by Peter Carey
I once heard Melba sing and knew, from the first note, that I was in the presence of extraordinary gifts. Izzie had that quality, without me even knowing quite what that talent was. If you had given it to me, I would have sold cars with it, one a day.
I cannot even pretend to understand all the resonances that were alive on that bright, tossed day. I cannot imagine that Izzie knew what was going on in Leah's mind; but then I also find it difficult to imagine that he was ignorant of her turmoil.
He did an odd thing. Let me tell it.
Charles was sitting on the bonnet of the truck. The cockatoo was tied with dunny chain to the outside rear-vision mirror from which perch it shrieked and wailed and attacked its own reflection. (If you are, from habit, seeing a white cockatoo in your mind, I must beg you to change it for the correct one, three foot long, funereal black, its yellow fan of feathers at present clasped shut beneath its tail.)
Izzie, his hands in his pockets, his suit jacket bulging with books, came to stand in front of Charles who had disliked him the moment he knew the man existed. And just as, years later, Charles would not be able to pass by an aggressive or frightened animal without attempting to befriend it, so, it seems to me, Izzie approached my suspicious hostile son.
Izzie held out his dainty hand towards the cockie which tilted its ferocious head to one side and examined the approaching meal. Izzie began to spill out an immense amount of information about cockatoos including such historical titbits as the fact that its close relation Calyptorhynchus magnificus (the red-tailed black cockatoo) was the first Australian parrot to be illustrated. This little sketch was executed not by Joseph Banks, but by his draughtsman, a chap called Parkers or Parkinson, in 1770. The information, however, was not merely historical (that would have lost Charles's attention very quickly) but covered breeding, questions of diet and inclination to travel. My son hoarded away everything he heard. The result, however, was that he felt obliged to give something in return. "It bites," he admitted.
"Yes," said Izzie. "Yes," he added, offering his fingers as if they were egg sandwiches. He was not a fool. He not only knew the bird was female (Charles had not), he knew that its beak must be powerful enough to crush a pine nut or hakea pod. So for what did he offer this sacrifice? For Charles's admiration? For silent Sonia's? Or for Leah, who remained with the white wings of the article for which Joseph Kaletsky was later tried? Did he reduce the value of his courage to that of a gimmick?
Leah watched him calmly. She passed her hand across her eyes a second and yawned. The eucalypts tossed above her head and the casuarinas shed needles with a sigh that meant nothing more than windy weather.
And the cockatoo, at last, took what was offered and Izzie gave an odd, high hoot. Charles slapped the bird across the head. The finger was released. Blood streamed.
We all, I think, looked at Leah. This is why I am sure we understood more than we knew. We looked, all together, towards her and she, hearing the hoot of agony, looked up, saw the blood flowing from the finger, and looked down again.
This is one of the few moments of childhood that Charles can accurately recall (for the rest it is imaginary slights, fictitious hardships) and on this day in Bendigo he too saw the blood flowing down the lacerated finger and I am indebted to him for the recollection of a dirty fingernail atop it all.
It was not to be a simple day for at this very moment, while Leah was returning to her magazine, while the finger was still aloft, before the cockatoo had stretched and spread itself, levitated above the bonnet of the Dodge with its sulphur tail feathers splayed out beneath it, a black Chevrolet, with a wireless aerial running along its roof like the outlined drawing of a knife blade, rolled over the rocks into the camp with its engine cut.
It was the town police from Bendigo.
As a car salesman you have many dealings with police, particularly in regard to registration of vehicles. Up until that day I always got on well with them. At Barret's we gave them a bottle of grog at Christmas, nothing dirty, but enough to get my plates through the system quickly. In short I did not, as Leah now did, begin to shake like a leaf, nor did my face, as Izzie's did, set into a scimitar sneer.
