The Best Australian Essays 2015 (8 page)

Havoc: A Life in Accidents

Tim Winton

I

One summer night, after a few hours surfcasting for tailor, my father and I were driving home along a lonely road between the dunes and the bush. I felt snug and a little sleepy in the passenger's seat, but it was my job to keep the gas lantern from tipping over, so I clamped it tight between my heels and resisted the urge to drift off. We'd gone down at sunset and caught a feed, but at the age of nine I could take or leave the fishing. The chief attraction of an outing like this was the chance to be alone with my father.

The evening had gotten cool and the windows were up. I remember the ordinary, reassuring smells inside the vehicle: the pilchards we used for bait, the burnt-toast whiff of the gas mantle, and the old man himself. In those days his personal scent was a cocktail of Dencorub and Quick-Eze. He hadn't always smelt like that.

For a moment the inside of our car was bleached with light. I saw my own shadow creep across the dash. And then, with a yowl, a motorbike pulled out from behind and overtook us on the long straight towards town. There were no streetlights, no other cars. Either side of us there was just bush. The road had only recently been sealed. All my life it had been a limestone track. But now the city had reached the beach. Things were changing.

As the rider blew by, the old man gave a low whistle and I straightened a moment in my seat. Dad had complicated views about speed. He adored motorbikes; he'd ridden them all his life and he loved to ride fast. As a traffic cop he did it for a living. But then, half his job was to chase folks and pull them over for speeding. The rest of the time he picked up the pieces when things came unstuck. To me, speed was no thrill, and I was especially leery of motorbikes. My father's medicinal smell was a constant reminder of both.

The lantern glass jinked and tinkled between my legs. Out ahead there was nothing to see but the black road and the single red eye of the rider's tail-light. Then it was gone. The light didn't shrink into the distance – suddenly it just wasn't there.

Within half a second the night was jerked out of shape, and in the few minutes that followed, I felt that my life might warp and capsize along with it. I didn't see the rider fall but I still think of him and his machine skittering on divergent trajectories across the rough-metalled bitumen. The old man pounded the brakes and we came to a howling halt. Dad got out and, with a startling new authority in his voice, told me to stay exactly where I was. Not that I needed telling.

I craned forward, stunned; my neck hurt from where the seat-belt had caught me. In the high beams I saw a motionless body on the limestone shoulder of the road. My father strode over and knelt beside the rider. His shadow was enormous; the headlights gave every movement and colour a nightmarish cast. The old man got up again. He dragged the motorbike off the road. When I wound down the window, I could smell petrol and all the salty, minty scents of the coastal scrub. A moment later the old man got back in. I was rattled by what I'd seen and disturbed by how businesslike Dad was. This drama did not seem to impress him. He sighed, buckled his seatbelt and started the car. He said we had to find a phone and call an ambulance. To my horror, we drove away and left the rider out there at the roadside. There was a bus terminal not far up the road, a lonely floodlit yard full of hulking green vehicles, and a sleepy security guard let Dad use the phone.

When we returned to the crash site, the injured rider began to stir. I didn't know it then but he was convulsing. It was as if he was being shot through with electricity. As Dad climbed out of the car, he said he had an important job for me. I was to stamp on the brake pedal over and over again without stopping, so the ambulance crew could see our red lights in the distance. The idea made practical sense, but I'm sure it was mostly a means of keeping me occupied and out of harm's way. Many years later, by another roadside, I employed a similar tactic to keep my own kids from seeing something worse. As a kid it was good to be commissioned, to feel useful for a short while, and as I clung to the steering wheel and jabbed at the brake pedal, which I could barely reach, my father crouched out there in the lights, talking to the fallen rider, who kept fluttering in and out of consciousness, trying to get up on his shuddering legs. Every time the man turned his head I saw that his face was raw meat. Some of it hung off in strips, like paperbark. It was red, white and yellow. His leather jacket was glossy with blood. He tried to haul himself up on his elbows. Then he was screaming.

After a long time there was a siren in the distance, the distinctive two-note sound of an ambulance, and the noise seemed to inflame the fallen rider, whose yelling and swearing and struggling grew more violent. He needed to go, he kept bawling. Where was his bike? When Dad suggested he stay put for his own benefit, the bloke wanted to fight. Dad held him down by the arms.

