‘We all loved your daddy’: In a country town everyone knows when your father dies

There are people in the rooms that don’t usually have people in them. I have to knock before I go in. It feels like a share house. Mum hasn’t cooked for ages. The neighbours are feeding us well.

In a country town, when your father dies, everyone knows. And everyone wants to help out in some way. So our house is full of flowers and my hands are full of cards. Everyone wants to touch me and kiss me on my cheek and say, “We all loved your daddy.” Everybody loves you.

I wake up in the morning and there is a woman I vaguely recognise from my dad’s work, one of the girls from the office at the harness racing club, the trots, where Dad was the president. He loved horses, but he also was into horse racing. She sits on my bed and says she wants to tell me a story about my dad. I sit up.

The author Michelle Brasier’s christening with mother and father, Ellen and John, and her brother and sister, Paul and Susan.

There had been a house on fire in town. The people who lived there weren’t home, but someone put the fire out and saved the family dog. They tried to find out who the Good Samaritan was; they even put an ad in the paper. Nobody came forward.

“That was your father,” she says. And she was right. That was my dad. He was humble and generous, and he did things for people.

Once, when James and I were driving to Wagga and the car broke down (servicing cars is for the rich), Dad drove through the night, halfway to Melbourne, to pick us up. He wasn’t cranky. He just laughed at us, packed our bags into his Camry and said, “All right, you little shits, let’s go get some potato cakes from the servo.”

I still think about the woman sitting on my bed that day. It’s the only conversation I remember from the month after my father died. Well, that and one with a mystery woman who came up to me at the funeral, got her hands caught in my curly hair, squeezed my cheeks together with her palms and said, “Michelle, whenever I see you, I just think The Lion King,” and then disappeared. I hope she was a ghost.

Two days ago, I called my brother Paul’s best friend to fact-check that my brother definitely had been chased by two separate rhinos on two separate occasions. After verifying the rhinos, she told me the story my brother had told her when Dad died.

My brother was a really good sportsman. He was apparently ranked higher than Lleyton Hewitt in tennis at one stage, although Bec Hewitt never wrote my brother a beautiful poem. Paul liked footy and tennis, and he thought cricket was okay, though it ate into his weekends, which he needed for drinking and carrying around a small baby (me) so he could pick up girls with pretty faces and melancholy secrets.

When Paul auditioned for the regional cricket team, my dad was on the panel. I don’t know what songs my brother sang (assume an upbeat Gilbert and Sullivan and a contemporary ballad like Kelly Clarkson’s Beautiful Disaster) but apparently he did really well and, being a bit of a local superstar sportsman, everyone assumed he would get into the team without any fuss.

But Dad didn’t pick him. When my brother asked why, Dad said that he didn’t feel right about picking his own son. He felt like Paul didn’t need the opportunity the way some of the other kids did. Some of them were from families Dad knew were doing it tough, and he could see they needed an opportunity to rise above what they’d been through. Sport had helped Dad escape from a difficult home life with a wretched stepfather, and he wanted to give that sense of community to some of these kids.

My brother really respected my dad for that. When presented with an opportunity for nepotism, even a nepotism that was maybe earned or excused by my brother’s skill, Dad chose to give someone else a chance. That was how my brother remembered him. That was his father.

Edited extract from My Brother’s Ashes Are in a Sandwich Bag (Ultimo Press) by Michelle Brasier out September 3.

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