Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  I applied this principle to the McGraths.

  I was an Aviator. That was my value to them. I set to work to reinforce this value. I propped it up and embellished it a little. God damn, I danced around it like a bloody bower-bird putting on a display. I added silver to it. I put small blue stones around it.

  By the time I swung the headlights of the Hispano Suiza on to the McGrath house in Western Avenue, Jack McGrath could see the factory I said – it was a pleasant whim – I was going to establish, a factory that was going to build Australian-designed aircraft. It was splendid. Everyone in the car could see it, shimmering in the moonlight.

  You call it a lie. I call it a gift.

  When I saw the size of the house, I was pleased I had taken so much trouble with my story. It was the equal of the lace-decorated Victorian mansion I saw in the headlights. It was capped with a splendid tower and the tower was capped with a crown of wrought-iron lace. For a building with a tower I could not have taken too much trouble.

  In an instant, it seemed, they had the mansion blazing with electric light. It poured forth in luxury from every window, washed across the flower beds and flooded the lawn. Even the yellow-brick garage had its own set of lights and as I garaged the Hispano Suiza I could hear the voices of the two women as they called to the maid who fluttered like a moth inside the kitchen windows and threw fleeting shadows out across the lawn.

  I liked the electricity. I liked the sheer quantity of it. It was right that a house like this, grander than any I had ever stayed in, should be so enthusiastically illuminated.

  The cicadas, as if they were wired on the same circuit, suddenly filled the garden with a loud burst of celebration. If fireworks had now illuminated the summer sky they would not have been out of keeping with my emotions. I had never seen anything like it. I had never seen anything approaching it. There was a ballroom, a music room, a library, a tower. Don't worry that there was no dancing in the ballroom, no music in the music room, and not a single book in the library. To dwell on those empty shelves would be to miss the point. There were stained-glass windows made by M. Ives of Melbourne. There were carpets, wall to wall, made in Lancashire from Western District wool. There were ice chests, music machines, and electric wiring everywhere.

  Jack had introduced the electricity himself. He hadn't messed around. He ran the wires like streamers across the ceiling, tacked them on to wooden architraves, hung them from a picture rail and looped them around the curtain rods. The neighbours in Western Avenue might not have cared for this frank approach, but I liked it. It made me comfortable. It was a house where you could put your feet up and drink French champagne or Ballarat bitter according to your mood.

  The other remarkable thing about the house was chairs. There were so many of them waiting to be sat on that you could see, immediately, that the McGraths were hospitable people and they'd never pass up a chance to buy an extra chair if it took their fancy. Their taste was catholic, although that is a term they would not have used themselves. Was there Chippendale? Perhaps. And Louis-Quatorze? Probably, but the Herbert Badgery who looked on that array did not even know such names. They were all chairs to him, some old, some new, some tatty, some gilt, some comfortable, some overstuffed, some bursting with horsehair which would prickle the back of your legs and make you itch. I got the feeling that my hosts expected, at any moment, a hundred people with weary legs to walk in off the street.

  I could hear the women making supper. Jack showed me to a room. He opened up the big French doors on to the veranda and the room filled with the smell of flowers, salt from the bay, the humming generators of cicada engines. The cupboard was full of clothes that Molly had collected to sell for the Wyuna Nursing Home appeal.

  "Help yourself," said Jack. "There's some first-rate stuff in here, I warrant you."

  I got myself a new wardrobe that night, selecting carefully, thinking of the winter ahead.

  "Snaffle every staver," I told myself as I admired myself in my new suit. I thought I was a real smart bastard.

  10

  They tell me now that there was no wireless in Geelong in 1919, but I tell you there was. It had a big round dial depicting not only the stations but the world itself. We sat around it on our chairs. Phoebe drank a cordial and clinked her ice inside the glass. Molly had tea. Jack and I drank Scotch. Alcohol was always dangerous for me when I was excited: I sipped. Not Jack. He confessed he had been a teetotaller to the age of forty and he appreciated his drink the way he appreciated knots. He wiped his mouth with the back of his broad hairy hand and marvelled at its effect on his constitution.

