The Everlasting Secret Family

by Frank Moorhouse

  I felt it in my stomach as I leaned against his legs and looked up at him. I was a vassal, now to be always in some low level of need, and this would be the difference, most time I would be in need of him and having to live within the shadow of his absence.

  He went then to his suit and took from its pocket a black box. I was shocked by premonition. He took out a silver bracelet. A metaphor coming true.

  This was a manacle.

  He said firmly, “You are to wear this.”

  He dangled it. It was a plain silver, small-link bracelet. There was no engraving on the plate.

  That was right.

  “Put it on,” he said.

  The way he said that, it was the old days again. I had changed from sharing his daily life, I was now being kept for his pleasure.

  “Yes.” My heart was hurting.

  “Hold out your wrist.”

  I held out my bare arm to him; liquid with submission, I could not have stood.

  “Yes.”

  He clicked it on.

  “It has a lock to which I have the only key.”

  I was breathless with feeling for him, breathless from his perfect authority, the unfaltering confidence of his command.

  How hypercharged life is when it breaks out of propriety. I was sorry, as I trembled there against his legs, for those people with well-behaved love. How good it was to have one’s integrity utterly infringed, to be the trembling, crushed, infringed self.

  It was for me a re-experiencing of that same true feeling, the lightning-struck feeling when he had come to the school that first time and taken me to the hotel room.

  I was shaking.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  My eyes were crying. He ruffled my hair and said, “I’m not passing you on. I won’t pass you over to the animals,” and laughed in his private way. I was so weak I couldn’t bother with the implication but allowed his words to further eliminate any false sense of self-pride, of “integrity”, and thus allowed myself still further to flow free and true in a near swoon of submission.

  He then, in a business-like way, dressed back into his suit, me tying his tie, helping him with his coat, his laces. I saw him out and then fell naked back on the sheets, my anus awash with semen, my mouth still cloyed with its taste, and a silver bracelet locked on my wrist.

  ‘Til ring you,” he said as he left. “The House is sitting next week.”

  The new purpose of the telephone, the telephone as chain, as a chain which permitted me to go only as far as the sound of its bell.

  “Til ring you” was an instruction.

  Oh, I knew who the dog and who the master now.

  When I did sneak out and give myself to a drunken sailor or some migrant worker, it affirmed the meaning of the bracelet. I was restored to my sense of wholeness for all the nights I spent aching for him. I did a lot of sexual aching, harder for a seventeen-year-old boy. Never able to masturbate, for fear he would need me.

  Always to be there for him when he wanted my body, when he was not too busy running the country. Or being a husband.

  I was faithful to him, in my fashion, but I was still, too, a naughty bad dog sometimes in the early hours of morning out in the dark city.

  II.

  THE LETTERS

  I’m going to get out the letters.

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  And why not? I want to show you what you were once. What you were when we lived together. Before power and marriage etc made your personality into a social technique, until it hides its face behind a flashed-on smile. You’ve become a shimmer of courteous responses. I watch you on TV. And with me you’ve become a grunt. Because your personality couldn’t survive your oh-so-model life.

  “I said not to get out those letters.”

  All those things you do at Home you’ve told me about to make me suffer. Do you know what they are? Elusions.

  “What word is that?”

  Elusions. What you do is not hobbies. They’re ways of evading the eyes and faces of people. To avoid the need to truly react. I see it all now. Because I study only you. The paradox of politics. It is at the very heart of life but, for those who pursue it, it is a way of escaping life. I see it all now. It’s all structured reaction. You and your coins and cannons. That’s interesting. Your two prized collections of coins and cannons. Money and guns. I hadn’t seen that before. When you come here, though, you drop the shimmer of courteous responses and become a grunting stasis, but at least that’s real. That’s animal.

  “Your vocabulary is overreaching.”

  Not quite a person. A grunting stasis. But that’s real. I’m the last remaining person on earth who knows you.

