by Peter Carey
Mr Lo began to straighten chairs. He unlocked the little nest of wooden legs that Hissao had made into a "Ghosts' Cage" and lined the chairs neatly along the rail of the gallery. When he had done this he took out his handkerchief and dusted the seats. Then he sat down. He thought optimistic thoughts.
41
I have never been a great one for returning to my past and thus experiencing that giddy gap between past and present where, in a second, you trip and teeter and, with arms flailing, fingernails scraping against egg-smooth walls, you fall through twenty years.
Yet on that day in Sydney, that muggy steaming day, I breathed the odour of my little boy's manly sweat and plunged and soared in the turbulent air of time.
I met the mad woman. I looked into Hissao's eyes and saw my lost daughter, for whatever Emma had made of him, there was no mistaking that similarity, that sweet nature, that pretty face.
Charles, I assume, introduced me once again to Leah, but there was such a commotion in my mind that I did not hear. I did not recognize her and so wondered at the particular attention this handsome woman bestowed on me.
The birdseed importer had a fat bum and took up too much of the front seat. It was hard to turn. I was blocking Charles's view in the rear-vision mirror. We roared up George Street and headed towards the bridge. Charles was shouting various facts about the car and its performance, accelerating, braking, and showing off. He drove no better than Jack McGrath.
"Mother is in Sydney," he shouted… "Who?"
"Phoebe, your wife. My mother is in Sydney."
"Oh," I said. I did not wish to hear about wives. I was taken by the handsome woman in the back seat. I wanted to turn so I could see her wedding finger, but the birdseed importer was trying to question me about my business and Charles wanted a coin for the bridge toll. I got my hand into my pocket, gave him the two bob, and saw it safely into the tollkeeper's hand, and then, as we lurched savagely on to that ugly steel structure all Australia is so proud of, I managed to squirm free of the importer's attention and turn in my seat to look at the woman.
I groan out loud to remember what I did. I tipped my hat, although there was little room to do it, "Herbert Badgery," I said, "I don't believe we've been introduced."
For answer I received a whack across the face.
42
Leah Goldstein had a lovely face. All the angles had become rounded, like a river rock that is so smooth that all you wish to do is place it in your hand, and once it is there it gives you a comfort and a happiness you could not begin to explain, that such a smooth sun-warm rock should fit your cupped palm so perfectly.
We sat on the Argyle steps beneath a Morton Bay fig which is still there today, and I unstrapped the tie and gave her the knife. God, it was an ugly thing – there was no elegance to the weapons made in Rankin Downs. I never did say what it was I planned to do with that blade, but I always assumed she understood. Perhaps she never did, but merely saw it as a symbol of my criminality, something that could be discarded as easily as the dank gaol smell which – she told me later – permeated my clothes and my skin. In any case we dropped the knife into Darling Harbour that afternoon and I wept, for the fourth time that day, and Goldstein wept with me, but perhaps she did not understand. I thought about this often, later. I wondered if I should not make it more clear. When we were lovers again I would be stricken by visions that would make me groan. I would touch her chest or feel her lovely ribcage or lie with my head against her breast listening to her beating heart (it had an odd skip to it, that heart) and think of that steel blade with its grubby rag-and-string glued handle.
I did not ask why she had told me lies so long. All I cared about was the future. I undid my shirt on the Argyle steps. I told you I was a vain man, but I had less to be vain about than I once had. The quacks had been through my back, mining for a kidney stone they never found, but what damage they had done was nothing to what I had done myself in my quest for frailty. I showed her the crepe-skin around my neck, and the place where my biceps had once been tight before I so cleverly dissolved them in the acid of my lying mind.
I swear to God I will never understand Goldstein's criteria about skin, for she found nothing wrong with mine. She touched it and looked at me with her velvety cat's eyes. She did not flinch. She smiled. So did an old lady who was standing on the wrought-iron balcony above those narrow steps. She was hanging out her washing between her canary and the wall and she stopped, with wooden pegs in her mouth, and smiled.
Once the skin was settled, we moved on. My back hurt like hell, but I did not confess it. There were pains shooting up my legs and my teeth set up an ache as vague and persistent as people talking in the next room. I drew myself up and tried to tell myself I was a young man. I drew up my forearms a fraction and imagined myself on the sand at Bondi Beach. But you do not slough off a shuffle so quickly, and I soon had to admit that I would be an old fellow for a little while and that I could not match the dancer's walk beside me.
At sixty-five years of age, women do not see you. You are invisible. Until, that is, you walk down George Street with a young woman with a dancer's walk and then you go from invisible (flip-flop) to neon-signed and you are, take my word for it, a celebrity, a ballet master, a painter, a famous anarchist, a free-thinker, a revolutionary, an inventor of note, a criminal of power and influence, but look at me, I am only Herbert Badgery and once I was shy about my legs and now all I want is to lie down on my bed and take an Aspro and hope my toothache will go away.
I should have quietly withdrawn myself, gone back alone to my hotel, read an uncensored newspaper and gone to bed early. Charles, however, was busy arranging my life for me.
