Octoroon

Passing the dinner table tonight chap made you start, choke on your food, confused memory and perception, almost knocked you from your chair into the aisle where delightful old crones rickety on their pins to start with might have been brought tumbling down in a godawful scrum. Foggy streets and back lanes of Collingwood and Fitzroy fifty years ago were dotted with pavement rain trees, yellows and browns, scarves and kebayas. Creeping dark was about right too for closing time, forcing the slow, unsteady retreat back to rooming houses and tenements where stairs needed hoisting. Pigmentation almost perfect, not much more than slight tonal difference involved. Taken together with the features of pug-nose, forehead, jaw and jowls, the rich six o'clock swill bloomed across the capillaries. My oh my! What a life there must have been given his age and class. There was even some sideway rocking on heels like the old timers over the cobblestones. The Jocks and Jimmys would have instantly claimed him as their own. Drab, worn and faded Penguin polo straight from the Two Bob shop. Opening his mouth would have created a problem, though the era provided a certain degree of cover. A true ang moh—carrot-top somewhat faded and grayed now like the shirt. In Collingwood the type would have clung to the pillar lining up the pots on the high shelf where they were safe. Where could he have hidden himself here all this time? Might conceivably have had not a single word of English; broken Hokkien and Malay perhaps. To be engaged by any means possible on any reappearance.