Tales of Mystery and Romance

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘Your dabbling in effeminacy doesn’t interest me. But I’ll tell you another thing it isn’t – it isn’t dodging being a real person by hiding in irony, self-concealing humour, hiding behind ambiguity, double-edged humour, switching of persona, self-deprecation – that’s all so much shit.’

  ‘Is that style finished?’

  ‘That’s all finished. And you take in too much media. It’s really piteous how much media you take in.’

  ‘I enjoy the confusion of voices.’

  ‘You should get one magazine and stick to it. And you should think of all those trees too.’

  ‘I went to Nimbin.’

  ‘There you are! You talk about Nimbin as if it were the Easter Show. Nimbin is a million miles from where you’re at.’

  ‘You have always,’ I said, ‘envied me my bushmanship.’

  ‘The much vaunted bushmanship.’

  I winced.

  ‘The much vaunted bushmanship – sure we all know you’re an expert bushman. That you can survive indefinitely and you know about moss growing on one side of the tree, and you can shoot, and do things with pieces of vine and find water, and knew not to eat red berries. But that’s just the mechanics. You don’t know the soul of it. You don’t even approach the fourth dimension. You are way way way back in the third.’

  He went briefly into the university bookshop leaving me in the wind of self-inspection. I watched him moving his colleagues’ books back and bringing his own forward. He spoke with a bearded man with his hair tied back in a ponytail. A very cool-looking person.

  Milton came out shaking his head and looked accusingly at me. ‘You’re unsavoury – that’s what you are,’ he said, ‘you are an unsavoury person. Do you know who that was whom I was speaking with in there?’

  ‘The person with the ponytail – the very cool-looking person? No,’ I said, with strong interest.

  ‘That was Hans Poulson. He told me you have been telling people you know Hans Poulson. You told me you knew Hans Poulson. Hans Poulson says he’s never met you in his life.’

  ‘Was that Hans Poulson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The communalist?’

  ‘Yes – now look, I know you sometimes just lie but it isn’t funny any more. But give me just one reason why you should go about telling people you know Hans Poulson.’

  ‘One day all the drinks will go back into the bottle.’

  ‘You know one of your troubles? You try too hard.’

  ‘I’m low Church of England,’ I said, ‘one of the tenets of the old Low Church was that you had to do your best. To do your best was enough for salvation. I always wonder if it means you have to perform at your best or is intention enough – intending to do your best. If you intended to try maybe. Even if your trying falls short of full effort, as long as you wanted, wholeheartedly, to intend to try to do your best. Maybe it’s enough if your consideration of intending to try to do your best was full-hearted. Maybe just wishing you’d intended to try to do your best will be enough.’

  ‘Did you try those relaxation and meditation exercises I photocopied for you?’

  I told him I had been doing them but stopped when the telephone rang. But I considered them self-treason. An artificial graft.

  ‘They do not follow from my knowledge and sense of how the world works, the way things happen, from what I sense about the way we are at present,’ I said balefully, ‘like classroom sex education – arid. It has to be in the flow of a physical relationship. It has to be earned by venture.’

  ‘I’m no longer interested in your theories. And you must stop making homosexual approaches to me. You’re not very good at being a homosexual. Perhaps if you’d been better at it I would have been interested.’

  ‘Yes, I am a very bad homosexual.’

  ‘I’m afraid this is the parting of the ways,’ he said, as we reached the main gate, ‘I think I have made things pretty clear.’

  ‘Wish me luck,’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t treat the wishing of luck as some perfunctory figure of speech. Lucky things happen to people who have supraliminal empathy. You’re rude to luck. You shit on luck.’

  ‘Maybe there is no luck. Maybe there’s always a pattern. Synchronism. I know a man who made a fortune from bad luck.’

  ‘You should be nice to luck,’ he said.

  ‘I will,’ I promised, too seriously, too ready to comply.

  He shook his head and turned away, going off to a New Scene. A new Life Style. He looked dazzling, as if lit by a cool, strong beam of sun, his feet pointed to the ground as he walked.

  He looked like some fucking pixie.

  The little phoney.

  THE BELLY DANCE

  1. According to most authorities the good belly dancer must express death, sorrow, pregnancy, sensuality, anger, enticement, tantalisation, and lewdness without causing a disturbance in the audience.

  There are twelve tempos used in the dance.

  It was introduced to the West by Sol Bloom in 1893 at the Chicago Fair. ‘Little Egypt’ learned her dancing from Sol’s troupe and became the best known belly dancer in the West.

  Some criticise Little Egypt for lacking dignity. They did not like her leaping naked from a pie in the Waldorf Astoria.

  Incidentally, Little Egypt was the first person to do that – leap naked from a pie.

  Milton once said that he thought the Desiderata was a ‘rather nice thing’ and finally bought one to hang on his wall from Brays Books.

