Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  While Charles dropped back to lean against the wall, the rest of us entered Craig's Hotel in style, through the revolving glass doors, a quick inquiry at the desk and then through to the saloon bar with me no more than three inches behind Leah so that I might hide the stain that marked her backside.

  It was that quiet sleepy time in the afternoon when the people who inhabit saloon bars do so quietly, where the work of the barmaid is betrayed by small quiet sounds, and no wolf-pack laughter or hen-party screech offends the ear of the sensitive visitor who may peruse the photographs of famous racehorses at his leisure while the other drinkers whisper quietly to each other, or read their copies of theCourier Mail, turning the pages quietly in respect of the hour of day.

  The snake, of course, disrupted this calm a little, but Charles was soon found playing in the street and introduced to the ashen barmaid and then the dour licensee. And while those drinkers who remained found themselves huddled together in a suddenly talkative group, the snake (a Children's Python) worked its way across the slippery linoleum towards an extraordinary-looking man in a yellow-checked suit. He had a bald head, a little goatee beard, an ascetic high-boned face, and gold-framed spectacles over sunken thoughtful eyes. While Charles, blushing red as usual, conducted his stubborn negotiation, this other fellow carried on his own silent conversation with himself, resting a gold-ringed finger on his pale lower lip. He rolled his eyes like a fellow trying to multiply 23 by 48 without using a pencil.

  It was easy to see the licensee was not an easy man with a quid. It was not that he haggled, but that he did not move. He regarded Charles with sleepy-eyed suspicion. I expressed the view that the snake was venomous, and relied upon the fact that pythons are not native to Ballarat. The snake paused, lifted its head from the linoleum, and flicked its tongue at the smoky air.

  "God damn," said the man in the yellow-checked suit. He spoke in the purest American.

  The licensee blinked his lizard-lidded eyes; the snake lay flat as a fallen stick. A green pound note was passed, at last, into my son's custody.

  "God damn. You're Lee-anne. The snake-dancer. I saw your show." He picked up his hat, stepped over the snake, and took two gliding steps across the floor, his hand extended to my blushing lover who was huddled back against the photographs of racehorses, pretending snake-fear. "Nathan Schick," he said, smiling crookedly but charmingly to reveal a gold-filled mouth, "I saw your act in Nambour, Queensland."

  I did not see Charles leave, but a scream from Sturt Street told me he was accompanied by the python.

  Nathan Schick seemed quite unaffected. He fussed around the table and forced Leah to sit down. He shoved out his pale hand and gave me that charming, weary, gold-speckled smile.

  "Badgery," I said, trying to keep the publican in view.

  "I know, I know," said the splendid American, patting a small round stomach which looked like a tiny cushion shoved down his trousers. "You, sir, are a funny man. A very funny man." I could not listen to him. I watched the cardiganed licensee approach. I kept my eye on the door and smiled at Nathan Schick. "Yes, sir, I saw your show. You should see her," he told the dour-faced publican who had come to block my exit. "You should see this young lady work with snakes."

  The licensee had the fine red veins and slow poached eyes of his caste. "I just have, Mr Schick."

  Nathan Schick blinked and made his mouth into an "O". What a ham he was. I am nine-tenths convinced he betrayed us to the licensee and then rescued us to that we would feel ourselves in his debt.

  He gave the licensee a crisp new pound note, ordered a round of drinks, sent Sonia to fetch her brother, and told the barmaid she was lucky to have such talented performers patronizing her bar. Schick could talk a line of bullshit like I never heard before, and in this he had the distinct advantage of being American and therefore never hesitant about expressing an opinion. Australians, in comparison, lack confidence, and it is this, not steel mills or oilwells, that is the difference between the two nations.

  Schick also had that peculiar deafness that Americans adopt towards Australians (not dissimilar to the deafness city people adopt when listening to country people). It comes from not understanding the rhythms of their speech and assuming they would not live where they did if they were more resourceful.

