In the twilight, we sit by the fire in the semi-dark, with the day easing into night. We are watching but pretending not to watch the small man, the midget who is called Liam, with Nikola over there chattering away, incessantly chattering.

By the fire, Nikola and Liam.

Liam’s a quaint little guy, he laughs a lot, over and over. He has this way of revisiting something he’s already said, so as to laugh at it again and again.

Thus again he’s telling Nikola what ‘actually’ happened when he got out of the ute and accidentally discharged the six gauge.

We can hear him.

‘So funny! So funny it was. He comes racing across to meet me. And he falls over. Falls at my very feet.’

Nikola says, laughing, ‘Well, that was funny.’

‘What is he a - a clown?’ asks Liam, ‘Or what? Is he made up? Is he wearing white clown paint?’

‘He,’ says Nikola, ‘is a film director. And his friend is a film writer!’

‘Shoot!’ says Liam, ‘Go on! You don't say! Fil-um people. What next!’

Their voices drift into the wind.

Meanwhile, I’m with Justman, and I press on saying, ‘How come you wrote "the mark upon him"? I've never known you to say that, to say "the mark is upon him."’

Justman says, ‘It's not necessarily you. Why do you think it's you? It’s writing’. He looks at me. ‘I’m writing a screenplay. That’s fiction, Funk-face.’

‘It's not me?’ says I, ‘Oh no, the White Knight. The White Knight with the mark upon him, the White Knight going off to protect Nikola. That wouldn't be suggesting me, would it?’

I’m pulling, in petulant irritation, at a piece of grassy reed-like vegetation, growing just where I’m sitting, sitting a short distance away from the fire with Justman.

Suddenly, I cut myself on it.

The vivid blood spreads across my fingers.

Justman says, ‘Anyway I can say the mark on you. I can say it. Nobody else bloody ought to. But I can’.

He looks weirdly across, then, and says, ‘You can say the mark on me too. Say it, buddy’.

‘What?’

‘You know what!’ says Justman.

‘There's no mark on you,’ I say.

‘No mark on me?’

‘There's nothing showing on you,’ I go, ‘Not like with me’.

Justman says, ‘Yo, Whitey. Shame! You tell white lie. I've seen you. Caught you looking at me as though there's a big HIV printed on my forehead.’

‘Nobody else,’ I say, ‘has ever called me that. I mean "Whitey".’

I’m sucking the blood from my finger.

‘I mean said it in a nice way,’ I add, tasting it, the blood.

Over near the fire, Nikola is giggling madly at something the little guy has said to her.

Moonbeams show up her head and her bare neck and her shoulders, for me to look at, as I think what it is I’m going to say.

So I hold up the still bleeding finger. I say, ‘You could cut yourself, Justman. On this sedge grass, here the way that I did cut myself. Do it. And then we'll mix our blood’.

Justman is moved by this. I see that he is. He knows what I’m driving at.

He hates it, the showing of the emotion, but he can't help it, can’t help the wetness that’s filling his eyes.

Justman, angrily, says, ‘You're crazy!’

And he stands and moves away from me.

Liam Gallivan, that’s his name, sees Justman wandering dazedly over to the fire, and beyond, begins speaking to Justman as he sees him approaching, and, he’s noticing, because he’s a real little noticer, that Justman has been weeping tears.

I see this because I follow Justman across to the fire. I flop back down on the earth.

Liam says to Justman, awkwardly, as he passes, ‘Thank you. For your wonderful hospitality. I have enjoyed it so very much. The tea and the oranges. The fire’.

Nikola calls across to Justman, ‘He would like us to visit his place’.

Right then a weird screeching erupts from somewhere. Nikola, scared, draws in her breath.

‘That is only possums. Or bunyips!’ says Liam. He repeats, ‘Or bunyips!’

‘To visit his place,’ says Nikola, louder, recovering.

Liam, in a high-pitched sing-song voice says, ‘Goodness gracious. I would dearly, dearly love it and so would Mother. So Mother would, she would’.

‘Well’, says Justman, ‘but we have to move on tomorrow’.

To clarify like, I say, ‘We have booked in tomorrow night down the road. We will have to leave early morning, I guess’.

‘Oh, says Nikola. ‘Oh, I told him that. He says come over tonight. He says why just go to sleep when there's company?’

She looks across at Liam, for confirmation.

He nods enthusiastically.

She looks back at Justman. And at me.

Liam, trying to persuade us, says, ‘I would never really have shot you. I always carry my gun but. Not to shoot folks but’.

He cackles.

The screeching breaks out again.

