Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  "Say again," said Charles. He placed his hearing aid on the table, propping it up against the blue packet of de Witt's Antacid Powder which he brought with him wherever he ate.

  "They're thieves, pickpockets." Phoebe looked at her son's contrivance with disgust. "Put it in your pocket, Charles. Show some manners."

  "He can't hear you if he does," Leah said, but Charles put his machine away, looking a little hurt. Phoebe smiled at Leah. She was too polite to call her a pinko.

  Emma, in the meantime, had Hissao on her lap and was feeding him although he was now five and quite old enough to have his own chair and feed himself. Emma did not contribute to the argument although she smiled at me from time to time and occasionally I heard the barely audible sound of her murmurs. She popped mashed-up messes of food into her son's pretty mouth while his dark watchful eyes roamed over us. Once, in the middle of an argument, he smiled at me and for a moment I heard nothing that was said and smiled at him like a man in love. So late in my foolish life I was to acquire a real family after all.

  "So, Father, what do you say about the Holden, eh?"

  I shrugged. I am not a shrugger by nature but I wished to avoid saying anything hurtful.

  "Come on. Come on." He put his ape arm behind Leah's chair and beamed at me.

  When I had done my years of study in Rankin Downs this was not the context in which I had planned to unleash my learning. I had imagined dispassionate discourse, conversation as restrained as teacups quietly kissing their saucers. But still I answered my son in a considered way, avoiding anything that could be considered personal.

  "I would say", I told him, "that we Australians are a timid people who have no faith in ourselves."

  It was then that the trouble started. It was not with my comment, which was quiet and civilized. It was my son's reply. He roared with laughter as unmusical as the chair he scraped beneath him. I felt my temper begin to rise. I tried to bottle it. I had my heart intent on entering his household and I would not – not this time, please God – go hurling snakes around the room, ranting with a young man's passion, destroying the very thing I wanted.

  "You don't believe me?" I asked him quietly. I fancy you could describe my smile as wry but my eyes, I felt them, were small and showed themselves as an intense violet blue.

  Charles laughed again.

  I did not lose my temper. I spoke sweetly, so softly that he had to produce his machine again and listen with a strained expression. "Then why…"I said.

  "Speak up."

  "Then why", I waited for him to get the thing adjusted, "are we so easy to fool? Why do we let them call it 'Australia's Own Car'?"

  He did not obey the rules. He did not know them, the bloody ignoramus.

  "Because it is." He thumped his fist on the table and made the plates jump. Emma's eyes slanted and she hunched her shoulders. Leah stared at the tablecloth. Phoebe examined the little watch she had pinned to her breast and the two bigger boys, the apprentice dullards, put on their deadman's eyes and looked to the front.

  "No," I said. I was still quite calm. "It's a lie. And the shame is, it's not our lie; it's their lie."

  "Your father", Leah said, "uses the word lie' in a slightly eccentric way," and she touched my leg again, beneath the table, recalling the tender conversation we had conducted over our Bundaberg rum.

  "There are several meanings to the word 'lie'," said Phoebe, speaking as a professional in matters to do with language, "but only one to the word 'liar'."

  "A lie", I said, "is something that isn't true at the moment you say it."

  I saw Goldstein's smile – it spread to her eyes and suffused her skin as pervasive as a blush.

  "E. g.?" my son demanded.

  I had lived with my Vegemite jar so long that I did not find its contents disgusting. Often it was frightening but mostly it reminded me of the trivial nature of my imagination – for I had no doubt that it was this that controlled its contents. I could do no better than some warts, a fish, and – for a week or two – a tiny fox-terrier (it was only half an inch long) that finally changed into something like a cauliflower. Even mad Moran had made angels.

  "E. g.?" my son demanded.

  When I placed the bottle on the table, I was pointing out our lack of courage and imagination. It was all so clear to me that I felt no need to explain it further.

  "E. g.," I said.

  But all they saw was a finger floating in a bottle.

  Emma grabbed for it, but it was Charles who won possession. He looked at me with disgust but I was too far along the line of my argument to go back and explain it to the slower ones.

  "What is this thing?"

  "Almost anything you're brave enough to make it into."

  "I don't understand you," Charles roared.

