Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  Charles did not like Underbill's dunny, but when Henry Underhill was home he stayed there for long periods, luxuriating in the remembered kitchen.

  Among the things he pondered, with his trousers pulled around his goose-pimpled thighs, was why his father-in-law had singled out Emma to say that she was like a horse. For Emma's mother and her two sisters were just like her. They were broad and strong with comfortable backsides and nicely shaped big-calved legs. They all wore skirts with lots of fine pleats and twin-sets which they washed carefully – each of them following an identical procedure – rolling them dry with several bathroom towels before leaving them to lie flat on a little table near the kitchen stove and thus contributing a sweet clean odour of soap and wool to all the other feminine perfumes that Charles found so comforting and kindly. And as for being flighty – there were no signs of flightiness at all. If anything they seemed the opposite -they had soft placid brown eyes, round untroubled faces, black fringes, and small even white teeth. They all had the endearing habit of murmuring as if they were reluctant to commit themselves to an exact opinion, and Charles did not feel critical of this – how could he? – this soft wash of sound.

  Charles liked these women as much as he detested the man. It did not occur to him that one might be the product of the other, that their way of talking might be the consequence of Henry Underhill's intolerance for opinions other than his own. The mistake is understandable because they did not carry themselves like meek women – they walked confidently with their heads up and their shoulders back – and yet when little Henry Underhill came into the kitchen, there was nothing they would not do for him and the whole mood of the place was ruined. They polished his brass and blancoed his military webbing, not reluctantly, but eagerly. If he complained about his tea, they brewed a new pot, and looked happy to do it. They laundered his whites for boundary umpiring. They stood in Lederderg Street at night without overcoats, their arms folded beneath their breasts, watching while he drilled the surly militia up and down. They, alone in all Bacchus Marsh, could not see what a fool he looked.

  Charles did not confess his true feelings about his future father-in-law. When Henry Underhill was in residence Charles took the lowliest seat, near the doorway, and drank the dark black tea the man of the house required. While Emma cleaned her father's boots, filled his cup, or warmed his newspaper, Charles watched silently. When she laughed at some joke against the Best Pet Shop in the World, Charles smiled.

  He was having his own quiet revenge and he was conducting the whole affair with a nicety that would surprise those who thought him clumsy. It was not in his nature but (if you take my meaning) well within his ability, and he tortured Henry Underhill without the victim realizing that it was intentional. He did it very simply. He refused to discuss the bond. Hints on the subject he ignored. Even the most direct questions seemed to produce a malfunction in his hearing aid. So while the two appeared to be great friends, there was really a war in progress. Underhill insulted Charles's business ambitions. Charles refused to discuss the bond while, at the same time, he conducted his secret negotiations with the Education Department from a post office box in the main street. And this was the real reason he went back to Jeparit – because Henry Underhill discovered he had been sneaking down to the post office, cutting through the sale-yards and the side lane in the Lifeguard Milk Factory. Charles did not have the nerve to lie to a direct question and that was why he and Emma returned to Chaffey's. Their excuse was the AJS but the real reason was to avoid questions about the bond which Charles had by then, formally, committed himself to paying off, at the rate of five pounds five shillings and sixpence a week for three years.

  They arrived back in the middle of the wedding arrangements and found Henry Underhill ill with nerves. He had swollen lumps on his legs like water-filled pigeon's eggs and, less dramatically, a measle-like rash across his chest. Charles was thus not only permitted, but instructed, to remain away from him.

  On the wedding day itself Henry Underhill coated himself with calamine lotion before dressing in his best suit. He had striped trousers and a long black coat. It did not occur to Charles that his refusal to discuss the bond had produced Henry Underhill's illness and he did not mention it until after the wedding itself, when they were lined up for photographs outside the church.

  The photographer was Jack Coe, of course, and he was darting around in his usual style, making sure everyone was in their place. He moved the itchy Underhill a fraction closer to Charles Badgery.

  "I paid the bond," Charles said.

