Forty-Seventeen

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘I was researching the family,’ his father said, bewildered. His father held out his hand for the photocopy of the clipping, wanting to take it back, but he did not give it to him.

  And he himself was visited by the same sly coincidence, there and then in the sunroom, that he had first been dead drunk in a Masonic Hotel, another Masonic Hotel, when he was a youth.

  This recollection passed across his attention and blocked out the newspaper he held in his hand for a second, and then the newspaper claimed back his attention.

  Russia’s new navy, death by misadventure, alleged bigamy, deplorable fatalities, sudden death, trotting club notes. The average age then for males was forty-seven. Two suicides on the pages of the small-town newspaper. Tough times.

  Walking backwards, walking backwards from what? Walking back from the event. Trying to turn back time, walking backwards away from his life in that country town. How far back did his grandfather want to go? Back to London? Back before he was married?

  His father said that his grandfather married late – at thirty-nine. Was this a warning to him now not to marry? Was it a curse?

  What was upstairs at the Masonic Hotel that his grandfather wanted? The drink would have been downstairs. Was he looking for a friend? A male? A female? Why didn’t the friend take care of him?

  Maybe a room, maybe he wanted to sleep in the hotel, not go home, not be at home.

  I’ve hunted tigers in Bengal,

  And lions at Zambesi falls,

  The elephant and the hippo too

  The rhino and the kangaroo

  But, though I am a hunter bold

  I must confess I funk a cold

  So when hunting I make sure

  Against such risks by Wood’s Peppermint Cure.

  ‘Shouldn’t it read, “by taking Wood’s Peppermint Cure”?’ he asked his father. ‘Here,’ he showed him the verse and the last line, realising that it was a nervous deflection away from the unwanted family fact. His father did not follow what he was saying, obviously unable to bring his mind away from the bewilderment of the revelation.

  ‘“So when hunting I make sure. Against such risks by taking Wood’s Peppermint Cure”,’ he said to his father, a little more loudly.

  ‘Oh yes, yes, yes.’

  How did they rhyme cure and sure? Maybe pronunciation had changed.

  Infanticide, bigamy, suicide, drunken drowning and a UFO all on one page.

  And the gods striking out – ‘In Johnsville lightning snaked off the double chimney of a house occupied by Mr and Mrs W. Skinner. The flash brilliantly lighted their bedroom and was followed by a deafening detonation – a 400-day clock stopped at the exact minute of the strike.’

  How could he have suicided if he were that drunk?

  Was his father cursing him?

  Describing the laying down of the keels of four of the Russian Dreadnoughts, the Times correspondent in St Petersburg said, ‘Great difficulties were experienced in selecting the designs. Last year the choice seemed to lie between Hamburg and Italian designs, but the superiority of those offered by the British became apparent.’

  Once in the bar at UN City in Vienna, Ulyanov had asked him what ‘dreadnought’ meant after they’d seen it on an old English soft-drink case among garbage in the street.

  Dread means fear, nought means no. No fear. Dreads nothing. Do not fear this – no – the opposite, it means fear me because I am without fear.

  It was used for a British class of warship with guns of one large calibre.

  And about the UFO story. He and a friend had once seen a UFO and not reported it. Back when they’d been just out of school.

  They felt intellectually guilty about having seen it and he now felt intellectually guilty about not having spoken out about it.

  They had not said anything at the time because they were unwilling to identify themselves with the sort of people they thought saw UFOs – cranks, nuts. He and Rich were Rationalists. So they had agreed they wouldn’t say anything about it. ‘What good would it do?’ they’d asked themselves, trying to excuse their denial of the evidence of their eyes.

  They had been walking down the path from a house at night when a large circular spacecraft-shaped image or thing passed over their heads at about 100 metres. It had disappeared in an instant. He and Rich turned to each other and said, ‘Did you see that?’ He remembered having a dry mouth.

  Yes, they’d both seen it. It was a UFO. There was no report next day in the newspapers of any sightings or an explanation of what they’d seen.

  When he was at school in the fifties a school teacher had tried to convince the children that UFOs were optical illusions which they could produce by staring at the back of their eyelids or by some such optical manipulation. He had tried to believe the teacher. But the trick with the eyes had been unconvincing.

  He had his grandfather’s temperament. But he had his great-grandmother’s temperament too. Both wrestled for his soul. What was he doing believing that sort of thing? Belle talked like that.

  Last year he had been backpacking in the Australian bush with an American physicist who deodorised too much and who had been given his name by an American associate, Madden, who hung about the IAEA in some capacity. During one of their rest stops he’d told her the story of the suicide.

  ‘Is it a curse?’ he’d asked her, not at all interested in her opinion.

  ‘But I know that hotel!’ she said, excitedly, ‘I’ve been to that town when I did my Australian tourist-type trip two years ago. I stayed at that hotel.’

  She belonged to that club of wandering people who moved about the world doing international civil service business in semi-loneliness, seeking the company of acquaintances, talking to strangers in bars, having slim professional connections forced by lonely circumstance to double as ‘social life’. He belonged to that club. Following up whatever tenuous introductions you had in a strange city.

