(Discovery of my fetal years: age lives right smack in the mind of the beholder.)
Out the front gate of the Roszak property this Dr. (pending) Roszak drove. Call him, if you like, the second of my grandmother’s lodgers. But this is too plain a picture. There was more that lived within him than I ever understood. Something that stung or burned or pecked at his insides, turning him bilious and jutting his skin along this bone and that so that, from where I was due to start growing, in the obreptitious womb of my mother, he was an impossible mountain, an edifice of a thousand plateaus. Thoughts, curled like black snakes beneath his ledges and crevices. Political conjecturality went whirling through his caverns. Social pandects and convincements bloomed in his rookeries and scarps. Philosophies so hyperborean and fierce carved alternate histories for the diverse tribes of his valleys. . . . But enough! Suffice it: he was a DeSoto speedster of twenty-one and, since he’d grown up as a respectable mirror image of his father, a local municipal councilor, had been teaching Sunday School at the Charismatic Church on The Esplanade for some years. On his mind now: too much! The truth is, he’d received exam results in the midday post and was calculating, by way of clever additions and anfractuous percentages, that he had become, that day, honors graduated.
So does he cry out in delight? He does not. Does a graduand loosen his bateau neck or undo his jerkin? Uh uh: he is wearing a cardigan with a black Mondrian stripe. Does he drive like Maxwell’s famous molecular demon which, possessed of one hot side and one cold, creates perpetual motion and therefore breaks the Second Law of Thermodynamics? No. The one compensation to his new status: the car radio up uncharacteristically loud on the BBC World Service. . . .
Because, what was an ending was also a beginning. To be graduated meant also that he could be post-graduated. Preliminaries over, Siemens Roszak would move on in the new year to the position of respected doctoral student.
O fine pending gownsman! O scholar illuminati! O Roszak moonshee! He’d been four years in the making and now could show himself well-made. He teased the pedal a little and the DeSoto scattered gravel.
. . . On every side of South Steyne universities were blooming like sunflowers: big-headed, oily and brilliant. In the north, where the cities were industrial the universities were tall, like smokestacks, and made of high-tensile steel, of glass and of concrete in shapes hyperbolic and paraboloid. In the south: low lying universities like fields on which wheat or barley might grow or goats graze. In the East “Let a thousand blossom!” performances reminiscent (Roszak records) of Berliner Ensemble (though he has never actually seen . . . ), ditto all this talk of Godot, pipe columns, pure geometry, spires which rival . . . While in the west—but the west was no more than desert! In the west, haulpak lorries sailed away from open-cut mines, like bright yellow container ships carrying continents across the sand—the universities there were sparse and, where they struggled up, their shape was dependent on the whims of self-made mineral magnates and threaded with spinifex and stuck together like conglomerate. President Domino (this being his most popular but not his only name. Also: Sir, President Pig-Iron, No! No! not Roosevelt) whose vision was this: Education for each and every deserving bod! Advanced learning and attention to the upcoming. Ball games and so forth by which can be judged proper men. “A strong nation depends, boyyo, on healthy minds and ahem healthy bodies?” And schools too—these should be sufficient that no vacant lot sits without casting shame on us all—because it could be a school. It could give birth to a brilliantine future.
O sure, babaloos, your brilliantine uncles and aunties are all on the way! Umbilicals are going to reel out to rope them in. Confinements are ending, the length of which, by and large, has gone unnoticed. Membranous cords thread between gaps in fences and weave around jacaranda trees in the garden; drop out between legs and lay over feet; slide between ellipses in the story; jiggle down stairs and curl up hillsides. Arteries and veins and distinct vestigial structures are being sent forth across suburbs to supply and nurture them bigbigtime, so that when each of them finally arrives all they will need are
“Teachers,” Siemens Roszak said to himself as he drove. “Mental producers,” in a voice which seemed to have been born broken and bearing the register: bass baritone. “Revealers, releasers, mobilizers, multipliers” as he drove now past the Trymelow house where an A40 was parked beneath a pink frangipani and the Great Cheese was snoring deep and wet and, for the first time in a week, dreaming of . . . But let’s not intrude on a widow’s privacy!
Her soon-to-be lodger, and South Steyne’s newest illuminati, passed her by and followed for a moment the ragged edge of the cliffs beneath which the beaches begin and the reefs and bars of the South Steyne wash. To those who saw him pass there was nothing amiss. No reports went out that the Roszaks’ DeSoto had been stolen. No one bothering to confirm that the windows were down and the tires were squealing. No reports—not even a confirmation of who was driving. After all, no one was sure.
Question: did anyone ever notice that one of my grandmother’s lodgers bore a remarkable resemblance to his own father? Most certainly. In fact, we couldn’t tell them apart. The obstetrician Maskelyne, it was said (not Scarobosco, as he was a GP), who delivered him by Caesarean section, turned to the window of the delivery room and pointed out to Stevin Roszak that his son was intact and then . . .
“Not possible,” said Dr. Maskelyne, and dropped the infant into the hands of a nurse.
Nurses swore that someone stepped into the delivery room and stopped the clocks, thus giving the boy the appearance of history frozen.
“Never seen a Caesar child with such a big head, and so wrinkled up,” they chortled. “Should be smooth and untouched by the labor.”
They being the same nurses who, in the following weeks, gave beds to the first casualties of The Coral Sea, bringing to the Second Great War the innocence and lack of compunction of not having known the First.
“But why,” they asked, “such an old old youngun?”
In summary: the Roszak boy entered a warring world already grown up and with this came certain expectations. Foremost: that he should be an intelligent kid. To this he complied. Secondly, that he should be a son who got on well with his parents. Confirmed! Thirdly, that he would be a boy whose idea of fun had about it none of the boisterous self-centeredness and lack of reason of his peers. Dear dear, sadly (yet thankfully) true. And now at twenty-one and newly graduated he had spent the morning alone, carefully reading Mad magazine and waiting for a sign of the postman until he drove his father’s car out of the family garage and up along the Fairlight escarpment. . . . Banksia bush all around and, it being summer and the hottest time of the day, teeming with the shrill trill of tiny black cicadas. Songs of Eden-like insects, abdomens vibrating, a host of tiny compound eyes, filament wings unfolding and drying, muting the approach of the DeSoto as new illuminati pulled it up by the roadside, left the engine running, and made his way through the bush, along a track worn by his previous comings and goings, to the escarpment edge.
Below: the burgeoning suburb of Vale on Vale, rival developers busy making roadways in opposing directions, slight spirals of smoke from the turpentines burning, a dot or two on go-getters bare soil of sprinklers set to enforce the growing of kikuku, primulas, chrysanthemums in heat such as this and, at the base of the gully where the main line from the North Head Treatment works would soon cross, The Vale School. A building in the tropical style with its underside raised on stilts and beneath it stored hoops, rings, mats, medicine balls, an apparatus (never used) for escaping across ravines, a chocolate wheel, a pommel horse and stockman’s bridle and all around a verandah of six foot width and the windows hidden below bull-nose iron and an iron roof which was so bright as to blind. Reflected also: sheds in which during severe storms the children could pray, sing anthems and eat and a Union Jack flying at full mast, satchels hung on pegs, bicycles, a trough of poised bubblingers, waterfalls and, what about (because the outskirts were never far away), a white pony ridden in from a farm in the west and grazing lazily beside the creek on nitre brush and eelgrass.
We pause only a moment because our