  And who can sometimes find you. Your Wife doesn’t know you. I can tell. The only time your muscles fall loose is when you are here. Is here, here with me! For those moments when I undress you, bring you to erection, when you lie naked, just another man, and when you moan and moan and cry out and murmur and cry and come—those noises show me that there is a writhing person in there. And my only moment of power. Oh, but then—zip—you’re gone again and each piece of clothing goes back on—hey presto—the Man of Affairs. Herr Cabinet Minister.

  “Don’t prattle.”

  I will. I will read out from the letters. Look at the letters, hundreds, now so nicely bound. Will you one day have a government person, or one of those heavies, come around and destroy them? Or me. Why do you permit me to have them? I suppose because there is no way of them being linked to you. How many pages you once effused—over me. Look.

  “You’re becoming hysterical. Take them away. Take them away from my face.”

  I will read. “. . .On that drive to Canberra you acted so impulsively, so impishly . . . did you realise that it was the first time that you didn’t have to be coaxed? Or bribed or forced? Although you had always wanted to do it, once you were made to do it, it was not until that day in the car that you initiated it. You had until then, I suppose, liked the game of feeling that it was against your will, your nature, or whatever. You enjoyed playing the stubborn, sullen boy. It was from then on, from that day of that drive, that you were a different person, a special person with a special destiny and aware of it. Which I had of course known, and had of course known you would one day be made to realise . . .”

  And I thought it meant at the time that I had “fallen in love” with you. But for you it meant that I was ready for anything that you required. That I was in a new phase. But at least your letters, if they were not “love” letters, were effusive and you were fascinated by me and you used words to me. At least there were words then, including words about yourself.

  Let me recall the “drive to Canberra”. That evocative memory. It was your election campaign. We were driving through the electorate. I was fifteen. No. I was probably fourteen. Had I even done the School Certificate? I had been released from school after one of your “notes” had arrived at the Headmaster’s office and I was told that there was a government car waiting for me. The faces of my friends staring down from the school windows. I’d pack my things knowing that I would be whisked away to some hotel, to be fucked into a daze. And later, sometimes, to be used by your “associates”. Made drunk. And the drugs, oh yes, the muscle relaxants. Or no—sitting around in hotel rooms while you talked to people about things I didn’t understand. That is what I remember most. You talking to foreign people. I remember once hitting on the idea of filing my nails in front of them. I think I wanted to embarrass you, it seemed an outrageous thing for a schoolboy to do and you said coolly, “Yes, your nails could do with some attention—we don’t like grubby boys,” and those in the room all laughed knowingly. I went from the room flushed and confused, close to tears, but you didn’t come after me. I came back later and they had gone and I cried in bed with you in the submission of utter lost confusion.

  Anyhow. The drive to Canberra. We were driving fast. I moved over to sit hard against you, remember? I put my hand lovingly up to your neck
and my fingers into your hair. I did it because I now felt “in love” with you. Do you remember what you said? You said that I was too close, there’d be cars coming up behind us and you’d be recognised and lose votes. I said that you could possibly gain votes from homosexuals. You were amused by my using the word “homosexual” and said that it was the first time you’d heard me say it. I blushed, but you made me say it again, although I didn’t want to. You made me say that I was a homosexual, but I resisted saying it. And then I said it, turning weakly to you and taking your hand, putting it to my lips and saying it through your fingers and my kiss. “Oh yes, I am, I am homosexual.”

  “You have an unhealthy memory.”

