by Anna Tambour
He didn't come immediately but when he did, "I was telling Mrs Braverman here," I said, "that a bull's got a high voice, nothing like that calf-call you're making, isn't that true?" Ever since that redbelly, I reckoned he must of come from a place like me.
"Yar," Po said. His lips were curiously red and swollen and he had a faraway look in his eyes.
A little pleat formed between Mrs Braverman's eyes as she regarded Po.
"Let's see you play," she said.
I bowed to her and turned to Po.
He went back and returned, struggling through the clothes racks with the instrument in his arms. At the look of it, Gloria Braverman's pleat deepened but Po's eyes were closed by then, his lips pressed to the mouthpiece.
"Bwaaaah!" yelled the giant snake with the voice of a hungry calf.
Mrs Braverman fled.
It was so funny, I laughed till I cried. But I didn't tell Syl.
~
From that day on, Po played only the snake instrument. All day. After a while, he could play like the wind in the grass, so soft that the equipment overpowered him, but the girls didn't like that. They liked him to make the calf sound. "Bwaah! Bwaah!" they'd urge, and "Bookat!" or something like that.
So he made up songs that sounded like they were yelled by a hungry calf. They loved them and they accomplished so much work that they were oftentimes standing around with their hands on their hips, waiting. By the end of a month, I think he could of made that snake whisper, but he didn't. It only yelled.
The first intimation that I had of anything wrong was when I noticed that women had stopped asking for Po.
Then one day when I opened the door, I found an envelope that someone had shoved under the door. It was an article clipped from the Melbourne Daily Courier.
Adelaide Culture Taken to the Cleaners In a Word
"In the mushroom culture that is Adelaide, your correspondent has come upon a delicious morsel of farce in the centre of town: The Pococurante, where those with fashion at heart come every week, and the crème of Adelaide have their clothes created and cleaned to a T. This centre of culture is run by two strange blokes, who must be laughing up their sleeves at the cognoscenti who don't know their pococurante from their frankly-Scarlett,-I-don't-give-a-damn. They serenade the beauties that flock to this denizen, with Mozart. Not quite. Follow the sound of the angry bull, and you'll hit the bullseye."
All day I drove myself insane. What was the article on about? Some nasty anti-Adelaide bit of snideness? That's something that Melbourne and Sydney do, but I was trying all day to figure out what to do about Po, who really had to stop playing that snake thing, at least like that.
I'd never read the Melbourne Daily Courier before, and don't imagine that any of our customers did. But that article could of been slipped with the ink still damp under the pillow of every Adelaidian, such was the response we got. We hadn't been this slow since the old days, and the people who did come in, came in with silly questions, not things to clean. I could feel the city's anger.
In the back of the Pococurante, Po played his snake for the girls, who were getting through the work faster than it was coming in today. Po hadn't mentioned that I didn't call him to the front any more, but then Po never mentioned anything.
My one comfort that day was that Po didn't know about the newspaper article.
~
I didn't want Sylvia to find out about it either, but when I got home, she met me with "What's the bull? And what's this all about?" And she shoved an open book at me and pointed.
The dictionary. I didn't need her to point. On the left hand page, something was circled in angry red crayon.
I read it.
"Why didn't you just punch me in the eye?" I asked.
"Why didn't you look it up?"
"It was a name, not a word," I said. "He was Pococurante! I told you. Would you of looked up a name embroidered in gold on a bloke like that's shirt?"
"Huh!" she said and without taking her eyes off me, yelled "Beatrice! Get your teaset off the hallway floor this second or—"
I heard a scuttle and a whimper, while I looked at the thing in my arms and wondered what to do with it.
"I don't know," she said to me. "But honestly ... perhaps not."
Sylvia and I were just inside the front door. I walked past her and dropped into my chair. I couldn't decently strangle the dictionary, so it sat in my lap.
Syl walked over to me, picked it up and flung it against the wall. "There," she said, "You can put it in the bookcase later." She rested her hands on her hips.
"Now," she said, "I asked you about that bull."
"It's a calf," I said. Syl was born and bred in Adelaide.
"Get on with it."
"It's only an instrument that Po practices in slack times," I said. "Sometimes it sounds like a calf ... only a calf."
