Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  That night Les Chaffey would dream of chopping wood, splitting open an ironbark log and discovering a red rose, miraculously untouched, within its hollow core.

  4

  Les Chaffey was a man who could not see a loose thread in a pullover without pulling at it, or spy a horse without trying to pat it. If he met an Italian he would want to hear the Italian language spoken and then have many common English words translated ("Now then, what would know how it was cooked and what went into it. This behaviour gave him a name as a sticky-beak and a gossip. It made no difference that he had also invented several ploughs and a device for grubbing Mallee country or that people had journeyed all the way from Melbourne to inspect them. This gave him the additional reputation, not totally undeserved, of being dangerous.

  He had a gramophone and several Tommy Dorsey records. He sat in the hot dining room or on the veranda with shirt sleeves rolled up, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his white ankles showing above his slippers, his head cocked on one side, listening like a dog to an inexplicable sound. He did not give the impression of a man listening for pleasure, but one wishing to make sense of a complex language.

  Les Chaffey had left school on the day he turned fourteen and he had always regretted it. But he had come to believe that if he asked enough people enough things he would end up with an education regardless. He had, therefore, trained himself to ask questions.

  So as his wife stacked up the dinner plates, Les smiled at his guest and combed his wavy fair hair, not from vanity, but in the style of a good mechanic who wishes everything in order before a machine is stripped down. He removed the odd hairs from his comb and dropped them fastidiously on to the floor.

  A mouse, running for its life, slipped and fell from the rafters, upset the sugar bowl and scampered off the table.

  Les Chaffey sat, smiling, in the lamplight.

  Charles shifted in his seat. He had the feeling something was about to start and he did not know what it was. They were waiting, it would appear, for Mrs Chaffey to return from the kitchen.

  She hurried in, shuffling softly in her slippers, and scraped her chair and folded her hands in her lap.

  "What would you make", Les Chaffey began, tucking his comb neatly into his shirt pocket, "in your line of work, in an average week?"

  Charles was wondering if they might give him an aspirin or a slice of bread, but he decided to deal with the question first. But when he had answered, it was quickly replaced by another.

  What was his experience with the red-bellied black snake? How did it differ from the blue-bellied variety? What was his mother before she was a Badgery? Would they be any relation to the Minyip McGraths? What does your father do? What do you reckon about Mo McCaughey? Who do you vote for? What's your opinion of General Franco?

  Charles answered this last question carefully, but when he discovered his host was both a nationalist and a socialist he told him the truth: that he had been on the brink of going to fight against "that mongrel Franco" when he had been waylaid.

  Les, of course, was interested. He herded the spilled grains of sugar with the edge of his hand and when he had them into a little pile he swept them into the sugar bowl. Then he placed the sugar bowl on the shelf behind his head.

  "Now," he said, "how did it happen?"

  Charles was thinking about the Harrises' house at Horsham -they had served him six lamb chops for breakfast and cut a lunch for him to take when he left. They had put sweet gherkins on his cheese sandwiches and he had thrown them away because he did not like gherkins. Now he regretted it. He could, for instance, have taken the gherkins off the sandwiches. He could even have washed the gherkin taste off the cheese. He had been a mug. He would never throw away good food ever again. Even if he could not have got rid of the gherkin taste from the cheese he could, at least, have kept the bottom slice of bread which the gherkin had never touched.

  "You were on the boat?" Les Chaffey suggested.

  "No, I never saw the boat."

  "He had the ticket," suggested Mrs Chaffey. It was the first time she had spoken, but Charles liked the way she leaned towards him as she spoke.

  "I had the money for the ticket to get to London."

  "Right," said Les. "You had the do-re-mi. You had it in your pocket."

  "In my money belt."

  "In your money belt, right you are. Then what happened?" The shutters were all propped wide open and Charles could hear the cry of a solitary owl, Mo-poke, Mo-poke. He was about to ask for a slice of bread and then he looked up, the question on his lips, and he saw how keenly Mrs Chaffey was listening. He decided to tell the story first.

  5

  He had, in the beginning, no intention of going to Spain at all. He had been going to Sydney, to find his mother. As the train swung and swayed in between the dingy backyards of Sydney he felt that his life was about to begin. He imagined his mother would live in a house similar to the ones he saw by the railway line and this did not dismay him at all, quite the contrary. He was expecting warm embraces and hot tears, soft beds, big dinners; the noise of the trains passing his window could only increase his happiness.

  He had brought his last two, his best two, rabbit skins to give her. She could make them into a hat or a stole. They were hard on one side and soft on the other and when you bent them, they made a crinkly noise. They were his best-quality skins and he took them out of his bluey on the last leg up from Liverpool. He showed them to the sailor.

  "They're for my mum," he said. "I haven't seen her since I was a little nipper."

  The sailor advised him to find his mother whatever effort it took. He himself had grown up in an orphanage. He offered to help, but Charles said he already had a friend who was helping him. When the sailor learned the friend was a female he showed Charles a French letter in a paper envelope. It was stamped "air-tested" and he insisted on Charles taking it.