I thought everything would be fine once the ambulance arrived, but when it finally pulled up the whole scene intensified, as though some fresh madness had arrived with the help. There were suddenly more bodies, more voices, more flashing lights and lurid shadows. And at some point a different man – an even louder bloke – appeared, announcing himself as the rider's father. I don't know how he got there or how he'd been informed but I could see he was staggering drunk, and I felt myself come to a new level of alertness. There was something vicious and unpredictable about him. His eyes were wild. He had the look of a mistreated dog. As he stumbled towards his son, who'd already been lifted onto a gurney, he was weeping and blubbering. Then he went crazy. It looked as though he was trying to throttle his son. When my father and the ambos hauled him off, he wheeled on them, snarling, and began to swing at them.

I didn't stop pumping the brakes; I'd been drafted and I took it seriously. It was as if I'd woken in a cinema during the final reel of a horror movie. Everything was way over my head. And it wouldn't stop. I'd never witnessed anything like this before – all the blood, the flashing teeth and fists, the screamed obscenities. This was mayhem. As a kid I'd been shielded from drunks. I had no experience of violence, domestic or otherwise. I'd certainly never seen a grown man act like this before. I couldn't believe he could hurt his injured son like that. And I was deeply disturbed by the prospect of him hurting my father. I was outraged and terrified, and so paralysed it felt like I'd been booted with an electric charge myself. A wild man was attacking my dad. He was lurching and lunging at the ambos, too, but they were uniformed strangers, and to me they were just shadows dancing, I barely took them in; I only had eyes for the old man. And it didn't matter that he was fending off every blow with an ease bordering on contempt. What I saw was my father under siege, in danger. And I couldn't help him. I stayed where I was, lashed to the wheel, in a state I had no language for.

Eventually the police came. The scene quickly resolved itself. Dad dusted himself off and came clopping back to the car in his thongs, chuckling at something the coppers had said. We were late for tea now, and he was eager to be on his way. I could hardly speak. At home, Dad did what he could to minimise this lurid little interlude. His account of it to Mum was cursory. But the experience stayed with me. There was something dangerous and outsized about the emotions it had stirred up, and the sensation was like being caught in a rip: no purchase, no control.

That scene has puzzled me all my life, haunted me in a way. I was a middle-aged man before I understood why I'd been so afraid. Of course it's distressing for any child to see a parent under threat, but what was happening for me that night was a little more complicated. I was cast back into an old fear and a much earlier accident.

By the time I was nine there were things about the old man I'd gotten used to. The scar on his neck was silvery by then, and when he came out of the shower the divots in his hip weren't so livid any more. The ever-present tubes of Dencorub were just part of him now, as was the roll of Quick-Eze forever sliding across the dashboard. I was so accustomed to all this I'd forgotten what the heat rub was for. He'd been dealing with chronic pain for years. Dencorub was the only relief he had once the quack had taken him off the anti-inflammatory drugs, and those wretched pills had left him with stomach ulcers, which was why he chewed antacids as if they were lollies. He'd been taken away from me before. I'd seen him all but destroyed. And it had been only three or four years since his prang. Now I went fishing every chance I could. To be close to him, as if unconsciously I feared he'd be taken away again. Clinging to the wheel of his car that night, half out of my mind, it was as if someone had kicked the chocks out from under me. The sight of my father under threat again was almost too much to bear. We'd been delivered, Mum and my siblings and me, and for a long time I'd felt safe again, and now, quite suddenly, I wasn't safe at all.

*

In my fiction I've been a chronicler of sudden moments like these. The abrupt and headlong are old familiars. For all the comforts and privileges that have come my way over the years, my life feels like a topography of accidents. Sometimes, for better or worse, they are the landmarks by which I take my bearings. I suppose you could say they form a large part of my sentimental education. They're havoc's vanguard. They fascinate me. I respect them. But I dread them too.

