.:ELECTRIC VELOCIPEDE:. Strange Incidents in Foreign Parts by Anna Tambour

It was the year that Roald Amundsen, “last of the Vikings,” successfully navigated the Northwest passage; the year that Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were banned from the Brooklyn Public Library; that millions of hearts beat time to “Wait till the sun shines, Nellie” and “How’d you like to spoon with me.” The year that Greta Garbo was born and Jules Verne died. The year that Frank Branston, son of Violet and Cuthbert Branston, was a ten-year-old boy who lived at 87 Mulberry Street, Fentonville, Illinois, in the land of candy corn—and at that moment it was five minutes past six o’clock Halloween suppertime, and he had just laid down his fork. In his impatience to trick-or-treat, a part of him stuck out its lip and shut its mouth hard, refusing to let him eat the clod of rutabaga on his plate. And though he felt a satisfaction that made his earlobes glow, he also wanted to box that bad part of him’s ears. Why hadn’t it waited for tomorrow’s rutabaga clod?

“Franklin’s got bellyache if anyone asks,” Violet Branston (‘the flower of Fentonville’) declared. Cuthbert was in the doghouse for forgetting to fix the porch step till it broke. His son looked hopelessly to him for the indignation someone needed in this house, someone besides Frank’s mother, who ran on enough het-upness to run a riverboat to the moon. Frank’s father, the ex-sailor, now seller of sensible shoes, sat looking at nothing, like a dead catfish. Frank’s father avoided his son’s eyes, but couldn’t avoid his wife’s.

Compliant Cuthbert (who was once called ‘Cutlass,’ and who’d always hated rutabaga, but never in front of his wife) marched son up to son’s room, where father wordlessly left the stoic, heartbroken boy, who threw himself on his bed. But moments later Cuthbert returned, finger on lips, and handed Frank a book, “Parvel’s Adventures and Voyages in Strange Countries and Foreign Parts, with Many Incidents & Curious Beliefs.” Like the other two surprise books Cuthbert had given Frank, this was all about places marvellous and far from Fentonville, and it was a secret between them, to be stored, hidden in a place that Cuthbert had secretly and expertly constructed in the boy’s bed. With a pat on Frank’s head, Cuthbert left, closing the door. Frank hid the book. Moments later, Violet Branston flung open the door to see her boy kneeling praying by his bed. Not sure she was happy, she shut the door and turned the key with a click whose smoothness was positively self-satisfied.

Of all the what-for, caster-oiled, last-judgement hell’s-high-water punishments she could have conjured up—and Frank was convinced she spent most of her time conjuring—this ruination of his Halloween took the blue ribbon.

“I hope your chin grows rat hair! That your hands grow tails!” Frank cursed under his bedcovers, and he added a few choice ones for that mountain that would wait till he ate it or Kingdom Come. Though he was no high-pants boy, and his hair wouldn’t take a licking and stuck out around his head anyways, he cried on his bed like a baby—a baby just old enough to cry without disturbing.

Eventually, he went and stood by his window, watching the children come. He heard their knock, the trick-or-treat! and then he watched them walk away. He heard them mutter, and then clatters like hailstones. By tomorrow, those clattering things would be all over the street, and people would step on them unawares, they’d crunch underfoot with a frightening crack. And if it was a grownup who done it, why he’d step away smartly, worried it was old Mr. Farley’s glass eye.

His mother’s homemade treat, again this year, was the trick in trick-or-treat. Horehound drops. Made with lots and lots of horehound.

Of course the beggarly trick-or-treat, the unhealthy feast of Halloween offended Violet Branston’s sensibilities, but when Frank was five, Cuthbert argued cleverly to let their son do what every other Fentonville child did on that one night. “What would the Hammersmiths say, pet? Violet thinks Fentonville’s not good enough for her son? Violet’s worried Alma cooks poisoned treats?”

The Hammersmiths ran the town’s social calendar, Alma Hammersmith prided herself on her sasparilla divinity, and Violet Branston would die if she were excluded from Alma’s annual strawberry social.

So for five years, Frank Branston had trick-or-treated, and he looked forward to Halloween with the keen anticipation of a boy whose mother believed in food that provides regularity. Not even the Little Lord Fauntleroy costume Mrs. Branston made for him put saltpetre on his tail.

All that mattered to Frank was trick-or-treating. Mrs. Brenner’s popcorn balls, the Cooper family’s rainbow-striped salt water taffy; fat licorice sticks stamped with initials fancy as some riverboat gambler’s stickpin; corn kernels that tasted like corn should; humbugs that would break your teeth if you didn’t suck them slow; candy apples that stabbed your tongue with cinnamon; exotic salted almonds from the Goldsteins; and best of all, a great big bar of Giegerhopf chocolate, wrapped in silver foil.

