Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  Small boys ran past. "Hubba-hubba," they called to the embracing couple. "Hubba-hubba."

  Leah did not hear them.

  When she looked, at last, at Izzie's face, she was startled to find him grinning.

  "I've joined the Party," he said.

  She remembered thinking that Rosa, at least, would be pleased.

  23

  But Rosa was not pleased. She called him names: ultra-leftist, adventurist, names, it seemed, that described his behaviour in fighting policemen.

  But then, all squeezing in around that table again, they became quiet as they realized the bleakness of the position.

  Leah's mind spun. She considered wiring her father for money, and then, quite properly, dismissed it.

  "But what will happen?" she asked.

  No one answered her. It wasn't necessary. She knew herself exactly what would happen: they would have to live on handouts. There would be government stooges around the house asking questions about chooks and tenants. If they received payment for either they would get no hand-out. Rosa would unleash her tongue on officious felt-hatted spies who would never believe they had no income and, even if they did, life would be a misery, trudging all the way down to Number 7 wharf for a meal ticket, then back up to the other end of the city to collect a gunnysack of food – no vegetables, no fruit, and a lump of meat chopped up just anyhow.

  "I think, Lenny," Leah said, "that you will have to rent your house, for money."

  Lenny ran his hand through his wiry grey hair. He opened his mouth a fraction and his false teeth – Leah had never noticed them before -gave a small clack.

  "Leah, Leah," Rosa said. "Do you really think we would evict them?"

  "We would do no such thing," said Lenny quietly. "It would kill us."

  "But you must do something." Leah was impatient, not for the first time, with the Kaletskys. They seemed helpless to her, like children, and now they were, it seemed, overcome with some family emotion that excluded her completely.

  Rosa put her arm around Izzie and hugged him to her. "You are a good boy, Izzie."

  "An ultra-leftist," he reminded her, but their cheeks, mother and son, were still pressed together.

  "Better an ultra-leftist than a Menshevik," said Rosa Kaletsky.

  Leah had forgotten what a Menshevik was and, anyway, did not care. She did not see what application the in-fighting in Russia had to do with a caravan in Bondi where the immediate problems had to be solved, i. e., how to feed the stubborn Kaletskys who were blowing noses and smiling to each other unaware that there, in their midst, was a girl imbued by the dangerous ambition to do One Fine Thing.

  24

  Whenever Leah thought of Mervyn Sullivan she thought of liquids, water, tears, sweat, the whole of his large handsome face surrounded by an envelope of liquid that, itself invisible, left a fine smear of condensation on his big features and made him appear sentimental or weepy when in fact he was neither.

  She had carried his card ever since he had given it to her that afternoon at Bondi.

  "You never know," he had said.

  "You never know," she repeated to herself on every occasion she had considered throwing it out.

  His office she discovered on the fifth floor above an arcade at the dingy end of Elizabeth Street down near Central.

  The sign on the door proclaimed mervyn sullivan theatrical agent but the scene inside the door showed nothing but disarray. There were open filing cabinets with their insides falling out and, on the floor, yellowed clippings, photographs, letters lying next to indentations in the carpet that betrayed the recent removal of a desk and chair. A woman's dress, brilliant with spangles, hung from the picture rail.

  Amongst all this Mervyn Sullivan sat hunched over a metal waste-paper basket, his left hand on his chest, carefully keeping his silk tie from harm whilst he ate a meat pie, the watery contents of which dripped messily and landed noisily amongst the crumpled papers in the bin.

  She carried her emu suit in a paper bag.

  "Mr Sullivan," she began, "I am Leah Goldstein and you met me at Rosa Kaletsky's birthday party at Bondi. You gave me your card and invited me to call on you."

  Mervyn Sullivan did not say anything. In fact, he did not even look up. He had, always, tremendous concentration on anything he took a mind to tackle, and the meat pie did not allow anything else.

  It was to this concentration on the task at hand that Mervyn Sullivan attributed his now doubtful success.

  Leah waited for a reply. If there had been a chair to sit on she would have sat, but as there was none she stood uncertainly at the doorway and waited. She watched Mervyn Sullivan complete his meat pie and carefully wipe his fingers with newspaper cuttings.

