‘I think I’ll just walk down to the local pub for a few drinks,’ he says, smiling and looking directly at me.
We’ve just got back from the airport and we’re having a cup of tea at my home. It’s the first time I’ve seen them face to face for seven years, as they’ve been travelling overseas, and the first time they’ve flown interstate to visit me in literally my first home away from home.
I look at him and remember…
He spoiled every Christmas we shared, every birthday we celebrated and every family gathering or party – even my graduation dinner. We were always held hostage to his drinking.
An alcoholic? Well, a binge drinker at the very least. He could never have just one drink and the drink always made him nasty and spiteful. When he’d been drinking he’d pick at us, looking for any weaknesses he could exploit. He tried to pit mother against child, child against child and child against mother. He’d reduce us to tears. He didn’t use blows, just words.
Only once did I dare to speak out against him.
‘You have no right to get drunk and pick on us all,’ I said, with all the courage and outrage I could muster at ten years old.
My mother said my words upset and hurt him and made me apologise the next morning. ‘He’s a good man and he loves us,’ she said.
I felt truly alone in the world for the first time at that moment.
‘I’m sorry for speaking out but not for what I said,’ I finally muttered to him. It seemed like a victory of sorts on my part, not a total capitulation, but I’m not sure it was.
It was clear it was a game to him. Well, for one thing he kept on doing it.
Some working week mornings over breakfast he would say, ‘I think I’ll call into the pub for a drink on the way home from work.’ Those days he might or might not come home drunk. Sometimes he said nothing in the morning but came home late and drunk.
When he said he’d go to the pub after work, he knew we would worry all day about what was to come in the evening. On those days, by 5.30pm, when we would normally expect him home from work, my sister and I would sit at the lounge room window and peer out at the drive, watching for his approaching car, compelled to be there like moths to a flame. We were helpless in his thrall. Ironically, the watching achieved nothing – if he’d been drinking, he didn’t drive the car erratically or stagger from it to the front door. But we had to watch and watch. And even if he was late and drunk, we had to greet him effusively and try to jolly him into good humour for all our sakes.
‘I think I’ll just walk down to the local pub for a few drinks,’ he says, again, breaking my reverie.
‘I heard you Dad. Fine, if you want to go, go. It’s just a few hundred yards left down the main road. But if you go, don’t bother coming back. We’re in my home now.’
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