My NanoWriMo — Chapter One

I was six years old when my father first took me on a Ferris wheel. It was the first time since I had learned to walk that my feet had been off the ground — unless you counted the fourteen times that my parents hurled me over the backyard fence during an unusually heated dispute over a low-hanging eucalyptus bough — and the feeling was utterly exhilarating. I asked my father, “Daddy, is this what it feels like to be God?” but my father didn’t answer. He simply looked down at me, and smiled, and slowly but surely poured his Big M down the back of my shirt.

Later in the ride, we reached the very top of the wheel’s rotation, and sat there for a minute or two, swinging in the breeze, looking at the fairgrounds laid out beneath us like so much delicious fairy bread on a muddy tablecloth. I turned to my father and asked, “Daddy, how high up are we? How high does the Ferris wheel go?”

He chuckled and answered in his gruff yet kindly yet darkly menacing voice: “Why, as high as you want it to go, Stanley! A wheel like this can take you as high as the sky, as high as the moon.” He leaned down close to my face and I smelt that peculiar mixture of pipe smoke and lanolin that I will always associate with him. “Stanley,” he whispered conspiratorially, “this wheel will take you to the very top of the world, if only you believe in yourself.”

I never forgot his words. As I grew older, I learned that they had all been lies, that my father had been playing for a damned fool, and that that wonderful night atop the Ferris wheel had been a sham. In fact the wheel only went about thirty metres up, and was not particularly impressive even by Ferris wheel standards. My father’s ostentatious talk of skies and moons and tops of worlds had been a sick joke played on an impressionable child who he knew to be receptive to fancy speeches and attractive falsehoods. Even the fairy floss I’d eaten on the wheel retrospectively turned to ashes in the mouth of my memory.

It was the first time I truly understood how evil my father was. Once I saw the truth, so much of my early childhood made sense. When I was two, he had strapped me to the back of a Malaysian tapir and filmed it running across a busy intersection. He submitted the footage to both Australia’s Funniest Home Videos and Australia’s Most Horrific Accidents, and neither would air it. This enraged him and he spent the entire subsequent weekend spreading butter on his clothes and arranging them on the front lawn. “Hoping to attract the attention of a rescue plane,” he told me, but when I asked what he meant by this, he put a finger to his lips and didn’t remove it for a month.

As I grew older, his behaviour had only become more erratic: by the time I went to university I barely even thought of him as a “Father”: experts say it’s only natural that a boy’s affections for his dad start to wane after the eighteenth or nineteenth electromagnetic experiment, and with my it was no different. Sick of carrying around the odour of burnt flesh and a hairstyle that would not deviate from the vertical no matter how hard I ran headfirst into telephone poles, I told him, “No more” and that was when my father took to the tree in the backyard, where he lived full-time for six years prior to my entry into the tertiary education sector. His last words to me when I left to take up residence at Page University were, “I am now more woodpecker than man. ‘Ware Hubris!” I knew what he meant.

But since then I hadn’t seen him at all. So what was he doing now, today, sitting in front of me in my office, wearing a green leather catsuit and sipping from a tall glass of carrot juice, eyeing me with the sort of expression you might normally expect to find on a horse who just found out he’ll have to wait five minutes for his anti-anxiety prescription to be filled?

Taking a deep breath, I recalled the advice of my old college professor, Dr “Grapefruit” Hemporderly: “When you want to know what a man is doing in your office, begin by asking him, and then take the appropriate action from that point on.” And I followed that advice to the letter.

“What are you doing here?” I asked my father, and waited. I knew he was not one to provide hasty answers. Once he had taken thirteen months to tell a waiter whether he wanted cracked pepper, but when he finally got around to it everyone in the restaurant agreed that it had been worth the wait. I knew that if I were patient, I would get the answer I needed. While I waited, I passed the time by dressing and undressing myself repeatedly.

“You’ve done well for yourself.” His booming voice, with its pen-chewer’s burr and distinctive Finnish accent, broke the silence at last. “Set yourself up all fancy-like.” He took a long draught of carrot juice and gestured carelessly around the office. “The desk, the printer, the fish tank, the carpet, the other carpet on the wall, the ceiling-carpet, the several carpets drying on the windowsill. It all must have cost a pretty penny.”

“I’ve worked hard for what I have,” I replied coolly, putting on my top hat, a power move I knew always intimidated prospective clients. “And I’ve made a lot money, by being the best.” I pointed at the framed certificate on the wall behind me, and the tale it told:

THIS IS TO CERTIFY THAT STANLEY ARMBIN CAN SWIM 25 METRES

As a child, I had been mercilessly mocked by both my father and my mother about my swimming. Neither had believed I would ever pass eighteen metres. My chest swelled a little with pride as I demonstrated to the old man just how wrong he’d been.

“We’re getting sidetracked,” I said, illustrating my point by holding up a photograph of a minor train crash. “Are you here for personal or professional reasons?”

“What’s the difference?”

“I think you know the difference.”

“Maybe I’ve forgotten.”

“You, forget? Don’t make me laugh.”

“I never could make you laugh, could I Stanley? I tried. God knows I tried.”

“Drawing faces on your thighs was never as funny as you thought it was, Dad. I had more refined tastes. I like subtle, observational humour.”

“That was your mother’s department.”

“How is my mother?”

“That’s a good question.”

“You don’t know?”

“No, I know. I just thought you asked it really articulately.” He smiled and scratched his toes with a long bronze backscratcher that I only now realised he had been holding between his teeth the entire time. “I didn’t come here to talk about your mother.”

I laughed: a hollow, mirthless laugh, like a man watching a baby elephant accidentally eat a spider. “You never did come here to talk about my mother, did you, Dad?” I sneered. “Even when you came to my soccer games, you would storm onto the pitch and shout at me that you weren’t there to talk about my mother. You ruined the whole season.”

“It’s as true now as it ever was,” he retorted, finishing his drink and starting to eat the glass. “But I don’t have time to sit here all day. Until 9pm at the very latest, if I’m honest. I’m here to hire you.”

I was so stunned I crawled beneath my desk and whimpered for half an hour. Never in a million years had I dreamt this day would come. Indeed, for the vast majority of those million years I had not even been born yet, and the possibility of me dreaming of it was even more remote than it was now. Yet even post-birth I had not dreamt it, and the reality had become too much to bear.

My father…hiring me? My father…in need of a private detective? My father…nude?

What fresh hell WAS this?