Matosha Brand, crack watt from watt and bloom in the thickly composted seed-beds of our garden (hand-composited, as it were, by Proctor Van Pruss, who once worked in linotype for the E . . . News, occupying the unique position of knowing no words for which a trail of flowers and twigs could not be substituted). . . . Hey! we’ll go swimming! Swimming in the aromatic peat of the North Head Treatment Works. Splashing tarry as if in the wake of Apollo himself, the Saturn V rocket (which reminds me of the ancient story of Cronus, the eater of his own children—who spewed them forth years later, fully grown. O a related story to my own that is!) Spewing forth children and LOX and kerosene, Maxim remembers. Swimming in blue kerosene by day and splashing in tarry black by night. Man! we’ll break free from gravity, cut ourselves from the slough, distantly separate light from sound, wield lightning like handshakes, be hawks and doves and dolphins again, sprout apples and fire and poetry alternately, ride the salty sea-breezes of Macarthur Park, follow day-glo rivers which will rush down the whirling, divergent avenues of the Vale on Vale, cut rock-n-roll runnels bravely across the gentrified desert of The Esplanade. Tie-dye butterflies will flutter in swarms onto Queenscliff Beach from our cocoons forty-one years in the waiting. Goony birds will fall grinning from clear skies. Fruit bats will carry paddy-melons in their claws and waft Indian musk through the succulent branches of all these frangipani. And Columbia, our Columbia . . . Of course, flight schedules will call for some enigmatic pussy-footing. Dare I say, new flaps must now be cut in solid old doors. A significant return such as this demands the release of numerous technicolor-coated felines. Yes, cats must be let out of bags. What must be told finally, it appears, is the story of a pregnancy. A gestation of considerable dimensions. A confinement in which there were infinite configurements, in which days became months and months years (not so unusual really; in the hospital next door there are several recent examples of similar occurrences and there is, of course, the pressing question of the sirens’ own confinements). But a pregnancy . . . Yes! A pregnancy should be mentioned which, multiplied by an unexpected paternity and the singular will of my mother, took on a character of its own. A pregnancy which lasted, by my calculations, for a period of nine years.
Once upon a time, and a very very . . . Once upon a time, or . . . Well, the story of my conception is plain enough. On the evening of December 1,1960, my mother’s mother, Lucille Trymelow, a Fairlight impresario, stepped out into her garden, unaware of the role her daughter was about to play, and was struck forthwith by the notion that the sky—which was clear enough to be revealing the right ascension of the constellations Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo, but as dark as Hell—this same southern sky was producing torrential rain. She stood quite still with her face grokking upward toward a billion twinkling stars, allowing the rain to teem over her, filling the cusps of her cheeks as lukewarm marzipan might flow and fill the craters of a sponge cake, allowing it to trickle and then begin to fill her ears which, she was sure, had picked up the first strains of “Spirto Gentil” on the wind and was reciting them into the lyric of “Died For Love,” gathering a familiar summer walnutiness as the wind picked up, whirling rain and now leaves down upon her, chorus to verse, chord to chord, crab apple vibrato . . .
Lucille Trymelow, I’m talking about, my grandmother, an unsung South Steyne impresario, (whom Variety Magazine lists in the cast of Ishtar and not correctly as an extra in the much earlier flick: Pallas Athene). A professional booking agent considered by Sal Lunacharsky, Milton Fuiji, Ramon Gomez, among others, to be “A-Okay!,” top banana on the hoover and doover, an all-round theatrical representative. As smooth as the very best cream cheese. Try—melow (Mrs.) not Tremelo, which was the name of a group of accomplished bandola and hurdy-gurdy players who didn’t tour the south until a few years later, singing “Silence is Golden.” Try . . . mell . . . ow. But it makes perfect sense that, early on, some confusion should exist. After all, she’d been married to show business for well-nigh quarter of a century. Wedded to it like a gaseous ring to a giant and unseeing Saturn—like Adelaida to Andrey, Lyon Burke to Anne, Mr. Portnoy to the long-questioning Mrs., and giving herself over in the several layers of her velveteen skirts and phlox floral bodices to produce that Cinderella and ball-gown look of a woman who long ago cracked off a glass slipper for her one and only prince.