The police were not, however, here to inquire about motor-car registration plates (although they made a note of mine before departing). They were here to advise a communist agitator and his collaborators to move out of town. They did this with a mixture of weariness and primness that I was later to recognize as characteristic. They searched no one, and made no inquiries as to why their major interest had blood streaming down his finger. We were given sixty minutes to pack and it all happened so fast I did not even argue. When they called me "Baldy" I did not raise a fist.
Even when they departed I had no time for post mortems because now I found Izzie's wrath was focused on me. He was under the illusion that I had informed the local police. I had somehow, it seemed, done this during the night. I had walked five miles into Bendigo, like Curnow betraying the Kelly gang, to give the warning. What bullshit. I have seen drunks get themselves into this sort of passionate rage, a time for ultimatums, bottles with broken necks, drawn knives and shotguns grabbed from under car seats. But it was only nine in the morning and there was no alcohol to justify it.
The charming man I had enjoyed ten minutes before now became a hateful little sparrow to whom I would happily have fed poisoned wheat. He splashed blood on my clean shirt, and that upset me almost as much as the silly ultimatum he now proclaimed, demanding that Leah choose now, once and for all, between the pair of us.
Leah walked across from the petrol drum to which she had returned for the magazine.
"Come," she said, holding his arm. "I want to talk to you."
"Talk to me here," Izzie said.
"Izzie, please."
"Talk here," he said. "What can't be said?"
"All right," said Leah Goldstein, no longer fair, no longer rational. "All right."
It was then she told him, in front of everyone, she could not bear his skin.
I think of a suit of scar tissue, ripped and broken, beside which agony a lacerated finger is nothing but a young man's prank.
42
"What sustains you, Mr Badgery?" Leah asked me, rattling northwards in a hurriedly packed utility, hounded by small-town police who imagined us revolutionaries. They were waiting for us at Heathcote and Nagambie, Tatura, Kyabram and Shepparton itself. They found us entering town, or buying a pie or a few gallons of petrol. In Nagambie we got our camp set up before they were on to us, Brylcreemed Irishmen with cabbage soup on their breath. They were familiar with our names and our business which was, they informed us, the overthrow of lawful government. We packed our things and moved on, driven across the state like the legendary sparrows the Chinese eliminated by never letting land.
"What sustains you?" she asked, as I turned down one more unlabelled gravel road which promised an escape from the tyrannical coppers of the soft-fruit country.
I attempted an answer. The car crashed hard into deep potholes. I was thirsty. Dust went muddy in my throat.
"Nothing", she said, "sustains you, Mr Badgery. You are walking on hot macadam, quickly. All that sustains you is your filthy belt, excuse me, but it is true. You are sustained by a gadget. The gadget does not believe in anything. It does not have an idea. It is just a product. The workers who make it are serving a mindless thing."
"It prevents dizziness."
"Dizziness, you told me, fearfulness. The verdigris on the battery makes your leg green. Have you noticed?"
"What is 'sustain'?" Charles asked, leaning forward like a scabby sultan from the pile of bedding in the back. Leah had charcoaled a small moustache on to his face and it was Leah, now, who answered his question with such patience, at such length that I derived great benefit myself.
"What is wrong with us all", she said when she had satisfied my son's curiosity, "is that we are sustained by gadgets, or desires that are satisfied by gadgets, when someone like my husband," she swallowed
, "whatever his faults," a long pause, "is sustained by something more substantial."
"And what sustains you, Mrs Kaletsky?"
"Movement," she said, displaying her white feet. "I admit it. I am really the one dancing on hot macadam, not you: town to town, dancing, writing letters. I cannot stay still anywhere. It is not a country where you can rest. It is a black man's country: sharp stones, rocks, sticks, bull ants, flies. We can only move around it like tourists. The blackfeller can rest but we must keep moving. That is why I can't return with my husband as he wishes," she announced, seeking rest in a simple theory, "because I am selfish, addicted to movement."