  Leah Goldstein was not expecting him. If she had seen him in the street it is doubtful if she would have recognized him, for he had grown large and the dress he now adopted was of his own choosing – a combination of cast-offs from municipal tips and certain flash items for which he had paid too much money. Thus he wore a big checked jacket with bright blue and gold squares which had been refashioned from a man's dressing gown, a pair of heavy hobnailed work boots which, judging from the number of eyelets, might have been thirty years old, and a big white Texan hat bought by mail order from Smith's Weekly. He carried a rolled bluey, but not across his shoulders. He had made a leather handle to buckle on to its straps so that he could carry the bluey at his side, like a suitcase. He did not wish to be thought a swagman.

  Leah Goldstein would not have recognized him in the street, but she could do it – did do it – before she turned on the porch light and saw him standing there still holding his tram ticket in his hand. The smell of tea-tree oil came to her, blown on the westerly wind, and the austere set of her face was already softening and her lips were forming the shape of his name before she reached the light switch.

  For a moment she feared he would, like a new puppy, burst through the fly wire. But he contained himself and in a second, with the flimsy screen door still intact, he was crushing her to him and she was laughing out loud. She was pleased to see him, more pleased than she would have imagined, but just the same she had to shush his croaking voice, his joyful shouts, because there was a meeting in progress inside and she – the minute book was in her hand – was secretary. She put her finger to her lips and said he could come in and listen, that they would not (she pulled a face) be too much longer.

  In the little room, sitting on the floor, on broken chairs, on the bed, were a number of men and women who would be, or already were, famous as artists and writers. They were meeting to organize an exhibition to raise money to send Australians to fight against General Franco and when Charles entered they smiled at him in a good-natured way and went back to their business. Charles blushed bright red and sat in a corner against the wall.

  There was a fie
rce argument proceeding about whether there could be any such thing as proletarian art. Charles was surprised to see that Leah, whom he remembered most for her strong opinions, took no part in this. Neither did she write down anything that was said. She sat beside and a little behind Izzie's wheelchair and, twice, smiled at Charles. No one seemed to take any notice of Izzie's mutilation and Charles was shocked that he did not take the trouble to throw a rug across those trousered stumps.

  Charles felt self-conscious and ill at ease. He understood almost nothing about the room or the situation. He could not see why a man should wear a fur hat or a woman have green stockings. He did not understand the abstract print on the wall or even the language that they spoke. He listened to Izzie Kaletsky pouring scorn on the possibility of proletarian art but he could not understand what he was talking about.

  And yet he had trapped rabbits and sold birds. He had been fencing in Western New South Wales. He could trap rosellas with no other bait than a cup of water. The total of his savings was a hundred and five pounds six shillings and twopence. This was more, he thought, than most of these people were worth. They had no right to make him feel so stupid. He sought a way to move the ground to something that would be more favourable to him. He was not so ambitious as to attempt to make the Picasso print disappear or the problems of proletarian art vanish, and yet this is precisely what he succeeded in doing – he opened his swag and took out his snake, a little green and yellow tree snake, startlingly beautiful and very active, which he had bought that afternoon in Campbell Street.

  He sat in the corner, casting secret smiles at Leah and soon the meeting was finished because everyone was looking at the snake and no one could concentrate on what anyone else was saying.

  It was not long before he was telling them about his work with the fencing contractor and his experience with snakes out west. He was, after all, a Badgery.

  When everyone had gone, Leah excused herself (it was time for her to make Lenny's cocoa) and Charles and Izzie were left alone together.

  Izzie was irritable, not with Charles, but with his comrades who were so easily distracted from their work, like children in a schoolroom on a summer afternoon. He rocked himself back and forth in his chair, lit a cigarette, and tried to stop the tide of desolation that always overcame him when the meetings were over and he was left alone with his wife. He fidgeted, balanced his ashtray, bit his lip and tried to feel sympathy for his unwanted guest.

  "So," he said, "what are your plans for Sydney?"

  Charles missed half of the sentence but he understood more from Izzie's face than he would, anyway, have gathered from the words.

  "I'm a bit hard of hearing," he said belligerently.

  Izzie did not repeat himself. Now he was reinstated as a teacher his days were long ones. He nodded, wearily. Charles interpreted the weariness as hostility.

  "I suppose you think I'm a bit of a mug," he said.

  Izzie shook his head. "No," he said, and smiled.

  They sat and looked at each other. Charles was soon in a panic. If he was not an idiot he should be able to say something. He did not know what to say or how to say it.

  "I remember you," he begged. "We met before. My cockie bit your finger."

  Izzie would have preferred to be kind to the fidgeting boy, but Charles chose to remind him of the day he would prefer to forget.

  There was another silence.

  "I came down to find my mum."

  Izzie said something but Charles missed it. He started fiddling with his hearing aid. He banged the metal box on his knee.

  "Do you remember me?" he demanded. "I remember you. I was only a young fellow."

  "I'm sorry. I'm tired."

  "What were you talking about when I came in?"

  Izzie explained but Charles gave up understanding almost as soon as he started and when he spoke again it was on another subject entirely.

