RAINBOW CLOWN NEWS

The Lord of Barns jiggled his bejewelled rack of black smelling keys locked like birds in his great tailored pockets of salt and old comets and, panting like an onion of parrots, took up the nearest telephone in that great old hallway and began to beat several large helpings of conversation out of it. There were a number of especially prickly conversations he was dragging from the device. The one about blood clots made his head blossom into eight great blisters of crumbling pie crust, and an especially vibrating one had his eyebrows smoking peculiar secret codes nobody outside of one lonely French outcast in a cabin in the North Pole could decipher. When he did decipher it he made the decision to draw maps of imaginary cliffs for the next several years in dark rooms with faltering lamps, and the whole thing became extremely unsettling.

Driving from Melbourne to Adelaide, the Lord of Barns lights the radio dial with a sweet pile of odd cigarette glow which flickered against the numbers decalling the perspex radio screen.  There was still a long series of corners and hills to negotiate with his Stingray vehicle, and he had not even really approached Mount Gambier yet. Outside the moon hung like an arbour of wheatgerm over the bleak road he was forging along. Fish hissed in the far off oceans behind numerous outcrops of petrified pine. The night wore on.

‘Rubbish!’

The frozen Mayor had a point. Clara and Isabelle preferred not to consider it though. There were buffalo to be netting and the tennis raquets in their spangly bags were not to be dealt with in contrary type ways.

The crumbling paddocks, all smoke stack bean blue green and black hearted, stretched up towards a windbreak of heavy set hoop pine and birch wood. Hurricanes of moss parcelled in creeks of insect twitchings smelled of giant engines grinding like forests of cobwebs deep inside the gigantic evening. The frozen Mayor watched the girls walk away from him. The great forestry wad of his lamb choked left hand dug five foot into his striped blazer coat pocket and clutching about for fruit mince pies of matchstick and fire, he grunted German obscenities, and admired the choir stalls of black robed crows cloaked in ponds of dark and evening. The cold was strolling in with its parcels of straw and timber soldiers, and it was not at all interested in what the Mayor had to say about antiques.

Somewhere up in the sky Roberta drove her bi-plane through the cloud rambling late afternoon. She was already thinking about the Pacific Islands, and the three days it would take to fly all of her books from Bathurst to the far off watery compound.

The night was a long way away.

(To be continued around July sometime)