  "By Jove," he said, "that was good."

  There was wireless, all right, and they read the news on it. Jack, like my father before me and my son after me, was a bit on the deaf side and he leaned attentively towards the set. The rest of us stared at the amber glow behind the map of the world: there was news that night of the Australia-England air race. Ulm, so the plummy-voiced announcer said, had crashed in Crete.

  My God, it was the year to be an aviator. We could do no wrong. When the press wrote up a pilot he wasn't just a pilot; he was an "eagle soaring above our skies" and no matter how often some ex-RFC type crashed while publicizing War Bonds, the public never seemed to get tired of it. The Australia-England air race fed them on tales of heroism and danger.

  As it happened, I had known Charles Ulm. Possibly I had known Charles Ulm. To tell you the truth I can't remember whether I really did know him or if I claimed it so often I came to believe it myself. Photographs of Ulm never looked like the man I described but people always blamed the photographer for that, not me. In any case, when the news was over I told them all about Ulm, what he was like as a man, what he looked like and so on. In short, I delivered value.

  I gorged myself on cold roast lamb and beans and beetroot. I hadn't had a feed in two days.

  11

  Phoebe watched the man who kept a snake for a pet, who shared, it seemed, a bedroom with the creature. She thought he devoured the table with a most peculiar passion, a passion as cool and blue as his eyes, as controlled and modulated as her own careful speech. She watched her mother as she fluttered – a hummingbird – in the cage of the aviator's oil-stained hand.

  "That is so, Mr Badgery?" said Molly who had gone all plummy-voiced. "Is it not?"

  Molly was so shell-shocked by social life in Geelong that she had lost all confidence in her normal manner. She now crooked her finger in a monstrous way when drinking tea. People thought her affected.

  Phoebe would one day grow into the most formidable snob yet she did not judge or reject her mother for her anxious affectations – her mother was vulgar, but she loved her. Phoebe put the whole responsibility upon Geelong. It is in matters to do with Geelong that she was a snob and she would, given half a chance, have made invidious comparisons with Paris. She did not get a quarter of a chance. The talk was all aviation. They quoted the farmer from Myah-Myah who built an aeroplane in 1910 based solely on a newspaper photograph of the Wright Brothers' plane. They talked of Smithy and Ulm and were momentarily silent for the first Kingsford Smith, Ross. And Phoebe missed the point: the talk was really a celebration of towns as plain (and plainer than) Geelong. They were eyries, the birthplaces of the great. Australians, it seemed that night in Western Avenue, were born to rule the skies.

  We drank a toast: "To our eagles." The owner of the antiquated Morris Farman on whose side was strapped a bicycle for seeking help, did not even have the grace to blush.

  Phoebe, however, invented me according to her needs. She imagined she saw Jewish blood, or Semitic blood anyway. She thought of Arabs in ships with odd-shaped sails, traders from Sumer, Phoenicians selling their rare purple dyes swept here in the eddies of time to a dull bay and an electrically-illuminated supper in Geelong.

  But she saw also, in an ebb in the conversation, that I suddenly looked so sad, so lost, that my mouth lost its shape. In my eyes she saw the shape of brilliant dreams, and also (like a private dra
wer stupidly left open) the stubbornness, the wilfulness in my lips, a cruelty, a fear of my own weakness. Her perceptions were a dangerous mixture of deadly accuracy and pure romance.

  I did not speak to Phoebe during that meal during which she silently, picking at lamb gristle, nibbling at lip-staining beetroot, made a number of decisions that were to affect her for the rest of her life. The first of these was that she would learn to fly and the second was that I should teach her.

  That night she would glide into sleep on the double wings of a Morris Farman. I stayed up talking to Jack for another four hours but when I lay, at last, on the cool sheets of my bed, I spat carefully on my forefinger and rubbed, ever so lightly, the head of my penis which was filled to bursting with dreams of creamy skin.

