Grappa.

At night the trees speak in hushed tones over the small starlight-silvered bungalow, but the river at the end of the street snakes its bends in black silence.

I walk along the river’s north side at night, sometimes under a full moon, listening to the faint hiss of the upper branches of the silhouetted pines, old cypresses planted a century ago by some riverside farmer who probably lost stock floating away in its sinister flood prone flatness.

Eventually the child, his auburn-haired, kaftanned and sandalled mother sometimes already in exhausted sleep, is grown enough to accompany me past twilight to climb on the tubular steel play-rocket embedded in concrete at a sky-bound forty-five degrees. He sits silhouetted like the trees, so I cannot see his astronaut’s intent frown of concentration. We return to the bungalow and he sleeps and I read, deep into the night, motoring magazines or Bleak House or the film festival program.

George, the Sicilian landlord, collects the rent every second Saturday. Cash, in person. Sometimes he disappears into the dark understory below the main house where years ago he built a bunker; and emerges, dusty, with an also-dusty flagon or bottle with the fluttering remnants of a Penfolds or Tintara label. One winter Saturday morning he removes a cork - dramatically, playing the Sicilian archetype - from one of the bottles, and a liquid that flashes in the sun fills the bottom half of a tiny glass the size of a Peck's paste jar. 

‘Â saluti!’

I drink the clear viscous liquid and it tastes like the age-old fires of hell. Or heaven. Too fast! He pours another Lewis Carroll shot. Powered but unshrunken, I drive my Humber Super Snipe to Puckle Street, park outside the record shop that has Peter Frampton and Debbie Boone posters in the window, and negotiate the diminishing hours of a shopping morning through a new kind of lens.

*

The blue bus purrs to a stop with an exhalation of its air-powered door, and woman in a fawn coat gets off and disappears around the corner. The red monolith of a telephone booth stands silent while, inside, a teenager cries tears of longing. The echo of a shriek carries across the valley from the railway line on a ridge a mile and a half away. 

In the valley below, obscured beneath the canopies of trees, someone walks across the grass, as if through space and time, from a bungalow to the house where a party is in progress. ‘Elvis is dead,’ a voice says.