“Yowi!” said the natives. . . . And now, a trinket to show. A show and tell, babaloos. This in my hand, taken gently between fingers because it is as fragile as a babaloo’s breath. Over the years its natural elasticity has been lost and it has become brittle. White and jagged: it is a portion of eggshell, but not that of the domestic fowls that came to the suburb of South Steyne ignominiously, crated twenty-to-a-box aboard the S. S. Supply to support the appetites of transported convicts; not that I would find as a child in our guttering, the lice-carrying starling or sparrow or, if I climbed high, high onto the grand turrets and lattice of Columbia from where I could see my mother and the three lodgers throwing frisbees like flying saucers through the tangled colors of our garden, the beautiful but endangered pink-crested kingfisher, whose egg was as lumpish and as patterned as a globe. But not this. It is the elongated shell of the loggerhead turtle. The smallest portion because, naturally, the rest was broken in the birth. . . . That while the probationers were learning the methods of search and destroy they would employ in coming years, while Maurice Manticora was entering Daffodil’s room to write a story which was already published, the great loggerhead (which in previous generations had been kept by sailors, upside down on deck as food for ten days, whose shell had been turned into combs and brooches for the invisible wife of Governor Macquarie) heaved herself out of the water and onto the wooden decking and there, in the manner of great turtles (with heterogeneity and rigor), gave birth to one hundred, two hundred, three hundred rocket shaped eggs from which, a few weeks later, flibbertigibbets hatched, flinging their scaly wings about and beat a hundred paths to the open sea. This being the first and last time in recorded history that not a single infant would be lost to predators.
“Humble apologies,” said Sgt. Atherton, as the proprietors stepped through the pier’s Gate of Horn. “The fact of the matter: a young lady has just now dove on into your tank and damaged your stock.”
But Chezter and Neva Carlson only casually acknowledged him. The boy holding their hands was crying vauntingly, and they climbed directly upstairs to their apartment behind Poseidon’s protective trident (the sarge tramping after them) and settled the child in his nursery painted not with fishes but with mammals of the roguish kind: Smoky, Bugs, Bambi; and adorned at the cothead with the cutesy peg of: CHE CHE, Cheval, who appears a little later at the rear of a camera as well as in front, conducting experiments in exposure and aperture and practical methods for studying human physiognomy.
“It is a matter,” Atherton insisted, “of due public safety.”
Meaning that other young people might follow this precious Daff into the fishtank if an example wasn’t made. Yet he couldn’t even raise a spark of interest in the Carlsons, who shared with Abner Zimmerman the occupation of the pier. The sergeant’s military record, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) retired, not preparing him . . . either for Chezter, who believed in that brand new, desultory brand of South Steyne shopkeeping known as (among other things) Galbraithianism, nor for Neva whose lifelong and unschooled clairvoyance joined with new motherhood to produce: “Na! Che will be famous!” “Che Che will be President!” “This beautiful gidgy of mine will make such a difference!” “Wait-n-see! Wait-n-see!.” . . . While downstairs in a room housing blood-n-bone, beach worms, chicken gut, mish-mash and the pipes and boxes of filtration Maurice Manticora was making himself at home and committing to paper the second Trymelow to carry the weight of a masthead.
“So,” he began, “let me get it straight—you plunged into the pool huh? because you were depressed and believed yourself unattractive huh?”
It doesn’t take a savant to see that dark-eyed Manticora is not inclined toward the objective correlative, that he’s already fallen for my mother’s diaphanous looks (a fact which cannot signal good news ahead), and that the follow-up he’s just thought about writing will bear only a passing relationship with reality. Recalling, in this, the strange epidemic about to sweep through the whole of South Steyne.
As quickly as TV antennas were going up on the new estates—joining Hills Clothes Hoists, chalk-box fibro-cement, roaring Victa motormowers—the real magic of the teakwood box became apparent. South Steyne citizens discovered it subjecting their dead lives to all kinds of engrossing largesse; its cleverness was insatiable, its wittiness commendable, its profoundness undeniable, its intuition culminating a few short years later in the (accidental?) screening of the assassination of a president, which E . . . News could only outdo by considerable speculation and Worldwide Bingo.
Meanwhile, word of her daughter’s plunge has reached the Widow Cheese and she’s on her way.
Widowhood made of my grandmother a junction from which you could follow to her base the heaviness of the past and to her (now marvellously entangled and brilliantly peroxidic) hair the lightness and brightness of the future. Split around mid-waist by a rope belt, she soon would bulb-out down low and thin in the apex until she resembled, just before her death, a tear-drop or, alternatively, the flame of a bright burning candle. . . . We both had this distinction. My conception, likewise, was to be a common junction and when I was developed enough to realize this and share with Lucille Trymelow my feelings it is a fact that we laughed and sang out without a care: “So we two Pozzos are the beginning and the end of things, the debut and Ho! Ho! the finale!”
. . . Only now, I’m a little unnerved by hare-brained rumo,rs that Messrs Zimmerman, Livio and Roszak have been held up. The lodgers, held up! So for the moment I will, after all, only be able to introduce you to my mother, and must wait a moment to point out my fa . . .
Well, leaving that question aside, it is to beginnings and ends I turn, because it seems that, when news of her daughter’s plunging reached the auditorium of the Fairlight Returned Servicemen’s League Lucille Trymelow was already beginning to feel the first effects of not having slept for an entire week, of an announcement made, a future uncertain, a house too empty, a garden overgrowing, of the summer heat and the roaring forties of the southern sea. In summary: of all those malevolent spirits from which a twenty-five year marriage had protected her. . . . To make matters worse, the people around her, in a climate which had always prided itself in the motto “Nothing by Halves,” were entering the period of the Columbo Plan and the final days of the rule of President Domino whose eyebrows were so tall that they clicked clocked back and forth as he spoke, keeping time for his people and recalling to mind the first song I ever heard:
Ding Ding Domino, we children sing O
Here’s to the red, white and blue
There’s blood on our hands
And blow them Asch-ians
‘Cos God knows we all love you.
But let’s not bring a singing voice into it just yet. . . . Unparalleled prosperity, unprecedented President Domino with infinite honorary degrees, a presidential car sweeps regularly along The Esplanade surveying the effects of our urban sprawl, and a brand new widow smiles awkwardly at old biddy No.10 who is issuing an invitation to afternoon tea as the husbands of the Great Wars file past with palms out-turned on their foreheads in respect of a dead crooner and gruff military looks brought on by news of another university soon to be built to house foreign students arriving on the Colombo Plan.
Hey-ho the Colombo Plan which first introduced Maxim to talk of other worlds (the Third World, that is, by which he was sure was meant a world external and eagerly waiting—a fact which gave an unborn child great comfort). A third world of foreignness sailing to make a new