As seen in Clean Hands by The Bowen Street Press
When my father tells me stories of him as a child, I feel sympathy for a boy I’ve struggled to love as a man. Nights spent in the crisp breeze of the bay and long days spent killing fish and killing time. Far enough away from the big smoke, too close to the bush smoke; my father grew up on an island that refuses to stop calling his name.
When I was nineteen and out of the routine of high school for the first time in forever, I heard my own name everywhere I went; at gigs of bands I’d never heard of, on the lips of new friends. My world was expanding at a pace that I could only understand as exponential.
When I was nineteen my mother made me sell my ticket to a music festival so she could drag our father and all of us back to where he came from. Borders were made to be crossed in those days; state lines were merely imaginary. It wasn’t until spicy sneezes and city-disrupting coughs that going home felt to my father somewhat close to privilege.
We sat on a plane that I was sure wasn’t going to land. But I lived, and I did so with the stale pleasure of arriving in a town I never quite liked enough to miss. And although he’d never admit the same, my father’s hesitation to return seemed to silently agree.
My father came from no money. He came from hard work and boots strapped tight and the naïve belief that it was only these two things that required a fair battle with capitalism. And he won. A big wig at the worst paper in the country, two daughters he sent to private schools just because he could. When the parents of the drop-kick kids from the island he grew up on needed an example of success, it was his name they shouted.
On the internet I saw reminders of a music festival I wasn’t at. These were reminders to hate my parents a little more than usual as we drove as south as roads would take us. The asshole of the asshole, my father told me once. Always walking a fine line between disdain and pride for the town that claimed the first nineteen years of his life, my father sometimes forgot that he wasn’t supposed to let on to his children how much he resisted going back home.
Passive silence filled the drive the whole way there. To silent that silence, I wore headphones the whole time. I had bought these ridiculously big headphones for myself with money I had earned from my job at the pharmacy, delivering medication to old people on my bike. It was a silly job for a silly girl that I was silly enough to be proud of.
After three hours of listening to the same album, we arrived. I allowed my parents’ arguing and my sister’s complaints to soundtrack the breeze as I slipped out of my headphones and into the music of the bush. City people with the obnoxious volume that visitors from the mainland forget to leave behind, my family bickered their way up the steep driveway to my grandparents’ house.
My parents got my father’s old room, the one he came of age in. My sister and I got the spare room in the basement, the one between cars and rusted bikes. My grandparents hadn’t changed my father’s room at all, every participation trophy and student newspaper column still hung half-heartedly from the walls, reminding my mother of a life before her. They reminded my father of a life before his, too, a prequel he often forgot. If leaving the island meant allowing his coming of age to come and to have gone, coming back was a rude reminder that it would always be there. I almost offered my parents the chance to swap rooms, untangling them from the clutches of my father’s past selves. But I wanted easy access to the bikes.
Six days in and all I could kill time doing was ride the streets of a suburb of sleepy greens. I rode streets my father had told stories about, slices of anecdotes at Christmas lunch, extensive narratives after a dozen beers; being in a world I’d known mostly through stories allowed me to be in a world closer to his.
Away from the city and away from my life, everything slowed down. I heaved my father’s bike to the top of hills and watched surfers disappear within waves. On paper, my father’s old town was idyllic. The danger of romanticising a place I couldn’t stand would creep in the minute we left. But then I’d remind myself that the island is merely more than a warp in time of my fast-moving youth. I went there and slowed down; I rode streets that felt as familiar as dreams. There was no present and there was no future; I rode through memory and moved through the past.
While my friends tried acid for the first time to their favourite bands in a paddock, I got a flat tire eleven kilometres from my grandparents’ house. I neither understood how to change a tire nor had the means to do so, and suddenly the sleepiness of the town that I had enjoyed riding through awoke a terror in me. No one I knew, knew where I was.
But sleepy towns still need phone reception, so I held my mobile up high as I tried to get through to my mother. She was asleep, or drunk, or possibly both, as had become the easiest way among my parents to kill time in a place that doesn’t seem to believe in it. She said she’d come shortly, although I knew she’d be long. I panicked a little; I was nineteen and lost in a town that only knew my last name. Nineteen and lost in the past, when all I knew was new beginnings.
