Tales of Mystery and Romance Read online

  ‘Ah, but it is our relationship to what we do,’ says Milton wisely, ‘the why and how.’

  Hestia’s brother, the wheedling arse-licker, says to Milton, ‘How to explain the taste of sugar to he who has not tasted sugar?’

  ‘Truly,’ Milton says, touching Hestia’s brother’s cheek with the knuckles of his hand, tenderly.

  By reference to other flavours? By comparison with other senses? By linguistic analysis? By reference to poetic and literary description? Through chemical analysis? By use of the non-verbal arts?

  ‘There are a number of ways,’ I say aggressively.

  ‘You have missed the point,’ Milton says kindly.

  Oh well, I say, turning away, making a false nose from the champagne wire, the baguette. Serenity, I can take it or leave it.

  They look at each other with deep regret.

  As we approach the Hari Krishna people chanting in the street I can tell that Milton and Hestia’s brother flow out to them. I, on the other hand, stiffen with distaste. My distaste is kept in check by a democratic bouncer in my head who bounces out improper, intolerant reactions when they occur.

  The Hari Krishnas, it seems to me, get in our way.

  My street liberty is offended.

  The Hari Krishnas hold out their magazine. I take it. ‘Thank you.’

  I take all their incense. ‘Thank you.’

  I hold my nose insultingly. Why don’t they smell like people instead of like flowers.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ one says, ‘you could make a contribution. Five dollars for the book.’

  ‘I thought it was part of the sales package,’ I say nasally.

  ‘Ah shit, don’t start,’ Milton says to me, showing no satori, ‘give those things back.’

  ‘Kabir says you are going to the door of death bound hand and foot,’ I tell them, quoting from what I’d read of Milton’s book the Poems of Kabir.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘He who shaves his head,’ I say, pointing at their head, ‘dyes his garments: he reads the Gita and becomes a mighty talker. He is going to the doors of death bound hand and foot.’

  One of the Hari Krishnas is trying to gently rip the incense out of my hand.

  ‘Please give those things back,’ Milton begs.

  The Hari Krishnas wrestle with me.

  I manage to say, ‘When you leave off ordinary clothes,’ now a little breathless, ‘you kill the senses and you do not please the Lord.’

  ‘Piss off,’ says the Hari Krishna, lapsing from his holy, embracing voice to the voice of a decent plumber.

  Milton drags me off. Hestia’s brother says ‘peace’ to the Hari Krishnas. The sickening turd.

  ‘They got in our way,’ I say, ‘they give off sex-negative vibrations – they have disfigured themselves. Why do they do that? Disfigure themselves? Because they’re sex-negative, anti-sensualist. And they insult the people of the street with implicit arrogance. The street is a delicate social space – they are misusing it, going against the customs of the people – it’s a shared space.’

  ‘Jesus you’re aggressive,’ Milton says scoldingly, ‘at least they have a Way.’

  ‘All beliefs work,’ I say, straightening my bow-tie, ‘they all give you something to be.’

  My shoe lace is undone. They do not wait. I catch them up.

  ‘I, too, have an on-going accumulation of life experience, a progressively developing life position,’ I say. ‘As well, I am true to my mood and inclination.’

  Exactly, says Milton.

  I’m afraid so, says Hestia’s brother.

  ‘Why don’t you shut your neck,’ I say to Hestia’s brother.

  We part at their commune. They do not let me accompany them. I peer in, trying to see what goes on in there. I jump up trying to see through the window.

  I mooch away.

  Separate we come

  Separate we go

  And this be it known is all

  we know.

  THE COMMUNE DOES NOT WANT YOU

  At the door of the commune I hesitated. What ectoplasmic shapes and indistinguishable bearded denim and mumbling cabalism throbbed here, Oh Lord.

  I knocked. Do you knock at a commune door? (too unflowing? does it pre-empt their attention?) Do you just go in, affectionately, pacifically? Or is it by initiation?

  A young man as fresh as a constable, no beard, came to the door, opened it and went back in.