43
In all her fifty years Phoebe had never once worked for money. She was not ashamed of this. On the contrary. She had, after all, given her life to art and as for money, it always turned up somehow. Visitors to her little flat would look around at the pretty walls, the small works by famous artists, the rugs on the floor, the view of the harbour out the window and – feeling themselves steeped in nasty compromises, pot-boilers, jobs with newspapers, unpleasant sinecures with the Education Department- not only envied her but admired her.
Her poetry, of course, was little known, but by the end of the war she had begun the little magazine that historians now talk about so seriously – Malley's Urn, a private joke amongst the literati at the time and if you don't get the joke, don't worry – it was never very funny.
There were those who imagined her to have inherited wealth, but if Phoebe even smelt a whiff of this misunderstanding, she set it straight – her mother had left five coal mines to the Catholic Church. Imagine!
So where had the money come from? First from Horace until his ship had sunk, torpedoed in the English Channel. Also from Annette Davidson until, at an age when you might think her past it, she had run away to Perth – in the middle of a school term – with her own PE instructress. She had arranged a telegram to Phoebe which announced her death but everybody -even Phoebe – knew the two women had a "horrid little milk bar" in Nedlands.
So it was left to Charles to be a patron of the arts and he was not at all displeased by this. You could buy (if you wished – few did) Malley's Urn in the pet emporium – there was always a stack on the cashier's desk and Charles had a complete set of that quarterly green magazine in his musty bedroom which he read on his insomniacal nights.
Now all of this seemed firm and settled until the day that I arrived in Sydney and Charles decided that his mother should have the flat in the pet emporium. Charles was so excited by this idea that he did not even wait for the reunion dinner he was planning for that night. He got his mother on the telephone and came straight to the point.
"And leave my flat? My lovely flat?"
"Mother, it's very expensive."
"And take up with him?"
"Come and meet him," Charles begged.
"Oh, don't worry, I'll come and meet him. But I will not leave my flat. I refuse, I absolutel
y refuse, Charles. I value my independence."
It was then Charles lost his temper and said some unkind things about her "independence". He succeeded in frightening his mother terribly.
44
Amongst her friends, Phoebe was not thought to be unkind. Quite the opposite. But as she walked into the private room at the Hyde Park Hotel on that evening in February 1949, she was armed for battle. She was angry with her son who now strode across the vulgar carpet to welcome her, but she kissed him on his rough sunburnt cheek as if nothing was the matter. She nodded to Leah whom she had never liked, and smiled at Emma, trying to convey fondness while, at the same time, keeping sufficient distance to discourage those soft-centred kisses.
Everyone was standing except for Emma who had seated herself at table. She wore, Phoebe noted, the same ostentatious pearls she had worn on Christmas Day. She had also, through design or carelessness -it was not quite clear which – neglected to wear a corset and her round little stomach rose from below the belt of her long silk dress and disappeared into the floral valley of her thighs.
Phoebe accepted the kisses of her grandchildren. No one would have guessed that she was repelled by all this sticky-mouthed humanity. She was bright. She laughed as she always did when nervous, and put her hand to her throat. She let her eyes go to that place in the room where her opponent sat.
"Herbert Badgery, I presume," she said in a whisky-cured contralto. She laughed again. The feathers cascaded from her little hat.
I stood and walked towards her.
She held out her hand, briskly, with her handbag tucked beneath her arm. I shook her hand and found it damp.
"Well," she said, and laughed again.
I could feel everyone watching us, marooned there in the middle of that room, the long cloth-covered table by our side. I felt dead-eyed Henry sit with a thump on one of the chairs. I had gone for a rum with Goldstein. She said it was good for toothache, but I could see it had been a mistake. I had already called Hissao "Sonia".
"You've got old," said Phoebe.
I refrained from saying that she, also, had got old. Her carefully applied powder did nothing to hide the fine lines which were not those caused by laughing and smiling but were, rather, a fine network, like rivers on the map of her upper lip. Yet she had become the thing she had imagined and there was not, in either her bearing or her accent, very much left that would connect her to Jack and Molly.
A waiter came with sherry on a tray. I could have done with another rum, but I kept my hands jammed in the sticky pockets of my derelict suit, producing, doubtless, an effect that Phoebe would think was "common". She took a sherry. The boys said they wanted lemonade and I was pleased to feel that I was no longer the centre of attention. Henry was pinching Nicky and making him cry. Hissao wanted a pee and I could see Charles making toilet inquiries of the waiter. Emma started murmuring over Leah whose face she had so carefully made up, producing a doll-like beauty which, while foreign to her character and everything I liked about it, none the less made my wrinkled dick stretch and unwrinkle as if it were lying, not in the dark discomfort of my underpants, but in the gentle warmth of tomorrow morning's sunshine.
The windows were open on to Elizabeth Street and the hot night was suddenly filled with the frenzy of exhaust pipes, slipped clutches, the distinctive slap of engines wrecked by wartime gas producers. I liked the smell of car exhausts and I sniffed in the stinking air as Goldstein would have sniffed in jasmine.
"I mean no malice," Phoebe said.
A strange expression. I looked to match it against an expression on her face, but she had her face bent from me, looking for something in her handbag – a white envelope, smooth, unbent, unmarked by powder.
