by Peter Carey
Charles leaned across the rail and watched Mr Lo thoughtfully, as though he were nothing more than a newly arrived cockatoo whose responses he was attempting to judge, to see if he would adapt to his cage readily or would end up noisy and a nuisance to his fellows.
Mr Lo bowed to Charles, bowed as he had not bowed except to Grandfather. Then he spoke a high-flown poem, badly remembered, which his accomplished sister had often recited before visitors. (The poem was in Mandarin. Charles Badgery did not notice the mistakes.) Finally he turned five somersaults and would have done a sixth except that he was out of practice and feared a disgrace.
"Please," said Mr Lo, suppressing his greedy lungs.
Charles was considering the thing that he never considered, the thing that he could not even admit that he thought about, but which had lacerated him since that day in 1943 when he emerged from the damp little church in George Street and discovered – it was his outraged mother who brought it to his attention – that his son was not named Michael, as he had thought, but Hissao. Now, six years later, he compared, point by point, his son with the man in the cage. He saw, quickly, that the visitor bore no resemblance to his son. His eyes were round, not almond-shaped at all, and they were sunken into shadows.
Seeing the proprietor's thoughtful face, Mr Lo realized that his tenure was in question. He began to sing a small sad song he had learned from his grandmother. Charles, hearing the sadness in the song, was at once moved and disgusted. He walked around the gallery rail but he would not look at the human being performing like a monkey in a cage.
He had ordered that the door of this particular cage be made big, like a normal door to a normal room, so when he decided to enter, he entered easily enough. Still, he found it difficult to battle the nimble Mr Lo who clambered up to the barred roof and hung on.
"Please," said Charles, "I cannot have you here."
While this all took place on the north side, Leah, on the south side, extracted Mr Lo's real story from Emma and – while Charles stayed inside the cage and Mr Lo hung on to the ceiling with aching arms -Leah came to the bars to explain the situation to the proprietor. Mr Lo, she said, wished to remain in Australia. The Australian government, having regard for the colour of Mr Lo's skin and the shape of his eyes, did not wish him to stay. They had given him the same iniquitous dictation test that they had given Egon Kirsch, although they had done it in Dutch not Gaelic, and they did not wish him to stay. They were wrong. Mr Lo was right.
This opinion had a confusing effect on Charles. First he had an excessive respect for the law which he must – there is no other explanation – have picked up from the Rawleigh's man who, having failed to abort him, had nursed him instead.
Second, he had immense respect for Leah Goldstein's firm opinions.
Everyone, he knew, was watching him. Leah was saying that Mr Lo shoud be harboured. His wife was edging around the rail towards him. There was a man from the Customs Department – a government officer – waiting in his office downstairs, "making inquiries" about certain activities and although he had nothing to hide he was fearful about it and was now made doubly fearful by this illegal activity being conducted above the government official's head. He did not want trouble. He began to sweat. He could feel his deodorized armpits were sweating.
"Perhaps", said Mr Lo, who felt himself unable to hang on much longer, "you think I want money. No money," Mr Lo said, even though he was frightened at what he had got himself involved with. He was beyond thinking. If only he could have a night's sleep without worrying about arrest.
"No," Charles said.
Mr Lo dropped wearily to the floor and examined the painful impressions the bars had made on his hands. He had soft hands. He was proud of them, but now his hands would become rough and callused, his long nail torn, and it was just as the fortuneteller had said – "Bad fortune, much hardship, great wealth follows."
It was cramped in the cage. Mr Lo was fond of garlic. Charles was not and so – although he did not wish to – he retreated from the cage and stood, with Leah, Emma and Hissao, looking in.
Mr Lo, although weary, managed a somersault.
"Let him stay," Emma said. It was a murmur, of course, but her husband knew what it meant. He turned and looked at his wife's eyes and thought, "Do you love me?"
For answer she released the strand of pearls that she had been clutching, and touched his sleeve, a habit she had, which, for all its restraint – no skin touched, little pressure applied – signified her most tender moods.
