Tales of Mystery and Romance

by Frank Moorhouse

  I tell you, birth, for the baby, smells of diesel oil bus fumes.

  She sat there with the fruit cup, and said, ‘It’s beautiful weather we’re having for this time of the year.’ I look out at the humid, overcast day and I would have to say, in all honesty, that I consider the day … negative … and nondescript … vapid … and the greys – crushing.

  She always strives for the illusion of harmony.

  In my drug fantasies you were not sixty. You were a unity, a conglomerate of all the ages I’d known you at, since you were twenty-three when I first met you. You were twenty-three when I first touched your cunt and breasts. Il punto a cui tutti i tempi son presenti.

  ‘The watch has two days stored time,’ my father highlighted.

  ‘You could sleep for two days and it would still tell the right time,’ my mother said.

  ‘Well that should suit him,’ my sister said, ‘the time he spends in bed.’

  ‘I wear mine to bed,’ my father said, ‘to ensure that it doesn’t stop. It keeps better time that way.’

  ‘It would go for two days after my death,’ I said, with pointless resentment. Wasted timetelling.

  My mother said, ‘At times you’re so morbid.’

  The watches left beside beds. How about those? My ex-wife came into my flat and there’d been Juliet’s watch lying beside the bed. She’d said nothing.

  Months later, after we were married, at the Wrestling of all places, I’d said to her, ‘You never mentioned the watch, that day – the time you came to my flat and saw it.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  Yet we always took off our watches before making love.

  My father said, ‘Swiss watches still rank first. Japanese watches don’t keep good time.’

  I have a good time, I say to myself, at least, now and then.

  ‘Always remember this,’ my mother said, as we left, ‘this is always your home and there’s a bed here anytime you need it.’

  She kissed me on the cheek. The only physical touching we’d had over those thirty-odd years – since I was in her cunt and my mouth was on her nipples.

  My father shook my hand, thus winding both our watches.

  His hand, presumably, as difficult to believe as it may be, plays, or once played with, the cunt of my mother where I once was, and which, presumably, as difficult as it may be to believe, masturbated sperm, created by the same balls that created me. But, as Milton would say, it is the problem, philosophically, of Jackie’s axe. The skin having been shed and replaced, the changes in the chemistry, the psychological and personality growth, ageing etc. Can it be said that it is the ‘same hand’?

  I saw my father once in the bedroom, his hand working up and down his reddish prick, my mother out in the kitchen humming hymns, my father with the Sunday Truth spread before him shooting good sperm out at the stimulation of teenage-love-nest-orgy journalism, shooting into a handkerchief faster than the eye could see, and quickly burying it in the trouser pocket of the suit on the wooden valet. I then entered the bedroom, ‘Have you finished with the Truth?’ You could say that, in our house, there was a bit of a queue for the Truth.

  ‘It’s a good time of the year for jobs.’

  Had my mother’s cheek-kissing lips sucked the same reddish cock, the cock of the man whose hand I now held in a paternal grip which, at the same time, wound our watches?

  ‘And keep the guarantee – in case it loses time.’

  I decided then to tell them how I’d coupled with coy mother in a drug fantasy, how, furthermore, I’d seduced my father’s wife in a lesbian embrace. Because in the fantasy I had become female. In the flurry of goodbyes near the frangipani, I let it pass.

  People forget their watches when they face the mirror. Service station wash rooms, swimming pool dressing rooms, one-night-stand beds.

  If it be conceded that the bed is a mirror.

  As I drove my sister back to the city, in her car, I described to her how it all began and was lost.

  How Concord came about and died. It grew, I said, fimetariously, as it were out of the road.

  ‘I’m not going to ask you what it means, so go on,’ she said.

  ‘The road bleeds, so to speak, which is that it bleeds some of its movement, its traffic. This traffic decides to stop at a point in the road, and stop there for good. A human deposit congeals with these words “I think we’ll build near the crossroads”.’

  ‘I’m not interested,’ she said, ‘I have a headache. You know that when you come home I get a headache.’

