The Everlasting Secret Family

by Frank Moorhouse

  I restrained myself from rising, not wanting to disturb her sleep.

  She eventually awoke and the small girl disappeared in a frown and became a hawking and coughing, cigarette-smoking woman in her thirties. She went to the bathroom with a muttered “Good morning” and I heard her cough more and spit, and then clean her teeth.

  Waking in the morning with a stranger of the night. Untogether, muddy, bumbling, exposed with all the stains, grit and odours of the night. And all those other awakenings without the cover of privacy or intimacy—hospital wards, on aircraft—bodily disoriented, waking amid all that stirring, discomfited, animal humanity. But waking with a former lover, of many years previous, was something else.

  I was curious about the aging of her body, about her morning habits. Cindy had closed the bathroom door but I heard the rattle of the toilet-paper holder and thought that she was using an inordinate amount of paper. I laughed—she had before. She’d done that at seventeen. And I’d thought that then. I remembered us laughingly discussing it. I, on the other hand, we’d discovered, had always tried to make do with as little paper as possible. But she’d used abundant paper which, back then, I’d privately thought had something to do with “being a woman”.

  She came back more brightly and said “Good morning” with an effort of will, in a well-bred family way. “What a hell of a mess. What a dreadful, hellish mess.”

  “I thought you might like to pull out of the conference—we could get a flight back today. Go home. Have a boozy lunch.”

  I didn’t want to leave the conference, but felt I owed her this gesture.

  “You and your conferences!” she said, a small laugh, calmer now, but the laugh was still troubled. “You talked me into this conference—now look!” Her good humour was an effort.

  “You feel okay? Pain?” My voice fumbled. “Any aftereffects?” Not really knowing what rape might mean, how much involuntary muscular resistance was given by the body. Or whatever.

  “No. I don’t seem to have suffered. That way anyhow,” and she looked at me. “You’re still hazy about women’s anatomy aren’t you. You were always squeamish about it.”

  I reddened. “I suppose so.”

  She became wearied, grim. “Rape in a good cause, the inevitable fate of a lady radical,’’ she said, lighting her first cigarette. “How about breakfast?” She drew with relief on the cigarette. “The fate worse than death. Well, I’ll be able to talk from field experience at conferences on rape.”

  The flippancy she was trying for was not there in her voice.

  “It may be too late for breakfast,” I said, going to the telephone.

  Cindy asked me to order smoked salmon and warm toast.

  “Cindy, you’re not going to get smoked salmon—not at breakfast.”

  “It’s only a matter of them getting it from a refrigerator.”

  “No substitutions,” I said, ill-humouredly.

  “What?” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s an American expression.”

  I suppressed my exasperation at her wilfuiness, this spoiled-brat capriciousness. It had always been there. It may have been enchanting at seventeen but in adult life it seemed wilful, or self-sensationalism. Or anyhow it was against my adult style, of living within the conditions of a given situation or something. Of ambling through life, or, as Cindy might have said, sneaking through life. She seemed always to push against the understood limits. I controlled myself, she had a claim to being indulged. Embarrassed, I asked for smoked salmon.

  “Yes,” I said to room service, “that’s right—smoked salmon.”

  “And warm toast,” Cindy called to me, “and no capers.”

  “And no capers,” I said.

  “And no onion rings,” she said.

  I relayed this and the motel kitchen said they’d see what they could do.

  “No,” Cindy said, as I put down the telephone, “no—I’ll go back to the conference and face the deadshits, although I don’t know if I’m up to verbal confrontation.”

  “Surely they will have left.”

  I was about to add, “in all decency”, but realised that the expression belonged to some sort of class attitude.

  I felt some trepidation myself about how we would handle it if they hadn’t left. How much aggression would be there in them if they were unrepentant. What if they were arrogantly confident of her not calling the police and paraded this confidence. Or took not calling the police as Cindy’s acceptance of the rape, even her passive consent. Or what if they feared she might still call the police and became intimidatory towards her.

  “Thank you,” she said, “I won’t ask you to do anything more—just stay with me today.”

  “Of course.”

  That seemed quite a lot to ask even so.

  “Right,” she said, “we’ll face it out.”

  We?

  Our breakfast arrived—including her smoked salmon, but with capers and onion rings—and I shamelessly took Cindy’s praise for having secured it. “You’re the only man I know who could have got them to do it,” she said, dishonestly, picking off the capers and onion rings and putting them in the ashtray.

  She booked herself into the motel for the rest of the conference saying, irrationally, that she wouldn’t be able to face the communal college showers. But she said there was no need for me to stay with her.

  In the cab back to the conference she commented sourly that she had probably got VD from last night. “And that’s a racist thing to say too. That’s another stage of racism—realising as you say something that it’s racist—but still it indicates a rising consciousness, I suppose.”

  Then she amended it again, saying that maybe it wasn’t a racist thing to have said, given the statistically higher incidence of VD among black people—introduced by the whites.

  “I’ve heard there’s a theory about American Indians giving VD to Europe—through Columbus.”

