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away my ammunition. Beyond the sad lace curtains, parallel with my bed, was a grey wood-paling fence. One kilometre away, the electric train line was also parallel. In a long black cape, Barry Humphries stalked the streets.
    It should have been obvious that I was not suited to engineering, but my father’s ambition was to see me established as Shire Engineer of Bacchus Marsh. He bought me an expensive slide rule which I never learned to use. I faked my physics experiments, working back from the correct value of g which I still recall as 980 cm per sec per sec.
    I had no idea that I was on the path to catastrophic failure. Indeed, anything seemed possible. Celine’s friends were drama majors, psychologists, political philosophers and poets. They discussed Description, Narration, Exposition, Argumentation. Had I been capable, I would have faked this too, but all I had to offer them were some controversial facts: Agenbite of inwit. U.P.:up.
    My clever father never had a need to develop a treatise or present an abstract. Nor had this skill been required of me at high school up in Ballarat. I had sat my matriculation confident I was a whiz at chemistry and mathematics, but I arrived in Celine’s magic circle with four plain passes and no clue as to how to play their game. They were reading Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Alfred Jarry. Any radical thought I might offer—that there might be no God for instance—was tedious to them, and they seemed embarrassed I should mention it. I was staggered that, while they had not known each other previously, they seemed to be continuing a conversation which they had started years before. They all knew rhinoceros was a play.
    More than once they told me to piss off, but I had chosen them, and I would stay until they saw my worth.
    The motorcyclist rarely spoke to me. Sandy Quinn had the habit of smiling while I talked. Years later he would tell me he had been anxious on my behalf and had only smiled to give me some support.
    Celine’s body could not have been at all as I imagined it but she would always be a physical actor who could make you believe her waist was smaller and her legs longer than in real life. She was not as clever as I thought she was. Sometimes she was cold to me, other times quite tender. Once she mussed up my hair in public, and perhaps she was as much on my side as she later claimed, but she was always, unfailingly, relentlessly amused to see me run to fetch the balls thrown by the poet. The poet had a long square-shouldered body and a freckled face that might have been bland if you could not see that he was, in his very quiet brown-eyed way, capable of absolutely anything.
    “Catcher in the Rye,” the poet said mildly. “You said you read it, but you didn’t, did you? Not really.” His manner was so agreeable. It was hard to believe he was tormenting me.
    The leather boy had his head down rolling cigarettes, one after the other, lining them up on the table edge then tucking in their hairy ends.
    “Not really, no.”
    The poet had a smile like someone sucking on a match. “Too American I suppose?”
    “Stop it Andrew,” said Sandy. “Enough.”
    “So Felix,” Andrew persisted, “it’s Patrick White for you and Salinger Go Home?”
    I had not read Patrick White either. “Sometimes that’s necessary,” I said.
    “So, with literature, you are Australia first.”
    It was time to take this idea and run with it.
    “For me it’s the Battle of Brisbane,” I said, “every bloody day, mate.”
    The leather boy snorted through his nose, but of course not even Sandy had heard of the Battle of Brisbane.
    “There was no battle of Brisbane,” he said. “You must mean the Brisbane Line . We were ready to give the Japs everything north of Brisbane.”
    “No, Sandra.”
    Even now I am ashamed I spoke to him like that. I was too defended to even glimpse his extraordinary capacity for empathy. I called himSandra and it was as if a starling spat at him. He