Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  The hearing aid was in his ear but not connected. The ear spluttered and exploded, crackled and fizzed as it always did, whether connected to the hearing aid or not. With this ear he remembered me – the grief-mad father who had struck him one awful evening at Clunes.

  The new Mercury sidecar, a heavy attachment better suited to a large motorbike, proclaimed his business: "Snake Boy Badgery" and the crudely He saw the mailbox when he was still a mile from it – a pale blue thing sitting on the sand which slowly revealed itself to be what he had known it was anyway – a four-gallon drum on its side with a small veranda soldered on to keep the weather out. A soft sandy track led from the mailbox through a stand of stunted Mallee gums and up a gentle rise to where a house – its corrugated iron walls gleaming silver in the heat – stood on a bare orange patch of earth.

  Charles stopped at the mailbox and read the sign. "Chaffey." He was already nervous. He wondered what sort of person Chaffey would be, if he would be suspicious, or sarcastic or rude, if he had sons who would taunt him or daughters who would laugh at his funny looks, if they would refuse him water, deny him a feed, or give him both and then send him out into the dark unfriendly night without wondering if he had a bed to go to.

  The gate was not made from wood or iron, was more of a trap than a gate, a strained contraption made from fencing wire and a complicated series of loops and levers that served to tension the wire and slacken it off. He had not come across the system before (not surprisingly – it was the product of Les Chaffey's ingenious mind) and so took some time to get it open and even more time to get it shut.

  Marjorie Chaffey saw Charles undo his scarf and belt and place them in his sidecar. When she saw him comb his hair she thought: "Salesman."

  It was late in March but still very hot. The wheat had long been taken in but still lay in sacks at railway sidings where it was being eaten by mice. The earth had been ploughed and seeded twice but the expensive seed had never germinated and the paddocks, the subject of mortgages and other substantial documents, were drifting like bad dreams in the wind.

  Marjorie Chaffey tried to read the sign on the sidecar as it approached but she had left her distance glasses on the mantelpiece and so could not make it out.

  The veranda was only two feet above the sandy soil, but it gave her the advantage over strangers and she remained there as she always did, looking down at the machine (shining black, glittering gold) which fell silent, not sharply or cleanly, but like a noisy meeting slowly brought to order.

  The rider did up the buttons on his suit coat. He was, she saw, only a boy.

  Charles tried to see her face, but the sun was in his eyes and the woman was in shadow. "G'day missus."

  "G'day." The reply was as flat as a shutter on a window.

  He squinted up at her. It would be a small exaggeration to say that he sought love in the stranger's shadowed face, but none at all to say that he wished approval and acceptance. He was a stranger moving amongst strangers, finely tuned to acceptance and rejection.

  "Hot enough for you?" he asked.

  "Hot enough."

  He was sweating inside his heavy suit, but he wished to appear a man. He also wanted to say, I'm just a boy. I won't harm you. All I want is a feed and a place to sleep.

  The woman on the veranda was as still as a goanna that knows itself watched and even the feathery touch of her broom as it shifted on the floor reminded him of a goanna's forked tongue as it smells the air.

  "Boss home?" he asked her. He knew the black eye made him look unusual. He would have liked to explain the black eye to her. He was sure she was a nice woman and kind to her children. He could not explain the black eye. He was ashamed of it.

  "What you after?" she asked.

  "Oh," he blushed and made an arc in the sand with his boot, "bit of business."

  "What sort of business would that be?"

  A mouse ran across the veranda and she flicked it halfheartedly with her broom. The mouse ran up the handle of a rusting shovel, along the horizontal corrugations of the wall (Charles saw it, soft as a shadow across the silver) through the window and into the house. She removed the prop from the corrugated-iron shutter so that it dropped closed with a clang.

  "Mice bad?" he asked.

  "Bad everywhere," She said defensively.

  "I come from Jeparit today," Charles said. "They were bad up there. By Jove they were. Eat your buttons."