  “Oh yes, that’s been around for a long time now,” she said, “but we’d need a very good palaeo-immunological test to establish it. And we haven’t got one.”

  I asked her why she wasn’t on the pill.

  “I don’t fuck that much these days.”

  I didn’t pursue it.

  We had missed the early session.

  She was trembling when we met with the others standing in the sun outside the auditorium with their cups of coffee at morning break.

  “God, I can’t,” she said, without in any way pulling back.

  “Are they here?” I asked her,

  “No,” she said, whipping a glance across the faces of those in the sun.

  “I’ll find out if they’re around,” I said, without really thinking that they would be.

  I went over to one of the other aboriginal delegates, John Percy Blake, and asked him if the Redfern Delegation had left the conference. Wondering, as I asked, if that was the nickname that only the whites used.

  He knew whom I meant.

  “No. Don’t see them about though.”

  He asked me why I was asking and I made up a reason.

  “Probably on the piss,” he said.

  Relieved, I went back and told Cindy.

  “It appears that they’ve gone,” I said.

  “That only raises another problem,” she said. “Now I’ll have to contact them somehow and tell them that the police aren’t after them. They’re obviously terrified.”

  “No,” I said, “you don’t owe them a damned thing. Let them sweat.”

  “The bastards have done enough sweating. Historically,” she said.

  I stayed silent.

  With agitated energy, lighting a cigarette as she walked, she went over to John Percy Blake.

  I resigned myself to her caprice—for one day—although I wanted to be rid of the problem, to be seated alone in a crowded auditorium, immersed in a session.

  Returning she said, “He will try,” and we began to move into the auditorium. “They’re fin
dable, they never go far from certain territorial limits, hotels, streets.” “Like American tourists who stay at the Hilton.”

  She acknowledged my attempt at humour, or sociology, and went on, “Maybe I should start looking myself.” “God you’re impossible, Cindy—just let it be.’’

  “It was my rape,” she said sharply, “and I’ll play it any way I want.”

  As we took our seats in the auditorium Cindy said that she couldn’t help feeling that people could “tell” what had happened to her.

  Her eyes roved the faces.

  I looked at her. The body and the face are really very secretive.

  At the end of the session we broke for lunch and halfway up the aisle Cindy grabbed my arm. “Oh god, there he is, there’s one of them.”

  She dived for her cigarettes.

  I looked across, he was about eighteen or so.

  “Are the others about?” she asked.

  I could find no menace in his face.

  “No, I can see only him.”

  What would he think my role was? What was my role? She was freshly agitated, in dilemma, head down, deeply frowning. She said she’d better go over and talk with him. “No, Cindy, you don’t have to do that.”

  “Will you come?”

  “Leave it be.”

  “Will you come over with me?”

  “Only if you must.”

  “No,” she said, “you’ll only write about it.” It was a try at humour.

  “Come on.”

  “Thanks.” She took my hand, leading me over towards him.

  He moved away when he saw her coming.

  She called to him in an authoritative voice, “Alan!”

  He stopped and turned.

  He was nervous. “I came to see you, give myself up.” “You do it in a funny way, Alan,” she said, very controlled. “And where are the other two?”

  “Don’t know.” “Hadn’t we all better have a talk.”

  “It was the drink, the drink took away our heads.”

  “It was more than that, Alan.”

  I realised that I wasn’t looking at either of them and that I was absenting myself from it.

  When I looked up, he was looking at me as if I might be an official.

  She turned to me. “Leave us for a while,” she said confidentially, “and thanks.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  They went off and I was relieved to be free of the involvement, and aware also that it had passed beyond my comprehension, I had no clue what they would talk about or how.

  When they didn’t appear for the afternoon session I assumed they had found “something to talk about”. But by late afternoon I had fantasies, some discreditable, some concerned, and I eventually found a telephone and rang the motel.

  She answered.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yes—yes, I’m fine.”

  “How did it go?”

  “You mean with Alan?”

  “Yes, of course, I mean with Alan or whoever—with the three of them.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine!!??” I shouted. “What do you mean—fine”

  I could tell now that there was someone with her. Alan? Alan, I suppose, yes. Or the three of them.

  Or the whole fucking tribe.

  “I can’t talk now,” she said.

  “Are they there—there with you?”

  “Yes. Look I can’t talk now. I don’t want to talk about it now. Okay?”

  “Well, I think I have a right to ask.”

  “Please don’t pursue it. Don’t bring it up. We’re talking it through. Life’s very complicated. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Cindy!”

  A laugh in the background, a male laugh, rushed into my ear.

  “Cindy, I was trying to take a concerned interest.”

  “I know. It’s appreciated.”

  We finished up. I kept getting a flock of signals from our conversation but couldn’t make it all out. Partly because I was angry, but it was also, well, I felt the situation was weird. The four of them closeted in a motel. The laughter.

  As I left the telephone booth I was angry again about the smoked salmon.

  My palms were wet.

  Bloody hell.

