Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

"To hell with the law," Horace told Bernstein, "the law is a monkey on a stick."

  "An ass," said Bernstein.

  "A billy goat's bum," said Horace, the bottle tucked safely in his pocket, his handkerchief abandoned on the floor. He bowed formally to his benefactors and withdrew.

  He threaded his cautious circuitous way to the Maribyrnong River, heading north as if he intended to visit Brunswick, then south as if the zoo had suddenly claimed his interest. He trotted out towards Haymarket along quiet streets and, when he considered himself safe, finally allowed Toddy to wander with his lolling head and stumbling hooves along the last two miles to Ballarat Road. They stopped for snapdragons and roses, delphiniums and geraniums. They stopped so Toddy could shit, or merely lift his tail and consider shitting. The horse, perhaps aware that the excitements of the day were not yet over, prudently threw a shoe four hundred yards from home.

  69

  The horse had its head at a pile of dung, purchased by Molly, intended for the garden. I saw it in my headlights and read the Rawleigh's sign on the panniers of the cart. My scalp prickled and my hands clenched. I knew that something was wrong. I am not inventing this, not confusing the before and after. I knew something was up before I heard my wife's voice, refracted, splintered, like the glass across a fallen water colour.

  I ran towards the house. I found the kitchen empty. The bedroom was full of light and threw too many shadowed forms against the canvas walls. I ran up the two steps that had once led to the small stage of the hall and found the scene that follows: my wife lying on our bed, spewing green bile into a basin held by a stranger, my mother-in-law sitting on the end of the bed stroking her daughter's feet.

  Phoebe wore a woollen nightgown. She twisted, stretched, jack-knifed, clasped her stomach and repeated the fractured moan that had chilled me at the front door. Her hair was wet and plastered on her forehead. My pocket bulged with commissioned photographs of "my house", "my home", "my family".

  "What in the name of God is happening?"

  Molly would not look at me. The man with the basin could not hold my eyes.

  "Phoebe," I said.

  "Poisoned," she said, and tried to laugh.

  My first and strongest inclination in the face of these conspirators was to hit someone, to bend a nose, crack a tooth, bang a head against a floor.

  "What poison?" I shouted and even Molly would not look up. She stared at her daughter's cold white feet. "What poison?" I asked the fat head. I gripped the iron bed with hands on which I had written the price of a limited slip differential.

  Phoebe opened her mouth to answer, then changed her mind, moaned, and leant towards the stranger's basin into which she discharged a long stream of green liquid.

  "I am your husband," I said, rocking the bed.

  The man I later knew as Horace Dunlop opened his child's mouth and then closed it.

  Phoebe pulled herself half up and leant on her elbow. "I am pregnant", she said, "and I have taken poison."

  I pushed my way round to the head of the bed, my eyes half closed, my brows hooded. I would have unchaired the poet and trampled on him if he had not been wise enough to vacate his position swiftly.

  I held the basin.

  "No baby," Phoebe said wearily.

  I shook my head.

  "No baby," she said and tried to smile. "No nothing. No Phoebe either. Poor Herbert."

  "Get a doctor," I said to the poet who was hovering at the doorway, "whoever you are."

  "No doctor," Phoebe said, and took my hand.

  "They'll charge her," the poet said. "She won't die. Don't call a doctor."

  "Who is this man?" I demanded. "Why is he here? Did he give you this poison?"

  "No, no," Phoebe said. "Only the Rawleigh's man."

  "She won't die," Horace said, taking a tentative step back into the room. "She is losing the foetus."

  "How dare you," I roared, standing up and spilling bile down my trouser leg. "How dare you call my child a foetus."

  "It is the name…"

  "It is not the name of my child you scoundrel and she will lose no child while I am here."

  "It is the scientific name of the unborn child."

  "And unborn it will stay, until its time. You mark my words Mr Man-or-Beast, she will lose no child. She will lose nothing."

  "Poor Herbert," Phoebe moaned.

