Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  There is something about a westerly. When you're inside a house, there is no nastier wind. It pulls and tugs at you. It howls and shudders. But when you're in an open space it is a different matter entirely and it affected both of the men. Charles was struck by a desire to remove his clothes and let the wind wash around him; he was almost drunk enough to do it.

  "So," Nathan said. He detached a sheet of newspaper from his ankle, and held it up fastidiously between thumb and forefinger before releasing it.

  "So," he said. The newspaper sailed through the air and wrapped itself eagerly around a lamppost. "So what are we going to do?"

  "We're going to get drunk."

  "We've done that." Nathan handed over the whisky all the same. He noticed, as he did so, that the street was totally empty, all of William Street from King's Cross to Hyde Park. Something went tight in his chest and he put his hand to his face and held it. But then two taxis appeared beside the New Zealand Hotel and came up the hill towards them.

  When the taxis passed, Nathan tried to light a cigarette but the wind was too strong. "What", he put his Lucky Strike back in its crumpled packet, "are we going to do when your customers have gone home?"

  This was the Intro to the Scheme. It confused Charles. He could not see how the "we" had got itself messed into "your customers". He pulled the cork out of the bottle and raised it to his lips.

  "The war can't last forever," Nathan said. "Then all your rich Yanks will go home. My question to you, Charlie, is have you thought about this?"

  Of course he'd thought about it. It had kept him awake at night, wandering around his galleries, sitting in pyjamas on those wide lonely stairs, staring into the aquariums in search of sleep.

  "I want the war to end tomorrow," he said. "I would give my right arm."

  "Yes, yes, I know." Nathan did know. He was not without sympathy. He merely wished to get to the scheme. "But what will you do?"

  Suddenly Charles was lurching to his feet and roaring into the face of the westerly.

  "How in the fuck do I know?" His eyes were watering, but possibly it was only the wind. "How… in… the fuck… do… I… know?" Some girls in a taxi drove past and waved at him, and he waved at them. His mood suddenly changed. He stood smiling after their tail-lights before returning to sit, more or less neatly, beside Nathan. "I'm shikkered. I've never been so shikkered before. Do you know how I know? Because," he started giggling, "because I don't normally fucking swear. Nathan, I don't know what I'm going to do."

  It was then that Nathan said all that stuff about Emma needing treatment. It was unnecessary. He regretted having said it immediately.

  "What do you mean, treatment?"

  "Believe me, Charlie, it costs. I know. My first wife is the same."

  "There's nothing wrong with Emma."

  "Charlie…"

  "There's nothing wrong with her. I love her…"

  "Charlie…"

  "Do you love your wife? Course you don't. You said you didn't. I feel sorry for you, Mr Schick, but I love my wife and my boys."

  Nathan took the bottle and felt the golden liquid dull the pain in his cigarette-sore throat. It was a long drink, as long as drowning, and when he had finished, and fumbled with the cork, and got it, at last, firmly into the throat of the bottle, he looked up and saw that his partner had gone.

  Then he saw him, lurching at an angle across William Street.

  "Shit," said Nathan Schick.

  The big pear-shaped figure paused in the middle of the street. It by the wind the figure turned and stumbled on its crumbled way. It tripped on the kerb on the other side of the street, kept its balance with vaudevillian precision, and disappeared into the darkness of the Forbes Street steps.

  Nathan moved lightly across William Street. He regretted having said anything about his wife. He could never guess that his comment, so vigorously denied, would lead to a hosing down within the hour. Nathan took special care at the kerb. He crossed the footpath as dainty as a shadow and started to ascend the unlit steps.

  "How the fuck do I know?" said a voice from the sixth step.

  Nathan threaded his way past a nest of knees and elbows and sat on the step above him. He felt the cold in the old stone steps and resisted the strong desire he felt to talk about love and loneliness.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "How in the fuck do I know?"

  "Charlie, listen."

  "I listen."

  "Do you want to go back to selling puppy dogs in a one-room dump?"

  "I never sold a puppy dog in my life."

