Daffodil Rosa moving first . . . because the oceanarium is closing for the day and she climbs up into the air and though she has been serving time for illegally submerging and bears the split nails, the bruised knuckles, the aches and pains of a gracious penitent, though she has seen love-less reflections and been hard pressed to ignore them, she steps out onto the street with a waxing step and says brightly to herself: “What a day! Would you believe?” (a fact which the journalist, Manticora, would report in years to come as DIVE GIRL BLOOMS and, apriori, MY BABY, SHE’S GOT WINNING WAYS). It is summer, after all, and the wind has softened to a breath and the sea has lost its whiteness and rolls deep afternoon blue; the swell which rises from the north and crashes onto the basalt outcrops of South Steyne, burning the grass of the headlands. The bus that would take up her up Tyco Avenue, Archazel and Alphonsus in the direction of Columbia waits at the government busstop on Kokonau, partly filled with army cadets from the North Head base, but she passes it by and heads down the street toward the sand swirled width of The Esplanade.
. . . The Esplanade on which the Wee Bill and Bully stands facing the beach, along with the tattoory of Dutch Hoyle (in the window: seven independent ways to depict a King Cobra: your choice), the news agency of Mr. Marshall Leacon (and his son has indeed made sales today and his father sighs and suspects finally that he is getting through to the boy), a theatre with Dionsysian columns, a municipal library, a council chamber, a snow cone parlor, an empty fisherman’s hut which will one day become a lively scene for a boy who once viewed the world through a jungle of jalapeños and black turtle beans. But for now the Wee Bill and Bully is liveliest of all, and the voices of two young men make themselves heard in the street, sailing on tall schooner ships as they are. Their conversation turning from birds and butterflies. Misunderstandings are becoming so-n-so ancient history, because each knows (in the state of mind that prevails) that the other is not what was expected. In agreement. Grok? Nice fellow! And straight-talking too. Ummm! Hmmpf! And the conversation has sailed beyond this, beyond and beyond until it is in sight now of Ultima Thule, two previously uncharted tropical islands. Recalling, that is: that one young man is a perfect reflection of his DeSoto owning papa and the other of the habits of seven different sets of mamaspapas. Witness then: the principles of chief engineering, the utilization of raw materials and natural sources of energy, the application of scientific method to the building of machines and structures. Recall: that all modern families are more or less equal (or similarly unequal, depending on your point of view). That the dinner table is a place for a new mouth to be fed and that a boy who is no bigger than a chimpanzee should not be a big eater. “Man! what have we brought into our home, and for twelve months no less?” . . . And then there are Mr. Beckett’s words. Because an old man who could not hear and could barely see had the advantage of not being swayed by any but his own fine thoughts and principles. Because words that were spoken meant the most to a young immigrant whose reading was so distinctive (So foreign!) that he could not share the results of it, expect by his actions. Mr. Beckett driving back down the peninsula by instinct alone saying, “It is not like it used to be ugghhh! They do it no less but now they would put it in pipes. Pfffffff! And so they look at me as if they don’t . . . It hurts? But business will continue. Believe me, Toto, you need only trace it back to origins.” And a dunnyman’s boy, who is small, heaves up a steaming pan and imagines the eating habits of seven different new world families. And now, in his shed, Mr. Beckett is beginning to wake and soon will be getting ready for work. . . .
While the sun turns tail and casts itself across the harbor, blackening the great evening ferries as they fill to the gunnels with clerks and secretaries and then set sail, and burnishing the wrought iron roof of the fun pier, and Thommo K. straightening his surfboard on a whickapoody breaking on The Bower, ducks beneath the lip and is rocketed forward in a crouching position, head tucked, arms curled over his radiant head, coming out and cutting swiftly across open ocean, leaving the take-off spot behind him (seen now by wrinklies walking their hoary Labrador dogs) as he sweeps onto the pebbly shore of Shelly Beach, and the others follow in twos and threes, paddling onto the northern swells and standing straight up on waves beginning on the fairy reef and wrapping black and enormous toward the rocks.
As the sun disappears, the beachfront begins to change. Mr. Leacon is securing his doors with padlock and his personal jinka chain and leaving on the footpath the meticulously tied bundles of today’s magazinesnewspapers to be exchanged in the pre-dawn for tomorrow’s. At Dutch Hoyle’s a light comes on and will blaze into the late night (visible also by cognoscenti sailors arriving from points in the north) because he finds it easiest to work late at night when the noise from The Esplanade is almost gone and the crisp brown (Ho Ho! parson’s) noses of passing sunworshippers do not pry up against his window. Only then can he take an arm, a back, a belly, a buttock for what he believes it truly is, and thus let himself go with the flow. “Releasing za Dutchie beast, ya?” . . . Municipal library also now closed and, but for a watchman who reads The Phantom Returns rocked back on a chair by the door, it is dark and empty. In the street: no snow cones. No lifesavers in redyellow skullcaps. Johnny Dogs, with his cart pulled up on the verandah of the Wee Bill and Bully, laments the planned obsolescence of tires and propane gas.
And out from the swing doors come Tit and Rosz. They walk with perfectly accomplished steps. Ha! Ha! Ha! Shoulder to shoulder. What a business that was, hmmpf? Glad we cleared that up, then. Ditto wee-hee . . . Deadset! woe-hoe! did you see down there on the beach, sir, the surfers have built themselves a fire? Ummm. A bobbyfreakingdazzler. . . . Driftwood and seaweed and the balsa of a surfboard that has been snapped in two on the South Steyne wash. Blazing up now. Lighting faces already crackled with sun and brine. While from the pavement above, where cycles lie over crankcase to crankcase, comes Nicky the Greek and his Hogwinders with an offering.
Call it: Dutch Cheer (though Dutch himself has sworn off the shellac on account of the jitterbugs it starts in an artist’s hands). Call it: grog, after the stuff that kept the first settlers alive, that Leichhardt imbibed before he went looking for an imaginary great north-flowing river, that Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson sampled before they discovered the yellow brick road that led them over the Blue Mountains, that the Gregory Brothers cracked when they sighted the Never Never. Call it: owl-eye. Call it: DA Pilsener. “Hey there! What’s cookin,’ man?” and beneath the sand—because the sand has been vigorously dug out some time earlier and a pit made with black rock and a fire set—the humped shape of a meal, the unmistakable sand model of a boar baking hungy.
. . . And now Daffodil reaches the beachfront. She makes out the current she rode that morning, a great galaxy of little Esplanade florets whirling out toward the horizon and, sweet babaloos, she sighs. The tide is coming in and with the strong swell it collides with cliffs and surges right up into crumbling sandstone caves. She is pretty sure she hears a gramophone somewhere playing “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 . . .” But now also there’s something else. Another song being sung, which might just as well have been “Do Re Mi” or the beckoning rubato of “Belle Star.” And is it my imagination or is there movement in the currents of the wash? Are there tails and fins approaching from out to the sea, the silver of bream, the nacre of mackerel, the lips of grouper? Is sand that will wash up at her feet being filtered by time-worn manta rays and gummy sharks? Can there really be billions of twinkling eyes looking out at her?
Freakier things have been suggested. (Were there, or were there not, rebels waiting to ring out traditional tunes in the amphitheatre of a distant bay? A bay—if babaloos were here to believe it—named after that most lovelorn of creatures: the pig! Was there not a wall being constructed which, through the simple addition of bricks and mortar, would make one city two and perch an entirely foreign president on the precipitous edge of a New World frontier? Were there not guys and gals prepared to cut the throats of ticketholders in order that they might get a seat on one ordinary yellow bus