"It's not decent," Charles said, and his tone was exactly the same one he used when he found her stroking the goanna in such a way – no one else could do it – that its pale hemipenes emerged pale and spiky from their sheaths. He said it as if he was waiting, passively, to be contradicted, to be told it was perfectly decent.
"There's no privacy," he begged. "What if he raped you?"
"You lock me in," said Mr Lo. "Please." He shut the door and made a passable imitation of a padlock with his soft and slender hands.
Charles would have loved to snap a heavy lock just in the place where Mr Lo suggested. He also found the idea of locking a human being in a cage disgusting. And so he stood there, staring at the marine architect's hands, caught between his humanist ideals and his sexual jealousy.
In the end it was the gentle pressure on his sleeve that won the day, and Mr Lo was not only permitted to stay, but he stayed with no padlock.
You will understand how fine the balance was when you see Charles, late that night, earlier on other nights, come sneaking out of his flat, sliding his stockinged feet along the polished floorboards in case he should knock over Henry's Meccano or stab himself on Nick's donkey engine, holding his breath, the torch in his dressing-gown pocket. He gets himself right up against Mr Lo's cage before he turns on the torch. Mr Lo lies on his back, fully clothed, his dark eyes wide open.
Mr Lo, as it turned out, was nothing but a gentleman. Every evening he lowered the pink Venetian blinds so the ladies could undress in privacy and he would inquire of them, with a small cough, before raising them each morning.
When Charles at last calmed down, he engaged Henry Lo to draw the plans for the new loading dock at the Ultimo warehouse. This activity did not stop Mr Lo trying to make himself agreeable to the customers who continued to wander on to the fourth-floor gallery.
By the time I met him he could execute a perfect triple somersault.
39
Later, when my grandson was an international traveller, he experienced similar feelings to those I felt on the wide stairs of the pet shop. I had the sense of stepping into a vision, of every edge being sharp, of every colour intense, of viewing the whole through glass as carefully cleaned as the great skylight in the ceiling and, had I sat on the roof and gazed down into this world, like a Barrier Reef tourist in a glass-bottomed boat, I could not have felt more entranced or more alien.
I could not separate my son's industry from Goldstein's lies. I could not tell where one stopped and the other started and I dithered, my knife against my leg, my hat in my hand. All right, all right, I was intent on getting put up and I should have discarded my knife there and then and twice I tried, stooping down on a landing between galleries, pretending to retie my shoelace, only to be interrupted by loud-booted boys or gawky teenagers with comic books in their back pockets. So I left my knife where it was, although it felt too tight, and I wandered down to the ground floor, sorry I had not taken more trouble to write to my son.
On the ground floor I tried to peer up into the fourth gallery, to see if I could get some indication of the standard of accommodation, but the galleries were so deep and the canyon so narrow that it was impossible to see a thing. I should have written to him. I often wrote him letters in my head, eloquent loving letters, but when I sat down to write them my hands went cold and dry and I could not bring myself to form the words required. Now I would have to go away – it was the sensible plan – sneak down to Wollongong and start the correspondence fro
m there, wait a year if necessary until the boy invited me up to stay. But even while I developed this careful plan, my hands began to shake. I went out into the street to calm down. I turned my attention on the little pink-nosed wallaby in the window. It was then I realized that the Badgery Pet Emporium had entered into what is known in the car game as a "joint promotion", that the whole of the window was an advertisement for the new Holden car, that the map of fake flowers the wallabies stood on bore the legend: "Australia's Own Car".
This was bullshit. The car was about as Australian as General MacArthur, although it was not MacArthur but General Motors who had taken the government to the cleaners. It was a simple deal. GM permitted the Australian government to provide all the capital. In return the Australian government permitted GM to expatriate all the profits.
Twelve years before this piece of deception would have got me particularly excited, but now I saw it from M. V. Anderson's point of view, and noted it, not as something new, but one more element in an old pattern of self-deception. This is the great thing about being an intellectual. It is very calming. I felt no anger. Not a touch. I hoped Charles had been well paid and I was not at all offended when, via the medium of the tannoy above my head, Lou Topano and his Band of Renown gave forth with "Holding You in My Holden".
