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
