table was somewhere beneath the treetops below. The thrill of absolute power guided my hands to my fly. I was the source of the Ganges, the spring of Lourdes, the piddling bronze boy of Belgium. I urinated into the river with pride and calculated how long it would take to flow past my parents. I imagined my father scooping a plastic picnic cup into the stream and taking a drink.
As I descended, I could hear a strange noise filtering through the bush. It sounded like the high-pitched wail of an injured animal. I imagined a wombat being torn apart by a Tasmanian devil and hurried down the track to the picnic area.
My mother was standing next to the picnic table hunched over Dean. She was pressing a damp cloth to his forehead with a worried look. Dean’s face was red and wet with tears. He was crying openly like a girl. Dad was packing up the picnic bin with his lips in a hard line. John was looking at his friend in an embarrassed, disappointed way. Only Carmel was smiling. Her eyes were on Dean but her hands were busy with the cricket ball. She was tossing it expertly from one hand to the other.
I was the first to be diagnosed with hepatitis A. Carmel followed within a week and a few days later Dad came down with the disease. We were told not to leave our house in Ulverston for four weeks. Dad wasn’t allowed to go to work or the pub and was forbidden to drink alcohol. He spent his days feeling sorry for himself in front of the television, swiping flies with the Punter’s Gazette. The disease wasn’t pleasant but it did have one very shiny silver lining. We were forbidden to engage in any physical activity. Television was out with Dad hogging the set so Carmel and I took up board games and poker. These we pretended to play while kicking each other under the table.
Mum and John miraculously didn’t get the disease. They were told to be very careful and to wash their hands with special soap after handling us. John held his nose and flattened himself against the wall whenever he met me in the hall. He even got a room on his own after Carmel and I were shunted in together. This was a temporary arrangement but a vast improvement on life with John. Carmel punched hard but at least she made me laugh. She also had imagination. Her eyes lit up when I suggested forming a singing duo.
‘You’d make an excellent back-up singer.’ Carmel had a keen eye for natural talent. ‘We could be the next Carpenters. We just need the charm of Val Doonican with the staying power of Andy Williams.’
I felt a glow of pride in the defrosted-chicken department of my chest. Carmel knew what she was talking about. She’d seen me perform often enough. Mum and I had been working on my voice since I was old enough to say Dick Dingle. I performed for my mother whenever she got something mysterious called her period. These unhappy periods occurred quite regularly and entailed tears and hot-water bottles. My job was to sing into the handle of a hairbrush and dance until she smiled and remembered where the family block of Shelby’s fruit and nut was hidden.
‘What about Frank Sinatra?’ I didn’t like the Carpenters and wasn’t particularly fond of Val or Andy. They appeared on Sunday-night TV music specials. I always felt slightly carsick before the start of the school week and associated these singers with a feeling of doom.
Carmel smiled. ‘Once every five years you say something intelligent.’
The chicken stirred again behind my ribs. This meant I’d said at least two intelligent things in my life.
‘Sinatra’s where the money is. You’re Dean Martin and I’m Ol’ Blue Eyes.’ Carmel examined her eyes in the mirror over the mantelpiece. She blew a kiss to herself.
‘No, I’m Sinatra.’ My voice had the whine that preceded tears and a tantrum.
‘OK, OK, we’re both Sinatra. I’m Frank and you’re Nancy.’
Carmel put together a routine of Frank Sinatra songs from Mum’s Sinatra records. My job was to do the harmonising vocals for every song except for a ‘You Make Me Feel so Young’ medley. For this number, I was allowed to sing the Nancy part unaided.
‘You have to sing it even higher and warble the end bits because it’s a girl’s part.’
‘But you sing Frank’s part in your normal voice.’
‘Yes, but my voice has a naturally deep timbre.’
I couldn’t argue with her on that point. People sometimes mistook Carmel for Dad when she answered the phone.
Carmel arranged an evening performance for the family in the lounge. My stomach was fluttery as we dragged the Aussiemica table in from the dinette and draped a red candlewick bedspread over it. Carmel placed three chairs in front of this stage but took one away after John refused to join. He said he had no intention of being showered with disease.
Mum and Dad were quiet for the first four songs, politely clapping at the end of each number and occasionally nodding. It wasn’t until the Frank and Nancy duet that we got the reaction Carmel had anticipated. Dad smiled for the first time in two weeks when I broke into Nancy. He was clapping wildly next to Mum by the time Carmel and I did our final harmony.
At the end of the show Mum handed us each a bar of Shelby’s. She ruffled my hair and whispered ‘Twinkle, twinkle’ in my ear before going into the kitchen to cut a cream sponge cake she’d baked for the occasion. Dad was still smiling when he came up to me. He pounded me on the shoulder in a manly but friendly way.
‘I needed that. The laugh’s done me the world of good.’
‘It wasn’t supposed to be funny, Dad.’
‘I was laughing with you. Did you think I was laughing at you?’
‘Yeah, I did.’
‘You think I’m the type of father who laughs at his children?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I was humouring you. It’s a form of encouragement. You’ll understand when you get older.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Don’t worry. In a couple of years you’ll lose that whinny.’ He walked away laughing to himself.
The illness was ideal for receiving special treatment and avoiding sports, but it was bad news for Mum and Dad’s relationship. They’d always been a mismatched couple and never had the lovey-dovey sort of arrangement I saw on family TV shows. Mum and Dad didn’t exchange compliments or show open affection to each other. It was more businesslike than that. The arrangement became even less amicable after the beach trip. This lack of warmth transformed into hostility during Dad’s illness. While it had never been acceptable to show affection with children in the room, it was now fine to go at it hammer and tongs in front of us.
As the weeks dragged on, Dad got progressively more miserable and touchy. Even Carmel avoided the lounge where he’d taken up residence. My father spent his days not drinking and glowering at daytime television, which was dominated by cooking shows, farming programmes and reruns of old films. Even Dick Dingle produced boring daytime programmes. It was one of these, a Dingle documentary on the scouts of Tasmania, that finally stirred my father into action. He called John into the dinette and took out his chequebook. John waved the cheque at me to make sure I’d seen the sort of power relationship he had with our father before leaving on his bicycle.
That
