Mt. Dandenong.

The uncle was not a real uncle but a second cousin, adopted by my grandfather as a seven-year-old after his mother had died in his infancy. His father, post-war, had been too busy or couldn’t be bothered; or was drunk, or syphilitic, or both, or just disappeared.

Now it was the early 1960s, and the uncle was a proto-hippy with a dark clipped beard and Buddy Holly glasses. He could have been a folk singer of protest songs, but instead took a successful career in finance and married a tall dark-haired beauty with eyes like deep pools and the kind of freckles that spoke of past summers on endless beaches. 

For all that unlocked vault of luck, or Calvinist pre-destination if you prefer, the uncle was not pretentious. He drove a blue Volkswagen, and he drove it like a Porsche. On Sunday afternoons he threw it around hairpin bends on the road up to Mt. Dandenong, at the top of which we fell out, dizzied, laughing, cramped. We gazed at the map-like monochrome spread of Melbourne way down below, wondering where the colours went, and how so many thousands of people could exist, probably outstretched digesting their Sunday roasts; peering between the thumbs and forefingers of our outstretched hands, the child’s vista-measuring tool eons before adults invented the sextant.

After a while he drove us home again, reversing the hairpin bends and downshifting industriously like de Portago, rumbling to a stop on gravel at a halfway-down shop under scant straggled shade, barely a canopy, and dark inside against the harsh sun, for snacks or ice cream or drinks, before delivering us unremarkably - as if we’d just come from school - back to the suburb that, seen from our eyrie of two hours earlier, had been a speck like a dead leaf on a tennis court. He sat in our kitchen on a reversed chair, his pipe sending rococo curls of Amphora Full Aromatic to the ceiling, while my mother, his cousin-sister, made tea and conversation. 

Then he would leave us and take his willowy freckled beauty far away to their house in a suburb by the sea. When he drove off we listened to the Volkswagen's disembodied gear-changes until they faded to a bee’s faint buzz. 

The uncle, whose mother and blithe father had, of course, long been dust, would raise four of his own, and lives on in an aged care home where he sits with the world inside his head, mute, remembering nothing.