The Architecture of Song

by Gary Crew

  Then Augustus began to sing.

  And while the rest of the crowd was more interested in what might appear next, or that a pony shat on the fresh-spread sawdust, or a clown lost a shoe, or that ‘them tigers stink’, or some other circus hula-hula, on hearing the first note, blind Ollie sat bolt upright, his head snapping in that direction, his sightless eyes following the prancing path of the zebra, and as Augustus lifted his voice to fill the yawning space above, Ollie looked up, each note transforming, until where once had been an indigo haze he saw a firmament of stars: the very architecture of song.

  ‘I can see,’ he bawled. ‘I can …’

  If anyone heard, none believed.

  So the phenomenon was lost, the architecture once more mundane as the mob beneath, blind as they were to all that was wonderful, ignorant of the sublime, wanting only the beer and skittles, the ‘MORE! MORE! MORE!’ of the brash and crass, of the boom and tinkle, of the tinsel and tulle that every mob has always wanted, that every mob has ever equated with ‘Having Fun’ and a ‘Corker Night Out’.

  When Augustus stepped from his conveyance, exhausted, the crowd stood. Not to scream and cheer as Rosa had so ambitiously hoped, as Cigar Sullivan had so earnestly desired, but to turn, as one, and file out, tramping mud and dung as they headed towards their horses, their buggies, or the long walk home, convinced they had been duped. They could see a circus any holiday – or the football, which was better – but as some bloke whined, ‘Them ads fer that singin’ dwarf reckon he’s a corker but he weren’t, eh? Bit of a runt is all. Nuthin’, eh?’ And satisfied that the age of miracles had passed, they left.

  Save for Ollie Dogson, all smiles, who, having heard, had seen.

  ‘We’re ruined,’ Little Donny wailed. ‘The mob couldn’t care less about him. It’s over.’ And a vision of his future self, facedown in the tar pits of Disney, clouded his dismal gaze; for Donny he was, but Grumpy of the Seven Dwarfs he would become.

  ‘I say that Rosa ruin us sooner or later,’ Carlo, the oldest Colleano moaned. ‘She no good. She never been any good.’

  ‘And him,’ the second Colleano whined, ‘that midget, he no better. He push her to it, he did. He up hisself. He no reach the peoples, not like us boys, eh?’

  ‘I didn’t hear nothin’ special, did youse?’ Bertie Sullivan sneered. ‘Not a showman’s boot lace, he wasn’t. Didn’t rate a whistle. Not a hoot. My father already chucked him out. Freak. Fact they’re all gone. Losers, all-a them. See how far they get without us. There’s no show without us. Youse reckon?’

  But Cristo declined to catch his eye, wondering, Maybe I miss something. Maybe I too busy making my brothers happy to hear? And downcast, he looked across the paddock, watching them leave: Rosa and Stan and young Augustus, making their melancholy way through the long grass, across the dribbly creek, down by the silent willow.

  THE HOUSE

  THEY WANDERED FOR YEARS, sleeping rough. Useless as he was, Augustus gave pleasure wherever he could, serenading many a hobo under many a street lamp, in many a shed, on many a country road, but he did not grow. At eleven years old (six years being the duration of their travels), he stood just thirty inches tall.

  Stan picked up work as a labourer, never complaining, not with the kid to care for; not with his surrogate Hogie to love.

  Rosa had her hair bobbed, selling the red hanks for profit. Most often she worked cleaning public facilities, which she hated, cursing the silly caps, the buttoned-up uniforms, the flat-footed boots.

  ‘I feel like that stupid elephant. What was her name?’

  ‘Aunty Dora,’ Augustus chirped. ‘I miss the circus.’

  ‘The circus is over,’ Rosa hissed.

  She hated the mops, the slop buckets, the stink of stained urinals, the white-shirted bosses, but especially those kids who dropped stuff or dribbled stuff or spilt stuff or puked, then looked at her, bold and expectant, until she’d had enough, vowing she would rather starve than mop. And she nearly did, a circumstance that cost her that adolescent fat – farewell Buddha – as she matured into something of a vamp.

  ‘You look real good,’ Stan told her.

  ‘Surprisingly attractive,’ the ingenuous Augustus obliged.

  At the end of six dreary years, Rosa’s sexy body held their future.

