Caramels, behind the counter MANCHESTER, and right smack there in the midst of clandestine lipsucking, dribbling, stick-jawing they agree to make a pact: “Now that we have done this thing we marry well and kiss this place goodbye!”
Stranger than fiction, this truth. Stranger than . . . O, hindsight, that gives with one hand and takes away with the other! But progress is never upfront. It spins back and forth, fibrous and mazy like wool from a loom. These two 1955 fatties should not appear pig-ignorant because, by the time I’m conceived (not long now, I can assure you), they will have become the respectable mamas of two brothers of mine, Haberdash and the hairless Sweets. Take note: there were ancient agenda and there was concord. In the sewing rooms of several thousand State High Schools, on the opposite quadrilateral to woodworking, technical drawing, metalcrafting, girls not much younger than Daffodil Rosa (some older, in fact, but not in mind. O no!) sewed needlepoint hearts and saleable pincushions for Dr. Barnado’s Busy Bees. (Secrets: the uses of pennies accumulated in a man’s dicky pocket, clandestine methods of strapping down an eight month bulge. Curses: the stiletto heel, all night rollers). Who doesn’t accept a reasonable human being would consider such pacts? . . .”Now that we have done this thing,” said the Einsteinian two, “we cannot turn back.”
. . . And so, the Widow Creamcheese wheels on, her eyes drying as she drives with her window open through South Steyne; A40 humming with perhaps a loving mechanical beat, a steadying drum roll of final release; while below, her daughter, a mother-to-be, carrying a bucket of visceral sip sop, approaches the first of her glass oceans. Oceans lime green and new. From within, fishes glitter. Mouths gape. Fins flurry, like wings. Steam wafts. Waters rise. The rotunda, round as a wheel, a frisbee, a hoop, maybe the sign for peace, is speckled with bright sunlight from outside and begins simultaneously to fill with the splashes of anticipated feeding. But now Daff has dropped her bucket, turning slowly at first and then faster. Faster, and then faster, whirling like the center of a stylus as she sees herself reflected ten times over, her face in every fishtank, silent and familiar, over and over, the round diaphanous moon face of her thoroughly lovelorn reflection. . . .
2 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