When she looked up I thought she was frightened of me. She handed me the envelope. In my confusion I imagined it was money, compensation for that aeroplane she had stolen from me. I thanked her, and tucked the envelope into my pocket. It felt thick and comforting. Perhaps there would be sufficient to pay my son some rent.
"You see," she said, "I know you are a bigamist." She finished her sherry and looked around for a waiter. There was no waiter. She put the glass down on the table. "You were already married when you married me. You were married", she said, "to Marjorie Thatcher Wilson in Castlemaine on October 15th, 1917, and you were never divorced."
I said nothing.
"I have all the papers." She was quite gay. In the next room a dance combo began to play. There was a saxophone, 1 recall, and a piano player with an American accent. The waiter came and filled her glass. "It won't matter if you tear it up, because I have the real thing. It's a little folio tied up with a ribbon and it cost me forty pounds. But the point is, dear Herbert, that I will not give up my flat."
I had no idea what she was talking about, although I remembered Marjorie Wilson very well. She was a nice woman, and I was sorry I left her but the problem was not her but the screeching mother she would bow and scrape to all day long. I was silent. I was thinking about Marjorie and how we had to do it in the laundry while we took it in turns to keep the squeaky wringer moving.
My silence seemed to make Phoebe gayer.
"If you force me, I'll have you charged with bigamy and then, I believe, I'm entitled to sue you for all sorts of things."
She laughed again, and I was reminded of her mother in the days when she thought something was wrong with her brain, when, caught in Geelong, with no faith in her normal manner, she had crooked her finger and adopted a plummy accent and revealed her terrors in continual laughter.
I was feeling quite anaesthetized. I had another sherry to help it along. My teeth stopped hurting and I promised Phoebe that I would cause her no trouble. I congratulated myself on having moved beyond a young man's rages.
I winked at my flirty lipsticked Goldstein as I sat down at the table. She touched my calf and smiled softly. I felt myself master of the situation. I said as little as possible but smiled politely at everyone. I asked them questions about themselves, an old salesman's habit guaranteed to make your prospect think you both sympathetic and intelligent. I did not imagine there was a risk of an argument about Australia's Own Car. I did not think I cared about the subject. I imagined I had no passions left except those involving shelter and the comforts of skin. I would do nothing to jeopardize either. I was going to have a place, with Goldstein, inside that wonderful building of my son's. I was going to wake each morning and gaze up at the skylight and know, straightaway, what sort of day it was.
Charles sat himself between Leah and his porcelain-faced wife. When the oyster shells were removed, he stretched and yawned and put his long arms along the back of Leah's chair, a gesture perhaps accidental, but I did not take to it.
"So, Father," he said.
Phoebe, on my right, whispered that he only shouted because he was deaf.
"Tell me, Father," he removed his arm from Leah's chair, and leaned forward intently. "You haven't given your opinion of the Holden."
I was not insensitive to his feelings about the car. I had questioned him about it at length. I would have thought this enough to do the job, but he was not such a simple fellow as he looked.
"It went well," I said. "I couldn't pass an opinion without driving it."
"You can pass an opinion on one fact: it's an Australian car. I thought of you the day I read about it. I thought, Father has lived to see his dream come true. An Australian Car. Did he ever tell you, Mother," he turned to Phoebe who was now looking very bored and was taking exception to Charles's great pleasure in saying "Mother" and "Father" at the one table, "did he ever tell you how he walked away from the T Model on the saltflats at Geelong? When we were kids we used to ask him to tell us that story. He must have told it to us a hundred times. He…"
"There are no saltflats in Geelong," Phoebe said. "He was lying."
"The saltflats are at Balliang East," I said.
Phoebe shuddered. "A dreadful place."
"Very close to where I met you."
&nb
sp; "That's what I meant."
Goldstein was the only one to laugh. It was also Goldstein who, on the subject of Australia's Own Car, made the point about the extraordinary deal General Motors had done with the Australian government. She talked about this in detail while Phoebe sighed loudly and shifted in her chair.
The roast beef arrived and for a moment it seemed as if the conversation would pass on to something less difficult, but Charles had no intention of letting it go.
"Yes," he said, polishing his fork with his table napkin. "There is money here to do things. There's no doubt about it."
"Yes, dear," said Leah. "It's our money, but the Yanks do get all the profit. They won't risk their money because we have – or they think we have – a socialist government."
"Who can blame them?" said my feathered wife. Her voice was not quite firm and bobbled uncertainly on its perch.
"Excuse me," Comrade Goldstein put her fork back on her plate and sat up straight in her chair. "Excuse me, but I do."
Phoebe ignored Leah. (Perhaps this made me angry, but I didn't think so at the time.) "I can't bear the way they speak," she said. "I just can't stand their vowels."
"I like it better than the Poms," said Charles. "It's not stuck up. Now, you've met Nathan…"
"No, no," his mother tapped the table with her dessert spoon. "I don't mean the Americans. I mean the Labour Party. They've all got pegs on their noses."
"It's the Australian way of speaking."
"It's pig ignorant", said Phoebe, "and if I were an American I wouldn't trust them either. They talk like pickpockets."
