The Everlasting Secret Family

by Frank Moorhouse

  “Then I’ll remove it myself,” Crawford said, getting up, going to the front of the room.

  I hadn’t throught Crawford would push it so far. Now I was uncomfortable.

  But the room was smiling its support of Crawford. In the hot afternoon we had become the class at the end of term. A class of children flustering a weak teacher. No, it was more like a class of children overwhelming a fellow student put “in charge” of the class.

  Markham wouldn’t give Crawford the duster to clean the board and he held it petulantly behind his back.

  “Watch out,” Charles called, “that’s a dangerous weapon.”

  Some of the people had started to giggle.

  Crawford went to the board and removed the word with his handkerchief.

  At this, Markham put down the duster with deliberate care, said that he would not deliver his paper, gathered up his notes and stuffed them, without deliberate care, into his briefcase and left the room lugging the briefcase, which hung open, unbuckled and gaping. “Until common courtesy prevails,” he said over his shoulder, jamming on his silly hat.

  The laughter died down immediately, although there were some dying snorts.

  The chairperson suppressed a grin and tried to restore procedure. “Somebody had better go after him,” she appealed, looking to Crawford.

  Crawford went out the door after Markham, he was gone about a minute, and then came back without him. “I can’t find him—I declare it a half holiday.”

  Some of us cheered lightly and, without hesitation, most people put their papers into their satchels and began to leave the room.

  The chairperson shrugged and said why not. “It looks as if I’m out of a job anyway,” she said.

  A woman from Malaysia leaned over to Crawford, who was putting away his things, and said, “Back home we say the way to get rain is to wash a cat.”

  He smiled uncomprehendingly.

  “Markham’s magic is a bit awry,” Charles said, lighting a cigar, standing, waiting for us to come. Markham was getting about the conference with a new pose. He saw himself as some sort of medieval fool.

  We moved out of the room to the lifts, Charles, Crawford, and I. We waited for the lift. It arrived and delivered out Markham with a floppy, strained grin, returning, his briefcase still hanging open.

  “Everyone’s going,” I said, “you may as well come for a drink.”

  “Yes,” said Charles, cigar alight, “you’ve lost them, Markham.”

  The grin passed from Markham’s face, he appeared stung with disappointment.

  “Come for a drink,” I said.

  “No,” he said, “I try to make it a practice, whenever possible, not to ride in lifts with covert homosexuals, especially those covert homosexuals who make a personal profit out of the gay community.” He did not look at Crawford or say these things at him but talked to Charles.

  He then pushed past us and went into the lecture room.

  It was a puzzling reference to Crawford’s homosexuality.

  Crawford had come out as a homosexual about six months earlier in a letter to the newspapers. I did not, however, understand Markham’s reference to personal profit or covertness.

  “He is bitter,” Crawford said, but his voice showed that he’d been disconcerted.

  Throughout the conference I had heard no reference to Crawford’s coming out in any conversation. Cindy and I had mentioned it but we were old friends. But the others seemed to have steadfastly ignored the change in Crawford’s image—from conservative businessman to gay activist.

  We entered the lift, which Crawford was holding, because there now seemed no point in going back to the lecture.

  We began to go down in the lift.

  “But what makes it more irritating,” Crawford said, “is that he’s obviously not read my letter to the papers.”

  No one had anything to say. No one looked at Crawford, all eyes were on the floor numbers as they lit up and passed, the smell of Charles’ cigar filled the lift. Only when the automatic doors rolled thankfully open and Charles said, “Who’s for lunch?” were we relieved of our prickling embarrassment, of our guilty truancy, and from our inability to talk about Crawford’s homosexuality.

  AUDITION FOR MALE VOICE

  When we ended up in Bisi’s room drunk for a singing party to end the conference, I wondered if there’d be a person who wouldn’t have a song to sing as I had once, as a cadet, not had a song to sing, and yes, at this party there was a person who had no song, a young poet from Melbourne. And l’d thought poets always had a song to sing.

