Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  About banks he said: "You are doing the right thing, Chas, to have a pet shop. By that I mean – you are handling a product that already exists. My big mistake in life was to make a product that had not previously existed. You see, these fellows at the bank are only there for two reasons. The first is that they've got no imagination. The second is that the bank is a secure job. So they've got no guts and they've got no imagination. They lack every bloody thing you need to make a quid. So what you need, when you approach them, is something they can understand without thinking. You won't have to make them imagine a pet shop, because they'll have already seen one. You won't have to give them drawings of cockatoos or prove to them that a cockatoo can actually fly and talk and that, if it could, people would want to pay money for the privilege of owning one. The cockatoo already exists. This puts you in the same league as importing or manufacturing under licence. They'll lend you money whether your suit is pressed or not."

  About wives, he said: "Now you reckon you're too young to go into marriage, and I grant you that there is not a lot of talent in Jeparit to change your mind, but you should not consider opening a business without a wife. You think you can do it, and then you realize there are books to be done, bills to be sent out, and women are particularly good at this sort of work."

  "Fix his bike."

  "If you've got a telephone," said Les, blinking at his wife, combing his hair, holding the comb up against the light so he could remove the hairs properly. "If you've got a telephone," (he put the comb back in his pocket) "if you've got a telephone…"

  "I'd need a telephone."

  "You would. They're a great aid to any business. If you have a telephone, you need someone to answer it."

  "I like a woman's voice…" said Charles, as Mrs Chaffey rose, quite suddenly, and walked out of the room, across the passage, and into the bedroom where she threw herself on to the bed so heavily Charles could feel her misery through the soles of his boots.

  "But not only that." Les got up, went to the door, peered across the corridor, shut the door, and sat down again. "Say you're called away, someone's got to answer it. You can't, because you're not there. Now you can employ someone, of course, but then the money is going out of the family, and you won't get the same intelligence, or diligence either." He paused. "A guinea for a bloody parrot," he said, and whistled. "It's a bloody marvel."

  "Mr Chaffey, please, I'd appreciate it if you'd put my bike back together."

  "You're a funny fellow," said Les Chaffey who could not understand how anyone who was such a no-hoper with machinery could display such a talent when it came to a more difficult thing like birds. He would, of course, be lost without a sensible wife and in this respect the motor cycle would prove to be an important asset. Girls liked fellows with motorbikes. He began to think about the various local girls who might look kindly on his lodger, but could not, immediately, think of any. They were either too pretty (and therefore too up themselves) or too clever or too stupid. He completely forgot about the young schoolteacher who boarded with Chook Carrol out at Red Hill and might never have thought of her had he not had his attention drawn to her by chance.

  17

  Charles only went into Jeparit that day because he was frightened to be left alone with Mrs Chaffey. He did not like Jeparit very much. It was a small town where everyone stared at a strange face, and he had only gone into the general store to escape the ordeal of the main street. He was poking around amongst the rolls of pig wire, trying to fill in time until Les Chaffey came to fetch him, totally unaware that Robert Menzies (that famous kisser of royal hands) had escaped from the same shop – he had been born there -and was now on his way to being Prime Minister of Australia.

  Les Chaffey, meanwhile, was standing in the street outside and wondering if it might be worth his while to teach his guest to dance. It was then that he saw the bank manager walking at an unusually brisk pace. The bank manager had wrapped up a revolver in a handkerchief but the handkerchief was not large enough to hide the weapon from Les Chaffey who introduced himself to the man's attention and demanded to know what he was up to.

  The bank manager had only walked fifty yards from his office but he was already puffing and he was in such a state of excitement that it took all of Les's skills to extract the story from him.

  He had been contacted by the police, who had no pistols themselves, to ask him to go up to the school where Miss Emma Underhill was bailed up in the schoolyard with a large goanna on her head. The goanna was a big fellow and, being cornered by teasing children, had run up Miss Underhill (as goannas will) thinking her a tree, and now Miss Underhill was bleeding and hysterical and the goanna must be dealt with.

  "And what," asked Les Chaffey, reaching for a comb which he had left at home, "what were you going to do with a firearm in a schoolyard?"

  The bank manager thought that the pupils should be sent home.

  "You would evacuate the school? On account of a goanna?"

  The bank manager knew that Les Chaffey was a sticky-beak and a trouble-maker, but he was also nervous of the firearm. "Do you have a better idea?"

  Les Chaffey did have a better idea. He ran into the general store and pulled Charles out, holding him by the collar and leading him (still holding the collar) along the main street, past the giggling draper's, in front of Dan Murphy's Commercial Hotel, and up the sandy path into the schoolyard where a high-pitched scream (the goanna had just shifted position) attracted him to Miss Underhill who stood, isolated and lonely, on a bitumen square in front of the shelter shed whilst four teachers and thirty-six pupils stood in an arc and stared at her.

  "There," said Les Chaffey to his panting puzzled friend. "Isn't she lovely?"

  18

  Years later when she was being eccentric, had shed her corset and let her arse spread unhindered by anything but her perpetual dressing gown, Emma showed her youngest son a tiny foetus – it was no more than an inch long – which she claimed was his half-brother and which – she tried to make him look in the old Vegemite jar that contained it – was half goanna and half human.

