Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  "Empty."

  "Show me."

  I dropped my hands into the skirts of mosquito net and dragged the empty bottle into bed. I held it up against the light. The bottle was empty but she drank from it anyway.

  "Young women's skin," she said. "She was twenty-three when you left her."

  "She left me."

  "So you claim, but who could believe you? You told the newspaper in Grafton you were an ex-serviceman. You believe whatever falls out of your mouth because you don't really believe anything, just Product. You don't care about people, you only care about skin."

  "Leah, Leah, I love you."

  "Skin," she said. "Skin, you told me – the feel of skin."

  "Let me…"

  "And when it stretches and sags you'll throw me out, trade me in for a new one."

  "Let me tell you a story."

  "Don't touch me."

  "A story."

  "A lie."

  "A true story. How I got my electric belt."

  "How you got your Product to worship."

  "It's about skin. Do you want to hear it or not?"

  "Yes," she said, suspecting a trap.

  The story was, more or less, as follows. Most of it is lies, but I could think of no other way to tell Leah Goldstein that I loved her and not her skin.

  46

  Molly was practical. She had always been practical, even if she had spent half her life pretending she was not. "You are a commercial asset," Mrs Ester had told her, and Mrs Ester, may she rest in peace, had been right.

  She enjoyed driving home in the T Model taxi, enjoyed it far more than the Hispano Suiza, which was a fine car doubtless, but did not have "Boomerang Taxi" written on its door, or a commercial licence plate, or a "Not for Hire" sign displayed on the roof. She was not plying for business, but rather celebrating her occupation and enjoying the smell of lavender that emanated from the small muslin bag hidden beneath the back seat.

  As she turned from Flemington Road up to Ballarat Road towards Haymarket she reflected that she was tired. Waiting while a wagon turned into the timber yard on the corner she checked her face in the rear-vision mirror and was pleased to note that the tiredness did not show. She was a handsome woman, a little plump, but handsome none the less. She patted her cloche hat and wondered if she appeared hard. She had dismissed Inky O'Dyer that afternoon, but her face did not suggest she was capable of it and Inky O'Dyer, small, swaggering, chewing a match, had been slow to understand. But she would not have the public being cheated, and Inky had cheated. She felt sorry for him. She felt more sorry for his wife, and had posted her a cheque for twenty pounds. For those who suffered she brimmed with compassion. Towards those who erred she was less than generous and when she thought of the insolent Inky, his cap pushed back on his head, his hands in his deep pockets, her mouth diminished in size a fraction, an event she did not witness in her mirror, for by then the wagon had finally entered the timber yard and she was almost at the corner at the Haymarket yards.

  As she came down the track beside the yards (the same track I had met Horace on that afternoon) she saw the steer before she saw Charles. It was a large black animal with a white blaze on its forehead and one ear missing. The beast had been cut proud. It pawed the earth and dribbled, blocking the road, glaring malevolently at the taxi. She thought of Jack, who had become the subject of puzzling and angry dreams. She found herself, asleep, slapping her dead husband's face. She was not the sort of person to inquire as to why she might be so.

  The steer annoyed her. She stopped the car and tooted the horn and, when it did not move, got out of the car and approached it with the crank handle. The beast hesitated, retreated, and then, kicking up its heels, dodged round the car and up towards the main road.

  It was only then, suddenly frightened by the risk she had taken, that she saw Charles standing in the middle of the track, shoeless, mud-faced and blubbering.

  She knew then what had happened. She had heard the whisperings in the house on the Maribyrnong and known something evil was afoot. Her daughter was a stranger to her and the colluding poet (who would not lift the seat when he urinated) could not meet her eyes. She had watched Annette Davidson silently, with a stock-taker's eyes, and measured, in that wide red mouth, the extent of her deviousness.

  She swept up Charles from the roadway and while she chattered to him and called him dearie and little man, she was preparing herself. She drove fast on to the property, noted the aircraft gone, and, carrying her bulky bawling grandson in her arms, entered the house.