After a while she said "Mmm," and then, "Must feed the kids."
She put them to bed as soon as they'd eaten. Then she fixed two tall, stiff drinks: brandy and water without the ice and without the water. She put the glasses on the table by my easy chair, shoved me into it, and sat on my lap.
"You can't change the name now," she said, "or everyone'll think they've got you. You must tough it out." Then she kissed me.
"I don't deserve that," I said.
"Too right you don't," she said, and kissed me again.
She talked, and we drank on empty stomachs, and I felt after another of her drinks, that I could tough it out. But then there was Po.
"You must face Po," she said. "Buy him out."
"Yar," I said, but we didn't laugh.
I knew I couldn't do it.
~
The next day we might as well of been closed as far as customers giving us jobs went. The ones who picked up jobs were cold as a witch's tit, excuse my French. But in the late afternoon, a reporter came in from the Adelaide Telegraph, just as Syl had told me to expect.
"They've picked a fight," she'd said. "And they'll get it."
So I was ready, I hoped.
I laughed at the Melburnians' snideness as Syl told me to call it, and shrugged my shoulders at Pococurante, saying that if Melbourne people didn't think that Adelaide people don't know what it means, that just shows Melbourne's unworldliness.
"We can snap our fingers to what they're obsessed with," I said (something else memorised from Syl). "We've got juh nuhsay quah." I added. That, I'd remembered from Gloria Braverman, who had said it alot once, and Syl said that I should repeat that, too.
"I bet the reporter will ask you to say that twice," she said. And she was right.
"And about those sounds of an angry bull?" the reporter asked.
"You ever been to an opera?" I asked the reporter, and he laughed out loud as he wrote that down.
I laughed with him, but didn't feel any too good inside. Po hadn't come in, and didn't pitch up all day.
~
The article in the Adelaide Telegraph came out the next morning, and it was a triumph. Melburnians were "jealous sourpusses, as anyone would be with their weather ... According to Oxford professor W. K. Lister from the Royal Academy of Music, who is visiting his sister here in Adelaide, from descriptions of the instrument being played by Mr Pococurante" (I distinctly told the reporter: Clarence Braithwaite, so I don't know how this mistake occurred) "the instrument is a Schlangenrohr, otherwise known as a Serpent, invented hundreds of years ago to be played in churches as a choir enhancement. It is a credit to our city, and possibly of quite venerable age. It is extremely difficult to play. The professor said he would be honoured to meet ..."
Customers came in all day waving the Telegraph like a flag. "Hooray for us!" they crowed. "Where's Po?"
Po didn't come in all day. And what's more, the snake-serpent-whateveryoucallit had disappeared. I'd been too preoccupied to pay any attention to Majka when she'd asked about both the day before. Po had always packed it in its case and left it in the shop before.
~
&nbs
p; When I got home Sylvia was there to meet me at the door, a frothy glass in her hand and a smile as big as a house on her face.
I pasted a smile on my face, but couldn't face the drink.
The next day the girls were frantic. Still no Po. I served the crowd of customers at the counter and then told the girls I'd go find him, and to take the day off.
I closed the shop and walked the three blocks to the rooming house where we'd both lived till I got married. The manager went to Po's room at my request, but Po didn't answer the door. He was paid up to the end of the week so it was like pulling nails from ironwood to get the manager to open up his room, but finally he did when I said I'd leave and come back with the coppers.
Inside, a neat room greeted us, with nothing personal in it except what he left in the wastebasket: a magazine of physical culture—something of a surprise. A powder-blue envelope with no writing on it, but it had once been sealed. A balled-up clipping from, you guessed it before I did: The Melbourne Courier. And a dried-up applecore.
I felt sick.
While I scouted round the room, I remembered what it was like living in the one next door. Alone in your room, you'd hear other men breathing, turning the pages of magazines, and the rest. The back of each door had a sign on it that said, "NO women" topping a lot of other NO's. The view from the window was a brick wall with a painted ad: Bonds.
I went home to Sylvia, not knowing what to do. We put the kids in the old Morris and drove all over Adelaide, even out to Snake Gully, looking, like lost farts in a haunted shithouse.