Frank made those treats last as long as he could, which being a boy, and one who couldn’t take chances, meant one gorgeacious night. Come dawn, even the last humbug was only a memory.

Now memory was all he had to suck on, as suddenly, the Revelation came upon him like one of Reverend Woodley’s lightning bolts. Next year, Franklin Branston would hand out candy—the shameful horehound drops. Trick-or-treat for him was dead forever. There was nothing ahead for him in life.

Then he remembered the book, which on any other night, he would have been gorging on. He un-secreted it and took it to the window, where he could stand and read in the new streetlamp’s light. He opened randomly—a private superstition.

Tonight he learned about the Hindoos and their wheel of life. How if you’re good, you won’t die and go to no Temperance Meeting heaven, but get whirled around by the wheel and flung out as someone else. It reminded him of what his father told him about the roulette wheel on the riverboat. As a Hindoo, his honesty would be valued about that abomination on his plate. And as his reward, he would be turned into someone good. He thought of his father, and knew this was a message from him. Would they meet? If only his father hadn’t hurt his back . . . . Together they’d sail . . . . But wait! There was a hook attached to this wonderful future, just like in everything. He’d have to die! What dang use was that?

He put the book away, but . . . . “Please,” he said, looking towards his bed, and he bowed to it and uttered a gibberish prayer that he made up on the spot, please fling me back as a pirate. In the meantime, his feet were icicles. They hurt so bad they felt good, the misery of his body keeping company with his mind.

Eventually, all the other children were safe in their beds, eating. The street light now lit up the late-night life. Frank watched a cat play with a horehound drop. He heard the clink. And then another cat appeared and challenged the first. And then a raggedy tom swaggered in, and there was a no-sidelines, all-in-for-everything banshee-wailing all-out-brawl, and it was just wonderful; and then at the sound of a window opening, all the cats skedaddled. Frank was too cold to move, though he was just looking now at an empty street. Then all of a sudden, he felt sore inside. Sore as a woke-up bear. So sore at all those cats having their freedom, no one telling them what to do. Frank felt so sad and sore at everything but especially at those cats, that all he wanted to do was go out and get him one of those cats, and . . . .

He opened his window when he should have been sound asleep dreaming nightmares at his refusal to eat God’s food. He climbed up and knelt on the windowsill and leaned out and grabbed the branch of the mulberry tree. Wrapping his fingers around its comforting limb, he swung away from his window, but his right foot caught and unbalanced him, and he lost his grip, and fell away from both branch and window, onto a piece of broken copper gutter Cuthbert Branston had forgotten to fix, a very sharp piece.

Of course Frank died. But since he’d never believed in any hell worse than he already knew, and was, as his mother never ceased to remind him, no Christian, he died as he believed most recently—as a Hindoo. And since he’d been a bad boy (not about the rutabaga mash—heavens no—but about wanting to harm creatures), the wheel of life spun him round and flung him out as an nascent fruit of the exotic East—a baby eggplant in Trinkamalee, Ceylon.

That was the first of a long line of eggplants. They don’t have much scope for change in the hierarchy of the living, being such passive players. So that eggplant suffered a typical eggplant life. Death at the prime of life, by pickling-suffocation. The next eggplant ended life as a torture of slow drying. The next, born in the cool hills above Isfahar, was licked to death by flames. Then there was . . . oh, you’re probably not interested in the details, other than the fact that each eggplant born from the death of the last was flung out into a different Foreign Part, another someplace exotic, though every place is exotic to someplace else. They saw the world, this line of eggplants, but what can an eggplant do about it? And so they were flung out as other eggplants.

And so it went, eggplant unto eggplant, till we get to the latest eggplant incarnation. This one we find sitting amongst a pile of eggplants at a Sydney harbourside-neighbourhood fruiterer’s. It had no distinguishing marks. Just a general shine of health and a hefty weight, and it was bought.

Late that afternoon, the woman who chose the eggplant picked it out of her shopping bag in the kitchen of her waterfront home. As she touched her chef’s knife, her mouth prickled with anticipated taste—a recipe she planned to test. She drew the blade across the taught flesh. The purple skin resisted—went squuuueeek, but when the wound was still only a surface gash, she suddenly remembered. It was her a cappela performance night. There had been a change of date. She washed the knife and dried and oiled it, and put the eggplant, slashed-side down, into a wooden tray along with a dozen flame-orange tamarillos and six long-stemmed artichokes. She took out a frozen container of aioli, a loaf of crusty filoncini, and a container of calamari stuffed with eggplant caponata and gorgonzola cheese, all homemade. She wrote a note for Ned, their son. “Singing tonight. Dinner’s on the counter. Barfi in the freezer for puds.” She felt a tiny twinge at his disappointment last night.

