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