"He's gone," I said after two hours of this.
"Where would he go?"
"How should I know?"
We took the kids back. They were crying. I left her and them in the house, and went out again. I didn't know where, but I had to go out.
I walked till my feet were blistered. I hadn't walked this much for years. He could walk, I remembered. He never groused like the rest of us at the length of those tramps in mud.
When I felt so lost that my eyes were getting misty, I made my way back to my own house, and Sylvia.
Our stereo ran hot that evening so that music took the place of talk. We didn't have too many records, so she had to play her Benny Goodman twice. That was fine by me. Any noise would do, because nothing would do.
We went to bed early and I looked at the ceiling for hours. I wanted to strangle whoever those people were—the nasty ones. He had protected me, and what had I done for him?
"You need your sleep, Mal," came Syl's voice through the darkness. She'd been pretending to sleep, too.
"I'll be right," I said to Syl.
"Shh!" she said.
"I was," I said, miffed. It was Syl who had spoken, not me.
"Shut up, Mal. Listen!"
I heard it. A voice—high and thin as the night. One long note. It swelled ... and then died away.
"How beautiful!" whispered Sylvia. "Shh!"
She didn't need to shush me. I felt my ears stretch, I was straining so hard to hear.
Again and again—that voice, and each time, further away.
"There's no words," she whispered, "but then there aren't really in opera, are there?"
She wasn't wanting an answer, so I didn't give her one. She shut up again.
"If only I could sing like that," Sylvia finally sighed when the voice was too faint to catch any more.
When dawn came, I heard her ladylike snores.
~
When I opened the door of the Pococurante only a few hours later, Majka and her sister came in as usual, but we each had our jobs to do, so we nodded to each other and got on with it.
A crowd of customers was already waiting, sounding like a flock of galahs: "Did you hear her too? My word! I wonder who ..."
And they must of breakfasted on radio waves to come up with Call of the Soprano, Phantom Lady of the Night, Dame Melba's Ghost, Heavenly Disturber of our Peace and such rot.
Well, Sylvia had been taken in completely, but I couldn't let it stand. All the customers got an earful of my correction, as I explained that the lady was a bull. After about an hour of this, an old guy who was quietly waiting, holding a hoary jacket, backed me up. "A bull's call is unmistakable," he said.
Finally, at that slack time just before noon, I was alone in the front, so I went to the back and told the girls that I was sorry they'd been too far away to hear that bull, living in their migrant camp, but they said that just around dawn the whole camp heard it, too.
"Papa say no bull," Maj said. And just then, a ghost tweaked three sets of lips.
"Pococurante" copyright © Anna Tambour, was originally published in Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories edited by John Klima, Spectra Books, NY, 2007
The Onuspedia
An expert is someone who always makes sure of the spelling.
(some ripped-out excerpts)
stolen from the University of Utah. This theft coincided with a rebirth of interest in the Aemetic language and culture. There are today, no popular translations. The most respected texts are the Harvard edition by Cunningham (out of print) and his Skwandro Concordance (out of print). Sir Geoffrey Gyre's 1929 Cambridge Comprehensive Aemetic Lexicon is now being revised, according to the publisher. T.E. Lawrence's Sahan-ro: A Thousand and One Wars is out of print.
For a discussion of the theft, see Lt. Col. Brewster ("Bud") Langley's "The Skwandro Prediction" in Armor, the Magazine of Mounted Warfare, Volume XI, no. 4, July 2002
SLEEDOORN, WALTER ("TINKER") - see Felix Catfood, LaundRite, Rainbow Chews, Cowboy Pete's Razor in a Jar, Love-Me-Dear Chocolates
Walter Pense Sleedoorn II (1898-1937) was born into one of the original Old New York families. His father was a banker who never learnt to read but was such a brilliant manager of men that he became the head partner of Schuip, Sleedoorn & Blythe two years before his marriage.
When Walter was four years old, his mother Emmaline (née Schueuller) was invalided out of society, due to her weakness for laundry starch. She pilfered so much from the housekeeper's store that, on the morning of July 15, 1902, the Around Town column in the New York Post mentioned Walter Sr. as "limpy", a reference to his limp collar just hours earlier at the Metropolitan Opera's opening night of Franco Alfano's Risurrezione. The delicacy of the Post ensured that only those who knew about the collar, knew.
