Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  I thought the business finished. But it was, alas, merely starting, for the excitement of the river seemed to have served the function of priming the engine of Miss Adamson's madness and it began (roughly, with coughs, curses, and small explosions) to ignite, and then to turn, and soon the whole mechanism was huffing and chuffing, ready to run all through the night up and down, down and up, along one track whose point of departure and point of arrival were identical: chooks.

  I did not notice at the beginning. I did not notice that she was speaking about her chooks in a peculiar way. She was worried about them. That was only natural. She said Maisie had no idea how to look after them. But she was not cross with Maisie, but with me, for luring her across the river.

  She pulled a notebook from her pocket and showed me her breeding plan, all little tiny boxes and arrows at angles, but still I did not think her mad, merely unfriendly. She accused me of not understanding the diagrams. She was right. She did not do this in any hysterical way, but as proof, if you like, of my inferiority, that I was a man so stupid I could not understand a chook. My ignorance was a thing I was, I have admitted it before, most sensitive about. I collapsed easily before her attack.

  She may have stopped talking, but I don't remember it.

  At dusk a woman with a kerosene lamp came down to the crossing and waved it about. Miss Adamson got out of the car and screamed instructions at the raging river. It was quite obvious Maisie could not hear her, but Miss Adamson shouted at the light until, at last, it went away.

  It was night before I really started to understand that I was trapped with a mad woman. By then she was stretched out on the back seat, her muddy boots on the upholstery, smoking.

  "We have no right," she said, lighting a cigarette (I did not ask her where she was putting the ash and butts). "We have no right to make them so stupid. God did not make them stupid. Men did. All we do here is repair the damage."

  "What damage?" I asked, but I was thinking of the damage she was doing to Bert's upholstery.

  Then she sat up. The moon was just rising. I could see her very clearly. "Does nothing stay in your head, tinker?"

  She then set off up and down her one track. Half the night she huffed and puffed while I drifted in and out of nightmares.

  Her opinion, as I gathered it, was that the chook should be discontented. She found their content and their stupidity to be unnatural. She gave me chooks, chapter and verse, history, breeding, the Asian jungle fowl, the works. She had some jungle fowl which, she said – and I am sure she meant nothing vulgar -would put some spunk into her leghorns. They were on a verge of flight, she said, of freedom, anguish, life, love. She shook me awake to make sure I understood.

  I had not eaten for three days. I told her this, but it did not affect her. She would not permit me to escape my hunger with sleep.

  At dawn we saw a slight middle-aged woman in a black Edwardian dress. She was standing on the other side of the much reduced river. She was compressed by severe stays. She wore high-laced boots and a netted little black hat. She was carrying a bucket and hollering and pointing, but I could not make out what she was on about.

  The object of her excitement was obscured by the tall avenue of blackwoods that lined the river, and then, in the grey imperfect light I witnessed what was, I suppose, in the history of noxious weeds and feral beasts, an important moment.

  I thought at first they were sulphur-crested cockatoos.

  But they were not. They were white leghorns, the most stupid of chooks, rising, white and heavy into the soupy summer air.

  Miss Adamson was standing beside me. "There," she said to me, her eyes no longer cold and hard, but wet and shining and full of hurt like a wronged child. "There, tinker," she said. "You see."

  There they were all right: ignorance, stupidity, malice, flying free and unfettered. They circled, their overdeveloped wings working at too fast a rate for birds so big. They set off south, the least hesitant one leading, down between the river blackwoods.

  These were the progenitors of the wild chooks that caused so much trouble in the Wimmera wheatfields and of the leghorns who were soon to invade Leah Goldstein's story.

  20

  On her first day back in Sydney Leah went with Izzie to Bondi. The world shone with the light of picnics and Leah was delighted with everything she saw. The ordinariness of those little Bondi streets did not dismay her. She loved their mess, their crass. She liked the paspalum growing in the grass strips, the white clover with its rusty heart, the nettles poking out of chain-mail fences. A man in a cotton singlet was asleep in a kitchen chair on the footpath and around the corner came a nanny-goat, its chain rattling behind it, pursued by a woman in Sunday curlers and her husband's dressing gown.

