Tales of Mystery and Romance

by Frank Moorhouse

  I don’t think she was picking and choosing the pieces from the notebook – just reading them as they came.

  … he felt he lived his life in a roar of thoughts. He sometimes became weak, physically, with the implications, correlations, hinted interpretations, linkages between ideas, which passed through his mental life, especially those just beyond his intellectual grasp, or beyond the available accommodation in his mind. They became a passing flash, someone passing by the window, a direction which had to be let go because he did not have the time to follow up. These things, along with a high consciousness of his own ignorance, excited him rather than demoralised him because he could now ‘imagine’ the knowledge which could be found, and brought to bear, on an intriguing phenomenon. He knew now the ‘types’ of remarkable information and ‘types’ of insights which were almost inevitably available if you knew where to look, which wasn’t hard, and had the time, the energy, the life. He enjoyed, in a trembling way, in a wistful way, the unsighted, the not unravelled, the regretfully unpursued line of thought ….

  ‘Do you consider yourself an intellectual then – yes, I suppose you do,’ she said, ‘I suppose you always have.’

  ‘The new Australian style is not to be frightened of calling yourself an intellectual or an artist. Australians weren’t allowed to once.’

  ‘It still sounds arrogant to me.’

  ‘I think I’m something else.’

  … some people, my friends, are so unsure of the world, and distrustful of it, that they become daily paranoid about waiters, bills, taxi drivers, who they fear go the wrong way, telephones they think are tapped. Waiters who ignore them, cheat them, oysters which have been put into shells out of bottles. They feel through much of their life that they are being cheated, betrayed, ignored, spurned, spied upon.

  Perhaps we all are …

  … you should never tell the truth to someone who will get it wrong. Bad neurotics are bad listeners. They hear only parts, and they re construct, rearrange, according to their own broken code of sense. Also people who are not verbal – they take in so little, so badly. Some people, consequently, are permanently excluded from complicated reality, or information. Others are protected from information. Mothers for instance. We all protect ourselves, of course, one way or another …

  … the distortion of information by fictional suction. Underlying our use of information is this strong suction towards fictionalisation. The attention of the audience, the reporter’s expectations, the audience expectations even in conversation, drag you away from the complicated, ragged reality, from say, pointlessness, away from stray and unrelated material towards a distorting order, a distorting sensationalism. There is an under-tow towards communal pre-occupations, superstitions, supposition, amusing fallacy, terrifying nonsense, the pretence of disaster (news papers). Gossip and conversation also. All retelling of events. There is a minimal requirement of testable reality. This is coupled to communal humbug. All the time we drag the information and facts towards humbug and sensationalism …

  … R lives that ad hoc life, goes on some personal, unexamined mash of guidelines – disgustingly conventional – some simplistically progressive. But I guess it works for her. Maybe I’ve been lucky (unlucky?) the next move makes itself plain and clear. Towards what end though …?

  ‘That’s me – that R is me, again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that really how you see me? How would you know. After all these years, you haven’t seen me for years.’

  ‘It was how I saw you.’

  ‘How insulting. Damnable.’

  ‘I didn’t ask or expect you to read it.’

  From vanity, I had been interested in hearing my ‘thoughts’. I had forgotten that they might be offensive to her. I don’t even know if I believed the ‘thoughts’ any more. I went over and pulled the book away from her but she held on to it.

  ‘Wait,’ she said, ‘let me finish. I think I have the right.’

  … inventions – a small company to manufacture bright ideas …

  She read this with a rising shriek.

  ‘You’re joking!’ She looked at me. Then she read on.

  … say a wrist counter attached to the watch to count drinks, exercises, calories, small calculations. To record temporarily a telephone number.

  (3) a way of inflating a flat tyre by ‘borrowing’ pressure from the other three?…

  ‘You’re becoming like your father.’

  ‘Here, give me the book.’

  ‘No one last thing – hey, yes, let me read this!!!’

