Читать книгу Moon Dance - Brooke Biaz - Страница 12
Оглавление2 The Dunnyman’s Boy
The mere mention of lovelessness has brought my partners calling. Knock. Knock. Knock. What a beetle-headed fashion certain sirens in this house have adopted for introducing themselves, with knocking and ringing and an intemperate amount of haww-haawwing.
Knock, Knock, Knock, they go. Not a widow amongst them, mind you. Nor do we encourage tears here any more. Nor would those tears rush away like the widow Trymelow’s, with a shower of rain which wasn’t. But instead, plump winged partners of mine with curled and aching bird’s feet and husky singing voices, perched down below in the long grass, rapping on Maxim’s window as if they’re Queenscliff High gudgeons tapping at the glass of an aquarium. “Listen here, Moonface,” they’re mouthing. “You will not encourage our children to visit. You will not! For one thing: they’re sick.”
So my partners grow belligerent and waddle forward with the pursed lips of non-flying indignation. But facts, I’m afraid, are both forceful and tenacious. For one thing, a moment of conception is waiting. And a front verandah is lying bare which exhibits significant pro-creative evidence of its own. It is over this very verandah that the now famous Bob Dylan once strode to launch himself at the world. Innocuous, this verandah which, right from the start, bore the name ‘Columbia’—after the recording company, Columbia Broadcasting System—the name carved in jarrah, a strong local bloodwood, set in ghost gum, which is ephemeral but more resilient, and behind it wailed forth a cedarwood home in a swing style. Grandpa Bibbidi Trymelow, marvelous right through—for a moment, ten times more famous than the “Laroo Laroo Lilly Bolero” woman. His first and only contract having so much freaking promise that Manticora of E . . . News proclaimed him “Our New Recording Artist.” Columbia: three-storeyed, belfried, turreted, iron-roofed, verandahed top-n-bottom like nothing so much as the Great Cheese’s bridal party (for bridal parties are, as everyone knows, batty and embattled gatherings), stuccoed and latticed against the heat of the tropical sun and, on each storey, doors that opened outward to let through the breeze, revealing: The sea! A vast southern ocean on all sides. A perpendicular residence, not then hugging the sandy soil, as it does now. Built, and then augmented, above sea cliffs. Cliffs where a patriarch (once young) with lungs hailed prematurely bought plots at a price made lowlow by certain falls on a street he’d never seen—namely Wall Street. He made an investment, without entirely understanding. A fault he later compounded by trusting in the deprivations of patriotism: offering land to the War Office who, prompt as a slot machine, paid top bill for it and jerried up a hospital to take what was left from the Battles of The Coral Sea. So here is a proud man (now six feet under but not forgotten) who maintained a singing career on the purchase and sale of seaside plots. Not unlike The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead and Sly and the Family Stone—though they’ve worked in rather the reverse pitch. A singer who, short of stature and of engagements, festooned his home instead, with turrets and frontals, battlements and diaper work, and with rooms, which forced his wife to advertise after his death and which led, as we will shortly observe, to the arrival of a young immigrant named Tito Livio.
“Hmmmf!” Tito Livio cried out to Mr. Beckett, the dunnyman, “they should put these things on wheels and we could do it faster!”
(A car has just wheeled past, looking not unlike a funereal urn, politely continuing on its way to a much older part of town where its driver swings it into a short sandstone drive and pulls up beneath a frangipani, which is in flower and so dropping a pink wax carpet out in front of her as she steps forth onto a festooned verandah as well-established as South Steyne itself)
“Wheels!” Tito Livio shouts again, “and proper handles, don’t you know, and if I had my way, sir, they would deposit them right close on the curb so that carrying so far would be unnecessary.”
But Mr. Beckett, who has been doing this job for well nigh forty years and knows the changes that have occurred in the deposits and frequencies and shifting demography of excrement, hears nothing that is said, being hard of hearing and (though he’d never admit it) also a little hard of seeing. Nevertheless, a young migrant is undeterred and, swinging a steaming dunny pan up onto the tray-top, continues: “I am appalled by the failure of the council to think logically in these matters.” . . . The dunnytruck passes on along the plateau of Tumbledown Dick Hill, Tito Livio seeing from there the jutting of new estates out into the green of Gai Chase Forest. Between the sea and the Blue Mountains distant. A panoramic delta of new constructions, red roofs and frameworks which follow a mathematical logic applaudable, a grid of grey basaltic clays and glass rich volcanic sands, criss-crossing at precise intervals the roadways of rival developers whose earthmoving equipment is distinctively yellow, green or blue and whose workers associate only at the camp-fires of their color fellows, being on incentive schemes and having big bucks tied up in superannuation policies. Smoke rising from the tumbledown of turpentine trees and the dozer piles of gums, she-oaks, hard-headed banksia. A growling intermittent on the breeze; the scent, the waft, of mortar pouring . . . and a young migrant sighs his approval and offers an old guy a date from the packet stamped “Finest Quality Puglian” and they chew as the dunnytruck chugs on through the bush to the next sprouting of as yet unserviced dwellings.
. . . A white uniform, of the kind the South Steyne council provides its contractors, was fitting Tito Livio like the suit on the gent at the Hoyts Cinema, ballooned in the trousers, and the golden epaulettes gave him horned shoulders. Also: written on his pay packet poking from his top pocket it read: Tiny Livio (the first in a long confusion of names, producing over the years: Titi, Toto, Tot, Tiny, Letti, Jetty, Jot) whose origins are not the backwater jungles of those Columbo Plan cookies but the ancient marble outcrops of the north because his own father—and now (if it’s possible) I’m speculating back three generations and in this stopping history dead still—his father sailed south through the Dodecanese, the Stenan Karpathos, the Sea of Candia, the Suez, three years after the last war, claiming formal refugee status, and promising to put behind him the Committee of Eighteen Solons and the singers of “Giovinezza.”
“What can happen once can happen again,” Guido Livio told his brothers. A theory of life which didn’t prepare him for the death of his wife two weeks later, aboard ship and some years before Sanger discovered the molecular structure of insulin. Imagine this poor great grandmama who preferred her dolce with less not more and was bringing to the new world (almost) big talk of nuts and fruit, dying from a lack of sweetness in her blood. To which her husband declared, “How dare. . ! Not true!” and put the ship’s doctor on his tail for suggesting. . . .”Fix!” he demanded, but some things on a long journey are unfixable (as certain fetuses can attest), and though he felt steeped in political assuredness, and the confidence of a man who’d weathered ducismo, it made no difference.
Absence of reason: her husband (stamped ALIEN PERSON momentarily) followed her soon enough after arrival, soured by the sea journey and finding in the heat of this new place not enough air to sustain life.
“All this breathing space,” Guido Livio declared, “and yet . . !”
(A phrase which echoes in eighteen year old Tito as the dunnytruck makes its way along Chukta Ridge, revealing itself above the estate which will become the exclusive suburb of Vale on Vale, a slooshing coming from behind and the clatter of the wooden pan seats)
Tito Livio more or less an orphan of emigration—but quickly picked up by The Brotherhood of St.Endymion, who saw in a boy who had mastered English speaking so quickly, an opportunity to show charity at work. And so, at age eight, Tito Livio discovered magnanimity as one family after another lined up to take him in, promising contractually to raise him from one birthday to the next. Twelve months a piece, so that a relay of mamapapas was set in motion, a fabricated pre-cast of households and one year ambitions, and he was brought up from crew-cut to curly-top, after which a wage from the Department of Sanitation provided him with a room on The Corso, behind Leacon’s News Agency and two terraces down from Abner Zimmerman’s Fun Pier. And why, you want to know, did they clamber for a child who was not, after all, a new born babe, not a bundle in swaddle with formula like Christmas on his lips and frequent windy grins or inclined to grab fingers and tug cutely for all his might? Who woke up now and then in the evenings and wandered about the unfamiliar homes with almond eyes like a barn owl, peeking in on mamapapa and other family members besides, and curling himself up in the welcome rug as if the draught beneath the door provided him with some sustenance or elevation or the door offered consolation. Why? Why? . . . Because Hey-ho! of his size. They were attracted to him because of his measurements. Tito Livio was no bigger than a chimp.
