Nicklin tipped up a little as you walked from Michael's house
across to Mister Banks's place on the eastern side, as if
the street had been rocking with delight or keening
kinesthetically when the world had had to stop rehearsing
and be real and it had been caught off balance. On its
almost triangular corner block the house had been
designed to keep its wake up side to the morning sun.
Lately he had been rising early, making wide-eyed
discoveries about how familiar places interact with secret
times of the day.
If he got out of bed before Mum and Dan and Errol - Dad
didn't count - he could leave footprints in the dewy yard,
ride his bike along Nelson all the way to Fong's (which
would still be closed of course, but sometimes Mr Fong
was carrying in milk crates, the clinks seeming loud in the
morning air, and putting cardboard boxes full of tomatoes
and a sort of green vegetable like a gherkin with sails
down the side, on top of wooden fruit boxes stood on their
ends on the footpath under his window.) He could bring
in the Courier Mail, folded square the same size as a
missal with a corner tucked in on itself so the bundle
would survive being tossed from Mr Newton's jeep without
unravelling as it skidded off the back ramp and on to the
ragged lawn under the hoist, and all before anyone,
including the sun, was up.
As the day attracted or compelled others to join in he
couldn't hold on to his ownership. Dan arose from his
dream state, where he wandered lost in the foothills of
Mount Adolescence, to wander awake in the same
country. Michael had no memory of him joyful; he had
always been morose and dangerous. And before Dan,
Mum,
busy with kettles and hotplates and spreading warm
sovereignty all over the house.
Now it was afternoon. Michael sat with his feet hanging
over the edge of the ramp on the outer side. The ramp
was placed at a right angle to Nicklin Street. It had
replaced the old back steps, and enjoyed some celebrity.
Mum secretly expected it to be the first of many that
would be built in the neighbourhood. Its inner side had
formed a canyon with the wall of the kitchen until it was
filled in with rubble and earth to form a sloping rectangle
intended to become lawn.
He was tossing little twigs towards the rough patch under
the edge of the hoist where the copper boiler had stood
until recently. He had been fond of its concrete stand.
There had been a cavelike opening at lawn level where
he had watched Mum stuff wood and newspaper and light
them. Set into the top had been a deep recess down
which he would sometimes peer, watching with a sense of
danger as the flames took hold, preparing to pull away
quickly, to Mum's mock alarm, until she dropped the
black-encrusted copper pot into its huge embrace and
turned on the garden hose. Sounds from the kitchen
where Mum was beginning to prepare tea brought him out
of his reverie and he leapt up and ran up the ramp
towards the open laundry door.
Just inside, so that you faced its front-loading glass
porthole when you first came through the back door, was
the
Bendix. A pillar of breeze blocks rising from the
ground
below and topped with concrete, like the licorice
on a
licorice allsort, out of which steel rods protruded and
joined to its underside, had had to be installed with the
Bendix
to accommodate its violent vibration. When,
amidst much
excitement, it had first been freed from its
cardboard box
Michael had been captured by the fancy
that it was
somehow connected with William Bendix, a
serviceable
actor whose career was then, unknown to
him, in its dying
fall. He played solid middle-aged men
with blue collar
credentials and had a face to match, one
of the necessary
adult characters in the pictures he
watched from the
slingback canvas at the Roxy on
Saturday afternoons.
Michael sometimes sat in front of the Bendix and watched it
swirl suds and clothes, his hands, and sometimes his
cheek, pressed against the warm glass. Huge, white and
modern where the "copper" was ancient and black, the
Bendix was still and quiet now as he passed by on his
way to see what Mum was cooking.
Through the kitchen window Michael looked past Mum
peeling potatoes at the sink, and saw the cab pull up in
front of Banks's. Monica Hethorn alighted from it on the
opposite side after handing something across the
seatback to the driver. She stood with her hand through
the front passenger window, waiting for the driver to hand
her something as she chatted to him. "Dad's home,"
Michael shouted. He left the kitchen at a run, skipping
into the laundry.
He stretched out one hand and cannoned off the Bendix
down the ramp, leapt the two steps to the footpath and
crossed the gravel and the bitumen heedless of traffic.
Monica was still standing on the other side of the cab.
Her pleasant face and dark shining hair were framed by
the
window on the driver's side and again, in a tighter focus,
by the far window through which she now watched him.
Her expression altered slightly as he sprang up on to the
driver's side running board and clutched the door. The
groove into which the window retracted when it was
wound down formed a line of vacant space joining his two
hands. He steadied himself.
"Are you coming in for tea now, Dad?"
What happened next was never clear to him afterwards. He
replayed it often trying to deal with it, but there were a few
seconds stricken from the record, as judges sometimes
order should befall certain actions which courtroom
etiquette refuses to countenance after a barrister sneaks
a mention of them past the judge. A curious practice, this
public acquiescence in a pretense that a thing did not
happen, since, once heard, it stains the jurors' minds,
allowable or not. Nor could he later remember if any
words were spoken. Probably there were, but certainly by
no-one alive to the scope of his embarrassment or the
depth of his longing.
The driver turned to him, their faces inches apart. It was not
his father.