Forty-Seventeen

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘I’d like to go into the bush without a plan,’ he said, to see how they’d jump, ‘to go into the bush idly.’ The word ‘idly’ was strange to the dining room.

  ‘Plan the work: work the plan,’ his father said.

  ‘If you didn’t have a plan how would you know where to go next?’ asked his nephew.

  An existential question.

  ‘It’s the journey not the destination,’ his ever-protective sister said.

  He thought it was both. But he didn’t want to have her offside too. ‘I hated all that up-at-dawn, fifty-kilometre-day regimented walking we all went in for as kids,’ she added.

  As he was putting his things into the car the next day his mother gave him a two-litre plastic container of water and told him to put it in his pack.

  It wouldn’t fit in his pack but he told her he was going, anyhow, to the river.

  He tried to ask casually, ‘Which side of the family were bushwalkers – was grandmother a bushwalker?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘she was a city lass.’

  ‘Great-grandmother?’ He knew the standard answer.

  ‘She’s a bit of an unknown quantity,’ she said, ‘she lived in Katoomba and that’s about all we know. She worked at the Caves.’

  He wondered again if that was all she knew. He never got further than that answer.

  His father wouldn’t come out to say goodbye. His going into the bush in direct refusal of an order.

  His mother said she would pray for rain.

  ‘Well don’t flood the river on me,’ he said.

  He drove as far as he could into the bush and then, hoisting his pack, left the car – going through the Act of Severance, the break with habitation and people, the solitary swimming out into the wilderness.

  For him it always required a mustering of will and it always brought about a tight alertness. He’d taken 15 mg of Serepax on the drive up to the bush to counteract his family’s sapping and to calm him for the bush.

  He’s taking drugs, his nephew said.

  But the tightness continued. Again, as always, the small cold warning spot of fear switched on as the connections with safety receded.

  As he walked deeper into the bush his mind monitored his system, running over his body like a hand, a detector listening for fault.

  The bush flies were thick but he’d seen them thicker and anyhow he’d make a détente with the flies. He said peace to the flies, peace.

  He talks to the flies.

  He came to the slab of rock and he laughed to himself about making love to Belle, holding her so the flies crawled over her face. There were three kinds of flies this time, he noticed, which he wasn’t allowing to bother him.

  Something about fucking a girl on the rock and flies.

  As he stood on the slab and recalled the perfect Christmas dinner she’d cooked, he realised that his efforts this time to somehow ‘erase’ the mistake of bringing Belle into the bush was not going to work. He had inscribed it deeper by doing it. And it didn’t worry him now anyhow. She was maybe a re-enactment of his great-grandmother and that was that. Whatever that meant.

  He’s not going on about the great-grandmother again?

  He decided to go down into the gorge by way of a descending creek, barely running, which led him to a rainforest on the slope of the gorge. Vines, moss, a dense overhead canopy of branches and vines, silence. He liked the dank chambers of rainforest – they were like a nightclub in the daytime, broken sunlight, a smell of trapped staleness. He sat for a while in the dankness. The flies would not come there.

  Maybe this is where Belle and he should have come for Christmas. Or maybe this was where he should lie down and never rise, there in the decay.

  He wants to lie down in all the crap.

  But he went on, down the remaining stretch of creek, blocked here and there with boulders, and then dropping steeply to the river. Reaching the river was a minor exultation. It was no great river at this point but it ran with enthusiasm and had a thin waterfall. He stood under the fall naked – waterfalls, however thin, always suggest that you watch them or stand under them.

  He’s standing there under the waterfall testing a notepad of waterproof paper.

  After two hours or so of more walking he began to lose alertness and decided to make camp.

  He wasn’t a follower of the Fung Shui approach to camp sites, the search for the most propitious site. He accepted ‘good’ camp sites when they came around the corner – the running creek, the camping cave, the grassy knoll. But most of all he liked making camp in unpromising situations. He liked to shape an unpromising site into shelter. Sometimes he was reluctant to leave those camps he’d won from rough conditions. He supposed this was ‘very Western’. He used to say in restaurants back in Sydney and Vienna that he went into the bush to have a dialogue with Western Man but instead he invariably became a Man from a Western.

  He took off his pack and declared ‘this is it’. As the gypsies would say, anyone who now approaches this place would have to ask permission to sit by ‘his’ fire and should not walk between him and his fire, and should approach with sufficient noise so as not to be mistaken for a stalking enemy. But in all the years he had walked in the Australian bush he had never come across another person.

  Something about gypsies, he’s talking about gypsies.

  There had been times when he’d fancied he heard someone ‘out there’ and sometimes he kept his loaded Luger pistol at hand to keep away the phantoms. There were also the times when he would have quite liked someone to come out of the bush to join him and drink bourbon at the camp fire. He heard voices at times, but knew them for what they were.

  He packs iron. He packs iron?!

  He built his fire in the almost dry river bed where a narrow stream of water still ran in a wide bed of sand. But when he came to light the fire he couldn’t find the disposable lighter which he used in the bush. He remembered checking the equipment against the thirty-one-item equipment list before he started. He was, he thought, good at checking and constructing lists. Last year he’d bought a replica of a 1930 brass smokestone lighter from the United States for the look of it – from an Early Winters catalogue. But the fuel dried out of the smokestone lighter in the summer heat. He’d gone back to the cheap disposable lighters. But it was missing.