  "Eat your buttons everywhere." Charles did not hear her, nor did he notice the three safety pins on the front of her floral dress. "Eat your toenails in the night," she said.

  Charles was fiddling with his hearing aid, a heavy metal box that pulled his suit coat out of shape. It came on with a roar. He grimaced.

  "Sorry," he said, putting his head on one side as if he might, from this angle, penetrate the shadow. "I'm a bit hard of hearing."

  "Ah," she said, suddenly sorry for him. "You didn't miss nothing. Just talking about the blankety mice."

  "Got a cat?"

  "Got two," she said, defensive again, "but it does no good."

  Charles could smell, already, although he was not yet invited on to the veranda, the sour dank smell of mice. "I got something better than a cat, missus."

  "Better talk to my husband if you're selling, but he won't buy nothing. If you've got mousetraps or that sort of thing you're better off to save your legs. He's up at the forge," she said, becoming angry, again, about the glass of water she would have to offer him.

  Charles trudged around the back, past the hot silver walls, around the corner of the kitchen house. He had hoped that the man was not at home. He would rather, any day, deal with a woman for there was always a soft spot to be found in the hardest of them.

  He was careful not to tread on the dead, sandy vegetable patch. He threaded his way through a rusting garden of ploughshares, tines and scarifiers and made his way, without hope, towards the dark mouth of the bright-walled shed. His hearing aid crackled and he missed the sounds of a man smithing and the cries of white cockatoos, three of them, as they passed overhead on their way to a stand of trees above a dry water-hole; their cries, coinciding with the slow powerful movement of their wings, were like big creaking doors in need of oil. Charles saw the birds but they only depressed him. He had swapped his nets for petrol.

  The forge was set up at one end of the large earth-floored shed and he saw the red glowing piece of metal in the gloom before he saw the farmer himself. As he walked towards the shower of sparks he did not take in the unusual nature of the shed – the shelves packed with odd-shaped pieces of metal, the neat handwritten labels. He walked past a drill press and a lathe without wondering why a farmer would have such equipment. What he did notice was the tractor – an old T Model cleverly converted so that the heavy chain transmitted power to large metal wheels.

  "Petrol," thought Snake Boy Badgery.

  The farmer was one of those quick-eyed finely built men whom farming has made strong and wiry but who, in the end, are not suited to their work because they like the company of people too much. He was pleased to see the stranger standing in his shed. He did not immediately break off what he was doing – shaping a metal wheel cleat to replace the broken one on his tractor – but he finished it only roughly and when he had dunked it, sizzling, into a drum of year-old water, took off his apron and shook hands.

  Charles was relieved to see the man's face, and not just because it grinned at him, but because it was, anyway, a friendly face, cocked, crooked, with pale eyebrows at extreme angles and deep wrinkles in the corner of pale blue eyes. This was Les Chaffey, a man with a dictionary on his shelf, a map of the world on his wall, a habit of poking at things with a fork or a screwdriver when they interested him.

  Charles liked him immediately. He liked his waistcoat with the silver watch he had won at the rifle club. He liked the three different pens and the propelling pencil he carried in the pocket of his collarless shirt. But mostly he liked the way he cocked his head and listened carefully to
what Charles had to say.

  "Is that a fact?" he said when Charles, in an untidy rush of words, had told him about the snakes, i. e., that they were not poisonous and that they ate mice. "And that's your line of business, is it?"

  Charles said that it was. His price was a gallon of petrol, a meal and a place to sleep. As he named the price he feared it was too high but, when Les Chaffey shook his hand to confirm the deal being done, he was sorry he had asked so little. Charles's eyes betrayed him by suddenly watering. He hid his emotions in the dark pockets of the shed.

