Worn chap from the school of hard knocks in his blue overalls, bib & shoulder straps, late 60s or even tipped. Impossible to deny spare change. Dickens’ illustrations again; earliest figures on the trains and trams in the inner city with Kum Luka. Were the men who had passed expected to suddenly appear from the scrum in the streets and the carriages in Kum’s company? If anyone in the wider world of the city knew where they may have gone it would have been Kum. On the step of the back veranda once, after Kum had been struck by his godson’s dreamy gazing, the confidential manner had never been offered previously. It was his private belief, Kum had suggested, that the clouds passing there slowly above were nothing less than the God himself; that was how he knew everything that transpired on earth. No one in childhood had spoken anything of this sort previously; among our kind there was little indulgent play with children. Even now it seemed remarkable that one could suddenly be approached on the street by such a figure and have in possession the sought after coin. Preposterous really. As was the thought of being selected by the man, some kind of affinity implicit.
Flinders Lane, Melbourne