  As they set up camp one night in an Ipswich Park, broke as usual, a drunken miner approached their fire, face coal-black from the pit, eyes white and wide in surprise. Stan stood in defence of his charges, but it was Rosa who handled the situation. She’d been lying on the grass, dress hitched up, keeping cool. Seeing the drunk staring, his eyes huge, she got to her feet. With a cock of her pretty head she led him to the shrubbery. Nor was she seen again until the following night.

  ‘I found work,’ she said, appearing out of the dark. ‘And a place to stay. For all of us. You pack up. I have to go. Miss la Vie’s. Just down the way.’ She gave a vague wave. ‘There’s a red light out the front.’

  Miss la Vie’s whorehouse was a rundown Queenslander. Low-set at the front, raised on ten-foot wooden stumps at the rear, the weatherboard house was surrounded by a verandah with french doors opening out. From these pulsed fleshy curtains as if inside were a living thing, and breathing.

  The first morning, on waking in a shed down the back, Rosa told Augustus, her face pressed close, that the nature of her work at Miss la Vie’s was to remain confidential for ‘personal reasons’.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m saying, stupid,’ she snarled, ‘that what I do up in that house is none of your business.’

  But while Rosa was doing whatever she did – and didn’t seem too happy about – and when Stan left to find work, Augustus soon came to appreciate that this lecture on the mysteries of what went on ‘upstairs’ at Miss la Vie’s did not extend to ‘downstairs’. Enjoying confined spaces as he did, he soon learnt the pleasures of the crawl space between the verandah floor and the powdery black dirt beneath. He might play the Red Indian there (grubby knees and elbows creeping) until, flat on his stomach, he could peer directly into the ant lions’ craterous dens to observe their massacres close up. And sometimes, moved by the myopic proximity of it all, he might hum something dark: The Funeral March of the Marionette being a claustrophobic favourite. But always pesante, as his mother so often instructed: ‘It’s drear, Dear, drear.’

  Augustus learned of the origins of Miss la Vie’s business from Mary Smokes, who he first discovered squatting in that very dirt. Mary was what Rosa called a ‘gin’, sometimes an ‘abo’. Mary was as fascinated by this pallid dwarf as he was by her bony blackness. Encouraged by her ready acceptance of him, the boy found the courage to ask: ‘What happens upstairs?’ and most particularly, ‘Why aren’t I allowed to go there?’ Ever willing to share, Mary informed him that upstairs at Miss la Vie’s was a brothel (‘A what?’), and that both Mary and Rosa were pros (‘Pardon?’), and paid to have ‘bloke’s things’ put inside them, but Mary, being an ‘abo’, was obliged to earn her living downstairs, in the dirt.

  Several sessions were required to absorb all of this, Augustus sitting wide-eyed as Mary carried on, occasionally pausing to fill a cigarette paper, running the dribbly tip of her tongue along its edge then pressing it firm.

  Through her smoky meanderings Mary told Augustus this land had been her people’s and only when that White Boss Fred Watts came and took it to build this house was her mob moved on. But Bossy Watts, after building the place, big as it was, never lived to enjoy it. ‘Died down the Sunset Mine, he did,’ Mary informed him, wide-eyed. Rather than lose the house, Helen Watts (born Daphne Fooks, out Goondi way), his grieving widow, changed her name to Miss la Vie and took on a new career. Augustus was informed of this some time later by Blue Butterfly, a sad and solitary whore much given to melancholy histories. Mary Smokes didn’t care for such tales, the melancholy history of her own people being more than enough.

  ‘Ya live ’ere, mate?’ she asked, rolling a smoke, the matches appearing out
of some fold in her daggy floral. She had blacker spots on the back of her black hands. Moles maybe. Fat as the ticks on the bulls in that yard at Goodna the night they slept in a Moreton Bay fig. Flying foxes swarmed that night, munching and twittering in the boughs.

  ‘We live down the back yard,’ Augustus said. ‘In the shed.’

  ‘Ya wid Rosebud, eh?’

  ‘Rosa, you mean?’

  ‘Missa Vee call ’er Rosebud up there,’ and she raised a thumb towards the floorboards.

  ‘Oh?’ he said.

  ‘An’ Stan, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Stan shares the shed with us.’

  ‘Stan oright, eh?’

