The Electrical Experience (16 page)

—might have, once, if I particularly fancied a girl.

—did they ever go out with you, Frederick?

—sometimes they did.

—bullshit. Stewart is hard again.

—a girl in Bega once.

Stewart waits, staring disbelievingly, sternly at Frederick.

—she really fancied me, that sheila. He is losing confidence, his words come out weakly.

—a lot of them won't, you know. Won't go out with you. Scared of their boyfriends.

He says this as unconfident explanation.

—ever hit a woman, Frederick?

I am surprised at this question. Stewart must have sensed something that I didn't.

—no. Frederick is defensive. Not really.

—what do you mean ‘not really'?

—I hit a whore once.

—for what?

—I forget.

—come on, Fred, you remember.

—I wanted to kiss this girl and she wouldn't let me.

—kiss her? This was a prostitute?

—she wouldn't let me. She said it would make her puke. I hit her then.

We all stare, transfixed. I think even Stewart is caught up. The fifty-five-year-old man, actually hanging his head with embarrassment, the whirring of the camera motor, the crushing silence.

Jane's Place

—fantastic, that was simply fantastic, Stewart is saying, walking around, running his hand through his hair, drinking his drink in gulps.

—we've got enough footage for thirty minutes, I say, hoping we can finish up now.

—we can get more, he says. Old Fred is really opening up.

Day Seven

—well, Frederick Victor, you've made your first one hundred and fifty dollars, coming up for one hundred and seventy-five.

—no more of that stuff like the other night, Stew.

—no, tonight … tonight we do politics.

—never been one for politics, Stew. Not a party man, that's a principle of mine. I always vote Labor, but I'm not a party man. It's my firm belief that there should be a party to look after the working man, but that your average working man can't run the country. Do you follow me? What the Labor Party needs is educated men. Like Doc Evatt and Gough—educated men. The working men should pay these people to represent them. Do you follow?

—do you know any political songs? asks Jane, who collects Industrial Songs.

—come off it, Jane, says Stewart impatiently. Sometimes Jane is a pain in the arse.

—what about legalisation of homosexuality? What about the poofters, Frederick?

—how do you mean?

—what are your feelings?

—feelings?

—what's your opinion?

Nervous grinning. Fred looks down and then around at us, way down he senses that what he thinks may not be ‘right' in our eyes. But he hasn't any way of finding out what the ‘right' answer is that will please Stewart.

—nothing against them. But it does say in the Bible that they should be put to death.

—ah! The Bible. I believe this is the first time you've mentioned the Bible, Frederick. Would you put them to death or in jail?

—if they get caught at it.

—what about brain surgery?

—yeah, the brain or a bit lower. Say, between their legs.

He laughs at his remark and looks around, but stops when he sees no sharing of the joke.

—ever been with a man, Fred?

—come off it.

—what if I was to tell you that Gary there behind the camera and Peter on the sound recorder fuck each other? Would you ring the police?

—you're just having me on.

—no, it's true (Stewart turns), isn't it, boys?

Gary raises a hand of assent, and Peter nods. It is all prearranged.

Fred goes red.

—what people do in private's all right by me, he mumbles.

—you're a weak bastard, Fred. You change your opinions under pressure. Typical.

—a man's entitled to his opinions, says Fred.

—right through the filming, Fred, you've searched around for answers which would ‘please us'. You've twisted and changed your so-called opinions to win approval.

—look, I work for a living. I'm not a pack of bludgers like you lot. From the university or whatever part of the wood work you crawled out of.

—no, Fred, you have no pride, no opinions.

Stewart acts out disgust and turns away.

—cut, it's all a waste of time, he says to Gary.

This is all prearranged. It's a false cut.

—you can all piss off, for all I care, says Fred.

—look, Fred, your whole generation is servile. You never took your life into your own hands. You were always servile with the boss, with authorities. You never asserted your rights to run this country, to share in profits, to have a place in running factories. You fought willingly in whatever bloody war came along.

Stewart is quite angry. I think he's really disgusted this time.

—the whole point of this film, Fred, is to show the typical Australian—pliable, servile, bigoted … Dullards.

Frederick is goaded, unexpectedly.

He gets up and gives Stewart a push, telling him to piss off.

And then he throws a punch.

Stewart suddenly seems so much bigger than Fred, and actually holds Fred's wrists.

I move in and try to separate them, saying cooling things.

Fred doesn't calm down, he abuses us all and then tries to kick the sound equipment.

I hold him off, while we get the gear together and get out.

Day Eight

We go to see Fred for the final session. Jane, Terri and me front him again. He says he is going to his solicitors about stopping the film. The inevitable ‘mate at work' has an inevitable ‘brother in law' who knows all about this sort of thing.

Jane and Terri use their charm and the name of Paul Hogan.