  “Sing—everyone a song,” said Bisi.

  In the old Journalists Club surrounded by older journalists, the older men having taken me, the cadet, to wet my head. “You’ll have to sing a song.” “Naturally,” I say, not recalling any song, churning at the fear of performance, impersonating an equality with the older men. “Naturally,” I say, heartily, deep voiced, at seventeen. And to the fifty-year-old journalist who’d just sung, I say, deeply, “Go on, Fred,” throwing back my beer. “You’ll have to do better than that, Fred.”

  The drinking test, to stay on one’s feet, the testing session.

  “You’ll have to sing,” the older journalist says. “Everyone has sung.”

  To have the words, to hold yourself together, to deny shyness, to join with knowingness in age-old drinking rituals, tell a good story, sing a man’s song, know the match game. Take the mail to dead man’s gulch.

  “I will, Fred—I will—don’t rush me.” Laughing, inwardly desperate, big-voiced seventeen, the cadet, frying in my self-consciousness. No song coming to my lips.

  “Come on, sing a song.”

  To reach seventeen I had climbed higher in a tree, gone into a female lavatory for a bet, sworn at a teacher, had a fist fight with a black, learned to throw a knife and make it stick, shot a rabbit and skinned it, gone into a cemetery at midnight, spat on a church altar, dived off Forty Foot Cliff, touched a girl’s breast, touched a girl’s cunt, drunk twenty schooners, done the University-to-the-Quay crawl. Asked a barmaid for a fuck.

  Come back when you’ve begun to shave.

  “Sing a song.”

  I have passed nearly all mine now, and more.

  Gone with a whore.

  And tests passed more than once.

  Fathered a child.

  Come back when you’ve begun to shave.

  The tests too of the military.

  “I will, Fred—let me finish this beer.”

  Cut a body target in two with machine-gun fire, bayoneted a human dummy, endured a route march in full gear, endured a battalion parade without fainting, gone into a gas-filled room.

  Bisi was beating the waste-paper bin like a drum, the big Ibo “high life” music, the music of the market town Onitsha.

  “Oh-yes,” he cried, singing, “oh-yes.”

  The moral rearmament man from Samoa was there, not drinking, but smiling, smiling, smiling. Oh-yes. He did an act of pulling in the canoe with his tie, and with great style, squatting pn his backside on the college room floor. Pulling in a canoe at UNESCO.

  Norman sang Land of Our Fathers, moved by his own voice from the mock-serious to alcoholic dreams of a Coldstream Guard, and back again.

  Now the harems of Egypt are fair to behold,

  And the ladies the fairest of fair,

  But the fairest, a Greek

  She was owned by a sheik,

  One Abdul-A-Bulbul Emir.

  And Ivan Skivinsky Skivar. And The Harlot of

  Jerusalem. And tools of fools who tried to ride. Hi hi cafoozelum, the harlot of Jerusalem.

  Mathers sang Will Ye No Come Back Again, and cried.

  I cried. Norman cried. Bisi cried.

  “Sing anything.” The old journalist. “All right Fred, give me a second.” No song to sing, racked. The cadet.

  My name is Sammy Hall, Sammy Hall, Sammy Hall. Damn your eyes, blast your soul.

  How did they know them, where did they
come from?

  Why didn’t I know?

  Painfully—“All right, quiet everybody, here I go”—painfully my voice leaps. I sing a popular song of the day, eyes closed, stumblingly, in a boy’s voice, impersonating a grown man, four lines. Blast my soul. Damn my eyes.

  Roll me over, lay me down and do it again.

  On Ilkla Moor Baht’at.

  Norman sang Land of Our Fathers, became a Coldstream Guard and stayed a Coldstream Guard.

  Bisi beat the drums of the market town of Onitsha.

  The young poet was asked to sing.

  “Go on sing, anything,” I said, my voice the voice of the old journalist. Don’t you know—

  There was an old man from Cape Horn?