(Ugh, heave-ho! the near-blind Mr. Beckett shouts from the driver’s seat, and out scrambles his boy to retrieve the pans)
A wind up. A clockwork. A model. The Titoman was small’s small. Not that this matters. These were the years of minuscule men proving fittest (Leaky, after all, discovering Nutcracker Man who was the size of Atlas and dead for 600,000 years because of it). All parts under-exaggerated. Eyes prying on the fineness of fingers. Feet: “Are they bound, do you think, in the evenings?” “And that hair! Don’t he look just like Golly!” What Bibbidi Trymelow feared in his shortness, and compensated by insisting his mikes be set dangerously low on their stands, Tito Livio recommended. That is: minutiae, the microcosmic proportions of the human physiognomy.
All the more reason for the young mamapapas of the estates to be attracted to him—collecting, as they were already, everything tiny and intricate from Kelloggs Corn Flakes, swap cards of boxing Sugar Ray and Mr. Floyd Patterson (cut down to size), madly saving penny to the pound. And to praise him up: “At your age!’ ‘What an achievement!”
“Tsh Tsh, such a strong one!” says Mr. Beckett in an uncharacteristic display of sociability. “And works so hard too, bphhf! Never seen one who puts his back arrgghh! into it.” Nosing for Christmas bonuses, while just beyond Chukta Ridge the crew of Metropolitan Water, Sewage and Drainage are drilling through sandstone for the pipes of the main line to the treatment works at North Head. . . .”Driving all the way to Barrenjoey Lighthouse, Tito, and for what? Pffff!” says Mr. Beckett. Slim pickings. The Tito-man offering amaretti now, which are refused on account of Mr. Beckett having teeth that are yellowed like a draught horse’s and letting go, and they turn back with their half load, down along the peninsula, the green water of Pittwater on the right, the blue sea on the left and the sun just reaching its afternoon peak.
Some years later I would raise questions about his early career and find in Tito Livio an affection inexplicable. How he admired the old man for the way he conducted his business and that he modeled himself in many ways on the old man’s attitudes. Origins speaking volumes. Mr. Beckett continuing in this field long after others had closed down or moved into the burgeoning work of extraction for the tanners, rubber-molders and oil refiners setting up along the Parramatta River. But the old man knew his market and sold his services on complete obliviousness to the downside of human waste. After Tito Livio moved on he went through half a dozen boys until deciding he’d be better off doing the job himself. None of the others showing any aptitude for the work. Complaining of the stench. The weight. The opportunities for disease. But Mr. Beckett, who could not properly see or hear them, decided quite simply that they didn’t understand the true nature of the job.
. . . And now the dunny truck rolls into the yard, backs up and tips out its load. Tito Livio bids Mr. Beckett good night (because, though it is the hottest time of the day and the sweat rolls off them both like molten pinballs, the old man is heading for his shed to bunk down until evening, when he will wake, eat and get ready for work) and now the Titoman is on his way also, along The Corso. Ferries are arriving from Circular Quay and heading out to Taronga where they berth at the hippopotamus house and their passengers climb their way uphill through peccary, wombat, hyena, jackal, native cat and wildebeest to the kiosk and plastic souveniry. On The Esplanade: twelve dozen illegally parked Holden cars, their owners lying down on the sand which glitters with zinc and zircon. Ahead now: the newly launched Charismatic Church of the diocese of South Steyne. Former makeshift Nissen of South Seas soldiers in advanced stages of recovery. Known in the parlance as “Strawberry Street” just for this reason: the red badges of (perhaps) Mercurochrome, of (could it be?) blood splotted on issue whites. Home to the beach mission of the Charismatics which periodically has risen up behind the banner of King George’s cross and tramped over roadway, paved walk and white sand to the edge of the sea, blessing Christmas Day approaching and the true meaning of the yuletide, being charismatic with lifesavers, muscle-builders, hot-dog johnnies, towel thieves, perverts, ice-cream vends, surfers, skip-boarders and coconut-oilers spread-eagle. Tito Livio, stoked to have finished work but judging (rightly) in Mr. Beckett’s demeanor that the trade in excrement is getting tougher. From inside the place a song which (trained ear cocked) I know to be “Blessed Are The Meek” sung in the way of choirs with upward tones too small and downward tones too large. Polyphonic. Imbalanced. And Tito Livio reaches the church noticeboard and pauses. It is large plain board and set behind glass and the sea-breeze, being what it is, has fogged the glass with salt and gives the appearance that clouds are reflected or, naturally, that it’s steamed up. Tito Livio wipes the sweat from his eyes, wonders at what he might do to improve Mr. Beckett’s business and (ho-hum been toting sloshing pans all night) begins to read. For a young man who has learnt to speak a new language so perfectly it is a strangely faltered reading. Red lips open and close. Almond eyes sweep back and forth. Brow becomes furrowed. It soon becomes apparent that he has a unique technique. That the lines appear to move for him in distinct and Zowie! foreign ways. When he turns his head a little . . . this way . . . and now that . . . it’s as if he’s reading perhaps with his ear or orifices invisible set somewhere above his temples. Now this way . . . now that. And he has traveled maybe one paragraph. But not downward in the traditional manner. Across. Diagonally! Now three words from elsewhere. Now another from the other side. Tito Livio reading with a dyslexic’s attention to arrangement and space. Counterposing one part of document with another. Reading by color and shape. Following an ambitious course across, down, in reverse. But that’s not all! The more he reads the more he begins to grow. His chest is starting to puff out. His hands which were small small and fingers like filaments are clenching and in the clench they balloon and his knuckles white up and look like marble beneath the surface. A head crowned in black Roman curls is shaking and the curls spring out and corkscrew. Before he’s finished he’s as angry as Hell and stomps off in the direction of the municipal library.
A Student for a Democratic Republic
Man! what steamed a young guy up so much that he shucked off exhaustion and swore to God outside a hall of particularly charismatic beach missionaries that he would deal with the matter forthwith. WIDOW TRYMELOW’S LODGERS WILL NOT RETURN TO FACE THE MUSIC . . . No! No! Rumor it isn’t. Made-up headline of the divergent route of the lodgers (Has Maurice Manticora been granted his license to write copy again? As I’ve told it so far he hasn’t yet lost it!) BOB DYLAN TELLS HIS FAMILY “‘SEE THAT MY GRAVE IS KEPT CLEAN” No! No! Babaloos are rightly concerned that the truth is being stretched and gather up close and quiet and ask, “Was it news of the dunnycans?” Sweet innocent . . .”Was it news of fishes?” Ho ho! . . .”Was it about the missionaries who frighten us when they visit?” . . . They give you that line about becoming engaging little lambs, huh? Don’t worry they’re speaking in metaphor. . . .”Was it jokes, papa, about brothers and sisters?” “Was it words concerning the blessed Daffodil and also that Mr. Tito?” “Was it news of who is our grandfa . . . ?” No no! And, I must remind them, “Tito Livio, after all, is simply the first on the scene. There are two more lodgers to come and one of those you know already. That’s right: he’s the one who just growed and growed.
My babaloos, poorly housed in the hospital next door (land on which Bibbidi Bobbodi Boo made a solid twenty-five per cent). Guinea pigs. Children for whom empiricism has dealt a poor hand. You at the forefront of modern science. Look at you, tightly bandaged, fed by fluids in yellow and pink and puce, some of you in chairs which run on electricity, from the shaven patches on your heads things spring and jiggle (I am thinking now of Mars, the red planet). All this to discover the secret of long gestations!
