Read Online You Never Met My Father by Graeme Sparkes - Free Book Online Page A

Denny in Launceston. And my luck too, I guess.
    Kirkwall had the feel of a sanctuary. I’d wake up in my own narrow bedroom to the enchanting warbles of magpies, so different to the raucous cockatoos and corellas that arrived later in the day. In the keen morning air, I’d visit the unexplored parts of the garden or the parched home paddock, with a long-retired greyhound and an orphaned lamb as my only companions. Solitude required so much less effort than company. I didn’t mind occupying my time with simple pursuits, like checking the progress of flowers, or counting pond fish, or studying cobwebs woven between trees, or following the trails of ants. I would feel the temperature rise by degrees with the regularity of a clock ticking over. I took pleasure in the day’s warmth on my neck.
    The only outsider to visit that I can remember was the Rawleigh’s man, whose vehicle was a kind of mobile dispensary. He sold balms and medicines for minor ailments that needed no doctor’s prescription. Pat looked forward to his visits but I only had a passing interest in him. I secretly endowed him with evil intent; his lotions were clever poisons. Did he supply her with the Bex she took every day? I reconnoitred from behind a shrub, armed to the teeth, ready to defend our castle if he made one false move. I only appeared when the dust from his retreating van settled and silence returned.
    Sometimes curiosity led me further away from the homestead towards low-lying land that was encircled by old, spreading eucalypts. As I approached an unpleasant hum seemed to emanate from the leaves. There was an eeriness about the place which intimidated me, and daring myself to walk to its centre, my courage failed. Still I went time and again to the periphery to experience the strange sensation.
    â€œIt’s the dead Aborigines, I bet,” Jean said, after I asked her to accompany me once.
    Back at the homestead she showed me her evidence, a skull that the gardener had recently given her, explaining that the homestead was built on a “blackfellas’ graveyard”.
    There was another place I discovered that was just as unsettling, on a neglected piece of land beyond the vegetable garden and the chookyard. A large cage had been constructed of wire netting with a funnel entrance on top. Rotting meat was placed on the dirt floor of the cage, and crows would arrive to drop through the funnel for an easy meal. Their woes began on departure. When they flew up to the funnel their wingspan was too wide to allow their escape. Every few days the old farmhand would check his catch and shoot any bird not yet dead from exhaustion or thirst. “They pick out the little lambs’ eyes,” Pat said to mollify me as much as explain the trap’s purpose. It crossed my mind that this was another manifestation of human ingenuity, and it disturbed me.
    Pat did her best to fortify her brood against the starker realities of our predicament. I was still too young to understand the burden she faced bringing us up alone, the loneliness she must have felt. She was in her early thirties, a woman in the prime of her life, whose husband at the very least must have been a disappointment. But if she had regrets or resentments she never revealed them to us. Looking back there seems to be moments when I was concerned about her emotional state. But how can I be certain these are genuine childhood responses rather than something I later hoped I had once felt, when I was old enough to appreciate what she had endured? Besides, if I had such moments they were fleeting and private, shared with nobody, neither sisters nor mother.
    One of my memories of Pat at Kirkwall is of her dressed in a floral frock with a hem to the shins, wearing glasses on account of her poor eyesight, with white-frames to match her white handbag, her hair moderately short and permed, her cheeks powdered, her lips glistening pink or red. It was how she was whenever we