  And then came me.

  ‘I once created the sensation of being with mother while fucking my ex-wife.’

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, putting a hand to her brow, and then, having I think partially at least visualised this, said, ‘Which ex-wife, for godsake?’

  ‘Portugal. Do you ever think of your husband as your father, our father?’

  ‘Oh shut up.’

  ‘I sometimes think of myself as your sister. Me as female.’

  ‘I’m not going to talk about all this.’

  ‘I don’t think that in our family we put enough up front.’

  For the final miles she wouldn’t talk.

  We don’t put enough up front in our family, that’s a fact.

  THE AIRPORT THE PIZZERIA THE MOTEL THE RENTED CAR AND THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE

  In the airport lounge we embraced. We embraced under the international ideograms. I am hungry. I want to go to the lavatory. I need an interpreter. Where is the doctor. This way out. They spoke to me and I to them above and beyond my greetings to my ex-wife after seven years. I should have listened to them.

  I stood in my Breton holiday cap and stared after the people suspended in Transit. I wanted to be with them in Transit. A destination ahead. The place you’ve come from, well behind you. Suspended. No badgering choices. No possessions. All services present. A true state of purity.

  ‘Well.’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘After all these years.’

  ‘It’s been a long time.’

  As I looked into her eyes the droning of the airport called to me. Translated English came through, calling to me, from the comforting, depersonalised Public Address System. A voice filtered of all human evil, threat, mood with a hypnotic cadence. Another purity.

  We got straight into the mysteries where we had left off those years before in the milk bars of our Australian city suburb.

  ‘I had déjà vu just then,’ she said, my ex-wife, in the airport lounge.

  ‘Oh yes?’ I said.

  ‘Do you ever have déjà vu?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve had déjà vu.’

  ‘Doesn’t it affect you. I mean, doesn’t it serve as a reminder?’

  ‘A reminder?’ What had I forgotten? ‘I’m sorry, I’m not with you.’

  ‘A reminder that all cannot be explained. Suggestions of our pre-existence.’

  I used a smiling head movement to say, no one denies, some things are difficult, come on now that’s no mystery, and who the hell talks like that, and what for instance.

  ‘There are explanations of sorts,’ I said in words.

  ‘What explanations?’ she demanded, courteously petulant.

  ‘Oh, physiological – retinal skip – optical paramnesia – something like that.’

  ‘I won’t accept that,’ she said, like a quiz gong.

  I waved a generous hand. ‘What does it matter – it’s certainly a weird sensation.’ Not wanting grit in the eye of our first meeting.

  ‘I think it’s evidence that we have lived before,’ she said, ‘I know you’ll scoff but it has never been explained to my satisfaction.’

  ‘Now …’ I said, almost choking on scoff, ‘where is that fiery atheist from Concord High School?’

  It helps to remember that we all came from High Schools.

  ‘Even you have to admit there are things that cannot be explained,’ she said, ‘and anyhow I hate people who have explanations.’

  No
w what do I say? Is it something to do with women being denied the scientific tradition, denied a role in the affairs of the world, that leads them to superstition? Or maybe I attract this sort of person, or maybe I bring it out in them, maybe this is their rebellion against my personality and its oppression. I have known a number of women who hold on to some mystical gemstone, secretly, sometimes ashamedly, usually when it is sensed, and prised out, like a stone from a hoof, they are embarrassed. But they continue to hold on to it, say a belief that there are card tricks that cannot be explained. That one person in the world is imbued with supernatural power, Uri Geller, albeit rather useless power. Something like that.

  I said, ‘We cannot explain some things,’ wondering if I was giving too much away, ‘only because we don’t have the explanations. I know this is going to sound bad, but I find life pretty simple to explain, especially human motivation. I don’t think there is much to it … to life.’ I shrugged my shoulders. That was how it seemed to me then.