  Then he stood up and did up his suit coat.

  "Mr Sullivan…" Leah began again.

  "A long way from Romano's," Mervyn Sullivan said. "Lobster thermidor and French champagne, crepes Suzette and yes sir, no sir. A long way too, girlie, from when I saw you last. Don't you want to be a lawyer any more?"

  "Doctor," Leah said. "You see, Izzie lost his job and…"

  Mervyn Sullivan held up his hand. "Spare me, please. I listen to these stories all day. Please."

  "You said you'd get me work."

  "I'm packing in this game," Mervyn Sullivan said, indicating that Leah should sit in the chair next to the waste-paper basket. "I'm finished. I can't make a quid any more."

  Leah looked at the shining handsome face and mistook the liquids for signs of emotion. In the middle of her own disappointment she found room to be sorry for him.

  "How terrible," she said.

  Mervyn Sullivan did not seem to notice her sympathy. "I have girls like you in here every day. Dancers are a dime a dozen, girlie, I promise you. There's nothing. If you don't believe me go and see All-Star, go and talk to Jim Sharman. Ask him about dancers. They all think they're star material. They come in here and then they want to argue with me. Anyway, I'm packing up, I'm going on the road again. Who would have thought it? Fifty years of age, and back on the road. Jesus wept."

  "I'll do anything," Leah said. "I learn quickly."

  "Dancers are too much trouble," Mervyn said. "Give me a good vocalist, a fat lady and a magician. Why do I want to break my heart with dancers?"

  "I brought my costume."

  "What difference does a costume make?"

  "It's an emu costume," Leah said, and held up the feathers. "Don't you remember Rosa Kaletsky's Emu Dance?"

  "So why would feathers make you co-operate? It's your age, girlie. You'll think you know everything. Give you a week and you'll think you're it. You'll be telling me how to run my business, you'll be arguing with me, having headaches, going sick, falling in love with the first decent-looking cocky who comes ogling you in the front seat."

  He was standing now, staring at a photograph on the floor. He stooped and picked it up. "Prunier's," he said, handing it to Leah who saw Mervyn Sullivan with a beautiful woman on either side of him. "I was the King," he said. "I got Sheila Bradbury, that's her on the left, a hundred quid a week. She's an alcoholic now. If you want sense from her see her at breakfast while she's still shaking."

  "I don't drink."

  "But could I trust you?" Mervyn Sullivan said softly, his eyes watering and his upper lip swelling. "You're at the university. You think you've got brains. You think you can dance. You'd argue with me all day long. I'm getting too old to argue, girlie. Mervyn knows what's right. You're a good kid," he said, coming to look at the photograph over her shoulder. He was very close, but she was not frightened. But when she felt his hand on her neck, she knew, with a shock, what was required.

  "Would you co-operate?" Mervyn Sullivan said. "That is the question."

  They were five floors above the street. A fine rain was falling and obscuring the outlines of the world outside. Leah shivered.

  "You see," he said, and took his hand away.

  They stood there, staring intently at the photograph of Mervyn Sullivan an
d two women at Prunier's. There was a vase of flowers, roses, on the table. The black-trousered legs of a waiter hovered by Mervyn's left shoulder. The woman who was now an alcoholic had her hand on Mervyn's right shoulder. Lost in the black and grey world of the photograph, Leah made her decision.

  "All right," she said.

  "You won't argue," Mervyn Sullivan said, turning her by her shoulders to look at him. Her nose came level with his splendid tie. It was a big tie, and tied into a luxurious fat knot. "It's hard on the road," he said. "The towns are ratty. We sleep in caravans. There is no damn glamour, just hard work," he said smiling. He brushed her breast with the back of his large hand and she thought, again, that he would burst into tears. "The magician is a fairy," he said, taking her hand and placing it against the hard thing in his trousers. "And I can't pay you like a professional. Two quid a week would be tops."

  "Three quid," Leah said, thinking of Rosa and Lenny.

  "Three quid," Mervyn Sullivan agreed, unbuttoning her skirt. "Just for the legs."

