It’s humid inside. Naturally. Briny. The walls are green with it. There are flaking reliefs of Vasco da Gama, Dirk Hartog, Captain James Cook, Captain Nemo. And the brine makes the wooden stairs slippery. A gramophone somewhere plays “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 . . .” As Daff, eyes tuning in now to the half-light, turns to the denizens in the glass tanks: black eels rock-hiding, jellyfish bumper-to-bumper letting down stalatactitic tentacles; and down further, the spiny cod, the puffer, the bull roat. Down. Down. Down she goes. Now harlequins in tanks lit phosphorescent, the impossibly purple, the fluorescent red, fish with crescents so perfectly drawn they cannot be . . . flat fish, fish with false eyes, until she has descended into the central rotunda. A round tank, and through its convex scratched windows another visitor she notices, a man, standing higher up in a shaft of light opposite. Now a school of slimy mackerel sweep toward the glass, check, and then away. Now a brown grouper loping, older than the history of humanity and supporting what appears to be a crusty foam ball on its back. And then the tank becomes hazy, windy green again and the man opposite presses his nose to the glass and points and grins and Daff moves to the next window and waits. But there is nothing. The tank appears empty. She spies once or twice a shadow, the sandy riflings of a Chinese manta, a glint of the man opposite who appears to be speaking to her, his mouth moving in a queer fish-like rhythm, opening and closing and forming his lips into pillows. But by now mama has made her decision and moved on, past entire walls of fluorescent corals and crustaceans in species, past Closed Temporarily for Cleaning, and is climbing a new set of stairs. There are voices somewhere, a song, and the continuous enthusiasm of the recorded commentary. . . . Upward, until she’s squinting in a shaft of the sun and the wind catches the sand which has blown onto the decking and she cups her eyes away from it and peers out over the harbor, sighting in the distance the eleven o’clock ferry. Witnessing ferry passengers. Gunnel-crowding. Flying towels printed “Curling, Shooting, Trimming . . !” and “Ride the Wild . . !” Day-trippers and big-spenders, old-timers and vacationers, battling seasickness, eyes fixed on points out in front. She is in view not a moment when her arms begin to limber and stretch. Before battling eyes: a girl of fifteen climbing high on the railing of the Oceanarium, wearing blouse and pencil skirt and tight-fitting shoes, hands now clamping over her eyes, her white hair dancing the Watusi, her skin as sun-tanned as a lizard, her face as round as . . . and suddenly she plunges.
Drowning, when all’s said and done, is an efficient solution to the insurmountable problem of loneliness. Therefore my fatherless mother plunged and entered the rarefied world of the suicide. She entered it impetuously but without remorse. She went willingly and took with her no evidence of her life. Her plunge repercussed through water, concentric circled, reverberated, spun and revolved. Green water engulfed her and light became diffused. Sea-salt spun cool and watery and made filament like webs and these webs entangled but also supported her. Water became speckled as if in the process of shedding its skin, and whirled according to unseen cycles and equally undiscoverable currents. Currents carried sunlight and sunlight, as it does, pushed darkness out. Darkness went and sound, “I do like to be beside . . .,” denizen commentary, the low chug-chugging beat of Taronga ferry engines and the pealing bells of the fun pier, was muted into the music of Frankie Avalon and Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs and there, Daffodil, drowning, observed several species of migratory fish swirling and dancing in progressive Prides of Erin, a manta ray, that graceful filterer of waste, shoveling sand, a grouper loping, lumbering with pouting lips like the toes of boots, a loggerhead turtle carrying its hundreds of soft-shelled and yolk feeding young, and the last thing she saw, pressing her round face to the thick green safety glass, taking in water with the ease of air, letting water flow through passages and pores and water fill cavities and the terrible deep hole within, was a tableau of an anonymous pair making love in the steamy rotunda of an oceanarium.
The One Domino Theory
Man! A death as simply executed, as skillfully performed and as exquisitely presented as this was going to be popular. What family could prevent it? Nebulous Daffodil, floating as she did with her arms and legs forming the points of a bright star. Who would circumvent such a simple but consummately beautiful end. Petals becoming clouds on a sea-green surface. Diaphanous. Aglow. What begins in show biz as a splash becomes, in no time, a wave. I note today’s E . . . News editorial which recalls the third of my grandmother’s lodgers: ZIMMERMAN IS RETURNING: FIRST SIGHTING IN THIRTY YEARS OF SOUTH STEYNE’S SAD MARIONETTE.
Today the Jokerman has risen from his bed. Wild orchid plants threaten again to bloom uncontrollably on the patrolled stretch of Queenscliff Beach. Who knows what abomination will soon snake its supine self out from the gates of Columbia, and prevent the efficient flow of seaside traffic. Why friends, in no time at all our babes in the wood will again adorn themselves with bright shoulder tattoos in the shape of hearts and peace. Hairy Monkees will swing down from their trees to screech soprano in the evenings, twisting and cavorting uncontrollably through South Steyne and laughing out silly and wild and purple over the Muzak of our beds. God help us!
“Yes!” Maxim’s lactating partners are screeching through the gaps in the door. “Yes! Yes! hote-de-tote, God help you if you don’t open up and give us our children.”
- - - - -
“If you don’t let us in, maybe we call the newspapers too. Do you hear?”
Arrrh! But newspapers—who can take seriously the lining of so many budgerigar’s cages.
“Maybe what you’re doing with those babaloos is kidnapping, huh? What do you say?”
Facts only then. Nothing else.
In those days of the Domino Theory and the Colombo Plan Mr. Maurice Manticora was paid well to compose powerful headlines before investigating stories. As this was a method of ensuring deadlines were met, and as our suburb had come to believe that the moral prerogative of supply far outweighed that of accuracy, and as, alternatively, the news would have consisted of nothing more accordant than numerous blank spaces which, no matter how well blocked or bordered or otherwise composited would nevertheless have remained blank, this was deemed sound practice. And so, being conscientious, Mr. Manticora was responsible for the following: CASTRO FORCES TURNED BACK and ROCK AND ROLL, YOU’RE NOT SERIOUS! and MISS ELIZABETH TAYLOR IN LOVE and MONKEYS RETURN FROM SPACE and much later WELCOME PRESIDENT MARCOS. He was a man of considerable integrity, difficult to get to know, with a single twisted black brow revealing the fissures and valleys of his job and a nose in bold type. . . . Therefore, in good faith and sometime before leaving for the oceanarium, he composed the following: HIGH DIVER DROWNS IN DEEP DEPRESSION and proffered the premature: ‘”We lost her in the kelp. God! And the sharks . . ,” says a constable who refuses to be named. “It’s too horrible. Please!”‘
Then, as now, what masquerades as reasonably veracious copy? I report, more accurately, three natives fished my mother out with a boat-hook. One of them, King Billy, who was hard of hearing, kept on and on, “Boy-o-boy, she don’t seem to be breathing.” and pulling at his ears as a sure sign of trouble. But to the aurally astute—sure, there was breathing and there was heaving and, also, there was telling “Hey, you guys, I’m fine now!” but nobody seemed to be listening.
When Sgt Joel Atherton arrived in the company of four probationers and two dedicated accident hounds of the Royal Ambulance in milk caps and pharmacy coats they set up a GHQ behind The Squid and emptied the fun pier. Miss Daffodil Trymelow was wrapped awkwardly in a rain coat and placed in a warm room with the fishmeal and sea-salt until the owners of the premises could be contacted and charges laid. Citing, that was, damage of an unspecified sort. Each young, probationary constable, with the glimmer of new moustaches on their lips, later composing a statutory