  An odd smile surfaced from beneath Henry Underbill's moustache, a vulnerable nervous thing fearful of being squashed if it came out into the sunlight.

  "You what?" he said.

  "Now," said Jack Coe, "Mr Underhill, could you please…"

  "I took the responsibility", said Charles, "to pay the bond."

  "Ha ha," said Henry Underhill, looking at the camera. "Ha ha."

  "That's right," said Jack Coe, hidden under his black hood. "Mr Badgery, please, a smile."

  "You'll never make a business man, lad," said Henry Underhill, scratching himself in the secret of his pocket.

  "I am a business man."

  Emma murmured in her young husband's ear.

  "I would have paid half," said Emma's father.

  "Right, now, steady," said Jack Coe.

  "I would have paid half!" yelled Henry Underhill. "You'll never make a business man. You'll never make a business man's bootlace."

  It was the best photograph taken. Both Henry and Charles had spoiled the others but now they beamed at Jack Coe's camera and Underbill's face was so creased you could not notice the swellings. No one looking at the photographs since that day has ever doubted the quality of their happiness.

  22

  It is obvious to anyone – Emma Underhill was Henry Underbill's daughter. This was not, it seems, so obvious to Charles. When he paid his five hundred quid and took possession of the daughter, he imagined himself to have liquidated the father and erased his influence. So if the Marching Martinet had once fathered Emma Badgery, now he was forced to magically un-father her, to withdraw his penis and blow it like a nose in his checked handkerchief, to fold the handkerchief like a table napkin and slip it through a silver ring, to leave his seed where it would do no harm, on the kitchen table. Emma had emerged, de novo, untainted. Charles had paid his five hundred quid and Emma, therefore -I trust you follow – had never made her father's tea, blancoed his webbing, held out her hand for the sharp burn of his strap or her lips towards his frosty affections.

  Once they were safely in Sydney Charles never mentioned his father-in-law again and the only message he ever sent him was each year at Christmas when he added his signature (C. Badgery) to the card his wife sent. And because his memory, like any river, changed its course, cut a corner here, exaggerated another there, soon all he could remember was that Henry Underhill had said Emma had a backside like a horse. It certainly did not occur to him that he had been warned about her mental stability.

  If it had not been for the war (whose slow birth he had watched so keenly and also so wilfully ignored) I doubt that the question would have arisen. In almost every respect Charles and Emma were well suited to each other.

  Leah, who came to visit their little shop, saw (typically) what was good about the place – that it had a murmuring, nurturing quality. It was a place of succour and tenderness. Leah was delighted with the variety of life, the rabbits, big and fat, the lorikeets as richly coloured as oriental rugs, the dull white-eyed python waiting patiently to lose its skin, the not-for-sale Gould's Monitor, the little seas of kissing jewels which were aquariums, the smell of straw, apples, grain, and the volatile odours of faeces which were, mixed together, pleasant and repugnant all at once.

  Amongst these charges the newlyweds were like a pair of giant children, forever kneeling or bending, pacifying, supplicating their easily upset charges. They both had big hands and big feet and young faces and Emma's
speech, although shy and indistinct, did not feel timid but rather sensuous and sleepy. She seemed to speak with the drowsiness of a happy lover.

  It is true that Charles talked a great deal but he did not do it to exclude his wife and looked, continually, to her for agreement, so that the whole business enterprise was flavoured with their great tenderness together. And although Leah was interested in the problems facing the best pet shop in the world, what really pleased her was the couple's affection.

  She was impressed too that they wished to do everything properly from the beginning, had made appointments to speak to people at the zoo, made notes and constructed cages that were really too big for the little shop. It was a mistake, perhaps. But they were happy not to have a prison like those overcrowded holes in Campbell Street. The big cages did create problems because they had to bunk one species in with another. The pretty blue bonnets had showed themselves to be pugnacious in the extreme. Feathers had flown. Blood had run.

  And Emma had been wonderful, Charles said. The girl blushed and lowered her eyes. Leah could imagine those strong-wristed hands offering succour to wounded rosellas or rescuing a terrified guinea-pig from the well-meaning attentions of a buck rabbit.