  As the alcoholic Sheila Bradbury could attest, Mervyn Sullivan was a bully and a bastard but he was a masterful lover and although not totally denying the watery emotion suggested by his face, performed with such lingering brutality that Leah, who five minutes before had been a virgin, found herself in Elizabeth Street, spread out across a desk and making tiny bird-sounds she did not at first recognize as coming from her at all. Mervyn Sullivan had been a tap-dancer. He was brilliant, alone in a spotlight, which itself suggested there might be an audience for the event; and Leah, in the darkness, vibrated like a tram on metal wheels and felt an electric pleasure as she raced over cold wet bitumen.

  When it was over, he was matter-of-fact. "OK," he said, "now you can dance."

  "You hired me already."

  "Christ," he said, "You're arguing already."

  "You said three pounds."

  "Look, girlie, I don't even know you can dance. Now, please, just for Uncle Mervyn, put on your feathers. And let's hope you do a little better on your feet than on your back."

  She danced, without music, with hate in her heart.

  "All right," he said. "Meet me down in the arcade on Wednesday morning and bring a photograph so I can get a sign painted."

  25

  She was nineteen years old; her eyes were clear; she was so young that Rosa could not even bear to contemplate it. She placed her hand next to Leah's, silently, as if the evidence presented there on the oilcloth-covered table should be argument enough: the corruption of one, the innocence of the other.

  Leah's brow contained not a line. It was so smooth that Rosa ran the tip of her finger across it, from the bridge of her nose up into the dense curly blue-black hair that never, in any light, revealed the scalp beneath.

  Rosa opened her mouth to speak and then shut it. What was there to say? How could she un-say all those dances, wind back all those scratchy pieces of silly music?

  In just this way had she lost Joseph, through the power of her stupid mouth. But you could lose someone to Lenin with a clear conscience. You could not abandon someone to Mervyn Sullivan so easily.

  Lenny, crumpled, unshaven, unhappy Lenny, said nothing. She could not meet his eyes. She knew she would see blame there. She felt blame enough.

  So they sat, in silence, while the westerly wind buffeted the little caravan and rain dripped slowly through the leaking hatch in the roof.

  Rosa would have liked to say some of the things she felt about Leah's decision. For instance: it suggested an enormous arrogance, to undertake this change of career for the benefit of people who had not requested it, people far tougher than she was who had – anyway -survived a lifetime of difficulty without such monstrous charity, this bright-eyed, shining One Fine Thing.

  Yet she could not say this with any confidence because Leah stubbornly refused to admit that Lenny and Rosa had anything to do with it. She said nothing, not even half a hint, about sending them money and no one could bring themselves to ask her this most embarrassing question or say that whatever money she made she would need herself, that even if she starved herself on their account, she could not, on a dancer's wages, be a breadwinner.

  The turmoil of this meeting will be best understood if you imagine Rosa, now, as the caravan rocks in the wind, begin to speak sternly, harshly even, and all the time stroking Leah's smooth pink-nailed hand, and both women's eyes full of tears.

  Rosa and Lenny begged Leah, jointly and separately, to reconsider. They spoke badly of Mervyn Sullivan and painted unattractive pictures of life on the road. But all this flowed off her smooth and untroubled skin which was, like all young skin, thin as paper and thick as cowhide.

  Leah, excited beyond belief at this daring swerve in her life, refused to admit that she had done anything earth-shattering. She was insouciant, arguing against the skipping rhythms of her heart.

  "Why", she asked Rosa, "is a doctor superior to a dancer?"

  Rosa flinched, feeling her own words turned into knives and used against her.

  "When the bills come," Lenny said, "then you will see the difference."

  "Leah, if this is for us…" Rosa began.

  "No, Rosa, it is not for you." And indeed she felt that was true, and although she felt a little frightened of what she had done, she also felt an enormous relief. She was too stupid to be a doctor. She could not have borne another year of feeling so inadequate. Everything around her conspired to make her feel stupid, even Izzie whom she admired so much.