  Hissao was disgusted with his mother (who wouldn't be?) and not least because she allowed her upper denture plate to drop at the moment of this disclosure. He did not look, or looked only briefly at the "thing" floating in cloudy liquid.

  He shuddered, he who accepted his mother's peculiarities more easily than any of us.

  Hissao was well informed about the genitalia of goannas. He had known, from a very early age, that the male has not one penis, but two. These are pale spiny things no more than two centimetres long, and normally kept retracted in little sheaths under the rear legs. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Hissao stumbled on the mechanical reality of such a coupling, but he should have known better than to approach the problem in this way. There is no doubt that some unlikely things have happened within the wombs of the women of the family but there is no question that they have been able to affect the shape of their offspring as easily as children idly fooling with some Plasticine. Why, if not because of this, is Hissao himself not only named Hissao, but also snub-nosed and almond-eyed? Why? Because the Japanese were bombing Darwin and Emma was not a stupid woman.

  The goanna foetus in the bottle was to cause us all a great upset and no one was to be more upset than Charles for whom it was to prove quite fatal.

  When he stood beside Les Chaffey in the schoolyard in Jeparit he could not see what the silent girl would become and -untroubled by wild visions – he was able to admire her composure and her sturdy limbs. His hearing aid crackled and hissed. He looked at her sternly. She had pronounced hips, a barrel chest and a broad backside, but it was not simply her shape that he found agreeable; it was her stillness in the midst of all the hysteria that surrounded her. She had screamed, of course, from pain. But now the reptile (a Gould's Monitor) was still again, the girl's pleasant moon face was composed; only her brown eyes displayed any agitation. When she heard that Charles intended to remove the goanna, she smiled
at him, lifting her top lip to reveal pretty pink gums and small neat teeth.

  The goanna had its leathery chin resting just above her fringe. It tested the air nervously with its forked tongue. Its front claws gripped her broad shoulders, its baggy muscled body moulded itself to her cotton-clad back and its hind claws gripped the soft mound of her generous backside. Its tail, striped yellow like all its body, did not quite touch the ground.

  Charles then transformed himself from an acned, red-faced, awkward youth into an expert. The schoolchildren who had whispered and giggled about his funny face and bandy legs saw the change and fell into a silence.

  "Get a chaff bag," he told the bank manager, with such terseness that the man did as he was told. Charles turned off his hearing aid and walked out into the no man's land that separated the assembled pupils from the frozen girl.

  Emma, seeing him stand before her, observed the hearing aid, a small brown bakelite knob protruding from his fleshy ear, and it made her trust him. He seemed older and more experienced. She felt his personality to be round and smooth and free from nasty spikes. She smiled, a smaller, shyer smile than last time, and this raised, from the ranks of the children in front of her, the same magical incantation that had greeted Leah Goldstein and Izzie Kaletsky when they embraced in a Bondi bus shelter.

  "Hubba hubba," the children shouted.

  The bag arrived. When this fact had, at last, been drawn to Charles's attention, he walked slowly towards the goanna. His neck was tingling. He felt a warm hum at the base of his skull. The goanna blew out its neck. Charles made a noise deep in his throat. The goanna hissed and then, before anyone had time to gasp, Charles had it off and into the bag, causing no more additional damage than a ripped patch of dress which revealed a blood-spotted petticoat underneath.

  "Thank you," she said, and waited for Charles to fiddle with his hearing aid with one hand while he held the agitated chaff bag with the other.

  "Charles Badgery," he said, blushing now that the expert performance was ended and he found himself, a shy boy, faced with a girl he liked the look of.

  "Don't hurt it," she said.

  She placed her hand on his wrist, a pressure so light Charles could barely feel it and, at the same time, could feel nothing else. "It wasn't the goanna's fault." Her voice was as light as her touch. "It was them," she nodded at the pupils who were still, for the moment, quiet. "The little beggars were cheeking it. Promise me you won't hurt it."

  "You have my word," he said, quite scarlet, but now they were being crowded and, like aviators just landed, were taken away by the mob, Emma by her pupils, Charles by Les Chaffey and the bank manager.

  19

  Never in Les Chaffey's life had a plan worked out so neatly and it took him by surprise. He had developed plans more rational, more reasonable, prettier plans, more optimistic plans but these – carefully detailed to the last screw – had been stillborn while this careless doodle, this idea that Charles must fall in love with the schoolteacher, now came to pass exactly as he'd envisaged.

  "Well, I'll be damned, I'll be euchred, I'll be a Dutchman." He grinned and rubbed his leprechaun mouth and gazed at his raw red friend who would only confess that Miss Underhill seemed "like a nice sort of girl".

  The motor cycle, it was obvious, was an essential aid to courting and Les, having belted his truck up the drive in a cloud of dust, did not stop for tea or a chat with his wife, but pulled his overalls on over his good Fletcher Jones trousers and set to work immediately. It was not in his nature to work so quickly, but he could see that an hour lost would be a dangerous hour, so he put his head down and did not stop until the AJS was back together. It was because of this, or because of Charles impatiently circling him, getting in his light, kicking over his tools, that the quality of the job was less than it might otherwise have been and the machine would ever after be troubled by faults that originated in those two excited days.

