Wizardry (Jun25)

Pair of beautiful Afro sisters, one hooded and one plaited. Nine makes the elder grade 4, younger might have been 2, perhaps. Striking little coconuts with their Oz accents and rhythms. Daddy at the counter attempting to scan and print. Golly gee! Who walks into the foyer opposite all of a sudden, but a girl from elder’s class in school. Milly! Milly!... Oh my goodness! What are you doing here, Milly?... Asian with glasses giving one look behind, before she wordlessly disappeared behind the glass of the employment agency next door. Puff of smoke and gone... Maybe her mother works there. How did Milly get here though? Catch a bus did she, maybe. Even driving it took 20 minutes to get here. Waves through the door like cleaning a window pane. Milly! Milly!...  Won’t come out and the pair can’t risk going in… Go on girls, do it! Watchya scared of? It’s safe… Won’t risk it. You go in then!... Hey! But hang on a minute, whose classmate is this girl after all?... They’re not going to eat you in there, no big bad wolf waiting... Solving the mystery must wait on the morrow, however. Darn. Veeeery strange. Daddy progressed to the PC room; Junior circling through the pair of doors, the prayer room and PC. Hello. Hello. Hello each pass… Full of beans like that they could not have been fasting. Christians? You couldn’t tell. The Muslims occasionally brought in young daughters. Right oh. A game then. Come on. You ready? Need paper first…Hang on, gotta be something here. Rummaging. Rummaging. Had some somewhere…Yeah. Finally. OK, on your toes now and no second chances. This here is how you spell MILLY, alright. And this now is how you spell your name too…What did you say it was? What?... FRATA? FRATA?... OK… Block letters. F.  An R. An A… Leaning in… No, no, no. That’s not how you spell Milly. And. That’s not how you spell my name, either… The former variant was easy as pie. Simple; no help needed. Latter we had to see… An E, then?... OK. OK, you got it. EEEE. There. And. What?... A PH. Like for what?... A dolphin?... Not FFFF. A P. And a Haich… Pen waving like a wand before big stunned and gleaming brown eyes… Abracadabra. Jingily, jingily, jang!... There. You. Are… EPHRATA. But what I wanna know now is why daddy named you after a river. You gotta tell me. Come on. You gotta. No secrets. We going to be friends or what?... WAH! The looks on the faces! Blimey! Flamin’. Little mite’s lamps bigger than anything and that swivel of the chin like an ice-cream cone on the march!

 

 

NB. Fausi’s no-name café on Barkly Street, Footscray by the P. O., where most mornings there were more Viets than Africans. Brought back Muhammed Ali refusing the draft. Despite all the evidence, just like Iraq, politicians like John Howard could no doubt retrospectively justify it.