  12

  I had some funny dreams about Jack McGrath in later life, but there is no benefit to be obtained from discussing them here, even if I do compare that first night to the first night with a new lover. There was passion, sympathy, excitement. We were tireless. We were sopleased. We talked of aeroplanes and motor cars, bullock teams and the bush. We recited Lawson and Banjo Pater son. We were still beneath the naked light globes in the ballroom when the milk cart went clopping down Western Avenue. We heard the clink of the ladle in the bucket, the sweet sound of pouring milk, the seagulls restless on the Quay a mile away.

  Jack must have been dressed in the suit he had worn in honour of A. D. Collins, but I choose to remember him differently, with stubble on his folded face, the patch of dark hair on his ruddy cheek, his collarless shirt unironed, his old vest, his patched trousers, his unlaced boots placed beneath his chair (where they would be lost on the morrow), his toes curling and uncurling inside his carefully darned navy blue socks.

  He told me the story of his life, and I'll tell you too, later.

  I also told him the story of my life, or rather the parts of it I had never told a man before. It has to be told again now, and I find it harder than I did when I looked at Jack's soft eyes in his crumpled sympathetic face.

  This story concerns my father who I always imagined to be an Englishman, who made such a thing, as long as I knew him, of his Englishness, who never missed a chance to say, "I am an Englishman" or, "as an Englishman" that I was surprised to find out he was born in York Street, Warrnambool, the son of a shopkeeper. Yet for all that, I must carry his lie for him. For he made himself into an Englishman and my first memory of him is being chastised for the way I spoke.

  "Cahstle," he roared at me, "not kehstle." He did not like my accent. He did not, I think, like much about me. My brothers were older and they got on with him better. They were useful to him in his business and I was too young to do any more than feed the animals and jump down to apply the brake on hills.

  His business was to represent the English firm of Newby whose prime product was the Newby Patented 18 lb. Cannon, and with this machine in tow we covered the rutted, rattling, dusty pot-holed roads of coastal Victoria, six big Walers in front, the cannon at the rear, and that unsprung cart they called a "limber" in the middle.

  Always we were in a hurry. There was never a time when we might stop at a pretty spot, or a morning when we could lie late in bed. Always there was some group of squatters who had got themselves together or -and this must be what really happened -who my father thought could be persuaded to get together to buy a cannon to protect themselves from Russians or Chinese or shearers.

  He was a man who saw threat everywhere – thin but very strong, pale-skinned, blue-eyed, black-bearded and as cold to his children as he was charming to his customers. I have seen him at table with fat mayors and muscle-gutted squatters, laughing, telling jokes, playing them as sweetly as if they were his own violin, warming them up, getting their pores wide open before he hit them with the icy blast of fear that was his specialty.

  It was from my father that I learned about the Chinese and he painted pictures of such depravity that when I met my first Chinaman I expected him to kill me.

  God knows what I learned from my mother. I did not have her for long. I cannot tell you what she looked like, although, of course, I thought her pretty. I can remember sitting beside her on the limber -she is nothing more than a shape, but warm and soft, quite different to my two brothers and father who rode postilion on those huge Walers -they were as hard as the iron leg guards they wore on their right legs.

  My father dispensed with my mother when I was still very young and I always assumed that he sent her away, but it is more likely that she died. Only two things are certain. The first is that he would not discuss it. The second is that I blamed him. I was left alone on the bench seat with only the rounds of ammunition to keep me company. The limber was unsprung and iron-wheeled. They steered a course over logs and pot-holes just to jar me. And although I saw a lot of country it was not much of a childhood, moving as we did through threatening visions of Russians, Lascars, Jews, Asiatics, Niggers and other threats to our safety.

  My father was always very mean with his ammunition, and it was because of this that we finally parted. There was never a group of men, or an individual man, who did not like to see the cannon fired and there was nothing guaranteed to get him into a fury more than firing off a salvo for someone who did not buy a machine. He never showed his anger to the men who caused it ("A sale", he said, "is never lost, only to expect.

