Moon Dance. Brooke Biaz

New Recording Artist.” Columbia: three-storeyed, belfried, turreted, iron-roofed, verandahed top-n-bottom like nothing so much as the Great Cheese’s bridal party (for bridal parties are, as everyone knows, batty and embattled gatherings), stuccoed and latticed against the heat of the tropical sun and, on each storey, doors that opened outward to let through the breeze, revealing: The sea! A vast southern ocean on all sides. A perpendicular residence, not then hugging the sandy soil, as it does now. Built, and then augmented, above sea cliffs. Cliffs where a patriarch (once young) with lungs hailed prematurely bought plots at a price made lowlow by certain falls on a street he’d never seen—namely Wall Street. He made an investment, without entirely understanding. A fault he later compounded by trusting in the deprivations of patriotism: offering land to the War Office who, prompt as a slot machine, paid top bill for it and jerried up a hospital to take what was left from the Battles of The Coral Sea. So here is a proud man (now six feet under but not forgotten) who maintained a singing career on the purchase and sale of seaside plots. Not unlike The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead and Sly and the Family Stone—though they’ve worked in rather the reverse pitch. A singer who, short of stature and of engagements, festooned his home instead, with turrets and frontals, battlements and diaper work, and with rooms, which forced his wife to advertise after his death and which led, as we will shortly observe, to the arrival of a young immigrant named Tito Livio.

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      “Hmmmf!” Tito Livio cried out to Mr. Beckett, the dunnyman, “they should put these things on wheels and we could do it faster!”

      (A car has just wheeled past, looking not unlike a funereal urn, politely continuing on its way to a much older part of town where its driver swings it into a short sandstone drive and pulls up beneath a frangipani, which is in flower and so dropping a pink wax carpet out in front of her as she steps forth onto a festooned verandah as well-established as South Steyne itself)

      “Wheels!” Tito Livio shouts again, “and proper handles, don’t you know, and if I had my way, sir, they would deposit them right close on the curb so that carrying so far would be unnecessary.”

      But Mr. Beckett, who has been doing this job for well nigh forty years and knows the changes that have occurred in the deposits and frequencies and shifting demography of excrement, hears nothing that is said, being hard of hearing and (though he’d never admit it) also a little hard of seeing. Nevertheless, a young migrant is undeterred and, swinging a steaming dunny pan up onto the tray-top, continues: “I am appalled by the failure of the council to think logically in these matters.” . . . The dunnytruck passes on along the plateau of Tumbledown Dick Hill, Tito Livio seeing from there the jutting of new estates out into the green of Gai Chase Forest. Between the sea and the Blue Mountains distant. A panoramic delta of new constructions, red roofs and frameworks which follow a mathematical logic applaudable, a grid of grey basaltic clays and glass rich volcanic sands, criss-crossing at precise intervals the roadways of rival developers whose earthmoving equipment is distinctively yellow, green or blue and whose workers associate only at the camp-fires of their color fellows, being on incentive schemes and having big bucks tied up in superannuation policies. Smoke rising from the tumbledown of turpentine trees and the dozer piles of gums, she-oaks, hard-headed banksia. A growling intermittent on the breeze; the scent, the waft, of mortar pouring . . . and a young migrant sighs his approval and offers an old guy a date from the packet stamped “Finest Quality Puglian” and they chew as the dunnytruck chugs on through the bush to the next sprouting of as yet unserviced dwellings.

      . . . A white uniform, of the kind the South Steyne council provides its contractors, was fitting Tito Livio like the suit on the gent at the Hoyts Cinema, ballooned in the trousers, and the golden epaulettes gave him horned shoulders. Also: written on his pay packet poking from his top pocket it read: Tiny Livio (the first in a long confusion of names, producing over the years: Titi, Toto, Tot, Tiny, Letti, Jetty, Jot) whose origins are not the backwater jungles of those Columbo Plan cookies but the ancient marble outcrops of the north because his own father—and now (if it’s possible) I’m speculating back three generations and in this stopping history dead still—his father sailed south through the Dodecanese, the Stenan Karpathos, the Sea of Candia, the Suez, three years after the last war, claiming formal refugee status, and promising to put behind him the Committee of Eighteen Solons and the singers of “Giovinezza.”