  As it turned out such haste was unnecessary and no motor cycle was required to woo Miss Emma Underhill who, tired of her landlady's son who was building an outhouse specially to please the young miss, walked the six miles across from Red Hill to inquire, she said, about the well-being of the goanna. The Underhill women were all great walkers and Emma did not come traipsing along the sandy road in high heels and white lawn dress. She put on her white short socks and her strong brown brogues. She wore a heavy tweed pleated skirt that did not show the dirt, and a black twin-set, a colour that suited her complexion. She did carry an umbrella, but she used it energetically, like a walking stick, and she put her shoulders back and held up her head and walked with a good stride, strong and determined, but not without grace or sensuality either. Whilst walking, Emma Underhill showed a part of her character she kept hidden the rest of the time and for an hour and a half she did not lower her eyes once.

  She handled the complications of the Chaffeys' gate without hesitation and she walked, more sedately, up the long drive, aware that a woman was squatting on the front veranda watching her. She put up her umbrella and realized, for the first time, that she was being bold. She would be talked about.

  She introduced herself to Mrs Chaffey and said she had come about the goanna.

  She was directed around the house to the back where she found Charles and the goanna, both together, inside a stout stockade on the edge of the scrub. The monitor was already well on its way to being tame.

  She did not go into the cage at once, but stayed with her hands clutching the chicken wire while Charles showed her how the monitor would let its back be stroked and its head rubbed. He was very shy and this made him stern. He said he had begun by using a long piece of cane, and when the animal was used to being rubbed with this, he had used his hands. He said he was lucky, that another monitor, identical in age and appearance, might have stayed wild forever, but this particular one was different. It was quite safe for her to come into the stockade. He gave her his word she would not be harmed and this last commitment he made very solemnly indeed.

  Emma entered, clutching her handbag to her chest. She had already decided to get married. She squatted beside the prone reptile, even though it made her wounds hurt. She had had a single stitch on her bottom and a tetanus shot as well. She touched the hard scaly back with the tip of her finger.

  "Hello, Mr Monster," she said. Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling – until now – had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, but he did not let on about his deafness.

  Emma had withdrawn her hand and stayed squatting in the dust. "You're its friend," she said. "It likes you more than me."

  "It can't tell you from me, I reckon." Charles drew a doodle in the dust with a broken stick. "All it knows is that we are the sort of animals that bring it food."

  Both of the Chaffeys were now hovering around the chook pen, pretending to be mending a laying box. It was Mrs Chaffey who observed, tartly, that if they swapped the goanna for a bag of cement it would have made no difference. And, to be fair, the goanna, being well fed and contented, was not unlike a bag of cement. It lay flat on its belly in its heavy timber and wire stockade while Charles Badgery and Emma Underhill squatted on either side of it and rubbed and patted, patted and rubbed, their cheeks flushed.

  This part of the story is still popular around Jeparit. They say the goanna lost so much skin from all this patting that it soon began to bleed.

  20

  It is not true, of course, that business about the goanna bleeding -no one in Jeparit ever said such a thing. Not even the town that produced the Warden of the Cinque Ports could stretch to such a grotesque idea. It was I, Herbert Badgery, who said it. I was struck with a passion to make my son look a ninny. I did not plan to. I love
him. I have always loved him. My greatest wish is to show you my brave and optimistic boy struggling against the handicap of his conception and upbringing towards success. And then, just as I am almost achieving it, I think of the way he walks, lifting his feet high and stamping them down. He walks like a yokel, a moron. I want to grab him by the ear and drag him to a quiet corner where I can teach him to walk properly. I love him, yes, of course I do, but I wish to mock him, not only him but his ladylove, not only her, but the landscape they inhabit, not merely the landscape in general, but the paddocks of Chaffey's farm in particular. I would like to take them, each one by name, and convert the dreary melancholy of the place into a very superior and spiteful kind of beauty, to caress the damn paddocks until they too begin to bleed.

  Look at them, the three of them: boy, girl, goanna. They are all desert creatures, accustomed to eking out what they can from poor circumstances. In the goanna's case it does not irritate me. I expect it to behave like an opportunist, to eat twice its body weight when the food is available, because there may be nothing else available for a month. But when my son takes the affection Emma Underhill offers him, he does it in exactly the same spirit -as if no one, ever, will be affectionate to him again. He would fall in love with anyone, a butcher's cat that rubbed itself against his legs. And once he had done it he would be loyal for life. Of course I am angry. I am not an unreasonable man. I don't wish to deny him affection and love. I would not mind if he was likely to go flying off on a waltzing binge and get himself engaged to a waitress first and a telephonist second.

  Can't dance? Of course he can't dance. Fa. He does not need to dance. He could not have seduced her better (made her head go numb, gormless, silly, her eyes go wider), not if he had spun her in her peach organdie ball gown round the Jeparit Mechanics' Institute.