  He went through the equipment. No lighter. From the moment you left the car behind you things began to go against you in the bush – something always got broken, something spilled, something was lost, something forgotten. Well, rarely forgotten with his drill. Everything began to degenerate – batteries, food. From the moment you left civilisation you had only so long to live.

  He forgot his lighter.

  His incompetence about the lighter appalled him. Fire was crucial. He went to the emergency kit where he had a box of waterproof matches. They were there. Go on, deduct points, he said to his nephew, take off ten points.

  Fifty.

  He lit the camp fire.

  He grilled his steak on a green forked stick, baked two potatoes in the coals. He wondered if his mother had taken the lighter from his pack. Impossible.

  He for-got his ligh-ter.

  He for-got his ligh-ter.

  He ate two marshmallow biscuits.

  After dinner he killed the fire and went up beside the tent on the grass. It was a cool evening and he thought he could detect rain in the air, a fall in barometric pressure maybe.

  He settled down with a flask of Jack Daniels bourbon, sipping it from his Guzzini goblet which he carried for sipping Jack Daniels in the bush.

  He wished himself a good fortieth year.

  He ate smokehouse almonds. He felt the bush to be benign for the first time on this trip. He had shed the pangs of isolation. After the second bourbon an emphatic peace fell about him. He finished the evening writing languid notes – a conversation with himself, it sure as hell beat a lot of conversations he’d had that last year.

  He’s sloshed.
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br />   In his tent, in his sleeping bag, his torch hanging from the ceiling, he read a few pages of Buddenbrooks. Having run away from his own bourgeois mercantile family he immersed himself in the fortunes of Mann’s German bourgeois family of the nineteenth century.

  Herr Ralf von Maiboom, owner of the Poppenrade estate, had committed suicide by shooting himself with a revolver, in the study of the manor-house. Pecuniary difficulties seem to have been the cause of the act.

  ‘With a revolver?’ Thomas Buddenbrook asked, and then, after another pause, he said in a low voice, slowly, mockingly, ‘That is the nobility for you.’

  He says we’re bourgeois.

  During the night he was woken by rain and said to himself, ‘Well done, Mother’ and drifted back to sleep with the pleasure of being in a wild environment but secured against it, he liked weathering out storms in a tent.

  In the morning it was drizzling but he took out the German solid-fuel stove and set it up in a small pocket cave, the size of a fireplace, for the making of the morning coffee to begin a wet day in the bush.

  Make a fuzz-stick. No need for the emergency stove just because of a little drizzle.

  Well, he didn’t feel like fooling around with damp wood.

  Strip dead wood from standing trees.

  He knew how to make a fire in the wet. He just wasn’t going to crouch and blow his soul into a damp fire.

  Having set up the stove he couldn’t find the matches.

  He went into the tent and made a cramped search through his things again, taking everything out of the backpack, and emptying the food bag.

  My God, now he’s lost the matches.

  Dismayed, disbelieving, he sat in the tent surrounded by his thirty-one items of gear and tried to think what could have happened to the matches.

  Twenty-nine items of gear.

  Yes, twenty-nine items of gear, yes.

  He searched the route from the tent to the dinner fire, to the side of the river course where he’d washed, to the place where he’d sat sipping his bourbon. He went to where he’d had a piss.

  He considered the possibility that an animal, a possum maybe, had taken them; but he would then have expected to find remains of chewed matches. Frankly, he’d never had a possum take anything, at any camp. Once a dingo pup had taken some food from a pot. What would an animal want with waterproof matches?

  He thinks a possum took them.

  He crawled back into the tent, the drizzle barely making a sound on the tent, and reported to his captain-self that he’d lost the matches – had failed to pack the lighter and then had lost the emergency matches.

  He really has lost the matches.

  He could perhaps do something fancy like using a magnifying glass from his monocular.

  If there was sun.

  Yes, if there was sun.

  He hadn’t mastered the bow and friction drill method. And he really didn’t understand what tinder was.

  Doesn’t know what tinder is.

  In the tent he ate all the marshmallow biscuits, dulled still with disbelief about the matches.

  He eats marshmallow biscuits for breakfast. What?! He takes marshmallow biscuits into the bush?!

  For godsake he was forty and he could damn well eat what he wanted for breakfast.

  But they didn’t make him feel good.

  As he brooded, it came to him as a dim signal from a long way off that there was a conspiracy going on.

  The parent within was hiding the means of making fire from the wilful child. But it was such a pedantic case of the psychopathology of everyday life. It offended him and its realisation brought him no relief.

  He’s saying it all has to do with Freud.

  He forced himself to get out of the tent. He put on his poncho again and stood in the drizzle, dispirited. He decided to take a walk downstream for a while, maybe to Webb’s Crown. But after fifteen minutes of hard going, the drizzle, the lost matches and the marshmallow breakfast broke his resolve and he gave up and began to make his way back to the camp.

