Roundabout

Cafe Locked Out, The Essays

It was Sunday, and we were looking for a park with a barbecue. The council ones were fantastic, but they didn’t always work. If we found a park with a toilet close by as well, then we were being spoiled.

When you lived in a bus, this was a morning ritual.

We were in one of the western suburbs of Melbourne. We were next to an oval, and while a few young men were kicking a football around, they were hemmed in by the dog walkers who were circling the oval. All of their dogs were on a lead.

We were on the carnivore diet, which had seen me lose my belly fat. As the steaks began to sizzle, I pointed out to Kelli how all the dogs were pedigrees.

In our fifties, we were now walking museums. We could both remember a time when there were no computers, no cameras, no ATMs—though they were vanishing now. If you wanted money for the weekend, you better make sure you got to the bank on Friday. There were also no mobile phones. How did we stay in contact with each other?

We laughed as I told her about how Dad would load up the trailer with rubbish and take it to the tip, where, in bare feet, we’d scramble over the rubbish already there, collecting any treasure we found, until Dad cracked it.

“Get that stuff out! I just emptied the trailer. I’m not taking more back than I brought.”

Nearby the tip was the Swan River, and Dad would take us there afterward, where we’d jump off the jetty and vanish into the murky brown, while our dog remained on the jetty, his tail wagging as he barked at us, each time our laughing faces emerged.

There were pedigrees around then, but most of the dogs were mixed breeds, bitzas, and had their own lives that were entangled with ours via love.

One of our dogs adored Mum. Where Mum went, her basset hound shadow followed. He’d been a present to us all, bought off someone who didn’t want him. But despite his adoration of Mum, whenever a local bitch was on heat, he’d vanish for a few days, then turn up exhausted, beaten up, and starving.

One time he never came back. And even though Mum was always complaining about him, this broke her heart. I remember us walking the streets calling his name, as Mum called the pounds, but we were driven more to heal Mum than to find him.

In the end, he became another scar her heart had to wear as time moved on.

Other times, we’d come home and find the front yard full of dogs who were hoping to get an audience with our little terrier, who was on heat. Despite our best efforts, one of them got her pregnant. She had six pups, and once they were ready, we all asked our friends and my father’s work colleagues if anyone wanted a puppy. As a family, we decided to keep the puppy no one else wanted, which turned out to be the ugliest one.

But despite his odd looks, this mongrel, who became Dad’s shadow, managed to bury himself so deep inside my father that when he died, Dad, who rarely cried, wept.

When we bought a cat off death row for my own family, the RSPCA vet asked if we were going to book it into “Kitten Kindy.”

“Kitten Kindy?”

“It’s a six-week course,” she said. “It’s to train your cat to be a more socially adaptable cat.”

Socially adaptable? I thought. It was a cat. The reason we loved them was because they weren’t socially adaptable.

Dad used to joke that this was cat heaven. Where else would they get a better deal than here?

“Look at him,” Dad would say as the cat slept next to the dog. “He goes out when he wants. He comes in when he wants. He eats when he wants, gets a hug when he wants, and has the audacity to tap your mother on her forehead at three in the morning, demanding to be fed, and she’ll get up and feed him. I’d like to see how long the dog would survive if he tried that.”

Socially adaptable? Why would this cat agree to such a demotion?

I felt like suggesting that rather than kitten kindy, why not cat university, so he could become a feline lawyer and pay for his own whiskers.

A few months later, that cat got run over. We didn’t know. The RSPCA called to inform us that he’d been found. They then informed us that they offered a range of funeral services, from a discrete, intimate celebration of his life to a forty-seat chapel.

I told Rohana she should ask them if a bin was one of their options. And how about the chip they’d implanted in the back of his neck—could we use it in the next cat if it wasn’t damaged?

Such a different time.

A treat was a ten cent bag of mixed lollies, and each long weekend, after hitching up whatever camping equipment he had—and it was all changing—Dad would throw us all in the car, and we’d leave just before dawn. So by the time the sun found him, Dad was already on the highway, one arm on the windowsill, and effortlessly ignoring all of us, as he went in search of anywhere to camp, where, from the step of the van, he could see houses, or even the road.

Newspapers were the news, magazines spoke of other worlds, where people were rich and famous, as we produced our own music tapes by recording songs straight off the radio.

There were divorces, there were murders, there was a neighbour losing his mind, striding naked up and down the street, screaming in his own language, with a piece of four-by-two in his hand. There were parents having affairs, and the Beaumont children were still missing. Evidence that amongst us, unimaginable monsters lurked, and yet on school holidays or on the weekend, my young brother and I were gone. Leaving the house to vanish into the playground, which was a close and untouched section of bush.

If fear was here, it hadn’t yet found the hooks it needed to control us.

But here before us now, one of the dogs had an electronic collar that would allow his owner to shock him if he misbehaved.

In the nearby playground was a modern roundabout. Small, it had speed inhibitors to protect the kids from falling onto the specially designed rubber-like floor of the playground.

For a long time, we grew up on caravan parks, and once, in one park, myself and a few other kids were trying to make our own roundabout, an impressive stainless steel cauldron, with handles.

Then, from nowhere, some grown men, fathers and the like, who must have been watching us struggle, came over and, with beer on their breath, said, “Hold on, kids.”

Then they laughed as they used all their strength to spin this roundabout into the eye of a cyclone.

I can still remember the thrill of clutching desperately to a handhold, as the centrifugal forces tried to rip me off. It was a warm memory. A fun memory. A memory constructed by men; strangers, whose laughter I can still hear. It might have felt dangerous, but even as kids, we knew we were safe, for we didn’t see these men as toxic monsters to be feared, but protectors who had decided to spoil us all.

Whereas here, in this small park, the playground had several young children playing upon it, as their quiet fathers watched on. The fathers weren’t interacting with each other, only with their children, and that they did with whispers. Making the playground feel more like a library or perhaps a wake, for the more you studied these men, the more you noticed. It looked to me like the men were avoiding eye contact, even with each other, out of shame.

They were single dads, and this must have been their day with the kids, and the rules were clear: Don’t have anything to do, at all, with any kid that wasn’t yours.

But why the shame?

Was it the sombre wake of broken families? Was it the sense that they had failed their children?

The children didn’t seem to share the shame. As our breakfast cooked, I watched these kids leaving the playground to run up to their fathers, and I didn’t need to hear what they were saying, for despite all we’ve gained and all we’ve lost, I can still recognize the warm and ancient language of love.

Michael

Would you be interested in a novel of these collated essays, or perhaps you have a book of your own you want published, if so please contact John Stapleton who will soon publish them.

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A Sense of Place Publishing

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