  … why did he christen his female persona Jane Simkin. Why Simkin. Is it ‘symptom’. Or Sin + kin – a family sin or a sin against family, sin with relative – mother. Inner incest. Auto-incest. Sim is ‘Miss’ spelt backwards. Miss. Mis + kin – wrongly related? Wrongly related to self? To the male in him. Wrongly related to his own male ness. Miss = single woman + kin (family)…

  ‘Please give me the book.’

  ‘What in god’s name is that all about?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it. It’s a private game. I’d forgotten it was there. It’s all years old.’

  ‘What? When you lived with me. Did you think you were a woman?’

  ‘Look, I have to go now. I’m going to try for an evening flight. Send that port by air, not by sea. By air.’

  I put the book away.

  ‘What a note to end on. Before you go out in that, out of my life like this in that stupid hat – may I summarise your behaviour?’

  ‘It’s a Breton cap.’

  She stood there in her towelling bathrobe, hood fallen back and, like a school mam, tapping her palm with a finger, she listed the following, while I went about zipping my travelling bag and checking my papers, money.

  ‘One – you arrive on a day’s notice after an absence of seven years. Two – you spend an hour with me, mainly insulting me, and then sneak of out of the motel room without telling me and yet return again, the next day. Three – you refuse to see your daughter. Four – you insist on sleeping with me. You beg me to sleep with you – psychologically blackmail me. Five – you order an expensive crate of port. Six – an international cablegram arrives for you from some dirty little homosexual telling you he never wants to see you again in his life. Seven – I read in your notebook that you think you’re a woman. Thought you were a woman when you were married to me. If I understand it. Eight – you leave me again, after sleeping with me, having spent less than forty-eight hours in Portugal. Nine – your last words to me are ‘send the port air freight’. Is this what happened? Pinch me. You have moved to the very edge of the real world. You are at the very edge. Do you know that???’

  MILTON TURNS AGAINST CHAMPAGNE

  Since I have returned from Portugal Milton has been avoiding me.

  I turn corners to see his leg disappearing over a fence at the end of an alley. I see people resembling Milton who have on false moustaches. I once approached him but he denied he was ‘Milton’ and said he was always being mistaken for ‘this Milton’. As I went morosely away I heard him and his new friends blurting with laughter at their own superiority and at my consternation.

  I went to his university room and I knocked and he said, ‘Who’s there?’

  I said, ‘Me.’

  ‘Go away,’ he said.

  ‘Is it because I don’t believe in the lower astral? Because I have no mimpathy or something?’

  ‘You embarrass me – go away.’

  ‘How do I embarrass you?’

  ‘You ask questions like that.’

  ‘I’ll drop the camp stuff. Stay outside your body space.’

  ‘Go away, please.’

  I said, ‘Alright’. But I stayed there hoping he’d come to the door to look to see if I’d gone.

  ‘I know you’re still there – go away,’ he said.

  How could I believe in the lower astral? My mysticism was that of the Low Church of England. I knew about the ‘holy ghost’ but even th
at got low credibility in Concord. Baptised in the name of the Father, confirmed in a dry-cleaned suit with girls in white dresses carrying ice-cream white prayer books. Attended Sunday schools smelling of cot death and double-decker bus fumes but never felt the Holy Spirit.

  ‘Go away, please, I have a class in here, I have a tutorial going on in here.’

  ‘They’re welcome – everything up front. Is it my bushmanship you envy?’

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘Is it my survival skill – my stealthy ease in the wilds?’

  There were titters from the students. I congratulated myself with a smile, but a gimcrack smile. Flavourless. There was no point. I went away and when I reached the bottom of the wide oak stairs I heard Milton’s voice saying, pleadingly, ‘Go away, please, I know you’re still there.’ But there was no amused supremacy for me in knowing that his intuition was faulty.

  I went by the room of the Jack Kerouac Wake. I went in, smelled the wax polish and ran my hands along the chairs which had waited once for our presence and our mourning, ‘Bye, bye, Jack, see you soon’, had been my valediction. But we bungled his death.

