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

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.
    â€˜Is it a curse?’ he’d asked her, not at all interested in her opinion.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 – allaround 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.
    â€˜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 energy – reaching for a book was an