Nobody's Fault by Derek Haines (rm book recommendations txt) 📕

father walked the short distance and sat down by his son. Not speaking straight away. After a minute or so, he asked, ‘What are you doing Son?’
‘Running away Dad.’ was his almost whispered reply. His father looked at his son, and held back a smile and said, ‘Well, I don’t think you are going to get very far with a flat tyre. Maybe we should head back home and see if we can repair it.’ David nodded in defeat, and pushed his bicycle home. His father walking slowly beside him. Within a few days the event was forgotten. Except by David.
The sensation would rise in David many times. Prior to his ill fated expedition to Sydney as a teenager, David had run away many times. In his early years, maybe just to the end of the street, or to a park. As he got older, he would wander further. He could never explain to anyone the reasons why he did it. Least of all himself. It was just an irresistible urge. An auto-response. It would perplex his parents until the day he left home for good at twenty. It was to perplex David for his entire life.
Shortly after turning twenty, and with a successful apprenticeship completed, David married his girlfriend. With hindsight David would admit to himself later in life that he married at an early age to satisfy his urge to run. To run from the environment of his family. To run to create a situation where he thought he would be independent and in control of himself. Highlighting this was his decision, which he gave his new bride little choice in, to move to Adelaide within a few months of being married. For a short time David felt he had escaped. From what? He had no idea. The move to Adelaide was a disaster. He didn’t settle at all. Although he found a job within days of arriving, he lasted there less than two weeks. After five years in the one and only job he had, he found his new job strange and uncomfortable. The sudden changes David had meted out to himself in such a short period of time scared him. He ran from his new job. No formal resignation, he just didn’t turn up for work there again. Luckily, he gathered himself and found another position within a couple of weeks. Which he tolerated.
The fear of change is a normal human reaction. To someone with an inbuilt auto-response to run, it would be prove to be a commonly faced fear for David. The clash of his inbuilt need to run away from events, feelings and situations, while not even understanding why, with his quite normal fear of change, would create a confusion he would find difficult to handle. Even more so considering that he also had a deep desire to keep friends and live a settled life.
In contrast his young wife found an interesting position and was enjoying her new life. Until, one day, just short of six months after their arrival in Adelaide, they returned home one evening from work to their apartment. They found nothing! Nothing except carpets and curtains and an open door. Everything gone. After the initial shock, and a quick check, they did find that their clothes had been left in the wardrobe. The event was traumatic for them both, but especially for David’s young wife. Shortly after the police had left and the eventful evening left them alone, she admitted to being homesick, and asked if they could go home to Perth. David agreed instantly. She was warmed by his understanding and care to agree so quickly. She did not understand that the events had been fortuitous for David. He had felt the urge to run building in him for some time. The events of the evening enabled him to satisfy the urge now. He could run away again. The perversity of running away to his home was lost on David at that moment.
Within seven years of marriage, David had fathered two wonderful children, bought a house, left his wife on three separate occasions for periods of time ranging from one week to three months. Notwithstanding the three times he left his wife, he otherwise stabilised his life into a boring routine as an ideal husband and ideal employee. In the last of these seven years, he ended his career as a plumber, and started a new life as a plumbing supplies salesman and shortly after this as a divorcee. He ran for what he thought would be the last time. The divorce cost him some more friends. It also cost him his house and home, most of his possessions, and his cherished role as a father. Leaving his wife did not overly concern David. The loss of his children did. The feeling that he had run away from his children, whom he loved dearly, would grind as a guilt in his very being for years to come. Drinking consoled his loss for short periods.
With the freedom of a single man at twenty seven, and a wish to make up for the fun years he perceived he missed by marrying so young, David made new friends quickly. In no time at all he had a whole new social circle, and was enjoying life to the fullest. Life was party time. With his new job, which paid well, and also paid a generous entertainment allowance, David partied very hard. And drank hard to numb his pain of the loss of his children.
Within a few months he met a young attractive red headed eighteen year old. She was on a working holiday from Sydney. He fell in lust with her, then in love with her.