She was wrong about herself – what sustained her were the threads from the famous suit which she had woven into something new and personal, something finer than that sour greasy object which she had, if not misunderstood, at least imperfectly comprehended. With the threads of the suit she had woven kindness into a philosophy that was as simply practised as sending money to Rosa, picking up bagmen on the road, teaching me to read, sharing her food and being attentive to someone else's children. What she had made had little in common with Izzie's giant dream, was like one of her proverbial baby swallows beside his giant canvas of smooth grey forms, that complex ants' nest bathed in golden light.
"My husband is sustained by a better world, you see, not by fear or selfishness."
"Yes."
"He has probably killed his brother," she said, as if talking to herself, "and he thinks this is permissible. He thinks this is just. He thinks it is Correct."
"And that is better than being sustained by a belt?"
"Probably," she shivered, and tried to shut the scratched side curtains. "The intention is better. The intention is generous, not fearful."
"But why did he have to dob in his brother?"
"Not dob in."
"Do the Russians have a patent out on communism? Why does he have to explain himself to them?"
"It is a science," she said without conviction. "And the Russians have performed the first successful experiment. You'd have to ask him, Mr Badgery," she said bleakly. "I don't understand either."
"I liked him," I said.
"People do," she said and sat hugging her bare arms, no longer curious about the rabbits leaping from the bracken-covered paddocks we were passing through.
"No one asked me," said the voice from the back. "No one asked what sustains me."
What sustained my son, it seemed, was his new friendship with the cockatoo and Leah, guilty, weary, gritty-eyed, hugged him awkwardly across the back of the seat, and, with tears running down her cheeks, told him he was a good boy.
"I won't hurt her, will I, Leah?"
"No, Charles. I know you won't."
"I won't let her down."
"No."
"I know what sustains Sonia," Charles whispered, putting his arms around Leah's neck.
I turned to look at the sweet smile on my daughter's sleeping face.
"Disappearing," said duplicitous Charles, attempting to see what reaction this would get. "She tries all the time," whispered the little informer. "She says prayers to Jesus to make her disappear."
I couldn't help smiling. I never had a high opinion of the power of the Christian god: electric crosses, holy pictures, Irish priests at country football matches.
"Jesus doesn't know the trick," I said.
"I told her," Charles said.
"And who should she pray to, Mr Badgery?" said Leah who had never, once, referred to my act since the Bendigo fiasco.
"You don't pray to Jesus, I promise you that."
"But who", she insisted, "do you pray to?"
"Matilda," I grinned.
She frowned.
"Goddess of Fear."
Leah did not laugh. She put her hand on my knee. "Do you become afraid, Mr Badgery?"
"Sometimes."
"Let's buy alcohol," she said suddenly. "Let's buy alcohol in Violet Town."
43
Alcohol sustained us, it is true, and had it not been for this (and a packet of French letters I was forced to buy in Benalla) we would have made it across the border with petrol in the tank and five bob to spare, free, ready to make an honest quid without the help of the Victorian Police Force.
Alas we ran out of petrol in Wodonga and Charles, to his everlasting pride and eternal shame, sold his yellow-tailed black cockatoo to the man in the pet shop outside whose establishment fortune decreed we should come to rest.
There is nothing to tell about this except to let you see the expression on my son's face when he had bid up the price from ten shillings to one pound. His face seemed to swell, as if ruled by air or fluids; it became quite pink and taut and his eyes brightened with moisture and his mouth quivered at that odd uncertain point – a point I would like to leave it at forever -where, tickled by pride, made loose with relief, it may burst into the broadest smile or, alternatively, fall in on itself, feed on itself, a bitter meal of self-hatred that might sustain a man forever.
44
I would rather fill my history with great men and women, philosophers, scientists, intellectuals, artists, but I confess myself incapable of so vast a lie. I am stuck with Badgery amp; Goldstein (Theatricals) wandering through the 1930s like flies on the face of a great painting, travelling up and down the curlicues of the frame, complaining that our legs are like lead and the glare from all that gilt is wearying our eyes, arguing about the nature of life and our place in the world while – I now know – Niels Bohr was postulating the presence of the neutrino, while matter itself was being proved insubstantial, while Hitler – that black spider – was weaving his unholy lies.
