“Inner space, ipso facto, could provide sustainable life-supporting resources for umpteen years.”
O thrill to the bubbling joys of self-containment! A scientist is about to write a book entitled The Sciences Were Never at War. Who suspected it, anyhow? Man! one thing at a time.
. . . Daffodil Rosa, both sea-loving and sun-bathing, entered the world of the aqueous. The air was thick with the nitrous bubbles of tanks and thin with oxygen and her head was spinning. She fed the denizens on the hour, every hour, and though mamas and papas worldwide are now crying “Sweetie, they don’t eat that much.” “Stop! Stop! those dang pets of yours’ll explode!,” they were destined to do well (as we all will—you’ll see). Pink mollies to receive, in time, their fluorescent pinkness. Neon tetras to have returned to them their natural spectrum. Bass, minnow, crappie, gar, sturgeon, shad. Species alive-o! Tripping along on mama-attentions while her loneliness swum beneath the surface of something else. Breathed deep on the de-oxygenated atmosphere. Shoveling seasalt Hey-ho! Hey-ho! Watched over by three natives who considered her effect on the fish an instance of devilment as yet unresolved. There would be dark consequences to all this life-giving, they were sure. Bad vibes. Why so—the barbed, the spined, bullrout, stonefish, ratfish, cobblerfish, fortescue, shark yakkai!—beasties all rise up to this one’s ministrations. Bad, bad vibes this young one brings. . . . But what could be more innocent than giving a world cycles? What more than the rhythmic patterns she provided? Counting out the amounts of issue as she went. Initiating tides in the still ponds of artificiality. Swirling currents and rips, sand spurts and spouts. Switching on lamps and reticulation to provide the effects of the seasons. And feeding. Her arms deep in a bag of mishmash. Deep deep so that up to her shoulders now there was a coat of powdery white. Dipping down down so that cupped in two white hands that will one day clasp burgeoning belly, one day feel for an unborn’s head, one day cradle dripping babaloo; brimming and dripping through fingers which will . . . there is blood-n-bone, chicken gut, the offal and entrails that only fish could love, visceral sip and sop. And now a smell close by which proves everlasting. The fishiness, the saltiness, the bloodiness, the scent of loneliness diminishing to be overcome by something new: an aroma of impatience, drouth, concupiscence—the perfume, that is, of an insatiable hunger (along with the occasional hint of another, made by machinery, books, resins, refuse and guitars: the fertile aroma of three tenderfoot lodgers-to-be).
Meanwhile, Lucille Trymelow had done the right thing, and so she drove home. She made short work of the hairpins and narrow thoroughfares of Fairlight. Whisking A40 like it was the outer of her own rolling body. Pressing it forward so that the politeness and quaintness of its design seemed unthreatened by the pace of life that was approaching. Driving below the balconies where new arrivals in Mr. Chesty singlets loosely hung their arms and bellies and shouted in accents “Getchaearsfixed!” to the radiolas cranking out “Calcutta” and “Let’s do The Twist.” Blackies, yellowies, reddies, brownies who came south on the promises of the Columbo Plan to learn all there was about industrialism, professionalism, technocracy, manufactured medicine, Programd instruction. Ten pound white-as-ghost immigrants also, who would soon fill the aisles of the factories rising on the Vale escarpment, dealing mostly in processing and forwarding: best quality ores and ites, the wool-clip and the wheat. She screeches past all this . . . as time, in an Einsteinian way, refracts back exactly five years to 1955 and, in “Pink Cow” aisles of Lakeland Pencils, Perkins Paste, Decca 45s, Smiths Crisps, Berlei Support-Cup Brassieres two plump chicks, planning just in time, are making a pact. The lights are low but the shelves rightly sparkle with their evening’s work, their tinseling and glass baubling, their holly stenciling for this season’s yule which imports five new brands of antiperspirant (bodies present their true colors in the tropics); transistor radios from Japan which are carried in one hand only and which, Charismatic T Bull claims, suck the juice right out of your sockets at twice the running cost to yourself and are made of leather that isn’t leather; clippers that do short back and sides, quick as pie. And the two plump chicks bunch up together. Good workers. First rate. Miss Wilmers is very proud. Destined for Counter Senior or Lay-by. . . . Their hands meet over a broke-open packet of Mackintosh’s Cream Caramels, behind the counter MANCHESTER, and right smack there in the midst of clandestine lipsucking, dribbling, stick-jawing they agree to make a pact: “Now that we have done this thing we marry well and kiss this place goodbye!”
