We never did discover where the old Pole lived. Possibly it was in Al’s housing block in Hanmer Street, as Johnnie Good surmised. A couple generations ago a man like that would have jumped ship in the port like old Peter the Fin’s grandfather and one or two others. Because no one had ever heard the man speak, how long he had been in the country was unknown; it had only come down that he was a Pole. After his afternoon stint on his bench by the canon slugging his sherry, the man often took a leak in the bushes by the tennis court on the corner, never taking much care to seclude himself properly. One afternoon he had collapsed there, an ambulance carting him off and the local Facebook chat expecting that might have been the end of him. Passing by the café tables the man always held a steady course, all unseeing and never any deviation from his goal. This afternoon wheeling by he was found sitting in his place by the water, angled against the northerly at his back, and when a seagull came up to his feet in a glance without inclining his head or altering his stony visage, the Pole dropped like a tiny crumb his colourless eyes down to the bird.
Fast-forward Carlo now in anticipation beginning to lose shape and form. Behind the glasses the wavering watery eyes. Slight back-tilting of head whenever the conversation turned earnest. The screening of hair blowing about like women found useful under observation. Daughter Soleil would carry his imprint the rest of her life. (Recall that voice of her father from Sydney down the line in Bab's back garden on the day of her funeral before he had been met. We had all listened to the animal screeching wondering to ourselves.) Soleil the child of a one night stand in Sydney, as her mother regularly reminded. At some point in his youth Carlo's own mother had suddenly adopted four or five African orphans. (Never mention of his own father.) Streaks of cigarette & later even larger vape clouds engulfing the figure. One memorable winter afternoon Carlo and Robbie had marched together up the street in their coats wielding their vapes like bushrangers their shooters. Experimental film-making followed art school (unseen to date); the conventional had never been any possibility.
