The Second of Three

THE SECOND OF THREE

Lindsay Boyd

Published by Changeling at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Lindsay Boyd

Cover by Vila Design http://www.viladesign.net

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Part One: Life as a Blond

Part Two: The Second of Three

Part Three: The Day of the Lizard

Epilogue: Unmasking

About the author

Other titles by Lindsay Boyd

Connect with Lindsay Boyd

Part One: Life as a Blond

Let me live like a skyrocket. Let me colour the night sky for an instant with all my being and then burn out.

Yukio Mishima The Boy Who Wrote Poetry

It is, as someone once said, so difficult to reclaim that feeling from childhood. Once lost, once a person has reached adulthood, it appears to have been lost forever, never to be truly recovered. All that can be hoped for is an approximation, and this usually only for an instant, of that extraordinary sense of eternal youth and of a life without limits.

This nearness might conceivably arise from a visit to the scenes of one’s youth, although who would be so bold as to deny that such places can never be the same after a person has discarded their childhood shoes for all time. The child of yore has, literally, grown so much taller, has experienced widely through the intervening years, and may stand dumbfounded within and outside the buildings frequented in the past. Photos of oneself as a youngster are often false leads mired in a struggle to recognise the faces staring back.

For me, for a return to that childhood atmosphere to be in any way complete, it must come into play on a different level. For instance, whenever I encounter a smell from the time I am transported back to my infancy. I surmount all obstacles and become a child once again. The same can occur with equal efficacy simply by conjuring a smell from the past on an imaginative level. For example, the distinctive aroma I associated with my grandfather, or the pleasantly sweet leathery tinge of my father’s aftershave lotion.

In music or a song lies an even more powerful means to this end. Music, with its dreamlike quality, was the great revelation of my childhood; my safe haven in fractious hours, it cut straight to the heart and sometimes the soul as well. I began tapping my feet to rhythms from a young age. Posterity has captured an instance of me as a months-old babe perched on the ground with one ear cocked. In all likelihood I am listening out for and taking enjoyment in some tune or other.

How breathtaking the birthday morning when I breakfasted at the kitchen table, dressed for school as usual, and found a compact, battery operated radio among my presents. No gift could have pleased me more and with what pleasure I switched on the set and turning the little black dial at the side located snatches of music amongst the static. In a moment, I settled on a frequency airing a current hit, a bright, breezy popular tune. I marvelled at the clarity of the sound until I could afford to dally no more.

For many years after this a radio would sit on the night table positioned between my bed and the one my younger sibling slept in. I made a habit of reaching for it in the period immediately following lights out. I would hold it close to either ear, trip the knob and search until I encountered blissful melodies.

Certain songs that I loved as a child remain deeply embedded and underscore the periods when they featured in the soundtrack of my life. Now, many years after I initially heard it, a re-listening to Roberta Flack’s unrivalled love song ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ calls up the warmth, bright sunshine and clear blue skies with which for me it was synonymous.

I loosely recall such a day near the end of one school term, a day of hot sunshine that cascaded unobstructed from the bright blue dome above. I passed several hours in the late morning and early afternoon in the company of a friend living in Beaumaris. Returning home, I broke the rail journey at Bonbeach and swam for half an hour in the bay. Back at the station, the hair on my scalp still damp after the pleasant exertion, I sought a place in the shade, transcendent warmth coursing through my gangly limbs.

On another day I might have silently if not all too seriously begrudged the wait for the next southbound train. But that afternoon such thoughts were non-existent. I would have lingered endlessly without a gripe. It must have been then that I made out the refrain, though I could not say where the source lay. Perhaps the stationmaster’s office diagonally opposite, or maybe another passenger had switched on a radio in the nearby tin roof shelter that served as a waiting area.

The music, a haunting combination of acoustic guitar, piano, cymbals and strings, bewitched. As did the female voice and the words she articulated with precision. I sat absolutely still, absorbed. I felt I could have plucked out of the air the eternal joy she was singing of. There is no better way for me to reprise the vital lost essence of childhood than by closing my eyes when I happen upon such songs again.

***

I entered the world around eight o’clock in the evening on the first Saturday in May 1958. It is easy to visualise my father at the time, a man just turned thirty-one, bespectacled and with a high forehead, biding his time in the maternity wing of the local community hospital. The epitome of a spouse with a wife undergoing labour, his eyes perform a ceaseless dance.

But this is no typical expectant male parent, unversed in what my mother is enduring as I prepare to abandon her womb head first. His job as an ambulance officer has brought him into contact with women experiencing labour pains. He has even played the midwife. He could be with my mother. He ought to be, he might be thinking. But such is not the modus operandi in the late 1950s in a quasi-rural settlement to the south of the metropolis of Melbourne.

