In the dark

The laws that govern the rest of us – civil, physical and otherwise – just didn’t seem to apply to him.

He bowed to nothing and no one.

He would go and go and go, until he had to stop, literally in the middle of whatever he was doing, and sleep.

One night we were driving down some God-forsaken stretch of highway between wherever we were going and wherever we had come from, somewhere on the edge of the outback in country NSW, when he declared that he needed a nap.

Without much further explanation, he pulled over to the side of the road, put down the driver’s seat, and slept, leaving my younger brother and I to stare out of the windows.

There were no streetlights. No houses. No traffic. We hadn’t seen another car in what felt, to my child-mind at least, like hours.

The only illumination was the stunning expanse of the Milky Way above us, too vast to comprehend, and a single green light on the dashboard, blinking on and off.

I suppose we also slept at some point.

We were too young to articulate the many logical questions prompted by this behaviour – why are we stopping here? Why are we sleeping in the car? Why are we driving through the night? Why hadn’t we waited until morning? How long are we going to be here? Why are we not in bed? – but old enough to grasp the strangeness of the situation, to feel a gnawing doubt in which questions swirled unformed.

Such was the nature of holidays spent with my father; a lot of time spent trying to explain the unexplainable. Trying to comprehend the actions of a madman using my six, seven and eight year-old mind.

This was not the first or last time he left us alone in the dark.

Wherever and whenever the rest of the world were sleeping, my father was burning the midnight oil. He did not have a sleep routine so much as a sleep lottery.

In fact there was only one time and place you could rely upon him to sleep: the cinema.

It was such a reliable occurrence that in hindsight I think he may have been taking us there to sleep. Or perhaps it was merely convenient that we could all be doing an activity for a few hours where no attempt at parenting was required.

Either way we did not factor into the film selection – even though we would ultimately be the only ones watching.

He snored through most of The Wedding Singer, leaving us with instructions to 'wake him up for Billy Idol'. He was asleep before the opening credits of Mission to Mars. Disney was never on the menu.

The cinema became loco-parentis in more than one sense, on more than one occasion.

In the country town of Deniliquin circa 1997, the Regent Theatre was probably one of the few places still open in the evening – apart from the local Pubs of course. Its wide entrance and facade brightly and cheerfully lit up the otherwise empty street. Naturally that made it an excellent place to leave your two young children while you nipped around the corner for a beer, or two, or three…

But it wasn’t just the lights we had to keep us distracted - no, no, my Dad had thought this through. First he took us to a petrol station to select an ice cream each, then we were deposited in the car in front of the movie theatre, and left with the promise that he would be “back soon” - a suitably vague commitment should we complain later.

What his master plan did not account for was that little children have little bladders and at some point my need to pee would overcome my fear of leaving the car.

Fortunately, I had watched my father disappear around the corner with the eagle-eyes I maintained in his presence, having been lost by him in public places on several occasions. I left my poor brother alone in the car while I went in search of him, probably with the promise that I would also ‘be back soon’.

Looking at a map today reveals that the pub is significantly further away from the car than I once remembered; it's visible about 100 yards from the corner. How I found it as a child in an unfamiliar town is a mystery to me, but I suppose by then I had already developed the self-reliance required to cope with a parent whose attention was inconsistent at best.

Whether my Dad had told us that’s where he would be or I deduced it, that’s where I went.

Pushing open the door I was greeted by the unique and unmistakable odour of dozens of drunk men after a hard day’s work on the land; stale sweat, tobacco and carpet soaked with a thousand spilt drinks.

I remember the amber light that filtered through beers on every surface, a sea of bar tables, hairy legs and dirt-encrusted R.M. Williams riding boots.

I scanned the weathered, and quite probably surprised, faces for my father; a diminutive and determined young girl making my way through a crowd of old men – how old they really were I couldn’t tell you, to my child-eyes everyone was tall, everyone was old.

He was sitting at the bar, holding court as he liked to do. Probably regaling the bartender and whoever else would listen with tales of his time as a gun trader in Sydney’s financial markets. When he clocked me standing there at the bar next to him, several emotions flickered across his face like a film on fast-forward; shock, anger, bemusement, irritation, resignation…perhaps even a hint of admiration at my resourcefulness.

He took me to the toilet (red tiles, the acrid smell of men’s urinals) and when we returned I imagine there was a rather awkward conversation about where exactly I had wandered in from, because the next thing I knew my Dad went out to retrieve my brother from the car and bring him in. I guess the bartender or perhaps some of the locals took pity on us and convinced him that we were better off under the watchful eyes of the drunks at the bar, passive smoking.

That must have been the night my brother had his first sip of beer and his first puff of cigarette, age 6, sitting on a beermat on the counter like a little mascot. He coughed for about a minute straight, and my Dad called him ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ for quite a while afterwards.

Ah the good old days; children in bars, smoking inside, drink-driving.

Eventually we drove back to his girlfriend’s house where we were staying. He sent us to bed and began his nightly ritual: sitting in front of the television with a beer and a cigarette, defying sleep.

Sometimes I woke up and came out of our room, to find him there, still awake, all the lights off, watching rage on ABC at 3am. Tiptoeing over, I climbed onto the other side of the sofa, not saying a word. We would sit there in silence in the dark living room, silhouetted against the light of strange 90s alternative music videos – until I fell asleep.