  ‘Hey,’ I called, ‘is this Milton’s commune?’

  ‘It’s not Milton’s commune, but he lives here, yes,’ he said, over his shoulder.

  ‘Is he in?’ I asked the receding back but the man disappeared into a dark hole at the end of the hall.

  Don’t they have caution? I could be the enemy of the commune.

  Any manners, residue of their middle class?

  Any guidelines for the handling of callers?

  I groped my way into the commune.

  There appeared in the dim light, amid the raga music, to be a person in every room or the shape of a person. Were they the residents or were they callers? Or were they too answering the advertisement for the room? In a commune there is always this group sitting around the kitchen table reading or picking at themselves, toes or noses, drinking tea, and you don’t know if any of them live there or whether you can sit in that chair or is that Big Paddy’s chair or is that where Papa Milton always sits.

  I’m too dressed. I reprimand my bow tie with a twist, a yank.

  No one looks up when I come in. Nose picking leads to brain damage.

  ‘Hullo there.’

  Someone dragged snot a mile along their nasal passage.

  They have their heads down, reading upside down newspaper wrapping or the labels on packets, drinking tea from enamel army mugs.

  ‘Is Milton in?’

  ‘I think he’s in his room.’

  I could not see who said this. I could not, for the life of me, see their lips move.

  ‘Which is his room?’

  ‘Just bang on the wall and shout.’

  I was not going to bang on the wall and shout.

  ‘I think he’s with some chick,’ someone else said, although again I saw no lips move.

  I moved into the other room. It was not so much that I moved, more that the unreceptivity poked me out through a huge circular hole in the wall into yet another even darker room. They had knocked this huge circular hole in the wall, leaving rubble. I sat down on a lopsided bean bag chair, keeping one of my legs out-riggered so that I wouldn’t fall over. The beans always move away from me. A pig squealed out from somewhere in the chair. A pig. From under me.

  In the dimness I saw a girl with long suffocating hair about her face – personality concealment – who said, ‘Come here, Pushkin, did the nasty man sit upon you.’

  ‘It wasn’t my intention,’ I told her, ‘I like … animals … pigs.’

  ‘Do you have a pig?’ she asked.

  ‘I did have a cat but it decamped. It went away. Greener pastures.’

  ‘Cats only do that to people who ill-treat them.’

  ‘Oh no – it just went away.’

  ‘You must have ill-treated it.’

  ‘No, cats just go sometimes – for personal reasons.’

  ‘That’s the only reason they run away – ill-treatment.’

  ‘No, I like animals. I used to talk to the cat. Shaw said cats like a good conversation but you must speak slowly.’

  ‘You hurt Pushkin.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt Pushkin. I want to see Milton. About the vacant room. Is he with a chick?’

  ‘Don’t use the word ‘chick’ with me if you want a reply.’

  But. I was going to say to her that I never use the word but that it had hopped onto my tongue from the other room, from the Kitchen Klatsch, but oh well, I let it go.

  ‘The herbs look good – the watercress is growing well.’

  ‘Anyone can grow watercress.’

  I was going to tell her that in the
story The Girl Who Met Simone de Beauvoir in Paris the male in the story is based on me. That I have, despite my use of the word chick, agonised on the questions of liberation. I am imperfectly liberated, that’s true. I wanted to reconstruct but parts were missing. Maybe they could be imported.

  I told her instead that I went to a commune once in Phoenix, Arizona, where everyone was smoking dope and I was drinking Lone Star Beer and they had a pet Red Indian who noticed this and came over to me and said, Wow man, you drinking Lone Star Beer, give me some man, I love beer, I can’t smoke this shit, where you from. I told him from Australia and he said he’d heard great things about Australia, like everyone drinks. I said yes everyone drinks, almost everyone. He said that sounded like the place for him.

  At first she made no comment.

  Then she said, ‘Do you always talk so much – you’re not a very “still” person are you? And I suppose that was meant to be a put down of dope.’