Eventually the car rolled up and I rolled my bike over. But it was my father in the driver’s seat, with a sympathetic smile and an impatient look in his eye. He helped me slide the bike into the back and we took our places at the front, watching the road silently disappear underneath us as day disappeared to dusk.
He hadn’t been out in these parts for years, my father told me, breaking the silence. We swung through all the roundabouts, swaying side to side, my father’s bike rattling a song in the boot. It was strange to hear affection from my father, but he was no stranger to nostalgia. His half-hazy anecdotes of a time, now worlds away, were as close to admiration of this town I would ever hear from him. His town. It seemed easier to forget that he came from here, that he left here. That he could leave. All his high-school mates and next-door neighbours still mowed the same patches of grass and shared gossip in the butcher’s line.
But no person is an island. He left this town, but the island never left him. I could see it when he told me about the stop sign bent forty-five degrees against the wind, pushed into a limbo pose when an old friend wasn’t looking where he was going. And I could see it as we passed the main road, pass the butcher and the grocer and the local newspaper he worked at for free as a kid.
And that, he told me as we slowed down for the orange light, pointing across the main road at the faded sign of a dumpling palace. That, he said, was my first ever job. I didn’t remember my father mentioning working at a Chinese restaurant, but then I remembered there’s a lot I don’t know. He laughed, softly, and told me, no, it was a pharmacy way back when. When curfew was the sun setting and fish were as big as their arms, when he and his friends moved through the town with the ease of always being home. I used to deliver the drugs for all the oldies around town, he said, and I waited for him to continue. But he was lost in thought, in memory of a different world happening to different people.
The light turned green but I hesitated to interrupt. My father, for the first time in so long, was back home, back there. And from orange again, the light changed red. My father looked toward the road and muttered a profanity, but I could tell he didn’t actually care. We had nowhere to be, no rush to get there.
In the silence of a quiet radio, red became green and we rolled forward again. I watched the powerlines skip jump over the hills, the bush breathing with the breeze. I asked my father if he could take us to the beach in the morning, before we leave for the airport. He said, ok.
We rolled into the driveway of a quiet house, the darkened windows a warning to our heavy feet arriving home. My father helped me push his old bike into the garage, between cobwebs and rusted cars, and told me he’d fix it tomorrow. But we fell asleep in a time warp that night, and tomorrow became an illusion. I didn’t wake up until it was time to leave the island, time to pack our things and go home. Still half-asleep, I asked my father about the beach, about fixing the bike. But with planes to catch and bags to pack, my father waved me away with the easy dismissal he had mastered.
From behind the passenger seat, I listened to the bush. I wanted to feel what it felt like to run from the island. The electricity in the wind grabbed my hair and a terrible noise filled the rental, but I kept winding the window until it was all the way down, letting my wrist wave with the waves of the wind. It took us just a moment to drive through that old town, to go down the main road and past the butcher and the grocer, past the newspaper my father worked at as a kid. We swung through the final roundabout, the one just past the dumpling palace, and we headed for the highway.
I turned in my seat and watched remains of a life that wasn’t mine disappear around corners and into a temporal horizon. Out of the town now, time existed again, real life was brought up to speed. And soon we’d be out of the island, back mainland and back home, already romanticising the short lives we lived there, lives away from our real ones. I wanted to ask my father about his job, the one at the pharmacy, when he was seventeen with sore calves and new money. I wanted to ask him about the life that he had had, a life I could understand, lives away from the one he had now.
But we were turning onto the highway and my mother told me to wind the window up. The car sat in obvious silence, and so I didn’t ask. I put my headphones on and fell into a world of song, songs that would from that moment on only remind me of the island. They would be songs I’d hear in the years to come, when I’d be at music festivals, taking acid in paddocks, and I’d remember when I felt close to my father. On his little island, in his old town, riding his bike up steep hills and watching the surfers disappear. I’d remember him as a kid, working his first job at the pharmacy and spending the money on things he didn’t need, and I’d remember he was a lot like me.
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