Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [21]
In the year of my father’s Vietnam posting, carefully checking our small treasures in our music boxes and waiting for our turn to mark off and obliterate another day on the calendar, my sister and I understood the difference between his quiet presence and the silence of true absence. That silence, so palpable and heavy, renders you mute in return. You are left with small things, your stored treasures, the brief shocking moment of recognition when you glance at your sister’s face as you hand back the phone, and see sympathy, raw and unmistakable. Then your eyes drop away. You know you didn’t imagine it, but even this—maybe especially this—stays unsaid. Things unsaid fill up every room.
Before he died I self-published the memoirs my father had been working on for years as a surprise for him, but the timeframe never reached the period of his time in Vietnam. On a tape I have he tries to begin it, his voice a hoarse painful whisper due to the surgery he’d just undergone for thyroid cancer. He describes how the Australian soldiers stationed in Vung Tau with him helped build and maintain the An Phong orphanage nearby, filled with Vietnamese war orphans.
‘The army would bring all these little kids down to the back beach which was near our base, for a swim and a barbecue,’ he recalls. ‘There was one little bloke who stands out in my mind, who just stood back on his own. I went over to him, and he held my hand, for the whole day. Poor little bugger. Next time they came back, he ran up to me, and again, he was okay, but again he never left my side. That day when he got up on the truck to go back, he handed me a little parcel, a little hand-wrapped parcel. With a clean folded hanky inside.’
On the tape I hear my father’s voice crack and break. It wrenches with sobs.
‘I’d given him nothing,’ he whispers, ‘but he’d given me this. And these are the things that used to break my heart.’
The story of that little boy was about the only thing our father ever told my sister and me about Vietnam, and only then because we asked him about the handkerchief, which remained one of his most treasured possessions. In a story in one of my books, I used to think with a savage sense of having been cheated, it would have turned out that we would have adopted that little boy. That was how it should have ended, clicking into place with satisfying story-like inevitability, in a bigger world where bigger hearts ruled. I opened my books after that, and doubted their veracity. They were just pasteboard, really, holding together pages of paper in a certain order; their magic began to seem a little childish. Real life, colourless and hard and demanding to be endured, was the thing that would still be there when you woke up in the morning.
Over thirty-five years later, I listen on the tape to that poor little boy still breaking my father’s heart, then the sound of him manfully swallowing, trying to continue to speak. The words scrape faintly and huskily through his ravaged voice box, scarred with tumours, like every sentence hurts. In the background of the recording I hear my baby daughter start crying, demanding to be fed, and it seems like the cruellest irony that of all the things his cancer robbed him of, it took away his voice, ensuring that the rest of those stories would never be told, after all.
My golden-haired, cherubic brother was just over a year old when my father returned. Considering he’d missed his son’s first year of life in its entirety, my mother was anxious to have something, some ‘first’ he could be present for, and so she had valiantly fought a losing battle to keep my brother from toddling before Dad was home to witness it. She’d strapped him, squirming, into his stroller at the airport as we saw the plane carrying our father touch down and taxi towards us. As we waited, craning our heads in anticipation for