  "You mongrel," said the woman to the clever goat. "Lovely day," she said to Leah and did not even seem to see that Izzie, the source of Leah's happiness, was busy being a chook, not just any chook, but a chook belonging to Lenny and Rosa's new tenants.

  Last night, on the platform at Central, he had tried to kiss her and she had found herself, involuntarily, shrinking from him. She had felt a flinch of disappointment exactly equal to the gap between her ivory-smooth idea of Izzie and Izzie himself, this little scarecrow with rag-doll sleeves, bad skin and hair (she wrinkled her nose) that badly needed washing.

  But she had forgotten: Izzie was funny. And now, as he thrust out his bantam's chest and drew his hands into his flapping wings, she laughed in delight. God, what a chook he was. He clucked and chortled and scratched amongst the clover. He had feathers and a comb. He clicked along the paving stones on his pointed shoes.

  "Teddy's chooks", he whispered, "do not stand on pavement cracks."

  "Teddy's chooks", he leaped on to a low brick wall, "riding on the tram to Bondi."

  The chook was so well behaved on the tram seat. It tucked its head in and snoozed absently. And this (it was now history) was how the tenants' chooks had travelled to Bondi after their eviction from Newtown, their right to free travel defended by three militant members of the Tramways Union, one of whom -the famous Arthur McKay – insisted on paying full fare for the rooster.

  "I cannot wait", Leah said – and felt how pleased Izzie was when she took his arm – "to meet your famous chooks."

  She could not have avoided them. The new tenants' chooks had taken possession like a conquering army. The front fence -never a pretty sight – was now ugly with chicken wire. The chooks scratched and pecked at the remains of the front lawn. Their droppings marked the concrete path around the side of the house and – in the ravaged back garden, between house and caravan – she walked into a scene of execution: a headless Rhode Island Red spurted its last spasms of bright red blood beneath the picnic sky and then fell, drunkenly, and lay twitching in the dust.

  A man in a woollen round-necked singlet and serge trousers stood watching the bird with an air of puzzled curiosity. He had a big boozer's nose, tender with fragile capillaries, and – as he saw Izzie and tucked his lower lip beneath his upper – a manner that was at once self-effacing and sly. He pushed the dead bird with the head of his axe.

  Izzie introduced Leah. Teddy called her "missus". He squatted and poked at the small fire he had lit beneath Lenny's copper cauldron. The bottom of the cauldron was streaked with black and it was full of dark steaming water.

  "Hang on," Teddy said. "Got a prezzie for you." He rose and disappeared into the house and they could hear a woman's voice shouting at him in anger.

  "Nice bloke," Izzie said.

  "Where are Sid and Rosa?"

  Izzie nodded his head towards the caravan and, seeing Leah's confusion, explained: "Teddy's got a wife and four kids."

  "Oh," said Leah, looking at the dead chook and wondering how it was possible to be evicted in Jack Lang's state.

  "Here ya are," Teddy said. He had returned with a chipped bowl full of hen's eggs. "Nice fresh cackleberries for your mum and dad."

  As they walked the few steps to the caravan, Teddy dunked
the headless chook into the cauldron and the rank smell of its steaming feathers filled Leah's nostrils.

  21

  One expected discord amongst the Kaletskys, but nothing had prepared Leah for the dull air of misery she found inside that caravan on whose floor the sand of lost holidays, sand that had once stuck between Izzie's toes or clung to Rosa's brown calves, still lingered, cold, hardedged, abrasive.

  Rosa looked ill. Her face was sallow. Those lovely lines around her eyes and mouth had deepened and set into unhappy patterns, and although she embraced Leah and made a fuss of her, her eyes stayed as dull as the windows of that gloomy space. They crammed in together around a tiny table, oppressed by the weight of uncomfortably placed cupboards.

  Leah had returned to Sydney vowing to work hard at her studies, to give up her picnics and her dancing, but she had not been in the caravan five minutes before she found herself resolving to get Rosa out on a picnic.

  "So," she said, bright as a nurse, "you have tenants, Rosa."

