Forty-Seventeen (6 page)

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.

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.

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?

‘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.