  How long, I thought, how long should I give Milton if he’s with a girl.

  ‘How is the commune coming along?’ I asked, ploughing on with courtesy.

  ‘Look man, this is a house we all share, if you want to call it a commune you call it a commune, but for us it is a simple experiment in shared living with a poly-functional endospace.’

  Ah!! So that explains the knocked down walls, the huge circular holes.

  I had been told that, as for sharing, it was Milton who paid.

  ‘Why do you wear a bow tie?’

  ‘Oh that,’ I looked down, as if it had grown there unnoticed by me. ‘Oh … a bit of a lark … a bit of a giggle … a bit of a scream … a sort of a joke.’

  She seemed to be staring at me severely.

  I stumbled on. ‘Oh, about clothes – I don’t give a damn. A lark. Dress never worries me. I’ve got some jeans at home, actually.’

  ‘Pity,’ she said, ‘I thought for a moment we’d have one male here who presented himself. Men think that caring about clothing is female. And therefore beneath consideration. See, sloppiness is another put-down of women. Dress for me is a way of speaking.’

  ‘I like the idea of a sharing experience,’ I said, ‘learning to share Milton’s money.’

  ‘I find that offensive,’ she said.

  ‘Oh come now,’ I said, ‘it was a joke. I lived with Milton before – in the Gatsby House and he paid then. He paid for the jazz bands on the lawn, everything. I mean it wasn’t a moral statement. Far be it from me …’

  ‘I didn’t know Milton then,’ she said. She was, I could tell, not interested in knowing about anything which happened before her existence. She was not interested.

  I don’t blame her.

  I began to stare at my hands, which an interviewer once said were ‘nervous’.

  Then I thought of something chatty to say, knowing about brown rice and communes and such. ‘In Chinese restaurants it was always sophisticated to order boiled rice instead of fried rice. I always liked fried rice best but ordered boiled to be correct. Now I read Ted Moloney and he says ordering fried rice is quite acceptable and doesn’t offend Chinese chefs.’

  Again she made no comment. I think she was being ‘still’.

  She spoke. ‘I don’t find that in any way interesting – getting hung-up about sophistication and all that.’

  ‘But I thought it showed … never mind … have you read the latest Rolling Stone?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t read newspapers,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I read every newspaper.’

  ‘You must have a very messed up head.’

  ‘I read the manifest content and I read the non-manifest content. I read the archetypes, osmotypes and the leadertypes. I see the ideological meaning and the unintended information.’

  ‘I don’t read any newspapers,’ she repeated.

  ‘Oh, I guess I really just read the manifest con tent. I’ve pretty much given up classifying news into Merry Tales, Fairy Tales, Animal Tales, Migratory Legends, Cosmogonic Legends and such. I don’t do that much now.’

  ‘I’m a dancer.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘I’m learning Theatre of the Noh.’

  ‘It’s a rich world – I’m learning Theatre of the Maybe Not.’

  ‘Is that some sort of put down?’

  ‘I wonder if he’s finished yet,’ I said, nodding upwards, leaning across and stroking the … pig.

  ‘Do you know Lance Ferguson?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know Sheena Petrie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you Australian?’

  ‘Of course, from Sydney.’

  ‘Strange that you don’t know anyone.’

  ‘I know some people.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Here, here in Balmain.’

  ‘No …!!’

  ‘Yep – for ten years or more.’

  ‘Incredible, and you don’t know Lance Ferguson or Sheena Petrie?’

  ‘Never heard of them.’

  ‘Wow,’ she shook her head to herself and made a coughing laugh, ‘oh wow – you must live in a hole in the ground or something.’

  ‘I guess,’ I said glumly, ‘they’re Milton’s new scene – I’m from his first scene.’

  ‘And you say you know Milton?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘You mustn’t know him very well if you don’t know Lance Ferguson or Sheena Petrie.’

  ‘Ten years – I’ve known him for ten years. He was my closet friend, I mean closest friend. I haven’t seen him for a few months.’