  And I felt held away, discarded, piqued. I faced then my sense of appal at the idea of them together in the motel—all right, middle-class abhorrence. I pictured the flagon of wine, the loosening of formality as what started as a “dialogue”, self-conscious, faddish therapy, weakened into male-female drinking, joking around, undertones of sexuality there all the time, cigarette litter, room-service plates, sprawling on the floor, cigarette smoke, spillings of drink, intoxication. A scene I’d witnessed with Cindy and her friends in the past many times, had participated in. It was not only that they were aboriginals from way outside her social group—my god, they were aboriginal rapists.

  And then, infuriatingly, there was another mad feeling, of being slighted, of not being “wanted at the party”. That was madness.

  Seated back in the auditorium, filling out some survey someone was conducting about the conference, I had yet another thought. The Stockholm Syndrome. Yes. I dredged it up. The Stockholm Syndrome where the aggressor and the victim form a special bond, a puzzling alliance. I’d read about it.

  But, as Cindy said, life is too complicated, and I was perhaps only hunting about for an explanation of why I was no longer required in the play. Maybe, and this was another thought not previously allowed, maybe Cindy was not all that honest. Maybe she had, in a drunken, guilty lapse of control, that night gone past the code and restrictions of her lifestyle and temperament, gone with the situation there in her college room and allowed, encouraged, the dark forces, the lower depths, to take over. I say against her lifestyle because, although she led a free life, was sexually permissive, I did not consider this sort of situation . . . Why not? Group sex situations occurred. Why not she? Why was this out of the question? There was no reason to think she hadn’t. But this led off in other directions. My memories of her when she had been seventeen and we had been in love—these memories were in rebellion. They barred the way.

  No. She was not self-deceptive and she wouldn’t have needed to deceive me if that was what had happened that night. That could have been left in joking vagueness. No. It was more likely the Stockholm Syndrome.

  Life was complicated enough but Cindy wasn’t the sort of person who used that as a reason for trying to simplify. She used it as a release from order, as a reason for allowing complication to multiply and enmesh.

  Well, I was out of it.

  As she herself would say—it was not my rape.

  Yes,the Stockholm Syndrome, I Think

  Cindy returned to the conference and our working session the next morning, again late and this time with two aboriginals, two of the Redfern Delegation. One I’d met the day before, Alan, whom she’d identified as one of those who had raped her (I found myself looking at him, thinking, well that’s a rapist is it) and another I assumed to be also one of the rapists.

  Cindy and I simply nodded as she came in. I had come away from our telephone conversation yesterday feeling pushed aside, even feeling that I was somehow a wrongdoer in some ideological sense, that I was at fault for advising her to avoid them, to by-pass the problem. I suppose it was a form of racism to feel that it was best to “have nothing more to do with it all”, but it was also a pragmatic reaction to a no-win, no-solution situation.

  I may as well say it, I found Cindy’s fraternising with them lurid and vexing. While I had read of the Stockholm Syndrome and believed that was a part explanation for what was happening with her, I found this not quite manageable in first-hand living fact.

  At the session I was glad to sit with Charles, who had been appearing and disappearing throughout the conference, which, like all extended conferences, now had a core of diligents joined now and then by floaters and visitors interested in one session or anothe
r. Maybe my sitting with Charles was also a retreat towards his conservative style away from Cindy’s flabbergasting behaviour.

  Cindy at the discussion break went to the front of the session and after whispering in the chairperson’s ear took the floor to make an announcement that she wanted to “challenge the format”.

  Charles groaned out aloud.

  She wanted, she said, for the conference—or, at least, our working group—to grant more time for aboriginals and other colonial victims, who had, she claimed, not received proportionate time and she mumbled something about “white time” and “black time” and that at least one hour a day be set aside for their statements, poems, or whatever.

  She talked of “compensatory time” for historical wrongs.

  As she spoke, I thought, well I’ll have to go along with this because of my protective feelings about Cindy and because of another general feeling—that I’d had an easy life, enjoying the privileges of being white, and what was to be lost by going along with her?

  But I suppose the tougher part of me said that I had an instinctive resistance to these simple-minded public acts of redemption.

  I could see by an impatient nervous movement of his leg and his grunts that Charles wasn’t having any of Cindy’s proposal.

  It occurred to me too that she might be displacing the intolerable experience of the rape, asking for sympathy and compensation for those who’d done it to her because she could not ask for it for herself. That she hadn’t assimilated the experience as quickly as she expected she might, that it had become an undigested distress.

  The two aboriginals didn’t say anything although I assumed they were in on the plan, that this had grown out of their “meeting” together with Cindy yesterday.

  Charles was up and attacking Cindy before I could restrain him, and anyway, how could I have restrained him?

  “No,” Charles said, “for all my sympathies—and, believe it or not, I too am a bleeding-heart liberal—we have to remember this is not a welfare organisation. This is an academic conference, basically—no offence to the poets among us.” He waved an apologising hand vaguely at the poets in the audience behind him. “We have a program to which we should stick unless there are obvious intellectual reasons why we shouldn’t.”