I had tied my knife too tight. It was most uncomfortable. I stopped to pull it looser but it would not come. It was then I found myself in the midst of men still arguing about a car. The tail of the tie was showing at the bottom of the trouser cuff. One of the arguing men was my son, Charles Badgery.
His suit was silk, shot with threads of silk, but it did not hide his extraordinary build. Neither did the wide-brimmed Yankee hat cast a shadow deep enough to soften the crude features of his head: that huge thick neck, that jutting jaw, the mouth that could be mistaken for cruel.
I stared at him a moment, proud of him, irritated by his loud voice, but also embarrassed by my own suit which was fifteen years old and hung in great folds around me. I had lost weight in Rankin Downs. My shirt was too big and its collar sat loosely around my crepey neck. In short, I looked a no-hoper.
The car they were arguing about belonged to C. Badgery Esq. It was a Holden, one of the first. It was smooth, everywhere rounded, like a condensed Chevrolet, and the curved body panels shone seductively in the bright grey light of Pitt Street. It was like something from a letter. It glowed like a pearl and I too walked around it and felt my hand, almost against my will, go out to stroke it.
The arguers were cynics and romantics, some of them both, pretending to be rational men. Yet they were so bewitched by the thing they never once addressed themselves to the real issue but rather to such incidentals as the fact that the car was built with no chassis, that a bag of superphosphate in the back was necessary to make it handle properly. Some said it was ugly, some beautiful, and others said it was "tinny" and would crumple if you tapped it. But no one questioned that it was Australia's Own Car and nothing made a dent in Charles's excitement. He plunged his hands deep into his pockets, jiggled his keys, rocked back on his heels, looked up and down the busy street, waved to a passing friend and declared it a great day for Australia.
I should have got on the bus to Wollongong as I had planned. I was in much too confused a state to meet my son. I was a man descending on to a busy railway platform in a strange city with a battered old suitcase tied with string. I was jolted by impatient travellers, bumped by porters while I worried about whether my ticket was in my wallet or my fob pocket when it was in neither.
I held out my hand to him before I knew I'd done it. At first he thought me a stranger congratulating him. He shook the hand while he looked over his shoulder and shouted to someone else.
"Charles," I said. "It's Daddy." I did not know the weakness of the string that kept my emotional baggage together because there, in Pitt Street, the fucking thing broke, and everything I owned came spilling out of me, tangled pyjama pants, dirty socks, love letters, toilet rolls and old silk stockings. I hugged my boy and bawled into his deaf ear. I am not a big one for hugging men, I swear it. I never did it before that day. But I embraced my boy Charles Badgery in Pitt Street, Sydney, and frightened the bejesus out of him until he realized who I was.
It was a warm day, but I was shivering. I started to apologize for the knob in his ear. Don't smirk – I meant it – you should have seen it, the great ugly lump of bakelite sticking out of his ear-hole. He was too young a man to have to tolerate it.
Charles wasn't interested in apologies. He was pleased to see me.
"Have you seen the shop?" He led me towards it by the elbow. The doors were big and solid. Nothing quivered or evaporated. If Goldstein had invented it she had done a damn good job for it looked as solid as the real McCoy. "Crikey, this is wonderful. I always imagine you coming to look at it. I always wonder what you'd think. And here you are, I can't believe it."
He took me around the shop and introduced me to his staff, each one, by name, explaining the sapphire miner, loading me up with drink coasters. He was not ashamed of my ill-fitting suit or the tear marks on my cheeks. He took me into a large cage, all full of logs and ferns and running water and at the back he showed me a female lyrebird he had incubated himself. She was building a nest, he said, and was ready to mate. He was happy, because this meant he had cared for it well, but he was sad because there was no male to give her.
You could feel such a well of tenderness in the boy that I was affected by it too. A bower-bird came and perched by my shoulder and, for a moment or two, I could almost feel myself to be a nice man.
