cicadas passing by, whom the local children call the green grocer, the yellow baker, and the black prince, dipped their bejewelled heads . . . ? Just this: that the time had come to make a few changes around the place. Keeping in mind the esteem in which she held her late husband, and what he might say. Big-hearted goofball. Never tired of slipping into “You Wild and Mossy Mountains.” Loved to kid around on a warm night like this. Steamed up on hot nights like a purty spurty little marrow. Sung like a counter-tenor when his dander was raised. Ho ho! And all around her the green grocers, the yellow bakers, the black princes of summer were emerging to claw their way across kikuyu and clasp their rigid selves to furrowed grey bark. Abdomens rutting and barking in articulated revelry. Climbing eucalypts and calistemons and now into the frugiferous gnarls of the ancient mulberries. The heavy rain not deterring them one bit because, possessed of irresistible seasonal logic, they shed hard outer casings, quickly dry their impossibly filament wings and (cast upon only by stars) set about orchestrating a song in praise and illumination of insect birth and insect life.
“New Moon tonight,” shouted the widow from the back garden. “The brightest stars are only those that are dying.”
“Three theories,” called her daughter from the kitchen window. “Dig it, ma? A lunar trinity. The theory of fission in which a single planet, Earth, was formed and, as it cooled, spun so quickly that it flattened into a kind of cradle and then into a barbecue sausage and then, finally, it split right in two, sending a piece of itself up onto the stage to shine nightly over us. The double theory also, huh, in which earth and moon formed in the same solar condensation, but one half smaller, brilliant, but sad and sick. And then the captive theory, right, in which a solid body already formed and ancient reached out and grasped a younger body flying past and . . .”
“O Daff! But how could a man who was such an itsy bitsy baby go ahead and kill himself dead?”
The two of them had no other reason to be awake so late in the evening. The XVIIth Olympiad had closed three months before, so they could no longer sit in cane musnuds with their ears curled up against the BBC World Service while the redolent King-O-the-Southern-Airwaves, Mr. Garrison O’Grady, reported Rome-side: “It’s Gold! Gold! Gold!”
No reason for my mother to be in the kitchen late at night and my grandmother out in the garden, except a father-n-husband twelve hours under the clover. My grandmother’s dished face pooling bigtime in the starlight. Soaked through to the marrow (if only we could all reach in now and give her a proper toweling) when finally, ears momentarily unplugged, she notices the rain-song has changed. It’s not a song at all now but a conversation. This rain is speaking out loud. A “Shoo-shoo-shoo!” making itself heard above the teeming on the garden shale, becoming louder and distinctively tromboned. So she shook the water from her eyes, tugged back snakes of once magnificent hair, stood up and peered over the paling fence to find her neighbor, the Principal T. B. Bull, standing in his yard spraying his fruit trees with a garden hose. Spraying and intoning “Shoo-shoo! Shoo-shoo!” with an old-handed teacher’s belligerence.
And now the bats begin to whorl overhead, their red foxy faces pursed like rosebuds in the starlight, their wings rubberized and engineered in silhouette, their dung trails flying purple behind them, a screeching going across the sky, and the aroma was of peach and of apricot and the first sweet Morello plums of summer.
Calonyction Aculeatum: The Moonflower
In Columbia next morning Daffodil, unslept, flat on her back on the linoleum kitchen floor, lay sweating in the tropical heat, her feet brown and big and bare and propped up on the door jamb, her white hair spread over the linoleum like light, her mouth open but momentarily unable to speak (her voice had become as inconsequential as the unfilled spaces between the air). Though I am not yet conceived, this is the mother I remember, her sounds: the rush of her blood as it filtered through her capillaries and was replenished, her heart thunderous, clapping out its beat with a tambourine jangle she shared with her own mother, her breathing, ever higher pitched and shorter than the breathing of anyone I knew. Somehow, during that night, she’d taken on her mature morphology—which is to say, I would shortly come to know her perfectly, both from the outside and from within, travel the labyrinthine pathways of her circulatory system, observe the cleverness of her endocrine glands, each glandular secretion metered in respect of dilution by blood and the distance it has to travel, the blue voltage of her nervous system, its amperage and alternating currents—so I can report accurately: her systems were in disarray.
They say the duodenum is shaped like a C; in the days following her father’s death Daffodil Trymelow’s had taken on the malevolent form of an S, wrapping hard around her pancreas like a rock boa. There were mountains forming inside her, volcanoes, valleys, gorges, rivers, larval plains as vast and as shifting as deserts over which a dim lantern hung, as if it was hung in a window, an aurora borealis, a projector of shadows, a spectrum of shapes and puppetry (or am I thinking of the faces of children caught in the flare of fireworks?).
“O that awful T. B. Bu . . .” she began.
“O that awful T. B. Bu . . .” she began again.
Then, noticing her own mother also lost in thought, she slopped buttermilk between a butter knife and her forefinger and licked her finger with a tongue as lithe as a water skink’s.
Meanwhile, the sun tipped up over the horizon and, first striking the rising green hill of MacArthur Park, soon lit our garden which, in the short week since my grandfather’s death, had already grown wild. Without warning, the radiogram in the conservatory announced: “The International Summit of Presidents has failed.” “A scientist (somewhere) has developed the laser gun.” “The queen of England herself has given birth to a son. This is the first birth to a reigning monarch in one hundred years.” My grandmother’s house, Columbia, drew in a breath. In the trees outside there were starlings whose nests, it could be heard, were in the roof of the house. There were sparrows and magpies and scaly-breasted lorikeets, parakeets and cockatoos, white and black, ibis, spoonbills, bowerbirds and brush turkeys. There were gulls and kingfishers.
The garden drew in the sun, heaved, and began to breath. In the streets of South Steyne, Tsvoklovsky, the baker, was tossing white, doughy water from his doorway into the back lane and splashing it against the wheels of his van; Arnhold, the butcher, was arriving on his bicycle and leaning it against the telegraph pole outside his shop so that at frequent intervals throughout the day it would be toppled by passers-by and he would come out in his bloody white apron with its blue stripes faded and he would right the bicycle and stand there a moment, gnawing at his tongue, finally scratching vacantly at the pink pate beneath his cap, spit, and disappear back into the shop. To all this, my grandmother’s house seemed unaware. Its wide cedar staircase wound up silently from the front doorway, which was still open. On the dresser in the hall there were suit jackets, which had been removed in the heat of the previous day and somehow found their way home in my grandparent’s car, crowded into the back seat. In corners of the ante-room and lounge, in the conservatory corners and the fibro cement corners of the laundry, something funereal had descended, a dust-like grey, mealy beach sand, and a hoariness had formed on the cobwebs, as if they had been fixed in plaster of Paris, and then there was the smell, the mordant, brackish aroma of old halls and small hotels and dressing rooms with threadbare chaises longue and cushions printed with country scenes and filled with wood shavings. Columbia, it seemed, had suddenly become unfamiliar and unfriendly toward them.
“Now what are we going to do?” asked the Great Cheese, simply.
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“Your father was a happy man, and deserved better.”
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“Well, a young woman shouldn’t complain,” she continued. “And the house is our own and the soil’s