  He said he sometimes calculated the curse differently – sometimes simply by age – that when he reached that age, forty-seven, he would be impelled to suicide, sometimes he calculated it as being the years his grandfather had been married – the married years – which was not, as he was at present unmarried, a threat to him – or sometimes he calculated it as the years he’d been away from his home town. Or it could be calculated as being operative on the fourth year of the first child, if he married and had children.

  ‘I don’t know about curses,’ the American physicist said, as they hoisted up their packs and moved off.

  The coincidence which grinned malevolently from the newspaper was that after he and Rich had seen the UFO he’d become falling down drunk, ‘dead drunk’ in another Hotel Masonic in Petersham, Australia.

  He remembered being there with his friends – all around seventeen – and he remembered their remarking to one another after the second or third glass that the beer wasn’t ‘having any effect at all’. They were stronger than the power of alcohol.

  They had for that moment, and that moment only in their lives, believed that their will was all-powerful, could overcome alcohol.

  He remembered then being in a lavatory, asleep, being woken, staggering, barely standing, with his staggering friends trying to keep him on his feet.

  All staggering, they’d taken him back to where he boarded and propped him up against the door and rung the bell, and stumbled off. He’d vomited over himself.

  That night he’d pissed in the bed – mortification upon mortification.

  In the morning he’d had to face the landlady with death in his heart and his head racked with pain, and with a defeated will.

  ‘I’ve wet the bed,’ he said, again a child at seventeen in a voice without any strength of self.

  He had faced the landlady and then taken the soiled sheets to the washing machine.

  He had been unable to tell Robyn about it ever.

  He’d met the curse already – on that day.

  Drink

  Because of loss of energ
y – reaching for a book was an effort – sweating, horrendous nausea, inflammation of the oesophagus, pale shit, he went to have tests done by a GP in the city he was visiting.

  The GP was grave. ‘You have cirrhosis,’ she said. She was appalled at how much he drank.

  ‘You must never drink again,’ she said, studying the liver function tests.

  He’d told her that at the end of the day he had about four or five drinks before dinner – beers, martinis, bloody marys, or bourbons – followed by a half to full bottle of wine with dinner, followed maybe by a glass of beer to ‘refresh the palate’, followed by probably two ports or liqueurs or cognacs with coffee and then some after-dinner drinking, say a few beers or bourbons – about twelve to fifteen drinks of alcohol a day, each drink containing about half an ounce of alcohol. He drank about six days a week and within a month there would be a number of heavy drinking ‘sessions’ lasting over eight hours when, apart from dinner or lunch drinks, there would be another eight or so, bringing a session to about twenty drinks.

  Not only did he find it hard to be honest about the amount he drank, sensing that it was a little gross, he also had never in his life counted it up.

  He told his friend and drinking companion Richard that he had cirrhosis and would never drink again but Richard vehemently disputed this (after all, if one of them had cirrhosis, then all of them might!). Richard insisted that he have further tests done by a ‘friendly doctor’ who would give him a clean bill of health.

  ‘But Richard,’ he said, ‘I am sick.’

  The friendly doctor, himself a drinker, did liver function tests and interpreted them as ‘the result of a heavy binge’ and said that he’d be OK after a week off the booze.

  His own GP said that if he were worried he’d refer him to a specialist.

  ‘Yes, I’m worried,’ he said.

  When he told the liver disease specialist how much he drank, the specialist said, ‘Hell, I drink that much.’

  The specialist diagnosed viral hepatitis – a mild case – and recommended abstaining from alcohol for six months to allow any damage to the liver to repair itself.

  He decided to follow this course. It was his first extended abstinence from alcohol in twenty-five years – since he’d left school.

  In the first week he worried that he did not have ‘friends’, only drinking companions, and that he would now be unacceptable company, that he would be socially deserted.

  Drinking was a ritualised bonding, mutual intoxication was an act of helpless solidarity in the face of the human condition. How was he going to face the human condition without drink?

  When he was younger he had sometimes wanted to ‘drink himself to death’. In literature it had seemed a romantic and pleasant way to go, imagined as a slipping into intoxication and then into death, but he realised that he had wilfully misunderstood the expression ‘drinking yourself to death’ and that it would be both painful and miserable.

  Alcohol was like a camp fire they huddled around.

  He tried the non-alcoholic drinks, noting for the first time that supermarkets carried something called non-alcoholic ‘wine’. He finally settled on drinking a mix of non-alcoholic cider and soda water about fifty-fifty and became fond of it. He also drank virgin marys (bloody marys without alcohol).

  Drinking companions were a special sort of friend – ‘he’s good to drink with’ – who would go willingly with you into the zones of intoxication and anything that might follow from that.

  How static he now found his personality. The weather of his days seemed mild. Alcohol, he thought, introduced an exaggerated mental turbulence and strong winds into the personality.

  He observed that now sober he was more absentminded; he’d expected the opposite. But he did find that he no longer needed to keep notes of information given to him the night before.

