. . Well naturally and, newly anointed, she left the store, neither the daughter that she had been nor the mother that she was shortly to become. Her chopped hair in the wind twirled into a cloudy crown. Stick thin Thommo K. watched from his vantage point on the break, turning at the sight of her to catch a whickky which towered right over him until it curled into a jagged green barrel and swallowed him whole. Watched also by Nicky the rockerroller whose body would soon become a famous canvas and whose imported Hog would one day catch the eye of a lovelorn sociologist named Haberdash Stanopoulous. She swept away from the beach and toward the harbor in order to catch the bus which wended up around Lilyfield and Lavender Bay to the clubhouse where her mother was now standing before a meeting of the Returned Servicemen’s auxiliary and announcing her intention “to step down forthwith in light of the tragedy that has befallen . . .” Salt dried on Daffodil’s lashes and broke away now to make her eyes stream. Shiny shoes tightened on her feet. Swathes dried white on black pencil skirt. She crossed Corso, Cleveland, Bungaree, Bruntnell, and joined (momentarily) the queue beneath the bottle and cream government bus-stop on Kokonau, while the harbor in its summer frizzle . . . What hey-ho is white and green and riddled with kelp? What buffets ferries of the Public Transport Department in the direction of the convict lighthouse of Pinchgut? What surges into the boat-houses built by reef cruisers and middle-aged men in search of Mr. Marlon Brando? Who—as the bus arrived poked to the windows with soldier cadets from the base at North Head—who wandered off along the harborfront, a fatherless working girl of fifteen?
Mare Fecunditatis! Sea of Fertility from which the astronauts Conrad and Bean would later return certain larvas, proving that in creation and conception some substances are a lot freaking younger than identical others. “To measure the actual age of larvas,” says Columbia’s resident geologist, Emeritus Professor Andique Garnet, “you strobe the rate the parent radioactant seeps into the daughter. The maturity of the rock Dig it? can then be figured from the true number of parents to daughters in the scene.” “Sure-thing Andy,” Maxim answers confusedly, “but what happens when this daughter is still as fluid as larva? . . .” And so Daffodil Rosa enters the rollicking wooden framework of Abner Zimmerman’s Fun Pier. The sea licks up sea walls, frightening white doves into the muscular arms of Moreton Bay figs. The wind blows in through the boards, whistling Dixie tunes through the hoardings, joining the bells of the Bally machines, Hey, Kiss Me, Dealer, The Hogwinders in leather and stovepipes swinging pole to sparking pole, call suggestively “Want a ride or will you chuck up?” and watch her pass. Now the Queenscliff High gudgeons counting pennies and ha’pennies behind the grinning Squid of Twenty Thousand Leagues. Wandering past Pyramids, Harriman Incorporated, Salem Witches, King Kong, Gunpowder Plot, Eiffel Tower, War of the Worlds, Lovecraft’s Follies, Steam Engine, Cavor’s Sphere, Astolpho the Seer (Now featuring!), until finally the iron roof is gone and the pier opens and there, two storeys high, is Poseidon, his mares, argonauts and trident, 3-D over the archway and ticket booth of the South Steyne Oceanarium.