What can I say? It was none of these things. It was not even the monthly synodic bulletin of Pastor T. B. Bull who in those days was principal at the school in the Vale, waster of water, chaser of fruit bats, teacher of Alice (‘Meanwhile,’ Maxim reminds you, “shhhh. Do not ever take what your mothers” say for granted . . . and you should not be afraid of the charismatics: they will appear in time as heroes in the rescue of lambs, fishes and, of course, loaves—and in the confidence they exude. Do not, babaloos, ever ever fear singers.”) What Tito Livio read was this: Men are not Angels.
“Men per se,” he read, “are not of Heaven.” . . . My childhood memory of a charismatic document folded in four, pages bug eaten, stains of tabouli, a taratour sauce: “If there are men with enormous wings I have not seen any. . . . What do you say, citizens? Do you believe the story of Pelayo and Elisenda who came across an archangel in their garden and found the creature unresponsive?” Now sauce covers and makes it unreadable but if we ignore this and read on with dyslexic’s eyes, the next section continues the tone of address: “ . . . to which Robert Owen, the industrialist, made due contribution and in later life found solace not in spinning cotton but spinning the community together in a love of . . .” And again, the page adulterated, but not this time by sauces or bugs. The writer himself has crossed out this line, double, (scrubbing a story of a tailor who tried to sew flies into coats) and leaves us only with, “ . . . freeman or slave, patrician or plebian, the sun representing the light by uprising attainable” and now further obliteration which does indeed appear to be bug-food “ . . . who might heed Daedalus’s warning and the son’s wings melt on this evidence alone. Men, ditto, not being angels. Nor birds, I must say.” And now the age of the speaker appears perfectly obvious because he describes in some detail the miraculous differences between one species and another and though the hand is light and large and swirls out its words it is also selective and sometimes cramped and leans forward as if wishing always to get to what is coming next. The owner of this hand must be as old as Darwin himself! “A bird’s beak,” it says, “is not a man’s nose. A man’s hands are not a bird’s feet. Hair is not barbules. A man’s bones are not hollow. Arms are not wings.” And the weight of a not so welcome logic begins to mount up and the hand leans leans, and when it has been forced to prove that men are not birds it begins, tentatively, to argue that they are similarly not butterflies but already there is a shakiness, a shimmer in the strokes, a desire to ignore the facts, swirling, hurrying on, denying, questioning like catechism until finally it ends abruptly with “ . . . is love” and the signature: Dr. (pending) Roszak.
(Discovery of my fetal years: age lives right smack in the mind of the beholder.)
Out the front gate of the Roszak property this Dr. (pending) Roszak drove. Call him, if you like, the second of my grandmother’s lodgers. But this is too plain a picture. There was more that lived within him than I ever understood. Something that stung or burned or pecked at his insides, turning him bilious and jutting his skin along this bone and that so that, from where I was due to start growing, in the obreptitious womb of my mother, he was an impossible mountain, an edifice of a thousand plateaus. Thoughts, curled like black snakes beneath his ledges and crevices. Political conjecturality went whirling through his caverns. Social pandects and convincements bloomed in his rookeries and scarps. Philosophies so hyperborean and fierce carved alternate histories for the diverse tribes of his valleys. . . . But enough! Suffice it: he was a DeSoto speedster of twenty-one and, since he’d grown up as a respectable mirror image of his father, a local municipal councilor, had been teaching Sunday School at the Charismatic Church on The Esplanade for some years. On his mind now: too much! The truth is, he’d received exam results in the midday post and was calculating, by way of clever additions and anfractuous percentages, that he had become, that day, honors graduated.
So does he cry out in delight? He does not. Does a graduand loosen his bateau neck or undo his jerkin? Uh uh: he is wearing a cardigan with a black Mondrian stripe. Does he drive like Maxwell’s famous molecular demon which, possessed of one hot side and one cold, creates perpetual motion and therefore breaks the Second Law of Thermodynamics? No. The one compensation to his new status: the car radio up uncharacteristically loud on the BBC World Service. . . .
Because, what was an ending was also a beginning. To be graduated meant also that he could be post-graduated. Preliminaries over, Siemens Roszak would move on in the new year to the position of respected doctoral student.
O fine pending gownsman! O scholar illuminati! O Roszak moonshee! He’d been four years in the making and now could show himself well-made. He teased the pedal a little and the DeSoto scattered gravel.
. . . On every side of South Steyne universities were blooming like sunflowers: big-headed, oily and brilliant. In the north, where the cities were industrial the universities were tall, like smokestacks, and made of high-tensile steel, of glass and of concrete in shapes hyperbolic and paraboloid. In the south: low lying universities like fields on which wheat or barley might grow or goats graze. In the East “Let a thousand blossom!” performances reminiscent (Roszak records) of Berliner Ensemble (though he has never actually seen . . . ), ditto all this talk of Godot, pipe columns, pure geometry, spires which rival . . . While in the west—but the west was no more than desert! In the west, haulpak lorries sailed away from open-cut mines, like bright yellow container ships carrying continents across the sand—the universities there were sparse and, where they struggled up, their shape was dependent on the whims of self-made mineral magnates and threaded with spinifex and stuck together like conglomerate. President Domino (this being his most popular but not his only name. Also: Sir, President Pig-Iron, No! No! not Roosevelt) whose vision was this: Education for each and every deserving bod! Advanced learning and attention to the upcoming. Ball games and so forth by which can be judged proper men. “A strong nation depends, boyyo, on healthy minds and ahem healthy bodies?” And schools too—these should be sufficient that no vacant lot sits without casting shame on us all—because it could be a school. It could give birth to a brilliantine future.
O sure, babaloos, your brilliantine uncles and aunties are all on the way! Umbilicals are going to reel out to rope them in. Confinements are ending, the length of which, by and large, has gone unnoticed. Membranous cords thread between gaps in fences and weave around jacaranda trees in the garden; drop out between legs and lay over feet; slide between ellipses in the story; jiggle down stairs and curl up hillsides. Arteries and veins and distinct vestigial structures are being sent forth across suburbs to supply and nurture them bigbigtime, so that when each of them finally arrives all they will need are
“Teachers,” Siemens Roszak said to himself as he drove. “Mental producers,” in a voice which seemed to have been born broken and bearing the register: bass baritone. “Revealers, releasers, mobilizers, multipliers” as he drove now past the Trymelow house where an A40 was parked beneath a pink frangipani and the Great Cheese was snoring deep and wet and, for the first time in a week, dreaming of . . . But let’s not intrude on a widow’s privacy!
Her soon-to-be lodger, and South Steyne’s newest illuminati, passed her by and followed for a moment the ragged edge of the cliffs beneath which the beaches begin and the reefs and bars of the South Steyne wash. To those who saw him pass there was nothing amiss. No reports went out that the Roszaks’ DeSoto had been stolen. No one bothering to confirm that the windows were down and the tires were squealing. No reports—not even a confirmation of who was driving. After all, no one was sure.
Question: did anyone ever notice that one of my grandmother’s lodgers bore a remarkable resemblance to his own father? Most certainly. In fact, we couldn’t tell them apart. The obstetrician Maskelyne, it was said (not Scarobosco, as he was a GP), who delivered him by Caesarean section, turned to the window of the delivery room and pointed out to Stevin Roszak that his son was intact and then . . .
“Not possible,” said Dr. Maskelyne, and dropped the infant into the hands of a nurse.
Nurses swore that someone stepped into the delivery room and stopped the clocks, thus giving the boy the appearance of history frozen.
“Never seen a Caesar child with such a big head, and so wrinkled up,” they chortled. “Should be smooth and untouched by the labor.”