  ‘Yes. Stan’s all right.’

  ‘Bud not ’er, eh?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘That Stan, he orright, bud she ain’t, eh?’

  ‘Rosa?’

  Mary scratched herself. ‘That Stan, he wannin’ nothin’, eh?’

  ‘No,’ Augustus conceded, having no idea.

  Mary Smokes nodded, in agreement, apparently, her hairy chin scraping her leathery chest. ‘Bud ’er …’ And she gave the boy a canny wink.

  ‘Rosa is good to me,’ Augustus said, so there could be no doubt.

  ‘Yair,’ Mary said. ‘Yair …’

  After a longer than usual session with Mary one sultry afternoon, Augustus crawled out from under the house to loiter beneath the jacarandas by the roadside. He might have sung, to cheer himself, but could find no melody, nor anybody to sing to. Mary Smokes had no interest in his high-tone warbling; Stan had found work in some hell-hole mine and Rosa wouldn’t listen, although she did take the time to tell him about ‘the birds and the bees’, and finally, when he insisted, all but putting Mary Smokes’s words into her mouth, how she made a living.

  ‘Yeah,’ she growled, ‘and you better be grateful ’cause I’m doin’ it for you. Don’t think I want them filthy blokes sweatin’ and steamin’ over me. You got that? I might work here, but I ain’t no miner’s tart. You got that?’

  Difficult as this admission was to hear – more so to accept, especially if it was all his fault – Augustus maintained his faith in Rosa. After all, she was the one who had saved him when his mother so cruelly sold him off. Her and her black velvet slippers. And her grog. And what about that man he thought might be his father? That tall man in the white uniform with the gold braid on his cap who stood behind his mother at the piano – might he ever come for him? Might he ever accept some responsibility for him One Fine Day, as Puccini promised? Or maybe, the boy mused, staring into the purple depths of a jacaranda bloom, if I could find the right song and sing it to perfection, I might recreate him myself, perfection being the miracle that it is. Suddenly conscious of his pretension, he tossed the flower away.

  One morning as he wandered in the stony yard, Augustus was astonished to hear a song come spilling from the verandah, the voice poignant, the vibrato evident but not affected. Is that a man or a woman singing? he wondered, and ignoring Rosa’s orders, he clambered up the front steps to hear:

  Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment,

  Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie …

  The front door being open, he crossed the verandah – one stride, two, three, he was so small – spreading his arms to steady himself between the door jambs. Samson, was he? Or Odysseus? Both had heard that siren song:

  The joy of love is but a moment long,

  The pain of love endures your whole life long.

  The darkness of the hallway appeared impenetrable, but as he paused, knees trembling, heart fluttering, adjusting to this new reality – this maw of love – he saw that the walls were not black, but floor-to-ceiling red. He thought of blood, a red, oozing heart feeding those fleshy curtains, pulsing in and out, and he pressed his palm against his chest, suppressing his fear. Being no hero, no Odysseus, no Samson, and having neither the will nor the companions nor the wherewithal to restrain himself from that siren song – his dear little overalls having no belt – he felt himself succumb.

  One foot after the other, softly, softly, he trod the red runner there. The walls were glossy, even slick. Is it blood? he wondered. Oozing … And he stopped to take stock, aware that if he were to grow he might do so through song, and here, at last, even in this awful place, an extraordinary voice was calling him, a certain poetry of promise. ‘Go on,’ he whispered. ‘Go …’

  He made out a door to his left. Another, opposite, both open. Both rooms empty. Being aired, he thought as he caught the smell. What is that? Stale tobacco? Spilt beer? But he knew it to be sex, as one just knows, and he went on, palming the wall.

  Here were more open doors, more rooms. He put his head around to see a great bed, four-posted in brass, the scarlet cover pulled back like a scab, the sheets soiled bandages, the pillows rumpled. They must fight, he thought. Like at the front. Like in that war, and wrinkling his childish nose, he withdrew, since he knew nothing of that ordeal, not really, not like those lovers who had wrestled and gouged and torn and wept as they fought that fight: that frightful battle of love – although he did give a thought to Rosa and the sweaty miners, like she said, and wondered, Does she do it for me? Really? And guessed that she did, because nothing else made sense.

  So he went on, fascinated to see. To hear. To know, if he could.