  As they walked back to the house a wind sprang up and the farmer tried not to think about his drifting paddocks, a hard thing to do when they are stinging you on the back of the neck. He took refuge in fancies about the young visitor's black eye, wondered if it had happened in a farm or a pub and whose daughter had been involved. There was something about the Snake Boy that made him confident a daughter had been involved. He got it wrong. What he was seeing was a need for affection that could have been best satisfied by a big woman with an apron and floury hands. But Les Chaffey saw the oily remains of pimples on his neck and big chin and thought he secreted an odour of sexual need as obvious and all-pervasive as the smell of the mice who covered, in their teeming breeding millions, the land from Jeparit to the South Australian border and this parallel brought him back to the very things he wished to forget – drought and mice, mice and overdrafts.

  The shops in Jeparit, even the butcher's, smelt of mice, and in the grocer's you could see where they had eaten the paper around the lids of the Brockoff's biscuit tins and pushed the hinged lids open. At the railway sidings they ate the wheat bags from the bottom until the bags collapsed in on themselves, worthless, empty, a year's work inside the guts of mice. There were mice jokes and those who had children – both of his were at the Gordon Tech in Geelong – made little chariots from matchboxes and raced the diseased creatures in teams of four and six.

  It was the mice that had brought Charles so far from Sydney, riding a motorbike he had never intended to buy. He had read about the plague in the Sydney papers, but he had not been prepared for the extent of it, the fearless armies of squeaking creatures, the stink you could never escape, the red sores they spread on the children's arms and faces.

  No one had money to buy snakes and he had no talent to persuade them to change their minds. So he found himself broke and lonely in unfriendly towns, swapping the services of his pythons for a meal and a little petrol, knowing that tomorrow the snakes would be as sated as gluttons on Boxing Day and that if he wished to eat at all he would have to perform the Snake Trick. And it was the Snake Trick that had resulted in the black eye – his amateurish deception had been exposed in Dan Murphy's Commercial Hotel in Jeparit.

  The Chaffeys' home was hot as an oven and smelt of mice and sweat but Charles was thankful to be invited inside and be formally introduced to Mrs Chaffey.

  Mrs Chaffey was small and faded; however her worn pale eyes were still capable of transmitting signals of sharp alarm and warm affection on behalf of the husband called "Dad". She showed both of these emotions in the dark kitchen house as she listened to her husband explain the snake boy's business. She allowed herself to be persuaded to touch one; it was not the pythons that alarmed her, but rather the quantity of enthusiasm they might generate. Mrs Chaffey recognized enthusiasm as something vital in her husband's life, but she also knew it must be measured most precisely, like one of those potions (so beloved of quacks) that are vital in a small dose, and lethal in a larger one. When she had finished assessing the snakes she gave them back to their owner. Then she offered him a glass of water and cut extra potatoes for the Irish stew.

  3

  It is difficult to give the flavour of my son's life at this stage, and although he would later romance about it, claim that he had been a scholar of boarding houses and a citizen of the highway, that he had friends from Moe to Minyip, his grown-up eyes would still show the truth to anyone who cared to look at them: he had passed along those roads a total nonentity, had felt himself a no one, worse than a no one: shy, ugly, nervous of grown men, anxious when confronting boys his own age, a blushing fool with cafe waitresses, an easy target for teasing children.

  Yet he also harboured an idea of himself that contradicted all of this: that he was someone special, someone who would one day do great things not just for himself, but for his country. And these contradictions, the triangular tensions between his shyness, arrogance, and hunger for affection, made him a difficult person to get to know, made him belligerent when nervous, a stammerer when confident, weepy when approved of, brash when he would be better off being quiet.

  He was hampered further by his deafness which sometimes made him imagine slights where none had been intended.

  These things were quite enough to make him a poor salesman, but he suffered a further handicap – he was so eager to tell the truth that he could never simplify. I have seen in him my own dizzy desire to throw all one's being at a friend's feet, to show the tangle, the contradictions, the good and the bad, and say- there I am. I did it myself one evening with Jack McGrath. I have done it on other occasions, but with Charles the truth was an obsession. I don't know where it came from, but it made him a poor salesman. And this is not, as you may have imagined Professor, because a salesman is required to lie. It is because the truth, told thus, is of no interest to the average punter.

