by Peter Carey
I had to tell lies, of course, to explain this miserable location to Leah, but she was naive about halls at this stage of her career, never having had to hire one herself.
So there I was, at seven o'clock of a rainy night, shivering before the fly-spotted mirror while spiders kept on at their business on the bare tin roof above my head.
Leah made tea and talked to me softly about stage fright, but it was not stage fright that was the point at all: if the business in hand had been juggling or card tricks, I would have been in my element. I would have enjoyed those spangles and thought them my right for they provided an aura no less dazzling than the one that surrounded me when I walked down Ryrie Street in Geelong with my dreams intact and a Shaftesbury Patented Umbrella in my hand.
32
Charles marched before the gaping entrance, squeaking back and forth on his brand-new boots, clicking on steel toecaps, clacking at the heels, his garters itchy-tight around his wounded calves, his short tweed trousers rubbing at the knee, his jacket buttoned tight below his jutting chin, his hair parted with a knife edge and held flat with shining oil, his button eyes afire with dragon light.
Before him he held a jam tin. He jangled it – prouder than a blackboard monitor – jiggled the eleven separate shillings up and down and was pleased (triumphant) that the audience contained his hateful teacher and giggling strapper, Mr Barry Edwards Esq. who was known to grown-ups, it seemed, as 'A-plus-B'.
So Charles marched before that door waiting for his revenge or, at least, his vindication. His bald-headed father would soon arrange himself in the style that Barry Edwards had mocked, had compared to both standard lamp and ballerina.
The walls and ceiling of the little hall were lined with tongue-and-groove boards that had been, mistakenly, coated with kalsomine. Along each wall some well-intentioned person had placed coloured light globes (blue, yellow, green) at six-foot intervals, just below the empty picture rail.
In this evil light the eleven paying customers, all great supporters of Douglas Credit, all from the one bar of the Shamrock Hotel, hawked and spat and conversed in echoing voices about the banner for the Eaglehawk Bowling Club which, having been left behind five years before, now billowed in the draughts above the proscenium arch.
Sonia stood on a chair in a kitchen, her hand already on the heavy brass switch that would soon plunge the hall into darkness while her father transported himself, she had no doubts, into the arms of Jesus Christ Himself. She took her hand from the switch and pressed it against her arm, nervously assuring herself of her own solidity.
Leah had wrapped herself in a moth-eaten red robe which covered her emu feathers in a lumpy sort of fashion. She shivered. She rubbed her legs. It was not cold. She jumped up and down and declared that she was petrified, that she hated this life, that she would vomit any moment. A huge flake of silver paint detached itself from her shoe and revealed a bright red slash, like a wound.
"Please, Mr Badgery," she said. "Don't let me down." And went on stage, before I had a chance to make an escape. I sat hunched on my chair. I saw the back of her cloak disappear around the corner of the tea urn, and then she was on stage, making a very formal speech. Her voice was a tight-stretched mirror of anxiety as she publicly confessed the lies I had persuaded the newspaper to print. This unexpected piece of entertainment fell, shivering, in spooky silence: there were to be no death adders, no Gay Paree. They shuffled their boots. Charles clicked his money together apprehensively.
"But", the snake-dancer said (Charles' boots creaked), "I am one hell of a dancer."
There was applause.
"And I will dance with venomous snakes. I will dance with two red-bellied black snakes and also a python big enough to choke a grown man. But if this is not enough, you can have your money back now."
Charles held his jam tin very still, but he need not have worried: no one wanted their money back. Someone wanted a drink. Someone else wanted to see Leah's legs. They were in a good mood and did not complain about the leaking roof.
"But," Leah said, and her voice was suddenly sleek, groomed on the oil of their approbation. "But", she said, "there is more." She was so confident about my act I could not bear to listen to her. I plugged my ears and sucked in my breath. I stood up. Sonia smiled at me. She jumped down from her chair and kissed me on the hand, then jumped again to stand guard beside that dreadful switch which was to put me in the centre of attention.
Leah finished singing my praises. The applause was strong and riveted with whistles. I began my walk towards the stage. On the steps: Leah, pink, glowing. She patted my bald head and I got a laugh as I stumbled (missing floorboard) on to the dusty stage.
And there I stood.
I stood there for a long time without doing anything. Neither did the audience. We regarded each other. I blinked and peered miserably into the gloom.
Charles creaked at the back of the hall and it was for him that I arranged myself in the position for summoning dragons, the foot on knee, the stretched hand, etc. It was, I stress, merely the position, nothing more, as harmless as an unarmed grenade.
"Badgery," roared Barry Edwards in the dark. I peered out at him. "I swear it must be a Badgery."
The hall tittered. Charles's boots creaked in anticipation of a delicious revenge. His dragon stretched itself.
"Ha ha," said A-plus-B, "Two ballerinas, two lampstands. Not one, but two."
"Shut up, A-plus-B," a woman hissed. "We come for his show, not yours."
"Sorry, Kathleen," said brown-voiced Edwards. "A million pardons but I thought you come for the beer."
This was considered funny. They laughed for a while and when they had finished I was still standing there. I shut my eyes.
"God help us, he's gone to sleep."
