The Everlasting Secret Family

by Frank Moorhouse

  As they fanned out and penetrated, the distance between the searchers widened. Irving, never one for the bush, regretted the growing distance between himself and the others but limped and lunged onwards.

  He carried no water although he had seen the others with water bottles. For Irving these efforts always became a punishment. He always came out badly from them, cut a finger, had his nose burned by the sun. Although there was civic virtue to it, he this time felt some unreasonable guilt about the disappearance of the boy, which, sanely speaking, had nothing to do with him at all. He did not know the boy.

  He supposed that the feeling of guilt, complicity, came from his law-flouting soul, his private affronts to the prudery of the town. But more than that, he supposed, it showed that the punishing conscience did not work by rules of reason or fairness or sanity.

  His conscience was very likely insane.

  The bush gave him easy going and then hard going, the way it always was for him in the bush. As though there were palisades to overcome and then clearings. He was a man of the town, more precisely, he felt, a man of the cinema. He did not these days go far from the cinema unless to the city to visit, say, a night club. He was a citizen of Pacific City in his heart, a city which was pegged out but not yet built.

  The cinema was built facing Pacific City. Pacific City awaited the rail link with the capital and then the building would commence, the cathedral, airports, colleges, museums and street cafes.

  It would be a pleasure city like Baden or Nice.

  He’d been given a scout whistle on which to blow three long blasts if the boy was found. He resisted having anything to do with the boy scouts in the town, he did not like the constant lining up of boys in rows.

  Resting briefly, he was visited by a grim pantomime. He saw a bone-white skull. He struck it from his mind. He then said to himself—no, look at this pantomime, face it, and he invited it back into his mind. The white skull obediently reappeared. It was a skull of the boy. He saw then the dancing naked body of the boy with its large penis. But the skull remained stripped of flesh and skin, dried white. It was a grim vision. Irving gritted himself and forced his concentration to it until it faded, exhausted of its vividness and therefore, too, its ugliness. It carried no message to Irving. He said to himself that it was an example of the illegality of the imagination. He had not authorised this vision and he did not understand it to mean that the boy was dead. He had not conjured this vision. It was the mind doing things without permission. He put it down, in part, to the irritation that he was feeling about the boy being lost. For the lost boy causing him to be there in the adamant bush, for the scratching he was getting, and the dehydration of it out there in the bush.

  He squeezed damp moss and wet his brow and lips..

  There was no malice behind the grim visitation. He, while allowing it to fade, felt that it did not truly belong to his personality or relate in any way to his impulses. Not that he was unable to follow suggestions put to him by his imagination, indeed he frequently did. He allowed his imagination leadership—as far as the wretched coastal town and its prying allowed.

  Bellbirds could send you demented, too, the incessant single note. Spotted gums, too, in time. He pushed on.

  Maybe his appearance would frighten the boy, should he find him, dressed as he was in glare glasses, knee boots and white overalls with the name of the cinema woven in red across the back.

  Was the imagination just a screen upon which any old show came up?

  He struggled on.

  He would raise this with the Doctor.

  He almost didn’t see the boy because he didn’t expect himself, Irving, to be the one to find the boy. He almost walked on him, asleep there in a wide-mouthed cave. The boy, about twelve, awoke.

  He held on to Irving desperately, saying that he was lost. Irving said a comforting word and then remembered to give three long blasts on the whistle after finding enough spittle to blow it.

  The three blasts were then taken up by searchers far and wide.

  Irving and the boy walked back through the bush on what Irving hoped was the “reverse bearing”, and for the last part of the return home they fell into silence.

  Irving promised the boy a free ticket.

  They broke into the clearing and walked back to the house as the other searchers straggled out of the bush.

  Irving was congratulated at the house. “Good on you,” they said.

  The father then gave the boy a hiding with a leather harness strap to teach him not to waste people’s time, until the mother stopped it.

  Irving couldn’t bear to watch the beating and the searchers generally went away quickly, gulping down the black tea and leaving uneaten the home-made bread and lemon-butter.

  The wailing of the flayed child started again as Irving and the Doctor got into the car, and the slap of the harness leather could be heard again.

  “You’re something of a hero, Irving,” Trenbow said as they jolted away in the car, “but I suppose it is mostly a question of luck in a search.”

  “It is not judgement nor brain power,” Irving agreed.

  The Harvey brothers sat silent with their arms folded and Irving remembered that they had found two lost children in the last year. He would have been happy for them to have found this one too. This sort of glory didn’t give Irving much.

  “Maybe it is a matter of knowing where to look if you know how,” he threw in for their sakes.

  “You can sometimes tell where a kid might have gone, where a kid would go,” said a Harvey brother.

  He himself had had enough of children that week. Enough. He wanted to get away from them.

  “The boy might well have wanted to be lost with a father like that,” said the Doctor.

  The boy was lost again within the month and this time was not found.

  Irving recalled at the time of this news the Doctor’s sadly true surmise, and the boy’s vigorous, clinging body.