      “What can happen once can happen again,” Guido Livio told his brothers. A theory of life which didn’t prepare him for the death of his wife two weeks later, aboard ship and some years before Sanger discovered the molecular structure of insulin. Imagine this poor great grandmama who preferred her dolce with less not more and was bringing to the new world (almost) big talk of nuts and fruit, dying from a lack of sweetness in her blood. To which her husband declared, “How dare. . ! Not true!” and put the ship’s doctor on his tail for suggesting. . . .”Fix!” he demanded, but some things on a long journey are unfixable (as certain fetuses can attest), and though he felt steeped in political assuredness, and the confidence of a man who’d weathered ducismo, it made no difference.

      Absence of reason: her husband (stamped ALIEN PERSON momentarily) followed her soon enough after arrival, soured by the sea journey and finding in the heat of this new place not enough air to sustain life.

      “All this breathing space,” Guido Livio declared, “and yet . . !”

      (A phrase which echoes in eighteen year old Tito as the dunnytruck makes its way along Chukta Ridge, revealing itself above the estate which will become the exclusive suburb of Vale on Vale, a slooshing coming from behind and the clatter of the wooden pan seats)

      Tito Livio more or less an orphan of emigration—but quickly picked up by The Brotherhood of St.Endymion, who saw in a boy who had mastered English speaking so quickly, an opportunity to show charity at work. And so, at age eight, Tito Livio discovered magnanimity as one family after another lined up to take him in, promising contractually to raise him from one birthday to the next. Twelve months a piece, so that a relay of mamapapas was set in motion, a fabricated pre-cast of households and one year ambitions, and he was brought up from crew-cut to curly-top, after which a wage from the Department of Sanitation provided him with a room on The Corso, behind Leacon’s News Agency and two terraces down from Abner Zimmerman’s Fun Pier. And why, you want to know, did they clamber for a child who was not, after all, a new born babe, not a bundle in swaddle with formula like Christmas on his lips and frequent windy grins or inclined to grab fingers and tug cutely for all his might? Who woke up now and then in the evenings and wandered about the unfamiliar homes with almond eyes like a barn owl, peeking in on mamapapa and other family members besides, and curling himself up in the welcome rug as if the draught beneath the door provided him with some sustenance or elevation or the door offered consolation. Why? Why? . . . Because Hey-ho! of his size. They were attracted to him because of his measurements. Tito Livio was no bigger than a chimp.

      (Ugh, heave-ho! the near-blind Mr. Beckett shouts from the driver’s seat, and out scrambles his boy to retrieve the pans)

      A wind up. A clockwork. A model. The Titoman was small’s small. Not that this matters. These were the years of minuscule men proving fittest (Leaky, after all, discovering Nutcracker Man who was the size of Atlas and dead for 600,000 years because of it). All parts under-exaggerated. Eyes prying on the fineness of fingers. Feet: “Are they bound, do you think, in the evenings?” “And that hair! Don’t he look just like Golly!” What Bibbidi Trymelow feared in his shortness, and compensated by insisting his mikes be set dangerously low on their stands, Tito Livio recommended. That is: minutiae, the microcosmic proportions of the human physiognomy.

      All the more reason for the young mamapapas of the estates to be attracted to him—collecting, as they were already, everything tiny and intricate from Kelloggs Corn Flakes, swap cards of boxing Sugar Ray and Mr. Floyd Patterson (cut down to size), madly saving penny to the pound. And to praise him up: “At your age!’ ‘What an achievement!”

      “Tsh Tsh, such a strong one!” says Mr. Beckett in an uncharacteristic display of sociability. “And works so hard too, bphhf! Never seen one who puts his back arrgghh! into it.” Nosing for Christmas bonuses, while just beyond Chukta Ridge the crew of Metropolitan Water, Sewage and Drainage are drilling through sandstone for the pipes of the main