  And you smiled—at the time I thought you smiled because I pleased you, but I think now you smiled because of private thoughts—and you said that I was a “special class” of homosexual. But there in the car then I undid your fly and went down on you, into that fundamental smell of urine and the lingering odour, almost imperceptible, of excreta (but it was there), down over your penis and through the imported underwear which you got for us, before you married—does she buy that dreadful underwear you wear now, or do you wear it to identify with the normal folk?—and I licked the head of your penis through the silk and it oozed its juice making the silk transparent and I worked my mouth and the silk on your penis head while we drove at 100 mph through the wheat country and the hot, dry sun. You spread your legs to give yourself. Moaning, on and on at 100 mph in that Rover car you had then. I smelled the hot leather of the upholstery. The ever-so-slight smell of petrol fumes. The slight dry-cleaning fluid smell of groin. I gobbled and stimulated you, taking your balls up into my mouth, my tongue working you around and around, playing up and down, and then a finger fully in your anus. And then you came into my mouth pulse after pulse, the semen taste overwhelming the mingle of smells, the taste of semen dominating and wiping out all the other senses, although they came back, one by one, the texture of the silk first.

  “Your memory is unhealthy.”

  Remember, I took from you your semen and then lay there, my face in your lap. I remember plainly, while I had my head buried down there and you were coming into me, I remember thinking—is he ever going to stop. Is he ever going to stop? Is this possible, what have I done? I was very young.

  “Don’t go on—stop now.”

  When you finally finished, I sat up, wiped my mouth on a tissue, wiped you, and did up your fly, and we drove into town across the bridge. Within half an hour you were addressing a meeting and shaking hands with the mayor and his wife.

  I remember you sending me to a newspaper office in the town to book space, or something, for your campaign advertisements, and a nosey old editor with an eye-shade asking me if I were your “son” or a campaign worker or what. I said, “Aide de camp.”

  I thought that rather good at the time until you told me back at the motel that I had mispronounced it.

  Those early campaigns were the only time, though, that you’ve taken me into your political life, even if I were only someone in the car, unexplained.

  Excepting, of course, the Camden days, and they were hardly political. Those house parties. The old men and senators, or whatever, feeling me, talking about me being “pretty”, and you saying to me after, “Just keep smiling at them, let them do what they want.” You were so torn then—you couldn’t do without my body then, but you felt that sometimes it did your career good for me to pleasure the Old Men of the Tribe. You were anxious though, the only time I could truly say you felt anxious about me, that I might become someone else’s boy, but yet you had to risk it, had to prostitute me. And then you got where you wanted and put me into this, this “town house”—is that what we call this? And it has come to this—me locked here, virtually, visited by, God what is he called? An accountant? He never lays a finger on me. More’s the pity.

  Why doesn’t she dress you with some style? You’re both rich. You used to wear such beautiful clothing, but why drip-dry shirts—why? They are for travelling. Tell her, tell her they’re for when you can’t have laundry done. And for Chinese waiters.

  “You are not to mention her.”

  Yes. We won’t bring her into it. She’s sacred. Miss Sacred Heart Country Party Whore 1955.

  “Stop!”

  And you came back from the meeting in town to the motel and came to my room giggling. You never giggle now. Aren’t Herr Cabinet Ministers allowed to giggle? I was sitting up in the motel eating chocolates and listening to country and western music and you thanked me for washing out your underwear. But then you giggled and said that the mayor had followed our car into town and overtaken us near the bridge. You had said hastily to the mayor that I was a “nephew”. “Nephew?” said the mayor. “No, you were alone in the car. There was no one else in the car when I overtook.”

  “You involved me in risks.”

  So you locked me away. No, we could go back to those days without the risks. I am older now. I would be a good private secretary. I’ve told you this so often. But, of course, I don’t hold the same charm.

  “You have your place.”

  My head between your legs.

  “I don’t think, really, that you need more whisky. Put it down.”

  How I wish you were always around to tell me to stop, to tell me what to do. I was reading some woman and she says that’s what it is all about—“extinguishing the consciousness”. Obliterating the personality. I understand my state. I relish it.

  “Theoretical books are bad for you.”

  Don’t worry, this is not about the liberation movements. That’s not my liberation. I know that. I know now that my liberation is to be found in the opposite direction. The liberation through obeisance.

  “Mmmmm.”

  For instance, I could cut your initials in my arm. I could do that to show you what I mean.

  “Don’t talk like that. I’ve had to stop you talking about that sort of thing before.”