  "I hate them," Rosa hissed. "I want my house back."

  Lenny sighed and screwed his eyes shut. "If you want them to go," he said, "all you have to do is tell them." He lit a cigarette, made a face, then put it out.

  "Why should I tell them? He," Rosa pointed a finger at her son who stared, ostentatiously, at the metal ceiling, "he is the one who asked them here."

  "You have a short memory, Rosa," Izzie said. "Who offered them the house?"

  "How could they live in the caravan? It is hard enough for two people."

  Lenny was trying to catch Leah's eye. He was making secret fun of his wife. Leah was embarrassed. She took Rosa's hand and stroked it but Rosa did not seem connected to her hand. "I am a prisoner in this nasty box," she said, but to no one in particular. "I cannot go into my garden, I have to ask them if I might please use the shower. The shower is filthy. The walls in the kitchen are covered with grease…"

  "Whose grease?" said Lenny.

  "It smells. I hate it."

  "Rosa," Lenny said, "you are being selfish," but he put out his hand to her, to touch her shoulder. Rosa shrugged his hand off.

  "Of course I am selfish," she yelled, suddenly very angry. "I have always been selfish."

  "You gave them the house," Izzie said and Leah, who had begun to feel physically ill, found a strong shiver of dislike pass through her.

  "What else could I do? You make it impossible for me to do anything else with your stupid charity. You are a wishy-washy. You know you are."

  Izzie's face tightened and his pretty mouth became a slit. "Who owned stocks and shares? Some Marxist!"

  "I did," Rosa shouted. Leah wanted to block her ears, to run away and hide from this nightmare. "I did."

  "You are making Leah embarrassed," Lenny said, but Rosa was staring at her son and something nasty was happening between them.

  "Joseph would never have done this to me," she said. "A real communist would do nothing so sentimental."

  Izzie stood up, his face quite pallid. "Shut up," he screamed. He looked ugly with hate. "Shut your damn mouth."

  Lenny began to rise. Leah put her hands across her ears. The caravan rocked and swayed as Izzie ran from it. They heard his feet on the path and the squeak of the gate.

  "Go and find him, Leah," Rosa said wearily. "Go and find him. Tell him you love him."

  When she had gone, husband and wife went back to the matter that they had been discussing for two days. They circled round and around it, talking, talking, but in the centre of their talk there was nothing, a hole – the scrap-metal business was bankrupt.

  22

  Amongst some fleshy plants with leaves like ear-lobes, she found him, high on the cliffs of Tamarama where the wet Cellophane wrappers of Hoadley's confectionery assumed the same wet snotty look as the used contraceptive – that repellent thing – she had found there while walking as a dancer, her head high, her arms swinging, as fluid as a seagull, on a day when Rosa had been happy with the world and that other fleshy plant, the one called pig-face, had lain across a corner of the cliffs like vivid pink shantung flung across a draper's counter.

  He was curled inside a weather-worn piece of soft yellow stone a hundred feet above the sucking sea. If he had wrists like a girl, he suffered hurt like a man, privately, ashamed of tears or perhaps, Leah thought, seeing the black ball of pain in the arms of the rock, like an animal withdrawing from the herd. It seemed to her to be a deeply conservative attitude to pain – to withdraw from society as if one would be destroyed for one's weakness or incapacity.

  All away to the south the sky was hung with thunder blue and down along the beach at Bondi the sand glowed an odd deep mustard yellow and she wished she had been up on the cliffs on the day of Rosa's birthday party to see the procession along the beach: the mauves, the yellows, blacks and pinks, the wonderful Silly Friends parading noisily and emptily along the sand.

  She chose a course towards Izzie that would allow him to witness her approach and thus have time to compose herself. She walked with her head down, one hand on her hat, the other controlling her dress which rose recklessly to show the sky her dancer's legs.

  When she arrived at the rock he was sitting up, looking sheepish. She sat down beside him and took his hand, not as a lover might, but as a concerned stranger taking a pulse, and indeed it crossed her mind to wonder if such skin could ever be truly familiar, if it might not always be slightly alien.