  THE SCIENCE CLUB MEETS

  There was no Institute of Sciences in the town yet, so the Science Club, pending the building of an Institute, met in the School of Arts. The School of Arts housed also des Essenietes Academy of Dance, which, because no one could pronounce it, was called “Saints Academy of Dance”. The School of Arts library of mysteries, romances, detection and mysticism also looked after the Science Club’s journals—Popular Mechanics, National Geographies and the Model Engineer.

  The Science Club had on a number of occasions protested about their journals being alongside two books on the harmony of the spheres. The club had labelled theories about the harmony of the spheres as unscientific, but the School of Arts Trustees had ignored the protests, replying that the “placement of the books on harmony of the spheres was outside the prerogative of the Science Club”.

  Irving Bow went up the steps of the School of Arts filled with misgivings. He was to give a talk on cinema called “The Illusion of Life” to the club. He did not wish to share his secrets with them. A dilatory member of the club at best, he had never felt it to be his type of club. Too much the odour of model engine grease and of chemicals from Experiment Night. The Doctor, however, belonged, and had dragged him along. The club was really run by McDowell and his confrere Tutman, who were both filled with ideas for patent inventions and grand schemes for new devices from which nothing seemed to come.

  The club possessed a human embryo in a bottle which was entrusted to the Doctor, who usually forgot to bring it. The embryo was at least, Irving thought, inspirational and caused stranger thoughts in his head than the usual, if that was something in its favour. The history of the embryo was vague but it had been snaffled by someone for the club before it had reached the hospital furnace. It was undoubtedly one of the town’s illegitimate children.

  The club had many rocks labelled with auctioneers’ labels, probably wrongly, and a small phial of supposed gold dust, which Eric Pilk from the Bank of NSW took home with him and put in the vault and always remembered to bring. Each year
in the club’s balance sheet the increase in the value of the “gold” was noted. The club had a replica of the Tynmouth fishing trawler “Alice” in a glass case which the Englishman Thompson sometimes brought to the meeting for no good reason.

  In a hessian bag the club also had the stones which once formed a sacred aboriginal ceremonial circle.

  Irving entered the meeting room and found the Fellows gathered around a dead two-headed calf brought in from one of the farms. At least it wasn’t the Tynmouth fishing trawler “Alice” again.

  The Doctor was there, a little under the weather, probing the calf with forceps.

  McDowell was in the middle of things and seemed to Irving to be searching its pockets.

  “Guest of honour,” the Doctor said, glancing up from the dead calf.

  “I shouldn’t be giving this talk,” Irving complained. “I shouldn’t be telling you people the secrets.”

  “By jove,” George McDowell said, “I’ve had an idea.” He turned brightly from the two-headed calf, wiping his hands. “If we all had home projectors—why, we could pass the film over the fence to each other when we’d finished.”

  Irving scowled at McDowell. “I thought we were all businessmen together,” Irving said, putting down his things. “Anyhow, illuminants and optics are too complicated for the home.”

  “We are not businessmen after we enter this room,” McDowell said seriously. “We are dedicated to the pursuit of scientific verity once we enter here.”

  His projectionist and offsider from the cinema arrived with the auxiliary projector and electrical storage batteries, grumbling as they lugged it all into the room.

  The Science Club Fellows, inventors, modellers, amateur botanists and anatomists, experts on magnetism and clockwork, left the two-headed calf to come over to the projector, poking and tapping at it with pocket screwdrivers from breast pockets, measuring it with micrometers.

  “Careful with that,” Irving called unhappily.

  It had shown some curious films, the Hummel projector. Irving used it for his private screenings and the Doctor himself had watched Passion’s Slave twice now without comment, sitting alone in the dark of the cinema.

  When it was all boiled down, the Doctor and he were the only real sybarites in the town. Although it was true that Backhouse, the editor, had an imported book of nudes.

  The rocks always arrived. Pilk announced that the rocks were present. Who cared about the rocks and specks of gold dust? If it were gold dust.

  The Horticultural Society shared the room with the Science Club and had left some blooms in the corner, which were now dead brown and resting in fouled water. McDowell was attaching a note to the flowers requesting their removal and that the room should be left the way it was found.

  Irving shook his head at McDowell and sat down with the Doctor, who breathed whisky over him.

  “I have a profound affection for that projector,” the Doctor said. “We must have another screening shortly of that film?”

  “Passion’s Slave.”

  “Yes.”

  Here they were in this small south-coast municipality, with its incessant hammering and whine, day in and day out, of the sawmill and smell of the sap of sawn green timber and sawdust blown into everyone’s eyes, meeting in the pursuit of scientific truth.

  Irving shook his head to himself.

  An argument had broken out over something among the modellers, who, it was argued, did not rightly belong in the Science Club and should have their own society, their own president and vice-presidents, secretary, treasurer, minute secretary, returning officer, meeting night and patrons. But there were insufficient people already to go around the various clubs, organisations, societies, leagues and committees.

  “I may be pardoned for a desire to see a petrol boat doing it and when I asked Harry if he were a member of SMAE I meant to infer that he required his motor for aero work where air cooling is amply justified.”

