Forty-Seventeen

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘Damn it, Ian, we have to have experience.’

  I agreed.

  ‘Let’s find ourselves a couple of whores.’

  I was inwardly surprised. It was the last thing I expected from Tony, who had a girlfriend.

  I said that I didn’t have enough money.

  He said he had enough for both of us.

  I said it was all right by me.

  So we went to Kings Cross. I had an idea that we would not find any prostitutes. Tony was walking determinedly, talking of Hemingway and the need to ‘experience’ life.

  William Street was full of commercial brightness. Advertising beauty formed by gas-filled tubes and electricity.

  We turned off William Street and went along narrow dark alleys.

  We passed a man who said, ‘Along there, mate,’ and indicated a lane.

  We turned into that lane.

  A few houses had lights on. The lights from the houses revealed little groups of men at the doors of the depressing tenement houses. The men were quiet, some leaning with hands in pockets, some walking back and forth. They did not seem to be talking. I also noticed in some doorways women leaning sardonically against the doors. The street was so dim that it was hard to distinguish any particulars.

  I went up to a woman at the doorway and said, ‘How much?’

  Her old voice said, ‘Three quid for a few minutes or five quid for a strip.’

  A little voice in my head said, ‘This is it, mate.’

  Tony had the money, so he accepted. Before he went in I asked him for three quid. He had to ask the prostitute for change. They went in, the door shut and a few minutes later the door opened again and Tony passed out three quid to me. The prostitute said, ‘You can go somewhere else or wait till your mate is finished.’ I said I would go somewhere else.

  I wandered along past a group of men. I somehow thought that the larger the group the better the prostitute, but didn’t feel like waiting for ten or fifteen minutes while they all finished.

  I went up to a woman in a doorway.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Sorry, love, I’m not working tonight.’

  I walked on.

  Up to another woman. She told me three pounds.

  There were no lights on in the house. We went inside.

  The woman switched on a feeble light in the corner. It showed a bare room with a double bed. The bedspread looked dirty.

  ‘Sit on the chair and take off your coat,’ she said.

  I did so.

  ‘Righto, undo your fly.’ I did so.

  She produced a basin of water and roughly washed my penis.

  Though drunk I summed the woman up as ugly, fat and degenerate. But for the alcohol she would have appeared repulsive.

  But she appeared to me as only one thing – woman.

  She rolled her fat body onto the bed with a practised movement and pulled her skirts up. What was revealed did not seem pretty. I lay on top of her. She exposed her breasts. She grunted in a hard voice and I could not tell whether this was only sound-effects or genuine expressions of effort.

  After a while she said, ‘Are you coming yet?’ I was too drunk to feel much sexual excitement but I came.

  ‘OK, get off, I can tell you’re finished.’

  She washed me and switched off the light and showed me to the door.

  I said, ‘How are the tough economic conditions affecting you?’

  I was trying to sound friendly and nonchalant.

  She replied, ‘It don’t worry me, love, I only do this while me husband is away. Mind the step.’

  I found myself out in the dark, wet street. I could not believe what I had done. I shouted for Tony and he came out of the darkness.

  He had a black fellow with him. Tony explained that the black fellow had been refused by one of the prostitutes.

  I was angered. The three of us went up to the prostitute and I said, ‘Don’t you believe in the United Nations? Why don’t you let our friend in?’

  She snarled, ‘Take him home to your sister or mother.’

  Tony said, ‘You dirty slut.’

  I held Tony back.

  He was shouting about colour bars and sluts. The black fellow and I dragged Tony away. The prostitute shouted, ‘Keep him away from here or he will have a pistol in his ribs.’

  Tony cooled down. The black fellow said he was from the Solomon Islands. He said, ‘Why is it, you have a heart, I have a heart, you have blood and I have blood, but because of my skin she hates me.’

  ‘I don’t know, mate,’ Tony said.

  The black fellow then started talking about God, love, kindness and King David, in a deep, soft native voice and broken English.