  "All right, Mr Clever Dick." He gave the boy the Scotch and watched him drink it. There was a lighted window in a house above their heads and he could see the flow of the whisky as it ran down the boy's big chin and dripped, in a dotted line of liquid light, on to his shirt and tie. "All right, Mr Wise Guy, you tell me. How are we going to make a quid when the Yanks go home?"

  Charles saw the answer, right there, in the piss-sour gloom of the Forbes Street steps. The whisky stung a cut on his hand and he saw it -this patch of dazzling clarity in the middle of the murk.

  "Export," he said.

  Nathan leaned forward and tried to hug him. He poked a finger in his eye before he got an arm around his head and squeezed his ears. "That's my scheme," he said.

  "Me here, you there."

  "That's right."

  "Hands across the fucking ocean."

  It is true that the discussion on the Forbes Street steps led to the hosing down and thus contributed to the loss of the affection of his two eldest boys, but it also led to the formation of a company with Nathan Schick, to the printing of letterheads with a Los Angeles address, and to one (only) cockatoo that could say, "Hello, Digger."

  By 1949 Charles Badgery could afford to buy his wife a pearl necklace the price of which – he told me so himself – was one thousand guineas.

  34

  In 1949 I was sixty-three years old. I was now perfectly equipped to live in a world that did not exist, the world of Goldstein's letters. Had you seen me you would have been amazed that a place like Rankin Downs could produce such a specimen. I was educated, frail and decent. My voice was soft. I had a pretty stoop. My handshake was as smooth and as animated as a kid glove. I had the complexion of a eunuch and a Degree of Arts from the University of Sydney. You wish to discuss the Trade Union Movement in the 1890s? I'm your man. I can do it as if we are walking across streets of autumn leaves and there is warm cocoa waiting in the study. An interesting theory about the Shearers' Strike? Please be my guest. The role of lies in popular perceptions of the Australian political fabric? You have my speciality.

  I was a marvel. Of course I was. I did not even mind that the Rankin Downs' Parole Board thought the credit was theirs. They could never imagine the work, the endless boring work, it takes to achieve this sort of transformation. I modelled myself on M. V. Anderson. I got his way of hunching his narrow little shoulders together and sinking his chin into his chest and bringing his long nicotine-stained fingers together and looking up, a little coyly, at his questioner, pursing the lips and raising the eyebrows, etc., etc. Oh, I was a cute little popsy. You would have loved me.

  I told the Parole Board I was off to write a book; I was lying. What I really had in mind was no more complicated than drawing my pension, getting visiting rights to the Kaletskys, and effecting a reconciliation with my son. This last was a difficult matter. I wrote to him once, a short note I admit it, to say I was sorry for belting him across the ear. He never wrote back, and although Goldstein explained that it was due to excess of emotion – too many thoughts and feelings for his stubby HB pencil to control-I was angry just the same.

  But damn it, I had a weakness for grand buildings and I liked the sound of his shop. It was not merely a building with a tower. Itwas a tower. Goldstein, of course, had not informed me about the situation on the fourth floor. I did not know I had a grandson named Hissao or that his mother lived in a cage. I did not even know that the whole
edifice depended on the Americans' enthusiasm for Australian birds and reptiles. I will tell you the truth – it would not have put me off my plan to get myself put up there.

  Various women have threatened me with the prospect of a lonely old age. They have said it in the desire to frighten me and they have said it again when they've seen how it has worked on me.

  So I admit it -I spent my ten years in Rankin Downs with one real aim, i. e., that I would end up with a place in this rotten lonely world. I invested an entire decade so that I would not end my life hiding amongst dead cabbages in the Eastern Markets. It was monomania, I admit it, but not overly ambitious. I did not seek wealth or even fame, merely a fire to sit in front of, a friend to trust, some company for the summer afternoons which are the loneliest time in a city of beaches.

  I did not escape, although it would have been easy enough. It was not the type of dangerous thing M. V. Anderson would attempt. Neither, being a tea drinker, would he have an interest in a still, or kicking a football end to end inside the wire-walled enclosure. There was no adequate company there for M. V. Anderson. He was happier inside his books, resting his monstrous lower lip against the tip of his index finger. He was a person made for a sole purpose, to fit a very particular niche in life. He was no good for selling a car or anything practical, just this one purpose that I spent my ten years perfecting.

