Buddhas and Bikinis - Vetbook

irthday.
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Buddhas and Bikinis 32
I was in Townsville to participate in the celebrations for my father’s fiftieth
Home was a Grecian manor with a steep driveway to the top. I keyed in the security
pin and the gates opened. My heart sank as I rode into the estate and saw the Greek flag
fluttering from the roof.
A week in Townsville with my family was like being caught in a time eddy, my
mother a temporal vortex that sucked reality out me. She made our home a shrine to her
Hellenic past, how she imagined it was in Kastellorizo before she left, when she was too
young to understand the communist civil war, the corruption of the law, the exodus of the
brave.
She’s lived in 1950s Kastellorizo in her mind for the last thirty years and I told her
Greece was Bankrupt, and Kastellorizo was a red rock as barren as my spinster Aunt
Despina.
I told her this just to make her cry. When babies cry, they wake up, but mother just
kept sucking the nipple of dream-time. Maria and I were truly weaned of dreams and spat
the milk in her face every chance we got.
Jimmy Porter, a wiry old man on a postman’s motorbike had been delivering the
mail to Yarrawonga since I was a school kid and he remembered me because I used to race
him down the winding streets to the Strand. He had no fingers on his left hand; some said a
farming accident, but Maria recked it was God’s punishment for being a masturbator.
Maria and I used to call him Dim Jim, because we’d open the front gate to let out
our childhood dog, Minnie, when we heard his motorbike reach the top of the rise at the
head of our street. He’d see the dog as if it was the first time, and not know what to do.
Fear had made him a moron, not a good trait for a postman.