Lies, dreams, visions – they were everywhere. We brushed them aside as carelessly as spider webs across a garden path. They clung to us, of course, adhered to our clothes and trailed behind us but we were too busy arguing to note their presence.
So while Arthur Dempster discovered Uranium 235 I was learning to be a funny man, mocking the dragon, standing on a dusty stage in Bellingen, NSW, and looking like a fool while an emu pecked my bum.
I had painted a map of Australia on the soft canopy of the Dodge and marked our path in red. "Badgery amp; Goldstein (Theatricals)" it said. Later I added " amp; Pet Suppliers" in acknowledgement of Charles's role in our survival.
Charles grew large and strong, but in an awkward way, with powerful bullock driver's thighs atop his bandy legs. He had a long trunk, a huge head with a powerful jaw, a face painful with pimples. He suffered his adolescence, talking to various animals in a breaking voice. When he should have been masturbating or spying on girls in the changing sheds of shire swimming pools, he was caressing some bright parrot or persuading a carpet snake to give up its freedom.
During some bad times in the Northern Rivers, it was fourteen-year-old Charles who kept us alive, selling birds to a charming old American, a fellow named Parson who wore rimless glasses like Teddy Roosevelt. He robbed us, of course, but we didn't know any better. He paid us a shilling for king parrots, sixpence for a galah, and we stayed in Grafton while the jacarandas dropped their lilac carpets across the streets and Charles went out each day with his nets and his climbing boots, a sanctimonious look on his face.
We paid for all this, the rest of us, paid for it in Charlie's moods, his slammed car doors, his stamped foot, his flood of tears.
It was also in Grafton that I bought Sonia a pretty white dress so she could go to Church of England Sunday School. Leah, who dressed drably off stage, disapproved of this. I was never religious myself but I thought it a harmless sort of thing. I would rather have my daughter pray to Jesus and sing Christmas carols than flirt with dragons. Besides, I had nothing against a pretty dress and I liked to dress up my beautiful daughter, to brush her hair and tie her ribbons. I was not approved of and later, in a moment of heat, Leah would scream at me: "All you saw of her were pretty dresses, not who she was. She was just skin to you."
Ah, skin.
We cannot avoid it. Ever since
her husband had walked, glass-eyed, mask-faced, from our camp, skin had been an obsession with my puritanical partner who suffered her guilt, that she had rejected her husband for an unworthy reason. She did not even understand her own reasons. She put all the weight on that poor envelope and would not let herself see beyond it.
She wrote to Izzie once a week, but she said nothing to him of skin. I was the one who bore the brunt of her obsession.
45
Sonia was at Sunday School in her pretty dress and Charles had been taken up to Mapleton in the schoolteacher's jinker to remove an alleged taipan from the Post Office toilet. Leah and I -temporarily rich – had retired to bed in our room at Donaldson's Commercial Hotel, Nambour. It was the wet season: mosquitoes hung in clouds outside our net; the air was sweet with the smell of the sugar mill just up the road.
A romantic afternoon had been planned. Bundaberg rum was purchased. And then Izzie and his skin came greasingly into the room, sliding into the bed, and I found my lover looking at me with that calculating grey gaze of hers as if, had she been able to focus her stare finely enough, she would have cut away the bone on my shaven head and laid bare the smelly secrets of my dogfish soul.
"In what respect", she said, at last, "am I like your wife?" She propped herself up on her elbow and displayed her small flaw, the nipple of her left breast which had the habit of popping inwards and which she, when washing, and I when kissing, popped out again, in readiness for the day when she would feed a child. Sometimes we discussed this possibility, this furryedged future, but not today. The nipple remained inverted.
"I will tell you in what respect," she said, "it is skin. Give me the rum."