I opened them.
"He's awake," they shrilled, "he's awake."
There was a rush of feathers and I received a clip across the head and a push in the back. I fell, heavily. A four-letter word escaped but was stamped to death by the hooting, squealing audience.
There was an emu dancing over me. It lifted its net-stockinged legs high. It stamped on my hands and on my legs. I retreated, crawling, but did not escape the final indignity – a simulated peck on my dusty backside.
"Get off," the emu hissed, putting on the gramophone with its beak.
"Get off," the mob echoed joyfully, for no matter what faults the Bendigo Mechanics' Institute may have had, bad accoustics could not be numbered amongst them.
"Oh God," roared A-plus-B, "God save me, this is wonderful."
Charles opened his mouth in pain.
My son gripped his hands together and was given coiled visions of revenge no less luminous than Sonia's angelic hosts who fluttered in her mind's eyes, as disturbed as pigeons who find their coop door boarded shut.
I crawled off the stage and left the show to Leah Goldstein. My daughter came down off her chair and held my hand, but I did not want the shy sympathy of children, not that my son offered any. He would not even look at me. He put his precious jam tin on the kitchen sink and sat on the stairs where he could adore Leah without obstruction.
The Emu Dance was a great success. When the emu chick hatched they applauded the cleverness (Charles also, noisily). When she did the Veil Dance even the woman whistled her (Charles stamped). The tap was a triumph and when she returned for the great finale, the Snake Dance, the hall was as quiet and vibrant as a shiver.
My bleeding hands curled into fists and I could have punched the dancer on her little parrot's nose. I was far too jealous to watch her, and thus missed the moment when it started to go wrong. Perhaps, as I have seen her do, she held a clutch of assorted snakes in her hands and let them drop on to her head. It was called the Shower of Snakes. In any case, she attempted too much for the credulity of the big-voiced woman who asserted, loudly, that the serpents had obviously been defanged, their poison sacs removed and that fraud was being openly committed on stage. This was not, in itself, what stopped the show
and Leah did not, as she often did later, make a simple speech about the technical difficulties of either defanging or removing poison sacs. She could explain the operation required with scientific precision and point out the adverse affect on the health and happiness of the snake. What did stop the show was A-plus-B's footnote to the charge of fraud and this was made sotto voce, beneath his hand, under his beard. I did not hear the complete sentence, but heard him say "three by two" which is, in case you did not know it, rhyming slang.
The arm of the gramophone dredged a painful channel across "The Blue Danube" and left a repeating click which was to accompany Leah's dancing for many months to come.
Leah, shivering in a harem suit, decked in gauze and goose-pimples, stood with hands on her hips, her head thrust forwards, trembling. She ordered the lights turned on and singled out the man with the large black beard who seemed not the least perturbed by becoming the focus of attention. He folded his hands complacently in his lap and chewed his large moustache.
"I heard you," said Leah Goldstein, "and I heard your name."
"What if you did?" said the big-voiced woman now revealed to be quite tiny, weathered and shrunken like an old iris bulb. She had a fox-stole round her shoulders and a large fur hat jammed over her head. "What diff does it make what he said? The point is, Jew or no Jew, their sacs are gone." She nudged her bearded companion with her sharp elbow. "Jew or no Jew," she said to A-plus-B, "what's the diff?"
There were dragons breeding in that hall: they cloaked their activities in the smell of stale orange peel and leaking gas, and Leah, getting a whiff of it, felt her guts knot hard.
"There is no 'diff, Kathleen," said the ironic pedagogue, "until she starts to make money under false pretences. Then", he smiled at the shivering dancer, "it means everything. Here we have, in Bendigo, a perfect illustration of the world financial crisis. You, madam", he told Leah Goldstein, "are a cartoon."
"Your name is A-plus-B," said Leah.
"Correct weight," said the woman. "What's his birthday?"
"Shut up, Kath," said an equally weathered man in grey overalls who was sitting at the back of the hall. "You've had a fair innings."
"They call you A-plus-B because you believe in Douglas Credit. It's a fraud," said Leah Goldstein, launching into a five-minute attack on the whole system of Douglas Credit, the history of which she briefly provided, with special emphasis on its derivation from Social Credit from which system it had excluded all radical and humanitarian aspects. Further, she implied, Douglas Credit was a breeding ground for fascists, Jew-haters, and worse, the central algebraic proof of its feasibility (in which A-plus-B plays a central role) was a trick, a fraud more serious than anything to do with snakes and poison sacs. "You can't even add up," she said, in conclusion.
"Spoken like a Jew," said A-plus-B. "Always adding up", he said, "and subtracting."
"Substracting," hollered fur-hatted Kathleen. "Very good."
"Shut up, Kath," said the man in grey overalls. "You're pissed."
"Subtraction," said A-plus-B, "as in cheating."
"Address yourself to the question," shrieked Leah.
"Shut up, Kath," said the man up the back, and fell off his chair.