  It was an eccentric jerky clock that marked those years, like one of the faulty mechanisms that drag their heavy hands upwards and then, whoosh, drop them down. Slow, yes, very slow – ten years were an eternity. But fast too – it took hardly a second.

  And then, on the very eve of my release, I received a letter from Leah Goldstein. I suppose the letter was written as something joyful, i. e., that she, now, had done her time too, that she was free, available, without children, without Rosa, was unencumbered by french windows or orange trees.

  Lucky man, you say, to be so old and frail and yet, at the same time, to inspire such devotion. Bullshit, Professor. You think I squander ten years of my life on a fancy. Ten years, and there she is slaughtering children, diminishing a husband, burying a friend, rolling up a carpet, pulling down the wallpaper I had arranged myself to harmonize with. Lucky man. To become an asthmatic tea drinker, for nothing.

  Suddenly I could not even remember what she looked like. I could remember nothing but how she came into my camp so long ago, criticizing me, eating my food without being asked. She took an extra piece of Bungaree trout. Four slices, she ate, and did not even beg your pardon. Four slices. I was shaking all over. I could not keep my hand still. It was not nerves, not one of those weak-tea emotions I had been refining through sixteen filters. No, this was rage of a type M. V. Anderson could not even imagine, the poor sissy. I could feel bubbles coursing through my blood and the skin around my finger joints stretched tight. I was Herbert Badgery and I was a nasty bastard, no doubt about it, and I traded my wireless – I had been taking it as a present – for a blade.

  You would expect me to remember my exit from Rankin Downs, to remember that long jarring journey over wet-season gravel. I cannot remember a thing. I have been planning to tell you a story about those yabbies (they were as big as beer bottles) but there is no time now, and I cannot remember whether we saw any on the road out or not, or even who the "we" might be.

  I remember the train when it came into the siding and the shock and disappointment when I saw how filthy it was. The seats inside were green. I was expecting brown, but they turned out green. They were sticky with jam and spilt ice-creams. I had the knife strapped on my leg with an old tie. I had the Vegemite bottle in my pocket – you shoud have felt it – hot enough to burn you -I had it wrapped up in handkerchiefs. It was full of dragons but I did not look at it. I sat on the edge of an unpleasant seat and waited. Oh Christ that train was slow. It creaked and whined and shunted itself back and forth before it began to creak dismally towards Grafton. No one could tell me how long it would take to reach Sydney.

  I walked up and down the train for a while then. Do not mistake this for a celebration of freedom. I was not admiring the lovely scenery or the pretty faces of the passengers. I was battling with spasms of anger that came on me when I thought how skilfully she had lied to me every day for ten years and I knew why she had never had the courage to visit becauseshe could not look me in the eyes.

  In one of the carriages I came across two fellows playing knuckles, young fellows with old eyes.

  I invited myself to join the game. I still spoke droll and wheezy like Anderson but God I was fast. My frailty seemed to fall away like dandruff. I smashed my fist down on one knuckle and then the next until they were sore and blue and they asked to be let off.

  It calmed me for a moment.

  The bigger one told me he had travelled round Queensland playing knuckles, with his mate as a tout. He said the Spags there would bet on anything. He showed me his roll and reckoned he couldn't spend it as fast as he made it. I told him I was just out of the slammer and he gave me twenty quid. That was a lot of money in 1949 – a doctor's salary for a week – and I wrote down his mother's address so I could return the money to him but I lost it and never did.

  Did I tell you I was on my way to kill Goldstein? I did not form the words, but there was only one conclusion to my journey. For ten years I had suffered the exquisite pain of her letters, the mixture of jealousy and happiness, all those razor cuts, for nothing. I had bound my feet. I had cut off my balls.

  I had made myself into an intellectual, for nothing.