They being the same nurses who, in the following weeks, gave beds to the first casualties of The Coral Sea, bringing to the Second Great War the innocence and lack of compunction of not having known the First.
“But why,” they asked, “such an old old youngun?”
In summary: the Roszak boy entered a warring world already grown up and with this came certain expectations. Foremost: that he should be an intelligent kid. To this he complied. Secondly, that he should be a son who got on well with his parents. Confirmed! Thirdly, that he would be a boy whose idea of fun had about it none of the boisterous self-centeredness and lack of reason of his peers. Dear dear, sadly (yet thankfully) true. And now at twenty-one and newly graduated he had spent the morning alone, carefully reading Mad magazine and waiting for a sign of the postman until he drove his father’s car out of the family garage and up along the Fairlight escarpment. . . . Banksia bush all around and, it being summer and the hottest time of the day, teeming with the shrill trill of tiny black cicadas. Songs of Eden-like insects, abdomens vibrating, a host of tiny compound eyes, filament wings unfolding and drying, muting the approach of the DeSoto as new illuminati pulled it up by the roadside, left the engine running, and made his way through the bush, along a track worn by his previous comings and goings, to the escarpment edge.
Below: the burgeoning suburb of Vale on Vale, rival developers busy making roadways in opposing directions, slight spirals of smoke from the turpentines burning, a dot or two on go-getters bare soil of sprinklers set to enforce the growing of kikuku, primulas, chrysanthemums in heat such as this and, at the base of the gully where the main line from the North Head Treatment works would soon cross, The Vale School. A building in the tropical style with its underside raised on stilts and beneath it stored hoops, rings, mats, medicine balls, an apparatus (never used) for escaping across ravines, a chocolate wheel, a pommel horse and stockman’s bridle and all around a verandah of six foot width and the windows hidden below bull-nose iron and an iron roof which was so bright as to blind. Reflected also: sheds in which during severe storms the children could pray, sing anthems and eat and a Union Jack flying at full mast, satchels hung on pegs, bicycles, a trough of poised bubblingers, waterfalls and, what about (because the outskirts were never far away), a white pony ridden in from a farm in the west and grazing lazily beside the creek on nitre brush and eelgrass.
We pause only a moment because our new illuminati has moved on now and is back in the car and turning it around and driving one hundred yards back down the road to the red painted box on which is written POSTMASTER GENERAL. He breathes deep and enters the call box and from out of his pocket comes a neatly folded cloth which turns out to be a handkerchief. He places this handkerchief over the mouthpiece of the telephone and from the other pocket of his cardigan takes a small crumbled slip of paper. Paper twirling, crumbling and uncrumbling between fingers. There is perspiration on cheekbones and upper lip and it is not all come from thirty-five degree temperature. . . . Now the number he’s dialing. And newly illuminated ear (more about which will be discussed later) tentatively places itself on earpiece and records the burrburrburr at the other end. A moment passes. Two. There is a chance to call the whole thing off and thoughts of a father who is a local councilor and respected mechanical engineer and for whom a child born grown-up has much love. Lovesweetlove. But then the phone is answered “Yes” and a voice is urging new graduate on. “Hello! Hello! Is anyone there?” A thought now for the future of babaloos. Hearing again familiar, sanctifying, numinous, charismatic voice. ‘Who is this?’ Graduand, head swinging one way and other, makes certain that he is alone. Voice demands: ‘Answer please!’ And now, inevitably, earnestly, illuminati voice is answering: “Listen, bozzo, you’re all going to be history. I tell you bud, five minutes and the place is going sky high, you get my meaning? I’m going to blow you all to kingdom come.” And the phone crashes back into the cradle.
Who is this madman who threatens? Who is it who promises explosive devices in schools? Who runs now from brand new red call box and drives off in a V8 vehicle along escarpment road, tossing crumbled paper from car window as he goes?
No point in hiding it. Man! one of my mother’s lovers was a real advocate!
He left the scene of his telephone call and drove helter skelter down D Dick Hill and so could not observe the success (so-far) of his sabotage. . . . Below, in a tropical school house chairs were clattering, tables were toppling, chalk was dropping, ink was spilling and a voice was crying out: ‘Well don’t just sit there. Holy Mother of . . . Boy-o-boy. Move it! Move out of the . . . !’ And out onto cleared scrub strode Principal T. B. Bull, his lank carroty hair unsticking from its oiled place across his head, his speckled pate an angry but attractive crimson, his palms upraised and behind him in lines, somewhat disorderly and haphazard, the class.
Tick-tick-tick countdown in motion. Tick tick . . . behind shining silver schoolhouse: unexpected movement in the black banksias. Is that a DeSoto visible through the palmetto slough and scrub? Roszie, aged twenty-one, grabbing a window ledge at the rear and heaving himself up? The place was empty, naturally, but still drifting with chalk dust and rolling with pencil shavings, charts on the walls of the journeys of Sturt the boat carrier, Burke and Wills in sight of the Never Never, Henry Flagler surveying the Celestial Railroad, Flinders who sailed his rowboat, HMS Tom Thumb, two thousand miles on uncharted ocean drawing maps as accurate as those of the Spaniard Langrenus.
Siemens Roszak wandered between desks, loped to the rear where Jesus meek and mild observed from out of a cluster of flags of all nations, returned pencils to their slots, peered into workbooks left open, hufffed and arrrhed at the sight of cursive writing, arithmetic, paste-up collages of famous soap-powders, news print, finger paint. He was a tallish boy but didn’t reach his full extent, his back faltering and tipping him forward. Rolled shoulders and from them a neck which curved outward like the neck of . . .
“A magpie,” mama once declared. “Black and white: yin and yang. And no rhythm. Tight in places and loose, would you believe, in others? A chiller, dig? As if a small flounder has tried to swallow an overly large starfish. Bad example!”
His ears cupped and cusped (“O surely,” you say, “grok Maxim’s inheritance right there: the pointed ears of a saboteur!”—but there are questions, and I’m getting to that). His cornute elbows and horned hips, from the sharp hang of nose to the hang of . . . Some limitations imposed, babaloos, in light of Lady Chatterley and the trouble they had importing The Ginger Man. But yes, a child conceived when I was cannot deny: Siemen’s Roszak’s aquiline character seemed to me focused down there.
. . . Pausing momentarily to observe through the window of the schoolhouse Principal Bull-bull going off to uncoil the school hose with which the lay preacher returned to stand ready beside class dripping, hoping What? to extinguish the explosion. “That man has a frontal lobe problem,” whispered illuminati, a wry smile now above his pointed and tremendous jaw. “Bull. Bull. Bully bull.” He checked his watch, realized he has been inside the dweeb zone too long, and made for the front of the classroom before the jig was up. Chalk in hand he did not hesitate but wrote across the blackboard in thick letters the size of the youngest kid: LIES! LIES! LIES! And then he disappeared, back out the window.
No explosion then, except for a verbal one. But this would be enough to set things in motion. Three words and one meaning. Siemens Roszak would leave his father’s home and the Nissen on The Corso and shortly rent a room in Columbia. No longer in the early days of charismatic priesthood. A memory of pulpits almost erased. His career as a groovy Rev. Billy Graham never begun, though at times his clothes took on the shape of vestments. By and large, he was putting charisma behind him and entering his postgraduate years with a dull and unwritten slate. He tricked up the accelerator with the overhang of his shoe and spun down the hill to The Corso. The day was hot. The afternoon sea-breeze was blowing hard from the north east. And, that would be that . . . Except that two young men set in rapid motion are unlikely to stop on a dime (statistics to prove: 1.25 million lost in collisions in 1960 alone and all because of the impelling force of testosterone). On the BBC World Service Garrison O’Grady attempted a wrap up, revealing Spy Plane Discovered and Submarine Nears Bottom of Rosiana Trench but the signal was weak and the TV sets in the window of Mr. Yo’s Electrical were attracting more of an audience. No one quite sure what to expect: but Frontierland was coming, Adventureland, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, a mouse, a duck, Professor Ludwig von Drake. Pastpresentandfuture combined. Davy Crockatt. Space Mountain. Utilidor. To the tune of Cornell’s alma mater:
Down below the Disney railways
And the Merritt Island sand
Lies the well-known Utilidor
Branch of Tomorrowland.
