What about Arnie?

Sometime near the end of Arnie's relationship with my mother, Rae, my father had a brush with him at the Birdcage pub in Auckland City. Dad was enjoying a drink with a colleague, when Arnie approached, 24 stone, 6 foot something, moustachioed and intimidating. He glared down at Dad, who was seated, and spat out “You’re an arsehole.” Dad looked up at him, and said, “No mate, you’re the arsehole.” Dad’s friend started kicking him furiously under the table. “Anyone who comes up to someone they don’t know and says “You’re an arsehole”, must be an arsehole”, Dad continued. His friend persisted in kicking Dad’s legs energetically. Dad asked Arnie who he was, and he indicated that he was with Rae, who lingered further back in the pub.

Rae would have told Arnie the usual stories she told all her boyfriends, actually anyone who would listen - that she was a victim of physical abuse and marital rape at the hands of my Dad, and that to rub salt in the wound, he had indulged in various indiscretions. Rae was prodigious in her efforts to inform the world of a past that I suspect was a product of her own imaginings, and that over time became more real to her than the truth. She was particularly fond of dramatic public statements. One day, she vandalised her own home in order to publicise her tale of woe to the neighbourhood.

Soon after the break up with Dad, I returned home from school to discover my mother had spray painted his name in big blue letters, followed by the words "is a RAPIST" on the dark brown block work at the bottom of our house. I froze at the top of the driveway, my legs felt disembodied, my heart pounded in my chest, and an ache radiated out from my stomach. Her graffiti was clearly visible from the street. I fretted for my father. I didn't know what a rapist was exactly, but I understood they were not far off murderers. Was my father a rapist? I couldn't reconcile my experience of him as a funny and caring person with this dark word. Not for the first, or last time, I pushed aside my confusion. It was quickly replaced by deep embarrassment at the thought of the kids I knew who often walked by. They would see it, and they would read it. Their parents would see it, and they would read it. Perhaps they would know what a rapist was, and believe that my dear father was a bad, bad man, and that I must be a bad, bad girl. Up until this point, life experience had buffeted my innocence and worn it down. But this was a gale force wind precipitating a landslip. I questioned who my father was, and what that made me. But in short time it was the question of who my mother was that troubled me the most. I quickly learned to distrust her.

Whether my father raped my mother I could not say categorically. If it were true, it would be a great surprise to me. Whether he assaulted my mother, I don't believe so. I never witnessed such a thing, and neither did my siblings. The funny thing is, we only recall Dad acting in self-defence. We were witness to the numerous attacks Rae made on Dad for some real or perceived slight. She hurled crockery and pans of boiling water, lunged at him with a meat tenderiser, and threatened to the children that she would take his life while he slept.

As for the indiscretions, my father is an outrageous flirt, which I presume he was in those days, but he maintains he was never a philanderer and I have no reason to think otherwise. The only evidence of cheating came from Rae's quarter.

“Rae has obviously been feeding you rubbish.” Dad told Arnie. “Why don’t you listen to my side of the story?” My father then enquired about where Arnie worked (he laid paving) and said that he would pay a visit to the work site the next day. Arnie turned and left.

Dad turned to his friend. “Why were you kicking me?”.

“You didn’t know who that was?” asked his friend. “He’s ex-Hell’s Angels. He’s been in jail for manslaughter.”

Dad had no idea of the man’s past, but his friend thought Dad was very brave, all the same. Then Dad explained, “I had my palms under the table the whole time. If he lunged at me, I was going to flip the table and run for my life.”

Dad turned up at the work site the next morning, but Arnie wasn’t there. Perhaps my father was courageous after all. Or perhaps he was a touch a foolhardy.

I think it all ended with Arnie when Rae accused him of an indiscretion with a client. She told me that she confronted Arnie at a work site. I also recall her threatening to contact a client to tell her that Arnie had probably been stealing from her house while on the job. By then he had lavished my mother with money and gifts, including two silk outfits and a gold and opal ring. My mother gave it to me years ago, soon after she met her second husband. “It’s probably stolen”, she told me. I don’t wear it.