  ‘I find that dreadfully arrogant,’ she said, putting a smile on top of her criticism to ease it, ‘I think there are eternal mysteries, déjà vu, our dreams, dualism.’ She took my hand. ‘Our coming together after seven years, the number seven, after you disappeared without so much as a word.’

  Dualism? Where’d she get that? That’s what I’d told Hestia. I blinked. I was with my ex-wife in Portugal. Not with Hestia.

  We formally kissed. ‘Now let’s get out of here,’ she said, ‘I hate airports.’

  I love airports. I love the opera of airports. People weeping, and how soon people stop their tears. The flare of excessive interest in someone because they are coming or going. Everyone audience to the person. Speechy conversation which no one can remember afterwards, everyone over-laughing. Families with high-gloss airport emotion, a linkage of smiles, tears and touching. A moratorium on malice, air-conditioned goodwill. When the airport sanctuary is left, the automatic doors open into the sweaty heat and blown litter, and they also re-open the wounds of the family and the dust blows into the lacerations.

  I did not want to leave the airport.

  In the pizzeria we held hands. We held hands before the repetition. Each pizza thrown perfectly together. Parts of life have reached perfection ahead of the rest. Pizza-making is one. Thrown together with unthinkable dexterity, artlessly sculptured. Perfectly repeated.

  ‘It’s been a long time since we ate a meal together,’ I said, with a squeezed cheeriness.

  ‘It has been a long time. I can’t say, though, I call this a meal. Here you are in a new country and the first thing you eat is a pizza from a take-away food chain.’

  ‘I want to begin with the familiar,’ I said, ‘I know the pizza. New experiences have to be stalked.’

  ‘I wish you had let me take you to Enrico’s.’

  ‘Remember,’ I said, ‘those river picnics.’

  ‘Very dearly.’

  ‘Remember doing it on the rock.’

  She frowned, as though not remembering.

  ‘It was our first time – you gave me your virginity for my birthday.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Yes, yes you did,’ I said, insistently, hanging perilously on my effort at sentimentality. Had I got it wrong?

  Was it with someone else. Some other time. In another existence?

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘we didn’t do it and I didn’t give you my virginity – I gave you me.’

  ‘Oh yes, that’s what I meant.’

  ‘Did you know that you and Paul have the same birthday. Did you know that? I think that’s incredible. Two men in my life and they should have the same birth day.’

  ‘Two pizza specials, please.’

  ‘My astrologist, oh …’ she stopped on the word, putting her hand to her mouth to hold the rest in, ‘I remember, you don’t talk about astrology.’

  ‘Of course I do, of course I talk about astrology.’

  ‘You don’t take it seriously. You attacked me in the letters.’

  ‘Two pizza specials, yes.’

  ‘In some ways you’ve become more narrow, less open to life,’ she said, pensively, ‘I don’t mean to be offensive.’

  ‘No – that’s alright.’

  I wanted to watch the pizza making.

  ‘Look, ahem …’ I milled around, ‘ahem, well, look, it seems to me the problem of astrology is what to do with this knowledge of the future’.

  She looked besieged.

  I didn’t mean to besiege her.

  ‘I mean, that is, if you accept predestination it doesn’t mean that you can alter it – and if you could, wouldn’t your attempts to alter it and their outcome also be, well, forseeable?’

  She did not reply.

  ‘You may as well not know about it,’ I mumbled, to soften it, mumble, mumble, ‘gypsies think it is a curse to be able to see the future – not a gift.’

  ‘It is possible that magnetic forces at the time of your birth somehow program your brain cells,’ she said, unhappily.

  She thought ‘magnetic’ and ‘program’ were words which might appeal to me.

  ‘If on the other hand,’ I said, nodding at what she had said, ‘if on the other hand you believe in the forewarning – which events do you change – can’t fate outwit you?’

  ‘I don’t like your approach to life – you used to be more reverent, less arrogant.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  The pizza came as expected, hot, boxed, honest, as promised.

  ‘I hate take-away food,’ she said.

  ‘I love it,’ I said fiercely, recklessly, which wasn’t really as true as I made it sound. But it was too late. I was away – riding an unbroken horse.

