The Grey Man Read Free Page B

but with the world literally at my feet. I was a loner, but I didn't crave solitary confinement. Sitting in my cave, I was at once at peace, yet also restless. I just wanted to do something worthwhile with my life. But what?

    My father, Alec, never wanted children, but he ended up with six of them. He supported us, barely, but I don't remember ever hearing a kind word from him. If he said anything at all, it was something along the lines of ‘You're stupid’, ‘You'll never amount to anything’, or, in his Irish accent, ‘You're a fooking cont and you'll always be a fooking cont. ’
    Many years later, after I visited his childhood home, I would forgive him for the damage he did to us. His brother told me: ‘Your grandfather never treated Alec very well at all.’ From what I could gather, my grandad never had a kind word for my father, and made him work like a dog. So there it was, the sins of the father passed on to the son. He was emotionally abused by his father and passed that abuse on to us.
    Like hundreds of thousands of other people seeking a better life in a sunnier climate, my father had emigrated to Australia after the Second World War to work on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. He was a truck mechanic – just the sort of person needed to keep this massive engineering undertaking going. After finishing at the Snowy, Dad met Mum, who was a nurse, and they married and moved to Sydney. My long-suffering mother made the wrong choice in a husband. She paid for that mistake the rest of her life, and so did her children.
    Their oldest child, I was born in 1959 in the inner Sydney suburb of Bankstown. At the time he got Mum pregnant, Dad was running his own small mechanic's business. He wasn't present at my birth, which I suppose wasn't unusual for the fifties, but he didn't even go to the hospital to pick us up when Mum was ready to go home. It was a story I would hear often over the years.
    Sometimes Dad worked at home and when Mum walked up the garden path that day with me in her arms she could hear muted curses and the clank of metal on metal. Dad was lying on his back under a truck, his legs in grease-and-oil-spattered overalls sticking out from under the vehicle.
    â€˜Do you want to have a look at your newborn son, Alec?’ my mum asked.
    â€˜Oh, for fook's sake, woman, can't you see I'm working?’ he said.
    Mum had fallen for Dad because he could be charming when he wanted to be but I think they'd realised pretty soon after getting married that they weren't meant for each other. Mum used to say that Irish men were a lot of fun to hang out with, but that you should never marry one, because they made crap husbands. Dad probably resented a wife and a kid putting the handbrake on his free and fancy lifestyle, and I think my mum, who was better educated than Dad and had once had a career as a nurse ahead of her, also felt that marrying him hadn't changed her life for the better.
    Not long after I was born we moved to the fast-growing south coast of New South Wales. My mother, father and I lived in Berkeley for a while, but my father soon decided to pursue a business venture in South Australia and left my mother and me behind. Basically we were abandoned, although my father later said he asked my mother to come with him. She says that wasn't true. Mum had to get a job in Sydney to support us, so she left me with her mother during the week and would see me on the weekends. Consequently I developed a strong bond with my nan and grandfather, who were living with us.
    My father failed at his business in South Australia and later moved back. Despite being mismatched, my mum and dad had another six kids after me – five boys and one girl. For most of the time I was growing up we lived in a simple house in Balgownie, a suburb of Wollongong a few kilometres from the beach. Once I was old enough to ride a bike, I would cycle down to the waterfront by myself. I liked