  Apart from being a load of nonsense, I bet the Desiderata is a fraud. Linguistically it sounds like a fake. I bet words like ‘career’, ‘fatigue’, ‘aggressive’, ‘aridity’ (in the figurative sense) and ‘disenchantment’ in that particular sense, were not in use in 1692.

  I am awaiting a linguistic analysis from a Professor Knight and a letter from the Vicar of Old St Paul’s Church, Boston, which will ‘put paid’ to the Desiderata.

  DESIDERATA

  Go placidly amid the noise & haste & remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly & clearly & listen to others, even the dull & ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud & aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others you may become vain & bitter; for always there will be greater & lesser than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is. Many persons strive for high ideals & everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love, for in the face of all aridity & disenchantment it is perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. Many fears are borne of fatigue & loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees & the stars. You have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

  Therefore be at peace with God whatever you conceive him to be & whatever your labours … & aspirations in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham & drudgery & broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.

  Found in Old St Paul’s Church, Baltimore, dated 1692

  THE ORACULAR STORY

  The hotel was shoulder to shoulder. I was shoulder to shoulder with Hestia in the square-shaped bar which we stood around and which read, left to right: the shoulder chains and leather of the greasy bikeheads; shoulder to shoulder with the pale turtle necks of the camp bikeheads; the starch of the blue psychiatric nurses; the hunch of domino players; the semi-nonconformist middle class with red and blue dot peasant neckerchiefs, some daring to wear beads; radicals in battle
dress, back (or shoulder) to Hestia and me, shoulder to shoulder. We are as much our fringe as our core.

  Perhaps.

  We also stand shoulder to shoulder within ourselves.

  ‘He wiped his feet on me and then broke my back,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve done that to others.’

  ‘That doesn’t help, saying that.’

  ‘I thought you were beyond emotional attack.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I forgot,’ she said.

  She was crying. I placed a hand on her black denim shirt. ‘Hey come on – they love dancing well who dance among the thorns.’

  ‘That sort of dance isn’t my style anymore,’ she said, ‘or the thorns.’

  ‘Love is … lawless?’

  ‘He said to me – let’s have a little predictability in our life. Keep away from the whirlpools. Have a few people to dinner. Milton wanted to try another way of living. He wanted to try open fires and classical music.’

  ‘A nice brochure.’

  ‘That’s why you had to leave the Big House.’

  ‘Oh – is that why.’

  ‘But he’s still your friend.’

  ‘And now he’s thrown you out,’ I said. ‘Young cocks … love no coops?’

  She cried. I hadn’t seen her publicly weep before. At the Big House, when we’d been together, she had seemed so cool. I watched.

  She stopped crying then, abruptly, and wiped her face with a tissue.

  ‘Has my eyeliner run?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why don’t you have any good answers?’

  ‘For this, the Age of Aquarius?’

  ‘For any age.’

  ‘Well, you could live by unpredictability.’

  ‘Milton tries to sell me predictability and you want to sell me unpredictability. Men.’ She covered her face with her hands.

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘that maybe those who live by hope will die of hunger.’

  She took her hands away and looked at me. ‘Milton says you’re sententious.’

  I said that writers aren’t supposed to give answers.

  That wasn’t allowed now.

  But she didn’t listen, she drank down her drink, stared into her bag and then ordered a triple gin and a glass of water. She took out a bottle of nembutals, threw about ten into her mouth, swallowed some with water – started to swallow some more but I grabbed her. The nembutal bottle spilled and the water spilled.

  I held her arms.

  ‘You’re so bad with answers,’ she said, slurred, staggering.

  ‘I’ll get you home.’

  She was almost asleep by the time I drove her to her house. I took her in the front door, managing to open it with her resting heavily against me.

  I stripped her. Her naked body on a fur bedcover. I thought of the many lovers who had put their penis between her legs. I opened her legs wide, looking into her cunt. I held the lips apart. I tried to imagine the hundreds of penises which had fucked her. She’d opened her legs to many penises. Her body was so youthful, penis after penis.

  She was dead asleep. I thought then of Milton’s penis which had been there and my thoughts moved to Milton and his body. I had an erection from the thought of his penis. I first thought to masturbate but, seeing her sleeping, absolutely passive, and open, I took some KY jelly and lubricated her and fucked her. She didn’t show any sign of awareness. She murmured but it was the murmur of a person dreaming. She did however become wet.

  Friends are not like fiddle strings, I thought, which must not be screwed tight. Unlike fiddle strings, friends should sometimes be screwed tight.

  I was slumped in Hestia’s fireplace corner dozing, some days later, when Milton and three radical students manoeuvred in. I awoke like a sleeping guard and grabbed for my rifle. But Hestia indicated that he was still persona grata.

  ‘We’re writing a manifesto for the inquiry,’ Milton said.

  ‘You concede the jurisdiction of the inquiry?’ I questioned.

  ‘No,’ he said, perturbed, ‘our purpose is to change its nature and make it our instrument.’