II

I grew up in safety. In our home in the Perth suburb of Karrinyup there was nothing to fear and no one to second-guess. My mother did everything in her power to give my siblings and me a life free of the disorder she'd known as a child and the violence she'd endured as a young woman. She was determined to provide an environment that was predictable and nurturing. Our father was of like mind. He was a gentle man and he was careful to shield us from the things he saw as a cop. All the same, we lived in the shadow of havoc. There might not have been trouble at home, but trouble was the family business, and ours was a house of accidents.

Dad was literally ‘in Accidents'. He was a motorcycle cop working in the Accident Branch of the Traffic Office. At the end of a shift he rode his black BSA down the drive, gave the throttle a final
blat
and then propped it on its stand in the carport. When he climbed off the bike in his gloves and gaiters, his leathers gave off a distinctive creak. His own father, who'd also been a policeman, had made the same leathery groan climbing down off the horse at day's end. To me, that saddle creak was precious; it was the sound of safe return.

Around the house Dad was pretty oblique about work. All the same, I absorbed plenty of lore and perhaps too much information. As a small boy I knew the lingo. If he was late home it was because he'd had to go to a
prang
. And of course he didn't just go – he
attended
. I knew, too, about the various species of prang. The worst of all were the
fatals
. I knew when he'd been at a fatal because when he came in his mood was strangely subdued. Then, the talk between the adults was hushed and the smells different. Dad's tunic would stink of Dettol and petrol. Sometimes there was no chat at all, just a hug that went on too long. On rare occasions there was muffled weeping behind closed doors.

Any kid with a parent who works shifts learns to creep, to be mindful. For a copper's family there are extra weights to bear, unspoken things you experience vicariously. Like the constant physical weariness, and the moral fatigue that accumulates over time, because cops are never fresh and after a while they can't disguise their endless disappointment in people. They become weary, guarded, sceptical. They're always keeping an eye out for trouble. They expect it, anticipate it. And as a kid you sense this. As if by osmosis you learn what humans do at their lowest moments, at their most idiotic or vile, and you register the outcomes, which are invariably awful. Humans, you come to understand, are frail creatures. Yet in a second, from thin air, they can manufacture chaos and carnage. And it was this mortal ruin the old man sought to keep at bay.

But he brought havoc home, anyway – on his tunic, in his limbs and in midnight whispers. When he was out on the road I could read the fear of it in my mother's face.

There's an old song in Ry Cooder's back catalogue about a man stalked by misfortune. In the chorus the old trouper sings:

But the bloke's kidding himself. He can't forestall trouble, and that's the charm of the song. Although trouble loves the careless and the impulsive, first seeking out the selfish and the intemperate, in the end it's pretty democratic; it'll jump anyone, really, for neither virtue nor prudence will inoculate you against it. Just as the rain will fall on the just and the unjust alike, trouble of some sort visits everyone eventually. Real trouble isn't just inconvenient – it's catastrophic. That's how it felt the year I turned five, when it came to me and to my family.

In December of 1965, as he was riding back from a prang, the old man was hit by a driver who'd run a stop sign. The errant car slammed him into a brick wall with such force that it crushed his chest, his shoulder and his hip. He suffered a massive concussion, and because his ribs were crushed and his lungs collapsed, paramedics found him suffocating and close to death. To save him, they were forced to perform an emergency tracheotomy as he lay in the street.

Mum was told he'd been in a bingle but that it probably wasn't serious, so she didn't understand the gravity of the situation until she was mistakenly given the blood-soaked uniform that had been cut off him in Casualty. She had two small boys, five and three, and a daughter barely six months old. No one had prepared her for what was coming her way. Her husband, the sole breadwinner of the household, was in a coma. And she didn't know it yet, but nobody fancied his chances. For days he lay in the Resuscitation Room at Royal Perth Hospital. There was an unspoken understanding that he would never ‘be himself' again, and so traumatic were his injuries that two of his colleagues resigned shortly after visiting him. Even when he finally regained consciousness, nobody could really offer Mum much hope. I was not allowed to visit him. I came to suspect that he was really dead and no one had the nerve to tell me. Mum kept up a brave front. And she was genuinely courageous. But I was there to see the mess she hid from everyone else.