The view was nice.
Below, in the thoughtless spread of a town planner drunk of both power and rum, the first rays of morning sunlight were trickling across another typical Sydney Sunday.
Slander regarding Sir Ralph Darling and the Sydney CBD left for another day; the wisps of clouds that patted against Norman began to blur his vision as he flailed toward the upward arc of his apparent trajectory.
Despite the best assurances of QANTAS, the sky is not a safe place for a kangaroo. And in times such as these, maiden flights of Australian mammals generally draw a crowd, but within the bustle of a sunday morning still in infancy, only the weary, fresh with the settled dew of their waking, would notice Norman. The rubbing of eyes failing to shake a half thought that they shouldn’t have just seen that.
So high above pinchgut island the panoramic spectacle offered to Norman was sadly lost upon his confused internal dialog.
Reality began to align with the slowing of inertia and just as ‘That’s a pretty sunrise’ popped into his head, the embrace of the ground began to beckon this rather startled kangaroo back toward itself.
Years ago (in kangaroo years) Norman can recall emerging from his mother’s pouch into the cold of winter. The pastel purples of a coming sunrise soaked his first view of the sky with a beauty that he can still picture. A wagtail, erratic and panicked, even in rest, suddenly darted into the yonder, beating its wings furiously as it disappeared. Norman watched and in envious pause he then dreamed of flight.
A smile.
Thumps of joy beat into his heart; he’s felt this joy before, bounding through the brush of the Blue mountains, over grass trees and banksia, down beside rushing streams and though gullies of fern, but never this pure, never this free.
Is falling more fun? Like rising, but the stomach lifts upwards as if it’s lagging behind. Building, building, quicker, quicker, everything a rush of motion in one direction. Before then he had experienced fright and even worry but never this, the thrill of fear.
Sadly, it is only with rare coincidence that a hot air balloon should appear in the sky.
They are never really seen coming, they just appear, clicking into existence with a surprise that must be confronting for the Balloon operator.
It is then by rare coincidence indeed that one should be listing over Sydney harbour at this time of year, in this, the trajectory of an airborne kangaroo.
Furthermore, it should be no surprise that English language, in all of its verbosity, has not invented a word for the sound of a male kangaroo slamming into a fully inflated hot air balloon. One lucky witness, for whom this was a sound that will forever be ingrained into his memory, was unfortunately lacking when asked to describe the event.
Interviewed later the roof tiler would claim that the noise sounded much like a rat getting stuck in a pillowcase, to which the journalist interrupted and quickly cut back to the newsroom, leaving the rest of this burgeoning simile forever untold.
So it is that mornings are always left behind and as the tattered fabric of a broken balloon swept across five lanes of southbound traffic, a rather happy kangaroo hopped off down the Cahill Expressway on his way towards Bondi.
Norman was later tranquilized and now resides at the Australian Reptile park.
Sir Ralph Darling was dead long before any of this happened and had no opinion on the matter.
Sunday Short Stories 