  And even with someone like Les Chaffey, it seldom brings a benefit.

  Chaffey was interested in every word my son had to say. He sat him in his big gloomy dining room before the sun was down and put a big plate of stew in front of him. There was gristle on the meat and fat floating in the gravy, but Charles was so hungry that both his head and his belly ached. He picked up his yellow bone-handled knife and his verdigrised fork without waiting to hear if the Chaffeys said grace or not. Then Mrs Chaffey gave him a napkin so he put his knife and fork down and spread the linen on his lap.

  It was then Les Chaffey asked him where the pythons came from.

  Now if Charles had been able to forget an isolated pocket in Papua and a reported sighting in the Gulf, he could have answered this question in four words and got a potato into his mouth before the next question arrived. But he was not capable of such deceit and there was, anyway, such interest in the faces of both host and hostess, that he wished to present them with everything, not only about the snakes, but in the way that he himself, in the daily course of his life, had collected the information. So he not only mentioned the isolated pocket in Papua and the sighting in the Gulf which, he had to confess it, he had not read about himself but had been told by a man who he had met in a cafe in Ararat, a schoolteacher, a Mr Gibson, originally from Moe, who was not a teacher of natural science but of English but who read science as a hobby.

  I am abbreviating. For every road Charles took he came to a fork that had to be noted if not explored. He covered many points, including the origin of his suit and the explanation of the oil stain on the cuff, before he revealed that Mr Gibson had told him that the sighting in the Gulf was not the python in question – there had certainly been no scale count – but another python or rather a snake commonly called a python, but in fact not a python at all.

  His host and hostess were mopping up their gravy with big lumps of snowy baker-shop bread and Charles was still trying to get the first lump of spud into his mouth but he had not, even though he had abandoned Mr Gibson, been able to complete his answer.

  He sat talking, his elbows resting on the checked oilskin table, while his pythons ate their fill, lazily doubling their bodyweight; they oozed their way through holes in the hessian wall-lining and lay plump and lumpy amidst the dry black seaweed insulation Les Chaffey had brought all the way from Geelong. Charles watched a skin form on the top of his stew. He spoke faster and faster. He was grateful for his host's kind attention and, at the same time, although he knew it was wrong of him to feel it, he was angry and resentful that they would not let him eat.


  And yet he might have eaten in the end for his answer, although it seemed, as it uncoiled itself, to be never-ending, eventually began to taper and, finally, showed the divided subcaudal scales of the very tip of the tail itself. He should have had time for a quick mouthful before his host's next query, and would have, had he not noticed the aforementioned person leaning forward and staring unashamedly at his black eye. He was, as I have already said, ashamed of the story behind his injury but if he were asked a direct question about it he would have no choice but to tell the truth in all its humiliating detail.

  The sun had now gone and kerosene lamps had appeared in the course of Charles's answer. They cast a deep blue shadow and it was the quest for this soft hiding place that made him push his chair back and turn his head in such an awkward way. Once he had his eye tucked safely out of sight, there was nothing the Chaffeys could do to persuade him to eat. He patted his stomach and declared himself satisfied. He could have cried with disappointment.

  "Did you", Les Chaffey said, helping himself to his guest's uneaten food, "have a barney?"

  Charles stared at his host, transfixed.

  "A blue?"

  He had a headache, and his neck hurt too.

  "A stoush?" Les Chaffey suggested, leaning across his laden plate with knife and fork poised, his eyebrows skew-whiff in anticipation.

  Charles shrugged miserably.

  And then, as Marjorie Chaffey watched in the soot-curtained lamplight, something occurred that she would remember for a long time but never be able to do justice to in words except to say: "What a lovely smile."

  But this is an inadequate description of such a miraculous thing. The smile that Les and Marjorie Chaffey received from their guest was a request not to persist with the question and a generous reward for not doing it. But it was also much more than this and his Messianic grandfather, had he possessed such a gift, would have had all Victoria queuing up to buy his cannon.