  ‘And thus make a contribution to social destruction,’ said one of his radical students.

  ‘So much change is uncontrollable,’ I said with a languid enthusiasm, ‘and the consequences of action, mostly unintended.’

  ‘That’s a copout.’

  ‘The best we can hope to do,’ I said, trying to impress Hestia with my answers, ‘is manage technology and demography and their inevitabilities.’

  ‘You adopt defeatist emphases,’ Milton said.

  Hestia said, ‘He stopped me killing myself,’ indicating me with an affectionate finger, laughing, ‘saying that I should live for the unpredictability of life – and fucked me when I passed out.’

  She was trying for an intimacy with Milton by excluding me.

  ‘Charming,’ Milton said.

  ‘Friends should be screwed tight,’ I said.

  ‘It was rape,’ Milton said, enviously. ‘The ultimate putdown of a woman. You’re unsavoury.’

  One of the radicals dragged a flagon of wine from his army jacket and was filling tea cups with it.

  ‘Aren’t there any damn glasses?’ I complained.

  Hestia came back with glasses but the radical student and Milton preferred to drink their claret from tea cups. One rolled a joint.

  ‘Why can’t we roll four joints and each smoke our own?’ I further complained. ‘All that saliva.’

  They didn’t hear me.

  ‘Hang the expense,’ I mumbled.

  They slumped around me and Hestia, except for one who prowled about flicking through books holding his. cup of claret against his cheek.

  ‘What do you support then?’ Milton asked, with a casual aggressiveness.

  ‘I obey the imperatives of the personality,’ I said.

  ‘Meaning what? Meaning bloody what?’

  ‘A man’s got to …’

  ‘… do what a man’s got to do,’ he cut in. ‘Shit.’

  ‘Some formative values,’ I began, ‘some modified values, some ideal values, some compromises with everyday reality – survival.’

  ‘In other words, you lack theory,’ he said, ‘you have no coherent critique.’

  ‘If I’m not for myself, who speaks for me?’

  ‘Individuality is an illusion – you are purely interaction with others. Your behaviour is purely inter action.’

  ‘I support my allies, I bargain with the enemies of my enemies, I give succour to the victims of my enemies.’

  I turned to Hestia and whispered, ‘Take some nembutal, we’ll go to bed.’

  ‘What’s in it for me?’ she whispered.

  ‘The privilege of the dead.’

  ‘… not to fear death?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘My problem,’ Hestia stated, ‘is that I don’t know what to do with myself. Milton says I need a coherent critique. You’re no help. You have no answers.’

  ‘But I do,’ I said, ‘I do have answers. Make an arbitrary decision. Respond then to the challenges set in motion by the arbitrary decision.’

  We were swimming in a golden lake. It was before six a.m., an inland lake a short distance from the sea. A salt water lake.

  ‘But you’re so lucky,’ I heard her say as I surfaced again, ‘you don’t seem to have to decide what to do about anything.’

  We wrestled in the early morning water. ‘Every thing is contained within us,’ I said, ‘in degrees – as every proposition contains the whole universe. As Tzincaran says, to say the jaguar is to speak of all jaguars that engendered it, the deer and the tortoises it devoured, the pastures on which those deer fed, the earth that produced the pastures, the sky that gives light to the earth.’

  ‘You’ve been learning answers!’ Hestia said. ‘You’ve been rehearsing!’

  ‘We contain our opposites and alternative – the man in every woman – sometimes they are exclusive but not always.’

  ‘Does that exp
lain your behaviour?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see – I see the whole universe in this very lake,’ she said.

  We slowly somersaulted and kissed in the golden lake, underwater early morning. I was more aware of the flesh of our lips and the grip of our hands than of the kiss itself.

  ‘Do we like each other?’ she asked, ‘or is it that we like each other as parts of Milton?’

  ‘Probably as parts of Milton.’

  ‘What would you tell children?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d tell them about the great polarity of death and life and how everything is a symbolic depiction of this.’

  ‘For what purpose?’

  ‘Once realised, it gives a state of resignation and diminishes urgency.’

  ‘What are these symbolic representations?’

  We paddled ashore.

  ‘Sleep/waking, victory/defeat, silence/sound, passive/active.’

  We walked together in our French towelling beach robes, along the sand track to the stone cottage, where Hestia made asparagus omelettes and we drank grapefruit juice, and then percolated continental-blend black coffee which is so popular in Southern European countries, a high roast, very strong flavour, and a slightly burnt taste.

  We rode our rented motorcycles along unknown bush trails. A stick flew up, thrown by the wheel of Hestia’s cycle, and slightly tore the skin of her forearm. I sucked the blood from her wound, and then, with the engine of the cycle running, had her undress and lie back on the hot cycle, her hands gripping the handle bar, her legs straddling the seat, her lubricating cunt exposed to the midday sun.

  ‘Hold on,’ she said, and put on her riding boots, ‘My ankles were getting burned.’