The Origin of Me

by Bernard Gallate

  ‘That doesn’t mean you’re not related,’ Pericles said, unfazed by my theory.

  ‘Apparently, when he was about my age, Dad really struggled over having no way of exploring his family history. I want to discover why I sprouted an extra appendage and who I might’ve inherited the special little feature from. The answer might be close, but I feel like it’s slipping away.’

  Walking through Bert’s now unpadlocked gate, we found him out the front, snipping a rosebush with secateurs. ‘Don’t bloom if you don’t prune,’ he said to me. ‘Who’s your chum?’

  ‘This is Pericles. Pericles, Bert.’

  ‘Never trust a Greek bearing gifts,’ he said, eyeing the book.

  ‘Don’t worry, it belongs to the library.’ I held out the book but he didn’t take it. ‘I was just wondering if you’d read it.’

  ‘Can’t read anything without my monocle, and I don’t own one.’

  ‘There’s a bunch of things I’ve read about in here that I’ve seen at your place. There’s even a cockatiel called Percy.’

  ‘Well, that’s a little bit spooky, isn’t it? A very strange coinky-dinky, I’ll give you that much. Come inside and I’ll show you something.’

  He led us to one of his bookcases and pulled out three fat nineteenth-century catalogues for department stores – Anthony Hordern’s, Frederic Lassetter’s and George Pemberton’s – which he handed to me. I flipped through and saw illustrations of everything from carriages and farm machinery to piano accordions and croquet sets.

  ‘Despite the fancy name, the Magnificent Emporium was the smallest of the three,’ he said. ‘Lassetter’s was enormous, took up four city blocks on George Street. I’ve probably got a few thousand items from Lassetter’s here. Business went down the gurgler in twenty-nine.’

  ‘So you know of George Pemberton? I was wondering if you had any personal connection to him, or maybe Edwin Stroud, the author of this book.’

  ‘Curious little bugger, aren’t you? Everything will be revealed in perfect time, and time will reveal everything perfectly.’ He looked at his watch, heightening the dramatic effect of his cryptic comment. ‘Now it’s time to go upstairs.’

  He took us up to a blue door opposite what he’d earlier described as the Carnival Room and made us close our eyes before opening it. He guided us in and I heard a sound like a thousand eggs hatching, then opened my eyes and saw clocks – hundreds of them. Grandfather clocks, cuckoo clocks, wall clocks, clocks with thermometers and barometers and a glass cabinet full of fobs and wristwatches. Most of them running close to the correct time – 3.55 pm.

  ‘Check these out!’ Pericles said, pointing to a collection of animal clocks. Holding pride of place among them was a life-sized dog with a timepiece stuck in his side. I’d read about him last night – the mechanical foxhound that Melinkoff gave Pemberton! He still had a few defiant patches of hair remaining on his legs, but his head and back were barren, presumably from years of patting. The clock had stopped at 3.15.

  Bert shuffled over and said, ‘His tail used to mark the seconds.’

  ‘Must be hard maintaining all your clocks,’ I said.

  ‘Once took pride in keeping everything tickety-boo. Time is a great teacher but eventually it kills all its pupils.’

  ‘Maybe you should think about selling some of your stuff.’

  ‘You were the first person to buy something from me in years, young fella. Cocky little bastard you were, too, demanding that bike. Mind you, repairing it gave me a new lease of life. Started tinkering with other things.’

  ‘Our friend Isa, who you’ve met, thought you could have a garage sale. You’d have less stuff to move and more money to live on.’

  ‘You think letting a few nosy neighbours poke through my junk will make a couple of hundred bob?’

  ‘This stuff must be worth tens of thousands,’ I said. ‘At least.’

  Bert tapped his watch and shushed me.

  >TICKTICKTICK<

  A cuckoo sprang from his little house and cuckooed four times. One of the grandfather clocks chimed and the rest of the clocks followed, marking the hour in their unique ways. Cuckoos, chimes, bells and dinky digital riffs, all together in a shambolic orchestra. I stroked the dog, and the tempo of my internal clock – my heart – accelerated with the conviction that the three of us, Bert, Pericles and me, were together in the Church of Time.

  I looked at Pericles. His eyes were closed in reverence as the last of the clocks made its late claim. And then, again, there was only ticking.