  "It is a criminal offence," Horace said, plucking miserably at his cravat.

  "There has been no poison here," I said. "There is nothing in the house. My wife is ill. She will not lose anything." And if you had been there, had you seen me, you would not have doubted that I would keep the foetus clinging to the placenta by the sheer force of my will.

  "You get a doctor," I told the Rawleigh's man. "Now, get your horse out of the dungheap and go."

  "It is lame," said Horace. "It threw a shoe."

  "Then drive my car, man. This is 1921. Only a fool rides a horse."

  "I can't drive," he stammered. He had the look you see in public bars when a man knows he is about to get a beating.

  "I'll drive," Molly said.

  "You can't drive," I said, "you don't know how."

  "I can", she said simply, standing and patting her daughter on the knee, "and I will. Come, Horace," she said, "you come with me."

  And she took Horace by the sleeve and led him from the room.

  70

  It was still twelve years before Molly McGrath would come to public notice by refusing to sell her three electrical utilities, those of Ballarat, Geelong and Bendigo, to the newly formed State Electricity Commission. In 1921, however, we had no inkling of Molly's abilities. I did not doubt her passions. One had only to see her gazing at the electrically illuminated cross she had donated to the Catholic Church at Moonee Ponds – her eyes shone with that ecstatic light one sees portrayed in pictures of all the female saints – to see that she had as much enthusiasm for the electricity as she had for God himself.

  But we thought her silly. She encouraged us to think her silly. She was the half-mad wife of Jack McGrath, and had I known she was spending her days with realestate agents examining the books of businesses for sale, I would have done everything I could to protect her. As for driving a car, I would have judged her totally incapable. However I was not there to stop her.

  She had looked at the Hispano Suiza for a long time before she finally approached it.

  "It's my car," she said at last, and having gone for a pee and put some lipstick on, she rushed up to the vehicle and climbed in behind the wheel. She taught herself (noisily) the principles of clutch and gears; Phoebe came running from the distant Morris Farman to discover the driver of the car that circled round and round the bumpy tussocked ground was none other than her mother.

  When Phoebe recovered from her disapproval, she begged to be taught as well.

  Somehow they never got around to telling me, but the two women spent less time in the house than I had imagined. They were forever touring here and there – fast, unlicensed, but only sometimes reckless. It was this that gave Molly the idea about the taxi business, but that comes later on.

  My mother-in-law did not drive well on the night of Phoebe's poisoning. She stalled three times and lurched across a garden bed. She left huge wheel ruts in excess of anything her late husband could have managed. She could not understand why Phoebe would wish to kill her child. This writhing daughter was a stranger to her. She prayed to the Blessed Virgin who claimed more of her attention than the car she carelessly controlled. She prayed her daughter would not die. She prayed the child would survive.

  "I cannot understand her," she said to Horace as they crashed across on to the track to Newmarket. "Why would she ever contemplate such a thing?"

  Guilty Horace did not answer. He sank miserably into the big leather seats of the Hispano Suiza, too unhappy to be afraid of the consequences of such erratic driving.

  "She loves him," Molly told the poet. "She is infatuated with him. She worships him. Why would she do suc
h a thing? What did she imagine would come ofall that business?"

  The poet did not ask what all that business might be, although he guessed that aeroplane wings would do little to muffle the creaks of the marital bed.

  "She is a poet," he said (as they rattled over cobblestones towards Footscray in search of a doctor's light), but it seemed a poor defence in the face of the evil bile the victim spilled forth from her once pretty mouth.

  "I don't understand. He is so good to her. Poor Herbert," she said. "Poor man. She's broken his heart."

  She would never understand, although perhaps she should have. If they had taken three hours to find Dr Henderson's light the conversation would have continued its circular course, like an early-morning dream where the same problem spins on the edge of an off-centre black disc.

  71

  I sat by the head of the bed and wiped her brow with a water-wet handkerchief. I wiped it to soothe, to erase, wiped slowly, sadly, as I willed my child to remain exactly where he was.

