Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

Heads I win, tails you lose.

I toss the coin over and over, it spins in the air to land in my palm before I slap it over onto the back of my other hand. When I remove my hand, Heads!- ‘May you Rest in Peace Your Majesty’, I think, then flip it again, heads-Her Majesty’s serene profile again. Flip, the silver spins and glints in the artificial light- tails, a little platypus swimming, frozen in time, the monotreme memorialised forever on the tail side of the coin. 

Growing up, my dad used the coin toss to solve all his parenting problems. Don’t want to eat your broccoli, you know you should, right? Well let’s flip for it, heads I win, tails you lose. You wanna stay at your friend’s place this weekend? Let’s see, heads I win, tails you lose. I was sure my dad was the fairest parent out there, never a tyrant like the dads of the other boys’ I knew, always offering one of two options and deciding the outcome on the flip of a coin. He was also the luckiest dad ever, he never seemed to lose. It wasn’t until I was older that I understood, and shook my head at my naïveté.

“Dad, can you hear me?”

The doctors think that he can, and they encourage me to talk to him. They say he responds sometimes.

“Dad, I’m here. Not going anywhere so just relax, ok?”

He was the biggest man I knew, huge, like larger than life. He’d have a beer or three of an evening, while he told stories, some taller than others, and his palate wasn’t overly discerning. He liked to stick with the tried and true, VB every time. I remember the adds on TV growing up. The voice-over man in that serious tone decrying, “A hard earned thirst needs a big cold beer…and the best cold beer is Vic, Victoria Bitter!” My dad was that man. Not the voice-man, but he may as well have been the blokes that stared in that campaign. So quintessentially Australian, a certain type of man forged by the era he lived in. You don’t see blokes like that anymore. It’s not really PC.

I hadn’t seen Dad much these last few months, been busy but that’s no excuse really, and I hadn’t noticed that he’d become small. Kind of shrunken in on himself, as if all the bits that made him ‘dad’ were gone, just leaving ordinary human behind.

“Dad, I need a favour,” I whisper into the stillness of the room. “I need you to hang on, you hear me?”

He doesn’t respond. My heart hoped he would lift his lids and ask me what I needed this time. When I was a boy, I was forever asking for a favour. 

Like the time I needed to impress Mandy on that first date. She was a private school girl, I was a local high school lout. She was seventeen and new, I was not much older but eons wiser, or so I thought. Mario hired her because she was cute, he was a chauvinist like that. Although I knew the meaning of the word, at eighteen I was hard pressed to identify it in practice. So Mandy was our phone girl and chick behind the counter. Me and Mario, well, we put the pizzas together. It was a great job, I got to work with my hands and stare at Mandy’s ass as she leaned against the counter to talk with customers. Win, win.

Anyway, it was her birthday, and I was going to ask her out. Eons older than her, and my heart still stammered behind my throat when she walked in for that evening shift, looking like something that would melt in my mouth. I think I remember saying Happy Birthday and I muttered something about how lovely she looked. She smiled, a light of sunshine and I think I asked then with great coolness if she wanted to check out a movie. Said I heard the Drive-In was showing Indiana Jones, she said she loved Harrison Ford. So we were going.

I hadn’t factored in the fact that my car was a piece of shit Datsun 120Y and it was nearly as old as I was. It wouldn’t start, and I was supposed to be picking her up. 

So I asked, “Dad, I need a favour! Can I take your car tonight?”

He just looked at me, right through me and into that part of me that was him, thirty years before. “Heads I win, tails you lose.” Of course, by now, I knew that to mean no.

“But Dad!”

“You’re not taking some girl to the Drive-In and getting hot and dirty in the back seat of my car!”

“We’re not…”

“Do I look like an idiot to you, son?”

“I swear, no one is getting in the back seat!”

Well Dad wasn’t having a bar of it. He pop-started my car the old fashioned way, with me pushing the thing down the hill, him popping the clutch, and we raced down to the auto shop before it closed, where upon he instructed me in the fine art of vehicle repair and battery replacement. There went a good chunk of my week’s pay, but I was still able to pick Mandy up just on time.

We didn’t use the backseat, not that time anyway, however we did see many more movies in the Datto, and a few times we actually watched them! But life happens and Mandy grew up and moved on. She went to university to become a nurse, while I stayed on with Mario.

I look at dad now and think about that lesson. He didn’t let things come easy for me. I had saved for that Datsun for three years, and yes, the bloody thing was a piece of shit. But I learned to take care of it, had a spanner in the boot that I would use to hit the alternator in just the right spot to get the thing going when it was temperamental. I checked the oil and water each week and learned how to change the oil and spark plugs myself. Dad was old school like that. Why pay someone to do something you could easily do yourself with a bit of time and effort?

I thought of my own son. Riley probably wouldn’t know where the battery was on his car, and I wondered if I had even shown him how to pop the bonnet. What kind of Dad had I been for him? I had bought him a membership for the RAC and told him to call them in the event of a breakdown, but I’d never flipped a coin to determine his life, I just didn’t have that kind of input. I was too busy, having three pizza shops that I managed as the kids were growing up, and I worked long hours to get my business degree in on the side.

“Dad, I need a favour,” I say again. “I need you to stay here, with me.”

Of course Dad says nothing. He never used to say nothing, he was never afraid to tell me if I was being an ass.

When my then girlfriend, Trina, got pregnant at twenty-four, he pretty much chewed me a new one, and we were married within months. Trina’s belly was rounded gently under her lacy dress. You can’t tell too much from the photos, we made sure she was standing just so, with the bloody great flowers, that caused my eyes to water and nose to run, clutched before her. So all our wedding photos look like I’m in tears and she is glowing. 

“Dad, I still need you. You can’t just leave.” 

I hold his hand. It was smaller than mine now, the veins and tendons stand out against the paper thin skin. Once those blunt fingers had held me together, his firm grip on my shoulder when my world had come apart. 

The breast cancer diagnosis shattered my family’s foundation, and we floundered for three years. Trina fought it, was determined to conquer it. A hard, long and exhausting battle, but just before our daughter Ella was in her final years of school, Trina’s body said ‘no more’, and she left me alone to navigate those most important moments of our daughter’s life. What did I know of ball dresses and hair and makeup? If not for Dad, who put that huge hand on my shoulder and said, “You’ve got two kids who still need you, it’s time to man up!” I don’t know how I would have survived.

“Dad, you’ve still got a son who needs you,” I say as I lace my fingers though his, the delicate bird-bones looking particularly fragile.

I’ve always needed him. Growing up it was just him and me. Two bachelors doing what we could to get through each day. I never saw a string of women in his life, not like my early dating career where I enjoyed many girls, some for company some for more, but he was just a rock, an island to himself. After Trina died, I got it, you just don’t get time to put a woman first, as she deserves, when you’re holding together your life and children.

In the last few months though, I had met Jo, and Jo had consumed me. I hadn’t taken her to meet dad, or the kids or anything yet, I wasn’t sure if I was ready to be that serious. 

“Dad, I want you to meet someone, her name’s Jo,” I tell him softly . “I think I’d like her to be someone important. So you can’t leave just yet, I won’t let you.”

I hold his hand in both of mine, the silver coin clasped between our palms and I’m not sure if I imagine it, but I feel his hand squeeze back. It’s just a tiny movement, but I latch on to it.

“Dad, you can’t go, you hear me? Not yet. Heads I win tails you lose, Ok?”

I toss the coin, catch it and flip it onto my wrist. “Tails, you lose,” I whisper as I look into his peaceful, serene but sunken face, and I feel them, the tears down my face. Dad never loses…until today.