The Everlasting Secret Family

by Frank Moorhouse

  My arm would ache tomorrow.

  I remember being pleased that Charles was there holding his chair because it was uncharacteristic of him. He was not a gamesman. He gave a paper once at another conference where he examined the traditional division between those who by temperament liked the contemplative or imaginative life (inner games) and those who were for sports and physical adventure (external games)—the Arties and the Hearties. Charles always said that, like Oscar Wilde, he detested games.

  But he was in the chair game.

  Bisi started it and ended it.

  He called it off. He shouted something like “Wah” and threw the chair into the corner with a flourish.

  The rest shouted “Wah” and threw their chairs with great noise and probably some damage into the corner.

  I was the last to throw. I held my chair for that further half minute and then deliberately threw it.

  I did not say “Wah”.

  I looked across at Bisi.

  “You gave in,” I said, that childhood expression blurting itself out. “Conceded,” I revised, “you conceded.”

  “We Africans know when a thing is at its true end,” he boomed. “Timiza—a sense of proper conclusion. But if it’s challenge you want,” he went on, smiling, “if it’s challenge you want—to the night clubs of this city. Or is there a brothel district to this city? We could have contests of a different nature.”

  There was a clear smiling ambivalence, the friendliness contained in fierceness.

  But it was all too late, we were too far gone.

  “Tomorrow night—the brothel,” I said.

  “Tomorrow the brothel,” Bisi said.

  “You’re on,” I said.

  “Then we shall see, white man,” Bisi grinned.

  I bluffed on, not knowing what the hell we were talking about precisely. In the hallway I said slowly, drunkenly, “White woman or black woman, Bisi?”

  He guffawed, and I guessed that I had made something like a point. He slapped my arm. “Point taken white man,” and we went out into the night with arms around each other’s necks. His grip was just a little tight, I thought. But I staggered on with him across the frosty college lawn without complaint in our two-headed, four-legged race.

  YESTERDAY STONE AGE,

  TODAY SPACE AGE

  She was acidic, late forties, yet not the bitch. She cared for herself physically, dressing in a way that said she wanted to be liked. Her acidity too worked for her wit, although after her witticisms you felt maybe you shouldn’t be laughing.

  “I’ve had just about enough of the silver-winged birds bringing pestilence and plague to the idyllic Pacific islands,” she said in the staff club after the second reading by the islanders and other poets.

  “And didn’t I see somewhere,” she went on, her all-white court of younger male academics smiling, “that they gave us VD.”

  “That was the American Indians,” one of them said. “The American Indians gave Europe venereal disease. Or was it the Aztecs and Montezuma?”

  “Or whatever,” she said, waving her drink.

  One of the Australian poets, Terence Farman, drifted into the bar in his A-line shirt and ethnic sandals—Indian buffalo sandals. He’d recited, not read, his poems that evening because, as he explained, “it’s pre-literate to recite” and “one sets up different timings when one recites”. He’d added mime too, which recalled Sunday School action singing of hymns. “Build on the rock,” we would pound our fists, “and not upon the sand,” and we would open our hands and smooth the sand.

  When Farman joined us the jokes about the coloured delegates stopped. He’d probably been drinking with them and had, in turn, stopped their whitey jokes. There was probably a whole reality from which someone like Farman was excluded because people knew that he was a “life-affirming” poet and would tiresomely take issue, would misunderstand certain styles of humour.

  “You’ve introduced a little show biz into your act,” I said, to help him into the circle.

  “I’m trying to find my way back to pre-literate modes,” he said. “We’ve lost so much.”

  She bit into Terence. “Oh come on, Terence, drop that negritude.”

  “You should try to mix a little, June, you might learn something.”

  In fairness, I think we had all “mixed” but perhaps not as relentlessly as Terence, and mixing, for all its virtue, was not a way of relaxing. Because of difficulties of language, any glimmer of understanding in a conversation was pounced upon, clutched, dwelt upon overlong, for fear of moving on into confusion again. Maybe Terence wanted to become a Writer-in-Residence at the University of the South Pacific.

  She came back at him, unflapped. “My dear, that too is negritude. But that stuff today about Bali, my dear, claiming that they, the Balinese, have no stress, no hangups, are something outside the human condition—that’s pure idealisation, no better than the nineteenth century fiction. The idyllic South Sea islands.”

  “I didn’t quite say that,” Terence began.

  “Oh yes, my dear, but you did—but you tell us what you said.”

  I excused myself, leaving Terence to be eaten.

  As I was returning to my room, slightly boozed, I had a notion of calling on Cindy and deviated along the corridor of the college on the ground floor where the women delegates were. In the corridor I heard what is called a “muffled scream”, or I thought I heard it, and then a smothered “No”. I stopped outside the door from which it was coming. I looked guiltily along the corridor to check that I was alone, and then I eavesdropped to make out the sounds—sexual play? It wasn’t altogether my voyeurism that caused me to pause, there was a panic in the noises.

  I looked at the name on the door and it took me a second or two to recognise the name—“Dr Braughton”. It was Cindy’s room, but I hadn’t, I realised, seen her name before with its doctorate title. And the card on the door misspelled her name.