Stranger than fiction, this truth. Stranger than . . . O, hindsight, that gives with one hand and takes away with the other! But progress is never upfront. It spins back and forth, fibrous and mazy like wool from a loom. These two 1955 fatties should not appear pig-ignorant because, by the time I’m conceived (not long now, I can assure you), they will have become the respectable mamas of two brothers of mine, Haberdash and the hairless Sweets. Take note: there were ancient agenda and there was concord. In the sewing rooms of several thousand State High Schools, on the opposite quadrilateral to woodworking, technical drawing, metalcrafting, girls not much younger than Daffodil Rosa (some older, in fact, but not in mind. O no!) sewed needlepoint hearts and saleable pincushions for Dr. Barnado’s Busy Bees. (Secrets: the uses of pennies accumulated in a man’s dicky pocket, clandestine methods of strapping down an eight month bulge. Curses: the stiletto heel, all night rollers). Who doesn’t accept a reasonable human being would consider such pacts? . . .”Now that we have done this thing,” said the Einsteinian two, “we cannot turn back.”
. . . And so, the Widow Creamcheese wheels on, her eyes drying as she drives with her window open through South Steyne; A40 humming with perhaps a loving mechanical beat, a steadying drum roll of final release; while below, her daughter, a mother-to-be, carrying a bucket of visceral sip sop, approaches the first of her glass oceans. Oceans lime green and new. From within, fishes glitter. Mouths gape. Fins flurry, like wings. Steam wafts. Waters rise. The rotunda, round as a wheel, a frisbee, a hoop, maybe the sign for peace, is speckled with bright sunlight from outside and begins simultaneously to fill with the splashes of anticipated feeding. But now Daff has dropped her bucket, turning slowly at first and then faster. Faster, and then faster, whirling like the center of a stylus as she sees herself reflected ten times over, her face in every fishtank, silent and familiar, over and over, the round diaphanous moon face of her thoroughly lovelorn reflection. . . .
2 The Dunnyman’s Boy
The mere mention of lovelessness has brought my partners calling. Knock. Knock. Knock. What a beetle-headed fashion certain sirens in this house have adopted for introducing themselves, with knocking and ringing and an intemperate amount of haww-haawwing.
Knock, Knock, Knock, they go. Not a widow amongst them, mind you. Nor do we encourage tears here any more. Nor would those tears rush away like the widow Trymelow’s, with a shower of rain which wasn’t. But instead, plump winged partners of mine with curled and aching bird’s feet and husky singing voices, perched down below in the long grass, rapping on Maxim’s window as if they’re Queenscliff High gudgeons tapping at the glass of an aquarium. “Listen here, Moonface,” they’re mouthing. “You will not encourage our children to visit. You will not! For one thing: they’re sick.”
So my partners grow belligerent and waddle forward with the pursed lips of non-flying indignation. But facts, I’m afraid, are both forceful and tenacious. For one thing, a moment of conception is waiting. And a front verandah is lying bare which exhibits significant pro-creative evidence of its own. It is over this very verandah that the now famous Bob Dylan once strode to launch himself at the world. Innocuous, this verandah which, right from the start, bore the name ‘Columbia’—after the recording company, Columbia Broadcasting System—the name carved in jarrah, a strong local bloodwood, set in ghost gum, which is ephemeral but more resilient, and behind it wailed forth a cedarwood home in a swing style. Grandpa Bibbidi Trymelow, marvelous right through—for a moment, ten times more famous than the “Laroo Laroo Lilly Bolero”