Father: A Love Ode, a War Song
My grandfather’s glass cabinet taught me perseverance is the kid brother of success; on the other side of suffering lies an onslaught of medallions that grow to new heights under the light of ‘family heirloom’.
There was always the bottle. It watched us like a hawk, perched above the spice rack, nestled next to those kitsch containers for coee, tea, and our, in that sweet spot your eye line sought asylum in during dinner time, eeing the cacophony of cutlery, forks marrying peas to mashed potato and accusations to eat more broccoli. The bottle that raised an empire just to watch its beloved city crumble, to return to its cobbled alleys and looted mausoleums with a strained single tear and hymn of squandered chances.
Some stories write themselves. Or rather, some stories are too obvious to be worth the listen - the irony too palpable, the metaphors too apparent. Here’s one to prove it - a beer-brewing family with a hereditary habit. A classic tale of hubris. Too obvious to ever be clever.
Outside of genetic predisposition, our sole heirloom from my Father’s side was a bottle eternalising the prime of the Kortegast Brewing Bros reign; an embossed glass carafe, fogged from the decades of lonesome-lipped admissions.
I have never known my family without the breath of the bottle. A whi of sawdust and Melbourne Bitters and I shiver with my father's arrival; lying in my mum’s lap I’d get hints of the top notes of her Pinto Gris and be lullabied to sleep by the lingering vinegar bite. I was raised by an army of bottle-blonde aunties, whose wisdom was singed by the falling embers of their cigarettes and whose laughs outlived them. I deciphered sacred truths through wrinkled coral lips, nose inches from their spit, savouring every breath no matter my hatred for the wafting tang of cheap Riesling, no matter the way my constricting chest pleaded for me to ee as I stayed staring, catatonic and uncaring, taken hostage by their peepholes of pleasure.
I would learn, from my family and their spirited breath, that a woman drinking is a rebellion; a man drinking is a warning.
If the bottle was the breath, regret was the pulse of my family home, shaking loose the dust bunnies and mice bones with each throbbing blow. It was my father’s favourite mistress and his muse for future mistreatment. It’s call dragged him through the daily raga as a master with a leash, from pillow to work to the foot of my stairs.
Years ago, he was exiled to the moors of blundered chances, or so the story goes, where they hung him up to dry like a carcass quartered, the once prized sow at the county fair, nally fallen.
His posture still shows where the hook caught - at the nape of his neck to the bone of his collar - where the butcher’s crescent scythe tethered him, tauntingly, halfway to heaven.
At night my father would wrestle the feeling, confront it head-on with the horns of a Taureen in a storm of whispered confessions, words hissing, slick with ethanol and swallowed ambitions, he’d ght with shadows from a past unspoken. The murmured threats and curses seeped through my memory foam pillow and burrowed there until the morning reprieve, where we would all rise and stretch and smear vegemite to bread and pretend those hushed words were never spoken. Denial pairs lovely with Farmer’s Gold and Twinnings.
Dad often thought we were nothing alike. I know this cause he would say it. Often and enraged.
Interestingly, I’ve come to know that the same shadows cross our souls. As a child, I was him in my physicality. I wanted to run and jump and leap. Like him, I was good with long distance: a penchant for perseverance. As a teen, I was his anger, bottled and contained, but quick to rise, eager to escape. In my early 20s, his appetite for drinking. I am the puddle pleading with the gutter “Just one last drink, go on, spill me over”.
There are lives I’ve never lived without the dampening of drink. Songs sung solely in its pretense, places visited but untold.
Whenever I get asked if my Dad and I are close, I respond ‘Well I don't really know him’. So he wasn’t around, is the obvious conclusion. An absent father. Well, yes and no. He was absent and he was there.
There. Breathing in the walls. Coming home, heading home, down at the bottelo.
Soon, soon, always soon.
Waist deep in the sawdust and semi-dried cement.
If he was absent, how was he there? Well, what is presence outside of proximity?
What is presence outside of a shifting weight at the head of the table, a resting elbow scorned?
Is presence nothing more than the knowledge of their feet, the cadence of their boots making sense of the eve?
Didn’t you know, that absence has a loud presence; she’s an impolite wedding guest dressed in white, he’s a foreign hand making friends with your lover? Absence seldom reads a room but grows to the size of the elephant in its corner, requesting roast pork on Good Friday and dancing sodden gumboots on fresh shag carpet.
So, Dad was absent, but he was also proximity apparent. He was the knowledge of the distance between two forces, the awareness of arrival, and the ght it takes to stop this.
I have never known my Dad without the taste of drink. A buer of beer as armour, the bludgeoned brain of a morning after.
Dad, where do you go when you slip under its control? When you’re all alone, and the shadows you whisper to raise their weapons, do you become someone else, or do you regress? Back to before you could no longer avoid letting in the noise.
Is your father present, or do you two merge? Your dad, a man I’m thankful death stole the chance of meeting. Who, from stories I have gathered, was both the dictator of your worst nights, and a small washed-up thing you, after years of estrangement, had to stoop to shake the hand of, his blank face provoking you to state your name and relation like you were standing before a presiding magistrate.
I would like to meet you someday Dad. I like to think I would allow myself to listen.
Let’s start small: take the Bottle down from the top shelf, dust o the family crest, and we’ll light a tapered candle and slot it in, so as we talk we won’t be tempted to put our lips to it. Let’s talk about what brings us joy, what makes us tick - but breathe from the diaphragm, shoulders back - there’s no seat at the table for whispered threats.