cheese and drank strong black tea from a mug with a chip in its rim.
“That awful . . .” my mother attempted a third time, but still unable to draw her own mother along this line of thought, shouted through the wide French doors of the verandah: “Bull-bull to Bluey T. Bull!”
And so a name was born on that day after an island funeral. A name which I would never hear spoken, but which would come to me, nevertheless, like a mantra during my long confinement.
“Bull-bull!” my mother shouting it out in sequential notes. “Bull-bull-bull to Charismatic T. Bull!” until finally her own mother was roused to announce.
“Daffodil, we must take in a lodger.”
“Bull-de-bull! Ha Ha!”
“What else can we do?”
And then, quite unexpectedly, my grandmother joined in; mother and daughter leaning back against the front wall of the kitchen, the day heating up outside, their legs bare and cool on the linoleum, their heads back, their eyes closed and their mouths stretched wide, shouting together:
“Bull! Bull! Bull!”
Columbia rang out, its garden burst with frangipani and orange wattle, with bottlebrush and boronia, dragonflies lifted themselves over the giant cups of the chalice vine, blue-tongue lizards peeked lickingly from ridges of red sandstone, black snakes hid momentarily in their holes, and the sound of the wild goofing lament of the remaining Trymelows broke through the gumwood doors of this very room, and spun up through the house, winding up the cedar stairs and along the landing, poking into the bedrooms and filling them, slipping along the sallow tiles of the bathroom and across the shiny surface of the Bosendorfer piano in the conservatory, finding gaps in the wood walls to pierce, the lament spreading itself this way until it tumbled out and down onto The Esplanade (as our own sounds would soon after tumble), where it took on the character of unexplained noise, catching the attention of early morning office workers heading toward the ferry terminus for the city and of Mr. Leacon unlocking the jinker chains on the shutter of his news agency and of the swimmers testing the black, morning water in the sea pool, finally crossing the path of the first surfers of the day, with gun-boards balanced like the arms of scales on their heads, the boards tipping forward and back as they scurried across the Esplanade and onto the low wet basalt of the headland, and on toward the swell which had risen overnight and now was crashing down in great tubular waves on the coral outcrop of the Fairy Bower.
Dressed in silver crinoline over a fine green Lincoln velvet, Lucille Creamcheese stepped out her front door on the morning of December 2, 1960, determined to make a good impression out on her own. She carried in her velvet breast pocket, which bore a striking resemblance to the soft under-ear of a rhinoceros, an advertisement which would appear shortly in the personal column of the South Steyne E . . . News under the inauspicious caption “ROOMS AVAILABLE” and hoved down onto Raglan in the direction of The Corso where, behind the geometric shapes of the salon Five-O, Mrs. Magdalen Forsythe did good business. A salon for the ladies, looking out on the golden quarter mile of Queenscliff Beach, the sea-breeze blowing sets and rinses regularly at thirty knots and the sand of The Steyne thick as molecules in the salt air. These sure had bejewelled our Magdalen Forsythe and she carried herself of late with a scrumptious endocrine posture—rumors that ‘the old insect only does permanents and peroxiding to pay Internal Revenue’ and a better job being done on account of her being completely disengaged . . . Approximately then at her mother’s flipping open of last December’s Woman’s Day from the pile marked “Strictly Customers,” Daffodil Rosa stepped into the bathroom. Deserted, her own hair had grown long and, because she had been taken out of high school (as result of her father’s you-know) and spent the last week wafting between the red soil of Columbia and the sand banks and channels of the South Steyne wash, its color had naturally bleached to a diaphanous white. She mushed this new, diaphanous hair into a tail behind (a jaunty pony); she twisted it into a twirl uptop (a Turramurra turtle); she flip-flopped a handful of it in a pink silk bandanna until, convinced after what had happened that she could no longer make anything right, she fetched the nail scissors her mother kept on the sideboard and, not pausing to position them at one angle or another, she snipped off the final six inches.
No! No! No, she didn’t care. I hear talk these days from my partners who themselves once sailed into South Steyne proclaiming like sirens that they were pilgrims following the direction of who-knows-what dharma and now telling my babaloos that the Trymelow girl’s hair was where it was at.
“Being diaphanous your grandmama’s hair dug full moonlight.”
“White white, shining bright!”
“Short hair, long hair, love hair, song hair!”
“Hair! Hair! Hair!’”
My partners take their lead from thirty days at the Lyceum when Daffodil Trymelow played a minor role in an amateur production of Lysistrata . . . But no! Man, I’ve spent too long on hair already! It wasn’t what sprung from my mother’s head that guided her life; though its attributes were undeniable, its vigor and luster; each time she cut it, it simply grew back: golden to white, trailing and streaming its way through this house until, years later, when it succumbed to a thinness up front and an unfortunate grayness. And yet to me, who gestated in the wisps and diaphanous glow of its oiliness and lankiness, it seemed that finally it had assumed its rightful position . . . pulled back, blued and eclipsed by the sight of her most felicitous gift.
O to the glory of inheritance! What a grand fate to be entrusted with an emblem such as this! My jaw is a crescent. A jaw modelled on the rim of a wheel. Feel the bone, how it curves toward the upper hemisphere so that in spite of what you might like to do with the hair, left parting or right, you cannot change the geometry. This face of mine is round! Round as a frisbee, a hoola hoop, a yo-yo, round as peace itself. I’m no more self-congratulatory than the next bod, but this inheritance is certainly distinctive. No Matterhorn or mouth popping out. Nothing for poets writing in the heroic couplet!
Alone, her hair floated feathery to the wash-basin, the tin tub on the green linoleum. A girl of fifteen (born, to be accurate, on June 6, 1945), squirming herself into a skirt as narrow as a lead pencil, a blouse said to resemble a Dior; fitting into a pair of Clarke stylefits, applying powder from a mother’s Bake-O tin until, catching the chimes in the ante-room, she left the house in the direction of a supermarket we came to call The Pink Cow.
Don’t she look just like . . . like Grace Kelly heading down our Corso? Missed out marrying the prince, but possessing all the charm of High Society and as sleek as a porpoise besides. Already a big girl, naturally, but only in the way of her mother. Extraterrestrial: made of soil and more soil but carrying it in places it was most needed, filling it with a darkness in daylight and a full cream cheese glow at night. Her now grieving face a geography in which all things were reflected. The three lodgers being once heard to say: “O the stories that face tells.” Tito Livio adding: “She is as evasive as the tide.” And Siemens Roszak, whose claims on her were similar but often kept to himself: “It’s imperial looks your mother has, not principles.” And Bobby Zimmerman, strumming across nine loose strings on a guitar he told me was a Gretsch Ranger (Names had such incantatory properties in my childhood!): “Don’t she weave a beautiful web,” he sang, “to snare Iphianassa upon.”
Just like that most subtle of actresses, Grace Kelly, except that her skin was much darker, ebonious at that time of year, and she was heading, after all, for an appointment with Comptroller Wilmers at the supermarket which, in those days before Maxim was conceived, had lost it’s real name to the weather-worn sign that hung over its delicatessen:
Save money and think
of
