Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

"I did not like you, Miss Goldstein, until you finished yours."

  "God, you were funny, Mr Badgery." She snapped a gum twig happily and threw it on the fire. "You should have seen yourself."

  I made a mud map in the dark.

  She said: "I thought you were a spiv, excuse me; but when I saw you on the stage I changed my mind."

  I asked her why, and for once she was not interested in teasing the greasy hairs of reality apart to find The Truth.

  "I dunno," she said. "I did. Excuse me, I can't see your face. Come and sit over here."

  I went and sat beside her on the log. She grinned at me in the dark. "I was nearly a doctor," she said.

  "Fair dinkum?"

  "Dinky-die. Pass the bottle. I'm very partial to this stuff. It's not good for you. Nothing's good for you, nothing nice," getting down to the core of her problem. "How old are you, Mr Badgery?"

  "Forty," I lied.

  "I'm twenty-four," she lied.

  And yes, I know I promised there would be no hanky-panky, but that was a lie as well.

  "I'm partial to a number of things," she whispered, on the log, by the camp fire, at Crab Apple Creek.

  "I'm a bit partial myself," I said.

  "I'm very partial," she said, "but for God's sake, be careful."

  34

  Dear Izzie, she wrote, I love you and miss you. I have done it, again, and I detest myself. There is no point in my lying about it. I must tell you and you must forgive me if you can. I have also said things about you to strangers which I should not have said and did not mean. You are the only man I ever cared about or respected. You believe what I believe. You stand for what I stand for. You are brave and good and I send you letters that cause you pain.

  I dreamed about you two nights ago. You were in an odd black suit with belled cuffs and you were weeping. When I tried to comfort you, you did not know who I was and I woke up crying myself.

  Anyway, here is a money order. It is less than it should be because I wasted four shillings on wine. Izzie, one day we will be like ordinary people. We will have a house and a baby with big black eyes and Rosa and Lenny will play with it. I am frightened of everything. Everything seems dark and ignorant. I try to read the Gramsci but am so tired. My mind is rusted and full of rubbish. Please be careful. I am sending you a map of the camp site as usual so if your work calls you this way, you could find me. do not make a special trip. It is only in case you are doing Party work in the area. Will be in Bendigo some days yet I imagine. Your loving wife, Leah 35 The flesh of the morning was pink and tasted of mud like a rainbow trout, and I was the Prince of the Bedroom, the King of Liars. The urge to build was on me already and I looked at the world through imaginary windows and possible doorways. Leah snored in her palace and I hardly saw my children, although I must have dressed them, inspected their shoes, their socks, their nails, parted Charles's hair and retied the ribbons on Sonia's plaits.

  I remember nothing of driving them to school. I was under the illusion that it was my day; it was really my son's. On this day, the 23rd September 1931, he added the final card to his hand and climbed a giant eucalypt and carried down a yellow-tailed black cockatoo. Expressed thus, it sounds easy. But this is not your sulphur-crested cockatoo, often caught, usually caged, taught to speak Pet's Lingo. This is the giant cockatoo sometimes called funereal, and if you have ever watched these monsters ripping branches to pieces, seen them screeching at the top of river casuarinas, or seen, at close range, their odd faces (more like a devil's koala than a bird) then you would know, without being told, this is not an easy bird to catch or tame.

  He did not choose it. He was driven to it by Barry Edwards's sarcastic comments when the birds were observed above the schoolyard. Badgery was good with animals, he said, and would bring them down a cockatoo.

  My son had warts and smelly breath, but he was not a fool. He knew there was no choice but to up the ante in this game with his teacher. Having driven him out with snakes he would shame him with a cockatoo.

  The cockatoo, therefore, was a means, not an end, an instrument of revenge, a card in a game, but yet, when Charles was finally eighty feet above the ground, wrapping his useful bandy legs around the rough-barked eucalypt, edging carefully out towards his goal, he had forgotten what it was an instrument for; he began to coo.

  He swung in the high branches above the schoolyard where Sonia stood, with all the school – it was now recess – whispering eccentric self-taught prayers to Sweet Jesus Meek and Mine.

