. . . No! No! babaloos, not those inchoate schoolies from Queenscliff High, who learned the words primal and goddess from the Oxford English Dictionary and were jigging calculus in order to interrogate bully mullet stuck by the low tide in the silvery rock-pools of the breakwater. Not those little gudgeons. Older boys, boys old enough to be fathers (though in my case, you’ll see, suspicions turn elsewhere) arriving on The Esplanade on big black growlers. Rocker boys from the west who bounced Norton motorcycles, Triumphs, and Hogs up onto the footpath outside Dutch Hoyle’s and birded the Dutch himself (him promising he would art-up their private regions for free—but probably didn’t) and who brought with them always the tools of trade, the screwdrivers, the wrenches, their hammers and cycles. Those rockers, and the surfer-boys whose bleached look was so complete that from the distance they appeared to have a radiance about their heads, a five pointed shimmering, and their bodies tanned in stripes from the folds of their skin as they paddled out into rolling whickapoodies. . . . The entire gang, The South Steyne Hogwinders, saw Daffodil Rosa and made from her that siren of sirens, Brigitte Bardot.
“There are more things in heaven and earth,” they said, “than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Or maybe Maxim is mistaken and that is what Chief Rocket Designer Korolev said to the Russian astronauts Komarov, Feoktistov, and Yegorov. What the Hogwinders actually said was:
“The Hog 74 is much larger than the 45, only it has a considerably lower gear-to-pinion ratio.”
Meanwhile, haunted by a singing father who continued to crave his appearance on billboards, Daffodil Rosa dove headlong into the sea. She met the currents of the riptide as she would meet the currents of Dr. Pfizer, the Cambridge oncological engineer, later in life: riding them some way, making abrupt judgments, rolling her body in order to give the cold shoulder, until just after eleven she swam in, dressed, dried briskly on her blouse and strode off in the direction of The Corso and the “Pink Cow” Supermarket.
Didn’t it matter that wet swathes showed through her brand spanking skirt and Dior? Didn’t she care that salt water had dissolved powder, rouge, Diamante mascara? These questions I ask for the benefit of setting the scene and come up with the demonstrative: “No, she did not!”
Bather wet and with eyes blacked up like an opossum’s, Daffodil Rosa strode forward with a partly-formed purpose in mind. She paused only once, at the window of Yo’s Light and Electrical, where crowds in those days still gathered daily, Ha Ha! and Did you see that!, blocking the footpath, and she pushed her way forward to see behind glass and the most beautiful “Terms Available,” tele-vision. TV so new that it was diapered in tickets and tickertape “Wow!” “Gee!” in the convivial script of Mr. Yo himself “Bigtime Happening!” (for Yo, with his squiggles and squirls, would one day demonstrate to baby Maxim how a tele-vision might be mistaken, in some instances, for a close personal friend). On the TV, Miss Lucille Ball and Mr. Desi Arnaz saying “Some fellows here from Cuba, Ricky.” “Arrr Cubana! Swell!” respectively in a cabinet with speakers the size of the well respected Caddie convertible. Television which stopped workmen building the Kuringai Expressway and caused the government to issue the health warning: ‘No box during smoko!’ Maxim’s mother was not interested. . . . Or did not know herself interested; because, she said: “Pollytics, babe, means nothing to me.” and maybe the S.S. Iron Monarch was steaming toward us with four government tugs joggling beside its tremendous hull and the captain having instructions to assay ore for the making of seven million Singer sewing machines, two hundred Austin cars, five dozen Humber bridges . . . She noticed none of it, being beyond the airwaves of The George Jessel Show and The Circuit Rider and the silver airliner of Imperial Airways with faces framed in the portholes.
“We do what we must,” I call to my partners up the hallway. “It’s no way to behave: this pounding on closed doors.” All of South Steyne husshed and woooed in the mid-morning breeze while my mother, Daffodil, wet-swathed, black-eyed and diaphanous, was directed down a corridor to a glass door marked “Private.” As I watch now the glass door is opening and through the gap can be seen a beckoning finger. It is a finger of extraordinary boniness, a horny, skeletal thing that comes out of the film I Was A Teenage Werewolf and juts toward her, trimming to a point of split nail. “Yes you, girlie.” And, when Daffodil Rosa enters, the owner of the finger and the boney hand to which it is attached, Miss Celia Wilmers (comptroller) stares and considers, even as she closes the door, that this little chick don’t look like no “Pink Cow” girl. O no, not this one. “Her mouth,” Miss Wilmers is telling herself, “is cheeky.” “Her eyes,” she dutifully records, “don’t reveal any aptitude.” “Her face—Will you get aload athat!—is perfectly round!” Nevertheless, the interview goes ahead and, spurred on by thoughts of an impresario who always could get good box office in any circumstances, Daffodil Rosa makes amends. She confesses a secret desire to serve, reveals that she can charm howls of delight from shopping vixens, shows resolve for the divine cycles of work time and is duly rewarded with the chance to wear black-n-white, sensible shoes, neat hose, no finger make-up, pink lipstick (no other), blue eyes, hair back. Starting tomorrow.
. . . Well naturally and, newly anointed, she left the store, neither the daughter that she had been nor the mother that she was shortly to become. Her chopped hair in the wind twirled into a cloudy crown. Stick thin Thommo K. watched from his vantage point on the break, turning at the sight of her to catch a whickky which towered right over him until it curled into a jagged green barrel and swallowed him whole. Watched also by Nicky the rockerroller whose body would soon become a famous canvas and whose imported Hog would one day catch the eye of a lovelorn sociologist named Haberdash Stanopoulous. She swept away from the beach and toward the harbor in order to catch the bus which wended up around Lilyfield and Lavender Bay to the clubhouse where her mother was now standing before a meeting of the Returned Servicemen’s auxiliary and announcing her intention “to step down forthwith in light of the tragedy that has befallen . . .” Salt dried on Daffodil’s lashes and broke away now to make her eyes stream. Shiny shoes tightened on her feet. Swathes dried white on black pencil skirt. She crossed Corso, Cleveland, Bungaree, Bruntnell, and joined (momentarily) the queue beneath the bottle and cream government bus-stop on Kokonau, while the harbor in its summer frizzle . . . What hey-ho is white and green and riddled with kelp? What buffets ferries of the Public Transport Department in the direction of the convict lighthouse of Pinchgut? What surges into the boat-houses built by reef cruisers and middle-aged men in search of Mr. Marlon Brando? Who—as the bus arrived poked to the windows with soldier cadets from the base at North Head—who wandered off along the harborfront, a fatherless working girl of fifteen?
Mare Fecunditatis! Sea of Fertility from which the astronauts Conrad and Bean would later return certain larvas, proving that in creation and conception some substances are a lot freaking younger than identical others. “To measure the actual age of larvas,” says Columbia’s resident geologist, Emeritus Professor Andique Garnet, “you strobe the rate the parent radioactant seeps into the daughter. The maturity of the rock Dig it? can then be figured from the true number of parents to daughters in the scene.” “Sure-thing Andy,” Maxim answers confusedly, “but what happens when this daughter is still as fluid as larva? . . .” And so Daffodil Rosa enters the rollicking wooden framework of Abner Zimmerman’s Fun Pier. The sea licks up sea walls, frightening white doves into the muscular arms of Moreton Bay figs. The wind blows in through the boards, whistling Dixie tunes through the hoardings, joining the bells of the Bally machines, Hey, Kiss Me, Dealer, The Hogwinders in leather and stovepipes swinging pole to sparking pole, call suggestively “Want a ride or will