With promises of more: A Wonderful World of Disney. The Prince and the Pauper. While O’Grady, with a voice not unlike that of a crooner departed, predicted we would shortly witness the Archbishop of Canterbury paying a call on the Pope for the first time in 400 years. Man! Real weak: a signal no more than static on engineer daddio’s DeSoto radiorama. Meanwhile, outside Mr. Yo’s Light and Electrical: “How handsome, whatdoyousay, is Mr. Brian Henderson and his Bandstand show?” . . .”Have you recently got an eyeful of Wyatt Earp?” . . .”Did you watch those cave whatchamacallit Flintstones?” . . . And two young men in their prime on a collision course as camera begins to cut from one to the other. Back and forth. Revealing Tito Livio: curly-top shortie with legs pumped like drumsticks and hands so tight knotted. Recording Siemens Roszak: ears like the King of Spades, the phosphorous of sabotage on his breath. Suspense building. Theme music in the fun pier close by: “Come On-a My House” “Sixteen Tons” (music always entering Maxim Trymelow’s life at significant junctions). Audience thrusting forward onto the edge of their seats as DeSoto swings onto Raglan Street, in sight now of the ocean which is whipping to a froth; surferboys huddled beneath a teepee of surfboards; The Hogwinders opposite winding up their motors while Dutch Hoyle looks on, the ink not yet dry on his fingers; Mr. Leacon nose out from his newsagency, tapping his sharp feet waiting for the sight of his paper-selling son; and now Tito Livio comes into view, pounding the pavement, streaming venom. The most likely point of impact being Johnny Dogs on The Esplanade. Great fracas of Keen’s mustard and ketchup and Johnny (whose real name, I believe, was not Johnny at all) scrambling in the sand for his weenies and bunyips which catch a breeze and animate (the director on this scene being Kubrick after all) and away go the strutting bunyips with weenies springing in pursuit. Just as quickly, the immediate danger is past as DeSoto and dunnyboy’s legs contrive to move the scene further to the south. Past Leacon’s and Dutch Hoyle’s in one frame and snoring Columbia and the hospital in another. Down hill and up. The camera trucking back and switching to, High Shot: DeSoto caught behind wagons reversing as the wind becomes moist and clouds slither and roll into frame, and with this hint of tropic squall a crowd heaves-to and makes for cars: coconut oils, golden sunhats, Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikinis, call now for: “Rain on cue!” (a crowd the soon-to-be lodgers observe rising up from below, bodiless at first and then in degrees of sublime undress) . . . Too-pert little bellies which make bids for independent lives, aged biddies draped with several lifetimes of themselves, mothers peeling away layer by layer as if they will soon reveal . . . sunworshippers everywhere (heating things up), and the appearance along with them of genies, flibbertigibbets and brine swirling up from cracks in the pavement and (now panning) to black curls tangled in a short crowd at Snow Cone’s, bright red kids stoically holding their places in the line, clutching pennies, bare footed. The local theatre with its two mock Dionysian columns pasted with news of nativity next week. And now DeSoto is free and moves on. Its big bumper parting the crowd and, from the long shot angle of Tito Livio, also parting sunworshippers. Audaciously. Conspicuously. Young man filming in terms of shape and color. The DeSoto appearing as a cavorting alien sphere, a UFO, and this is its color: silver. With the sun glinting off it as if from the slats of roller blinds and the crowd colorful, blooming, covered in dew which raises them up as it steams away (a young man’s dyslexia later to prove beneficial when during labor I am introduced to barrels of jalapeños and bags of black turtle beans, but in this instance . . . ). And finally the split screen returns to a wide shot and DeSoto fresh from verbal sabotage pulls into a space between council building and municipal library reserved for: Chief City Engineer. In sight, that is, of dunnyman’s boy who perceives, due to an affliction (which is also a blessing) that the spaces are a complicated and uncommunicative grid.
So one young man climbed from the driver’s seat. The day was tropical, the afternoon sea-breeze was blowing hard from the nor’ east, and he was craggy and charged by the miraculous vision of a Charismatic school principal trying like the Devil to brandish a dribbling hose-pipe. He strode, striding, toward the marble steps of the South Steyne Municipal Library to enter the specious world of books; when, from out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a bird. A big bird, broad, and its wings were short and its legs likewise and it swooped from the direction of the theatre, catching the wind in its black mop top, glittering in the golden epaulettes of its plumage, swooping and dropping white feathers (which seemed surely to have been plucked viciously from seagulls), full-flexing, leaping, flapping onto the steps, giving off a peculiarly attractive, earthy scent, and the bird’s squawk was this: “Lies! . . . Lies! . . . Lies!” Eyes seeing ears. Ears hearing: “Lies!” And Bobby Allen Zimmerman is hurrying now, on his way to Columbia too.
Zimmerman
On December 2, 1960, as everyone knows, the wolfhounds Pcholka and Mushka plummeted to Earth, entered the atmosphere too sharply, and burned up. The next day, Chief Rocket Designer Korolev suffered a heart attack and was diagnosed as suffering from nephritis and pyelitis, common kidney ailments in survivors of the gulag. On such a Sea of Infinite Fertility anything was possible. . . . After all, was not Clark Gable dying quietly in his sleep, but close enough to Sylvia Pankhurst to prove that irony knows no frontier? Were not three young men about to read the same advertisement and so telephone an unknown impresario whose husband had died from an inopportune meeting with electricity and thereafter become lodgers in a house in which a young woman whose hair was diaphanous and floated feathery, who reminded everyone of Grace Kelly, but bigger, who bathed in the hottest sun and swam with fishes, became the subject of a remarkable pregnancy?
Overhead: a new moon. A new moon is a moon of considerable influence. In the streets there were cats and dogs, a contingent of surfers in rubber suits and Hogwinders in leather. Needless to say, a widow was sleeping and dreaming of . . . Deadset! Why not, to reveal that the Great Cheese had fallen to sleep for the first time in seven days and entered a dream which would prepare her for the changed world her new lodgers would bring to her. The world, that is, of uniqueness, of one and of many, of own things being done and space Man! space, of Chichester who sailed single-handedly and young Bobby Fischer who played a truly solitary game of chess, of a house empty but soon to be filled, of gardens barren but soon to be blossoming. The subject of the Great Cheese’s dream: Real Estate. Like generations of female impresarios before her, she was following in her husband’s footsteps. She dreamt of building new estates. Mare Fecunditatis or, more appropriately Lacus Somniorum, the Lake of Dreams. Meanwhile, Mr. Beckett, the dunnyman, is sleeping too and though his dreams cannot be recorded here—because they, like The Ginger Man’s wildest fantasies, the complaints of Portnoy and the Ten Tales of Boccaccio, are concerned with the posterior of happenings and the backside of appearance; because—Impossible to avoid it!—his dreams are filled with buttocks, bottoms, bums and sphincters in degrees of open and close; because his eyesight is bad and his hearing also, causing him to work mostly by instinct, traveling from the site of the deposit back to its origins which might not necessarily Ho ho! be the traditional location because he has detected of late, in his hazy-sighted way, that certain other orifices bear striking resemblance, that feet might be hands, that arms might be legs and, ipso facto, words might be . . . and because he has long exiled his sense of smell he cannot sniff out the difference between one and the other (customers lifting noses and calling, as they doo-doo: “Your charges are exorbitant!”)—and so his dreams cannot respectably be recorded, but their subject is one and the same as the subject of the dreams of Great Cheese and of lodgers one, two and three, namely: What about The Future?