  "I owe Leah a lot."

  "Everybody seems to." Izzie just wanted to go to bed and sleep. He did not wish to hear talk about his saintly wife, but he did wish her to come and rescue him. He looked expectantly towards the door.

  "I'm going to take her to the theatre."

  In fact Charles had been going to take them both to the theatre. He did not even know that he'd changed his mind until the words came out of his mouth and he had excluded Izzie from it. "And to a rest-er-raunt."

  "Good for you," said Izzie Kaletsky, now thoroughly impatient with his bumptious guest. He leaned over and started to pick up the typed pages that were spread on the surface of the bed.

  "Yes. I'm going to take her to the Chinese acrobats."

  "That's nice." Izzie placed the pages in a dun-coloured folder.

  "It will be nice. There are twelve boy acrobats, from China. I've got the money."

  "You're very fortunate."

  "I worked for it, every zac and deener. I was going to take her to a pub, but I met a bloke on the train who said a resteraunt would be better."

  "Then you should take her to Prunier's."

  "What's that?"

  "Prunier's. Here, I'll write it down for you," said Izzie Kaletsky with a malice that was no longer new to him. "It's the very best restaurant in Sydney."

  "That's what I want."

  Charles took the piece of paper Izzie gave him and painstakingly copied the name and address into a small marbled notebook.

  But he was to cross out the address the following morning when Leah, declining his invitation, laughed. It was then he knew Izzie had made a fool of him and he never tried to like him again.

  6

  It was Leah Goldstein who wrote to me to say my missing son was found at last. She described for me his half-grown-up face, his smell, his clothes, his croaking voice, his snake, his bankbooks. On the first morning she cooked him a big breakfast with grilled sausages, steak, kidney, onions, eggs, chops, buttered toast, cups of tea. She served this monstrous meal on a plate with a blue rim. This is what she told me, and I am not saying it wasn't kind of her, or even typical of her, only that you can't rely on it being true – by 1938 my puritanical friend was as addicted to telling lies as another woman, equally unhappy with her life, might be to a sherry bottle.

  Yes, yes, I am asking you to believe that Honest Leah had become Lying Leah. I am not saying that it happened overnight. These things don't happen like that. Lies were not on her mind at all. She had sought to do no more than deliver some happiness to me, each day, for every day I lived in gaol. She wrote me letters.

  She did not tell me that this enraged her husband. Neither did she describe the weather when it was unpleasant. If she was ill she would not trouble me with it; she would write as if she were well. This, of course, is not quite lying.

  She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant. It was Leah who calmed down Rosa's husband and her son. It was Leah who cared for and nursed her angry friend, washed the sheets and nighties she was so ashamed of, sat with her, watched her sleep until she felt herself to be soaked in the gassy odours of death itself. Later she would think of these months, when she helped her friend die, as one of the most important times in her life.

  But she wrote not a word about it to me. Instead she described long walks with Rosa along the cliff tops to Tamarama. She did not date these walks, but the impression given was that they had happened an hour or a minute before, that Rosa sat across from her at the kitchen table, drinking fragrant tea. They were beautiful letters, bulging with powerful skies and rimmed with intense yellow light. Every blade of grass seemed sharply painted, every word of conversation exact and true. Perhaps these things had once taken place. Perhaps she invented them. In any case they gave me that electric, unnatural mixture of emotions that every prisoner knows, where even the best things in the world outside come slashed with our own bitterness or jealousy. This confusion of love and hurt is very powerful. I came to crave it e
ven while I dreaded it. It is a more potent drug than simple happiness.

  Rosa died and was buried. Leah eliminated her presence from the house, threw away stubs of pencils and old ball gowns, yellowed letters, scraps of lace. No one tried to stop her. Lenny and Izzie mourned like Jews. While they sat on floors, Leah sat at the table and brought Rosa back to life. Now that, God damn it, is no longer mere politeness. She sent me descriptions of Rosa swinging her arms, Rosa burping, Rosa raising her lovely face to the sun. When it gets to this point she is no longer doing it for me alone. She is doing it for herself. And before a year is out she has the whole thing out of control and she has presented imaginary Rosa with imaginary grandchildren, made curtains, planted passionfruit and worried herself about the whooping cough in a world that exists between nine and eleven o'clock in the morning.

  There was a time, when I finally learned the truth, that I could have killed her for her deception, to have made me feel so much about what revealed itself as nothing. I will tell you, later, how I got on the train with my bottle and my blade. But when I think about her now I cannot even imagine my own anger. I see only the empty air around her, the coldness of the surfaces, the gloss on the linoleum, the yellow stare of the shining cupboard doors, the brown hard glaze on the cracked bread crock, the rusty drip mark on the empty porcelain sink, and my Leah sitting alone writing these letters to me, manufacturing a happy family.

  It was dangerous work and it is hardly surprising that she got herself addicted.

  And although she could put up with Lenny's whingeing about his husband's tongue, she would permit nothing to prevent her letter-writing and even Izzie had learned to leave her alone when she was occupied with what they both now chose to call "bookkeeping".