  "I don't understand you either, mug." (I was blowing it. Tough shit. Rough tit. Too bad.) "How can you turn your shop into a wing-ding for a Yankee card trick? Australia's Own Car! It's bullshit, boy. You've been done like a dinner."

  "I haven't been done, Father. I have done. I've done more than you ever did. You lied and cheated and passed dud cheques. You never fed us. We never had clothes. We were cold and hungry when you looked after us. Now look at you. Look at you all. Jeez, you get up my nose. I'm sorry, Leah, but it's true. I feed you all. I put food in your mouth, and yours, and yours, and yours, and yours. It's my worry, my responsibility, and no one here lifts a finger to help me." His voice went up an octave. "You come along here with your socialism or your poetry or your sarcasm or this, thisthing, but none of you actually do anything. In real life, someone has to talk to the bank manager. It's me. I'm the one. I'm a business man. All those years, Father, you talked as if you were a business man, but I can see now you weren't a business man's bootlace. You moaned and groaned about the Pommies and the Yanks but you never did anything. And now you've got the nerve to criticize my car. Well it's Our Car. There's not another one like it in all the world. Is there one in Russia? Ha. In America? No, it's ours and we made it."

  Everyone was silent, but Charles was at that point – I know it well – where the climax of a rage is not quite reached and something, some definite thing, must be done to cap it off. The flag must be driven into the snow.

  "But," he said, thrusting his hand into his jacket pocket and pulling out a crumpled quid note, "but, seeing you are all so independent, here's a quid from me towards the food and grog. I'm sure you can all pay for yourselves. Put that thingdown," he said to Emma, but his wife was entranced by the Vegemite jar and did not even look up when her husband left the room and stamped down the stairs into the night.

  Henry and George sat rigid. Emma and Hissao were already busy with my bottle.

  "Well," Phoebe said brightly. "I must be off, too." She kissed me briskly on the cheek and she had been borne out into the night on black feathers before anyone had a chance to ask her for a penny towards the meal.

  I must have looked miserable because Goldstein kicked my ankle and smiled at me.

  "Don't worry," she said. "He'll be back in a minute."

  It happened just as she predicted. He was away no longer than it takes to walk around the block, up Castlereagh, into Liverpool, and back. He came into the room holding his hat in his hand with his shoulders rounded, his long arms pressed against his sides. I did not want him to apologize. I thought him entitled to say what he said, even if I did think he had been tricked by the Yanks. I tried to stop him, but he insisted. He did not do it briefly. He went on and on and I had to listen. He was in the habit of it: apologizing for things he was not to blame for. I could not look at him, only at the tablecloth.

  "I hope you will stay," he said.

  "Oh yes," I said.

  "Not just tonight."

  "Thank you."

  "But always."

  It went on, we will leave it there. Let me say only that there were soon more tears – even Goldstein joined in – and soon I was walking through the warm bright streets of Sydney with my dancer on one ar
m and my gentle son upon the other. We proceeded towards my tower and you will understand that at a time like this a Chinaman's dead finger might easily escape my notice.

  45

  You, my dear sticky-beak, already know the conditions of life on the fourth gallery, but for me it was a revelation.

  My son had made his workplace like a cathedral and I had expected him, therefore, to live in a palace, not a prison. It was easy to see why the most normal person would not wish to sleep in the so-called flat where my boy (presuming me well past such a grubby thing as copulation) made up a bunk for me, throwing on children's bunny rugs and heavy eiderdowns although the night was warm and the air stifling. The flat had no windows, merely small opaque skylights which -I could see the rusty trails – leaked every time it rained. No wonder his children preferred the company of their mother. There was a ripe odour of horse meat and ageing apples, both of them pervasive smells that get themselves soaked into every surface so that a fellow trying to block his nose from them will find his blankets are as contaminated as the air itself.

  How could you compare this with the prospect from the fourth gallery where you could gaze upwards and find the sky full of bruised thunderclouds or blinding blue, on whose varnished rail you could lean, like a first-class passenger on an ocean liner and watch the customers perform their antics on the ground floor below? Here you could have the most beautiful birds on earth to amuse you, and at night you could find your way into the green watery depths of sleep via the cool tanks of dreaming reef fish.