  He worked on a boat. Tony wrote his telephone number on a piece of paper and gave it to him saying, ‘If you’re ever in trouble call this number at the Daily Mirror.’

  We left him walking up and down the street offering prostitutes his money and being refused.

  Tony said, ‘What’s wrong with the world, mate, what’s wrong with it?’

  He was still slightly drunk. I shook my head but did not reply. I was thinking about VD.

  Beirut

  After London, Edith and he had to join up for an official visit to a research reactor in Israel. In Tel Aviv, they again had an argument about sight-seeing in Jerusalem – he didn’t want to go there.

  ‘I can’t believe you would pass it up,’ she said, ‘given that Merrick has so kindly laid it on.’

  ‘I was filled with mumbo-jumbo about religion and Jerusalem when I was a kid, it makes me feel sick even now. I can still see the coloured prints of deserts, donkeys, palm trees, camels, crowns of thorns and whatever on the Sunday School wall. As a kid I felt that a religion coming from that sort of country and from people dressed like that could have nothing to do with me. I knew it could have nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Except that it laid the basis for our laws and ethics,’ Edith said, primly.

  ‘It wasted the Sundays of my childhood when I should’ve been out in the bush.’

  He drank his beer and looked out on the Mediterranean and he felt a regurgitation of all the feelings he’d had back in that country-town Sunday School. What did it have to do with his friends? With the pushy, talkative ten-year-old Robyn whom he’d later married? Sin and death and bodies anointed with oil.

  ‘I simply fail to see how Sunday School experiences would prevent you as a grown man from sight-seeing in an ancient city like Jerusalem.’ She again looked hurt about his refusal to be her companion. ‘After all, I’m a humanist myself.’

  That at seventy she should use a label like that seemed inappropriate. She was an eminent woman with honours, a reputation, she didn’t need a single label. But during the mission with him he’d noticed she’d used labels like that, perhaps to draw attention away from a generalised image of ‘eminent old woman’ towards more vigorous identities belonging to her fierce, fervent youth. For a seventy-year-old she was youthfully passionate about environmental concerns, although being with him had caused her to act with less piety because of his joking irreverence about such things, but in fact they were not wide apart in politics, just style.

  ‘You’re drinking more,’ she said, ‘not that it’s any of my business.’

  He stared back at her. She sometimes drove him to anger but there were those moments, like their shared cognac in the evening before saying goodnight and going to their own rooms, to which he now looked forward. Especially against the daily changing scenes and faces, their relentless itinerary. They had become for each other a familiar fixed domestic point.

  ‘It’s Marlowe doing this to you,’ she said playfully, picking up the book from the table, ‘reading too much about the tragic history of the life and death of Doctor Faustus. You’re frightened you’ll meet the Devil in Jerusalem.’

  ‘Who will offer me a deal too good to refuse? No, Edith, I can’t really face Jerusalem even if there’s the chance of a deal. Too much Sunday School.’ />
  ‘Never heard of anything more ridiculous from a grown man.’

  Edith went to Jerusalem with the First Secretary from the Australian Embassy while he drank bloody marys in the King David Lounge, the first decent bloody mary he’d had on the trip, and considered the biblical references around him – including his drink, he silently laughed at the biblical connection. As ever he pondered his personal losses and the incompleteness of his life, his doubts about his contract with the department being renewed.

  What he really wanted to do was to go to Lebanon and the civil war there. He wanted to peer into the abyss. Maybe go into the abyss. The IAEA work was too paleface – he wanted to be a redskin.

  He watched two young uniformed Israelis, a woman and a man, both with their Uzi machine guns, holding hands as they walked into the Hilton restaurant. They hung their guns over the backs of their chairs. They chattered animatedly.

  Gun-fighting politics was no more real than the committee room. Or the political theory class. But why then did it seem different, not only in degree but qualitatively?