The first action Walter Sr. took within minutes of his secretary reading the news to him was to send his wife, Walter's mother, to the Sleedoorn estate in Schenectady, from which she never returned. It can only be imagined what little Walter felt that day, or if he saw his mother at all from his nursery window. Walter Sr. walked with a limp from that day on. Although he never mentioned the reason to anyone, his physique, manly demeanour, and idiosyncratic language all contributed to his reputation, which only grew in stature to its culminative apogee, his funeral at which his heroism in the Indian Wars and the stoicism with which he bore his wound were lauded. Subsequent historians found no evidence that Walter Sr. had even taken so much as a European tour.
Walter Jr. was sent the next day to board at Habsley's in Long Island, where he soon came under the eye of Mr. Habsley himself. The boy didn't last long in that institution, as his interest in ink was not appreciated. When Walter was seven, his father died without warning, and the boarding school that Walter was in at the time evicted him as a debtor. He quickly fell into a life of petty crime. His brilliant mind and passion for chemicals would have allowed him to swindle many small traders, but he preferred to cheat larger businesses by sleight of hand. At this time, he never had a job but led a hand-to-mouth existence, sleeping rough on the streets. It was inevitable that he was caught, and he served his first sentence when he was only nine.
Walter Sleedoorn's incarceration was invaluable as a character-shaper. Amongst his fellow inmates were sons of some of the top criminal families in New York. He last served under lock and key when not yet old enough to shave. He was discharged from the Bowery Home for Intransigent Boys in
December 1911, and entered immediate and stable employment. Under the patronage of the Case and Kroeter families, he was the brains behind what we now know to be an empire of consumer goods, some of which are still infamous. The sensational trial (see The State of New York vs. Your Custom Corporation, 1936-1937) of Charles "Pinks" Case and Orville "Inky" Kroeter never ended satisfactorily as far as the public was concerned. On the 4th of July, 1937, the bloated, rope-entangled body of Walter Pense Sleedoorn II (nicknamed "Tinker" by Charley Graham of the New York Post) was spotted by a five-year-old boy who was fossicking the banks of Sheepshead Bay.
Bibliography
Hadwigger, K.H., and Romano Bacchi, Chemistry and Crime: A Love Affair, Franklin Medical Publishing, 1963, Lexington, Mass.
Dravid, S., and T. MacGreggor. 2004. 'Pica as a Signifier', Journal of Neuropsychological Studies 204; 1177.
American Enterprise Institute. 1980 The Costly Consumer: Adulteration and the Witchhunt Mentality. Washington D.C.
"Found!", "Tinker Fixed Up Good" (etc.), New York Post, pg 1-3, July 5, 1937 (see also July 6, 7, 8)
"Prosecutor Struggles in Your Custom Trial", New York Times, pg. 2, July 7, 1937
S'AU TZO-HU
This is the Bowdlerized term for what in Mandarin, was called the Sixth Taste, and by Octave Mirbeau, author of "Le Jardin des supplices" (The Torture Garden), la truffe de la bonne femme. It is the taste of the tender folded-over inside of a bound foot.
SZECWIEKIWIC, GOLBUZ — see WoT
Golbuz Szecwikiwic (1972-) was president of the International Society of Watch Fob Collectors between 1994 and 2004. The ISWFC is a splinter-group of the International Watch Fob Association. The groups gained a measure of fame in 2008 when the yellow globe and red background of the IWFA was mentioned in a US Senate subcommittee hearing.
SZUYR - see Boza
A type of small beer once made in southeastern Turkey. In his Travels in the Ottoman Empire published by Richard Hakluyt in 1601, G.B. Halbutt, who was a member of the Guild of Master Victuallers and a minor poet, wrote,"Wouldst thou, couldst thou, see into their crafty souls? O for a hundred eyes, wherewith to watch and pry the lid from the soul of that ruffian, Hakim Bey. I could only delve his drop. Yet as my eyes, mere two, peered into the golden meer, I met his match in my own reflection. Hail to our Guild. We are, barring the sea's worth, peerless."