  “No, Mr Evans, I do not want a display model, it is a fool’s idea and fit only for a glass case. If I did, I should not have a triangular head and Guy valve gear, would I? And we shall see about air cooling.”

  “Oh, Westbury, fill your pipe and take the Chair.”

  Irving was a bit that way inclined—that the modellers should have their own set-up, insofar as he cared. The subscription to the Model Engineer was a drain on the Science Club, costing annually twenty-one shillings and sixpence.

  The Science Club had at least two rules—nothing was to be attributed to the causation of magic, and the origin of the species and the origin of the earth were not to be discussed further until new information was available from London or the Continent. The latter subject had generated heat and threatened resignations, and someone’s tie had been yanked.

  The meeting quietened and Irving commenced his talk, looking directly at the two-headed calf lying at the back of the room. “A private cinematograph can bring strangers into your home . . .”he began, and the Doctor gave him a broad wink, “. . . these strangers can talk to each other and can talk to you, they can dance and sing, although we cannot yet hear them, that will come. They cannot hear us—something cinema audiences in this town do not yet understand and persist in hissing and booing.”

  The Science Club chuckled and sucked on its pipes comfortably.

  Irving went on to talk of illuminants and optics, saying, “For showing of lantern slides the lamp house slides across to the stand to come into line with the slide lens. I prefer not to call it a ‘magic’ lantern.”

  “Hear, hear.”

  “What focal length?” someone asked.

  Irving toyed with not telling. “The lantern slide lens should have four times the focal length of the cinema lens.”

  Then, to discourage them from going into home projection, he stressed to them the high fire risk.

  “Place an inch of film in the gate of a projector and leave it there with the lamp turned on and you will see how quickly it burns and how fiercely. If fire breaks out in the gate you must have scissors ready to cut the film top of the spool and at the bottom. Don’t bother with sand or water. Throw a blanket over the whole thing, thus smothering the flames.”

  And run, he said to himself.

  He wished they’d put a blanket over the two-headed calf.

  He told them that, unlike Scribner, he did not think that cinema would eventually “bring all the arts together in one new art and so supersede all other arts”.

  There was a vote of thanks and the secretary then announced that the Institute of Patentees would hold their International Exhibition of Inventions from October 22, inclusive, 1927, in the Central Hall, Westminster, London. A scheme, he announced, had been worked out to enable members who exhibited to insure their models at a special low rate per cent.

  “To date,” the secretary said, “the news from the organisers in London is that improvements in umbrellas was a popular category.”

  Chuckles from the Fellows.

  McDowell and Tutman had sent off an invention involving a magnetic attachment for the mudguards of motor cars run by the car magneto, which picked up nails and horse shoes which could puncture a pneumatic tyre.

  Nothing would come of that either.

  The librarian said that a new book had been received into the library on behalf of the Science Club titled “Geschichte der Atomistik”. The librarian said it with careful, rehearsed pronunciation, emphasising each syllable.

  The club pondered this.

  “It’s in German,” someone said knowledgeably.

  “Yes,” said the librarian.

  “Oh, then we must have it,” said Irving.

  “I take it that you’re being sarcastic,” said the librarian.

  “Is it a gift?” someone asked.

  “Yes, from Mrs Holdstein.”

  “Move we accept it.”

  “Seconded.”

  On Library Night once a month, to which Irving did not go, all those who wished to borrow turned up and the pe
rson who’d had first choice last month had last choice this month, unless it were a two-volumed work. A book inspector checked the returned books for torn pages and tea stains, and fined people for lateness and other offences such as bending the binding of the book back too far or turning over a corner to mark a page. Irving couldn’t stand the hanging about on Library Nights.

  “Oh, and another thing,” said the secretary. “I have a short summary of a talk given to the Institute of Patentees in London by A. Rynder, the letter arrived from London only today. If anyone is interested?”

  “Let’s hear it,” said McDowell, conscientious as ever.

  “What about the smell of the calf,” Irving said, wanting to get home early and have a whisky.

  “It won’t take long,” the secretary said. “I’ll keep it short. A curious fact brought out in the course of the lecture was that there are practically no bicycles in the United States as the workers do not ride them as in England. Consequently, inventions related to improvements in bicycles are not a good prospect.”

  The secretary ran his eyes down the communication from London and ended up saying, “Our correspondent says that little groups of patentees were still discussing points from the lecture among themselves on the stairs well after the close of the meeting.”

  The secretary looked up. “That’s all.”

  They sat there in silence, wanting so badly to have been among the small groups of patentees who gathered on the musty but well-polished stairs of the Institute in Westminster, the portraits of Faraday, Edison, Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunei on the walls, the gas lights being turned out by the caretakers who told them to hurry along as they talked excitedly about Rynder’s talk and spilled out into the spring air, pulling on their caps, going then maybe to a comfortable English public house for a pint, each giving guarded information about his latest theory, invention or calculation.

  McDowell broke the wistful silence by moving in a quiet voice that the report of the Institute of Patentees be received.

  The eleven men present raised their hands and formally received the report.