  ‘Are you part of the Balmain Bourgeoisie?’

  ‘No. Not part of the Balmain Bourgeoisie.’

  ‘Who do you know?’

  ‘Adrian Heber.’

  ‘He’s a spy. Everyone knows Adrian Heber.’

  ‘He’s not a spy.’

  ‘Sheena won’t believe this when I tell her.’

  ‘I wonder if Milton’s finished yet.’

  I heard a lavatory flush. ‘Maybe that’s him,’ I said.

  ‘No, that’s Harvey.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He has a weak bladder.’

  I stare at my nervous hands again.

  ‘I have no problems like that,’ I reassure her.

  Then I said, ‘Perhaps I should go up or some thing.’

  She then left the room, without saying where she was going, but she took the pig with her – as if I couldn’t be trusted with it.

  I fancied that I could still hear the bed squeaking above me.

  I looked through the huge circular hole in the wall at the people still sitting around the kitchen table, picking at themselves. Nose picking can lead to brain damage.

  I gave up. I went to the wall and banged and shouted, ‘Milton!’

  No one answered.

  I went back into the dim endospace and fought my way onto the bean bag chair.

  ‘You!!’ an imperious voice came from the ceiling and, looking up, I saw a hitherto unnoticed manhole-sized hole. A girl, not the girl with the pig, but a girl dressed as far as I could see in only a man’s shirt was crouched there.

  It occurred to me that I may have been watched the whole time – by the Commune Committee.

  ‘Here’s a note from Milton and your book back,’ she called, and dropped a note wrapped around a stone, and a book.

  The note read: ‘Go away. The commune does not want you.’

  The book he returned was Olive Schreiner’s Stories, Dreams and Allegories.

  ‘Did he like it?’ I asked, trying to point attention away from the wounding note.

  ‘He said he didn’t open it. If you gave it to him, he said, it must have had a malign intent. A way of spooking his equilibrium.’

  Scratching his duco.

  ‘He said that applying for the room under the name Buck Fuller was not considered a good joke by the commune and the commune was not fooled.’

  And the commune did not laugh.

 
‘Are you Sheena Petrie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘Of course. Everyone knows Sheena. She’s Milton’s best friend.’

  ‘Is there a commune for people who do not fit very well into communes? Could you advise me?’

  ‘I was instructed not to talk with you any further. You must go now.’

  MILTON REBUTTED – INTELLECTUAL TRICKS AND ACCUSATIONS

  The reason I haven’t been around much lately is that I’ve been working on a rebuttal of Milton, my ex-friend. Milton, as you remember, has made his person a flawless mirror of inward harmony. I remained an ardent votary of pleasure, a laughing sceptic, a hero of dissipation, and at the same time, I shouldered, ponderously, a civic role as a meeting goer.

  Milton, although he stayed with the Academy, has used a clever combination of paperback mysticism, a diet, and the Rolling Stone to re-hang his image. He has put on a new Life Style.

  We parted. He to a commune and I to a Nite Spot.

  A Spirited Defence of the Manilla Folder.

  He threw my files out of the house onto the lawn because, he said, they were like dead cockroaches about the house. They appeared this way to him because of his New Consciousness.

  The file, Milton, is no dead cockroach. It is a squirming nest of living facts. Until you understand the meaning of the file, its Vital Force, you will remain at arm’s length from this concord you seek. Those who attack the use or possession of files are in terror, not only of the unguarded, unsought revelation that the files can emanate, not only of the person with the files because that person might know, but in terror of the secretarial nature of poor reality. Those who ridicule the files in fact despise the unintense self and are the enemies of diligence.

  The manilla folder, Milton, is a housing for the useful remnants of effort. Or what about calling it – the trowel of the shaped life? A gesture towards the continuous life that does not deny yesterday and does not avoid the patterns yielded by the passing of time and the mistakes thus shown. You do not know how to delight in the patterns yielded by accumulated information, relevant documents, irrelevant documents, trivia and clippings.

  There is an implied future in kept records.