  The train journey took twelve hours. It arrived at Central. I got a taxi to Bondi. New-model cars were all around me. That is what I noticed most. They gave me the feeling of riding through a dream. The weather was warm, overcast, threatening thunder. I had the money to pay for my ride, but I jumped out at the lights at the esplanade just to spite the bastard. The driver was up and after me. Jesus, I ran. I left asthmatic M. V. Anderson at the first corner. I was over a fence and across a rusty-roofed chook-shed, on to another chook-shed, down into a lane, up the stairs of a block of flats with steel-framed windows. My back hurt, my leg hurt but I didn't care. Everything I did was on the premise that I was an old man who would soon die and I will tell you I savoured the rasp of my breath, like a rat-tail file in my oesophagus. I was Herbert Badgery, alive.

  I waited in the block of flats for a while and then I went off to find the Kaletskys' number. I have no recollection of the house itself. All I remember is the crumbling concrete path, the tall rank weeds, and the leadlight in the peeling front door. I broke the leadlight with my shoe and let myself in. There were stacks of newspapers around the walls.

  The house sucked. It was a sour, dank, rotten place. You could smell it was unhappy and no little children had run along that wide corridor for a long long time.

  In the front room, I found an old man sitting by the fire although, outside, as I mentioned, it was a summer day with big bruised anvil-headed clouds, the sky full of cold holes and giddy updraughts. I came into the centre of the room, holding my blade. It was a villainous thing, the best the youngsters at Rankin Downs could produce, made from car-number-plate metal and strong enough to saw its way into a rib cage.

  This faded old fart with silver hair looked at me. He was sitting on an upholstered cushion of that type that is called, I believe, a pouffe. He leaned over and picked up the poker.

  He put the poker between his teeth. I watched him. He looked at me and bent the poker into a U.

  Then he spat out the blood and broken teeth into his lap.

  35

  I robbed Lennie Kaletsky of five quid, just to throw him off the scent. Then I wandered down to Bondi Post Office and applied for the pension. I gave my address c/o Southern Cross Hotel.

  I was nervous of approaching my son, not because I thought Goldstein would be in his care, but because I now suspected the pet shop itself might be a lie, that no such glorious thing existed, or that if it did it would reveal itself to be a grimy little hole with w
iddling guinea-pigs in sour straw.

  I paid cash money for my second taxi. I checked into the Southern Cross Hotel. First I tried to sleep, but after I had lain on my lumpy mattress for an hour I got up and went to the barber's for a shave. Then I began to approach the pet shop. I pretended to myself I was not doing it. I window-shopped up Pitt Street, looking out of the corner of my eye, scuttling sideways like a crab.

  I saw the word Badgery first, high on the pediment of the building. I felt ill, as if the thing might evaporate. My back pained me and my teeth set up a throb, my body protesting about whether it was to be frail or no, and would I please make up my mind.

  I cross Pitt Street, threading my way between the queues of trams, not furtively, not like a murderer, not quite like a gentleman. I am non-committal in my movements.

  I approach the shop, looking down at the footpath. Outside there is a crowd of fellows, all arguing about some motor car. I excuse myself and they make room for me so I can stare up at the building.

  Of course it thrills me: Badgery, as bold as brass, in Pitt Street. Badgery Pet Emporium. It is better than she described. This window is thirty feet long and is set out with a design of pretty flowers. I make out the map of Australia. There are some words, but I am more taken by the little rock-wallabies which hop to and fro across this pretty scene and one of them, in particular, eating an apple, holding it daintily between its two front paws.

  The men go on with their argument about the car and I get out of their way. I cannot know that the wallaby will die of influenza in Beverly Hills and I am, of course, proud of my boy. I begin to remember things more fondly than I am used to – the day he brought the yellow-tailed cockatoo down from the tree at Bendigo School, how Izzie had his finger bitten, and how Charles sold the bird when we ran out of petrol in Albury.

  I enter the shop. Do I suddenly look like a Narrabri cocky on his first day in Sydney? Well, why not. Look at those galleries, those beautiful birds behind shining white wire, the glistening snakes coiled beneath spotless glass, that huge skylight, just as Goldstein described it to me, and now, as I watch, two white-overalled men work with buckets and water, cleaning off the week's supply of pigeon shit against a background of delicate stratocumulus.