  What about when you had that doctor friend of yours inject me with some drug which made me helpless and warm and open and you had me, when I was fourteen, you and then those other two men. For hours. I was so dazed I couldn’t work out what was happening to my body. You were training it somehow to behave in some sort of way you wanted, and you broke me so that I couldn’t behave any other way.

  “Oh shut up.”

  All right. But I will cut your initials in my arm.

  “Stop that.”

  He shouted at me, but I went to the bathroom and found a razor blade and came back to him.

  He sat there. I knelt before him, I was still in the satin jocks and satin smock that he liked me to wear, and I stretched out my bare arm.

  “If you must” he said, a change of voice, he was switching now, turning on to it, participating.

  You should brand me.

  “It would be safer to have you tattooed.”

  Yes. I’d like that too.

  “Go on—cut yourself. Cut my name in your arm.”

  He really wanted me to cut myself.

  I cut. I did it. I cut one letter. The blood came out in a string of globules. My body went cool with the shock of it. I stopped. I baulked at the second letter. I would have done it but I was stopped, the effort required to mutilate one’s skin, especially when the skin is perfect, as mine was, unblemished young skin, the effort was exhausting.

  “The other letter—go on,” he said, “cut the other letter.”

  The bastard.

  Bastard.

  I closed my eyes, opened them, and cut the loop of the next letter and then dropped the blade, I stared at the blood on my arm and then licked it, licked both the wounds, and then needed to sit.

  I felt faint, and then his arms were about me, the world moved, unsteadily.

  He pulled me to him. I had earned it.

  “You stupid boy,” he said. I sunk to my knees.

  He had an erection. He had an erection and I felt it through the silk of his pyjamas. I kissed his p
enis through the pyjamas and I was back then in the car with the hot leather, I hugged him around his thighs.

  He led me over to the bedroom and pushed me down on the bed lifting the smock, pulling down the satin to bare my arse.

  My face went down on to my bleeding arm and I tasted again my own steely blood as I felt him move himself into me, as I arched my buttocks to take him. He came, ejaculating into me, almost as soon as he entered, and the throb and the thrust of the penis were so distinctly felt that it was as if they were drawn with pen and nib and ink on my nervous system, the hot sperm bursting against the sensitive lining of my anus.

  When he’d had his way, he rolled off and said, “You should put sand into the wound—-to permanently scar yourself.”

  I told him that I would do that. If I had been able to move, I would have done something like that. I was held to the bed by a heavy blanket of sensual pain. I was centred.

  I will do that, I told him, I will.

  I put my head against him and cried.

  He then said something, something humorous, maybe tender, he said, “They are the most obscene letters I have received,” and he put his fingernail on the blood-smeared initials and traced them, hurting me, tracing them with his sharp fingernail.

  He then asked me to come to the bathroom, he liad to go, he wanted me to wash him.

  I said that I would after I had put something on the wounds.

  He said that could wait.

  III.

  THE LITTLE WORLD LEFT BEHIND

  Do you remember that on the day of his death, I kissed you on the mouth?

  A full mouth kiss. It was at a party, you’d taken me along because of how I’d been affected. We had heard of P’s death that day and everyone had been making all the right noises. We stood there on the fringe of the dancers’ skirts. The dancers revolved at the centre of the party, lapping at us as we stood in the darkened room. It was a backbenchers’ party. I remember water slapping along the jetty near the house. I took your head in my hands and kissed you on the lips. You went with the kiss. I had gone over the line of self-control by then with whisky and grief about P’s death. Was that grief? No, it was infuriation at being denied someone I wanted, that a person was denied me who had filled my mind and days for so long—as a person—not as a lover. A person who had talked to me. I would have been interested to have felt something as classical as grief. I would have been pleased to know that I had the capacity for the grand emotion. But whatever the inadequacy of my responses, I required, looking back, intense physical solace. I used sexuality that night to push away the presence of death.