  Milton once told me he hungered for a Great Friendship or probably what he meant was a Friendship with the Great. You know, where the letters are later published and people in their memoirs recall luncheons which sat spellbound while the two friends shared in witty wisdom (and whose collaboration almost resulted in the downfall of the Baldwin cabinet). And where in an autobiography one of them would write ‘… of all the aspects of my friendship with him, I think I value most those slow, contemplative walks through dusk-softened Hyde Park, those long letters written at breakneck speed to keep abreast of the thoughts – sometimes up to three letters a week – and the last words of the night over port before retiring when he and I would make our personal summation for that day.’ Living together in a peaceful country house with its quiet library and study.

  Well, Milton hungered for this.

  At least, he hungered for it once. Now he was after another Life Style.

  Towards this end, he had written the scenario of a dramatically broken Great Friendship which would provoke speculation for many years after. This was to be his manoeuvre with destiny and legend. The sort of broken friendship about which it is written ‘ … who can say whether the Baldwin government would have survived had these two minds worked in tandem. But this will be for the speculation of history. After that one swift, savage retort they never spoke again. Milton stood up, wiped his mouth deliberately with a crisp white napkin, and left the room without a further word. People further down the table turned to each other and said urgently, ‘What did he say?’ After that dinner, Milton and he went their separate ways. The words of the retort are now, of course, legendary. What course would this nation have taken had it not been for that regrettable, swift, savage retort? Young people who have met them both in later years find it impossible to believe, let alone visualise, that these two embittered old men, each living alone and lonely in their great country houses, could have once held hands in public, drank their champagne from the common silver goblet, in the abandoned and desperate gaiety of those permissive times.’

  I realised I was still standing in the room where the Wake for Jack Kerouac had been ‘held’. I remembered learning the catechism.

  What is your name? N or M.

  M represents double N (?) which is an abbreviation for the word ‘names’. Doubling an abbreviation is a common way of indicating a plural???

  I was eight when I was first told this. It was the first recoil I had from ‘belief’ in the holy spirit. This linguistic mumbo jumbo gave me my first hint that I was being launched on a long journey of mumbo jumbo.

  I became more interested in the expression ‘manifold sins and wickedness’, carnality, and pleasures of the flesh.

  I said, there to the empty room, that maybe we were trying to find something spiritual in the corpse of Jack Kerouac. Looking for a sign that there was something ‘other’ behind the reality. I was baptised when my godfather and godmother made me a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven. It hasn’t done me much good.

  To be truly evil, to be a devil, requires an interesting type of courage. A devil has to believe in Christianity and accept the Divine Majesty of Christ and then have the courage to defy God. I am not a believer and cannot qualify as a devil.

  I have, however, forfeited normality.

  When you turn away from convention, further from the expectations of family and your first childhood friends, those expectations which lay out, landscape, our direction in life, which glue us together as a ‘person’ so that we know what we are ‘supposed to do’ and ‘to be’, you find that the land becomes bare, directions indistinct, and the paths and their turnings of no consequence one way or another, not one more imperative than another, only passivity is left, nothing much happens, except quandary. A cold quandary blows permanently on the moors of abnormality. The cheery lighted house of normality is a distant stage-set.

  It’s harder even to find one’s way back to the story.

  Why didn’t I get the education that T. S. Eliot got?

  Would I then have qualified for that sort of friendship which Milton craved and would I have then been mentioned in memoirs this way, ‘he was not only a dazzling raconteur, a sublime conversationalist, but also a man of immense social sophistication, behind which lay a profound learning. There was hardly a subject of contemporary interest which he did not grasp sufficiently to qualify him for the conversation and respect of the authorities in many separate disciplines.’

  But then, on the other hand, I would have liked to have gone to a high school in the US with flash cars, jitterbugging, dating, sloppy joes with numbers on them.