Earlier in the week, she and Quentin had forbidden their son to attend last night’s inaugural Halloween party at Ned’s school. Quentin had said no by proxy, being tied up with a case in Goulburn, so the No had caused her to get all the bad vibes. “It’s not Australian,” Geoff had said immediately, exactly what she had said, and he almost had a cat on the phone when Kath had added, “He wants to go as Spiderman.”

“He can go with his head in a bucket, or not at all,” Quentin barked. Quentin Kelly’s most brilliant professional (and private) move had been to name their child after an outlaw. His chambers had edge, it got him a swag of front-page clients, and gave him, above all, panache—the larrikin who pissed on the system. But he knew, go as Ned Kelly or not at all meant that Ned wouldn’t go. Game, set, and match. Kath felt as viscerally against the school’s imposition of yet another capitalist cultural-imperialist import as her husband, but it was harder on her, as she had to face-to-face.

“What’s so Australian about that stuff you sing, your arugella or whatever those shithouse weeds are. Your stinkyfeet cheeses! Your quack dong fish sauce fad. Your Tuscany food trip!” Ned sneered, and he picked up the pashmina draped over the sofa, and held it up. “This,” he announced, “in Australian, is only a nanna’s shawl!”

Last night, Halloween evening—when the school’s party was being held and Ned and his mother were stuck at home together because Kath’s personal trainer had cancelled at the last moment, Kath thought about the boy. She’d once thought that a child would be a confirmation. As mother and son avoided each other, Kath tried to remember, confirmation of what?

So when Ned came home today, he slammed the door. Everyone at school had talked about the fun they’d had last night, and he couldn’t get their fun out of his head. He saw his mother’s note. She wouldn’t come home till midnight, earliest.

He checked out the vegetable tray. He picked it up and took it to their jetty on the waterfront.

First, the artichokes, he planted between the open slats. With an oar, he whacked their heads off one by one. The tamarellos, he stomped on. The decking looked like a bloodbath when he’d finished. Then he picked up the eggplant and shoved it into his shirt. The eggplant was the worst of all his mother’s revolting vegetables and disgusting fishy things. And now she was in the eggplant section of her recipe-testing for her next book. Just remembering the smell of that last test, reeking of silver-polish stink of cooking eggplant, made him want to chunder.

He threw the oars into the rowboat tied to the jetty and jumped in, his belly tight with the protruding fruit.

It was a warm summer night, and he rowed strongly with a ten-year-old boy’s anger. He rounded the bend and set out for the open waves, choppy with blustery wind. He rowed till he was tired, and settled his oars. The eggplant, he pulled from his shirt. He held it as if it were a footy ball, and then he stood in the boat, and smashed the eggplant as hard as he could, at the sea.

The eggplant’s bouyancy and the strength of the wind made the sea’s surface hard as a caloused hand. That hand grabbed the eggplant and tossed it back, hard, right at Ned’s stomach. He lost his balance and fell out of the boat, gulping for air and swallowing sea. As he grabbed for the boat’s side, sharp clinker edges cut into his knees, as the rowboat bucked against him. By the time he flopped back in, he was holding back tears. The eggplant floated wongk wongk against the seat. He picked the thing up and sat down. It’s knife-cut had split open, showing the bruised pale flesh as a large bloodless gash. Somehow, his tears began to flow. His fingers gripped the eggplant, fingertips into the gash. He had never actually touched an eggplant before. It was firm as his own thigh, warm as his own flesh, cool on the outside, warm underneath . . . .

As night fell and the ferries in the distance turned into black caterpillars on golden legs, he turned practically invisible, a boy in the dark, bent over an eggplant, holding it like a like a hurt pet. The wind died and the boat bobbed gently now as he cried over the eggplant, and talked to it as to a friend.

And thus the eggplant, that eggplant that had been fated, it had thought, to live a passive life—that eggplant that had never felt like an eggplant, nor ever wanted to feel the way an eggplant should—that eggplant and that boy Ned met. And the boy Ned rowed back safely and ate the dinner his mother had prepared, and he ate it alone—that is, alone in the yesterday meaning of the word. And afterwards, alone he buried the eggplant in the back garden under a heavy stone, in a private ceremony.

And when the eggplant died there, as it soon did, calmly and without pain, the wheel spun round and flung out a baby boy, into someplace exotic.