bought it at Pink.
The meat, does it stink . . . ?
So it goes. . . . Only, freeze things there a moment—because as she reached The Esplanade, which backs the beach at South Steyne and then curls around the Fairy Bower like the rings of an Olympiad, she experienced a moment of past hog-tying the present: . . . That is: she witnessed her father’s resurrection. No! not of his true and, by now, wantonly furfuraceous self but of the shape, the shadow of him past—printed, as if she’s in Hiroshima, on the wall outside Leacon’s Beachside News Agency. A cigar Indian who was far too similar to her father to be anyone other. No mistaking, after all, that granity brow, that full and, let’s admit it, aristocratic lip. Struck in a pose as if he was about to stretch out his patriarchal arms around her, palms flat as if she must give him something, his fingers seven inches extensile and so strong that they looked ready to roll her up, and all of him proned forward into a crescendo so terrible that the sight made a hussh like the sea and the shadow turned to flesh and blood and stopped her dead-still.
. . . When, finally, she gathered courage enough to slip by (amber eyes forced to the side of auburn sockets) he showed no fatherly pride in her bravery but contrived only to appear again, this time high over Dutch Hoyle’s Tattoory, selling cigarettes on an awning crinkle-cut and flaked by salt air: Woodbine’s! They’re Great!? And again: in the window of the Wee Bill and Bully Hotel, somehow set in glass like a white cabbage moth.
“What’s this, pop! Why do you . . . ?”
Daffodil Rosa, big though she was, flung herself holus-bolus down onto Queenscliff Beach. The sand below the South Steyne retainer wall, being soft, allowed girlish fingers to dig deep to find the sea-soak; her perfectly round face pushed into the topside dry. Wanting, yes, to see her father. Wanting, no, not to see. Her head stuck in ostrich-bob—and there in the dark of the sand subject to a clattering film of his final days. . . . How, in the Gun Club in Cooktown, on a monsoonal day in late November, her father sang “Kisses Sweeter than Wine” until he reached for his mike stand and it launched him twelve feet, forward, soaring over his once ardent fans, to land. . . . Cutting now to a close up of his face with his white tongue poking from the corner of his bloodless lips and five regular patrons looking at him spread-eagle over their counter lunches and his eyes so dreamy that she was sure he would shortly wake and begin his act: “Have you heard the one Ho Ho! about Icarus . . . ?” A film even with intermissions so that out in the foyer with jelly-cup and butter corn she could watch the nursey types coming from the hospital next door to raise and lower him and prognoses fat and ugly camped right on her pillow at night when talk was low and hidden behind nursey hands, “Cooked from the inside . . .” “Like a weenie, I tell you.” Dear dear . . .”Closest thing to a Dagwood-dog I ever saw.” “Fried up 240 volts like a flathead fillet.” And the more documentary this film the more she had to dig her incandescent head into the sand and poke her similarly spherical backside up. The beach boys loved it.
. . . No! No! babaloos, not those inchoate schoolies from Queenscliff High, who learned the words primal and goddess from the Oxford English Dictionary and were jigging calculus in order to interrogate bully mullet stuck by the low tide in the silvery rock-pools of the breakwater. Not those little gudgeons. Older boys, boys old enough to be fathers (though in my case, you’ll see, suspicions turn elsewhere) arriving on The Esplanade on big black growlers. Rocker boys from the west who bounced Norton motorcycles, Triumphs, and Hogs up onto the footpath outside Dutch Hoyle’s and birded the Dutch himself (him promising he would art-up their private regions for free—but probably didn’t) and who brought with them always the tools of trade, the screwdrivers, the wrenches, their hammers and cycles. Those rockers, and the surfer-boys whose bleached look was so complete that from the distance they appeared to have a radiance about their heads, a five pointed shimmering, and their bodies tanned in stripes from the folds of their skin as they paddled out into rolling whickapoodies. . . . The entire gang, The South Steyne Hogwinders, saw Daffodil Rosa and made from her that siren of sirens, Brigitte Bardot.
