Dad warned me about throwing stones. Years later, I knew what to do
My father, having long ago made the mistakes I was currently making, was easily prescient. “Don’t throw stones so close to us. You’ll hit someone. It’s just a matter of time.”
“I will not,” I replied, “My arm’s a rifle.” The next rock I picked from the clear waters of the Goulburn River was of white quartz, rounded by millennia of flowing water to look cerebral. It was a fossilised T-Rex brain to me and had probably once schemed of putting its head in the Flintstones’ window and snatching Wilma off the linoleum.
The thought of flinging this villainous organ across a river thrilled me so much that I put such effort into it the thing slipped out the back of my hand and hit Dad on the forehead, making him simultaneously prophetic and comatose and sounding like someone had smacked a teak armoire with a fire poker. He went down, before rising, bloodied, and staggering up to the shack, where he collapsed dead onto a couch.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
You could never tell with Dad, though. He died quite a lot. Normally, after being dead a minute or so he’d leap up and call us blockheads and sooks and tease us for our sorrow. A sister went inside to check on him this time, and came out confirming this wasn’t one of his normal deaths – because he was dead. I had killed my dad, which was bad enough. But I had killed their dad too, which was, in their eyes, way worse. He wasn’t my dad to kill. He’d been their dad first, in the good times before me.
So they began to compose another symphony of horrors for an audience of one. They were prolific composers of these terrible dirges. Not even Napoleon had so many sad symphonies dedicated to him, I think.
This one focused on David Copperfield. They must have recently seen the film, because they had certainly not read the book. Nor any book. The gist of their symphony, sung in three parts by an elder brother and two elder sisters, was that as a patricidal maniac, I would be sent away, like David Copperfield, to work in a bottle-washing factory where I’d be thrashed daily by greasy, hunched men whose universal hatred of boys was magnified to an ecstasy of loathing by lads who’d killed their own fathers.
I told them Mum would never allow me to be sent away. They told me that the mother of a boy who’s killed his father always marries a stepfather, which is a type of cowardly madman as mean as a pig, and this stepfather wouldn’t risk sleeping under the same roof as a flowering serial killer.
They said they’d come to visit me at the workhouse sometimes, but I must promise to wear long sleeves and trousers when they did, because they didn’t want to be sickened by my welts. I had no idea what welts were, but told them as I didn’t own any long pants they would have to put up with them.
After the longest hour of my childhood Dad came out on the deck and called us up from the river for lunch. He wasn’t as chipper as was customary after one of his deaths – white in the face, a bandage crossing his brow – but I was pleased to see him alive and smiled up at him through a veil of tears. He had survived an assault with a fossilised dinosaur brain. The son of a thinner-skulled man would be enslaved in a Dickensian nightmare, but the Cro-Magnon cranium of the Camerons had saved me. We are a blessed family in that regard.
Why do I recall this? I was at a river beach recently wading hip-deep while a nearby kid skimmed stones as his father yelled at him not to do it so close to people. I didn’t speak their language, but understood the conversation perfectly. The kid was telling his dad not to worry, his arm was a rifle.
Eventually, he got me in the kidney, pretty much as his father had predicted. It wasn’t a big stone, more insult than injury, but there was the educational aspect of the thing to consider. This father needed my help to save his boy from becoming a bad boy. So I clutched my wound and went down face-first in the water like a Saving Private Ryan extra. An actor, yes – but cadavers have nothing on us Camerons when playing at death.