  So Nathan Schick, while regarding us benevolently, misunderstood our ironies and took them for firmly held beliefs, contradicted them, dropped names around the bar, criticized the act he had recently praised, suggested "improvements" without a beg-your-pardon, asked us to join his troupe which would soon play the Tivoli in Melbourne, then thought better of it and asked us to audition.

  This, for people who had lost ten rosellas and a Dodge utility, was very heady stuff. When Nathan ordered straight gin, so did we. The angry blotches left Leah's neck and rearranged themselves into a rosy aura. She toasted me silently across the gin-wet tabletop, and even the line of her Victorian shoulders suggested relief.

  Nathan Schick had ideas to take our act to America, or so he claimed. He caught me pulling a funny face at Leah, and hamming up his hurt feelings, produced a little gold-embossed notebook in which he had written: "Lee-anne, snakes". We had left Nambour, he said, before he could talk to us. He was full of ideas. Most of them – he freely admitted it – were lousy.

  It was after five o'clock now and the bar started to fill. In pubs all over Ballarat thirsty men had only one hour's heavy drinking before they were expelled into the street at closing time.

  "Hell, Lee-anne," shouted Nathan Schick, now hemmed in by a forest of trousered drinkers, "hell, I know, I'm not an artist. I'm just making a suggestion. Look, an example only. If you want to play, say, Dallas, Texas, you need a hook. You're Australian. You got to have an Australian hook. Something in your act, not a snake – all snakes look the same. Not your ostrich. Something Australian."

  "It's an emu."

  "Who cares? This is an American audience. Do you say to them, Ladies and Gentlemen, this is an emu even though you think it's an ostrich? Does Herbie make a comedy routine from this?" He raised his pale eyebrows from behind his gold-rimmed glasses. He considered the idea of my comedy routine, flicking his wide eyes from one face to the next. I wondered how it was that, no matter how I hated Henry Ford, I always loved Americans. "Nah," Nathan smashed the idea flat with his ringed hand. "Nah, you need something Australian in your act."

  "A kangaroo," said Charles, and momentarily stopped kicking the table.

  "Yes," said Nathan Schick nodding his head at my blushing son. "But no. I took a herd of boxing kangaroos out through the Middle West at the end of the Great War and no one was too interested. They are a vicious animal, Herbie, did you know that? Yes, they are. They ripped each other's guts out – excuse me, Lee-anne -but it's true. You can't have that sort of thing in family entertainment, as I'm sure you know," he said, obviously believing we knew no such thing. "Now you two kids should not be scraping around Ballarat pulling bad tricks in second-rate hotels. Neither should I. If Jack Benny could see me here, he'd say, what the hell is Nathan doing in Bell-A-Rat. My answer is: Jack, I am making a living. His answer to me: Nathan, it is not a living, it is a death. My reply: don't I know it. We are getting too old for all this. What I want is an Aussie act for the States. This is a great country, but it hasn't even started to be exploited. You people don't realize what it is you have to sell."

  "Wombats", said Charles, "and koalas."

  "There are problems with the wombat," Nathan Schick said. "I was interested in wombats in '29. I went up to your zoo in Sydney and looked at the wombat. The fellow said you could train them but God, Herbie, no offence… Lee-Anne… but the wombat is not star quality. They would laugh at you in Pittsburgh. You know what I mean, uh? Pittsburgh?"

  We didn't.

  "They would laugh at you and your wombat. And the koala -sure, it's cute, but they pass wind and they're intoxicated all day. You can't work with those sort of people. The koala is not a commercial property. You need something very or
iginal. Maybe you should have some abos in your act. They do a war dance? Tie you up? Herbie rescues you? No, it's not enough. It's the wildlife that I like, and that's where I think you two are on to something."

  And what did puritanical Leah think of Nathan Schick? Leah Goldstein, who put Izzie Kaletsky on a pedestal and then worried about the ethics of skin, this same Leah Goldstein sat in her chair with her gin and water, and beamed at him. She loved Nathan Schick's vulgar suit and ringed hands. She liked the garrulous checks, like leftover material from a Silly Friends party. Even as he had walked across the saloon bar, stepping over the snake so carelessly, even as he opened his gold-filled mouth to expose her for fraud, she liked him.