  Then I heard “Please stop—no!” clearly enough but again smothered at the end, and I heard other low voices over it.

  More than anything it all sounded like a bad radio play.

  I paused and then knocked, saying in a silly responsible voice, “Is everything all right in there?” And then, clearing my throat, I said lightly, “Cindy? Is that you?” My voice, this time, was that of a “visiting friend”.

  I heard male voices now, one saying “Shit!” and another saying something I couldn’t catch. A voice said “Come on” and I heard a window being opened and other movement.

  I rattled the door knob, without trying to open it though, and knocked again. “Cindy, is that you?”

  Cindy’s voice shouted, now unimpeded, “You lousy, stinking, filthy shits.”

  Then she unlocked the door and burst out, in tears.

  She cried in my arms while over her shoulder I saw into her empty room with its open window. We went back into the room, closing the door. Everything seemed drably characteristic of Cindy, cigarette butts, a near-empty flagon of wine, glasses.

  Cindy was barefoot.

  “The bastards,” she said.

  I looked to the open window.

  “What’s been happening?”

  “Those bastards raped me,” she said.

  “No . . .”

  The word “rape” cooled me. I found my impulse was to look at her body. I felt a possessive sense of injury pass through me, a sympathetic physical pang, and then anger that she had allowed herself to be hurt and I held her tightly.

  And then doubt passed across my mind and I wondered if she were using the word loosely or figuratively. But it was no time to ask.

  I sat her down on the bed, my arm around her.

  “They raped me.”

  She appeared unhurt, no clothing torn. But I saw her panties at the end of the bed.

  “Who?” I asked, uncertain whether I should ask.

  She said it again in a high pitch. “Those bastards raped me,” with near-hysterical emphasis on the word.

&n
bsp; “Who, Cindy?”

  She looked at me then as if I were a stranger, an unaccountable appearance.

  “Okot p’Bitek,” she said, not as an answer but as a reference to something, an undirected utterance. She laughed, brokenly.

  “‘When a girl moves away from the protective confines of her family and village she is defenceless’.” She laughed again in the same way.

  She had an alcoholic slur.

  I remembered now. Okot p’Bitek was an East African writer. There’d been a paper on his work.

  “‘Let no one uproot the pumpkin in the old homestead’,” she said and then gave out a defeated, “Shit!”

  She reached for a packet of cigarettes. “Shit, shit, shit!” “You were raped?”

  “Yes—I was raped.”

  But who?

  “Do you need a doctor, sedative—what?”

  “No, I’m not bleeding,” she said in a sober way, “or at least I don’t think so,” and she put a hand up her skirt and felt herself. “No,” she said, “it was relatively painless except for the ego.”

  She laughed in the distressed way of before. “I always thought—I had these elaborate scenarios—dark lanes. I had these elaborate coping techniques.”

  “Do you want a drink?”

  “Yes—no, I don’t want anything.”

  I wanted to ask again who had raped her but felt restrained.

  “What are you going to do?” “And when I least expected it—maybe I was courting it—maybe that’s what happened, maybe I manipulated the thing to happen—I suppose that’s what the male system would have us always say.”

  “Your hands are ice cold.”

  “I may as well tell you, but it will have to remain between us . . . no—I won’t tell you. What’s the use.”

  I felt a craving to know. Was he—they?—conference people? I craved the scandal.

  “I know,” she said in a low voice, “I do want something.” She laughed, in the same low, desperate way. “Middle-class girl—I want a long, hot bath.”

  She shivered against me.

  “There aren’t any baths.”

  “And I’m not staying on here. I have to go. To a motel. I have to go.”

  She stood.

  “I’ll ring—I’ll get a cab,” I said.

  “Think!” she said to herself loudly, banging her head on her hand. “Think!” And then she began to cry again.

  She sat down.

  “I’ll go ring now.”

  “I’m not staying here. I’ll come—we’ll walk to the city.”

  “It’s too far, Cindy. I’ll get a taxi.”

  “No—have to go.” She began to gather things in a hurried way. “We’ll walk.”

  “It’s too far, it must be three miles. I don’t know how many miles.”

  I got her to calm down and she came with me to the telephone, then we went back to her room and she put her things into a bag and we made distracted, broken, waiting-for-a-taxi conversation on the steps of the college.

  “It’s one way to become instantly sober,” she said as we sat there, “must remember that.” And then she said, “And shit—I’m not on the pill.”

  At the motel I made tea and she asked for a brandy. I went down to the cocktail bar and came back with a bottle (for which I paid a tremendous mark-up). I poured her some and took it to her in the bathroom.

  “Thank you.”

  She put it on the edge of the bath untouched.

  “Please—one more thing—get rid of those for me.” She gestured at the panties on the floor.

  I didn’t at first comprehend, but then I picked them up, leaving her soaking in the bath, eyes closed.

  I wrapped them in the paper bag from the brandy bottle, thought of putting them in the waste bin in the room but thought the parcel would draw attention to itself. I went out of the room and down into the street and put them in a street garbage bin.

  I came back to the room, sipped brandy, and waited for her to finish her bath.