  The headmaster was yelling at Mr Edwards and Mr Edwards was biting his moustache and trying to get the headmaster to yell at him in private but the headmaster ordered Miss Watkins to ring the fire brigade and then he could not wait, and – he was a young man – tried to climb the tree himself but tore his Fletcher Jones trousers and showed his bottom and Miss Watkins took the girls to practise assembly drill in front of the shelter shed.

  The fuss in the playground hardly intruded on Charles's consciousness, for he was blessed with very particular powers of concentration. The commotion below merely warmed him as he moved closer to communion with the dark brown eye with its delicate pink surround. My son had a great store of affection he could not give to people properly; he just didn't have the knack. He could not hug his little sister without awkwardness, but when he confronted this steel-beaked bird his affection issued from him readily, like a net, a finely knotted gauze which the bird felt and stayed still to accept. As he took the bird it emitted a small noise, not the loud raucous noise of a yellow-tailed black cockatoo, but a small grizzle, like a new puppy will give, as it surrendered itself to the webs of Charles's affection.

  Charles descended, to applause, down the ladders of the Bendigo Volunteer Fire Brigade and into the anxious care of Barry Edwards who gave him no trouble – quite the opposite – from that day. In class that afternoon he sat with the cockatoo who, having entered an alien universe, was ministered to as a royal guest, was brought gifts of hakea pods and pine cones, was permitted to screech and shit, and was thus given the illusion that it was a god, being waited on by superstitious savages.

  36

  I was in an excellent mood. I called in at the tip and found good roof guttering awaiting me. On my way back to camp I nicked twenty foot of fencing wire from the bottom string of a squatter's fence. I never bought a nail in my life and I never understood why anyone would bother when there are millions of miles of fencing wire available to do the job. Eight gauge is best. Cut it square one end, angle it at the other, and there's your nail.

  I drove back to the camp constructing towers with pretty windows.

  I parked the Dodge and noticed Leah was boiling something up in a four-gallon drum. She did not look up to greet me and, imagining she was washing her female particulars, I did not intrude. Instead I busied myself with the guttering and the fencing wire. When Leah spoke she was right behind me. She made me jump.

  "One," she said, "I was drunk. Two, it won't happen again. Three, I don't love you."

  I covered my confusion by dropping the rest of the guttering on the ground.

  "Did you hear me?" she asked.

  "I heard you."

  "Good," she said, and walked back to the fire where she was -I discovered later – punishing her overcoat by boiling it.

  I fiddled with the fencing wire for a bit, making a few nails to start with. I like making things. It is always soothing, and the very simple things are the most soothing of all. The squatter's wire felt as soft as lead between my pliers. I made three-inch nails, each one exactly the same as the one before.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Making nails."

  "This camp is filthy," she said (untrue). "Your truck is filthy. I don't know how you live like this. Come on, move. Move your nails. Help me with the mattress. How long is it since you aired it? How long is it since you washed your children's clothes? Orange peel!"

  She emptied the back tray of the Dodge and started scrubbing. I took the guttering over to her hut. I f
etched an empty petrol drum to stand on and began to measure for the gutter. In a minute she was behind me with her wet arms folded across her breasts. Her neck seemed longer, stretched, her shoulders more sloping, her eyes larger.

  "Excuse me, what are you doing?"

  "Fixing up."

  "You sleep with me once and you think you own me."

  "No." If you had seen her once you would know that she could not be owned. "Just making a place."

  "This is not your place and never can be."

  I recognized the tone. This was not lolly-paper talk. It was hacksaw stuff, the annoying tone with which she had entered camp.

  "It is public land," I said. "It's a reserve, and if I take out a mining lease I'm entitled to build a hut here, providing I continue to demonstrate that I am actually working my lease."

  "There you go, land-house, house-land, you can't help yourself, can you, Mr Badgery? You're true blue. Dinky-di. You think you can put up some shanty and that makes it your place, but you can't, and it never will be. Are you listening to me?"