‘That's possums is all. I shoot 'em. Or bunyips. I shoot ‘em, too!’

He gestures in my direction.

He says, ‘But he, that one, had me a bit worried that's why I cocked the gun. Seeing his face come out of the shadows like, well, goodness gracious!’

I’m a little riled. I know why he has said it. But still I ask, ‘Why did I have you worried? What did you think I was?’

‘No offence, mate,’ says Liam. ‘We just all get worried if anybody is a bit different.’

‘But you don't worry me,’ I say.

Liam thinks about this.

Then he chuckles.

‘Mother's even shorter than me. Come and see Mother in the flesh, if you don't believe me. What do you say?’

So we go, set off through the bush, in the half-light, four funny people.

Down the slope, along the creek, over the little bridge, up a hill, until we come to a cluster of buildings.

In the distance the shape of a house emerges from behind the sheds and we cross a yard towards it and our feet, loud on the gravel, make a crunching sound, causing a dog to bark.

‘Is this,’ says Nikola, ‘Rats Castle?’

‘Rats Castle! You think I'm a rat?’ says Liam.

He looks like one, before he laughs, and also when he laughs.

And he says in his squeaking voice, ‘No rat. No Rat's Castle’.

‘It's on the map,’ insists Justman.

Liam says, ‘Wooowee! I'm scared!’

He laughs uproariously at his ‘joke’.

Nikola sees how he's enjoying himself so she laughs too.

"I’m scared!’ says Liam, as we approach the house. And laughs more.

Suddenly, there’s a child, we catch sight in the half-light of a child, on the verandah of the house, a girl-child framed by the open door watching our approach.

A breaking, piping voice comes, ‘Who's that? Who is that?’

Liam calls, ‘Nobody’.

He winks at me extravagantly and laughs.

‘Liam?’ comes the voice. ‘Is that you there, Liam?’

The small girl can be seen now as we get up close to be an elderly woman. She is tiny.

‘Liam, who's that you've got with you?’ she says, peering down, as we come closer.

‘They're folks,’ says Liam. ‘Visitors. Quick do some dusting and puff up the cushions.’

She says, ‘You're off your head’.

Liam clambers up the steps onto the verandah and puts out his short arms and tries to wrap them around her.

‘Mother, guess what?’ he says, ‘They're fil-um people! So you'll have a lot in common with them. Say, won’t you just have something in common. Oh, my sweet word, yes!’

We go inside the house.

Liam introduces his mother to us as as ‘Florence’.

‘Take 'em through to the front room, Liam,’ she says to him, then checks herself, and in a poor attempt at a sotto voce so that everyone can hear says, ‘Liam? Are they all right, Liam? I'm not a goer if they're not all right’.

‘Mother! They're from Melbourne. You don't want to go judging. Not by what they look like! I told you they're like artists you know. From the Mainland! The Mainland!’

‘You never told me, Liam!’

‘I said, "Fil-um people!"’

He nudges her, ‘You know! Mother! You know what they'd be very interested in, don't you? You go ahead and tell them, Florence’.

He cackles away, as we go down the passageway.

‘Florence! Florence!’ he says.

There’s no electricity in their house.

They have kerosene lamps. The soft lamp-light and the fire-light makes the living-room exotic and familiar, romantic and ordinary.

Florence, with her back to the fire, says, ‘That’s my grandmother’s picture, there above the piano. She was gorgeous. She was on the stage. She was pretty like me. I am still pretty I’m told. And I don't care who knows it, if I’m a day old, I am very nearly SIXTY FIVE years old.’

‘Mother!’ says Liam, ‘They won't believe you at all if you tell them that. Movies and movie people and dates. B'lieve me these fellows are expert IN THEIR FIELD they are. And knowledgeable with it. They know fil-um stars. Their biographies they know like the backs of their hands.’

He pauses, impressively, then continues, ‘You know what they were showin’ off with comin’ over here down the track? You shoulda heard some of it. Woo-wee. Ah now, listen! - to this one, Mother, Florence, - who was it? who was it? - I think I’ve got it - who was it? who said? who said, "I have rainbows all up my arse?"

He laughs and looks expectantly at his mother.

I can hear his quick breathing, as he waits for her to guess.

Florence chuckles extravagantly. She shows her long white teeth. She says, ‘I am sure I don't know that’. She laughs more, waiting to hear.

‘Guess? All right. You can’t guess? All right, then,’ says Liam. ‘What then if I tell you that that it was - Judy, it was, Mother - Judy Garland! She said that!’

He turns to Justman. 'Isn't that right?’

