Three right angles took me to school, thanks to the1920s cartographers who, in their grid obsession, turned geography into geometry.
I started school early; four. From the front gate, two hundred gently rising yards of cream and red brick houses crouched behind shrub and lawn, neat, ordered, tidy. Left turn. Fifty yards. Still a gentle ascent, fewer houses; bigger, quieter, somehow richer. Must have been the east-west orientation rather than my north-south.
Right turn. Main road. Careful: Frank in my grade two class, who lived on this road, was knocked down here once. Never the same. Ran across desks, molten anger. (Alcoholic father didn’t help; much older lawyer brother the same. Mother was an angel; dark eyes uplifted in some kind of accepting grace behind which lurked an infinite sadness. Also, two beautiful flaxen-haired sisters like muted divas.) Twenty yards. Left turn. Thirty yards. School gate.
Three right angles: a square peeled open into a zig-zag line on a map, as if rent by a random snip of pinking shears. Violating the cartography, I always cut the last turn, taking the racing line across the apron of George White’s service station, over which hung a double-sided, fluted and red-lettered yellow shell on a white steel pole. The showroom, into which I wandered when my father was outside filling up, was a clinical mirrored circus of Re-Po and Turtle wax, cigarettes and tobacco stands and displays of Shell collector card albums: Shells, Fish and Coral; Transportation; Birds; Australian Beetles; Meteorology. I collected the shell and fish ones, card by card - one per fill - while George - my father talking to him, arm on window - hosed standard into the tank of the car that never drove me to school, but would continue fifty yards past it on Sundays, disgorging beribboned sisters and smart-cracking brothers into the sun-drenched stained-glass fishbowl of a church. The images, I’m talking about the fish cards again, never leave you: a Burnt Murex posed in close-up on the sand, like an alien bikini girl, in front of a layered, painted sunset in hazy oranges, yellows and reds, a piece of Turneresque ephemera by a commercial artist whose name will never be known and probably never was. (On the other hand, he or she might have doubled as a post-modernist with major exhibitions at the NGV.) Next to the collector albums and the cigarettes and the carwax a Firestone tyre, brand new and bound in protective white plastic like a fracture bandage, sat proudly in its display stand emitting a new-rubber smell and waiting for a Fiat 125 or a Morris Major to have a blow-out. Beyond the showroom, the office was a jumble of grimy spiked invoices jostling on a desk with oily Rolodexes and hours-old sandwiches, while the wall behind hosted an uncurated gallery of pin-stuck paper and an A3-sized calendar, spiral bound at the top, and bearing an image of a goddess whose hills and valleys of white flowed like contours on a map; a depiction of topographic beauty as ancient as humanity, an artefact of photography and art direction and typography on curled paper impregnated with fumes of Castrol; the model an anonymous Hera, Demeter or Selene; as baroquely if immodestly worthy of gaze as the blue-robed Madonna, not fifty yards away, standing amid her devotional candles in the stained-glass fishbowl; whose steeple, a 1960s architectural reed, pointed feebly, as if not sure, to the sky above the school.
Comments
Post a Comment