Forty-Seventeen

by Frank Moorhouse

  He listed the drinking experiences which he missed:

  for some reason he missed again the drinking of cold cans of beer with a friend in a car at a drive-in cinema, eating hot dogs with mustard and sauce (something he hadn’t done for years)

  drinking Jack Daniel’s ‘old No. 7 Tennessee sour mash whiskey’ and eating salted nuts on an international flight at 10,000 metres looking down on the world’s terrain – say, the delta of the Ganges or the Russian steppes – or looking at the sun setting across a cloud bank, disoriented in time, ideally listening to Indian classical music in the headphones

  champagne at intervals at the Sydney Opera House looking out onto the harbour

  Jack Daniel’s bourbon alone in a motel room in a strange city after a long journey, watching foreign television

  a very cold Heineken beer and a Mexican meal arranged in a garden courtyard in the sun

  Jack Daniel’s beside the campfire in the bush, after a day of heavy going, on a cold night, with macadamia nuts

  cans of West End beer off the ice while driving across the outback in a Volvo wagon on a hunting trip

  a good cognac or a pernod and ice alone in his reading chair, with a book, in a dim room, reading for the night, with an occasional telephone call to or from a close friend

  a correctly made, not too dry, but very very cold martini in a dim piano bar, with the pianist playing the blues.

  Another dream that he had been drinking and had set back his recovery.

  He’d lost the habitual urge for a drink at about six or seven at night.

  He found himself searching interviews and biographies for references to drinking, how much successful people had drunk, drink and its effect on work.

  He remembered how he’d felt when he’d been drinking, that if he did not drink for a day or so he’d earned the right to a heavy drinking session. What would six months off the drink earn him?

  The drinking ‘session’. He realised that really much of his drinking in the past had been in the form of the ‘session’, if not the ‘spree’. Spree drinking was taking the drink wherever it might lead you in the night, unrestrained drinking as a launching pad into unrestrained behaviour. But a ‘drinking session’ was simply open-ended extended drinking.

  He could remember the time when he’d felt that there was no point to ‘a couple of drinks’, that the drinking session was the only meaningful use of alcohol, ‘serious drinking’.

  But measured drinking, a consciously shaped intoxication, had its own hedonism, its own enchantments, especially when integrated with, say, sex.

  This old lesson was nicely articulated by the eighteenth-century lawyer and bon vivant William Hickey (another Hickey) that alcohol was generally best when it was subservient to other activities and not the activity itself. Hickey said, ‘I certainly have at different periods drunk very freely, sometimes to excess, but it never arose from the sheer love of wine; society – cheerful companions, and lively seducing women – always delighted and frequently proved my bane; but intoxication for itself I detested, and invariably suffered grievously from.’

  But it was a damned hard lesson to remember at midnight, and it was a lesson which for him wouldn’t stay learned – even after two hundred years.

  He again dreamed he’d forgotten that beer was as dangerous to his recovery as any other alcohol and that he’d drunk it, setting himself back again.

  He had his first sensation of agoraphobia. At an airport he’d found the concourse full of faces from plays, from films, from his past, from his own scripts and stories – the smell of the food at the tables, the rattle of dishes, machinery noises, all recalled in an overwhelming jumble other people and other places and other airports, other journeys.

  A jamming of his mind with recollection. They’d all crushed in on him and he felt badly like a drink, like drinking heavily, but he resisted.

  He recalled the search, in the later stages of intoxication, for the accelerating drink, the hit which would bring deep relaxation or wild loss of self. He would change drinks or order a stronger drink in the pursuit of the last grand wave of intoxication. It didn’t always come.

  Strangely, he sensed that his co-ordination had grown worse during the months of not drinking. He seemed to bump into things, stumbled more. He feared he had multiple sclerosis.

  Maybe he’d done this when drunk too and just not noticed it.

  He felt the gratification of a sense of health – loss of weight – a consciousness of fitness, of being able to run further, cut more wood, walk further when backpacking. But it was by no means a dramatic increase in fitness, he had always been reasonably fit. He’d always wanted to be a ‘healthy drunk’.

  It was a bit like being an adolescent again.

  Now when he did irrational things or said dumb things he would say to himself, ‘But Jesus, I was sober!’

  He feared every now and then that the non-alcoholic cider he was drinking was actually alcoholic and would re-check the label on the bottle.

  He was now clearly aware of the chemicals which operated naturally in his body – he guessed they were things like adrenalin and hormonal activity – which caused excitation, agitation, senses of well-being. He could also clearly feel the effects of caffeine, msg, sugar.

  He observed that sometimes sexual attraction for that which was beyond possibility – say, seeing a sexually desirable woman in the street – or lost love – could transform itself almost immediately into a desire for alcohol. He had not observed the sexual desire-alcohol link so clearly before.

  The martini mystique. Louise, his first adultery, had introduced him to the martini. He missed the cold chilling seep of intoxication which came from a strong, correctly made martini, with the taste of gin distinguishable from the taste of vermouth but with the exquisite blending of both tastes in the mouth to make the martini taste, blending then again with the olive. He liked to be able to detect the vermouth in the martini, which went against the fashion for the very dry, almost 100 per cent gin martini. He also enjoyed the ‘third’ martini – the watery cold one left in the jug, the leftovers, which was mostly iced water with a martini flavour.