  He saw them studying the menu. He hoped they could afford whatever they wanted from it. Sometimes he wanted to pay for the young to have whatever they wanted in life. He hated to be in a queue for, say, opera or theatre and hear young people ahead of him being unable to afford the tickets.

  He wanted to be shot. That was what he wanted. The fourth bloody mary said that to him. He’d had enough. He’d cut his toenails too many times. He wasn’t good at living. He didn’t do it right. Living made him uncomfortable.

  He turned his attention to two young Israeli women showing each other their credit cards. He liked the way they were celebrating their professional status and whatever the cards said about their self-performance. Their economic prowess.

  He was impatient for Edith to return from Jerusalem.

  He rang one of his two friends in the Israeli Defence Force and inquired about getting up to Beirut.

  Yizhar was encouraging and said he’d try to arrange something.

  When he returned from the telephone he found Edith saying goodbye to the First Secretary.

  ‘How was it?’ he asked. ‘Let me get you both a drink.’

  Merrick excused himself but Edith sat down tiredly.

  ‘Given your feelings about Jerusalem, I shouldn’t tell you about it,’ she said, flushed from the trip. ‘It was just as you feared, I suppose, and just as I’d hoped.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And I took a decision,’ she said, ‘in the historic city of Jerusalem I took a personally historic decision.’

  He looked at her inquiringly.

  ‘Yes. I stood on Mount Scopus and decided to leave my husband.’

  She was seventy and he’d forgotten the husband. She was the public figure, her husband was not.

  But another thought strayed in – had he played some part in this decision? No. Not possible.

  ‘May I ask why? Why Mount Scopus? Did that play a part? Haven’t you been married for some time? Sorry – a few questions tangled up there.’

  ‘This is my second marriage. But Richard and I have been together twenty-seven years.’

  ‘That’s, well, a long time.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She drank the Scotch straight down. He beckoned the waiter for another.

  ‘It came about on the telephone last night. He said that the last three years had been the happiest of his life. I was dumbfounded. I felt they had been a steep decline into sourness. I hadn’t thought he would see the marriage so differently from the way I saw it. I couldn’t believe he had not noticed my condition. Or that I hadn’t noticed how he felt. The complete delusion into which both of us had sunk.’

  She didn’t have the tone of voice which suggested she wanted counselling. How could someone like him with such a lousy personal track record counsel a seventy-year-old anyhow, especially one coming out of a twenty-seven-year marriage?

  ‘I’m really a very solitary person,’ she said.

  He didn’t believe that.

  ‘I find it hard to say anything,’ he said, ‘too far outside my jurisdiction.’

  ‘I don’t really, at my age, seek advice. But I do need someone to, well, say it to. Just for the confidence which comes from hearing the words uttered. To put them out there into the world for all to see.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you know what we argued about most?’

  He gave a small shake of his head to encourage and yet to avoid showing a prying interest.

  ‘Health – and how the body functions. I’m not a food faddist, regardless of what you think.’

  He didn’t think she was a faddist. She seemed to eat her way through the food of any nationality. Give or take a few normal sorts of prejudices.

  ‘Throughout our married life he held to five incorrect understandings of how the body worked. I myself no longer believe we are what we eat. The body seems to me to be remarkably adaptable and tolerant and forgiving, and capable of all sorts of corrections and absorptions and rejuvenations.’

  He had a feeling she’d said this many times in arguments with her husband. She pursued the subject.

  ‘And we seem to have a palate which invites indulgence. I know some lovable gluttons and some highly productive and happy people with absolutely horrible diets and I know, on the other hand, some dreadfully grim people with terribly correct diets. Oh, I observe the basic rules, but as I’ve grown older I’ve said “what the hell”. He was so wrong about the function of the kidneys for instance. But …’ she stopped as though hearing herself and realising she was going beyond the boundaries of the conversational territory. Explaining her husband’s view of anatomy was going too far.

  ‘We seem to use food to exorcise demons,’ he mumbled, to cover her embarrassment. ‘Trying to bring about personal revolution by dietary upheaval. Eating is play too.’ He trailed off.