On the third gallery, we ran into a fellow, a seed importer from the Haymarket who wanted to go for a spin in the Holden. So we all clattered down those wide wooden stairs – light-coloured and worn in the centre of the treads, black on the edges – making as much noise as schoolkids let out early on a summer's afternoon, bathers in their hands, towels around their necks. Twenty-four hours before I had been in H M Prison, Rankin Downs.
At the front desk Charles remembered his family and despatched a wizened little fellow to bring "them" downstairs. I never imagined Goldstein was up there. I was trying to get rid of my knife, but Charles wanted me to get in his car. The birdseed importer came along. I got in the middle, and the importer got the window seat. And now, thank God, I could undo my tie. My companion took too much of an interest in my activities, so I merely loosened it off. I had no intentions about that knife one way or the other. I was preparing my plan to get myself put up. It was too important a matter to leave vulnerable to the chancy winds of human emotions.
40
Mr Lo confessed to no one how he longed to walk the streets of Sydney as a free man and he felt this need most strongly on days like this one – grey, hot steaming February days whose humidity and colour reminded him of Penang, of Sundays when you could stroll out by the sea wall with Old Mother, his sisters, his worldly brother-in-law, Old Mother flicking her fan – he could still hear the noise it made, like a clock – and he, Mr Lo, would always buy them those little glutinous rice cakes wrapped in banana leaf although he was a poor student and had less than all the others.
He would die and never see Penang again, unless it was as a ghost, alone on the sea wall looking for the cake-sellers who were home in bed.
But Mr Lo did not dwell on this. He tried to be optimistic. He dreamed, not of Penang, but of the more attainable streets in Sydney. Just the same, when the invitation was made for him to ride in Charles's new car, he declined, with thanks.
"I will hold the fort," he said, pleased with his colloquialism. "Please."
They did not try to persuade him any more. He watched Leah put on her big white hat and struggle into her shoes. He saw Emma make some last adjustment to her face, while little Hissao, his good friend, whom he entertained with ghost stories and Old Mother's songs, picked up his favourite Dinky toy and stuffed it into his bulging pockets.
Mr Lo smiled and showed them great happiness, but when the door was
shut behind them and he had carefully locked it, he sighed, and his eyes lost their fraudulent gloss in an instant, like cheap baubles from the thieves' market which tarnish in their wrapping on the way home.
Once, only once, had he ventured out into the street. But he had only gone a block before he was overcome with his vulnerability, his illegal status, the thought that there was nothing to protect him from questioning, officials, exportation, a gaol sentence in Penang and, finally, conscription to fight the communists in the jungle.
So he returned, and stayed, and did not try to go out again, sad to be locked away from the world and fearful lest he be forced into it.
Mr Lo was an intelligent young man. His teachers had all remarked on his understanding and his diligence. Things did not need to be explained to him twice. Yet he could not, in his present situation, ever understand how he was permitted to stay or what function he had in the workings of Mr Badgery's establishment. He had asked and been answered, but he had not understood and he behaved as he had when, as a child, when his father was still alive, he had gone fishing. He was too young to understand fishing, but he followed the example of his father and uncles. When they jiggled their lines, he did likewise. When they changed bait, so did he. But he did not understand. So it was in Mr Badgery's emporium: he did his somersaults and spoke in languages, but he could be overcome, mid-somersault, with a panic that there was no meaning to his antics. He no longer imagined that he was to be sold. That misconception had not lasted a week, and he had been relieved to realize it, and yet he also dreamed of the day when a beautiful young lady would come through the door – it did not even matter if she was not beautiful, or even if she was no longer young – and she would see him: neat, clever, nimble and she would fall helplessly in love with him. She would not even notice Mrs Badgery and if she did would not be so impolite as to laugh or point. She would stand shyly and lower her eyes, and he would speak to her. On the first visit she would not answer, but she would return, and sooner or later she would speak. She would want to marry him, but he would have to ask her, of course. And then they would walk the streets of Sydney together. He would buy her rice cakes, bright red ones wrapped in green leaf.
