by Auntie Rhoberta, the Red Dragon. Available from AbeBooks. Also, Scribd, Lulu.com.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Roumania.
- Dorothy Parker.

Chapter One: Llust for Fame

Daddy exploded, in putrescent rage:
“Fame? Fame, my girl, we measure in concentric Celtic circles, like the force of a nuclear blast!”
Shivering, ignoring her fat boofheaded partner across the breakfast table (he believed amongst other things in ‘ethical businesses’), she recalled the eruption with awe. She was not well up on geometry, Celtic or otherwise, but as a household name in literature (outshining Microsoft Word and Liquid Paper) she felt for the moment secure. Daddy, despite his head-shrinking tendencies, his fondness for little girls, and the fact that he was the country’s principal Patron of the Arts, could hardly bang up in a nunnery the brilliant novelist Leonie Barmy.
She’d just turned 40 after all. You play with me at your peril, chorused her off-key Voices. Her Uillean bagpipes, on a special kiddy chair beside her, wheezed their approval, eeeeeeeerrr. Their Scotch fillets went untasted.
As she crossed her legs, her knee jolted the table and her partner received a faceful of his breakfast. She was too busy listening to her Voices to care. Rather more observant, these, during her interminable Dark Nights of the Soul, called her house ‘Plato’s cave’ or the ‘Druidic grove’. For the moment she called it home, but her heart was not in it having gone out to her long-lost Mummy.
Breakfast of pork steaming and crackling before her, she raised her teaspoon, licked a finger and smoothed out her dark eyebrows.
She thought of stirring him to death but the teaspoon’s bowl cracked. An acidic tear raced down her cheek. She was reminded of a rat scuttling down a hawser, and rocked back and forth sullenly.

As if in response, Daddy slavered and breathed fire in her head, sipping a Bushmills and puffing on his dudeen of shamrock leaves. To silence him and his stage Irishness for a while, she stopped sinking at the circular quay and studied her abridged Celtic Mafia (CM) version of the Bible (signed by the author and in an Efficiency class wartime edition in which all the words in the language are reduced to one, understood by context) with its Good News of her ancient literary heritage.
Her mind formed guilty questions like ‘What part did the wily Celt play in the Crucifixion of Our Lord? Held up the sponge of Jameson vinegar?’, questions which robbed her momentarily of her minimal confidence.
(She stopped rocking in case her newly-atheistic husband thought she was praying.)
That morning she’d risen drowsily from her tangled bed like so many protagonists at the opening of a novel, and indeed 90% of the population. Having now had a good lie down, a Bex, and a cup of tea (thus reversing Daddy’s conventional wisdom), she fumbled, chewing loudly, through the greaseproof pages, and re-read in a whisper (girl number twenty define a horse) the bit about Dafydd ap Moses and his only daughter Rhiannon (Exodus 2:6, 26, BINGO!):

Rhiannon woz fownd inn a streem wivinn a hark ov bullrushis … BINGO?

Leonie’s mind, devoid of stimulus, tried to escape its present state of crucifixation. (Hey Mr Tambourine Man, sang her partner softly.) Her imagination laboured overtime (but was eventually sacked along with the rest of the workforce). Half-asleep still, drenching him with pork fat, she found it impossible to resist the acerbic (though musical) commentary of her principal Voice:

Eh, Bwana, look at dis, fach / bach? Blatantly emigratin’ to Australia! De chicken run never looked so good! Dere be fifteen men on De Dead Man’s Chest – which sound like a bad case o’ congestion, no wonder Mistah Kurtz he dead! Knees up Eva Brahn! Forget de moanin’ minnies and pick dem zits and banjoes! Earl Scruggs, de Stanley Brothers, Peggy and Pete, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, De Tarriers, Woody Guthrie, de Noo Lost City Ramblers, Samantha Bumgarner, Buell Kazee, Beverley Hillbilly … Ah jes’ leurve de good ole three-finga pickin’ …

Her unshakeable belief in the Great Chain of Being was a bit challenged by this anarchic irruption into consciousness, but she rather enjoyed the naughtiness the Voice encouraged. Loudly she sang, an old, old favourite of hers, Silver threads and golden needles cannot mend this heart of mine …

Well, don’t needle me (dat’s off de record) – but Ah’ll be a five-string General Authority o’ de Mormon Church! Dis vessel ain’t shipshape! She’s listin’ badly and should de Spanish Armada appear over de horizon dere ain’t no amount o’ holdin’ de telescope up to de wrong ah gonna save de dear ole Brish Empah and its centuries o’ accumulated work experience! Fo’ a start, where de fuck is de parrot? Halfway up de mizzenmast wid a frisky albatross, no doubt! But Ah clear ye, ancient mariner, you caint afford Alan Dershowitz OJ.
But hell, it ain’t no time to be singein’ beards and playin’ another rubber – mind you, it not safe not to use ‘em dese diseased days, a heap o’ leprosy about, unclean, unclean, unclean, three bells why is dat de time? (It were a big mistake takin’ dat free package holiday to America – a metropolitan powah presently recolonisin’ itself, de Gulag growin’ bigger ev’y day, give us yo’ poor, yo’ tired, yo’ homeless, we ain’t payin’ for ‘em, two hunnerd years o’ slavery – daylight savin’ come and ‘e wan’ go home – and you got to have a friend in Jesus, so dey say – but now de sea is in mah blood, me hearties. Avast ye, brer Ishmael! Lash me to the marst, Mr Christian! Tote dat barge and lift dat bale! Thar blows Hägar de Horrible off de port bow wid de whole shmeery tribe o’ Lehi! De ship’s biscuits is clearly past dere use-by.)

Leonie muttered and giggled to herself, sss-sss-sss-sss-sss-sss! Her partner, being a product of the uptight 1960s Tafia was no doubt pretending not to notice.

Let it all hang out! So welcome to Club Med, lil’ Jack Tar-baby – Ah’s Long Joan Silverberg and dis is Old Blind Lemon Pew, de well-known hauthors o’ Das Kapital and old enough to remember Booker T. Washington an’ Frederick Douglass an’ Toussaint l’Ouverture an’ Lenny Bruce Lower (Groucho couldn’t come as he spot de ex and find de treasure) who oughta be doing better than we is in dis age of freewheelin’ globularisation and international trade in snatch! De Dead Hand o’ de Parst carryin’ Out de Damned Black Spot and we ain’t gonna take dat, fer ter see our birthright tooked away, Precious Lord Jim old chap (I thought de bastard was Polish)! We gwine been stuck here for years a-singin’ o’ de Campdown Races over and over while debatin’ de Problem o’ Evil, and it gettin’ borin’ (we also sick to de back teeth o’ Israeli Defence Force Radio) – could you be givin’ us a lift, by Gor? (Dis Betsy to Heavens, over, scuze my mobile, it goin’ off in temple to mah great embarrassment, but it important to have access to a telephone so we’s can ring up de Prez and complain about de lack o’ democracy.) We natchrally can sing fo’ our soul food supper: Old man ribber … Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones … Swing low, sweet f.a. … If I had a hammer … May de sickle be unbroken …

This was so funny that she snorted and inadvertently blew an april shower of snot in his direction. The cruelest month indeed; pity it was December.