  She could not think of anyone who would suit Charles better. She seemed earthy, practical, loving and unpretentious. They both prepared the pets' meals together, working side by side at the kitchen table, carving dark hunks of horsemeat, breaking eggs, crumbling Madeira cake. They already had their own moth trap and would soon start breeding flies for their pupae. They did not seem to notice that their flat had a funny smell, but even this smell, unpleasant at first, soon came to be associated, in Leah's mind, with happiness.

  It was 1938. Hitler was in Austria. Bukharin and Rykov were already on trial in Moscow. Bondi Beach was not yet strung with barbed wire, but the cafes were already filling with Jews from Europe. Leah Goldstein stood on platforms beside her husband while he spoke against fighting the Nazis.

  She would appear, standing erect in that severe grey suit of hers, her flinty face unsmiling, like the popular image of a severe communist, but it was from this time that her letters began to fill with the sweet fecund odours of the little pet shop where she would go, more and more often, to drink tea with Emma, to watch her belly swell, to breathe deep of air rich with straw, rape-seed, molasses and fur.

  She was as happy there as in a letter. She did not speak. The two women sat behind the counter. Emma knitted.

  23

  Phoebe came to borrow a pound and was shocked by Emma's kissing. It was not Emma who started it. It was Phoebe who was a great one for kissing everything that crossed her path. It was not the act of kissing that was shocking. It was the quality of the kiss itself. You could feel in those kisses the juices of Emma's contentment and Phoebe – who had thought her daughter-in-law's big straight toes quite disgusting -was much disturbed. It was embarrassing, like walking into the middle of someone else's love-making, and Phoebe, who had come to flaunt her newest young man as well as get a pound, left the shop feeling old and out of temper.

  She was not alone in being affected by those kisses. Leah wrote me a page about them. Emma was a plant grown in an austere climate suddenly transplanted into a fertile tropical latitude. She stretched herself luxuriously and felt her toes uncurl in the warm red soil. She was all abloom with kisses.

  The extraordinary thing is she had not even loved Charles when she'd decided to marry him. She had thought only that he was a decent manly man and she had been comforted not only by his hearing aid but by his funny looks. He was like that dog-leg bridge the shire had built out over Parwan – stumpy and awkward but no one ever questioned its reliability. When he promised to honour and obey, you could rely on him. Anyone could see he was not a flash Harry or a lounge lizard or a drunkard. He would look after her.

  She had expected so little, and now she was almost drunk from the richness of her life. It is true that she did not like Sydney, but then she had never liked Melbourne. Cities were too noisy and confusing to suit her. She was a homebody anyway. She was happiest amongst the pets, or upstairs in the little flat which she was modestly redecorating with what money they had left after the Education Department took its tithe. She stripped the peeling wallpaper, killed the earwigs, and ladled on new kalsomine.

  Instinctively she reproduced elements of her mother's house. She bought a ha'penny brass hook on which to hang the hot water bottle, just behind the stove, in which place it had been awkward and inconvenient in Bacchus Marsh, and it was just as awkward and inconvenient in George Street, Sydney. She begged a calendar from the butcher's and hung it behind the door so that one had, as in Bacchus Marsh, to shut the door in order to know what day it was. And she found a framed picture of the King of England in Bathurst Street. It was very dusty and its frame was chipped but it was only tuppence and she brought it home and hung it (with difficulty – the picture rail was precarious) above the kitchen table. And she had just completed this last improvement when Charles, suckled on hatred of all things royal and British, walked in the door (his mind more occupied with the Snake Exhibition in his shop window) and stood, gawping, at the King of England.