  After a month he had his first yearning for a drink – he yearned for a cold, flavoursome American beer – a Coors in a heavy glass beer mug – with salted popcorn in a dim American country and western bar with a stool-girl to chat with.

  A form of intimacy, a description of a relationship, ‘We did a lot of drinking together.’

  He realised that alcohol was a relatively benign drug and that after twenty-five years of consistent drinking he suffered no distressing withdrawal symptoms.

  He’d always known that uneasiness with people was behind some of his drinking. This was confirmed after his first public lunch with strangers when he developed neck tension.

  He dreamed that he’d forgotten he should not drink and had accepted a drink and wiped out the progress of repair that his liver had achieved.

  He observed a dinner party, his first sober dinner party for years. He noticed the conversational risks that drinking encouraged, the making of puns, the wise-cracking, quipping, the saying of things which might fail. Other drinkers gave a generous reception to every thing – at least in the early part of the dinner. Drinking permitted free association, emboldened a quickfire tempo, which he found beyond his non-drinking mind. He found his mind too self-critical, full of stray material, cluttered with marginal connections, too qualified by caution. Later intoxication, he observed, was not so generous. It could become querulous, dogmatic, obsessive, and attention to what others were saying became erratic.

  He decided that as a non-drinker he should leave drinkers at midnight.

  He had his second craving. He craved spaghetti bolognese, plenty of cheese, plenty of black pepper, with a bottle of Valpolicella. The craving came to him while reading Her Privates We – First World War soldiers eating spaghetti and drinking wine behind the lines. It was not a ravenous craving.

  He realised that he’d sometimes had a drink to make himself ‘feel like drinking’.

  When he told Louise at a restaurant dinner that he was not drinking, Louise said, ‘What a bore’ and at first found it disconcerting. Maybe she felt she was being denied the security of complicity.

  He was reminded of the play The Iceman Cometh where Hickey returns to his former drinking buddies after having found ‘peace of mind’ and given up drinking.

  Hickey tells his former drinking mates in the saloon that he isn’t against drinking, though.

  Just because I’m through with the stuff don’t mean I’m going Prohibition. Hell, I’m not that ungrateful! It’s given me too many good times … If anyone wanted to get drunk, if that’s the only way they can be happy and feel at peace with themselves, why the hell shouldn’t they? … I know all about that game from soup to nuts. I’m the guy that wrote the book …

  But they find that having a sober Hickey about affects their drinking. One of them, Rocky, says, ‘But it don’t do no good. I can’t get drunk right.’

  And then Harry Hope who owns the bar, says, ‘When are you going to do something about this booze, Hickey? Bejees, we all know you did something to take the life out of it! It’s like drinking dishwater! We can’t pass out! … there’s no life or kick in it …’

  In the mornings he tended still to have a slight thickness of the mind, a pain from awakening back to life which he had always attributed to slight hangover.

  But whatever slight pain there was in the morning it was not as horrendous as hangover and every morning he had a dream again that he had accidentally drunk alcohol and would have to start his six months over again.

  In his period of sobriety he was for the first time able to examine the nature of his drinking. He saw it as maybe, six drinking sets or separate waves of intoxication.

  The first set of drinks, say the first three or so, achieved a perceptible change of mental weather – a change to a conscious mellowness, reasonably anxiety-free, although it had to be noted that the first drinks also usually punctuated the day and the end-of-work stress. The drinks celebrated a productive day or took the sting out of ‘one hell of a day’.

  The second set of drinks (say, the drinks with dinner) gave a free play to the mind, and stimulated some rush of ideas and words, a pleas
ing (or self-pleasing at least) rush of verbalisation.

  The third set of drinks (equivalent to, say, the first of the after-dinner drinks) was simply a fuelling or maintaining of the first two waves of intoxication, the heightened animation and mellowness.

  The fourth set of drinks – if embarked upon – represented for him the beginning of a pursuit of deeper relaxation or intoxication, some unspecified state of pleasure (through chance encounter, confessional conversation, uncontrolled hilarity, revelry or whatever). In recent years of drinking he’d found alcohol unreliable in achieving this effect.

  The fifth set of drinks was pursuit of loss of self, a seeking of a high level of intoxication without real expectation and with no concern for the aftermath. Again, he’d found alcohol increasingly unreliable as a means of reaching this stage.

  There was perhaps a sixth wave of intoxication – drinking to oblivion, passing out – which was something he had not done since his teens or early twenties.

  He’d found that waves four and five could fail to occur and, instead, become sodden intoxication leading to irritability. When drinking he was now able to perceive that the potential of reaching these states was lost and that there would be no pay-off from further drinking. But with good drinking companions it was always tempting to try for the fourth and fifth state.

  After three months of non-drinking he found that he still had the feeling after dinner parties that he had been ‘intoxicated’. He could now observe the adrenalin effect as distinct from alcoholic stimulation. He now saw that his non-drinking personality too was not particularly different from his drinking personality. He still said dumb things, and, if relaxed, could still be reasonably spontaneous, outrageous, playful. His earlier observations of himself soon after he’d stopped drinking had been of a tense and self-conscious, fearful, non-drinker.