Man! you could pick this love of life in her whole composure; which, even though Maxim reveals her standing dumbly in the rain, I know to be bold as a treble clef, curled over, big assed and baby faced so that while anyone could estimate her age by her rings and the furrows of her bark there was also a fair wad that was brandspanking and green about her, a certain readiness budding out on her solid limbs. . . . But now, don’t you see, she’s beginning to bawl. Her tears are thick and sticky and flow together like marzipan in cusps, her famous hair a God-awful mess in this star-shower, her nightgown is dripping onto the brown lawn and suddenly, now . . . she drops to her knees.
No surprise to discover my grandmother had that very afternoon attended the funeral of her husband (Ever samsara, endless cycle of birth and rebirth, care now for the cremated!)
“O, his tonsils were silver, his belly a copper pannikin, his tones were golden. A husband of infinitely solid metal!”
Him laid to rest among the hummocks of Rookwood Lawn Cemetery. Poured into a brass urn, which was finely and quite beautifully etched, and slipped peacefully into a hole four inches by three in front of mourners his daughter hadn’t seen (Not freaking once!) around our neighborhood. Men who’d fought the Japanese on several dubious fronts from Sanananda to Finschafen, Wewak to Balikpapan and on to the Fly River where soldiers’ heads were occasionally removed for good sport by natives who knew nothing about modern warfare. Him lowered into the earth to a trooping of color from the Returned Servicemen’s League and the seven saluting seconders of the 1st Raglan Road Boy Scouts. Crooners in cravats with tie pins and berets. Roustabouts, shearers, ring-barkers and bulldozer drivers (the elegance of their dozers nearby with their bold rippers and mouldboards!). All of them bawling at the sight of poor brassy “Bibbidi-Bobbodi-Boo” slipped in like a hose-fitting below the grass, the soil kind of crusty at that time of year and crumbling prematurely in on him while T. B. Bull, the school principal and lay preacher of the newly formed Charismatic Church, cried out “Witness before ye O Lord: a small man with a big voice! He sung us all as high as Heaven!” And everyone whispering in chorus: “Ain’t that the freaking truth?”
So the Widow Creamcheese knelt down glassy and blue in the night rain. In another hemisphere an official snow chiaroscuro was plopping from the roofs of Dnepropetrovsk to play havoc with the afternoon traffic, but down in the south where the roofs were made of corrugated tin and sprung with boat orchids even the cicadas were declaring “We know where it’s at, babe!” and beginning to nuzzle the soil until their proboscides found weak fissures and their claws began to scrape their way determinedly toward the surface.
And what, after all, was driving through a widow’s mind? What occurred as soil drummed “Taps” on a polished brass urn while inside the ashes of her husband’s only 45 single stuck from the ashen lips of a suit made by Saint Larope and cicadas passing by, whom the local children call the green grocer, the yellow baker, and the black prince, dipped their bejewelled heads . . . ? Just this: that the time had come to make a few changes around the place. Keeping in mind the esteem in which she held her late husband, and what he might say. Big-hearted goofball. Never tired of slipping into “You Wild and Mossy Mountains.” Loved to kid around on a warm night like this. Steamed up on hot nights like a purty spurty little marrow. Sung like a counter-tenor when his dander was raised. Ho ho! And all around her the green grocers, the yellow bakers, the black princes of summer were emerging to claw their way across kikuyu and clasp their rigid selves to furrowed grey bark. Abdomens rutting and barking in articulated revelry. Climbing eucalypts and calistemons and now into the frugiferous gnarls of the ancient mulberries. The heavy rain not deterring them one bit because, possessed of irresistible seasonal logic, they shed hard outer casings, quickly dry their impossibly filament wings and (cast upon only by stars) set about orchestrating a song in praise and illumination of insect birth and insect life.
“New Moon tonight,” shouted the widow from the back garden. “The brightest stars are only those that are dying.”
“Three theories,” called her daughter from the