  There was a young monk from Siberia?

  There was a maiden from Avignon France?

  There was a young fellow from Kings?

  No.

  No?!

  “I don’t bloody well want to sing.”

  “You have to sing,” the voice of the old journalist.

  Sing a song. Sing a song.

  “I don’t want to bloody well sing a song.”

  Norman said not to get uptight about it. It was all right.

  It was not all right.

  “I hate these bloody things,” the young poet cried, temper breaking, reddening. “I won’t be forced into these things.”

  “No one is forcing you.”

  We are all forcing you. “I hate this male drinking bonhomie limerick shit.” There was a young lady from Sydney,

  Who took it right up to the kidney.

  Bisi, “You bloody sing a song, young poet, this is a singing party, you sing your song, this is a drinking party, you drink your drink and sing your song.”

  “No daylight, no heel taps,” said Norman, the Coldstream Guard.

  The young poet held his temper with the black man. “I’ll go.”

  “No. You cannot go. You stay and sing a song.” Mathers sang Will Ye No Come Back Again, and cried. Bisi beat the drums.

  Norman the Coldstream Guard sang Land of Our Fathers.

  The moral rearmament man pulled in the canoe.

  I sang Joe Hill.

  I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me. I?

  We sang There is a Green Hill Far Away. The moral rearmament man from Samoa, Bisi from the market town of Onitsha, we all sang:

  There is a green hill far away,

  Without a city wall,

  Where the dear Lord was crucified,

  Who died to save us all.

  It was on the good ship Venus,

  My god you should have seen us.

  We are gentlemen songsters out on a spree,

  Doomed from here to eternity,

  Lord have mercy on such as we,

  We are poor little lambs W^ho have lost our way Baa, baa, baa.

  The poet says, grittingly, “All right, I’ll say the Lord’s Prayer. Our father which art in heaven.”

  We became quiet. We joined him, all male voices, saying the Lord’s Prayer, solemnly, heads bowed. We could have been at an army church parade. Norman was. We joined the poet.

  “Our father which art in heaven, “Hallowed be thy name,

  “Thy kingdom come.”

  EPILOGUE

  I did not get to talk with Cindy again until we met at the luggage carousel at the end of the flight home. I had not known that she was on the flight. There had been a scattering after the dying fall of the conference.

  She came over penitently and linked arms with me. “Sometimes I know my luggage will be the last, but on other days I command destiny to let my luggage come first,” she said.

  “Do you know what I think? I think I will not recognise my own luggage when it comes out. A whiff of panic always passes through me. What does that mean?”

  “Forgive me?” she asked. “I promise never to go to a conference again.”

  “Well, you didn’t have much of a conference.”

  We were interrupted by an old professor who’d been at the conference, he paused to ask us if we’d had a “fruitful conference”.

  I said yes, I had.

  Cindy, sharing the irony with me, said gushingly, “Wonderful, really marvellous.”

  He said, “So pleased,” and went off.

  She returned to our conversation. “But it wasn’t only the sordid ‘incident’, I meant it was also the other madness—six days at a conference leads you into a whole other reality.”

  The carousel seemed to carry foreign luggage—our flight all stood there staring at it, no one seemed to be claiming it.

  “I really think,” she said wildly, “they’re psychologically dangerous—it’s all so intensely verbal—and its regressive, back to the classroom—I’m sure the disproportionate use of the verbal skills—all that mouth and ear use—word-centred—produces sensory disorientation, insanity, like being deprived of light for days or sleep.” She laughed nervously. “Even my sordid adventure and my behaviour after it, that might have been a need for sensory compensation, a hunger for action, activity—who knows? I certainly come home from conferences aching for a film or a concert. Something that isn’t words.”

  I’d been reluctant to let go of the conference. What did that say about me? Did I particularly flourish in the disorientation?

  “But isn’t this different.” She gestured around at the airport. “Isn’t this somehow orientating.”

  Physical movement, noise.

