Moon Dance. Brooke Biaz

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СКАЧАТЬ if you don’t open up and give us our children.”

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      “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 declaration: “On the oath of God, and the Commissioner, we swear these fish, so named, have freaked out.” Indeed, since mama’s submergence and subsequent deep swimming the demeanour of the South Steyne Oceanarium’s internal sea seemed altered—as if the water had been unusually stirred, cold blood brought to the boil, and it was the opinion of the superstitious natives, who had worked in the company of cold denizens since colonization, that their fish had suffered the same fate as all creatures who turn their eyes upward in the event of a solar eclipse and that soon they would die and then—O the cost! And what would Mr. and Mrs. Carlson say, huh, already into Abner Zimmerman for several months rent and so forth, and also having just taken full possession of their son after five years of sending him to his grandparents (for financial reasons politely not to be mentioned), to find their business on the brink of collapse and all because of this girlie.

      “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 СКАЧАТЬ