  It was like a place where a murder had been committed. The very breadcrumbs on the oil-cloth table gave witness to it. Flies rose from an unwashed frying pan. Sonia was crying in her cot. Her nappy needed changing. She found me, in tatters, underneath the bed, my head bleeding – a broken window nearby attested to the cause. Nearby she found an axe, its blade chipped and ugly from its battle with the poems.

  "Lord save us," she said. "May God strike them," she muttered. "May lightning hit them. Molly's here," she said. "Molly's here."

  She did things in an order that had its own logic. First she attended to Charles. She washed a saucepan and heated up some milk. When she had done this she poured it into a large mug and added a very generous portion of her crime de menthe. She sat him on her knee and spoke to him soothingly. She took off his shoes and socks and played this little pig went to market and when the creme de menthe seemed slow in acting, made him another one. She was, perhaps, too generous, for Charles went to sleep before he had finished his second mug. She put him into bed fully clothed and then changed Sonia.

  I heard all this but it did not touch me. I was in my own fever world, composed of whirling aeroplanes, spars, rotary engines, guy ropes, and buildings with splintered towers. Herbert Badgery, who does not cry, whimpered like a child.

  As she cleaned out the bedroom she spoke to me, as she removed the bits and pieces Phoebe had left behind (three dresses, a silk scarf, two petticoats, scribbled poems crumpled on the floor, a chamber-pot-unemptied – a vase, lipsticks, the dress she had been married in) she talked to me.

  "You were a doormat, poor man. Don't mind, don't worry. God will have mercy on you. Molly is here. Dearie me, look at it." She hurled things from the room as she spoke, bustling around. She tore sheets from the bed, removed prints from the wall. "You'll see," she said. "You'll see. Good riddance. Bad rubbish. Little Miss Uppity, little Miss Spoiled."

  She carried the wreckage from the room down to the river, squelching through river mud in high heels, and threw what she had not dropped into the oily waters.

  She removed her muddy shoes and stockings outside the door and threw these, as if they too might be tainted, into the ashcan on the doorstop. Then she lit the wood stove and stacked its firebox full. She riddled the grate. She washed the dishes. She did her work with a passion, crashing dishes and saucepans. "They'll die," she said, "you'll see. You're a good man. Too good, too kind. Built her a house", she said, "with his own hands. Fed and clothed, the little riddance, the little uppity."

  Thus Molly set upon her cure. First the clean house. "Thought I was silly," she said, mopping the oilskin table. "Looked down at me. Laughed."

  She came to me then to attend to my wounds, smelling of disinfectant and Velvet soap. My mind was not right. I blubbered like a baby, howled and hugged her, raged like a warrior, giggled like a girl. She persuaded me into the bed. I sat up and talked like an adult. I told her I had been fired and then, in the middle of this, a great black blind came down over my head and I wanted to bang my head against the wall until it broke.

  I ran out to the birdcages and released them. I shooed them out, as if this magic might bring back my wife. I wrung the neck of a parrot that would not leave. Not just wrung its neck, but pulled its head off. Molly got me back to bed and washed the blood and feathers from my hands. She got me undressed. I had no vanity or modesty. She got me into pyjamas and sat by my bed sponging my face with a warm wet towel.

  "It
's a death," she said. "That's what it is, a death. Grieve. You can howl. I howled when Jack died, howled and howled. She is dead", she said, "and gone. Poor man, you were a doormat. Mud on you, mud from her feet. Miss High-and-Mighty, and left her babies."

  I woke up in a dark room and plunged back into the pit. Molly sat in the kitchen. She had the firebox door open. I could see the flames. She came in, dressing gown pink, soft fluffy slippers, her hair brushed out.

  She sat on my bed and held me.

