Gagarin! It’s an outrage, sergeant, to hear of the diving of one’s own when the rest of you brave souls have your hearts set on soaring and should I now wish to offer an apology it would be in the words of the explorer, Peron. . . .” Of Peron,” echoes Daffodil behind the door, and flashes a fifteen year old smile at Manticora which melts his virtuous heart clean away. . . .”Peron who, on his travels, witnessed a forty foot flood, where valley’s were cooler than the mountains and hailstones were fireworks. ‘This,’ he cried, is no ordinary circumstance.’ Imagine it! Imagine sergeant, that you are Peron in the frozen air of somewhere entirely new. Imagine the stirring and quickening of the soil, and the silent uprising of unknown vegetation in unearthly ascending fleshliness and in spikes. Imagine the parallactic drift of so-called fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.’ . . . Are you getting my drift, Snow Atherton? Gees, so what did my daughter say to herself: ‘I come to a place where five avenues meet and the oaks which form them are so extremely tall that they appear to support in the heavens a high garden-plot of greenery.’ And on this woeful day, sir, when everything is so novel and unexpected. Whether she is how to say, Miss Lunatic, is anyone’s guess. Or cries out ‘Good morrow to you Daniel O’Rourke’ and dives willy-nilly into fishtanks. Not usually. No, sir! . . .” The girl is destined for big things. A fact which lays out clear beneath me—like a chart. . . . O dreams she’s had! No red-faced farm girl, this one. No fragment of angry candy. No life she’s got planned to be set in plaster of Paris. A girl going strength to strength . . . up until now. And don’t forget Peron himself collected, on one island alone, twenty-three thousand unknown seeds, birds, reptiles, plants and minerals, not knowing whether they were law-abiding or law-defying. And just think—even President Domino has edema of late. Pulmonary. Gees! who doesn’t know what it’s like, Snow, to be overtaken by the size and shape of terrible events, especially when you’re young and not knowing the ropes and he, whose tonsils were silver as everybody knows, is now gone? . . . Gone! Are you realizing already what I’m getting at: the risk was minimal compared to the imagination required? And what a relief to find there are still some head honchos like yourself who would put life on the line for the purposes of showing the youngsters, soandsos they can be, who should know better but have not quite worked out what we know, and that we should feel the privilege and generosity of knowing, because that rightly is the spirit of the way the thing is accomplished . . .”
And so, hey-ho, a deal was struck.
Stranger than Fiction
From that moment on, I can report, here in this house grew a Daffodil who sung piscicultural. My mother, who gave to the piscine: attentions previously denied. Who found in the company of fish: mutual satisfaction, the memories of the silver tonsils of her father reflected in the scales of sea bream and mullet. Attached herself to the idea of motherhood by getting close to that most birth-prone of creatures. Fish, who live by the famous novelists’ principle: one can give birth to the many. Fish, deadset, who grok not a thing in return. Crustaceans dealt with equally, without prejudice. She made of those first hours in Carlson’s oceanarium: relief extremo.
“Which is more,” I hear from beyond the door “than she felt on first learning of her offspring. More affection she provided, I’ll tell you, to the scaly, the goggle-eyed, the thin-lipped, the poisonous, than to her own flesh and . . .”
No no! Because the distinct circumstances of my gestation decreed that a mother and her babaloo be . . . It’s no big deal. Bigger things happen! A president is about to be elected who will flicker, glow, and be snuffed out before I’m old enough to take possession of my own hands. Contestants on the TV quiz 21 will mysteriously reveal answers before they have been asked questions and, circumventing accusations of sorcery and demonology, their reward is: a great deal of money; while, beneath the sea, a crew circumnavigating—not once rising to sample the air—will swear they’ve discovered the proper environment for humankind.
“Inner space, ipso facto, could provide sustainable life-supporting resources for umpteen years.”
O thrill to the bubbling joys of self-containment! A scientist is about to write a book entitled The Sciences Were Never at War. Who suspected it, anyhow? Man! one thing at a time.