  “Anyhow,” she said, “and this is positively the last time I’ll say it—I’m sorry. I was mad up there and I treated you shabbily.”

  “You had every good reason to be mad. There’s nothing to forgive. I’m sorry about the Norris woman.”

  “Yes!” she said, remembering. “The Cattle Lady—you should be. She was rather desperate. I ended up rather liking her. I seem to have promised to let her stay with me. I could have done without that. Now I’ve become a women’s refuge.”

  I guessed that Kay had respected the recklessly given confidence.

  “But anyhow, when they ask in the senior common room how the conference was, I will be able to say blithely—I was raped; I staged a revolt against UNESCO; I had an encounter with the police; I wounded a leading magazine editor; and I became a black radical—for forty-eight hours.”

  “They’d expect all that of you, Cindy.”

  “No—no you don’t keep up with my image. I’m not like that at all any more. For the last year or so I’ve been pleated skirts and stockings. I’m supposed to have mellowed. You still see me as a chaotic student. No. That’s why all that stuff at the conference was so mad. It wasn’t me at all. I’ve been very different.”

  I hesitated but said, “You forgot one thing on your list.”

  “What?”

  “You set a child molester free.”

  “God, your humour is gruesome.” She gave a hopeless laugh. “Yes.”

  Our bags came out together on the carousel and we pushed through to get them.

  Living in adjoining suburbs, we shared a cab. In the cab she said that when Sophia grew up she would be able, as a mother, to give her advice about rape, she laughed wincingly. “I’ll tell her that when raped—don’t date the rapists.”

  I worried about the cab driver listening.

  “Have you read Passage to India—Forster?” I asked her.

  “I think so . . . it was a book I was supposed to have read. Anyhow I can’t remember books I read before I was twenty. Why?”

  “Oh, it loosely parallels your situation—race relations, and a similar sort of incident. But I don’t mean to dwell on the subject,” I said. “I hear Roy is refusing to have his paper published from that conference last May because Utah put up money for the conference.”

  “If I were he,” she said, “I wouldn’t want that paper published.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t that bad.”

  “But he must have known Utah were putting money into that conference—I did,” she snorted. �
��He wants to have his yellow cake and eat it too.”

  I laughed.

  We watched the familiar city stream past on either side, trails and landmarks of our shared life there.

  We passed the house where Cindy and I had lived together fifteen years before.

  We gave each other a look that said we were aware we’d passed the house.

  “My god, the suburb’s changed,” she said.

  Then she said, “Do you remember that drive we took from Dick’s book launching down to the coast? When we were together? ‘Across the plains, over the mountains, and down to the sea’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember asking me once at Gill’s party if I remembered it—and I said, deliberately lying, that I didn’t remember it.”

  “We were both tough on each other then,” I said.

  “But I did remember. I remembered vividly, but I didn’t want to indulge in sentimentality—I thought we had to be tough on each other to survive.” Again she laughed. “Now I feel we have to be sentimental to survive—it’s all we’ve got.”

  The inner city, our true city, came in around us. We looked out of the windows of the cab at the windows of the houses, the houses of a thousand parties, failures, money crises, storms, slammed doors, accidents, and deaths.

  “Do you think I should change my first name?” she asked, surprisingly.

  “To what and why?”

  “I hate the name Cindy—it’s so juvenile—there’s a hideous popular doll called Cindy—Sophia has one.”

  “Well when you were seventeen I thought it a marvellous name.”

  “Yes but now—I’ll change it to something neutral—Margaret.’’

  “Why not something like Imogene?”

  “No. Something plain.”

  “I’ve never told you—but Imogene was my secret name for you.”

  “Really? I’ve never felt like an Imogene.”

  We reached her place.

  “Do you have secret names, for everyone?” she asked, obviously intrigued.

  “No—only for you.”

  “Coming in?” She issued the invitation weakly.

  “No—I feel like some solitude.” “Yes. I feel the same.”

  “Give my love to Sophia.”