  I read the motel information folder. Looked into a book on historiography I found among Cindy’s things.

  “You mustn’t tell,” she said coming out from the bathroom, a towel around her wet hair, a cigarette, a second towel around her body to above the breasts. “You must swear that it doesn’t go from this room.” The second towel would have been mine.

  She hadn’t touched the brandy which she put down beside the bed.

  She sat up on the bed with her back to the bedhead.

  “Oh I feel clean,” she said. “The middle-class solution to everything—the hot bath.”

  She rubbed her wrist. “I’ve hurt my wrist, somewhere in it all.”

  “I already carry a lot of your secrets,” I said, bringing her back to the point.

  “Well,” she took a deep breath, “it was the three aboriginal guys—the Redfern Delegation. The bastards.”

  “Shit!”

  Actually they were not from Redfern but that was the conference nickname. I knew whom she meant.

  “The full story: we’d been drinking down at the pub and we came back to my room—at my suggestion—and drank the inevitable flagon and then it all began to happen, unlike any rape scenario I had. They actually held me down.”

  She asked for some tea.

  Why had she taken them to her room? Why not the college lounge?

  “Christ,” I said, “why did you go to your room?”

  “I knew them!” she said. “I worked with the bastards at the Centre last year. And anyhow, why shouldn’t I take people to my room?”

  “I can see your problem.”

  “What problem?” she snapped.

  “About doing anything about it.”

  “Christ, I wouldn’t bring the police into it, if that’s what you mean. My problems are, I mean, it’s the coping with tomorrow.”

  “They might leave—out of fear that you would call the police.”

  The disturbed laughter again, almost as if she were being sick. “It’s a classic textbook dilemma,” she said, “if you look at it—feminism and racism. Shit no, I couldn’t bring in the police, not after what we did to the aboriginals for two centuries.”

  “Other times, other mores. We didn’t do it to them.”

  “Oh shut up, you’re not entitled to an opinion.”

  “I wasn’t seriously arguing, I was just talking.”

  She was off in her own thoughts, turned away from me.

  “I know nothing of the race thing, really,” I said.

  “You’re an aversive racist.”

  She didn’t say it condemningly, she said it academically. I didn’t know what she meant but didn’t think it was the time to talk theoretically about race or, more particularly, about me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, turning back to me with a small smile and then going on. “I was even warned—this was a danger for nice girls who mixed with drunken, resentful, angry aboriginal men. I was even warned by another woman, an anthropologist, and I thought, and I thought she was full of racist rape fantasies.”

  She laughed, as if sick, and went back into silence.

  “At least I feel clean.”

  She asked me if I’d bolted the door. I asked her again if she would like a doctor.

  “No I just want to . . . I don’t want to repress it, with drugs or with booze. I don’t want to lose it that way. I have to live through it and out the other side. As quickly as possible preferably.”

  “We could take some private action—get someone like Harvey to heavy them. Street justice.”

  “You’ll have me a racist soon. I even find it tempting.”

  I saw no other way. Maybe we could turn the problem over to the black community, but when I looked across to suggest this to her I saw that she had dozed, cigarette burning in her hand.

  When I took it from her, she did not stir. I unturbaned the towel from her hair and she woke then, but allowed herself to be put to bed. Her damp hair was tight to her head on the pillow. I had slept
beside her when she was seventeen or so—fifteen years ago. I pulled up the blanket and she slid down into the bed.

  I remembered a time when we’d lived together back then and had heard a baby crying in the house across the road and it had gone on screaming for an hour or more and we wondered if we should go and see if the baby was in trouble. We had decided it was not our business. She had a daughter of her own now. Sophia—maybe six or seven years old.

  We hadn’t known much about babies or baby’s crying then. Or about anything.

  I got into the other bed. Seeing her body after the years did not excite me. I had a confusion of feelings about her: concern, and still the annoyance with her for having let this happen. And also the inconvenience of friendship. I would probably offer to go, to leave the conference with her tomorrow if she wanted, and to go home.

  But it seemed too that something had to happen after this, something had to follow from this . . . crime. I could not feel that it was all over. Maybe I had an urge for retribution. It couldn’t just happen that she could be raped and that this could be locked in the memories of the five of us or that it could be finished by a hot bath.

  But then I guessed that that was what was going to happen. It would be pushed away by the shuffling queue of human events. A crime recorded in five minds, wondered about by those minds, and left at that.

  STOCKHOLM SYNDROME?

  In the motel I awoke first and looked across at Cindy—it was fifteen years since we’d slept together. Now, again, sleeping at least in the same room. She had the sleeping posture of a secure small girl, which belied the personal, day-by-day disarray which she seemed to ferment in her life. And I looked at her and said to myself, “And now she has been raped by three aboriginal men.”

  The brandy remained untouched beside her bed.

  Did we really once love? When she was seventeen (or whatever her age had been—she had so often played about with her age then, and since).

  I was relieved that there was no desire left now which could lead me back into that operatic anguish of neurotic love.

  We had, though, bought each other perfectly appropriate gifts when we’d been together. Unlike some other miserable moments of truth with other people at other times, of gaping apartness revealed by the gifts given, and received.