As they attacked the boards of the lounge with tasselled boots and hand held sticks, I soon gave up on sleep, and added my presence to the flamboyant overcrowding bookended by a distant oriel framing next door’s weathered fence outside. The more talented drifted to the stables which was roofless but for the smouldering amber dropped from the stars, where their stringed instruments were furthest from the noise inside and the possibility of bagpipes. Mallards were disturbed by the musicians, who now began to watch each others fretboards intently seeking the other’s secrets, and from somewhere out of the cracking of codes flew the most beautiful unearthly melodies twining in the air. My own instrument was left hidden in the face of such virtuosity behind grandmother’s oak wardrobe in my little room but I merged incognito with a proffered harmony. My housemate’s recitation of a mountain chase of wild horses was in progress when he hit the toilet bowl at speed and cracked it in two.
I worked at a jail for children, some of whom ran errands for myself as Assistant Secretary. The boy thief was either a present or future murderer who only that day stole my trainees watch as I packaged it on my desk into an envelope for storage, while my gaze and thoughts were directed elsewhere by his sleight of mind and sleight of hand. And there she was my future wife, narrowing the distance at the end of a long corridor, past the Superintendent’s, narrowed it further past the tea room to where she had been assigned alone in the furtherest room. Burnished and beautiful any concerns of mine she defeated without a struggle, although I was still thinking it mistaken identity. Her family wanted us to marry; at about this time I began importing thoughts and observations into my journal, whatever I did not know but caught the tail of, which soon once hoarded filled the passage and the attic of my mind, and would go up surely in any firestorm. Her father wanted to know if I could catch a fish or change a tyre, which I could do but not to his satisfaction, he thought to feed me to a snapper or dislodge me coming in on a feathery surf.
I needed to pay rent in advance for our new home so took to taxi driving. Aged philanthropist impossibly weathered stepped out of the bluestone portal said, you know there is an island where I have been, where the possibilities are endless. I was a kindred spirit he thought, the dogs could be sure it was him at his estate across the unseen lawns, they knew his kind voice disentangling his sounds from mine, were barking his name, the custodians of the gate as he called them. The taint of food, her family day just departed, loved ones around her, she recalled about the kindergarten where we stopped that she was an activist, that this was her great public achievement, where the fruit bats that moment climbed the stairs of the Moreton bay fig. Funding was scarce and she courted power in government and raised money however she could; they named the kindergarten after her in gratitude, memories are sweet she said, I had my first kiss on this spot, she said, from the man I would later marry, I resembled him she was thinking, but she did not resemble her I was certain, as the westering moon beamed through a grubby cloud ring, there was a scratched image of an animal, high above the roof of a stock truck, where a steer had hoisted itself in protest approaching the abattoir in stark silhouette. That same day the image still seared as I arrived to find dad had killed our old philandering dog on his last legs. I could see father at the aunties as a child holding his loved spaniel hit by a car, aunty watched him in compassion helpless, father watching the dog’s lifeless eyes all the same, today he buried our own family pet and withdrew to silence, would never mention it again.
My blonde beauty and I were on our way but what she needed I only discovered later in regret, perhaps with luck and skill but where to find either at a pinch. Brilliant long entablature of summer cloud extended slowly north over the suburbs, watched it spellbound and traced it in my notes exactly as it moved.