  "When I was a young girl," Rosa said, "I used to dream that one day my mother would get sick and old and I would look after her. I would tell her, Mamma, I will look after you. She would smile at me. She liked me to say it to her. She repeated it to grown-ups to show what a nice girl I was. Later, when I was older, I did look after her, and I was happy to look after her. But I've thought about it lately, Leah, and I don't think it was a very nice sort of happiness. It was like a revenge: 'Now I have you. Now you will wash your hands when I say. Now you will eat your meal. It will be this meal – which I have cooked without consulting you – because I am very busy and you are a lot of trouble.'"

  "So," said Lenny. "So what is your story?" He butted out his cigarette and then placed it, not in the ashtray, but on the top of the table, lined up with all the other butts each one of which had been put out at precisely the same moment.

  "The story is that all young people dream they will control their parents. They wait, like crows, while they get weaker."

  "But you are not my parents, Rosa."

  "Then I will not have this on my conscience. We did not ask you to." She looked up and caught Lenny's eyes. He nodded his head slowly. See! he was saying. See!

  "Yes?" Rosa said belligerently. "What is it?"

  But Lenny would say nothing. He ran his tongue over his chipped teeth and studied her with his calculating man's eyes.

  "And it affects nothing," Rosa said to Leah. "Don't you understand? It is so naive. It is too naive to bear. The world stays just the same as it was before."

  "I wasn't trying to alter the world. Rosa, Rosa, don't cry. The Kaletskys are the ones who alter the world. We Goldsteins are more humble."

  "Humble. Listen to her, Lenny. I could smack your face. What will your father think of us?"

  "Too late to think now," said Lenny.

  "I sent him a list", said Leah, whose father still knew nothing of the Kaletskys, "with two columns. In one column I put all the pros and in another I put all the cons."

  "You left some out."

  "How do you know, Rosa, you haven't seen the list?"

  "You have left out all the things you are too young to know, because you have never been a dancer. All you have listened to is my silly stories. I'm sorry I ever told you."

  "Rosa, Rosa, don't cry."

  "I'm not crying. It is such a waste of life, for nothing. You will lie in bed in some dump, some rat-hole in Benalla and the fleas will feed off you and you will stop yourself going to sleep because when you ar
e asleep you will scratch yourself, and if you scratch your belly or your legs – you tell her, Lenny – then the customers see it. So you go to sleep anyway, you are so tired. You drove a hundred miles. You had a flat tyre. You did a show. You are so tired. You are so tired you stop listening to the drunks in the street calling out your name. You are too tired to be frightened when they break their beer bottles in the gutter and call out filthy things about the body you showed to them. So you go to sleep and you wake up at four in the morning because it is market day and the cattle are bellowing outside and you have scratched yourself all over and you will have to do the show with make-up all over your body and who will pay for the make-up? Lenny, you tell her."

  "You do," Lenny said.

  "So you wake up and you look at your face and it is getting a line, just here." She put a fingernail, light and sharp as a surgeon's scalpel, against the edge of Leah's mouth. "And you think how much nicer it would be to be a doctor and what a fool you were to ever listen to a bored old woman telling her sentimental stories."

  "Oh, Rosa, you won't listen to me. I don't want to be a doctor. I want to be a dancer."

  "A dancer, yes. The Tivoli. Her Majesty's. Even Romano's. But not Mervyn Sullivan on the road. He is such a wolf and poor little Izzie in Sydney half mad with jealousy. I thought you would marry him."

  "Oh, Rosa."

  "Marry him," Rosa said, hugging her fiercely. "Marry him. Stay here with us, Leah."

  Lenny stretched out his hand across the table. He knocked the ashtray and broke the careful line of calculated butts. He took Leah's hand and held it hard.

  "Stay, Leah."

  Leah wept. She felt such a rush, such a huge upsurge of both happiness and misery that she was overwhelmed by something close to ecstasy. At that moment, in that rocking caravan, she would feel, she imagined, all the pain and happiness in the world, and she wept, nearly drowning. It was the last time she was so young.

  26

  The ructions in her own family were predictable but abated after the first flurry of telegrams (too upset too unwell to WRITE LIFE IS A BARREN FIELD LOVE FATHER).