item 2:first scene from the character's
childhood

"My husband Bluey is a cabbie. He drives
a Black and White. I always get in a
Black and White if it's the first cab. I
wait for Yellows to go. Do you know Blue?
467. He always works Stones Corner."
Michael knew when he heard this bit that
if he looked out to the right he would see
they were passing the church sitting like
a cock amidst hens, somnolent, proud and
dominant over the school, his school,
which cowered beside it. A chookyard with
no need of a fence. They were halfway
home.

Glady was wearing a good dress. There was
that in her face he would try to capture
with a lump of charcoal thirty years from
now, and get almost perfectly the physical
contours of, but always the glow would
elude him. There were lights behind her
eyes, surely. A halo of excitement - then
he saw it emanate from her, later he
learned he was the author - made him sure
cabbies felt privileged as she chatted
unceasingly to them. His school bag,
strapped rucksack-like to his thin body,
held him forward towards the dashboard. The
golden flood flowing across his head from
the back, joined him with the driver in glory
for the rest of the eight minute
journey. He rehearsed in his silence the words
she was yet to say, to repeat, knowing almost
exactly by the script where they were on the
journey home from Aunty Mona's at Stones Corner
to the corner of Nicklin and Nelson at
Coorparoo.

It was her beaded dress. He had watched
hundreds of those beads joyfully accept the needle
through their middle and sail up into the air
flashing like the trapeze artists who held
him spellbound with fear and excitement under
Wirths' bigtop.

It was impossible to remember now what he must have
been doing as she sewed on the side sleepout.
There must have been something in his hands and
something on the surface of his mind, some toy, a
forty-five made of bakelite and silver paint. It
couldn't be he just lay on the second best couch
with his chin in his hands staring at her and
listening to her commentary on the world, her flawed
sociology, her cajun hybrid of Lebanese peasant
prejudice and Roman Catholic morality. The way, in fact,
he remembered it afterwards. Wouldn't that
have embarrassed her? He couldn't recall any
embarrassment.

The tiny bead, slung on a thread as close to
its own color as Gardham's could supply
her with, leapt up as the line went taut between
the bodice bunched in her left hand and the ring
finger of her right, which curved around to cross
the cotton like a bass player's chopping off a
note.

The bead's flight would stop. It would
vibrate there, braked by the the thread, before
sliding smoothly downwards to rest.

Wirths periodically raised their huge tent, army
colored like most things still were then,
on the vacant creek bottom behind Aunty Mona's.
Michael craned upwards so that he would not miss
a single gesture or flourish as the lithe figures
in their white singlets and spangled swimsuits
gripped the rope with their feet, one arm wound
around it vertically, the other flung back in a
gesture that said, "I do this for your pleasure and
amazement."

They gently circled in the air, smiling plumb bobs,
impossibly beautiful in a world he had no access to.
At last, when he had a pain in his neck, they
stepped from the dizzying platform to
drop smooth and fast and press their
stockinged feet to Mother Earth. The tarpaulin
she wore to recieve them matched her tent. It
transformed the grassy expanse Michael knew by
day as a place to while away the time till Mum came
into the floor of heaven.

In Glady's dextrous fingers the beads finally
declined and snuggled to their permanent rest against
her bodice. Her fingers were the model for mothers'
fingers, as she was the model - could it be otherwise? -
for mothers. How sad he felt for Dennis Simpson
and Grant Leggett, fellow sufferers in Sister
Everestus's grade two/three classroom, when he went
to their places to play and met their mothers.
They didn't look like mothers at all.

Now Glady's perfect hand brushed across his hair,
twirling it as it passed, a ten shilling note held
between thumb and forefinger. "Thanks, Driver. We'll
see you again. I'm always getting cabs home from
Stones Corner."

But this wasn't an always day. On always days she
wore dresses which Michael wouldn't have
registered. This was a beaded, special day. She
had been in town somewhere, not merely getting the
groceries at the Stones Corner BCC before coming to
pick Michael and his brother up from her sisters' shop.
She had been somewhere in that other impossible world.

[copyright: Michael O'Neill]

I am interested in comments and feedback.

My email address is

bonko@ozemail.com.au

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item 2:first scene from the character's childhood

item 2:first scene from the character's
childhood