It takes about fifteen minutes of talking, an agreement that there'll be no more politics, sex or insulting remarks. An apology from Stewart, and a promise that we won't use any of the stuff about his sex life. We promise, but, of course, we'll use it.

But as it turns out, there is nothing more to be got from Fred.

He goes back over the same ground. He does show us a reference that Terri's father wrote for him back
in the thirties, which says in part, ‘A first-class type of workman. A man who always leaves his brushes clean, always cuts a piece of timber straight and true, and always drills a 90-degree hole. Most importantly, he is the sort of person who can come up with a good idea.'

Fred says it's the oddest reference he ever got.

We take him for a feed and a bellyful of booze at a good restaurant. We do some filming of Fred in the restaurant, talking to the waiter.

Later, back at his place, he sings ‘Waltzing Matilda' to the camera, but does not know the words.

We rap and sit around having a few last beers.

We learn later that he tries to get it on with Jane while she's in the lavatory.

Jane's Place

Next day Stewart makes Jane tell what happened in the lavatory.

She says it was somewhere between a declaration of love and rape.

Stewart considers going back and confronting him, or getting him to act it out.

Jane will not be in it.

Nor will I.

Gary says that since the homosexual stuff, Fred has avoided him and avoided looking into his eyes.

We sit around telling our favourite Fred Story.

Stewart says—he came up to me at the end and said, ‘—well, Stew, you and me mates now? No hard feelings?' I said, ‘—yes, Fred, you and me is mates now.'

‘Doing the Government Stroke'—from timber-cutting—the non-productive stroke of the crosscut saw—the one that doesn't cut. The unproductive role of government.

‘Stay and lick the bastard.'

‘A hand-round supper.'

‘A sit-down supper.'

‘To run into town'—to drive into town.

‘They used to nearly live in the sulky'—always out and about. Sulky—a light, two-wheeled, horse-drawn carriage.

‘A service car'—a passenger car which travels a set route.

‘Up to Town'—up to Sydney.

‘Making up the coast'—on my way up the coast.

‘In business to make money—not friends.'

1. For those who would like to know a little more about Terri, I refer them to the stories ‘I Saw a Child for the Three of Us' in
   Futility and Other Animals
   (Vintage 2008); Terri and Becker together appear in ‘Soft Drink and the Distribution of Soft Drink' and ‘Jesus Said to Watch for 28 Signs' in
   The Americans, Baby
   (Vintage 2008); and Becker himself in ‘The Coca-Cola Kid', ‘Becker on the Moon' and ‘Becker and the Boys from the Band' also from
   The Americans, Baby.
   More of Dr Trenbow can be learned from the film ‘Between the Wars' directed by Michael Thornhill.
   
2. The story, ‘The St Louis Rotary Convention 1923, Recalled', also appears in
   The Americans, Baby.
   I have used it again because it is the starting-point for this book and I ask you to read it again in this new context. It is also one of my favourite stories.
   
3. I would like to thank my father and mother for their special help with this book.
   
4. I am also in debt for assistance given by the late Gordon F. Anderson.
   
5. The book was written partly while on an Australian Council for the Arts Literature Board grant and partly, before receiving the grant, with the financial help of my friends—from the free lunch to the non-repayable loan—for which I will be permanently grateful.
   
6. ‘A Black, Black Birth' first appeared in the
   Sun-Pictorial,
   ‘George McDowell Does the Job' and ‘George McDowell Delivers a Message to General Juan Garcia of the Cuban Army' in the
   Bulletin
   , ‘The End of Ice' was broadcast by the ABC, ‘The St Louis Rotary Convention 1923, Recalled' first appeared in
   Pol,
   ‘Rules and Practices for the Overcoming of Shyness' in
   Hemisphere
   , ‘Tell Churchill T. George McDowell Is on His Feet' in
   Southerly
   , and Gwenth's statement in
   Cosmopolitan
   as ‘Sister/Sister'.
   
7. Stephen Knight, Don Anderson, and Sandra Levy had that sticky job of giving an ‘objective' critical reaction to the stories in manuscript, one of the most delicate services a writer can ask of his friends and I thank them for risking it. Edna Wilson and Adrian Haber assisted with research.
   
8. Although in the stories George McDowell lives in a town ‘somewhere south of Nowra' on the New South Wales coast, he and the other main characters are not biographical studies of any living people.
   

Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator, and became a full-time writer in the 1970s. He has written fiction, non-fiction, screenplays and essays, and edited many collections of writing.

Forty-Seventeen
was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in
The New York Times
and was named Book of the Year by
The Age
and ‘moral winner' of the Booker Prize by the London magazine
Blitz
.
Grand Days
, the first novel in The Edith Trilogy, won the SA Premier's Award for Fiction.
Dark Palace
won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the
Age
Book of the Year Award.

Moorhouse has undertaken numerous fellowships and his work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in 1997.