‘That's - uh - what I read,’ answers Justman, his hand touching his chin.

‘Uh-huh,’ goes Florence, then sucks her teeth and says, ‘Well, well! Fancy! And why do you suppose Judy came out and said that?’

Liam says, ‘He doesn’t actually know. You don’t, do you?’ he says to Justman. ‘He only knows that she definitely said it.’

Justman shrugs his shoulders.

‘Funny though,’ says Liam, ‘Funny what they say, these celebrities. They’re just people like us. But I don’t have to tell Mother. Mother knows that. If anyone knows that, Mother knows that. Oh, my goodness, yes. Florence, she knows all that stuff.’

He does a little soft-shoe shuffle and then he plants his tiny feet and takes his mother by the shoulders and sits her down in a cane chair by the fire and he leans out and he kisses her on the top of her sparse-haired grey head.

‘My mother!' he says, ‘Florence.’ Proud as.

Justman, says jerkily, he eventually says, ‘I uh believe - that uh you like the movies, uh Mrs - ahh - Mrs -’

‘She loves them,’ says Liam, and winks grotesquely, ‘and the movie actors! Loves them particularly! She does!’

Through this, as he talks, he has produced bottles of Cascade Pale Ale and he is doing the honours, in style, blowing first in the glasses and wiping them out with a rag.

And then with continual flourishes, he goes on to the pouring out of the ale, extravagantly, into the long hotel glasses that have the motto ‘AHA’ imprinted on them, and he’s quite aware, you can see, that as each glass when it’s poured fulsomely runs over, the froth tumbling onto his shoes and onto the dusty rattan matting, that he gives not a cuss, for the more the beers slop over, the more generous must seem the hospitality, and so it goes, and then he's handing them around these good ales, the premium stuff.

As he walks from the sideboard with the glasses and back again he struts a lot and his little backside wobbles. Everybody watches. I know I watch.

His mother leans back in the cane chair near the fire and studies hard the faces of Justman and Nikola, the way old people do, and especially she studies me.

Especially at me she stares.

Ah well, I tolerate her fixed gaze boring into me. I’m used to fixed gazes. I’m an Albino.

So to make conversation, forced by the sound of her sucking her teeth and by the long moment of her staring at me, I drift into a little philosophising.

Here’s what I hear myself saying. ‘Some people have ‘normal' up their arses.’

An awkward beat. They all stare at me. I think I blush.

But Liam pulls the group together.

He says, ‘Tell them, now, Mother. Please! Please, please, oh please tell them!’

He dances about, excited, all his excitement mounting. He wets his lips. He blows the froth from his beer.

‘What?’ she says.

Liam rolls his eyes pseudo-impatiently. Then lifts up his glass, high, says ‘Bottoms up!’ and takes a long pull of his ale, and then he gasps for air and then he licks his lips again, then says, ‘Mother! You are really beginning to try my patience!’

‘Oh that,’ she offers.

She sits up more alert and focuses.

And begins, ‘Well, now, let me see. Yes. The year was 1928. I was a child prodigy. More than a child, more than a prodigy. As cute as a button. Mary Pickford had nothing on me. My bangs were golden honey. My voice was honeyed silk. My arms were liquid. My cuticles were -’

(‘Mother!’ screeches Liam.)

She continues, ‘It was summer. The summer of all summers. We lived then at Beulah’.

She breaks into song. ‘Oh Beulah-land, sweet Beulah-land,’ she sings.

And as she relates the past, in tinted tones like in an old movie, the scenes and events as they are seen in her head are somehow transported, or screened, rather, into the heads of each of us. Flickering sepia scenes. More or less, it happens somehow that way. Like we’re watching an old Hollywood classic.

As she goes on and says, ‘We holidayed wherever the sunshine was. Daddy always put us in First Class. Whenever we travelled we had luggage, thirteen pieces, fifteen pieces, almost a coach load there would be, and all of the softest calf leather. I had a white ermine collar on you know. Just as white as white it was. This time I was travelling on the train, back to school, Finishing School it was, on my own. Well! When I saw - saw him - I simply gave him a shy smile and held out my hand. But, oh, he was enraptured I could tell. He had lovely teeth. Say, I do, I do remember his teeth. At first he thought I was a child and he would have brushed the ends of my fingers with his fingers and left it at that. But as soon as he realised I was a woman, or a girl on the verge of womanhood, at once he was smitten. Quite, quite smitten. Heh heh!’

We wait for her laughing to subside. The fire throws up sparks. I take a slurp of Pale Ale.