It’s humid inside. Naturally. Briny. The walls are green with it. There are flaking reliefs of Vasco da Gama, Dirk Hartog, Captain James Cook, Captain Nemo. And the brine makes the wooden stairs slippery. A gramophone somewhere plays “I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside” over which a voice begins “From the deep, creatures . . .” and then crackles, fizzes, continues “ . . . magnificent and mysterious. Denizens of man’s final fron . . .” As Daff, eyes tuning in now to the half-light, turns to the denizens in the glass tanks: black eels rock-hiding, jellyfish bumper-to-bumper letting down stalatactitic tentacles; and down further, the spiny cod, the puffer, the bull roat. Down. Down. Down she goes. Now harlequins in tanks lit phosphorescent, the impossibly purple, the fluorescent red, fish with crescents so perfectly drawn they cannot be . . . flat fish, fish with false eyes, until she has descended into the central rotunda. A round tank, and through its convex scratched windows another visitor she notices, a man, standing higher up in a shaft of light opposite. Now a school of slimy mackerel sweep toward the glass, check, and then away. Now a brown grouper loping, older than the history of humanity and supporting what appears to be a crusty foam ball on its back. And then the tank becomes hazy, windy green again and the man opposite presses his nose to the glass and points and grins and Daff moves to the next window and waits. But there is nothing. The tank appears empty. She spies once or twice a shadow, the sandy riflings of a Chinese manta, a glint of the man opposite who appears to be speaking to her, his mouth moving in a queer fish-like rhythm, opening and closing and forming his lips into pillows. But by now mama has made her decision and moved on, past entire walls of fluorescent corals and crustaceans in species, past Closed Temporarily for Cleaning, and is climbing a new set of stairs. There are voices somewhere, a song, and the continuous enthusiasm of the recorded commentary. . . . Upward, until she’s squinting in a shaft of the sun and the wind catches the sand which has blown onto the decking and she cups her eyes away from it and peers out over the harbor, sighting in the distance the eleven o’clock ferry. Witnessing ferry passengers. Gunnel-crowding. Flying towels printed “Curling, Shooting, Trimming . . !” and “Ride the Wild . . !” Day-trippers and big-spenders, old-timers and vacationers, battling seasickness, eyes fixed on points out in front. She is in view not a moment when her arms begin to limber and stretch. Before battling eyes: a girl of fifteen climbing high on the railing of the Oceanarium, wearing blouse and pencil skirt and tight-fitting shoes, hands now clamping over her eyes, her white hair dancing the Watusi, her skin as sun-tanned as a lizard, her face as round as . . . and suddenly she plunges.
Drowning, when all’s said and done, is an efficient solution to the insurmountable problem of loneliness. Therefore my fatherless mother plunged and entered the rarefied world of the suicide. She entered it impetuously but without remorse. She went willingly and took with her no evidence of her life. Her plunge repercussed through water, concentric circled, reverberated, spun and revolved. Green water engulfed her and light became diffused. Sea-salt spun cool and watery and made filament like webs and these webs entangled but also supported her. Water became speckled as if in the process of shedding its skin, and whirled according to unseen cycles and equally undiscoverable currents. Currents carried sunlight and sunlight, as it does, pushed darkness out. Darkness went and sound, “I do like to be beside . . .,” denizen commentary, the low chug-chugging beat of Taronga ferry engines and the pealing bells of the fun pier, was muted into the music of Frankie Avalon and Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs and there, Daffodil, drowning, observed several species of migratory fish swirling and dancing in progressive Prides of Erin, a manta ray, that graceful filterer of waste, shoveling sand, a grouper loping, lumbering with pouting lips like the toes of boots, a loggerhead turtle carrying its hundreds of soft-shelled and yolk feeding young, and the last thing she saw, pressing her round face to the thick green safety glass, taking in water with the ease of air, letting water flow through passages and pores and water fill cavities and the terrible deep hole within, was a tableau of an anonymous pair making love in the steamy rotunda of an oceanarium.
The One Domino Theory
Man! A death as simply executed, as skillfully performed and as exquisitely presented as this was going to be popular. What family could prevent it? Nebulous Daffodil, floating as she did with her arms and legs forming the points of a bright star. Who would circumvent such a simple but consummately beautiful end. Petals becoming clouds on a sea-green surface. Diaphanous. Aglow. What begins in show biz as a splash becomes, in no time, a wave. I note today’s E . . . News editorial which recalls the third of my grandmother’s lodgers: ZIMMERMAN IS RETURNING: FIRST SIGHTING IN THIRTY YEARS OF SOUTH STEYNE’S SAD MARIONETTE.
Today the Jokerman has risen from his bed. Wild orchid plants threaten again to bloom uncontrollably on the patrolled stretch of Queenscliff Beach. Who knows what abomination will soon snake its supine self out from the gates of Columbia, and prevent the efficient flow of seaside traffic. Why friends, in no time at all our babes in the wood will again adorn themselves with bright shoulder tattoos in the shape of hearts and peace. Hairy Monkees will swing down from their trees to screech soprano in the evenings, twisting and cavorting uncontrollably through South Steyne and laughing out silly and wild and purple over the Muzak of our beds. God help us!
“Yes!”