  It would never have occurred to Charles that the King of England had no more importance to Emma than a brass hook or a butcher's calendar. The colour rose from beneath his collar and washed upwards like spilt ink on blotting paper. And it is no good trying to decide whether his reaction owes more to Herbert Badgery or Leah Goldstein or his own reading on the subject inSmith's Weekly and the Bulletin, but react he did, as instantly and instinctively as if he'd been punched in the nose; he struck straight back and his wife, big-bellied, weary-legged, did not recognize the monster who took possession of the man she loved. She felt a fear grip her guts and the baby kicked back against it, panicking inside her. She saw the tendons on his neck go tight as fencing wire one notch before it snaps. He put his wide-brimmed hat down – too slowly – on the table and leaned across – his arms seemed horribly strong and far too long (he could reach the picture rail without the aid of either chair or ladder) and pulled at the bearded King of England who, refusing to abandon his position, finally brought the whole picture rail springing after him. The rail bounced on the table, knocked Emma's teacup, broke its handle, and while the handleless cup rolled smoothly across the table on its way to destruction, Charles carried the picture of the King to the kitchen sink, opened the window behind it, and dropped it into the moss-covered concrete lane below.

  Charles had the family temper: the fast flare-up, the instant die-away, nothing left but ashes, contrition, embarrassment. So when he turned and saw her crumpling face, the monster left him. Now he knelt beside his shaking wife and tried to explain. He kissed her eyes. He was sorry. He nuzzled her neck. She was his little lamb. She was a precious, a pet, a possum, a mouse.

  But she, it turned out, was as ready to deny the King of England as he was to criticize his own childish temper. She no longer cared that the monarch had been an important man in her father's house. She despised him. Would never say his name again. She felt safer than ever in her husband's arms and her extraordinary kisses, those tropical blooms, were dark and heavy with fear-born adrenalin, cups of it, enough to make them both quite drunk.

  24

  Father Moran told me he had seen a fairy on a mushroom. It was a very small little gentleman, with tiny boots and laces. He was very specific. He could describe those little boots, brown with metal eyelets like his own, and laces that – although necessarily fine -were made from real hide – you could see by the fall of the bow. It had a pair of short trousers, a tailored jacket, a brown tam-o'-shanter. Father Moran had been only a boy when he saw it but he could now recall the most minute details. It had been at the end of the day. He had been with his brother Reginald and his father and they had gone out on the road by the Clarence looking for mushrooms. It was hot and steamy and the light was all hazy and golden and he had bent with his knife, an old bone-handled one gone yellow from b
eing dropped in boiling water, and was about to cut the mushroom when he saw the fairy sitting on it.

  While he was telling me this I was looking at those round shining pop eyes of his and I had the oddest feeling that I had known him before. Yet he had a very distinctive manner and you would not easily forget him. He was a square-headed fellow with curly grey hair and a florid face. He was a size too, with broad shoulders and a chest bursting out of his priestly black. But it was his eyes, big and bulging, and filled with all sorts of demanding emotions, his eyes that put me on edge.

  He was in the habit of staying for hours. I couldn't ask him to leave. For God's sake, I was in gaol. I had all sorts come to look at me. Doctors from America detoured via Sydney to meet me and then talked about me as if I was not there. Rankin Downs was like that. They told you how lucky you were to be in such a place and then they wrote your name on index cards, folders, assembled pieces of blue paper you might occasionally glimpse peeking from a stained manila folder on the Boss's desk. Your door could open at any time, for any reason. They did not need a key to do it. Anyone could walk in. Someone from Poland? Why not? I had a man from Poland. He was there to look at my gums, but when he was left alone with me he measured my head with callipers.

  So Father Moran was no more trouble than the rest. I did not mind him poking around in my bookshelves, but he worried me. It was not that he saw a fairy. I did not mind that he had seen a fairy. What upset me was the way his grey eyes bulged when he told me. He gave me a smile, neat and white as a wooden doll. By itself the smile was nothing. A display of teeth. But marry it up with the eyes in that big square head and you have what I would call a spectre.

  He moved from the bed and sat on top of my kerosene heater. The heater was not lit. It was September, already warm, although sometimes I used it when the rains came, to keep the mildew out of my papers. You never saw such rain as we had at Rankin Downs and the youngsters working out in the bush would come back covered in grey slimy mud, snivelling and homesick under their blankets of wet earth.