A blue-and-white sky afternoon. An impatient autumn breeze searches for leaves. I am lying on my stomach in the school playground, gazing at the small seeds, like tiny dimpled bullets, in the stalks of the unmown grass, and imagining the stalks are trees, and that I am in an aeroplane.
The school building is an L-shaped angle in the south-east corner of an oblong bounded by Muriel Street to the north, Teague to the south, and Garnet to the west. Half the playground is paved in bitumen, embedded with screenings designed to prevent children slipping in the wet - the ground is on an incline - but which result in dreadful knee and elbow grazes when children fall at speed, often.
The rest of the oblong is the field it has always been, and forms probably the best kind of playground, despite play experts later recommending steel swings, multi-coloured plastic climbing pyramids, or forts made from treated pine, all of which remove perspective and the sense of clear distance.
I can see a horizon; from this far end, down on the grass, I gaze straight over the top of the low north-reaching arm of the school building to the east. DC-9s and 727s alternately form a long narrow triangle of its roof as they sink lazily into Essendon airport, barely a mile away; but I am imagining Luna 9 (which has just made the first unmanned moon landing) setting down right here on the playground. I am mentally boarding the spacecraft when a boy from another grade approaches. His right hand glitters. It holds coins, new coins: the new national currency that hasn’t yet been released. He tells me his father works at one of the banks where the coins were issued for publicity photos, and his father gave them to him after the shoot. They have a strange gleaming metallic tone, having been made from a different alloy to shillings and pennies. The denominations are figures instead of words now, and the animals depicted on their reverse sides stretch and bound in arrested movement, unlike the museum-like profiles on the old coins. The boy walks away with his treasure of new money.
Later, a storm sweeps over the school so quickly that the sky is yellowed black before I can reach the classroom, and the rain that drenches me drips all afternoon onto the floor below my desk, and drops fall from my head onto my writing book, smudging the undried ink. It smells like a river.
One day, on returning to school after the May holidays, I find part of the playground has been cut up and turned into a maze of muddy trenches. The swastikas of right angles and longer borders are just deep enough to lay in, and if you ignore the coatings of mud, form the ideal seclusion.
Eventually a skeleton of timber grows out of the earth, an apparition, like some prehistoric animal, and clothes itself in a body of bricks, with ugly gaping holes. Then a roof. Glass, coloured like a carnival, fills the holes: windows. The apparition turns into a church, sky-scraping, like a rocket ship, dedicated not to any celestial god, it seems to me, but to the space race, because everything on Earth is pointing up! up! up! and that big round narthex window high above the choir loft, now filled with misshapen modernist shards of stained glass, is like a big, fat moon.
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