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

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 beendownstairs. 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.
    Â 
    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.
    Â 
    â€˜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.
    â€˜â€œSo when hunting I make sure. Against such risks by taking Wood’s Peppermint Cure”,’ he said to his father, a little more loudly.
    â€˜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 lightningsnaked 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 sortof 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