Therefore he has to endure this time lag. At one stage he rises only to think better of it and immediately resume his seat. Newspapers have fascinated this man, an ex-paper boy, all his life. So he reaches for the obvious, a copy of a daily evening broadsheet lying on a stand among a swathe of reading miscellany. He scans the bold lettering introducing a piece on one of the sporting pages: 'Can United grab glory three months after Munich?' Tom has just replaced the paper when a smiling nurse enters the room.

Mr Boyd, you’ve a son!

Tickled pink, Tom follows the nurse out of the room and visits with his wife and second son for a short time. The fair hair of the infant reminds him of his late older brother Jim. Returning home he takes a seat in the living room and extends his legs their full length. Fifteen-month-old Marty, my older brother, lies fast asleep in a bedroom in another part of the house. The new father of two brings the day’s Sporting Globe to his lap and opens it at the pages detailing the afternoon’s race results. The gathering of a half-empty bottle of beer and the topping up of a glass completes the ceremony. He raises it to eye level and toasts the new arrival.

Nine pounds thirteen ounces, you little ripper!

In the background a wireless is tuned to a broadcast of the Manchester United / Bolton Wanderers FA Cup Final. But Tom, having no interest in soccer, hardly listens. The publicity the Manchester United team – the obvious sentimental favourites – has garnered in recent months has washed over him. His loyalty and love lies with one football code and one team only.

In point of fact, the memory of the many friends and fellow players who perished in an airplane disaster in Munich earlier in the year will not be sufficient to inspire this Manchester United outfit to victory. The game culminates in a 2 – 0 triumph to Bolton Wanderers, a scoreline my father does not hear, having dozed off in his chair.

My inordinate birth weight, as Mum would often tell me, stemmed not from chubbiness but rather length as measured from head to toe. But though I tipped the scales at a fraction under ten pounds, the crown of weightiest bairn born in Frankston’s community hospital that day went to the progeny of an Italian woman. Considering the natural advantage his, or her, race conferred, in later years I accepted the thought of the silver medallion with good grace.

Notwithstanding his absence at the moment I first cried out, my father’s breath lit on me from the get-go. Among other things, I inherited or would shortly inherit the pallid Boyd skin, their freckles (if less than my older brother and many of my red-haired cousins), his ear for music and his love for the Geelong Football Club. Had my arrival in the world occurred as recently as three months earlier I would have welcomed the light in the provincial city by Corio Bay rather than at the gateway to the Mornington Peninsula.

Arguably, it was from Tom too that I inherited something else that would rear its head in years to come – an unintentionally fierce default expression that rubbed some up the wrong way and that others interpreted as an ingrained angry or disaffected streak. The price I would pay on both accounts would in time prove considerable.

In the late fifties approximately 20,000 people called Frankston home. Twenty-five miles separated the settlement from the centre of the city of Melbourne, an appreciable distance in those days though the rail journey had shortened by a half hour when the line was electrified in 1922. On clear days the skyline of the big smoke’s central business district was visible from the town beach. But not until the 1980s would Frankston be incorporated in Greater Melbourne.

Literally and figuratively we lay at the end of the line. Beyond, single-carriage diesel trains plied the routes to Stony Point and Mornington. The move away from Geelong, birthplace not only of both my parents but also Marty, was prompted by Dad’s promotion in his job as an ambulance officer. He successfully applied for the rank of station officer with the Peninsula Ambulance Service, taking up the position in March of the year of my birth.

I owed my first given name and perhaps my flaxen hair as well to Jim, christened James Owen, the uncle I would never meet. Jim’s snow-white locks ensured he stood out everywhere, my father told us. Leaving aside what this might be interpreted as saying about the lines of communication extant in the family I chose to grow up in, not until my early to mid-teens did I realise the name by which I had always been called – Lindsay – was in fact my proper middle name. I discovered with a shock that I was Owen Lindsay, not, as I had believed until then, Lindsay Owen.

This echoed a lingering confusion with respect to names on Dad’s side of the family. Incredibly, his own middle name of Alexander was misspelled Alexandra on his birth certificate. To add insult to injury, the date of his birth was rendered incorrectly. In addition, Tom would mention years later that no one in the family ever cleared up the mystery of the exact spelling of the first name of the second of his two older brothers, Laurie.

I would not retain Jim’s snowy-headed appearance for long, but the nickname my father bestowed – Snowball – held. Just the first of many nicknames bandied about over the years, it served to bring back those early days and my entry into the world as a blond. Manifold baby snaps and a tiny lock of silky soft hair Mum snipped and afterwards retained in an envelope corroborated my life as the fairest of blonds.

