Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  "Done," I said, giddy with relief.

  "Three quid," he said, "and it's yours."

  "Done." I did not care about the three quid. All I had in my bank account was the money he had arrested me with: three pounds, two shillings and sixpence.

  "Three pounds two and six, and you have a deal."

  "Done," I said, and happily signed the withdrawal chit he had brought in with him.

  Moth rose and, having fussily arranged his genitals, knocked on the door to be let out. This was habit, but quite unnecessary. The door was unlocked, and there was no one except prisoners to hear him knock on it. All he had to do was open it, walk down two steps, cross the so-called "quadrangle", duck under the big rainwater tanks, cut through the big shade house full of eucalypt seedlings – a nice cool place with a pleasant smell of damp earth and sawdust -and he would be at the front gate which would not, probably not, be locked either. The prisoners were either very young and in for very short sentences or, like me, too old to consider the fifty-mile walk.

  Moth stood at my door, waiting. He drummed his fingernails against the plywood.

  "I'll tell you, Badgery. I would have given it to you. I would have paid you money to take the nasty thing. Have you ever noticed", he said, "how in a dream nothing ever stays still? Things are always moving, Badgery. Have you noticed?"

  I stood up and opened the door for him. I just turned the handle and moved it in an inch so he would feel what I had done, but he no longer seemed interested in leaving.

  "Always moving. You look at a face and you think you've got a fix on it, but it changes. The mouth opens and becomes a fish or if it's pretty it turns ugly and all the white skin is suddenly scars. You have noticed it, haven't you?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "That's right," he nodded in satisfaction. "And lovely roses turn into lumps of meat. You cannot grasp it, isn't that right, like mercury between your fingers?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "That's right," he said. He stared at me with those odd pale eyes that seemed to shift mercurially from belligerence to puzzlement. "I knew you'd know," he said.

  He blinked and looked at me for a moment before he realized that the door had been opened. Then, without word, he turned and left me. I watched him pass out of sight under the tank stands. A minute later -he must have been running -I heard his car start and saw the lights sweep across the so-called "cottages" where the screws were obliged to live with their unhappy wives.

  I understood a little more about Sergeant Moth when I met his brother and heard he was famous in the Clarence River region for his enterprise in the field of small bribes. He made his money from after-hours drinkers, two-up schools and SP bookies and it was only natural that he would, like a careful housewife, hesitate before throwing out the scraps of an arrest.

  I didn't look at the ugly "souvenir" for weeks. I avoided it. I hid it behind Goldstein's envelopes – those perfumed razor blades -and when I saw it again, by accident, it had gone mercifully cloudy. There was a particularly hot February night in 1939, the one in which the yabbies caused so much trouble, after which the liquid in the bottle turned gin-clear. It was then that I noticed what looked like a wart behind the knuckle. But by 1939 I had other things to worry about. I had become a student. I had the privilege of a desk and extra shelves. Never mind I cracked the asbestos sheeting putting up the shelves -I got written up in theRankin Downs Express and when my exam results came out they made an even bigger fuss.

  I had the bottle tucked away behind the dictionary that the governor had given to me. Every time I removed the book I could not help noticing that the wart was growing bigger. This worried me as much as if I'd found a growth on my own finger, one that frightened me so much I couldn't confess it to myself, let alone a doctor.

  I started to take the dictionary down, not for a useful word, but to glance at what I'd hidden behind it. I saw it happened just as Sergeant Moth said it did.

  The finger changed. It changed all the time. It changed like a face in a dream.

  I will not upset myself by describing the slimy monsters that tried to free themselves from that bottle, but rather tell you about the morning I woke early and found it filled with bright blue creatures that darted in and out of delicate filigree forests, like tropical fish feeding amongst the coral.

  Is it hard to understand why an old man with his dentures in his hand would suddenly show his pink gums and grin? There: Herbert Badgery, Apprentice Liar, as delighted as a baby with a bright blue rattle.

  13

  The AJS had been wheeled into Chaffey's shed where it had been, solicitously, covered with a tarpaulin to keep off the shit of wandering chickens.

  It was a hot night and the smell of the mouse plague was heavy in Charles's nostrils as he lay in bed. He could hear the mice gnawing at the walls and scampering across the ceiling and, occasionally, a small squeak to indicate that one of his snakes was still dining.