She continues, ‘He lifted me up then like I was a doll and sat me on his knee. Nobody knew what he did then! Nobody knows what he did then! And nobody need ever know! How could they? The two of us, he and me, alone in the train carriage and the carriage blind almost pulled off its roller, he yanked it down so hard, did he not? And the pure white smoke billowing back from the engine over all the train windows, as we went through a tunnel, south of Campania. Heh heh! Well, we jumped right in! JUMPED RIGHT IN! You do, don't you, at that age? Jump in? Of course he was not even eighteen, perhaps a little less to, maybe less, and I was well - I don't remember. I don’t remember. Or I don’t want to say.’

She leans back glassy-eyed and she is breathing heavily and the cane chair creaks. She winks at me Liam says, softly piping, quietly, reverently, Liam, he is whispering the name, over and over, 'Errol Flynn. Errol Flynn. Errol Flynn’.

‘What?’ I utter.

Liam looks me steadily in the eye and says, ‘Mother - and Errol Flynn.’

Justman sits forward in his chair, splashing his beer. He stammers, ‘W- what? You m-mean -’

All of us stare at Florence, the focus of attention, as the universe stands still.

She continues, ‘We changed lines at Parattah. Parted forever. Later I thought that it was, you know, awfully jolly sporting that he had told me his name like that, Errol Flynn. Sometimes, sometimes they don't ... say their name ... you know, some boys won’t ...’

The memories go dancing, of course, around and around in her head.

And now that Justman and I realise who the person was in the memory, we ask if we can hear it all again and see it all again.

We think we will be able to visualise it even better next time.

But that’s not all! There’s better and better.

For, listen, from a niche or a cache, beside the fire-place, she then produces a large flat cardboard box and she’s taking the lid off it and she’s up-ending it onto the floor and masses and masses and loads and loads of heavy cardboard-backed black-and-white photos, and sepia and tinted and hand-painted photographs, scatter all across the rattan, onto the floor at our feet!

And Florence manages, while the focus of all attention, to manipulate with one small foot her shoe from off of her other small foot, and that is the way she doesn’t have to bend down, with the rheumatism, or whatever, and then with her pretty small bare foot, except white-stockinged, she now jangles the photos, and she shuffles through them, and searches, and cleverly and deftly manipulates one small photogravure, doesn’t she, clear of all the other photogravures, and elegantly with her toes, with her tiny toes she pushes it towards Justman, doesn’t she?

She does.

‘Does this help?’ she says.

Justman snatches up the photo and, with a huge hole in his face, gazes upon it.

I can see. It is a young Errol Flynn. Errol to the ‘T’.

Liam suddenly says, ‘Here Mother, thirsty work reliving that, let me top up your glass.’

Smiling, so proud of her, he does. He tips the bottle, filling her glass unthinkingly. Until the head on the beer erupts, as usual, over the edge of the glass and the beer spills onto her lap and flows onto her dress and down her dress, white with big purple flowers, dahlias, I think.

But she doesn't react to that, she's oblivious, also.

She and Liam chuckle.

She wets her lips, before she says, ‘After all these years I can still remember his teeth’. She laughs uproariously.

‘He bit me. Just here.’

She tugs at her frock, lifts it awkwardly.

‘Just - here,’ she repeats, indicating a mark on her side.

The old ebony clock ticks noisily on the mantle piece.

Though loath to break the magic moment, I can’t quite help himself, I am forced to say, ‘Uh - Mrs. - uh, Florence - I wonder, did you ever bump into - into Merle Oberon? I don’t suppose? Maybe as well? Merle? I don't suppose - that you - you ever - m-met - M-merle - Oberon -’

The clock strikes the half-hour.

Liam's mother looks up at the clock.

But she doesn't respond to my plea.

She's still dreaming.

Enjoying, enjoying all the best of the frothy beer and the froth of the past.

Then later, as we leave, this happens.

The clouds in the sky, rapid, flitting by the moon.

People shifting in the shadows, near the front gate.

Liam, angling for some time how to do so, now makes an overture to Justman, and takes his hand, contemplating some dream of coition.

But Justman shakes his hand loose and pulls away.

‘Stay the night!’ begs Liam.

Justman kills a mosquito that alit on his arm.

Liam despairs, and then as a last resort he sorts through his brain and locates an old double entendre.

He pitches it at Justman. ‘People can bunk in together,’ he says, laughing shrilly, falsely, emptily.

Justman turns on his heel, electric torch in hand, switches it on, sends knives of light slicing into the dark land of the bunyips.

