Jack Cox - Dodge Rose

Hold that!

I took the tray but the signal went dead at her approach. It’s just the weather I said. She said I guess next time we’ll have to be more careful. How. You left the front door open. We didn’t discuss it any further then. Three peals of thunder split over our heads. We’d forgotten our stuff on the clothesline so we dropped everything and ran for the fire escape. We spent the rest of the day grilling our refouled underpants on the heater and Monday morning we started out early. The streets were full of people going to work I imagine. Eliza walked where the storm had washed the last of the amber leaves, the bits of broken glass and plastic, turning over the flop of the weekend as we had the night before. She insisted the rupture might bare something but in my opinion there was no use hammering away at a lost cause. If we hadn’t made it out already we never would. Some people are crackpots. We still had our list and the blaze of day ahead of us. But in Bob’s Second Hand back on King Street we ran into all kinds of misunderstanding, so we turned around and flew up Cleveland Street to get to Darlinghurst and the Little Shop of Horrors, which was jumping the queue. Softly. At least Eliza was getting a real tour. Before we crossed Bourke Street in Burton she stopped and did a double take having never come at it from that angle before. She pointed down the hill. Here we are again. Pisgah run from the sea to the smokeless stack at Sydney Gate. That wasn’t in my vocubulary either. No, we’re higher up on it than we were. Do you think we might run into. Doesn’t matter anyway. The green man standing became the red man striding. Decisive at last we ran in front of a bus, tires hissing on the slick behind us, faces in blurred boxes. More than a scent of the blustering season but still pools not brooks, either above or below the surface. I expect that’s those sources run dry. Other young people were on the street, hands linked, in all kinds of jackets. What tenacious obsolescence, those shimmering constrictors; for the first time we must have almost fit. Down in. Echo the lot, la e lotio. No. Bends adorning. Een might come in. Dumb kids, playing old people. Where are the italics on this thing. Hardly feels like yesterday. And now this. This is retro. Me dehiscing, did I say that, down to rubble and I lose sight of you, weave away in the flicker of the crowns pressed together on the street, stars fading in my inky lids, litter of last light blinking off till all forgotten. It used to be called Semicircular Quay. That’s good, that’s in the books too. What frightfully innumerable summits I like to think I’ve been slipping over about my doubtful people. Look at me. I’ve lost them again. How’s that for the thorns of life. Fast pinnacles. My molten vessel. I said that before. Must be a different button. You don’t even need to write. What an unexpected boon for invention. So you return to where you started. Walk here no more, buoyed over deep space in a bassinet, your fingers looped in the cords of your bonnet, about the time you begin to take an interest in intercourse id est eyeball and semiloose sphere of the knee. They are buffing the mica flecked pavement in their haste to pass out. The rest has settled into an ashen cope. See. The other looms over you like Dad’s fob. Hands closing in. Hurry up that’s us they’re calling. No steam but a whistle. I make the air vibrate but in despair. To make a new beginning. Till we get there. The line comes alive, faster than. Where was I. Further on in the same direction. Yes, I mean, further on in the same direction we passed the north wind, facing wall of what used to be East Sydney Technical College, dappled against the still melancholy heavens, a repulsive, fangless dinosaur having bolted its prickly branches above the high tiles on the south side and, rid precipitously its bag of pistoles, piercing them naked into the otherwise limitless sky — the branches; I understand a flying fish or a vampire if I haven’t completely lost the ability to read would have been more suitable there, though no more excessively substantial, I would be glad to reaffirm that in the most formal environment. Like that well full of concrete. The drains were clogged to overflowing. I have nothing but my spontaneity. I will knout up hell if I have to. Eliza ran her fingers over the damp grey sandstone.

It may be dumb, she said, but you know I get the feeling I could miss it here.

She was really full of such homey expressions.

Out of our element again in the shop on Darley Street we asked to speak to Perry Quinton. A more or less blonde in a chair for sale with a ledger on her knee and a horrid pencil stub between her teeth called to him without getting up. There was music, a comfort to the myopic. What’s the matter yelled Perry Quinton appearing between two L.P.s he was, it turned out, at the point of sorting into crates at the back of the shop. The woman in the chair coughed. Thelma and Thelma here want to sell you something.

He left the records and invited us to a coffee table spread over with the day’s newspaper and a sort of picnic lunch of cold chips and tobacco pouch. Suppose you’re going to tell me you’ve got a once in a lifetime. You read what they dragged out of the Thames today. No. Look at that. That’s rare as bog butter.

Is that the date already.

Eliza put Sullaman’s whole document down before him. Maybe the idea was not to appear over accommodating. I appreciated the gesture whatever the thought behind it was. We could hardly afford to bugger up again this far down the list so we may as well have come clean with as few extras as possible.

Quinton, in fact, was convivial. But he wouldn’t take much. He made a few scratches on the valuation, offered to pay what we were asking for, fixed a day to come round with the van. We shuffled down Whites Lane to Victoria Street in a low mood. St. John’s with the faceless clock that had stopped chiming the quarters at the behest of the more porous neighbours, a shrinking part of the population, looked somewhat gloomy under the lacklustre sky. Even the French bakery across the road, with which we were now also in charity, had a flatter frontage than it was wont to have. Would have wont to have. Tenses, those are the least of your worries. At least I, a failed millionaire, can say of myself that I am no slave to matter, devouring with supreme indifference the bars of my sensuous cage. Strawberry cream flan. I will even try onomastics. The whish of that familiar sphincter. Usually I found bad weather relaxing. Dodge had a habit of foaming at the mouth in the summertime, pacing the room in a limp cotton two piece, what’s that line of Keats’. Oh, chestnut tree. . But September was over! We’d get nowhere if we went on trying to palm the garbage this way. Eliza agreed. We needed a different tack. We’d both noticed the list finished with Lawson’s.

An auction house.

She must have guessed we’d run into this kind of trouble. Mother always said bad things about auctions. Deceased estates. See what they’ve been reduced to. What if they bargain us down to nothing. That doesn’t happen. You put a reserve on. Do the whole thing at once. If some things don’t move at least we’ll be in a better position. But the auctioneer must take a cut, if nothing else. And all that publicity. It’d be a risk. Eliza considered. If we abandoned the flat beforehand. Collect what we could on the day and quit town.

We went down to George Street and caught a bus to the Crescent.

In an office over furnished in tinted leather at the back of the Lawson’s warehouse, we handed our list to a classical kind of washed up heartthrob who said his name was Paul. He leaned against the desk and held the list out to focus as I weighed the moment privately. A crease through the front of his worsted suit sat more like a scar in his flawless demeanour; the chivalric token of his salt and pepper crew cut implied a whole repertoire of belated habits kept up with the stubborn privilege of experience. Now that was a sentence that didn’t make sense. As he pressed the thumb and forefinger of his free hand between his bloodshot eyes I heard the chair beside me squeak. Eliza had crossed her legs. She raised her reservations.