  ‘I love Kentucky Fried Chicken. Children love take-away food above all else – they hate the food at home – children have to be forced-fed – did you realise that? – for the first years they are physically forced-fed and beaten until they eat the lousy food their mothers dish up.’

  I knew she harboured a Rousseauian theory that children were instinctively wise and that given no adult guidance they would choose in their best interest. She harboured bad theories, like escaped criminals, in the cellars and attics of her mind. I knew they were there. I remembered now.

  ‘They are propagandised,’ she said, ‘given the choice without all the pressures they’d do what was right.’

  Why do they believe the propaganda? Why don’t they know it to be false after the first bite of takeaway food? Tell me that. Why doesn’t the instinctively wise child believe reality over propaganda?

  ‘Why!’ I said, ‘take-away food is the beginning of the communal kitchen.’ I ripped on, ‘Most people cook so badly they love take-away food.’

  I had flown a thousand miles for one of her smiles at a very high altitude and here we were embattled over take-away food. The pizzas in their boxes were complaining, burning me through the cardboard. I shifted them from hand to hand.

  The people in the suburbs, I told her, were already learning that it was better to share the services of a professional cook. That’s what take-away food is all about. At last, I blurted, we are getting rid of a million little women in a million little kitchens stirring a million little pots. Saint-Simon.

  Then I came up with something else. I told her I thought that children preferred take-away food because they feared poisoning at the hands of basically hostile, frustrated, unliberated mothers. The traditional mother is an anti-mother. They punish their husbands and them selves by punishing the child.

  Why do I ride these unmanageable horses?

  ‘Do you have a theory about everything,’ she asked tiredly.

  In the motel we fought. We fought over the idea of ‘motel sex’ and the miracle of creation.

  ‘I don’t know why but it makes me feel debased – furtive.’

  ‘What you feel,’ I said, to my ex-wife, straining to make our personalities meet in the middle, also our bodies, ‘is that a motel lacks the “ambience of true living”, that
motels contain no personal “detritus”.’

  ‘Yes, you always have a cold word for everything,’ she said, ‘you were always the master of the clinical expression.’

  She sat in what should have been the comfortable relaxing chair for weary travellers. I lay on the vibrator bed. The motel met my every expectation and I thanked it. I had on the musak and the television without sound. The English-language newspapers would be delivered. I could monitor reality. Systematised comfort, cushioned by media.

  I have been in a hundred motel rooms in many countries. I like the morning concourse, bags humping into luggage compartments of dusty cars. The clatter of breakfast trays.

  ‘Have you read the short story called The St Louis Rotary Convention 1923, Recalled,’ I asked. She shook her head and said something about it being a good title.

  ‘In that story a character called Becker sings a song of praise to the motel.’

  ‘We should have stayed with my friend Pieta.’

  ‘I didn’t want to stay with your friend Pieta. I wanted to be alone with you where we could be intimate.’

  ‘A motel room!’ she sneered but it didn’t sneer properly, she was too nice.

  ‘Yes I feel at home in a motel,’ I said.

  ‘We should be with Chris – our child. Your daughter.’

  ‘Your child,’ I said, ‘I fathered her but she is totally your child. For godsake I haven’t seen her since birth.’

  ‘Why don’t you want to be with Chris,’ she said plaintively, tenderly.

  ‘Because I want to be with you. We couldn’t have had sex with her about.’

  ‘Chris is me.’

  ‘Crap.’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand – you’ve become so … it only hides your fear of life, you know. I am not a single person. It is no use getting accustomed to me. I am a combination of myself and my children.’

  ‘Holy Jesus.’

  ‘Why are you so abusive?’

  ‘Breeding is a rapidly depreciating virtue,’ I said.

  ‘Oh I see,’ she said, ‘so having children is – how would you say it? – invalid?’

  ‘Yes, you don’t need children – unless you’re a dairy farmer.’

  ‘How unloving you’ve become – and I think, a little sick.’