  We talked further about having a sale. Bert liked the idea but wasn’t keen on haggling with strangers. I reminded him that Isa’s housemate Terri was an antiques dealer with a wide network and could bring heaps of people, even run things on the day. Bert’s enthusiasm seemed to rise.

  ‘I’d like to keep a few special things,’ he said.

  ‘You could put a red sticker on them and label what you want to sell with a recommended price.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve planned the whole thing already.’

  ‘Now that you’ve explained where they came from, some of these things have a special meaning to me too, and I hope they go to good people who might look after them. And I want you to be okay.’

  ‘You’re a good egg. And to demonstrate my appreciation, I’d like you to have something special.’ He went into the Carnival Room and returned with a small wooden box and the mechanical chicken.

  ‘No, I don’t deserve that,’ I said.

  ‘You deserve a good clip over the ear for annoying me. As sure as eggs is eggs, Ethel is going to you. Leave her with me for now and I’ll see if I can’t get her cackling again.’

  ‘It’s ten past,’ Pericles said. ‘We’d better get to work.’

  ‘Just a minute, there’s a gift for the Greek as well,’ Bert said. He took a large gold coin from the box and pressed it into Pericles’ hand. ‘Guard this with your life. You never know when it might come in handy.’

  ‘Thanks, Bert.’ Beaming like a five-year-old on Christmas morning, Pez showed me the coin. One side was embossed with a sailor looking through a telescope and the words, DISCOVER NEW WORLDS . . . On the other, it said, AT PEMBERTON’S MAGNIFICENT EMPORIUM, beneath the profile of a bearded man, presumably Pemberton himself.

  ‘What about the sale?’ I said.

  ‘Let me do a stocktake first,’ Bert said, which we took as our signal to leave.

  When we arrived at Give Me the Juice, Helena and Christina raced up and sandwiched Pericles in a hug. ‘Settle down,’ he said, wriggling free.

  ‘Where’s the love?’ Christina said. ‘We haven’t seen you for two days, little brother.’

  ‘How did you manage without me?’

  ‘Not funny. Dad’s gone apeshit.’

  ‘So what’s new?’

  ‘He’s taking it out on us.’

  ‘He wants you to come home,’ Helena said. ‘Even the neighbours were asking where you were.’

  ‘I hope he went over there and explained it’s because he’s disgusted by the sight of me.’

  ‘Don’t speak like that.’

  ‘It’s the truth.’

  Sam was looking through the hatch, bristling with anger because we were running late. He came out and spun Pericles by the shoulder. ‘Listen, malaka, I personally don’t care if you’re a pillowbiter, arse-bandit, or the Christmas tree fairy, but you’re not George Michael and we still need to make money. There’s customers waiting to be served, so start serving them, yeah?’

  ‘You know what? Fuck you!’ Pericles gave him the finger and walked out. I went to follow but Sam seized my arm.

  ‘Don’t even think about it. You’ll make it twice as bad. Dad will want to know why the takings were shit and I’ll have to explain why we were two staff down, and then he’ll tell Uncle Con.’

  ‘Tell your dad he was sick,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, like sick in the head. This is a business, mate, not a counselling service.’

 
‘Please stay,’ the twins said, ‘for our sake.’ So I stayed and it was pretty bloody infuriating because I had to work out the back with Sam, who I’d used to think was a decent bloke but now thought was a king-sized homophobic prick.

  There were ten minutes of itchy silence before I spoke up.

  ‘You could’ve shown him some sympathy.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Remember when your dad got on your case the other week?’

  ‘That was about working on cars, mate, not prancing around at poofter clubs.’ Apparently people reckoned society was more accepting of gay people these days. Well, all of this was making me think it must’ve been pretty fucking horrible before.

  During my break I called Pericles to see if he was okay. He told me he was watching waves crash on Ben Buckler.

  ‘Don’t do anything rash,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not at The Gap, bud. It’s just that sometimes I wish I could cut off parts of myself.’

  ‘Don’t even try. Believe me – it gets very messy.’

  On our way back home, having met up with Pericles, I told him about my failed attempt to remove the tail. He winced in sympathy, but then laughed when I told him I’d settled for shaving it. Hair removal for him was a weekly necessity. We talked for ages about how, in our own ways, we both felt like freaks.

