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