Liam kicks the ground, turns on his heel and joins his mother, takes her hand.

She’s his consolation, she always has been.

Nikola, sloping forward, gives Florence a kiss.

Florence waves farewell to me. To me, who is, in fact, standing right next to her. Why she needs to wave when I’m standing next to her nobody knows. I think it’s because she thinks I’m short-sighted. Which I am.

‘Goodbye, everybody,’ says Florence. Then she checks as she remembers something. She puts her hand out to take my hand but she’s so short, she touches my leg, takes it, grabs at it.

‘Oh, what? What - what was it did you want?’ she says to me, holding my trousers near the groin.

I take a step closer further into her space, I look down over her, I wonder how her face can be so smooth and unlined at her age, as I agonisingly wait for something, for a word from her. For I think I know what she alludes to. It’ll be what I asked her about.

I cough awkwardly. I wait.

But nothing. The moon dips. The dark is all around us. Finally, I bite on my lip and give up. I start to walk away.

Just then, ‘Wait!’ calls Florence, ‘Merle Oberon? Merle - O-ber-on. - Hmmm.’

I turn back.

Justman, the Film Buff, intercedes. Pompous, he says, ‘There are contradictory reports regarding this. Some have asserted that Merle Oberon was actually born in India and she only said at first that she came from Tasmania, whereas later she vehemently denied it’.

But Florence begins to chuckle, that familiar chuckle.

‘No wait, let me think. There was another summer. That year I was at St Helens, at Binnalong Bay, walking on the beach I was, when I saw emerging, emerging from the ocean, a dark, a very dark, strikingly lovely, slightly I would say, Asiatic-looking girl with olive skin. And with such beauty, too. I can still see her. She comes crossing the bar with her white bathing costume a startling contrast against her dusky, dusky skin. O skin, such skin. It was, indeed, it was, Merle Oberon! Heh heh! And! I have to add this. The funny thing, do you know, was, she told me she that envied me. She envied me my skin! Imagine! Skin. O skin!’

She chuckles, she wrings her hands, she looks at her own bare arms.

Wildly, I say, ‘Yes! Yes! I too have noticed your skin, me, myself!’

I had, too, hadn’t I?

Well, we take our leave, walk off through the bush.

And it's hard to make out where to walk as the moon has gone in.

Justman leads the way, with the torch, striding angrily into the black unknown.

I know what he goes through.

It’s the HIV.

It’s AIDS. He thinks it is that now. He has implied that he will never have sex again.

Nikola and I are holding hands, helping each other. When one stumbles, over a rock or a root, the other helps, taking the weight of the stumble.

What a night it is! As dark as it is we see wallabies, scampering off, loud thudding the ground.

Justman flashes his torch and catches the eyes of the wallabies or wallaroos or pademelons.

Nikola says, ‘Why did you say to him, to Liam before, that we have booked in down the road? Where would that be, Dummy?’

I say, ‘I have the list somewhere. The names of the places we wrote down. You know. Where we want to go to make our movie.’

‘But booked in?’ she says, ‘Booked in? We’re not booked in.’

‘Predestined is what I meant, not actually booked in,’ I say.

I’m feeling ecstatic.

I love Tasmania! Errol Flynn and Merle Oberon. They're here! With us. All around us! And Louise Lovely, you know, and - and - and Christ knows, Essie Davis! And - and - and - Robert Grubb, even.’

The moon briefly comes out and we pause together where we are, the two of us.

But Justman goes on into the distance.

Oh, Justman.

But Nikola and I are alone.

Listening, first we are listening.

There's something, some sound above us, in the large ghost gum tree.

Why, it’s the the sound of breathing. Is it? Or humming. Or of something mystical.

Under the tree, the sound of stealth, then of rising excitement, until I, in my mind, have my arms around her.

I am locked in the position, close to her, my body around her, and my face burying in near the back of her neck.

I’m envisaging.

And in reality? She is there, she is reachable, though she gives nothing, and I don't know whether to move. I think, why must men make the move?

Except for the breathing, the night holds still.

Holds very still, until I will myself to act.

I shift my body around hers, getting in front of her, I’m taking her space, taking her eyes away from the tree, where she looks up, so she can’t, although she wants to, she can’t see past me.

Then, her eyes re-focus from the whiteness of the ghost tree onto the stark whiteness of my face which is close in front of hers.

Her face is shadow and I lean into the shadow.

And before I feel with my mouth her mouth, I see the shift of her eyes and the refocusing and the recognition.

I’ve kissed her, for the first time.

I have done that much. Skin to skin and flesh to flesh.