  I am sure, to this day, that she did not plan what happened. To plan such a thing would have been repugnant to her. Had someone suggested she do such a thing she would have been outraged. Perhaps I did it. I do not know. But somewhere between my search for comfort and her desperate desire to provide it, my head found its way to her breasts. Not young girl's breasts, dear Leah, not firm, pert, but large, and pendulous. Don't wrinkle up your little puritan's face and turn away. Face me. Look at me while I tell you that I, Herbert Badgery, took a breast in my mouth like a child, while the north wind turned to rock the little house of my disgrace. The dark and the wind isolated us from reality, from her god even, from the priest and the dusty confessional, and Molly was the angel of sleep, claimed that right, that role, out loud. "To make him sleep," she told her fierce and vengeful god, and I hope her god heard her. I hope he saw her discard her belt, heard it clunk to the floor, the slippers flop, the gown shed like a whisper; saw her body, the fleshy arms, the red corset marks on her generous stomach, the appendix scar, the blue veins on her thighs, the dimples of her sagging backside. Hope he saw them and found them beautiful.

  "In it goes," she said, "poor baby."

  "Molly, Molly, what's happening?"

  "Shush, shush, slow and easy. Mama's got you, slow and easy."

  No, my darling Leah, I will not plead normality and go rifling through my bureau to pull out birth certificates to show she was only six years older than I was. For making it normal would miss the point. We did not think it normal, either of us, it was abnormal, extraordinary, wonderful, embarrassing, and it did not happen just once, but merely raised the curtain on a time of my life when I was not the me I thought I was, and she was not the she she thought she was.

  I will tell you, my mother-in-law and I became lovers, but there was never in it anything as casual as the life of lovers, no waking together, no dropping of clothes on floors and piling into bed. There were firm rituals (as set as the Latin incantations by which she reached her god) that must be gone through. There were lines that must be said which soon would assume the form, not of words at all, but odd-shaped keys to doors that were otherwise locked tight.

  Our mornings were as proper as you would expect, both waking on our own beds. The demands of life ensured that breakfast would be made, fires lit, Molly's car be started, a formal but friendly goodbye be given while she left for work.

  I stayed at home and did not go into a world where I was a fool, a cuckold, a man without a job or a wife. I made myself into a small man and sat in the sun with a blanket over my knees with no more future than that suggested by the peas I slowly shelled for dinner.

  When I did finally venture out into the world with a new Dodge truck I was as shaky and nervous as any invalid, not surprised to find myself unwanted by employers. I read no newspapers and so made no connection between my misfortune and that of others.

  But this is leaping ahead a little and there is more skin, my darling, to regale you with. And why is your nose so wrinkled while your eyes are so bright?

  47

  Oh, how pleasant it is for a man to be looked after, and if I have made myself a pitiful thing, a broken spirit, an invalid with no dreams left, I do not take it back but present to you the other side of the grubby coin: that year with Molly in which I did not need to strive, to impress, to make a sale, to do anything other than sit in the sun or by the fire. Here I had the childhood I had never had, was petted, cosseted, indulged, and if there was a dark wound in my soul, if the yellow dusk and the white smoke from the tannery sometimes filled me with melancholy as I waited for my mother-in-law's car headlights bumping over the paddock, flickering like motor-cycle lights on the rough land, then that, I am sure, is the natural order of childhoods: that certain lights produce sadness, that the night be full of threatening shapes, and the sight of ants crawling along a windowsill is enough to induce an inexplicable terror.

  My children ran wild, with dirty faces and, often as not, empty bellies.

  In the evenings we ate puddings.

  And when my brood were safely asleep our little rituals would begin, everything in its place, one thing at a time. Brush your teeth, Herbert, in water so cold it hurts them. Empty your bladder into the stinking mysteries of the dunnycan. Bid your mother-in-law good night and climb into bed.

  Sit there, wait, toss a little, turn a little so that she, still sitting by the fire, can inquire: "Can't you sleep?"

  "No, not yet."

  "I'll get some warm milk."

  The warm milk is produced, yellow with cream, in a thick chipped mug that has travelled all the way from London to Point's Point, to Geelong, to Maribyrnong, to sit beside my bed, clinking on the marble-topped dresser beside my wristwatch with the luminous dial and the sweat-sour leather band.

  The milk will not work, but it must be used, as part of our ritual, as the raising of the cup is in the other.

  "You must sleep, poor man. I'll sponge your face."

  "Ah, thank you."