  He was hungry. His stomach was tight and he had a taste like iron filings in his mouth but it was, just the same, lovely to lie in a bed in a room by himself, even if the room was just an open back veranda. The mattress smelt a little unusual, but he was used to other people's smells, strange sheets, hessian blankets, beds shared with bony children, pissing children, pinching children. He could sleep anywhere, on kitchen tables or in hay sheds, it made no difference, and when he was an older man, suffering insomnia, he would look back nostalgically on those lonely nights when he could escape hunger or heartache just by lying down and closing his eyes.

  He slept easily, dreaming instantly of his pet shop in which environment the smell of mice (now gnawing at the salty underarms of his carelessly discarded shirt) was nothing more than the aroma of a pet's cornucopia.

  So as Charles contemplated a rare golden-shouldered parrot, a being so beautiful that its dreamer's face showed a beatific smile, Les Chaffey quietly slipped the tarpaulin off the H-series AJS and stood there, contemplating it. There was a look on his face that could be mistaken for hostility, the way he narrowed his eyes and pushed his head forward, but it was no more than intense curiosity, and it was easy enough to imagine that it was the sheer force of his gaze that had worn away at his wife's face until it had taken on the look of a pretty fabric that has been laundered too often, the bright blues gone chalky pale and the pinks almost white.

  The AJS, Les Chaffey thought, was an interesting machine. He squatted beside it for a moment. Then, like a fellow reaching for his pipe, he pulled a small wooden-handled screwdriver from his back pocket and, in four fast neat movements, removed the single screw from the pilgrim pump. He could see, before he touched that screw, what the pilgrim pump was, i. e., a device for automatically controlling the oil feed to the engine, but that was not enough. He wanted to know how it worked. He fetched a spanner and disconnected the pipes that led to it. He removed the little knurled nut on the pump itself and was surprised by the spring-loaded cams. He had not expected spring-loading and the spring escaped him, flying beyond the circle of lamplight. He collected what remained (a worm and roller, two cams, the knurled nut) and held them in the dry cup of his hand. He thought about the spring a moment but decided to wait for daylight.

  Having fiddled with the worm and roller, having learned the rate was controlled by the magneto sprocket, the mystery was more or less explained and, glancing over the bike again, he was struck by the small clearance between rear tyre and mudguard. How, he wondered, would a fellow change a tyre on a machine like this? Indeed, at first sight, it looked impossible.

  He was busy removing the chain guard when his wife came in and stood behind him, eccentric only in her nakedness.

  "Come on, Dad, leave it alone."

  "Nah, Marjorie, just looking." He looked up and gave her a creased smile and tapped her bare ankle with the screwdriver. "You go to bed."

  "What is it?" She squatted, and her body, had anyone been interested to look at it, was what you might expect of a forty-five-year-old woman accustomed to hard physi
cal work. She was slight, like her husband, and her biceps showed a similar wiriness. They both had suntans that stopped just above the elbow.

  "A pilgrim pump," said Les, opening his hand to show her the parts. "A wonderful thing. But what I'm worried about is this rear wheel. Could I trouble you to hold the lamp, Marjorie?"

  She held the lamp for him while he placed the chain guard gently on the floor. He unclipped the chain and folded it neatly. He put the chain clip in his shirt pocket.

  "I'm going to hold up the back of the bike," he said. "Now if you could just wiggle this back wheel around, we'll see what's what."

  She sat on the dusty floor behind the cycle, heedless of the dirt on her naked backside and, while her husband took the weight off the back tyre, she wiggled it as asked.

  "Did you ask his permission, Leslie Chaffey?"

  "For God's sake, Marjorie, don't nag."

  "I weren't nagging."

  The back wheel suddenly found its way free, just where it had appeared impossible, slipped neatly out beside the guard, and, taking Mrs Chaffey by surprise, rolled gently away from her to fall down in the shadows.

  Les Chaffey waited until his wife was clear, then lowered the rear of the bike. "I'll have it back together by morning."

  "You forget."

  "What do I forget? Hold this a sec."

  He handed her the chain while he fetched, from a high shelf in the unlit upper half of the shed, a stack of old newspapers. He spread these out, slowly, like a man laying out a hand of patience.

  "You forget," she said, holding the oily chain in her two outstretched palms. "You forget."