. . . Daffodil Rosa, both sea-loving and sun-bathing, entered the world of the aqueous. The air was thick with the nitrous bubbles of tanks and thin with oxygen and her head was spinning. She fed the denizens on the hour, every hour, and though mamas and papas worldwide are now crying “Sweetie, they don’t eat that much.” “Stop! Stop! those dang pets of yours’ll explode!,” they were destined to do well (as we all will—you’ll see). Pink mollies to receive, in time, their fluorescent pinkness. Neon tetras to have returned to them their natural spectrum. Bass, minnow, crappie, gar, sturgeon, shad. Species alive-o! Tripping along on mama-attentions while her loneliness swum beneath the surface of something else. Breathed deep on the de-oxygenated atmosphere. Shoveling seasalt Hey-ho! Hey-ho! Watched over by three natives who considered her effect on the fish an instance of devilment as yet unresolved. There would be dark consequences to all this life-giving, they were sure. Bad vibes. Why so—the barbed, the spined, bullrout, stonefish, ratfish, cobblerfish, fortescue, shark yakkai!—beasties all rise up to this one’s ministrations. Bad, bad vibes this young one brings. . . . But what could be more innocent than giving a world cycles? What more than the rhythmic patterns she provided? Counting out the amounts of issue as she went. Initiating tides in the still ponds of artificiality. Swirling currents and rips, sand spurts and spouts. Switching on lamps and reticulation to provide the effects of the seasons. And feeding. Her arms deep in a bag of mishmash. Deep deep so that up to her shoulders now there was a coat of powdery white. Dipping down down so that cupped in two white hands that will one day clasp burgeoning belly, one day feel for an unborn’s head, one day cradle dripping babaloo; brimming and dripping through fingers which will . . . there is blood-n-bone, chicken gut, the offal and entrails that only fish could love, visceral sip and sop. And now a smell close by which proves everlasting. The fishiness, the saltiness, the bloodiness, the scent of loneliness diminishing to be overcome by something new: an aroma of impatience, drouth, concupiscence—the perfume, that is, of an insatiable hunger (along with the occasional hint of another, made by machinery, books, resins, refuse and guitars: the fertile aroma of three tenderfoot lodgers-to-be).
Meanwhile, Lucille Trymelow had done the right thing, and so she drove home. She made short work of the hairpins and narrow thoroughfares of Fairlight. Whisking A40 like it was the outer of her own rolling body. Pressing it forward so that the politeness and quaintness of its design seemed unthreatened by the pace of life that was approaching. Driving below the balconies where new arrivals in Mr. Chesty singlets loosely hung their arms and bellies and shouted in accents “Getchaearsfixed!” to the radiolas cranking out “Calcutta” and “Let’s do The Twist.” Blackies, yellowies, reddies, brownies who came south on the promises of the Columbo Plan to learn all there was about industrialism, professionalism, technocracy, manufactured medicine, Programd instruction. Ten pound white-as-ghost immigrants also, who would soon fill the aisles of the factories rising on the Vale escarpment, dealing mostly in processing and forwarding: best quality ores and ites, the wool-clip and the wheat. She screeches past all this . . . as time, in an Einsteinian way, refracts back exactly five years to 1955 and, in “Pink Cow” aisles of Lakeland Pencils, Perkins Paste, Decca 45s, Smiths Crisps, Berlei Support-Cup Brassieres two plump chicks, planning just in time, are making a pact. The lights are low but the shelves rightly sparkle with their evening’s work, their tinseling and glass baubling, their holly stenciling for this season’s yule which imports five new brands of antiperspirant (bodies present their true colors in the tropics); transistor radios from Japan which are carried in one hand only and which, Charismatic T Bull claims, suck the juice right out of your sockets at twice the running cost to yourself and are made of leather that isn’t leather; clippers that do short back and sides, quick as pie. And the two plump chicks bunch up together. Good workers. First rate. Miss Wilmers is very proud.