  Yes, step by step, through this door, up this passage, jangling our keys, we proceeded, until the last door open we were permitted, as reward for our best endeavours, to cover each other with plum-soft kisses, while the half-drunk milk wrinkles its yellow face and separates itself into an edible impersonation of ageing skin.

  I never blamed the holy pictures for bringing our idyll undone. They looked down on us, I thought, benevolently: Jesus with his heart showing, like an ad in a chemist-shop window; Mary ascending into heaven. I liked to have them there. Had Molly taken them down I would have complained.

  No, I blamed the Irishman at Essendon, to whom Molly -worrying about persistent pains in her insides – at last made her full confession. The pain, it turned out, was only wind, for which charcoal tablets proved quite effective. But by then the Irishman had done his work and it had been decided that Molly must not keep me from my wife.

  I was plump from puddings and my hands were soft. She bought me a brand-new Dodge. She took me to Stobbit's in Little Bourke Street and had a suit made for me. She dressed me, weeping, in her own electric belt. She knitted a sweater for Charles and a pair of socks and a balaclava for Sonia. But in the end there was nothing more she could do but make a thermos of strong black tea – it took only fifteen minutes -and present me with two tins of cake with pussy cats painted on them.

  She stood in front of the old church hall that I had stolen from the Methodists. She plucked at the tall sedge grass that had invaded the grounds. She wore an unfashionably long cream dress which billowed out in the cold morning wind. She had used too much lipstick on her smile and her skin was dusty with powder, like the wings of a moth damaged from its adventures. She wore a cloth flower, a cream rose, in her gold-dyed hair. She held out a long-gloved arm and waved.

  The gearbox in the Dodge was new and stiff. It moved reluctantly into first.

  Charles kicked his new boots against the floor.

  Molly, her soul now guaranteed safe and sound, retreated clumsily towards the solitude of the house.

  I turned and drove straight back. But two days later we made our farewells for good. I headed up the Sydney Road, accompanied by St Christopher towards whose talisman I never felt anything but sentimental affection.

  48

  My attitude towards religion was not that of a serious man, and I did not think it odd that Sonia would have herself confirmed five times, not, that is, until the Church of England man in Ballarat brought it to my attention. This was in 1934 when Badgery amp; Goldstein lost the
Dodge and my daughter decided on another confirmation.

  I had no objection. She already had the dress.

  I forget the minister's name, but I vividly remember the boiled lollies he offered me. The rooms of his manse were stacked high with cardboard boxes, large glass jars filled with Eucalyptus Diamonds, Black Babies, Humbugs, Tarzan Jubes, and Traffic Lights. He did not explain himself but I have seen the type before: clergymen with an itch for commerce who must satisfy their natural cravings in odd ways. This fellow was obsessed with buying things in bulk. He had me taste the marmalade he favoured, an orange Seville in a four-gallon drum, enough to last him a lifetime. He was a pleasant enough man with a great pile of fair wavy hair atop a high forehead. He had a hooded brow, bright blue eyes, and a small innocent mouth carried with him from his childhood.

  He postponed the discussion of heresy (there was nought else on his mind) to show me the demijohns of water he had imported seventy miles from Melbourne. In the bathroom he demonstrated the comparative softness of Melbourne and Ballarat water by lathering his thin hairy arms and wrists -smeary Ballarat on the left, creamy Melbourne on the right.

  We then sat in the front parlour and watched my pretty daughter play too roughly with his son. She did somersaults on the rough green lawn outside the leadlight windows and did not worry that she showed her panties.

  Was I aware, he wished to know, of my daughter's frequent confirmations?

  You cannot suck a man's humbug and be uncivil to him. I admitted to having seen her in her confirmation dress in another town, in other towns, with the Catholics in Sale, the Methodists in Yass. I had the photographs in my wallet – the pretty girl with the prayer book looking at the camera, sometimes alone, or, at Sale, in front of that redbrick barn of a thing, lined up with all those Irish eyebrows, pale skin, dark hair, squinting at the sun.

  Did I believe? The reverend man inquired of me, proffering a second humbug which I declined.