. . . And now I must hurry on because my little ones are growing fidgety, picking at their bandages, plasters, poultices, and I can hear, from the other side of the door, their freaking mothers beckoning them back to the wards “Come! We know you’re . . . Come out! It’s time for bed!” and if everyone is sleeping there will be no one here to witness my conception.
. . . Because hey-ho! Tito Livio has finally got Siemens Roszak cornered and is soaring down from the top marble step of the municipal library, squawking as he swoops, “Why did you do it, hmmpf?,” and Dr pending Roszak who has, moments before, parked a DeSoto dusty from the Vale road in the Chief Engineer’s space, is struck down by guilt and sure that he has been found out and cries in return “I meant well! I did! Honestly, I did!” wondering How? Where? Who? and now their ruckus is raising faces from the pages of books and a librarian in pillbox and bangs is tapping on the long window opposite, mouthing a mantra of her very own PLEASE DO REFRAIN FROM SPEAKING, sunworshippers are noticing and lines of nippers waiting for snow cones, clerks in the office of births, deaths and marriages, a hot dog Johnny whose weenies and bunnies are covered in sand, Marshall Leacon who waits on his son, surfers in tepees and Hogwinders on motorcycles . . . and, my babaloos are asking, What happened next? To which I answer honestly: No one is sure.
“At some point,” the sunworshippers say, “the heavens opened up (It happens!) and though the shower lasted only a few minutes, it was as wild and as precipitous as any in the tropics. Norfolk pines (you’ve seen them) threw off their serrated fronds and these crashed down onto the paintwork of parked Holden cars, beach umbrellas spun rainbows, twirling, whirling onto The Corso, making wheels (With curly spikes!) and displaying colors as the sea heaved up and burst the walls, flooding the sea-pool where wrinklies had been floating.”
They say: “A whirligig in John Macarthur Park spun and creaked until the rust in the mechanism caused it to grind and crack and it toppled right over to one side and (Go ahead, take a look for yourself!) it hasn’t moved to this day. Sand genies, flibbertigibbets, brine; fronds, leaves, twinkie packets, twine . . . in moments the beach was deserted empty! there was thunder and lightning (this detail added hurriedly in response to a freaking boy’s But what else on the day I was conceiv . . . ? What else?).
“In any case,” say the sunworshippers, “when it was all over your lodgers, Tito and that doctor who was pending, were drenched through, their tempers were softened, and they were responsive to reasonable negotiation.”
But reports differ. Johnny Dogs, for one, recalls the law of diminishing returns. “Ruination!” he claims, “That day was a shambles!” because he knows in the minds of sunworshippers that the afternoon was always “Bad Weather!,” hungers were gone, skins were red and the bathers left to repair in the cool linoleum kitchens of Fairlight. . . . From the news agent Marshall Leacon, a lapsed memory: “As if you could call Alek a paper boy! Fact is, he was not yet back. Why was he not selling selling selling? Was he sentimental? (and now Mr. Leacon, feeling his scars, recalls) Did he know already that tomorrow there would be no more news?” . . . And local councilors in their chamber above: “Blimey, Roszak’s boy—thought he was a chip off the old block, what? Shame how he turned out. Smart lad.” . . .”Laddie, laddie che che choo,” echoed the Chezter Carlsons deep within the South Steyne Oceanarium, behind the flashlights and bright bells of Abner Zimmerman’s Fun Pier: “Coo, coo. Pweet Pwoo! Choo-choo, choo-choo” . . . While Dutch Hoyle, his round wire specs sliding below the arc of his nose, looks up at this same inquisitive, enquiring boy and answers, “Dat day, let me see . . .” his eyes, he says, are his windows and he lets the boy peer into them; but, when the boy, hoping to find the truth of his beginnings, leans forward across the ink pots and the crabby hand of a rockerroller, all that he can see is himself.
“On the evening you were . . ? Arrrr! Some groovy thing you vant to know, yeah? O what a mood I vas in, dat night! Sure I vas here. In dis seat no less and with my hands making funky spiders on the big mushy pud of Nicky the Greek. Three spiders. A cobra snake in some manner. Scorpion voman. Some mood, huh? Sure thing, maybe there vas a fight outside. Two jocks, you say? Maybe. Yeah, sure. Could be. Nothing’s impossible’ and his fingers return to the forearm upturned and exposed on his slab, he flattens milky flesh between thumb and forefinger and takes up the needle with its red pot screwed up and presses down on the pedal below table zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz . . .
There are versions (The Dutch reminds). “New vays,” Dutch instructs. But one thing is agreed: two of my three potential fathers met that afternoon on the steps of the South Steyne municipal library, words were exchanged, fists were clenched and somewhere in the hot and briny air of a southern summer solstice there was an echo of one accusatory word: Lies! . . . Lies! . . . Lies!
“What right?” cried Tito Livio.
And Siemens Roszak: “Justified! Entirely, ummm!”
If there was rain they would later have no memory of it, because Tito Livio’s head was soaked already and Siemens Roszak’s craggy brow and: Next? Next? What happened next? . . . Two young men were chased from the council steps by a librarian brandishing a date stamp like a pistol, warning of the consequences of disturbing readers, shouting (in whispers) PLEASE DO REFRAIN . . .
They equally ducked and scurried and casting myself back into this scene, hours before I was even . . . I too scramble for cover under the threats of the bookish, the well read, the narratively educated. How to be unconceived, after all, and yet explain the conceived? How to provide for inquisitive offspring? What groovy thing was Dutch Hoyle thinking as he drew a red outline and Maxim, as a boy, watched a cobra snake forming, a mongoose entwining, a heart bursting, an anchor cracking, a MumDad scrolling. Why-o-why? ask my babaloos will you not tell us the whole story? . . . Because night is falling and they can hear the birdies chirping from next door and the voices are becoming irate “Do you hear me, you tarantula! I’m warning you, Ginsburg, send those kids out!” and the babaloos are as sure as savants that blows will be exchanged Pow! Wham! Swat! That the two principals in this story set upon each other in a storm and rolled down marble steps, tooth and nail, claw and hammer, until one was victorious and stood with his boot on the bloodied face of the other. “The dunny-one,” says N0.1 son, confined to a wheelchair, “was pumped right up like one of them gladiators.” “And the pending whatsit,” observes N0.2 daughter, suffering from fetal psoriasis contracted after two hundred and forty months inside, “had learnt a dozen words for ‘Stinker!’” “The doctor knew things about bombs.” “Tito Livio was as strong as an ox.”
No no! Words? Blows? No no! What have your mothers been teaching you? The truth is: some wars are never won (I could reveal to you, babaloos, negotiations in Paris which claimed to end . . . But did not. And the Warsaw Pact). No, nothing to be gained here by seeing only in black and white, grey being the color of greatest suggestion. What is grey, after all, if not an admixture of all colors (Dutch Hoyle informs), if not a repository for the microscopic magic of rainbows, fluorescence and day-glo?