  Leah became light-headed more quickly than mere gin could explain.

  She laughed, that great wild snort of a laugh that was her trademark, and gave not a damn that heads in that noisy bar turned to look at her. She was talkative, almost (for her) garrulous. She told a story about Rosa, one about a snake; she held my hand and patted me on the head. When we stumbled out into the gin-bright street she liked Nathan enough to kiss him, first on one cheek and then the other. She made his sunken eyes gleam like diamonds and she glowed herself, realizing the importance of her gift.

  Nathan had a soft spot for us too. He was to tell us so, continually. He exploited us in his crummy show in Ballarat and had us work at starvation rates, but still he liked us. He was lonely, divorced three times with all his children either in hospital or gaol, but he was an optimist. He quickly became Dear Nathan, Bloody Nathan, Poor Nathan, Nathan-won't-shut-up, Nathan-won't-go-home.

  I grew to love the bony-faced bastard and his schemes, and I thought that Leah did too. She worked hard, laughed more often, told her awkward jokes, but the letters from Ballarat show the true condition of her soul: they lack joy. It does not matter that she had a real job in a big city, three shows a day, write-ups in theCourier Mail, a new act with a Distinctive Australian Flavour. All this, it seems, was froth.

  She wrote to Rosa: "The lesson I have learned is that what you say will happen, will happen. I declared myself a dancer when I had no right to. I had no skill, no experience, nothing. And yet, today, here I am writing to you from Ballarat and telling you about our show, and that I have spangles on my tits and a regular Yank to tell me when I am out of time. How pathetic I have been. I am like someone God has given three wishes to and all I have asked for is ice-cream. I have been wasting time trying to get deep satisfaction from something that cannot provide it. Ho-hum!"

  In the light of this one could be cynical and say that the telegram telling her of Izzie's accident was a gift from God.

  52

  Leah felt the jerk of the train physically rip her out of Ballarat. She saw dry-eyed Herbert Badgery standing waving, hiding his emotions in the shadow of his Akubra hat, grey, formal, unsmiling. Beside him Nathan Schick showed his gold teeth in crooked-faced regret. Mr Schick was bare-headed of course, because he-had given his Panama hat to Leah burgundy ribbon he "just happened" to have in his pocket. Dear Mr Schick, she reflected. Dear Mr Schick was a good man although, paradoxically, quite dishonest. He had them working for less than a stagehand, had lied to them about his Tivoli show, but had come to the station, given away a fine hat and stood there now with his eyes gleaming with tears in his ascetic bony skull. Sonia held a handkerchief to her mouth. Was she pretending to cry? Leah did not care for Sonia who had been, she thought (and said), spoiled by her prettiness, and her father's loneliness for female company. She was a product of Skin, stroked too much, fondled, indulged and should have had her knuckles rapped and her backside paddled instead of being permitted to display all these parodies of female fine feeling of which her gooey-eyed religion was only one example. She had been permitted to say a prayer in the carriage. Dear God let Leah travel safely to Sydney and may Izzie be better soon. Amen.

  Leah moved irritably in her seat and considered the other occupants of the carriage: old ladies of the type you no longer see: thick stockings, hanging drawers, stretched cardigans, ruddy faces, dead fur, powder, flatulence, all for ever in the process of arrangement and rearrangement while they looked for their tickets and called each other Mae or Gert. They smelt of dust and ignorance, like front rooms that need airing.

  Leah's cheek was smeared with tea-tree oil, the remainder of Charles's goodbye kiss which she would, in fact, carry with her all her life for she would never be able to smell tea-tree oil without remembering that acned face shining bright beneath the aromatic sheen. He had made her promise she would come back and she had phrased her promise like a clever lawyer. She was ashamed of herself for the promise, and unsure as to the correctness of what she was doing. Regret hovered, waiting to be let in. And yet, as the train tore her free of Ballarat, she was mostly aware of having done something, at last, that was fine, something selfless, something that did not cater for what she imagined to be her mindless hedonism: the pleasures of movement, the tremors of skin, the sensualist's love of description. She did not relish Izzie, and for this reason she was pleased to go to help him but even while she savoured the pleasure of this fine decision she was pulling herself up sharp, criticizing herself for smugness and self-righteousness.