***

Our two-child family has travelled to the Oakleigh home of Bob and May, Mum’s parents. The afternoon sun shines bright and the three generations we comprise are enjoying the day in the backyard. My grandfather’s crown of hair, whiter even than my own, fascinates me while I sit on the grass, smiling contentedly. I am still grinning when Marty hovers near, watering can in hand. Poppa lifts me high in his arms. Nana stands next to us. Beside her, Mum holds Marty aloft. The blithe pleasure in the fact of existence is unqualified.

It may have been then, or on a similar afternoon, that someone noticed the way my hair gleamed in the sunshine, leading to the souveniring. In my carefree innocence, I know nothing of the place I have been born into, let alone its unsavoury aspects, such as air disasters with the capacity to almost wipe out renowned football teams in one fell swoop or any other allegedly newsworthy occurrences – foremost amongst them at the time France’s headaches in their North African colonies.

My blissful ignorance continued for a long time. Only gradually would it dawn on me that taking one’s place in the human race in the twentieth century, a hundred year span of unsurpassed turmoil and almost non-stop minor and major strife in numerous corners of the globe, meant being tossed into a witches’ well. Till then, I could bask in much that felt good, as in a cocoon.

Drawn to the physical world, I liked nothing better than to sit on the front porch of our rented weatherboard at 19 Cambridge Street whenever the summer sun bathed the wooden steps. Tracing patterns in the loose earth and stones with my sandals, I loved the feel of the warm air as it kissed my fair hair and skin. Now and then I bent at the waist and ran my fingers through the earth, all but unaware of the muted sounds of voices, televisions and radios in the background.

Reconciliation to another of the great natural elements, water, eluded me for a while. I took umbrage when Mum first introduced me to the concept of a shower. In due course, however, I would never look back. On Dad’s side of the family there existed a clear-cut link with water. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a great grandmother was born at sea, somewhere in the Roaring Forties many nautical miles south of Madagascar, during her parents’ assisted passage from Liverpool, England to Point Henry, Geelong.

Sixty years later, my great uncle Manus, purportedly motivated by a wish to maintain proximity to a fellow who owed him money, joined the Australian Infantry and journeyed to the Gallipoli battlefield. Wounded in the conflict, he died on board the hospital ship, later to be buried in the sea off those blood-spattered coasts. What the sea yielded in Johanna Lucy Mary Elizabeth Wilde, it took back in the form of my young great uncle. Consciously or not, I paid homage befitting whenever I bathed in the ocean.

Television was not without its fascination and in tandem with my brothers, I passed many a late afternoon / early evening glued to the aptly named idiot box, a recent arrival to the shores of our remote island continent. For the greater part of the time it was American sit-coms such as Get Smart, Gilligan’s Island and McHale’s Navy that kept us enthralled. The antics of CONTROL Agent 86 in the former, in particular, often had me in stitches. Who needed chaos (KAOS) with him in CONTROL?!

We dressed appropriate to the season, light tops and short pyjamas in summer, long pyjamas and dressing gowns in winter. Whatever the time of year, we tended to draw our lower limbs up until we sprawled half-seated, half-lying on our chairs. Though our knees could point in contrary directions, in many ways our poses complemented, right down to the hands held loose against the sides of the face as we fixed our attention wholly on the magical screen.

I never felt more warm, snug and safe than of an evening when Mum came to bid my younger brother Chris and I goodnight. Usually, she stole into our bedroom shortly after lights out and taking hold of Chris’ toes played ‘Little Piggy’ with him. Then, she crossed to my bed, repeating the rhyme for my benefit. Prone to ticklishness, sometimes the mere touch of her hand on my foot alone tempted laughter.

Wiggling each of my four small toes in turn, she intoned, This little piggy went to market! This little piggy stayed home! This little piggy had roast beef! This little piggy had a bone! So cosseted, the world could never be unremittingly bleak. Even when, one by one, my brothers and I reached school age, we rested safe in the knowledge that Mum would see us off in the mornings and welcome us home of an afternoon.

Our pale green weatherboard featured a garden plot at the front and a constricted driveway at the side. Little distinguished it in terms of size and structure from any of the other dwellings on what was a quiet residential neighbourhood. Twenty-five yards or thereabouts from where we lived, Cambridge Street intersected a wider, busier thoroughfare. The bus stop where we embarked for school of a morning, satchels riding on our hips, Mum’s kisses fresh on our cheeks, lay just round this corner.

My formation in music continued at school. The singing of nursery rhymes and children’s campfire songs was a regular feature, our teacher waving her hands about like an orchestra conductor at the front of the room in a bid to manage our cacophony of high-pitched voices.

On certain mornings a third of us sang The kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, another third Merry, merry king of the bush is he, and the remainder Laugh, kookaburra, laugh, kookaburra, gay your life must be