  I did not want to lose my temper. "Leah, what have I done to deserve this?"

  "Forget what we did. The matter is obvious. The land is stolen. The whole country is stolen. The whole nation is based on a lie which is that it was not already occupied when the British came here. If it is anybody's place it is the blacks'. Does itlook like your place? Does it feel like your place? Can't you see, even the trees have nothing to do with you."

  "This is my country", I said quietly, "even if it's not yours."

  "Meaning, excuse me?" She put her hands on her hips.

  I scratched a line on the guttering and threw it to the ground. "You're a Jew. You don't have a country."

  "Of course we have a country. It was stolen from us."

  "Tough. What do you want me to do?"

  "I don't want you to do anything. I don't require a hut or nails."

  "Leah," I held out my hand.

  She brushed the hand away.

  "Don't touch me," she said. "Touch me and I leave, right now." And she walked across to the kero drum, her legs perambulating beneath her rigid spine, and began to fish out her boiling coat.

  I cannot stand being brushed aside. Most serious tempers begin with being brushed aside, kindness rejected, conciliation spurned. "And if I don't touch you, what then?"

  "How would I know?" she said, dropping the coat back into the water. "Don't you have any ideas of your own? Don't you read anything? Don't you think about anything but skin?" She suddenly burst into tears, calling me a bully.

  If you expect me to take her in my arms and quiet the tears, to stroke her hair and whisper into her ear, you have mistaken me for someone else. I lostmy temper. Not slowly, not neatly, but like an overwound clock flying into separate parts, with useful cogs and gears all converted into deadly shrapnel. I will not repeat the rough words I said. The gist of it, however, is essential: I had not invited Leah into my camp or my bed and she had no business attacking me for either.

  I turned my back on her and went back to nailing the guttering on the hut, splintering timber, bending nails, full of homicidal strength. I was as mad with fight as a bar-room brawler rolling out into the street; when her apology came it was the last thing I expected.

  She did not look like a woman apologizing. Her eyes were strong, and her manner thoughtful. One could not confuse apology with surrender.

  It was quite an apology, and not a short one either, although the length was not dictated by a love of words; she had a lot to say. On certain difficult matters, of which skin was perhaps the most important, she did not make herself clear, or I did not pay attention properly. Other things I grasped a little better – of all her conflicts, she admitted, the greatest was between weakness and strength. She saw herself in an alliance of the weak against the strong but (paradoxically, she thought) was much attracted to male physical strength which also (in the form of police, bailiffs, armies and Mervyn Sullivan) most terrified her in life. Her adultery had, therefore, been a more complicated betrayal and she had been wrong, she admitted, to blame me for it.

  I am prepared to wager that she never laid out the central nervous system of the dogfish as carefully as she exposed these nervous systems of her own; I was much affected and stepped down from my drum, with my own confession tumbling from me. I admitted I could not read and that the landscape had, indeed, always seemed alien to me, that it made me, in many lights, melancholy and homesick for something else, that I preferred a small window in a house, and so on.

  I must describe this to you coldly. I step back from it a little. Excuse me, but our hands are trembling, mine and Leah's, all these naked things of ours nodding to each other, shining wet and sensitive to sunlight.

  We consider each other, our eyes so sharply focused that the periphery of our vision is smeared with vaseline.

  We retire to bed. If there are curtains, they are drawn.

  37

  It is not the skin of young women, their firm breasts, buttocks, undimpled backsides, unstretched stomachs, etc., it is their expectations of life that I have lusted after, have drunk like a vampire with a black mouth and pink tongue; I have stolen their passions, enthusiasms, mistakes, misunderstandings, and valued these more than their superior educations.

  The steps of the Bendigo Post Office are not a private place on a Friday afternoon. When you hear Leah scream at me you will think -casual bystander – that my new lover is nothing but a screaming shrew, is less attractive than the big-faced yellow-tailed black cockatoo my son has chained, temporarily, to the external rear-vision mirror of the truck, a cockatoo whose tail feathers conveniently echo the colour of the telegram in Leah's hand, a pretty coincidence not noted by the idle clergyman who stops to stare or by the two taut housewives with string bags full of sausages who do not bother to hide their interest in the Jewess, her silver shoes, and the rude-faced boy who is pulling her towards the truck.