  The corridor ended in a great red room stretching between the french doors opening on to the verandah either side. The walls were swathed in fabric, drooping and scalloped, but pink too, like those curtains, all veined and fleshy, and everywhere littered with lounges and loveseats and smokers’ stands and rugs and carpets and cushions of satin and silk, and palms in brass pots and sepia photographs of the buxomed and breasted and dimple-thighed and cupid-bowed with curls crimped and girly yet for all their amplitude squeezed or pressed, like bovine tongue, into frames of cheap, flaking gilt.

  In a corner, at an upright piano like his mother’s, sat a person in a black bustier, thick blonde hair falling to cover the back lacing – though not all the way, since Augustus could see that the bottom was strung tight, the whale bone pulled in, the hour-glass waist narrow. The boy saw legs too, and black net stockings, and pallid thighs (a slab of hairy flesh just visible) tapering to a shoeless foot where the velvet slipper ought to be, pressuring the pedal, easing, pressuring, easing … This was the singer, the one who lured him, the siren, the poet:

  Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment,

  Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie …

  ‘Ma’am?’ he said, tentatively, and when the singer turned, spinning the piano stool, ‘Sir?’

  ‘Morphodite?’ Augustus wondered aloud. ‘A morphodite?’

  The morning after, he sat opposite Stan at a table in the shed down the back. They enjoyed their breakfast (toast and marmalade and Bushells tea from a brown china pot) before Stan left for the pit.

  ‘Yeah,’ Stan said, mothering the brown china pot. ‘One turned up at the circus once. Lookin’ for work as a freak. A sideshow, like.’

  ‘A morphodite?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, he reckoned he was.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘Could be a she. Dunno.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘So Bertie Sullivan took him behind a tent for a look-see. To check.’

  ‘And?’

  Stan hesitated. ‘Reckoned he saw the works. Up here, down there …’ He touched his breast, his crotch, then turned away, embarrassed. ‘Sorry, mate. But you wanted to know …’

  Augustus picked up his cup with both hands, his eyes narrowing above the brim. ‘Why would anyone believe Bertie Sullivan?’ he said. ‘He sees dirt everywhere …’ Then, remembering his own grubby version of show-and-tell with Mary Smokes, he looked away.

  Stan failed to notice. ‘Anyway, man or woman, the morphodite didn’t work out. Bertie’s dad, old Cigar, said he wasn’t havin’ no peep-show in his circus. So the freak left. Pity really. Had a nice dog, he did. Ni
ce honey-coloured Pommellanian.’

  ‘Pomeranian,’ August corrected.

  Stan shrugged. ‘So what did he look like, this one you saw?’ He needed something to think about down pit.

  Augustus thought for a minute. Considering his own peculiar appearance, he hesitated to mock others. ‘Interesting,’ he offered, satisfied with the word. ‘Like her voice. Interesting.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘I’d say “her”. Yes.’

  ‘Garn …’ Stan prodded.

  ‘Well, she had a handsome face.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Insofar as a woman can be termed handsome. I saw a handsome mezzo once. Statuesque. She had a very fine neck and shoulders,’ and taking a sip of his tea, Augustus paused to wonder: ‘What are those women called who hold up the portico of the Erechtheum in Athens? The ones carved out of marble? There were pictures of them in the encyclopaedia my mother stacked on the piano stool so I could reach the keys. Caryatids, was it? They were women and said to be handsome, weren’t they?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Stan grunted.

  ‘Hmm …’ Augustus mused, warming to the memory. ‘Of course her moustache was a drawback. If she was a woman, that is.’

  Stan’s head shot up. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Hairy Moira had a beard and she weren’t no morphodite. You best be careful. Moira travels. And French Betty. Word gets around. I don’t want any of their mates after us.’ And he looked to the window, suddenly fearful.

  ‘Sorry,’ Augustus muttered. ‘I wasn’t thinking. Sorry. Rosa so wants me to forget the circus. To put that life behind me.’

  ‘Forget the circus?’ Stan grunted, pushing back his chair to look out. ‘And Hogie? Is that what she means? Forget Hogie? I’d rather forget Rosa, that’s who I’d rather forget. Besides, there’s more freaks in that house up yonder than ever there was in those tents, under that big top. I think you’re forgetting who you are …’