  My wife wept and explained, argued, told the truth, lied and apologized while the spasms wracked her and I held her head above the basin.

  "The doctor will come," I said, "the doctor will come. He's coming now." I manufactured that damn doctor in my mind. I built his car and gave him road. I turned on his headlights and drew him towards me. Sweat ran from my forehead and caught in the creases of my eyes and coursed down my cheeks in imitation of the tears I could never easily shed.

  There were sounds locked tightly in my throat, sounds barely human, steel springs of misery which once released would have filled the room, speared the walls, and lacerated the smooth white skin of my bride and wife. I screwed them down with a lock nut and pierced the shaft with a cotter pin. I wiped.

  "Why?" I whispered. "Why?"

  Phoebe was stunned by the question.

  "Why?"

  "No good," she said. "Can't have children."

  I soaked the handkerchief and wrung it out. I sponged her arms. "Doctor's coming," I said.

  "Can't do it," she said and gripped my hand as another spasm wrenched her womb.

  "Can't do what, my darling?"

  "Can't fly. Can't do it. Can't poetry."

  "We will," I said.

  "Did you want a baby?" she asked, very clearly. She raised herself up and stared at me in surprise. I straightened the sheet. I tucked it in.

  "Yes," I said, and began to wash the perspiration from her clumsy hands, wiping each finger, one at a time.

  "Why?"

  I could not look at her. She forced my chin up with her hand so she could see my face.

  "I love you," I said. I dragged the words up from the dangerous part of my throat, dragged it out and slammed the door shut behind it.

  "Don't cry," she said.

  "I'm not crying."

  She sat up and held me. I put my arms around her and embraced her so hard she gasped for air. And I would give anything, now, to repeat that clean moment in the middle of such muddy pain.

  Phoebe was astonished. She had not understood me. She had never thought me fatherly. She had not imagined me with children. They seemed trivial, beneath me.

  "How could we fly? How could I write?"

  "You will," I said. "You will do both. You will have the child. I promise you."

  Now Phoebe, even in her remorse and pain, was not without calculation.

  "Do you really promise?" she said.

  "Yes."

  "Promise you won't stop me, ever."

  "Have the child", I begged, "and, God help me, the aeroplane is yours."

  "Will you write it down," she said, before the next spasm struck her and the bile she brought up changed from green to yellow.

  "Yes," I said. "I'll write it down."

  She knew me better than I knew myself and I do not blame her for it.

  "Better not die then," she said, and smiled.

  In any case, neither of us counted on Charles who was stubbornly clinging on, holding out against the raging seas that threatened to sweep him from his foetus world. He would not let go. Years later his wife would use the story against him and say it was this that had made him stubborn, that he would not go when he was not wanted, etc. However I fancy that Charles was always like it, from his very beginning, when he was a slippery pink thing without a proper face. So while we all made decisions, thinking it up to God, or the doctor, my willpower or Phoebe's connivance, it was none of our doing at all, and it was Charles who fought and won the battle against the cloudy liquid the actress bought in Carlton.

  72

  Dr Henderson was a small broad man with a shiny ruddy face and thin ginger hair. He answered the door with a vase of lilacs in his hand.

  Horace did not notice the vase. He noticed the doctor's tie. It was an Old Scotch Collegians tie and he was so desperate that he, quite literally, grasped it in his desperate hands and hailed his fellow Old Scotch Collegian as a long-lost friend.

  "What year?" asked the poet, softening his vowels in accordance with the social requirements of such a tie.

  It did not occur to the doctor that the dishevelled tramp on his doorstep might be claiming membership of a particular elite, but rather that he had lost his mind, knew not where he was or what year he was in.

  "1921," he answered, looking down his nose to where the warty hand grasped his old school tie.

  The poet thought this a great joke. Far too great a joke. He released the tie and slapped his thighs. "Ha, ha," he said, "damn good.1921."