"I'm a Jew all right," said Leah. She summoned Charles to her side (the first time he ever walked the boards). She whispered in his bright red ear. He returned with the jam tin of money. Leah took the tin and emptied all eleven shillings into the canvas snake bag. Then she took the two remaining black snakes, who had remained gently entwined around their mistress's warm body during the entire argument, and lowered them with their fellows. "I'm a Jew all right. I don't take money from fascists." She was having trouble speaking and I, who minutes before had wanted to punch her on her lovely nose, felt nothing but admiration for her courage. She, who could be so lithe and sensuous, stood in her harem suit, skinny, trembling, small-breasted, no longer in control of the shape of her normally austere lower lip.
Barry Edwards, previously flustered by a philosophically literate snake-dancer, could now smile confidently. He was blessed with a bully's subtle sensitivity – he was taking his cues from her voice. He was not thinking about the snakes which were now being carried towards him by Charles Badgery who felt then, that night, the shiver of power of a snake-handler. He would feel it all his life, but never so intensely, so exquisitely, as now, as his warty hand goes into the bag, glides sweetly past the sleeping python, in amongst the black-snake coils, smelling like a friend. The grubby little hand finds a shilling and holds it up to A-plus-B.
His garters itch, a pleasant feeling, providing the sweet anticipation of a gentle scratch.
Barry Edwards's hands reach out, greedy for the shilling, are nearly there, the nicotine-stained pincers, when Charles (you little bastard!) drops the shilling back into the sack.
How sweet my little son looked on that night. How angelic was his smile as he looked at his teacher's thoughtful face.
No one else would put their hand into the sack. Charles was enjoying himself, could have prolonged his little pantomime for minutes, hours; but Leah screamed at him to give the man his shilling; which he did. People scraped their chairs across the floor and gathered coats. They swarmed, moved erratically towards the door and back to where Barry Edwards remained stubbornly in his chair.
So Charles began to lay his pretty snakes at Barry Edwards's feet. He held the little black snake and showed its oil-glistening red belly and its smooth little head. He let it crawl around his neck and then he placed it on the floor like a child playing with a moulded-lead toy car. He pointed it carefully towards Edwards's odd scuffed shoes and watched as the aforesaid shoes moved themselves, one after the other, towards the door.
Imagine the Mechanics' Institute as a box of yellow wood with cold sickly light globes like a necklace around its picture rail. Arranged at random, pointing this way and that: some wooden chairs. In their midst: a jut-jawed child in short pants, playing with a red-bellied black snake, cooing to it on the floor.
33
We were magicians that night. We made futures and summoned up pasts. We sent up flares loaded with words that spewed like broken glass across the sky, and I knew the dancer so little I imagined this normal.
It was, my God, like Halley's Comet – for Leah to loosen her tongue and talk for the pleasure of it (lolly-paper talk) fifteen different factors must all coincide and I will list just eight of them.
1 A dancer's walk.
2 Danger overcome.
3 McWilliams Autumn Brown Sherry or equivalent.
4 Her correspondence fully up to date.
5 No uncertainties threatening, i.e., no camp to shift, or new hall to hire.
6 Puddles dry and mud absent.
7 No sickness in camp.
8 Her mood itchy, but not scratchy.
The style of discourse she favoured when these conditions were satisfied was totally unrelated to her normal approach which was as functional as a hacksaw. You could hardly call it flowery but it did leave room for sentimentality and whimsy and was fuelled by both optimism and remorse.
So when she summonsed up Izzie I swear I saw him stand before me on the skirts of shadow round the fire, his big eyes wet with hurt, his pointy toes kicking moodily at a fat fleshy thistle whose obstinate root would not leave the soil.
He was the Good Man.
There were, as yet, no shades of grey in Leah's mental menagerie, and Mervyn Sullivan was summonsed up to be the Evil Man. She could not bring herself to say exactly what she meant, but made herself so clear that I could feel I was lying in bed with him too, looking at his false watery mask while his prick gave odd vibrations to my perfect hatred and I grew breasts to press against his broad hair-matted chest and sharp nails to dig into his buttocks. She had Good and Evil, Strength and Weakness, had them paired and opposed in such a tangle that I grew giddy following her.
I paraded Jack and Molly, and displayed the Parrot Poem. I listened, light-headed, while she demolished Phoebe before m
y eyes, pulled her to pieces like a cheap celluloid doll, flung her arms into the blackberries and her hair into the fire.
"She made the cage," I was informed. "She was a spoiled brat."
The smoke from the fire was pleasantly intoxicating. I hastened to find a few favourable things to present in favour of my missing wife. I made a few fast lies, jerry-built things with bright colours and badly fitting lids. I talked aeroplanes and motor cars, all the Australian products that had begun so brightly. When I talked about these failures, Leah told me later, they sounded like little swallows that had fallen from their nests and died.
She showed me her father's suit, Wysbraum'
's red lips and broad bum, the white scalp beneath Rosa's hair, and that splendid canvas, that huge complicated composition of moulded grey forms that Marx made, which she at once admired but could not bring herself to enter.
I was not quite so frank. I was (as Leah said later) "secretive". I made no confessions of electric belts although the battery hung heavily on my leg; nor did I talk of ghosts and snakes.
"I did not like you, Mr Badgery," Leah said, beneath the vast star-powdered sky, "until you did your act."