. . . And so, sweet babaloos, it is appropriate that in the hours before your own father made his entrance (during a song and dance in which I will offer you a number of enfranchised participants), that the day turned magnificent grey, clouds came over in a flash (as they do in the southern tropics), but just as quickly were gone and, before anyone could settle for certain How? Why? the moment was passing, clenched fists were loosening, goggling alm-eyes were returning to their sockets, cusped ears were lowering their flames, and two would be lodgers were stamping out onto the sand blown esplanade, where fronds twirled and plopped from pines and perhaps there was the grey russsh of the sea and perhaps the grey aroma of brine and a crowd in grey flannel trousers, veterans of the Dardanelles and also of jungle warfare, leaning out from the grey verandahs of the Wee Bill and Bully where Indian Head beer was served day and night in schooners, the wilful vessels of all great adventurers. “You say,” Tito was asking, “that you plan to make a doctor of yourself, hmmpf?” . . .”And you say you have never been inside a school? . . .”Not once, sir!” . . .”Ummm, self-educated, I wonder?” “ . . . Many houses and homes, though.” “A man of the people, then?” “Seven mamas and seven papas, don’t you know?” “Tito, Tito, ummm the name rings a bell, and yet . . .” “So you are no longer associated with . . ?” “Denounced it this morning, as a matter of fact.” “Hmmpf!” “Ummm.” And Roszie thinking now: “What is that wonderful smell? Reminds me of . . ?” And Tito: “To be school principal, one day, regardless. Fine effort! Some ambition.” “ . . . of soil and water, perhaps. Ummm hankering smell, that is.” . . .”This is a big man in more ways than one!” And the veterans of Dardanelles and jungle warfare, with faces of salt and sun, were not surprised at all when two sweating young men, one tall and one short, one craggy and one curly, one bearing eyes and one bearing ears, passed by in the direction of the public bar.
Meanwhile, the evening lengthens. There are insistent knocks on Maxim’s door. Knock. Knock. Knock. Are there no ways to move from one room to another without all this knocking? Knock. Knock . . . and calls. What calls does Maxim hear when those on the exterior want entrance to the interior? Nay shouts now for the babaloos to be coughed up: “Let them out immediately, Moonie. No joke, huh! The kids gotta take their medicine.” Time, it seems, for my partners nightly harangue:
“You can’t keep them up this late, you . . . you . . . !”
And so:
“Go,” I whisper. “After all, what more’s to be gained this evening? Go and do what your siren mothers tell you.”
- - - - -
“No buts. Man! tomorrow . . . Well, Zimmerman’s on the way. . . . Hey, chins up, right?”
“But pop, you haven’t told us which of the lodgers is . . .”
“Go! I tell them. Go-go!’ Firmness being undoubtedly next to fatherliness. “Go, because Maxim is only as strong as each one of his many well wrought parts. Go, and then tomorrow I’ll . . . Remember, tonight to the north-west you’ll see Pisces, the Southern fish, which is not, strictly speaking Pisces (Fishes) nor Pisces Australids, the radiant meteor shower, and not the Pisces-Perseus supercluster, part of The Great Attractor, but Pisces near Grus, whose brightest stars are of the fourth magnitude. Remember also: Albategnius discovered Zebenelgenubi on a night like this, not to mention Betelgeuse. Red as love oil, babaloos, and a confirmed supergiant. Untold! Then, in the morning . . .”
In the morning, Maxim has an announcement to make.
And so my audience is gone with their father not even a prehistoric horn of cells. Tiny voices fade, cheeping down the hallway, once famous door is opened, siren screeches: ‘Tomorrow, ha! Ho! Ho!, you bet, Moonie. You heard of Autumnal Village Retirement Hostel, huh? What about Crown Removalist Company?’ and then the door slams. Shut! . . .
Needless to say, they’re right: they do not yet know of aunts and uncles or of the miraculous strength of umbilicals. They are unaware of record collections or of molecular structure of DNA. They are not yet introduced to methods of rising and safe ways of falling. They have not been made familiar with the long term genetic prerequisites for success or with the possibilities for failure . . . Instead, I can hear the sirens issuing their instructions “You will not!” . . .”How dare you argue!” . . .”Where did you learn that?” . . . The wards of the hospital whirrrr with wheels, beep, hummm, buzzz, and the doctors they employ, who at least these days understand the uniqueness of the prenatal stage, come in with Haloperidol and Nialamide and Droperidol and before long the commotion is dying down and I can see through the wire fence that the sirens have retired to the lounge to watch True Crimes and in the grey light of the TV their faces recall the face of one other . . . the face, that is, of their porpoise-loving grandmother.
Daffodil Rosa moving first . . . because the oceanarium is closing for the day and she climbs up into the air and though she has been serving time for illegally submerging and bears the split nails, the bruised knuckles, the aches and pains of a gracious penitent, though she has seen love-less reflections and been hard pressed to ignore them, she steps out onto the street with a waxing step and says brightly to herself: “What a day! Would you believe?” (a fact which the journalist, Manticora, would report in years to come as DIVE GIRL BLOOMS and, apriori, MY BABY, SHE’S GOT WINNING WAYS). It is summer, after all, and the wind has softened to a breath and the sea has lost its whiteness and rolls deep afternoon blue; the swell which rises from the north and crashes onto the basalt outcrops of South Steyne, burning the grass of the headlands. The bus that would take up her up Tyco Avenue, Archazel and Alphonsus in the direction of Columbia waits at the government busstop on Kokonau, partly filled with army cadets from the North Head base, but she passes it by and heads down the street toward the sand swirled width of The Esplanade.
. . . The Esplanade on which the Wee Bill and Bully stands facing the beach, along with the tattoory of Dutch Hoyle (in the window: seven independent ways to depict a King Cobra: your choice), the news agency of Mr. Marshall Leacon (and his son has indeed made sales today and his father sighs and suspects finally that he is getting through to the boy), a theatre with Dionsysian columns, a municipal library, a council chamber, a snow cone parlor, an empty fisherman’s hut which will one day become a lively scene for a boy who once viewed the world through a jungle of jalapeños and black turtle beans. But for now the Wee Bill and Bully is liveliest of all, and the voices of two young men make themselves heard in the street, sailing on tall schooner ships as they are. Their conversation turning from birds and butterflies. Misunderstandings are becoming so-n-so ancient history, because each knows (in the state of mind that prevails) that the other is not what was expected. In agreement. Grok? Nice fellow! And straight-talking too. Ummm! Hmmpf! And the conversation has sailed beyond this, beyond and beyond until it is in sight now of Ultima Thule, two previously uncharted tropical islands. Recalling, that is: that one young man is a perfect reflection of his DeSoto owning papa and the other of the habits of seven different sets of mamaspapas. Witness then: the principles of chief engineering, the utilization of raw materials and natural sources of energy, the application of scientific method to the building of machines and structures. Recall: that all modern families are more or less equal (or similarly unequal, depending on your point of view). That the dinner table is a place for a new mouth to be fed and that a boy who is no bigger than a chimpanzee should not be a big eater. “Man! what have we brought into our home, and for twelve months no less?” . . . And then there are Mr. Beckett’s words. Because an old man who could not hear and could barely see had the advantage of not being swayed by any but his own fine thoughts and principles. Because words that were spoken meant the most to a young immigrant whose reading was so distinctive (So foreign!) that he could not share the results of it, expect by his actions. Mr. Beckett driving back down the peninsula by instinct alone saying, “It is not like it used to be ugghhh! They do it no less but now they would put it in pipes. Pfffffff! And so they look at me as if they don’t . . . It hurts? But business will continue. Believe me, Toto, you need only trace it back to origins.” And a dunnyman’s boy, who is small, heaves up a steaming pan and imagines the eating habits of seven different new world families. And now, in his shed, Mr. Beckett is beginning to wake and soon will be getting ready for work. . . .
While the sun turns tail and casts itself across the harbor, blackening the great evening ferries as they fill to the gunnels with clerks and secretaries and then set sail, and burnishing the wrought iron roof of the fun pier, and Thommo K. straightening his surfboard on a whickapoody breaking on The Bower, ducks beneath the lip and is rocketed forward in a crouching position, head tucked, arms curled over his radiant head, coming out and cutting swiftly across open ocean, leaving the take-off spot behind him (seen now by wrinklies walking their hoary Labrador dogs) as he sweeps onto the pebbly shore of Shelly Beach, and the others follow in twos and threes, paddling onto the northern swells and standing straight up on waves beginning on the fairy reef and wrapping black and enormous toward the rocks.