  He was now at the clutch, or rather at the place where the clutch cable attached itself to a small lever on the gearbox casing. She came and squatted beside him and, when he held out the lamp to her, she placed the oily chain on the newspaper and took it from him. "You forget," she repeated. "The threshing machine."

  "For God's sake," he grunted, "that was twenty years ago. You didn't even know me."

  "I heard about it just the same. You forget what you're like." Just the same, she held the lamp high, and helped him to find the small metal ball when it popped off the end of the gearbox spindle.

  "The thing I can't understand", said Les Chaffey, digging out the parts of the pilgrim pump from his pocket and rolling them around his open palm, "is how they got the bank manager to lend them the money. How could you explain it to a bank manager?"

  "Oh, pity's sake, don't go on about it."

  "It was a good plough, Marjorie. Everybody said so."

  "They did," she said. She stood up. "I'm filthy and we've got two hundred gallons of water." When he didn't answer she shrugged and walked back to the house, hanging her head and kicking out her legs like a fourteen-year-old girl. She washed quietly, with three cups of water, and left the dirty water at the back door for her husband to use later.

  She lay on her bed and was asleep almost immediately. She opened her eyes – it seemed like a minute later – to see her husband standing there with a piece of glistening metal in his oil-black hands.

  "Marjorie, come and look at this."

  "I want to sleep."

  "Marjorie, this is a beautiful thing."

  "Oh, for Pete's sake." She sat up. She was cold. It was the cold that made her look at the clock. "Dad, it's five in the morning."

  "I know, I know, look how it's turned."

  "Oh God," she realized what it was. "God, it's the crankshaft." If he had stood before her with a pulsing red heart in his hands she could hardly have appeared more horrified.

  14

  Charles would never have any understanding of machinery. It eluded him. His mind, confronted by something as simple as a tyre valve, would suddenly go blank and refuse to function sensibly. This was not such a disadvantage later in life when he could afford to pay a mechanic to do the work for him, but it made things difficult when he was young and poor, and never more so than on the occasion that Les Chaffey went to work on the AJS. Charles woke early and went to sit in the dining room. He waited for ten or fifteen minutes. His stomach was drum-tight and very noisy. He stood up and walked around, examining the map on the wall, the dictionary on the shelf, the trophies from the rifle club. He was not so interested in these things but hoped that the sound of his boots on the floorboards might attract attention -he imagined his host and hostess sound asleep. He coughed once or twice, then he went out to the kitchen house where he found the stove cold. He opened the bread crock and discovered the end of a loaf of bread. He ate it in a nervous rush, chewing it so little, swallowing the crust in such a big lump, that he thought he had cut his oesophagus. He opened the sugar tin and ate a cupped handful, leaning over the sink so he would not put sticky signs on the floor. He brushed the spilt sugar down the plug hole and stepped outside. He did up all three buttons of his suit and walked (lifting his boots high as though his path were sticky mud) across to the shed where he hoped he might find Les Chaffey blacksmithing.

  It was gloomy in the shed but he saw, with some relief, that his host and hostess were both there. But even when his eyes adjusted to the light he did not understand what they were doing. He certainly did not recognize his AJS which was spread, in little pieces, across the freshly newspapered floor while Chaffey and his pyjamaed wife argued with each other about the gearbox.

  He did notice the amputated sidecar, but his brain, eager to find the most pleasant explanation, suggested to him that Les Chaffey must have a sidecar of his own. There was nothing to connect the oily parts spread across the MelbourneArgus with the motor cycle he had parked so carefully the night before.

  "Ah," said Les Chaffey. He looked up at Charles with weary red-rimmed eyes. "The man himself. Did you sleep well?"

  Mrs Chaffey, in oil-smeared striped pyjamas, smiled apologetically.

  "You weren't in a hurry to be off?" Chaffey asked him. "You could spare us another day I take it?"

  "Yes, Mr Chaffey," said Charles, who had noticed tell-tale sugar on the front of his suit. He brushed off the granules and thought himself bold for doing so. "Thank you," he said, and stepped closer to see what it was Chaffey was fiddling with.

  "How's this work?" Chaffey asked. "When I took it out I assumed that the primary shaft must mesh like this but the knurls on second gear go in an anti-clockwise direction, so I must have been mistook." He looked up at Charles. "Am I right or am I wrong?"