“There are more things in heaven and earth,” they said, “than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Or maybe Maxim is mistaken and that is what Chief Rocket Designer Korolev said to the Russian astronauts Komarov, Feoktistov, and Yegorov. What the Hogwinders actually said was:
“The Hog 74 is much larger than the 45, only it has a considerably lower gear-to-pinion ratio.”
Meanwhile, haunted by a singing father who continued to crave his appearance on billboards, Daffodil Rosa dove headlong into the sea. She met the currents of the riptide as she would meet the currents of Dr. Pfizer, the Cambridge oncological engineer, later in life: riding them some way, making abrupt judgments, rolling her body in order to give the cold shoulder, until just after eleven she swam in, dressed, dried briskly on her blouse and strode off in the direction of The Corso and the “Pink Cow” Supermarket.
Didn’t it matter that wet swathes showed through her brand spanking skirt and Dior? Didn’t she care that salt water had dissolved powder, rouge, Diamante mascara? These questions I ask for the benefit of setting the scene and come up with the demonstrative: “No, she did not!”
Bather wet and with eyes blacked up like an opossum’s, Daffodil Rosa strode forward with a partly-formed purpose in mind. She paused only once, at the window of Yo’s Light and Electrical, where crowds in those days still gathered daily, Ha Ha! and Did you see that!, blocking the footpath, and she pushed her way forward to see behind glass and the most beautiful “Terms Available,” tele-vision. TV so new that it was diapered in tickets and tickertape “Wow!” “Gee!” in the convivial script of Mr. Yo himself “Bigtime Happening!” (for Yo, with his squiggles and squirls, would one day demonstrate to baby Maxim how a tele-vision might be mistaken, in some instances, for a close personal friend). On the TV, Miss Lucille Ball and Mr. Desi Arnaz saying “Some fellows here from Cuba, Ricky.” “Arrr Cubana! Swell!” respectively in a cabinet with speakers the size of the well respected Caddie convertible. Television which stopped workmen building the Kuringai Expressway and caused the government to issue the health warning: ‘No box during smoko!’ Maxim’s mother was not interested. . . . Or did not know herself interested; because, she said: “Pollytics, babe, means nothing to me.” and maybe the S.S. Iron Monarch was steaming toward us with four government tugs joggling beside its tremendous hull and the captain having instructions to assay ore for the making of seven million Singer sewing machines, two hundred Austin cars, five dozen Humber bridges . . . She noticed none of it, being beyond the airwaves of The George Jessel Show and The Circuit Rider and the silver airliner of Imperial Airways with faces framed in the portholes.
“We do what we must,” I call to my partners up the hallway. “It’s no way to behave: this pounding on closed doors.” All of South Steyne husshed and woooed in the mid-morning breeze while my mother, Daffodil, wet-swathed, black-eyed and diaphanous, was directed down a corridor to a glass door marked “Private.” As I watch now the glass door is opening and through the gap can be seen a beckoning finger. It is a finger of extraordinary boniness, a horny, skeletal thing that comes out of the film I Was A Teenage Werewolf and juts toward her, trimming to a point of split nail. “Yes you, girlie.” And, when Daffodil Rosa enters, the owner of the finger and the boney hand to which it is attached, Miss Celia Wilmers (comptroller) stares and considers, even as she closes the door, that this little chick don’t look like no “Pink Cow” girl. O no, not this one. “Her mouth,” Miss Wilmers is telling herself, “is cheeky.” “Her eyes,” she dutifully records, “don’t reveal any aptitude.” “Her face—Will you get aload athat!—is perfectly round!” Nevertheless, the interview goes ahead and, spurred on by thoughts of an impresario who always could get good box office in any circumstances, Daffodil Rosa makes amends. She confesses a secret desire to serve, reveals that she can charm howls of delight from shopping vixens, shows resolve for the divine cycles of work time and is duly rewarded with the chance to wear black-n-white, sensible shoes, neat hose, no finger make-up,