  I had a childhood of competitive sport, meccano and bushcraft. And English Boys Annuals.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Milton said from behind me. ‘Why are you talking to yourself?’

  ‘You cannot escape the holy chrism – that oily anointment,’ I solemnly said, turning to meet him, referring to our nights in bed together.

  ‘I heard you saying that, I stood at the door and heard everything you said. Are you freaking out?’

  ‘I was evoking the spirit of the place,’ I said offhandedly.

  ‘I thought that this is where I’d find you,’ Milton said, ‘Why do you keep coming back here, to this room?’

  ‘I was, in fact, supposed to meet someone here,’ I said. ‘Vivian Smith, he wanted to know in which room it was we held the Wake. He was impressed with that.’

  ‘We didn’t.’

  ‘Weren’t you at it?’

  ‘I don’t play that game any more,’ Milton said, ‘can’t you tell when a thing is exhausted?’

  He was disowning, now, our make-believe world, our fiction.

  We walked through the dusk. The nylon shorted runners were on the oval. New runners every year running the same distances after the same trophies.

  Milton talked to me in his new quiet way. ‘You don’t truly play – you only play because you fear that too much work will make you a dull boy, you don’t play for play’s sake.’

  Maybe the playing fields had suggested this theme to Milton.

  ‘Let me elaborate on the cable I sent to Portugal,’ he said.

  ‘Please do,’ I said sensibly.

  ‘It’s your ebullient negativism – the way you charge through everything – your clumsy energy. That’s what we don’t like.’

  ‘Anything else?’ I inquired, thinking that maybe I could do something about that.

  ‘You don’t relate – you impose – you impose and shape the whole mood for those around you. You and your search for volupté.’

  ‘Is that why people won’t come to my parties?’

  ‘To be brutal – yes. All the expensive seafood and Kentucky Fried Chicken in the world won’t get people to your parties. And another thing – you alone like Kentucky Fried Chicken.’

 
‘The People like it.’

  We paused then at the running track, leaning on the rail in the dark-green Sydney dusk. Not as dark as Melbourne. I searched around for something impressively insightful to say about ‘the runner’ or ‘the dusk’ but came up with nothing much. No trinket of wisdom or wit to give to Milton.

  I was going to say that the runners change but the trophies go on forever. Worn-out generations of gasping runners.

  ‘And about your generosity,’ Milton said, moving on to what I thought was one of my strong points, ‘you make people feel ungenerous by all that unnecessary giving. Keeping a list of everyone’s birthday. Doing little things for people and not expecting thanks, or repayment. It just makes people around you feel self-centred and mean. You do it too systematically, too sensitively, your sense of timing is too perfect. It just makes people feel bad.’

  ‘That’s what I call poetic injustice.’

  ‘Look around you,’ he said, and I did, and he exasperatedly said, ‘no, I mean around your scene – not the oval – hasn’t it come home to you. Haven’t you noticed we are all into a different trip now. It isn’t champagne breakfasts. It’s not watching the rosy fingers of dawn at the Taxi Club. It isn’t throwing people into swimming pools, it isn’t expensive dinners and mock speeches, and it isn’t going to ethnic night clubs and joining in the handkerchief dance, having your photograph taken with the belly dancer1, putting dollar notes down the crevice of her breast, it isn’t getting your photograph in the newspapers wearing a cowboy hat, it isn’t appearing in public places in drag, it isn’t being seen arm-in-arm with two negresses in New Orleans. Oh you know what I mean, the scene has changed. And look at your age.’

  Listening carefully to what he said, I replied, ‘You make it sound first class. The long years of penury have led me into wild excesses. Like Raphael de Valentin, I have dreamed of a life on a princely scale and now I can make the dream come true. My bills for champagne alone are enormous. Under the influence of Eugène Sue I see myself as a dandy, for I have a horror of the solemn imbecilities indulged in by the English with their much vaunted sang froid. I suppose you are troubled by my white house gowns with gold tasselled girdles?’