  I said goodnight and went to my room to read, eager to see how Edwin would fare in America. I caught up with him and Melinkoff on board the S.S. Oceania.

  Irving Melinkoff spent most of his evenings in the Neptune Lounge, puffing on Cuban cigars and sipping cognac, discussing the latest ventures of the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers as if intimately acquainted. He’d introduced me to our fellow passengers as his nephew, and every night I was required to wait until the last of our company had retired before descending to our tiny cabin three decks beneath theirs. This usually occurred in the wee hours, as Melinkoff was a flamboyant raconteur and his accounts of exotic adventures and daring escapades were loaded with embellishment and diversion. The stories often contradicted one another, yet his audience never seemed concerned with their veracity, content to be distracted from the monotony of the voyage.

  I, on the other hand, had entrusted a year of my life to him, and if gross fabrication came so easily to Melinkoff, I wondered how he could be trusted to deliver the promised financial rewards. My niggling doubts, exacerbated by long stretches without sight of land and a harrowing four-day storm, evolved into an unshakeable dread of never being able to return home. Setting foot on solid ground in Honolulu brought such great relief that I considered giving Melinkoff the slip and not re-embarking for the final leg. Only the shame of returning to Sydney with empty pockets vanquished the idea.

  On arrival to San Francisco, the port was shrouded in a thick fog and low cloud, and not a single feature of the city was visible as the tugs, horns tooting, guided us to the wharf. But shortly after disembarking, the fog lifted and with it my despondency. Immediately after checking in to our room at the Royal Hotel – a great improvement on the cabin – we visited the offices of the San Francisco Examiner, where Melinkoff placed an advertisement appealing for ‘freaks and prodigies of all shapes and sizes, articulate, athletic and able to entertain’. The following Wednesday, a hundred and sixty hopefuls, less than one quarter of whom fitted the description, queued outside the hall of the Quilters’ Guild, awaiting their chance to impress the showman.

  The first to succeed was Ruthie Davis. Expelled from ballet academy for growing too tall, she’d sought comfort in the consumption of fancy pastries and dramatically expanded her girth. Melinkoff renamed her Baby Cakes the Living Doll, and ordered a childlike dress to be sewn up for her costume. The muscled torso of Roy Lister the Human Globe was tattooed with a map of the world, and he could make the oceans ripple by undulating his stomach. Melvina Wellington suffered from hypertrichosis, but bearded ladies were a common feature on the circuit, so Melinkoff came up with the idea of having her five-year-old son, Leopold, don a fake beard to appear alongside his parents as the first Fully Bearded Family. Fire-breathing sword-swallower Milton Banks, a.k.a. the Whispering Flame, was married to Serpentina, who, with her diamond python Octavius, had earnt the dubious distinction of being the most risqué act on the West Coast – woman and snake becoming so entwined in the finale it was impossible to tell them apart. The only other animal act was Samson and Delilah, two magnificent white leopards, and their trainer, Lloyd Farbridge.

  The last person to join our troupe had never before set foot in a theatre. Paulo Esposito was born with phocomelia, a genetic disorder that had prevented his limbs from developing properly while in the womb. The upper sections of both arms and legs were missing, and the lower sections were very short, which made his hands and feet appear to be directly connected to his torso. All of his fingers were fused, giving his hands a flipper-like appearance. Heedless of the fact that he’d been taunted by the name since childhood, Melinkoff reinstated the moniker Paulo Penguino.

  While the rest of the troupe spent the following week in rehearsals, I was employed constructing props, collecting costumes, organising photography sessions and printing thousands of posters, handbills and pitch cards. Initially I revelled in the excitement of traversing the restless and hilly city by cable car and the independence that came with Melinkoff’s preoccupation with the other performers. But by week’s end, vexed over the lack of attention he’d given me, I felt it judicious to remind him of my extremely brief time on stage and the matter of the glass tank, which hadn’t been mentioned since we’d left Australia.

  ‘Transporting a glass tank by rail would be too risky,’ he said. ‘It will be constructed on arrival in New York. In the meantime we’ll have to invent a suitable persona for you.’ He paused for a brief moment. ‘I have it! Instead of a Pacific Islander, we’ll make you an Australian native – a simple matter of blacking up and wearing as little as you can get away with. No need for feathers and masks here.’ He produced a newspaper clipping dated July 1883, advertising the showman Robert Cunningham’s first troupe. Beneath the headline ‘AUSTRALIAN CANNIBALS’ was an illustration of shipwreck survivors being pursued, killed and eaten by Aboriginal people.