  He wondered how his young wife Robyn had known about the origin of the martini. Had she had a lover back then too, who drank martinis?

  The six months ended and he passed his liver function tests. His first cautious drink was a beer – a can of Carlton draught. He feared the nausea which was his last remembered reaction to alcohol. The Carlton did not taste as he wanted it to taste and he had no inclination to drink more that night but the taste did recall his first beer, drunk from a bottle at the back of a dance hall when he was a seventeen-year-old school captain – twenty-five years before.

  Of all the drinking experiences he’d yearned for during his non-drinking period only the cans of beer with hot dogs in the drive-in cinema failed to live up to his expectation.

  During his forced abstinence he discovered that alcohol was not needed for him to enjoy uninhibited and spontaneous sex. He found he was marginally more active in what he described as affectionate, low-key sex. But upon returning to drinking he enjoyed again the extended sexual experiences with slow drinking – any drink – over a few hours, especially with Belle.

  White Knight

  He explained to Sandra, a new-wave television producer, that having watched so many Kojaks, Callans and Rockford Files and given his experience with international nuclear intrigue, he was now ‘ready to try to write a White Knight formula series for television’.

  Yes, it was an old-wave idea, but this would be nuclear White Knight – a Knight who polices the new energy. And a career change.

  ‘My whole life has been a preparation for this,’ he said. ‘I was not slumped there in front of your television set for those years when we were together, throwing my empty beer cans into your empty fire place, for nothing. That was preparation for this moment. And so was the time I spent with the IAEA freezing my arse off in Vienna.’

  Sh
e said, ‘As Stephen would say, the White Knight thing all began with the Arthurian legends and Gawain – all these series are about Round Table knights – it can never really be an old-wave idea.’ She was referring to Stephen Knight, associate professor, a medievalist.

  ‘Through the Looking Glass too,’ he said, ‘there is a White Knight in Through the Looking Glass. I re-read it during my hepatitis. Admittedly, a different sort of White Knight.’

  Alice looked on with great interest as the King took an enormous memorandum-book out of his pocket, and began writing. A sudden thought struck her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil which came some way over his shoulder, and began writing for him.

  The poor King looked puzzled and unhappy, and struggled with the pencil for some time without saying anything; but Alice was too strong for him, and at last he panted out, ‘My dear! … it writes all manner of things that I don’t intend –’ … Alice had put ‘The White Knight is sliding down the poker. He balances very badly.’ The Queen said, ‘That’s not a memorandum of your feelings!’

  Sandra said that she always felt a nausea sweep over her when she heard adults quoting Lewis Carroll. People clung to these books to make themselves oh-so-very-childlike and yet, at the same time, suggesting that they could grasp the enigma of existence from reading these books.

  He said quickly that he had not touched a Lewis Carroll book for thirty years. ‘It was during my hepatitis. I regressed.’

  ‘All right then.’

  ‘Hepatitis is a crisis of existential dimension – streets seem threatening and impenetrable. When the liver isn’t working some fundamental harmony is shattered. That’s what the Village Voice says. So you go back to books like Lewis Carroll.’

  ‘You mustn’t go on about your hepatitis. People with hepatitis seem to enjoy talking about it.’

  ‘With hepatitis – well, suddenly, you know, that’s all that’s left.’

  But it was agreed that he was to do a treatment for a White Knight series. Sandra suggested he talk with Laura Jones as a possible co-script writer. He made a file and wrote on it in Textacolour ‘White Knight’, and in brackets ‘(ring Laura Jones)’.

  Now, turning forty, it was good to know the next life move.

  On November 21, he came into his work room with the morning newspapers and a coffee cup, a piece of toast and marmalade held dog-like in his mouth because his hands were full. He dropped the newspapers on the desk where they fell onto the folder saying, ‘White Knight (ring Laura Jones)’ in green Textacolour. As he watered the plants with a cup of cold undrunk coffee, there on his desk from last week, and wondered again if it did the plants harm, he tilted his head to read the newspaper lying on the desk and read ‘… had been planning a simultaneous suicide ceremony for months to be carried out if the code “White Knight” was broadcast by Leader Jones …’

  He stopped watering or coffeeing the plants and sat down to read the newspaper with an alertness which became a chill.

  AAP-Reuter –: Georgetown: November 21. People’s Temple members in Guyana and the United States had been planning a simultaneous suicide ceremony for months to be carried out if the code ‘White Knight’ was broadcast by Leader Jones.

  The code apparently was not broadcast but Jones summoned his followers to the death meeting by telling them over the loudspeaker, ‘The time has come for us to meet in another place.’

  Although he had almost recovered from the hepatitis his body was still skewed by it, and it was with a residue of the sickness that he sat there in his swivel chair; even its slight motion gave his body a feeling of precariousness.

  Shakily, he finished his toast and marmalade and read the report with a welling anxiety.

