Read Online Forty-Seventeen by Frank Moorhouse - Free Book Online

his glasses as if beginning a speech.
    He silently agreed, there were many things he felt he should know in his forties.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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?
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    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.
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    The newspaper story ended and then came a two-line advertisement for Wood’s Peppermint Cure.
    â€˜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 eminentFreemason? Why should his father be visited by malevolent coincidences at his age?
    â€˜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