RAINBOW CLOWN NEWS

Cross up from the bookshop of clown fish and over the hill three hills away there is the cream bridge clanging out of midnights of ivy and cocoa flower. Walk with your books and your bird cage and your box of music grinding and swinging along and once you have made it up those hills and the bridge hunches over you you get to see the first light of the university of towers and old locked doors on the edge of the dangling river turn. Three generation reach of university share houses growing older and wealthier door frame the bend as it hinges left to Toowong, and desending through the ruff of river valley, stilt house towns crouching upon the maiden hair hillsides, all your memories of late afternoon twilight games of brandy flicker like short films before you.

How you get to the river from here is harder to talk about. Cars parked by the lane sides just heirlooms you won’t inherit. It gets darker and the university further away. The river blackens to a heavy road too thick to cross. You make your way by the headlights craning down Mount Coot-tha lookout west. The river valleys are high Canadian mountains everyone has forgotten about. All the chimneys smoke and it looks colder than you think it is. It reminds you of the mountains in winter when it rained and school was finished. The house next door you would never visit. You keep walking uphill and the hills get smaller as you climb up the taller paths, the bitumen smelling like clothes.

‘Here they bally come the knockers!’

Eugune Swanbriggs, 48,  clutching his steering hoop like a swan of cribs, sitting stupidly in the car seat of leathers, red and yoghurt, freshly thrown from his Studs Bearcat after colliding with a Scot, had more than a sack cloth of wasps on his mind that day. He had grazed his knees in the whole cart wheeling automobile action, and was not interested in talking to anybody about turnpikes. Not this afternoon.

And what an afternoon. The umbrellas were out on shopping expeditions, and the cake shops were stocking their mounds of sponge with shovel heaps of wealthy black smelling grape clumps, all of them singing like mouthfuls of porridge, all of them crumbling with sugars and wines and apple smelling wasps of tea. The moths were trawling the rivers and the boats of gowns were spangling up stream , running through universities of granite like windows of lonely people. But Swanbriggs was not enjoying any of it. He spent seven minutes collecting up different kinds of all the wits that had fallen out of his blazer, and began to think carefully about what to do with the left overs of his car, scattered around the grey fridge of road he had misjudged so diligently.

Minutes before the knockers came hurling over the tops of the road smoking like cheeses, the idea of top hats leapt like mahogany into the nether valves of Swanbriggs’ flailing brain. Despite everything that was to come, the parliament, the theatres, the vegetable chairs, it was this idea that went damp the fastest. As he limped about the broken flak of motor car handling crimpled fender wings and bracelets of tar smacked hub irons, the idea grew soggy in the crab pot of his mind, and three days later, still itchy after a five hour skirmish against the parade of knocking characters, all of them old and sting covered by bees, he had the finest top hat in the district fitted over his incredible head, sure and warm and black like tongues.

The plague began there, at that accident site, like all plagues do. It would go on to dominate the cultural history of the Swanbriggs family for the next seventy years, tall wooden poles with antlers like gourds sprouting in all directions, following every descendant down every laneway without failure or delay.  Swanbriggs doesn’t get the blame for it of course. He is much too busy corking wine.

Outside his misty windows the hat racks pile up and peer in longingly. They grow woodier every month.

Here is our interview earlier this month with Ernie Sigley.

RCN: Hello Ernie, how are you going?

Ernie Sigley: Ah piss off. I haven’t got the time.

RCN: Do you like to entertain?

Ernie Sigley: Piss off mate.

That was that.

Songs were written on that boat before novels were. The captain refused to accept any other construction in those years. He would sleep in the day and then climb to the deck with the moon and smoke his tobacco, watching the ice bergs scud and shrink over the horizon, watch the smoke rise over the mast and stain the stars with flowery nicotine. Anytime one of the crew had an idea for a novel they would be given a seven hour lecture on scurvy and the problems the ocean would have with anything as moudly and orange as a novel. No, he would say, lighting his fourteenth cigarette of the night. Only songs were to be played on his ship. Only songs were to be conjured from the deep.

His crew would listen to anything he said, they would follow anything he led them toward. They would crew the ship forging west through snowcapped oceans and mountains of salt frothing like sugar under black lizard skies. Later when they were all old in mountain cabins far away from the oceans, as far from the sea as their horses and careers and families could take them, they would still talk about him like stone. Like a hutch of old books they would refer to him and praise him. They were all holy men in those days and nights, after their finest moments. By then novels ruled the straits, the trade routes. By then the songs were already old and frosted. Nobody remembered but them.