Who is this madman who threatens? Who is it who promises explosive devices in schools? Who runs now from brand new red call box and drives off in a V8 vehicle along escarpment road, tossing crumbled paper from car window as he goes?
No point in hiding it. Man! one of my mother’s lovers was a real advocate!
He left the scene of his telephone call and drove helter skelter down D Dick Hill and so could not observe the success (so-far) of his sabotage. . . . Below, in a tropical school house chairs were clattering, tables were toppling, chalk was dropping, ink was spilling and a voice was crying out: ‘Well don’t just sit there. Holy Mother of . . . Boy-o-boy. Move it! Move out of the . . . !’ And out onto cleared scrub strode Principal T. B. Bull, his lank carroty hair unsticking from its oiled place across his head, his speckled pate an angry but attractive crimson, his palms upraised and behind him in lines, somewhat disorderly and haphazard, the class.
Tick-tick-tick countdown in motion. Tick tick . . . behind shining silver schoolhouse: unexpected movement in the black banksias. Is that a DeSoto visible through the palmetto slough and scrub? Roszie, aged twenty-one, grabbing a window ledge at the rear and heaving himself up? The place was empty, naturally, but still drifting with chalk dust and rolling with pencil shavings, charts on the walls of the journeys of Sturt the boat carrier, Burke and Wills in sight of the Never Never, Henry Flagler surveying the Celestial Railroad, Flinders who sailed his rowboat, HMS Tom Thumb, two thousand miles on uncharted ocean drawing maps as accurate as those of the Spaniard Langrenus.
Siemens Roszak wandered between desks, loped to the rear where Jesus meek and mild observed from out of a cluster of flags of all nations, returned pencils to their slots, peered into workbooks left open, hufffed and arrrhed at the sight of cursive writing, arithmetic, paste-up collages of famous soap-powders, news print, finger paint. He was a tallish boy but didn’t reach his full extent, his back faltering and tipping him forward. Rolled shoulders and from them a neck which curved outward like the neck of . . .
“A magpie,” mama once declared. “Black and white: yin and yang. And no rhythm. Tight in places and loose, would you believe, in others? A chiller, dig? As if a small flounder has tried to swallow an overly large starfish. Bad example!”
His ears cupped and cusped (“O surely,” you say, “grok Maxim’s inheritance right there: the pointed ears of a saboteur!”—but there are questions, and I’m getting to that). His cornute elbows and horned hips, from the sharp hang of nose to the hang of . . . Some limitations imposed, babaloos, in light of Lady Chatterley and the trouble they had importing The Ginger Man. But yes, a child conceived when I was cannot deny: Siemen’s Roszak’s aquiline character seemed to me focused down there.
. . . Pausing momentarily to observe through the window of the schoolhouse Principal Bull-bull going off to uncoil the school hose with which the lay preacher returned to stand ready beside class dripping, hoping What? to extinguish the explosion. “That man has a frontal lobe problem,” whispered illuminati, a wry smile now above his pointed and tremendous jaw. “Bull. Bull. Bully bull.” He checked his watch, realized he has been inside the dweeb zone too long, and made for the front of the classroom before the jig was up. Chalk in hand he did not hesitate but wrote across the blackboard in thick letters the size of the youngest kid: LIES! LIES! LIES! And then he disappeared, back out the window.
No explosion then, except for a verbal one. But this would be enough to set things in motion. Three words and one meaning. Siemens Roszak would leave his father’s home and the Nissen on The Corso and shortly rent a room in Columbia. No longer in the early days of charismatic priesthood. A memory of pulpits almost erased. His career as a groovy Rev. Billy Graham never begun, though at times his clothes took on the shape of vestments. By and large, he was putting charisma behind him and entering his postgraduate years with a dull and unwritten slate. He tricked up the accelerator with the overhang of his shoe and spun down the hill to The Corso. The day was hot. The afternoon sea-breeze was blowing hard from the north east. And, that would be that . . . Except that two young men set in rapid motion are unlikely to stop on a dime (statistics to prove: 1.25 million lost in collisions in 1960 alone and all because of the impelling force of testosterone). On the BBC World Service Garrison O’Grady attempted a wrap up, revealing Spy Plane Discovered and Submarine Nears Bottom of Rosiana Trench but the signal was weak and the TV sets in the window of Mr. Yo’s Electrical were attracting more of an audience. No one quite sure what to expect: but Frontierland was coming, Adventureland, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, a mouse, a duck, Professor Ludwig von Drake. Pastpresentandfuture combined. Davy Crockatt. Space Mountain. Utilidor. To the tune of Cornell’s alma mater:
Down below the Disney railways
And the Merritt Island sand
Lies the well-known Utilidor
Branch of Tomorrowland.
With promises of more: A Wonderful World of Disney. The Prince and the Pauper. While O’Grady, with a voice not unlike that of a crooner departed, predicted we would shortly witness the Archbishop of Canterbury paying a call on the Pope for the first time in 400 years. Man! Real weak: a signal no more than static on engineer daddio’s DeSoto radiorama. Meanwhile, outside Mr. Yo’s Light and Electrical: “How handsome, whatdoyousay, is Mr. Brian Henderson and his Bandstand show?” . . .”Have you recently got an eyeful of Wyatt Earp?” . . .”Did you watch those cave whatchamacallit Flintstones?” . . . And two young men in their prime on a collision course as camera begins to cut from one to the other. Back and forth. Revealing Tito Livio: curly-top shortie with legs pumped like drumsticks and hands so tight knotted. Recording Siemens Roszak: ears like the King of Spades, the phosphorous of sabotage on his breath. Suspense building. Theme music in the fun pier close by: “Come On-a My House” “Sixteen Tons” (music always entering Maxim Trymelow’s life at significant junctions). Audience thrusting forward onto the edge of their seats as DeSoto swings onto Raglan Street, in sight now of the ocean which is whipping to a froth; surferboys huddled beneath a teepee of surfboards; The Hogwinders opposite winding up their motors while Dutch Hoyle looks on, the ink not yet dry on his fingers; Mr. Leacon nose out from his newsagency, tapping his sharp feet waiting for the sight of his paper-selling son; and now Tito Livio comes into view, pounding the pavement, streaming venom. The most likely point of impact being Johnny Dogs on The Esplanade. Great fracas of Keen’s mustard and ketchup and Johnny (whose real name, I believe, was not Johnny at all) scrambling in the sand for his weenies and bunyips which catch a breeze and animate (the director on this scene being Kubrick after all) and away go the strutting bunyips with weenies springing in pursuit. Just as quickly, the immediate danger is past as DeSoto and dunnyboy’s legs contrive to move the scene further to the south. Past Leacon’s and Dutch Hoyle’s in one frame and snoring Columbia and the hospital in another. Down hill and up. The camera trucking back and switching to, High Shot: DeSoto caught behind