You think you saw something last week in the supermarket, and you look for it, and it isn't there. Must be out of stock, you think. Then you go home and google it, and find out it was discontinued in 2008. Nuts. But I saw it not a year or so ago. Maybe two. No, you didn’t. You haven’t seen it for seventeen years; maybe fifteen if you kept a pack in your cupboard going stale for a year or two. In that fifteen years other things happened. Children were born and grew. You bought some cars. Some relatives died. Others didn’t. The house leaked for two years until you got it fixed. The house across the road sold, thank God, the owner’s subwoofer had sent earthquake rumbles under the entire street. The parish priest died.
Out-of-mind things come back as if they were there a minute ago, popping out of some elusive brain cul-de-sac, like a handkerchief in the pocket of an old coat you haven’t worn since last winter.
Pro-Vita Weat-Harts: white pack, single ear of wheat graphic in ochre silhouette, red and yellow typography. Classic recognisable design, unlike packs now, all lurid colour with unreadable reverse typography: the old-school designers must have died or retired or something. ‘Weat-Harts’ were, of course, wheat germ as the product is collectively known, the heart of the grain, as against wheat bran which is the discarded husk. I grew up eating the stuff. Nutty, toasty, slightly yeasty little flakes that swam around madly on the sea of milk that surrounded the island of slow-cooked oatmeal that was breakfast.
*
The mists of time dissolve to reveal a mid-blue Volkswagen parked in Buckley Street, Essendon, outside a row of five shops near the corner of Fawkner Street. It is 1961. A man wearing a white roll-neck cable-knit sweater over tan slacks and a woman in a silky fluorescent orange dress with large purple flowers emerge from the car; the woman carrying a duffle bag. She disappears into one of the shops. He follows. Cut to interior. A middle-aged woman with olive skin and a blonde perm takes a jar from the customer, greeting her with a smile and a flash of teeth. Ukrainian? Polish? Turning to a large chromed vessel behind the counter, she hefts a lever at its base, and from an opened valve oozes a tongue-like wave of honey. She lets the jar - Fowler's Vacola, repurposed - almost fill, then shuts the valve expertly so that the honey settles just below the rim of the jar. The man smokes, impassive. Now the middle-aged woman takes a large aluminium scoop and, from a bulk bin, perspex with a hinged flap top, fills a large paper bag with some kind of foodstuff that flows into it soundlessly, like silent-movie sand. She twists the top edges of the bag closed and the couple leaves the store. Cut to exterior. The Volkswagen, with its characteristic engine clatter, pulls out, indicator tongue flipping up orange from its slot behind the driver's door, and the car roars west along Buckley Street towards Deakin Street, where it indicates right again. Little traffic then; the engine can be heard receding in the distance, like a dragon talking to itself before falling asleep, and then rising again as the Volkswagen climbs, unseen, the steep Deakin Street hill. If the car had had a radio, the couple might have heard I Fall to Pieces, and the woman might have cast a glance, shoulder-length hair flicking, out her window at the pale sunshine and the new houses set back in their neat lawns … and wondered.
*
Cut to interior of house. The woman in the orange dress with the oversize purple flowers takes a grey tin canister from a high cupboard, removes its yellow lid. The contents of the paper bag pour in, silently again, like gold dust. Wheat germ.
The details are so clear that the couple could have been my parents. But they were not. My father never owned a Volkswagen. Then who were they?
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