  ‘I am a Marshmallow Bushman,’ he said. ‘We are the Marshmallow Men. We are the stuffed men.’

  He began to break camp.

  Eyre, Stuart, Sturt. The explorers would not have been defeated by their mothers’ magical interference.

  Did his great-grandmother have a part in this? Belle, part-reincarnation of his great-grandmother. Wrong person to have brought into the bush. Painted fingernails. Painted toenails. Luxury life whore. There to apologise.

  Something about the great-grandmother again.

  He would go back to the city and hole up at the Intercontinental.

  Ring Belle.

  As he pulled down the tent he found the matches. They were under the eaves of the tent just where the fly of the tent came near to the ground. Somehow they’d fallen from his pocket the night before and bounced under the eave. They hadn’t ‘fallen’, they’d been put there by the invisible hand of his mother.

  The whole trip had been spooked. Too many relatives, living and dead, were meddling with his mind. The bush of the district was too strong a psychic field this Christmas.

  He’s thrown it in.

  In the drizzle, he zigzagged his way up the steep, wooded slope of the gorge, hauling himself up the successive rock ledges which characterised that country.

  He reached the plateau and the drizzle stopped and was replaced by a fog which came swirling in over the range. Visibility dropped to about two metres and he walked by compass.

  ‘Stop it, Mother. You’ve prayed too hard. We’ve got fog.’

  His compass brought him to the car and he congratulated himself on his navigation.

  Not bad, not bad for someone who forgets the lighter and loses the matches.

  He dumped his pack in the luggage compartment of the car and found the lighter lying there. He got out of his wet clothes into the dry city clothes. He combed his hair in the rear-vision mirror. He switched on the radio to music and swigged from the flask of bourbon, surrounded by white fog.

  He was safe from his mother’s fog and rain for the time, and from his great-grandmother’s disdain for the bush, if that was what he was copping, and from the mockery of his nephew. For the time. In the car. In the fog.

  The Grandfather’s Curse

  His father took him to the sunroom after his mother had gone to church and from the back of a book where he’d concealed it pulled a photocopied old newspaper page.

  ‘Now, in your forties, there is something you should know.’

  His father put down his glasses as if beginning a speech.

  He silently agreed, there were many things he felt he should know in his forties.

  ‘You are approaching the age,’ his father said, looking down at part of the newspaper, ‘when your grandfather died.’

  He reached for the photocopy.

  His father did not hand it to him.

  His father’s face shaped into yet higher seriousness.

  ‘Your grandfather killed himself.’ His father, the retired magistrate, now looked as if he were swearing an oath. ‘This is to remain a secret between us. The rest of the family know nothing. But you are nearing the age when your grandfather committed suicide and you should know.’

  He reached for the photocopy, but again his father withheld it.

  ‘I don’t want the family to know,’ his father enjoined.

  He again reached for the photocopy and this time his father released it. He nodded to his father’s words but his attention had gone to 1909, to the newspaper page from the country town weekly.

  At first he could not see the item about his grandfather. The surrounding news competed for his attention. Airship Solution. Mr Glazebrook of Clive and eight others watched what is thought to have been an aerolite for fifteen minutes until it disappeared at Cape Kidnapper. They described it as a bright light with the brilliance of a star which kept going in the same direction but rose and fell like a bird in flight. There is a suggestion that it could have
been an airship of unknown origin or an atmospheric phenomenon. Some said the sound of a machine was heard coming from the aerolite.

  But then, The Tragedy in Police Gaol.

  He read how his grandfather had appeared before the court in the country town charged with helpless drunkenness, and had been remanded for medical treatment. He had been drinking heavily in recent weeks.

  His father didn’t know why. ‘The incident was never discussed at all in the time I was growing up.’

  His grandfather was found dead in a padded cell of the gaol.

  The report said, ‘He had torn his shirt into strips and strangled himself as he lay on the bed.’

  How could a person possibly do that? Was it humanly possible to strangle yourself that way?

  The court was told he had been drinking heavily.

  He got out of his bed at home shortly after 2 o’clock and went to the Masonic Hotel. He smashed the glass in the front door of the hotel and putting his hand in the aperture unlocked the door. He then proceeded upstairs but in so doing awoke the inmates of the hotel. The proprietor immediately rang for the police. Constable Wilson after a tough struggle, with the aid of the proprietor and two of the boarders, succeeded in getting the handcuffs on him.

  The defendant showed positive signs that he was temporarily deranged as he refused to walk downstairs in the usual way, but insisted on backing down and then walking backwards into the cab. On arrival at the police station he again insisted on walking backwards and in this manner reached the lock-up. The defendant told the gaoler that he was going back in his life.

  The newspaper story ended and then came a two-line advertisement for Wood’s Peppermint Cure.

  ‘I was four at the time,’ his father repeated, as if absolving himself from responsibility. ‘I never have informed anyone. I have never known what to do with the information.’

  His father in his seventies was still trying to hide and share at the same time his unwanted secret. Why the Masonic Hotel when his father was an eminent Freemason? Why should his father be visited by malevolent coincidences at his age?