As the sun disappears, the beachfront begins to change. Mr. Leacon is securing his doors with padlock and his personal jinka chain and leaving on the footpath the meticulously tied bundles of today’s magazinesnewspapers to be exchanged in the pre-dawn for tomorrow’s. At Dutch Hoyle’s a light comes on and will blaze into the late night (visible also by cognoscenti sailors arriving from points in the north) because he finds it easiest to work late at night when the noise from The Esplanade is almost gone and the crisp brown (Ho Ho! parson’s) noses of passing sunworshippers do not pry up against his window. Only then can he take an arm, a back, a belly, a buttock for what he believes it truly is, and thus let himself go with the flow. “Releasing za Dutchie beast, ya?” . . . Municipal library also now closed and, but for a watchman who reads The Phantom Returns rocked back on a chair by the door, it is dark and empty. In the street: no snow cones. No lifesavers in redyellow skullcaps. Johnny Dogs, with his cart pulled up on the verandah of the Wee Bill and Bully, laments the planned obsolescence of tires and propane gas.
And out from the swing doors come Tit and Rosz. They walk with perfectly accomplished steps. Ha! Ha! Ha! Shoulder to shoulder. What a business that was, hmmpf? Glad we cleared that up, then. Ditto wee-hee . . . Deadset! woe-hoe! did you see down there on the beach, sir, the surfers have built themselves a fire? Ummm. A bobbyfreakingdazzler. . . . Driftwood and seaweed and the balsa of a surfboard that has been snapped in two on the South Steyne wash. Blazing up now. Lighting faces already crackled with sun and brine. While from the pavement above, where cycles lie over crankcase to crankcase, comes Nicky the Greek and his Hogwinders with an offering.
Call it: Dutch Cheer (though Dutch himself has sworn off the shellac on account of the jitterbugs it starts in an artist’s hands). Call it: grog, after the stuff that kept the first settlers alive, that Leichhardt imbibed before he went looking for an imaginary great north-flowing river, that Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson sampled before they discovered the yellow brick road that led them over the Blue Mountains, that the Gregory Brothers cracked when they sighted the Never Never. Call it: owl-eye. Call it: DA Pilsener. “Hey there! What’s cookin,’ man?” and beneath the sand—because the sand has been vigorously dug out some time earlier and a pit made with black rock and a fire set—the humped shape of a meal, the unmistakable sand model of a boar baking hungy.
. . . And now Daffodil reaches the beachfront. She makes out the current she rode that morning, a great galaxy of little Esplanade florets whirling out toward the horizon and, sweet babaloos, she sighs. The tide is coming in and with the strong swell it collides with cliffs and surges right up into crumbling sandstone caves. She is pretty sure she hears a gramophone somewhere playing “I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside” over which a voice begins “From the deep, creatures . . .”‘ and then crackles, fizzes, continues “ . . . magnificent and mysterious. Denizens of man’s final fron . . .” But now also there’s something else. Another song being sung, which might just as well have been “Do Re Mi” or the beckoning rubato of “Belle Star.” And is it my imagination or is there movement in the currents of the wash? Are there tails and fins approaching from out to the sea, the silver of bream, the nacre of mackerel, the lips of grouper? Is sand that will wash up at her feet being filtered by time-worn manta rays and gummy sharks? Can there really be billions of twinkling eyes looking out at her?
Freakier things have been suggested. (Were there, or were there not, rebels waiting to ring out traditional tunes in the amphitheatre of a distant bay? A bay—if babaloos were here to believe it—named after that most lovelorn of creatures: the pig! Was there not a wall being constructed which, through the simple addition of bricks and mortar, would make one city two and perch an entirely foreign president on the precipitous edge of a New World frontier? Were there not guys and gals prepared to cut the throats of ticketholders in order that they might get a seat on one ordinary yellow bus in Anniston? Was there not, in another hemisphere, near the railhead of Tyuratum, a mere boy from Klushino waiting to blast off for a trip that would take him ninety minutes and twenty-five thousand miles and land him in a plowed field at Smelovaka, near Leninsky Put collective farm and, bestowing on him the identity of a Martian or otherwise a star that had come down to earth, thereby threaten him with personal fame in a country where fame was willfully never ever personal?)
No answers forthcoming, a sea mist falls over this moment and I reluctantly sit back down in my seat and allow events to take their own course.
. . . Because Tito Livio is already close by the fire, and Siemens Roszak, and now a third, Bobby Allen Zimmerman, who will in the future compose a lyric for the Duchess Music Corporation which goes something like this:
Here’s to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too
And to all the good people that traveled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.
I’m leavin’ tomorrow but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday . . .
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I bin hittin’ some hard travellin’ too.
But so far he’s not yet practiced enough to be playing his Gibson guitar--except stiff-fingered at the frets. Playing bar chords blisters his fingers. It’s as if he’s being punished for not wanting to be a doctor like Councilor Roszak’s boy or for not trying hard enough to resist the inevitable attraction all boys have for excrement.
Nevertheless, there is music and he is playing it. It draws Daffodil Rosa down onto the sand. The sand still warm from a full summer’s day; there are pink thongs abandoned designedly on the pavement and tubes of White Zinc sunburn cream and the sea surging up to hiss and sizzle and the dry sand making it hard to move, so she takes off her tight shoes, walks forward and throws them straight into the sea (because she will never be needing them again). A fire now crackling ahead and music which is not of this world. A voice which reminds her of Buddy Holly. “Or Richie Valens,” she would later say, “Or the Big Bopper.” But, in her unctuous way, she adds nothing more. The shoosshh of beer foaming from bottles, the clink of bottles on the beach, and she wanders into the scene. Some of the boys are digging the swell, running up their boards laid out next to Thommo K. while the belly of Nicky the Greek is exposed and the bandage that The Dutch insists be kept on awhile is tossed on the sand and no one is quite sure what such a needle gore tattoo might be. “A wolf,” Nicky is insisting. “A werewolf!” No no! “A goat!” a voice cries out. Ho ho! “A hungy boar.” And the mound in the sand is pried open until the aroma of pork cooking begins to spill into the moment. . . . Tito Livio and Siemens Roszak are laughing and so is the song, a shindig, a clambake kind of wail, and mama steps up to the fire and says now, “Is this spot taken hey?” Something tiny and glowing and smoky is being passed along and it reaches her and maybe she partakes and maybe she doesn’t. Man! who can be sure, but the sun is completely gone from the scene now and if there is light she is making it herself . . . and mama says, “Some party!” Ummm! Hmmpf! “Maybe we should split.” So then she walks off along the shore and the tide is coming right up onto the dry sand and a thousand eyes are watching and she lets the sea drag at her feet . . . but now she is not alone. And when they have all passed beyond the twinkle of city light which might have identified one or the other . . . when they have passed beyond . . . she reaches down, or across, or around Who knows? . . . She keeps her eyes shut the whole time. . . . She reaches. She fugs. She plucks. She takes a pop there on the dying warmth of the Queenscliff stretch. She takes one against the sea wall where the rock makes a landscape of his behind. She leads one blindly to the grassy verge and covers him like the dew. She topples one into the whitewater and flips with him like a porpoise. She chases one to the sea caves and finds the entrance to her liking. (Yes, she is saying yes I will Yes) She turns him on his side and joins with him like his double. She holds his hands above his head and demands of him like his captor. She touches him at a distance and calls him: “Laddie, daddie che che choo.” And when the night is almost over and someone is waking and crying “O no, babe, not now, I . . .” she puts her fingers to his lips and shines down on him again in the red light of morning.