  "I dunno."

  "It's your cycle, son, and you should know."

  Charles's ears started to buzz. His eyes swept the shed as if tracing the flight of bats. Mrs Chaffey made sympathetic clucking noises but he did not hear them. He looked at the oily puzzle in Chaffey's hands. "This ismy bike?"

  "It's not mine," said Les Chaffey who did not realize the distress he was causing. He was not inclined to offer an apology or even an explanation. In fact, he seemed to be chastising the owner for his lack of knowledge and it was with something close to disgust that he put the gears to one side and started fiddling with the engine mountings, but a rubber grommet was missing and he had to abandon even this for the moment.

  "You'll never drive it properly," he said, putting on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles which gave him a severe owl-like appearance, "you'll never drive it properly if you don't know what makes it tick."

  Charles then asked how long the reassembly might take.

  Mrs Chaffey smiled at him, shaking her head, but her meaning was not clear.

  As for the mechanic himself, he would not be drawn. He knew, like any experienced tradesman working in such circumstances, that it is a mistake to make a promise you cannot keep. In a job like this one all sorts of unexpected problems can crop up. A broken ring may be discovered where none was guessed at, and then there is the delay in waiting for the new part, going to the parcels office at the Jeparit railway station once a week, irate thirteen-word telegrams to the distributor in Melbourne, and so on. Besides this, there are the problems of rogue dogs, or packs of them, who can sneak into th
e workshop in the heat of the afternoon and carry away a con-rod to bury or play with. Or, even more likely, the English manufacturers, typically ignorant of life in the colonies, unaware of the technical effects of mice plagues, might have made some part from a milk by-product – an insulator perhaps – and this is then lost to the mice and can only be replaced by the previously described rigmarole involving railway stations and thirteen-word telegrams – a costly and time-consuming business. So when Les Chaffey, in due course, made his answer about the length of time required, he answered sensibly.

  "No longer", he said, "than it takes, I promise you."

  If this had happened in the city, Charles would have seen plots and thievery all around him, but he was eight miles from Jeparit and so he blinked and tried to understand why his host, a kind and decent man, would pull his AJS to pieces in a draughty shed, gritty with abrasive Mallee sand and redolent of Mallee mice.

  "One thing's certain," Chaffey said, folding his glasses, rubbing his eyes, smearing black oil across his weary eyelids, "there'll be no more done without a drop of sleep. I've been up all night on this." He dropped his glasses into their case and snapped the lid shut. "Do you have anything planned for the day?"

  "I was heading up to Horsham."

  "Ah well, Horsham will still be there tomorrow. It won't run away." He put his arm solicitously around Charles's round shoulder. He only did it for a moment, because, being shorter, it was not comfortable. "Come on, Chas. We'll have some bread and jam and then I'll get my forty winks."

  There was no bread so they had jam in the tea. While his host snored across the corridor Charles sat at the big table with Mrs Chaffey while she apologized for her husband.

  "There's nothing here", she said sadly, "to challenge his mind. I see him some days on the tractor and I know he's gone off into a daze. It's very dangerous to ride a tractor not thinking. That's how I lost my brother – sitting there, not thinking, and next thing you know it's rolled on top of him. Wife and five children. I'm sorry about your motor cycle, son, but I've got to be honest and say I'm pleased you came. It's woke him up. It really has. Did you see his eyes? Well, you wouldn't know the difference but he's been going to sleep after tea and sleeping half the afternoons as well. There's nothing for his mind. The mice ate all his books. They ate all his plough drawings too, but he didn't even seem to mind. He took the bits that were left and threw them in the fire. Well, he doesn't know how to put your cycle back together, but he will, I promise you. He'll teach himself. When he made the plough he read up all about engineering and he made these little gadgets for telling about stress. I don't claim to understand it all, but there was a professor up here from Melbourne who looked at them and he said to me, 'Mrs Chaffey, it's a marvel.' Mind you, his mother told me he was a genius. She never forgave me for laughing at her. I wish she was still alive so I could apologize to her face. Sometimes I dream she's alive, and I'm so happy because I know I can say I'm sorry. But really, it's all for the best. She'd hate to see him now. He hasn't been the same since the banks pulled out of the plough and he lost his patent. There's an American crowd, I hear, who are making it now. It makes me so cross, I could spit."