Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer
She was her father’s daughter. All her life people had told her that. Mostly, when she was quite young, that had made her happy and proud. There was much to admire about her dad. And there was no denying it, she could see a lot of herself in her father. Her body was slight and neat and compact like his. She had the same longish face, the same set of his mouth, the same shaped eyes. She could eat without worrying about her weight (at least until she hit 50).
He had taught her useful, practical, impressive things that she had carried around with her for decades and which still had a utility on a daily basis. She drove confidently with her hands at ten-to-two on the steering wheel and accelerated competently into corners. Men commented on her firm handshake and her ‘good arm’ with a ball. Thanks to her dad she had excellent eye-hand coordination, an appreciation of all kinds of sports and a facility for some.
He had always been there for her, in a way she couldn’t remember her mother being. Or perhaps it was simply in a way she had preferred. He figured in her earliest memories, and for a long, special time it was just the two of them. She could remember listening to the Apollo 11 moon landing on the His Masters Voice Wireless with her father, sitting on the brown-carpeted floor in the lounge room when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made a small step for man but a giant leap for mankind. She remembered them sitting in the same spot playing with the Memory Game cards for hours, her father praising her. Always praising. And more hours in the back garden throwing and catching a tennis ball, her father laughing and calling her ‘butterfingers’ when she dropped a catch.
He taught her how to ride a bike and took her riding along the freeway that was being built near their house. They cycled together along the empty lanes as far as they could go, until the bitumen ended abruptly in shards of ragged steel and concrete, like bitten finger nails, and peered perilously over the barriers into the construction site far below.
On Sundays, her father, wore the big brown cardigan with metal buttons embossed with anchors that her mother had knitted for him, and took her to the corner shop where they bought ‘Coconut Roughs’ – crunchy discs of chocolate in copper-coloured foil. They dropped pieces of bark into the creek and watched them travel downstream, bumping and bouncing around the rocks like little boats. That was when she learned the word Bilharzia, and to be afraid of stagnant water. Many, many years later, on a visit back to South Africa, she returned to see the creek, but it had disappeared, taken over by houses and the roar of cars rushing past on the long-finished freeway.
Despite being such a strong presence her father was also an absence in her life. He travelled a lot and for long periods of time, leaving his wife and daughters alone for weeks, and so was often oblivious to the unfolding dramas and minutia of domestic and school life that were presided over by her mother. She would threaten to tell our father about their transgressions when he got home, but the threat rang hollow, they all knew he wasn’t really the authority in those matters.
When he was not ‘in the far East’ and not at work he was affectionate, at least with his daughters. He was also a marathon runner, and when he wasn’t smelling of sweat from a training run her father smelled of Old Spice.
You are your father’s daughter. When her mother said those words she spat them out with bitterness, disappointment and accusation. Her daughter felt it as a slap, an insult. You are more his than mine. She meant her daughter was cold, withholding, critical. It was true. She saw what her father saw and felt her mother saw her looking with her father’s eyes. Her mother was afraid of their alliance. He was her hero. Her mother felt betrayed, and she felt guilty about it then. It was only when she was older that she could see her father as her mother experienced him. She would always be her father’s daughter, but she understood too that he was just a man.