  "Talking to my mother," Izzie said, not looking at her. "Talking to my mother is not a game you can win. You are in check from the first move."

  "Do you know what I think?" Leah said at last.

  "What do you think?"

  "I think the chooks are making everyone unhappy." She smiled, but she was quite serious. When Izzie had made the chooks they had been snow-white creatures with wise black eyes but now they were malevolent and mad-eyed and their red combs were obscene.

  Izzie shrugged his shoulders irritably.

  "She has never been any different," he said. "It was always Joseph who could do no wrong. Whatever I did, it didn't matter-I was wrong. Oh, Goldstein, if only you could meet my slimy big brother. She loves him. She thinks he's the ant's pants. Have you seen how she wraps up his dull translations in tissue paper? Jesus Christ! He's such a fraud."

  "Izzie, why didn't you tell me about Rosa?"

  "I am telling you, Goldstein," he smiled, "now."

  "She's unhappy. She looks sick and miserable. And your father has a funny look too – disappointed and bitter."

  "I forgot."

  Leah looked at him incredulously.

  "How could you forget?"

  "I forgot. And there's a southerly buster coming." He pulled her to her feet and they began to stroll back to Bondi. "You don't know how busy I am. You don't understand what I do. You haven't evenasked."

  He gave her an odd sideways look. "I've got more to worry about than Rosa and Lenny." He pulled his grubby hands out of his pockets and started striking off points on his dainty little fingers. "Each day I teach. I get up at five. I do my preparation. I get to school at eight thirty. I'm busy till four. Then there's work to do with the local branch. Then," he hesitated, "I've got other stuff."

  "I am going to take Rosa on a picnic."

  "Leah, it is a secret. I'm working for the UWU."

  "Oh," she said. "I see." But in fact she didn't understand at all.

  "The Unemployed Workers' Union."

  "Good," she said, still not appreciating what this meant, that the UWU was mostly communist and that Izzie's membership of it was enough to have him expelled from the Labour Party.

  "I train speakers," he said.

  "You're a good speaker, Izzie."

  As they walked back to Campbell Parade he began to talk about his dissatisfaction with Lang, that he was nothing but a fraud, and Leah -who remembered all those nights they had worked to get Lang elected -suddenly felt weary and sick of all these bright futures.

  Campbell Parade was rich in leather sh
oes and double-coned ice-creams dripped frivolously on to the sweaty footpath. Izzie was still talking, gesticulating, bumping into people.

  "Izzie," she said when he, at last, paused for breath.

  "Yes-sie," he grinned.

  "What Rosa said about Jack Lang was right."

  "Yes."

  "Well, why don't you tell her so?"

  "I will," he said. "I promise." And then he went on telling her how he took his speaker's course at the UWU at Glebe, how a man named Bill Darcy introduced him to the class: "Youse fellows reckons you're not too impressive on the platform. Well, I want youse to cast your eyes on this little fellow I saw some of youse laughing at when he stepped in. Well, youse can start laughing on the other side of your faces because he is the darndest little speaker we got, so better sit there and listen to him while he gives you the drum and if you clean out your ear-holes you might get a bit of sense into your heads."

  Leah began laughing.

  "You'd be proud of me," he said.

  "I am proud of you," she said, suddenly serious. She was pleased that in all this awful world there was someone who was trying to do something decent and she wondered what was wrong with her, that her emotions ran so hot and cold about this man who now, as they withdrew into a bus shelter, shyly took her hand.

  It was then that he told her what he had begun by hiding, that he had lost his job. The Lang Machine, with cold vindictiveness, had not only expelled him from the Labour Party but dismissed him from his job at a state school. He had been arrested after a fight with police at evictions in Glebe and it was this, his new criminal record, that was used as the excuse.

  "Oh, Izzie. The bastards."

  The bus shelter was a bleak place. Drunks had pissed in it. Someone had gouged "Bread not Bullets" into the seat. The letters were jagged. She found herself embracing Izzie. His hair was greasy and unpleasant, and confused, in her mind, with the smell of the stale urine. It was an appropriate perfume for such an evil, loveless world.