  The doctor smoothed his tie with one hand, holding his vase of flowers at some distance where it would be safe from the enthusiasms of the stranger. "July 1921/' he said. "And half-past eight at night."

  "I was there in 1915," Horace said.

  "You're a returned soldier," the doctor said, imagining a different "there".

  "No. An Old Scotch Collegian."

  "I see," said Dr Henderson, looking at him with suspicion. "And what can I do for you?"

  Horace was so pleased to claim some fellowship with the doctor that all his fears immediately evaporated and he felt ridiculously safe. He told the whole sad story to the doctor who never, all the while, ceased to hold his vase of flowers at arm's length. The effect of the story was slightly spoiled by the laughter he used to punctuate his sentences. This was unfortunate, for it gave the impression that he thought the whole thing was some prank or rag whereas the laughter was produced by relief that he had not, after all, fallen into the power of a hostile stranger.

  The doctor did not believe a word he said. He could smell alcohol on his breath and he judged him drunk. Therefore he began to shut the door, stepping back quickly, withdrawing the vase as a tortoise will bring its head back into its shell.

  Horace placed his muddy shoe inside the door and would not let it shut.

  The doctor stamped on Horace's toe. But Horace seemed insensible to pain. He left it there. The doctor stamped again. But the only effect the stamping seemed to have was to stop Horace's nervous laughter. Horace thought the doctor totally insane.

  He left his foot there to be stamped on while he made a speech. It was a bit flowery, a tendency that he had in any case, but which he was inclined to exaggerate whenever he wished to establish himself as a person of substance.

  "Sir," he said, "you are behaving foolishly. My name is Horace Dunlop. My father," he lied, "is Sir Edward Dunlop. I am a lawyer. And should you decide not to honour your Hippocratic oath and come to the assistance of this poor woman, I will sue you. I will sue you for neglect, for malpractice and if the poor woman dies I will see you charged for murder. I will sue you for such a sum that you will lose this house, if you own it. You will lose your automobile (and I'm sure you have a good one). The Australian Medical Association will debar you. It causes me great pain, sir, to make such threats against an Old Scotch Collegian who I would have imagined to be both charitable and a Christian, but by God, I will have you sued for every penny you have and every penny you can borrow and you will spend the rest
of your life working to repay the loans you will have to undertake to cover the debt you are on the brink of incurring."

  Half-way through this extraordinary speech the doctor ceased stamping on Horace's foot and so, given confidence by this reprieve, he finished his speech fortissimo, giving it all the splendour proper to the nineteenth-century novels that had inspired it and Molly, sitting in the car outside, was able to hear the true story of her daughter's poisoning.

  The door opened. The doctor stood there with the vase still stretched before him. It was a Dalton vase in the art nouveau style. He smashed it at the poet's feet and made him jump.

  "All right," said Dr Ernest Henderson, "I will deal with you."

  Horace waited among the shards of pottery and broken lilacs, pondering his own position vis-a-vis the law.

  73

  Dr Ernest Montgomery Charles Maguire Henderson had a hell of a temper. It always surprised those who witnessed it, for ninety-nine per cent of the time he was a taciturn bachelor not given to loud noises. And then: whizz, bang, a plate or a horse's shoe or an Oxford dictionary was sailing through the air, on its way to a windowpane or towards a painting or a wall, and the chunky little man (as hard as an armchair stuffed with too much horsehair) would seem, momentarily, to compress, to compact his muscled frame, and just when you expected the poltergeist that had propelled the object through the air to take possession of him and expand with a malevolent rush, he would go quite limp, bite his small moustache thoughtfully, and go back to the ordinary business of life.

  Discovering shards of pottery or dictionaries with broken spines he would be inclined to regard them with surprise, and move them around a little with the toe of his shoe as if they were birds run down by speeding automobiles.

  Yet the thing that had made him lose his temper was exactly the same thing that made him, on this April night, leave his empty echoing house happily, with relief, and follow the Hispano Suiza eagerly: he was in love with a lady already spoken for.