made of my grandmother a junction from which you could follow to her base the heaviness of the past and to her (now marvellously entangled and brilliantly peroxidic) hair the lightness and brightness of the future. Split around mid-waist by a rope belt, she soon would bulb-out down low and thin in the apex until she resembled, just before her death, a tear-drop or, alternatively, the flame of a bright burning candle. . . . We both had this distinction. My conception, likewise, was to be a common junction and when I was developed enough to realize this and share with Lucille Trymelow my feelings it is a fact that we laughed and sang out without a care: “So we two Pozzos are the beginning and the end of things, the debut and Ho! Ho! the finale!”
. . . Only now, I’m a little unnerved by hare-brained rumo,rs that Messrs Zimmerman, Livio and Roszak have been held up. The lodgers, held up! So for the moment I will, after all, only be able to introduce you to my mother, and must wait a moment to point out my fa . . .
Well, leaving that question aside, it is to beginnings and ends I turn, because it seems that, when news of her daughter’s plunging reached the auditorium of the Fairlight Returned Servicemen’s League Lucille Trymelow was already beginning to feel the first effects of not having slept for an entire week, of an announcement made, a future uncertain, a house too empty, a garden overgrowing, of the summer heat and the roaring forties of the southern sea. In summary: of all those malevolent spirits from which a twenty-five year marriage had protected her. . . . To make matters worse, the people around her, in a climate which had always prided itself in the motto “Nothing by Halves,” were entering the period of the Columbo Plan and the final days of the rule of President Domino whose eyebrows were so tall that they clicked clocked back and forth as he spoke, keeping time for his people and recalling to mind the first song I ever heard:
Ding Ding Domino, we children sing O
Here’s to the red, white and blue
There’s blood on our hands
And blow them Asch-ians
‘Cos God knows we all love you.
But let’s not bring a singing voice into it just yet. . . . Unparalleled prosperity, unprecedented President Domino with infinite honorary degrees, a presidential car sweeps regularly along The Esplanade surveying the effects of our urban sprawl, and a brand new widow smiles awkwardly at old biddy No.10 who is issuing an invitation to afternoon tea as the husbands of the Great Wars file past with palms out-turned on their foreheads in respect of a dead crooner and gruff military looks brought on by news of another university soon to be built to house foreign students arriving on the Colombo Plan.
Hey-ho the Colombo Plan which first introduced Maxim to talk of other worlds (the Third World, that is, by which he was sure was meant a world external and eagerly waiting—a fact which gave an unborn child great comfort). A third world of foreignness sailing to make a new home amongst us, revealing to us: Alien Lives. And from which came Tito Livio, who became, by his own insistence, my loving uncle (“Tito,” he once said to me, “such as in the case of the famous partisan leader.”)—though his love owed more to a certain night on Queenscliff Beach than I was immediately to understand. Whose own short-lived father experienced, as he sailed for The South, a dilemma similar to the one the Great Cheese was experiencing as she drove away. . . .
“The times,” she was saying to herself, “have got to be changing. I cannot go on. What am I to do?”
Driving now toward the fun pier and into the sights of Joel Atherton who was fascinated by the deserted dodgems and pleased to conduct the kind of search for which four years of jungle training had prepared him. Great Cheese parking at the rear of Lovecraft’s Follies to step into the policeman’s vision.
“What’s this!”
(Is it true that the sergeant’s substantial jaw dropped at the sight of the woman approaching him?)
“Fine bearing!”
“What’s this?” Mrs. Trymelow demanding again (being a mother unable to see her only little flower.) “You have no right to withhold . . .” Which only succeeds in igniting a policeman’s secret pride: “Every right, madam!”
(I cast momentarily out into my bird-filled garden and am reminded that in those same hours of December, 1960, word came that they had found Adolf Eichmann, the Austrian gasman, in the jungle. I make no bones about on whose side the moonlight was falling. The side, that is, of the relatives of Seminole and Tuscarora Indians who watched the Nazi’s arrest dressed in no more than hemp string and palmetto and wondered what truly civilized citizens were all about).
“My daughter shall be brought to me immediately!”
“Missus,” the sarge says, “the girl’s got herself in strife. Some, anyways, with this swimming business.”
“O, it’s too bad isn’t it what happens when a kid’s abandoned?”
“Public nuisance we’re calling it.”
And the Widow Creamcheese: “O too too bad!”
At which point Daffodil Rosa picks up a little of the conversation, asks the journalist Manticora to please shoosh his motory mouth a moment, and cocks an ear to the storeroom door.
“Sure is a shame to see a pretty thing like your . . .”
“A shame!” bellows Great Cheese. “No shame is great enough to describe how I am feeling standing here.’ But now grief has finally overcome anger and she cannot do any other than revert to the role she has played for twenty-five years. The role of sequin stitcher, patent polisher, flies fastener, tie-straightener, mike checker (O the guilt that poor woman feels!) Her single most accomplished contribution: that of impresario. . . .” And to think my husband and I were there on the beach at the Maroubra rescue of ’44. Three freak waves. A thousand souls swept out to sea—and on a Sunday! Kids, rightly. Too bad if there had been no one at home. But there were a hundred strong swimmers in the chair that day, so for every ten flapping so-n-sos there was one good and heroic man (Bless them and vicki verki!) and when they got the first hundred ashore and made them sit there with their heads between their knees and a two pound preserver firming the breadbox then those heroes went right back out on the rip to pull in a hundred more!” . . .”Don’t quote me, Snow, but I was there. Wore a shingle and everything. A young woman, rightly, and working (if you remember the place) for The Empire on Campbell.”
She takes breath, proceeds: “Heroes like Simpson, need I mention, and his donkey, who carried the wounded across the Hellespont without thought or concern for their lives—until Simpson was hit. Who then marched out for Chunuk Bair, not at all sure whether he was alive or dead but no less determined anyhow, and that he carried out a thousand rescues around the dug-in Hell holes of Lone Pine before it finally occurred to him that his heart was fatally pierced.” Momentarily wiping her giant’s brow. “ . . . And Flynn, heroic Flynn of the Interior, the Flying Doctor, who single-handedly built every hospital and mission for three thousand miles. Do I need . . . ? And have you not yourself been humbled by the thought of young Charlie Sturt, carrying a boat on his back for sixteen years because he believed in the true and everlasting existence of an inland sea?”
O to see Lucille Trymelow in full flight! Witness Maxim’s ever-loving grandmama! And Maxim not yet conceived, knowing as he listens that what she says is accurate in every important detail. That from within her is suddenly bursting out an entire world, so that it is obvious that while some folks have looked at her and considered her big-boned or big-gutted, big-headed or plumpo at best she can now be seen to be not half the size required for the spunk of bold history
