stern under level, low-set brows. He seldom talks much, so we walk mostly in silence. I carry a leather school bag on my back; Bob carries a battered canvas rucksack. I like to think that he waits for me each day out of friendship, but I know there’s another reason: he wants to copy my homework, before lessons begin. Now he looks sideways at me.

  Did you get it done?

  The homework, you mean?

  Yeah. The homework.

  Yes, it’s done.

  Going to give me a look at it?

  Okay. When we get to school.

  He nods, and we walk on. I’m happy to help him in this way, because I yearn to penetrate his secret life. I don’t even know what part of Moonah he lives in, and Bob won’t say. Attempts to make him do so all fail: I’m met with monosyllables, or silence. When Bob doesn’t like a question, he just doesn’t answer. Sometimes I wonder whether he lives in an ordinary house at all. I see him living out of doors, alone, like the gypsy Meg Merrilies in the poem we’ve learned at school, sleeping in some nest in the grass, or in a stable. His blue school shirt and grey shorts are shabby, and it’s clear that he’s quite poor.

  Main Road in the summer is a magic highway. Straight and level, it runs north through Moonah towards the suburb once called O’Brien’s Bridge and now named Glenorchy; after that come the borders of the country. In those distances to the north, as we walk along, the pale blue ranges seem to sing, like the telephone wires that loop overhead. The air is filled with little whirrings, and the far, wild cries of an unknown life. Everything out here is mildly and sweetly faded, in a way that I believe has something to do with the presence of a smiling, invisible race who are part of that hidden life: people who are different from those in the ordinary world. I find it hard to imagine the nature of the life they live, knowing only that it’s connected with Moonah’s sun-warmed fadedness; with the old grey boards of unpainted sheds and outbuildings, faded and baked and cracked by the suns of many summers; with the whitened grass that grows along paling fences, smelling like warm bread; with the little
weatherboard shops out here, and the coloured, bleached-out signs that advertise tea and chocolate. Tram lines are part of it too, gleaming and shimmering in the sun like static streams of water. A green double-decker clangs by, its electric whine drowning the singing of the ranges. It recedes with infinite slowness down the long, straight line of highway, making occasional stops; it becomes a toiling green speck; it becomes a thing in a dream, vanishing into the haze that leads to the country.

  The passing cars have charcoal-burners on the back: a device made necessary by the wartime shortage of petrol. But we no longer have to fear that the Japanese forces in New Guinea will invade Australia: American and Australian troops are driving them from their bases into the mountains, and will soon overwhelm them. Occasional horse-drawn vehicles go by: delivery carts of butchers and bakers painted in carnival colours, the drivers giving double clicks of their tongues to urge the horses forward. The tool-laden cart of a Council road gang clatters beside the kerb, the group of lean men in ruined felt hats and ancient black waistcoats sitting with legs dangling, while one of them stands to drive, shaking the reins. Most of them are quite old; young men have nearly all gone to the War. The cart draws up at the iron horse-trough outside Cooley’s Hotel, and the men roll cigarettes while the old draught horse drinks and drinks. Oat-smelling horse droppings that nobody minds lie piled on the hot grey asphalt. It’s still a world in which horses have a part: one which will last a little longer, until after the War.

  We reach the Moonah State School early, well before the bell, and sit on a bench under a peppercorn tree. Bob looks at me and waits. I unbuckle my bag, take out my homework book, and hand it over. Bob pulls a stained and crumpled exercise book from his haversack and sets about doing his copying, using a blunt, chewed pencil.

  I decide to make another attempt to probe the enigma of his nature, and I ask him what would happen if he weren’t able to copy my homework any more. He looks at me quickly, and his eyes narrow.