  ‘No, I’m leaving him when I return. I’ll get by all right. I don’t think my diet will alter anything.’

  She was drifting into an introspective appraisal of her life.

  They sat quietly for a while with their drinks.

  At breakfast next day Yizhar, his Israeli army friend, came in in uniform, grinning, hearty. He was the only Israeli who seemed to have a properly tailored uniform. He carried the rank of colonel.

  After coffee and convivialities Yizhar said to him, ‘You want to see Beirut. It’s madness up there, you know.’

  ‘Oh that’s interesting,’ Edith cut in, ‘I was in Beirut – well, the year doesn’t matter – before the war, the Second World War, that is, I’d really love to see it again.’ She looked at him. ‘I hope I’m included in your sight-seeing plans this time?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it sight-seeing,’ Yizhar said, breaking into deep laughter.

  No and no, he had not included her in his plans. They were getting along better and he had not seen her going with him into Beirut. Perhaps it diluted the macho image he had of ‘going into Beirut’. Or maybe her natural or whatever presence was a shield which he did not want given his present life tiredness.

  ‘It’s a bit rough up there, Edith – there’s a civil war going on. One of us should stay behind to tell the tale.’

  The look she gave him implied a belittling offence against her as a friend, or as a woman, or as an older person.

  ‘I’ve been in tough places and done what would be considered rather dangerous things in my time,’ she said, shortly, and her eyes then slipped away from conversational focus to a bright reflective glaze. ‘Oh yes, Beirut before the war wasn’t all that safe either, though I dare say it was much safer than it is now. But I carried a revolver then. I had to fire shots, I remember, even then, some intruder or bandit. A bomb was thrown. A grenade.’

  Edith no longer surprised him.

  ‘The Kit Kat Club,’ Yizhar said, ‘you were there in the days of the glittering Beirut.’

  ‘Oh yes, but for me it was the Club St George and the Co
lorado.’

  ‘What were you doing there, Edith? Apart from living it up?’ he asked.

  ‘I was with the League of Nations – a very junior technical officer, nothing important. But you must really find a place for me on your trip.’

  Yizhar seemed not to be dismayed by the idea. ‘I’ll arrange it, but …’ he shrugged, grinned, ‘all care; no responsibility. Invisibly official, you’ll be. If you know what I mean. If I know what I mean.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t expect to find my Beirut of course, but it will bring back memories.’

  ‘No, your Beirut it won’t be.’

  ‘I came across from Paris on the old Orient Taurus Express – all those frontier checks.’

  ‘We’d better take our hip flasks, Edith, the Colorado is probably closed.’

  In his bed the next morning he awoke and met the familiar emotional condition which settled on him before every expedition of his adult life. It was a numbed control. There was none of the nervous excitement of childhood. He knew he was over-controlled but that no effort of will could break him free from that. His mind, as he lay there, sensibly prepared lists, rehearsed for exigencies. As he showered he looked at ways the day might possibly go; he would have made a good staff officer. But he had a yearning to be able to enter experience thoughtlessly, to be able to expose himself without armour or caution – to deal with exigencies as they arrived with what was at hand, to meet the world with surprise and then to perform in ways that surprised him. He knew that when such situations did crash in on him in life he performed well, but his pre-planned, pre-rehearsing mind meant that things rarely crashed in on him. He wanted more emergencies in his life. His nervousness, too, caused the essence of so many experiences to elude him, so much of his living had essence only as recall.

  As he packed his SW band radio in case ‘all hell breaks loose and we are pinned down for days and don’t know what’s going on’, he filled his pockets with Palfium and packed penicillin and tranquillisers. He filled his hip flask and put his Swiss army knife in his pocket.

  But I am this sort of person, he said aloud to himself as he stood there in his room at the Hilton, running through his mental check list. I am a survivor. Maybe he had to be that sort of person to survive the irregularities of his personal emotional life, the rootlessness.