“On the evening you were . . ? Arrrr! Some groovy thing you vant to know, yeah? O what a mood I vas in, dat night! Sure I vas here. In dis seat no less and with my hands making funky spiders on the big mushy pud of Nicky the Greek. Three spiders. A cobra snake in some manner. Scorpion voman. Some mood, huh? Sure thing, maybe there vas a fight outside. Two jocks, you say? Maybe. Yeah, sure. Could be. Nothing’s impossible’ and his fingers return to the forearm upturned and exposed on his slab, he flattens milky flesh between thumb and forefinger and takes up the needle with its red pot screwed up and presses down on the pedal below table zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz . . .
There are versions (The Dutch reminds). “New vays,” Dutch instructs. But one thing is agreed: two of my three potential fathers met that afternoon on the steps of the South Steyne municipal library, words were exchanged, fists were clenched and somewhere in the hot and briny air of a southern summer solstice there was an echo of one accusatory word: Lies! . . . Lies! . . . Lies!
“What right?” cried Tito Livio.
And Siemens Roszak: “Justified! Entirely, ummm!”
If there was rain they would later have no memory of it, because Tito Livio’s head was soaked already and Siemens Roszak’s craggy brow and: Next? Next? What happened next? . . . Two young men were chased from the council steps by a librarian brandishing a date stamp like a pistol, warning of the consequences of disturbing readers, shouting (in whispers) PLEASE DO REFRAIN . . .
They equally ducked and scurried and casting myself back into this scene, hours before I was even . . . I too scramble for cover under the threats of the bookish, the well read, the narratively educated. How to be unconceived, after all, and yet explain the conceived? How to provide for inquisitive offspring? What groovy thing was Dutch Hoyle thinking as he drew a red outline and Maxim, as a boy, watched a cobra snake forming, a mongoose entwining, a heart bursting, an anchor cracking, a MumDad scrolling. Why-o-why? ask my babaloos will you not tell us the whole story? . . . Because night is falling and they can hear the birdies chirping from next door and the voices are becoming irate “Do you hear me, you tarantula! I’m warning you, Ginsburg, send those kids out!” and the babaloos are as sure as savants that blows will be exchanged Pow! Wham! Swat! That the two principals in this story set upon each other in a storm and rolled down marble steps, tooth and nail, claw and hammer, until one was victorious and stood with his boot on the bloodied face of the other. “The dunny-one,” says N0.1 son, confined to a wheelchair, “was pumped right up like one of them gladiators.” “And the pending whatsit,” observes N0.2 daughter, suffering from fetal psoriasis contracted after two hundred and forty months inside, “had learnt a dozen words for ‘Stinker!’” “The doctor knew things about bombs.” “Tito Livio was as strong as an ox.”
No no! Words? Blows? No no! What have your mothers been teaching you? The truth is: some wars are never won (I could reveal to you, babaloos, negotiations in Paris which claimed to end . . . But did not. And the Warsaw Pact). No, nothing to be gained here by seeing only in black and white, grey being the color of greatest suggestion. What is grey, after all, if not an admixture of all colors (Dutch Hoyle informs), if not a repository for the microscopic magic of rainbows, fluorescence and day-glo?
. . . And so, sweet babaloos, it is appropriate that in the hours before your own father made his entrance (during a song and dance in which I will offer you a number of enfranchised participants), that the day turned magnificent grey, clouds came over in a flash (as they do in the southern tropics), but just as quickly were gone and, before anyone could settle for certain How? Why? the moment was passing, clenched fists were loosening, goggling alm-eyes were returning to their sockets, cusped ears were lowering their flames, and two would be lodgers were stamping out onto the sand blown esplanade, where fronds twirled and plopped from pines and perhaps there was the grey russsh of the sea and perhaps the grey aroma of brine and a crowd in grey flannel trousers, veterans of the Dardanelles and also of jungle warfare, leaning out from the grey verandahs of the Wee Bill and Bully where Indian Head beer was served day and night in schooners, the wilful vessels of all great adventurers. “You say,” Tito was asking, “that you plan to make a doctor of yourself, hmmpf?” . . .”And you say you have never been inside a school? . . .”Not once, sir!” . . .”Ummm, self-educated, I wonder?” “ . . . Many houses and homes, though.” “A man of the people, then?” “Seven mamas and seven papas, don’t you know?” “Tito, Tito, ummm the name rings a bell, and yet . . .” “So you are no longer associated with . . ?” “Denounced it this morning, as a matter of fact.” “Hmmpf!” “Ummm.” And Roszie thinking now: “What is that wonderful smell? Reminds me of . . ?” And Tito: “To be school principal, one day, regardless. Fine effort! Some ambition.” “ . . . of soil and water, perhaps. Ummm hankering smell, that is.” . . .”This is a big man in more ways than one!” And the veterans of Dardanelles and jungle warfare, with faces of salt and sun, were not surprised at all when two sweating young men, one tall and one short, one craggy and one curly, one bearing eyes and one bearing ears, passed by in the direction of the public bar.
Meanwhile, the evening lengthens. There are insistent knocks on Maxim’s door. Knock. Knock. Knock. Are there no ways to move from one room to another without all this knocking? Knock. Knock . . . and calls. What calls does Maxim hear when those on the exterior want entrance to the interior? Nay shouts now for the babaloos to be coughed up: “Let them out immediately, Moonie. No joke, huh! The kids gotta take their medicine.” Time, it seems, for my partners nightly harangue:
“You can’t keep them up this late, you . . . you . . . !”
And so:
“Go,” I whisper. “After all, what more’s to be gained this evening? Go and do what your siren mothers tell you.”
- - - - -
“No buts. Man! tomorrow . . . Well, Zimmerman’s on the way. . . . Hey, chins up, right?”
“But pop, you haven’t told us which of the lodgers is . . .”
“Go! I tell them. Go-go!’ Firmness being undoubtedly next to fatherliness. “Go, because Maxim is only as strong as each one of his many well wrought parts. Go, and then tomorrow I’ll . . . Remember, tonight to the north-west you’ll see Pisces, the Southern fish, which is not, strictly speaking Pisces (Fishes) nor Pisces Australids, the radiant meteor shower, and not the Pisces-Perseus supercluster, part of The Great Attractor, but Pisces near Grus, whose brightest stars are of the fourth magnitude. Remember also: Albategnius discovered Zebenelgenubi on a night like this, not to mention Betelgeuse. Red as love oil, babaloos, and a confirmed supergiant. Untold! Then, in the morning . . .”
In the morning, Maxim has an announcement to make.
And so my audience is gone with their father not even a prehistoric horn of cells. Tiny voices fade, cheeping down the hallway, once famous door is opened, siren screeches: ‘Tomorrow, ha! Ho! Ho!, you bet, Moonie. You heard of Autumnal Village Retirement Hostel, huh? What about Crown Removalist Company?’ and then the door slams. Shut! . . .
Needless to say, they’re right: they do not yet know of aunts and uncles or of the miraculous strength of umbilicals. They are unaware of record collections or of molecular structure of DNA. They are not yet introduced to methods of rising and safe ways of falling. They have not been made familiar with the long term genetic prerequisites for success or with the possibilities for failure . . . Instead, I can hear the sirens issuing their instructions “You will not!” . . .”How dare you argue!” . . .”Where did you