  He very much doubted that he would begin work that morning on the White Knight series with Laura Jones – aura Jones – as co-script writer. No.

  What would have happened to him had Jones broadcast the code White Knight? Should he stay indoors? Would that help? Was it better to move about?

  And what sort of questions were these to be asking?

  At the New Hellas lunch club that day, having done no work, he said to the political and historical people there at lunch that the Jonestown suicides must be the most bizarre post-Second World War news story ‘and my own story is just as bizarre’.

  He told them his story.

  Donald said, ‘So what? There is nothing to be said about it, even if it is the most bizarre news story of the post-Second World War period. And even if your story is equally bizarre, there is nothing to be said about it. It is an historical aberration. It says nothing about the United States that we don’t already know – or about the West – it says nothing about the decline or fall of anything. That is often the case with aberrations of history.’

  They all turned then to him, as a tennis crowd moves its head, looking to him to prove there was something perhaps to be said about it.

  He found, as Donald claimed, that there was nothing really to be said.

  ‘But there must be something to be said,’ he came back. ‘You people must have something to say. It could not be beyond analysis.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I don’t know what. All I know is that I was in the fallout zone.’

  Donald snorted.

  They looked at him – the lunch club – with censure for having introduced a promising subject and for then having nothing to say. They went on to talk about the coming of the republic.

  All right, there may be nothing to be said, he thought, nothing to be said there in the New Hellas about the Jonestown suicides, but it asks that something be said. Or was it saying something, not to the lunch club, or to the world, but to him alone.

  In bed with Belle, his friend the slut, he said that he thought it was the most bizarre news story of the post-Second World War period. Maybe nothing like it has ever happened in recorded history, he said. And then added his own story.

  ‘Is that not bizarre? Is there not a message in this for me?’

  ‘I’d like to get some sleep now,’ Belle said, hitting the pillow in emphatic preparation for sleep. ‘Why don’t you get decent pillows?’

  ‘I was brought up to be able to sleep on anything,’ he told her. He said, ‘Don Anderson of the Australian bureau in New York says that it was probably the greatest mass suicide in history and I was nearly part of it. But I suspect a Jewish village in Poland might claim the record. There were, I believe, mass protest suicides among the Jews from time to time.’

  ‘Go to sleep now,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t let it preoccupy you. Your libido needs sleep even if you don’t.’

  ‘I can’t help my libido – hepatitis affects the libido.’

  ‘And turning forty.’

  ‘Turning forty has nothing to do with it. I was actually quoting Knight to Sandra and he’s an expert on the Knight’s Tale from Chaucer. It all links up.’

  ‘Mmmmm.’

  Belle was not the right person for him to be with now he was forty. She claimed to be a representation of his great-grandmother, but that wasn’t enough.

  That was all right too.

  At the Thanksgiving party put on by Sam and Jessie, Jessie being an American, he said to the gathering partygoers that the Jonestown suicides must be the most bizarre news story of the post-Second World War period, ‘and I have a pretty bizarre story of my own to tell too – connected with it.’

  The guests at the Thanksgiving listened thankfully to his story but he arrived at the end of the story to find that they had nothing to say.

  ‘Imagine the poor stringer in Georgetown,’ Jessie said, ‘trying to convince the bureau in New York that four hundred Americans got together in the jungle and suicided.’

  That was a contribution to the story but it was not the aspect upon which he wanted to focus attention.

  Jessie said that the bureau probably told him, ‘Go have another drink, Harry.’

  ‘But what about Laura Jones – aura Jones?’

  ‘In New York t
hey probably said “jungle juice”,’ one of the party said.

  ‘There must be something more to be said about it,’ he prompted.

  The Thanksgiving conversation could do nothing with it. Everyone became thoughtful.

  ‘Surely things can’t be that bad in the United States,’ Jessie’s father said, at last. He was visiting Australia. ‘In our country, can things really be that bad?’

  He waited for Jessie’s father to say more. But no more was said. The conversation hung there among the thoughtful guests, but nothing more came.

  As they all went in for their turkey and pumpkin pie, he said to Jessie’s father that he wouldn’t take it to mean the decline or fall of the West. Jessie’s father said he hoped not.

  In the car on the way to the airport to drop Louise, an ex-lover who was passing through on her way back to the United States where she worked in the UK Embassy, he said that he had planned a television series on his IAEA experience with the working title ‘White Knight’ taken from a lecture by Stephen Knight. He had intended to work on it with Laura Jones – aura Jones – and how on the first day of work the Jonestown suicides occurred according to the plan ‘White Knight’. And how he’d been feeling rather suicidal himself.

  ‘Is that a bad omen for the series,’ he asked her, ‘or is that a bad omen!’

  ‘Or is it a bad omen for you. For you turning forty,’ she said. ‘Did you read that hepatitis can not only affect your libido but that it can take away your will to live?’

  ‘I have no will to live. Never have had. I could hardly have not read it since you sent it to me marked with a Stabilo pen. And you shouldn’t say things like that,’ he said, ‘to the sick.’