  She was surprised to be on that train. Like a child who imagines herself locked in her room and then finds the door not locked at all, she stood uncertainly in the corridor, wondering if she would not, after all, be better to stay in her room with her dolls and her books.

  She had not expected to be let go so easily. She had, of course, announced her intention firmly and then, to her surprise, found no one to question her. She had expected Herbert Badgery to fight her fiercely. Herbert Badgery, however, had not known this, nor had he guessed as she had, that once she had offered her services to Izzie it would not be easy to relinquish them. Later, when Herbert understood that his silence was based on a wrong assumption, he much regretted that he had not protested.

  Not a simple regret either, it turned and turned, as endless as a corkscrew in his heart.

  Leah did not overvalue Schick's easy emotion at the expense of Badgery's silence. She had lain in Herbert's arms often enough to have absorbed him, to have achieved that almost complete understanding of a character by osmosis. They had passed fluids between each other. She knew that this refusal to display emotion was not heartlessness but a dam wall of emotion on whose deep side she had also swum, silently, in a place not suggested by the flashy talk and loud opinions of Herbert the urger.

  The train shuddered down through the hills of Ballarat and travelled through the greedily cleared land which produced in her a melancholy unrelated to her own experience in this landscape. (It is true that she had danced in all these towns between the barren hills, first with Mervyn Sullivan and then with Badgery amp; Goldstein, bleak halls in frost-clear nights, potato farmers clapping (a padding noise) on thick callused hands.) But she saw the landscape with Herbert's eyes. It was his, not hers. She could feel nothing for the place, and only sense the things he had told her: how he had flown there, crash-landed here, sold a car to a spud cockie there, at Bungaree. Even Ballarat had been like that. She had seen it as one might see a triple-exposed photograph: streets in which Grigson drove, Mrs Ester strode and through which the horse dragged Molly's mother's coffin. All of this she saw, but it was nothing to do with her.

  Tonight she would see her father in Melbourne and she intended to ask him (took out pencil and paper to make the note) about his own feelings and why he had abandoned the rituals of their race which might have sustained them better in a foreign place. Why then had he denied himself (and her) this comfort?

  Neither did she understand the old ladies in the compartment and although she recognized the squashed lamington cakes they produced (wrapped in wrinkled greaseproof paper) and could give them a name, they produced no echoes in her own experience. She listened to their long conversation about the dryness of the country from which seemingly poor material they were able to knit a conversation, or, if not exactl
y a conversation, a series of calls and answering calls like crows will do just before sunset. The word "dry" repeated itself, joined itself to other words and then fell away into silence to be replaced by the about. On the panel behind their heads the railways had framed photographs of ferny glades and cool green places on the other side of Melbourne where the Goldstein family had once motored in search of walks, single-filed, silent walks where they had all moved and stopped with a single mind, to listen to a bellbird, to hasten to a clearing, to taste the clean spring water.

  She felt lonely, no longer joined to anything.

  She took out her writing pad – never, ever, did she travel without one – and began the first of many letters in a long and complicated correspondence: My darling Herbert, it began.

  I had never been addressed by her so tenderly.

  53

  She was surprised that her mother had not come, and startled to see Wysbraum at her father's side, grinning widely and stamping his big feet while Sid Goldstein held out the parcel to his daughter. So intent was he on offering this parcel, so triumphant was he, so inexplicably delighted by the poor state of the thin bare cotton dress his daughter wore, that the embrace was awkward and became a defence of the parcel rather than anything else. Too many things were said at once, questions about bags and journeys, platform tickets (Wysbraum had lost them), concern for Izzie, all orchestrated with a triumphal note regarding the parcel and the dress.

  "You see, Wysbraum," said Sid Goldstein, "you see, I told you. I told you she would arrive with nothing, Try it, try," he said to his daughter. "You are as thin as I imagined. Isn't it true, Wysbraum, didn't I tell you?"