Moving Among Strangers Read Free Page A

holidays and I could see that my father wasn’t like anyone else there. All the other men wore ties and leather shoes. My father wore denim shorts and thongs. All the other men brushed their hair before they came to work. My father’s unkempt wisps stuck out at all angles from his balding scalp. He didn’t care about superficial things like neat haircuts. He cared about the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese peasants, and humanity. I noticed that the other people at the university looked at him oddly because he acted more like a student than a lecturer – but that only proved to me how special he really was.
    Many years later when I got my first job at a university, I couldn’t understand why the students just walked in and out of class willy-nilly and sat up the back in couples whispering or texting while I was trying to give a lecture. Then I had a revelation: it was because I had no authority. I had no authority because I didn’t believe in authority. I didn’t believe in authority because I had been brought up to believe that being authoritarian was bad. But after that first semester I changed. I confiscated phones and disallowed eating and drinking in class. I became ‘Scary Carey’. But I didn’t care. I was the teacher of my students. I wasn’t trying to be their friend, much less their lover. My father, on the other hand, had had something of a reputation. Perhaps we can blame it on the times – free love, along with the sixties, came late to Australia.
    But this was why my sister began to resent our father: because of his infidelity. Later, the resentment turned to hatred. And then, much later, after he died, the hatred turned on the person who most resembled our faithless father, and that was me.

3
    The night my mother died I was in St Stephen’s Hall in Church Street with my son, watching him throwing clubs with the Newtown Jugglers. I loved the juggling club because everyone was so oddly and intensely devoted. During the day, jugglers were IT specialists and software nerds; by night they were fanatics who spent hours perfecting rhythms and routines that involved hoops, clubs, batons and balls of every colour, shape and size. This wasn’t a hobby, it was a vocation. Sometimes they practised in pairs or teams of four, five and six; at other times alone, often falling into a kind of self-induced hypnosis that involved the body and the mind in perfect unison. Until a ball dropped or a baton bounced or the unicycle slipped.
    â€˜And then I dropped,’ I heard them say. Or, ‘I can do twenty-four before I drop.’ Keeping your balls in the air, up, buoyant and fluid, defying gravity, was the aim. The drop point was the extent of a person’s ability. Yet, because they always fell, because everyone dropped all the time, the jugglers didn’t see it as a failure. Juggling was the least competitive sport I’d ever witnessed and I loved everything about it: the people, the props, the apparent pointlessness of it all. And for my son, who like me had never been interested in team sports, juggling was the perfect activity.
    The night my mother died I knew that my brother and sister and one of the nurses were in her house. What I didn’t know was that all three of them were sitting in the lounge room, while my mother died alone in the bedroom. Perhaps that’s how she wanted it. My favourite palliative nurse had told me how some people wait until everyone has gone so they can die in peace; that some people didn’t want witnesses, that dying, like sex, was a private thing.
    I could have chosen not to go to the juggling club that night. I knew my mother was near the end. Her breathing had turned into a rasping death rattle and her appearance was of someone already dead. The nurse had told me the last sense to leave a dying body was hearing, so I had sat by her bedside and read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Just in case.
    My brother rang me on