III
Tony

Fremantle is a port city twenty miles south of Perth. It is like all ports. Full of the smell of salt, rusting cargo and container vessels, all registered in strange far off places for the benefit of cheap insurance and cheap labour. Fremantle is the home, as it was in the late 1950’s, to many Greek and Italian immigrants. Many ending up as owners of fish and chip shops, green grocery stores or a corner deli. Many prospered in the simpler days of the late 1950’s and 1960’s. All needed the support of all the family to survive. Normality was father going to the market at 4.30a.m. to buy the produce, and have his family business open for trade at 7.00a.m. Of course the children worked in the shop as well. When they were tall enough to reach the cash register, they were ready to work. Working before school, and again when they came home from school, they had little time for any other activity. But, they were always the best kids at adding up and subtracting in class. Father taught them very well at the cash register.
Mother worked out the back of the shop. Rarely seen in the shop, she attended to the accounts, cooked for the family and the customers, and most importantly, held the family together as they all toiled eighteen hours a day to exist in their new homeland.
It was here that a young boy named Antonio Leonardi Pilletto arrived with his family in 1958. He was two years old when the immigrant ship disgorged him and his family along with six hundred other wogs onto the shores of Fremantle. His father, a stone mason and a master craftsman in his home land, became one of the wog shopkeepers of Fremantle. Nick’s Fish and Chips became home for Antonio. Before he was five years old, Antonio became used to being called Tony by the locals, and a wog, itie and dago by people who did not know him. These were days when there was no political correctness, and if you happened to be a wog, or an itie, or a dago, or chink, or a towel head, well, that’s what you were. This was Fremantle, a southern suburb of Perth. A young fat little Italian immigrant had to learn to cop it sweet, and work his little heart out with his family to survive this new country.
In the days of the late 1950’s Tony was lucky. There were many men like his father working in almost slave like conditions, building a dam to trap the Snowy River. This was on the east coast of Australia, half way between Sydney and Melbourne. It was also cold and isolated. Many, if not most, lived in tents during its construction and suffered enormous hardship during those years. The mentality of that time did not give a single thought to the fact, that this dam was to destroy an icon of Australia. The heart and spirit of Australia lived in A. B. ‘Banjo’ Patterson’s poem, The Man from Snowy River. When the Snowy River ceased to run, somehow Australia seemed to lose some of its heart and spirit.
To Tony though, life was not new, this place was all he knew. Arriving at two years old, his only contact with his home country was in the stories and memories of his parents. And in the learning of two languages. Speaking Italian at home, but thinking in English. He lived in an Italian household and he survived in a bigoted racist and isolated Australian society.
At school Tony was not an exceptional student, but as with all dagoes who had the advantage of working six hours a day at a cash register, he was always top of his class at arithmetic. This acumen with adding up and subtracting didn’t however do him a lot of good in his other subjects. Nor did the fact that he had worked three hours before school preparing fish for the day's trade, and had another six hours to work once he had finished school. The family’s combined labour paid dividends. Nick’s Fish and Chip shop prospered. Within ten years Tony’s father and mother had joined the elite of home owners. It was not far from the shop. Such a luxury after all the years of living in the back of the shop. This was their dream when they decided to come to Australia for a new start. To settle. To own their own business and their own house. Now they had achieved their aim. Now all they had to do was to continue to work to secure their children’s future, and their own old age. To these new goals the family worked. Just as hard as they had done before, but at least now in the comfort of their own home, away from the smell of fish.
High school for Tony was where he really discovered he was Italian. Closeted from the broad society at primary school, he was now in a melting pot of kids from a far wider area than his little area of South Fremantle. This is where he was not protected by mothering teachers. He was on his own. And just as other kids who were different, he had to find his own ways to survive. Young children can be cruel with their honesty. ‘Where did that man’s legs go Mummy?’ can be difficult and embarrassing for a mother of a verbose four year old to answer in a busy and crowded greengrocery store, but teenagers take this child like honesty to a new level of cruelty.
Tony was immediately targeted for simply being a dago, a wog, fat and having a moustache! His parents must have arrived in Fremantle by sliding on the grease of previous ities who made their way to Australia. Busy defending himself, he didn’t really notice how the abo’ kids, bought down from a remote Aboriginal tribal community in the north west by some do gooders in the local Catholic Church parish, were called chocolate drops or niggers or bungs. The white kids loved the funny story their dad’s had told