  My brothers seemed to accept their beatings but then they spent their day on horseback and shared their task, their understanding of life, with my father, while I sat alone on the limber with my thoughts which were only interrupted by my father hollering "brake". There was such weight in that cannon that the brake must be applied at the top of hills, and I was meant to know without being told, to jump down off the moving limber and turn the big wheel at the back of the cannon; this applied wooden blocks directly to the cannon wheels and, making a God Almighty scream, prevented disaster on steep hills.

  My father did not normally beat me badly, but there was an incident during the shearers' strike that resulted in a bloody beating. It was his fault, not mine. He got carried away with some wool cockies in Terang, and although I was only ten years old at the time, I could see that he wouldn't get the sale. These were fellows who wanted some fireworks, but my father missed the signs. He drew them pictures of mad-eyed shearers coming down to rape their wives and burn down their sheds. He let off ten shells and demolished a stand of iron-barks, leaving nothing but bleeding sap and torn splinters as soft as flesh. When it was over I could see the look on the men's faces – you see the same look outside brothels as they put on their hats and hurry away – a flaccid, shamed, satiated look.

  These squatters told my father: "We'll think about it."

  Well, he was nice as pie to them, but I felt the skin around my little testicles go hard and leathery and I sweated around my bum-hole and I will not describe for you the beating he gave me on account of this, but rather paint you the picture of my revenge, for it is this that I count as the day of my birth, just as it is from 1919, from the day I landed at Balliang East, that I count the days of my adult life.

  My revenge did not take place immediately, but I did have an idea. I imagined, as I sat alone on the limber with my bruises, that I lacked the courage to carry it out. But the idea would not go away. It grew inside me. At night it comforted me. Soaked to the skin on the road to Melbourne – we were covering about twenty miles a day – the idea made me smile, but I remained dutiful, applying the brake and letting it off as required.

  In Melbourne he had some work for a Grand Tattoo. He was paid for releasing showy blasts above the river Yarra; I don't know the occasion.

  But on the 15th June 1895 – when the squatters had defeated the shearers without the use of cannon – we came down the Punt Road hill towards the Yarra as part of a procession. My father had a uniform on, and my two brothers were also dressed up with leggings and hats like officers. My father had promised me a uniform too, but at the last moment he decided it wasn't worth the money.


  I did not honestly think I had the courage, but courage is a funny thing.

  "Brake!" called my father. "Brake!"

  Well, I jumped out. He turned and saw me. Have you ever seen the Punt Road hill where it comes down past Domain Street towards the Yarra? By God, it's steep. Well, I put the brake on at the top. The blocks of wood screamed against the steel, but as we came down the hill, I did it. It was such a well-oiled wheel. It moved so swiftly, so easily. Even a boy of ten could make it come whizzing back.

  I had not planned to destroy whatever home I had and it only occurred to me in that moment, that moment when I had released the brake, when the screaming wheel suddenly went free and silent, that instant before the other screaming began, it only occurred to me then as my father's eyes, panicked by the sudden silence, found mine, it only occurred to me then, as I said, that I now had no home. Yet the only thing I regretted afterwards was the damage to the horses. They were gentle creatures. I meant them no harm.

  "Poor little fellow," said drunk and sentimental Jack, releasing a tear or two which he smeared across his furry cheek. "Poor little chap."

  Thus encouraged I could not stop. I spewed out the rest of my story, which is not as harsh as it might sound today. In the Great Depression of the 1890s there were plenty of street urchins and plenty who did it harder than I did, plenty more who worked in factories where the air was so foul it would make your stomach turn just to stand in the doorway.

  I do not believe in luck. It was not luck that I was adopted by a Chinaman. I was adopted by a Chinaman because I chose to be. I did it, you might say, to spite my father. I did it because I liked his gravelly voice, because I saw him pat a little Chinese boy on the head, and pet him, and give him something to eat. (This was Goon Tse Ying and there is a whole story concerning him that I will come to later.)