  ‘With respect, sir, I only agreed to this venture on condition that I wouldn’t be required to impersonate a dark-skinned fellow.’

  ‘How then can we convince the public that you represent the intermediate stage of man’s ascension from beastly form? A skinny white lad with an unfortunate deformation is hardly exotic enough. We’ll have to compromise. The spiel is coming to me . . . Take this down!’

  Introducing for the first time ever

  THE ASTOUNDING BOUNDING KANGAROO BOY!

  HAROLD HOPKINS, a mere babe of one month, SOLE SURVIVOR of a TRAGIC SHIPWRECK on a remote Australian island.

  DISCOVERED by a kangaroo and ADOPTED as one of her own! SUCKLED on her milk, he developed BESTIAL characteristics! SPEARED by fierce Aboriginal hunters, his mother was killed and eaten.

  Resisting their CANNIBALISTIC urges, the savages spared the strange child.

  He was PADDLED to the mainland on bark canoe and DELIVERED into the caring arms of Christian missionaries.

  Intrepid explorer and theatrical impresario IRVING MELINKOFF has searched the darkest corners of the Earth to find this REMARKABLE and GROTESQUE specimen, the likes of which YOU WILL NEVER have the chance to witness again!

  Spared from performing the artless mimicry that my mother considered denigrating to my fellow man, I was initially pleased with Melinkoff’s solution. Later, though, I realised that my relief and instinct for self-preservation had blinded me to the destructive nature of the myths I’d be perpetuating. At the time I justified my acquiescence by imagining that the vast distance between our continents somehow absolved me from any responsibility to my countrymen. But that stance required a wilful ignorance of the plight of the American Indian and indeed coloured folk in America – slavery having ended only thirty-four years earlier.

  I google
d Robert Cunningham. He’d ‘procured’ nine Aboriginal performers from Palm and Hinchinbrook islands and had taken them on tour with P. T. Barnum’s Ethnological Congress of Strange and Savage Tribes. Afterwards, he toured them separately on the American dime museum circuit and then across Europe. Most of them became sick and died while on tour, never making it back to their home. Twice more he ‘acquired’ Indigenous performers and worked them to the point of exhaustion and death. He obviously believed that ‘the show must go on’ at all cost – even human.

  The staging for the launch of E-Radiata Serum™ at Farm Cove was a design and engineering marvel that I’d contributed to in a small way. The runway emerged from between two enormous screens, intersecting a traverse stage and extending ten metres before encircling the pool. Viewed from the top of Fleet Steps, the whole stage resembled an elongated female/Venus symbol. The Venus shell was concealed behind a black curtain studded with Swarovski crystals that formed the logo for $KiNT, the designer who was involved with the launch. Pez and I, stoked to be given the ushering gig and a chance of meeting Vienna Voronova, had arrived early and joined the briefing session.

  ‘Absolutely no seating changes,’ Mum said. ‘I don’t care if it’s somebody’s third cousin twice removed or Anna Wintour herself – seating allocations are not transferable. Now, here are your shirts in requested sizes,’ she said, handing them out. ‘No modifications please.’ SANCTUS MINERALIS was written on the back and $KiNT on the front. Mum confirmed everyone’s duties then introduced $KiNT, who I instantly recognised from BigTown Gym™.

  ‘Thank you, Charis and Morgan, for a truly stunning set.’ He blew them kisses. ‘All models are now in hair and make-up. Our story today is dreamboats and shipwrecks, and I’ve instructed the models to move languidly – as if underwater. Please carry that into whatever you’re doing because you’re all part of the show, yeah?’ He demonstrated the desired motion. ‘Float and glide, people.’

  ‘$KiNT is showing thirty-five looks,’ Morgan said. ‘The show will run for exactly twenty-three minutes, including finale. Vienna will be concealed inside the shell ten minutes before start, over half an hour total. There’s no chance of suffocation, but I don’t want her in there a second longer than necessary, so stick to timings.’ He pointed to his very expensive watch.