  There: Leah waving the telegram. She is a splendid creature, her whole soul trembling with love, with fear, feeling itself to be caught between good, evil, weakness, strength, duty, indulgence, crude appetite and fine ascetism.

  All around her people worry about sausages or neatsfoot oil.

  "You will punch him down," she said. "You think you can control him because you are stronger, but you can't and never will."

  The telegram, you must realize, is from Izzie who will shortly arrive in Bendigo armed with information about his wife's infidelity, and I – hurling the cockatoo into the back of the truck above my son's protests – am in love with his wife.

  38

  The world was wet and smelt of rancid butter and they huddled into the caravan, as miserable as rain-sodden chooks. Denied the company of his comrades, this was the size of Izzie's life. He was, within these confines, like a terminally ill patient whose uncushioned vertebrae show through wasted flesh which is Buddhist yellow, royal purple, mottled with bruises no cushion can protect him from.

  He was rubbed raw by his wife's letters; he spent her money; he hated her; also, perhaps, vice versa. And yet he waited for her to send him some impossible letter, some combination of words as particularly structured as laudanum.

  However it was not just one letter he required, but two. The stamps of this second letter would not be perforated. They would be cut. Sometimes, courting sleep, he would imagine the scissors would cut these stamps. Now, he thought, at this moment, they are cutting the stamps from the sheets. The Comrade has mittens and red fingers with chilblains. The stamp has no adhesive. She dips a brush into a pot of paste and there, my name. In two months it will be in my hands. Sixty-one days. He willed the letter across oceans, saw it impatiently through dawdling ports where incompetent officials delayed the ship with unnecessary fire drills.

  Rosa would give him no comfort. Perhaps she intended sympathy, but it was no help for her to criticize the Party. She would not leave it alone. She dredged through her memory for instances of stupidity, ambition, avarice sh
e had witnessed in communists. She poured vitriol on the Comintern while she waited for a letter from her other son.

  Only from his father did he draw some comfort. In these long featureless days, unable to concentrate on a book, not wanting to do anything but sleep until the letters woke him, he felt a real compassion for the man he had so often slighted. Now they made sandwiches together. Izzie held out a slice of bread in each extended palm while his father, patient and uncomplaining, brushed on the melted butter. When these two slices were done, Izzie waited, palms extended, while his father placed the two buttered slices on a sheet of newspaper on the floor, cut two more slices of bread, balancing the stale loaf on his thin knees, placed these two slices on Izzie's hands, and repeated the process again.

  It irritated Izzie that his father should accept this inconvenience so meekly; that he did not demand the table where Rosa now sat.

  Rosa had the table. She was conducting her interview with Dora, whose theatrical career had been ruined by an unexpectedly ballooning backside and who was now well spoken of as a fortune-teller.

  Dora's arms and thighs and face had quickly followed the example of her backside without ever losing the complexion ("real peaches and carefully on the chair and placed a large cane basket on the table beside her. She sighed and smiled vaguely at Rosa who had not yet guessed the contents of the basket. Rosa returned the smile which offered a diffused sort of goodwill but no real affection: the two women had known each other too long; each had said too many indiscreet things about the other.

  There was a movement in the basket. Rosa, a red scarf over her hair, cocked her head. Her interest was diverted by Dora who now displayed a small gaily-coloured purse. It was made from tiny beads and had a striking floral pattern. Rosa murmured her admiration. Dora's smile tightened its focus a little.

  The fortune-teller's hands had too many rings on them. They were the same rings she had owned when her hands had been thinner and the flesh had risen around the rings like the bark of a tree that will shortly engulf a piece of old fencing wire. Yet here again Rosa was prevented from critical concentration because the hands were now delving into the pretty purse and producing grains of coloured wheat and scattering them at random across the table. There were many different colours, all as bright as the beads of the bag.