  And yet, for all this possibility, the style of life on the fourth gallery had none of the poetry I had imagined when, just that morning, I had stood below and craned my neck to catch a glimpse of it. And yes, I admit it, I was disappointed at first and I did not like the way they permitted the overweight goanna to drag its peeling belly across the floor so that one had to be reminded – constantly – not to trip over the nasty thing. Emma tried to persuade me to pat it, but I merely touched it.

  They had made a slum of it.

  It is true that Mr Lo kept his cage tidy. And Goldstein, likewise, living in the rejected lattice, kept everything neat and spartan. She had a chair and a little desk. There was a newspaper photograph of me hanging on the wall in a neat black frame. But the rest of the place was – you know already – like a toolshed, a warehouse, a junk room, a repository for broken toys, empty saucepans, dispossessed chairs, unhung curtains, rope, nails, women's magazines and leftovers laid out for the goanna and then not found suitable by the recipient who spent its mornings next to Emma's cage, basking under an ultraviolet light.

  When I saw the fourth gallery my face, I am told by a dancer, went very odd. She said my skin went taut and then rather grey and after that it took on a white waxy sheen. Doubtless she tells the truth, but this pessimism, this shock, while quite natural, would not have lasted for a moment. It did not take me a minute to see what was to be done, what I was to do, and I was not angry or irritated, but delighted, that I had been given an occupation, that I could deliver value to my family so easily and quickly. I did not disapprove, as Leah thought I did, of the tangle of humanity. It was the tangle of objects that I loathed. It was the objects that seemed to rule.

  To reach the bedroom one had to pass through the kitchen where meals were prepared for both pets and humans. There was no decent lighting. The feed bins were smeared with broken egg. Fortunately the wall that separated it from the gallery did not appear to be structural. I would need a sledge-hammer to begin the opening out. There were a number of tools I would need at the same time, and a quantity of rough-sawn hardwood.

  So even while my son was busy making sure I did not share a bed with Leah Goldstein, I was turning my mind to his fourth gallery. I thanked him for his bed quite graciously and accepted a loan of a toothbrush for my dentures. I was then taken to say goodnight to everyone, and I shook the older boys by the hand and accepted a kiss from their younger brother. When I said goodnight to Goldstein I gave her a wink and a grin and kissed her on her nose. Neither of us argued with our sentence.

  They put me in my hole and turned off the light. Was I resentful? No, I was not. I threw off my blankets and pulled a damp sheet over my ears and nose and waited for sleep.

  My aches began to set themselves up like instruments in an orchestra. First the low grumbling oboe of my back, then the violin sciatica in my leg. Teeth and kidneys arranged themselves and I greeted my afflictions by name.

  I was used to a coir mat in Rankin Downs. Its substitute was too small and soft. I dragged it off the bed and set it up on the floor, but the apple smell seemed worse down there, and anyway I could not stop my brain from spinning. Too much had happened in one day, to have passed from prison to freedom, from murder to love, and now, as I lay on the floor in this airless room, to the problems of architecture.

  It did not come to me immediately. I was down there wrestling with it for an hour or two before I saw it. This was no job for hessian or tin or chicken wire. It should be thin and elegant, with glass and steel and walls full of swimming fish. There wasn't a pencil in the room. I turned out the drawers but they held only socks and school reports. I put on my tired and sticky shirt and went out to the kitchen to find a pencil. I could see through the kitchen window that the gallery lights were out and I was reluctant to draw attention to myself. I flashed the kitchen light on and off but could see no pencil. I stood on something nasty but it was perhaps only a grape – although if you were guided by your nose you would think it a fish's kidney or an eyeball. I could feel millet and other seeds beneath my bare feet.

  I slipped out the door to the gallery. It was very quiet, but also full of the currents of breathing air. Emma was lying on her back and was the loudest, but I could hear them all, the soft whisper of children's breath included. I went to the rail and looked up at the skylight. There was no moon and the stars were bright. I could make out the giddy powder of the Milky Way and I stood there, craning my neck, trying to make out the Southern Cross. I could not find it, of course (what Australian ever can?) but that is not the point at all and you will appreciate that a skylight full of stars is not a thing that a prisoner, even one from Rankin Downs, is used to. I began to incorporate a telescope in my plans. I would need to drop a concrete pier through four storeys, but it could be done elegantly, I knew it could, and you can imagine what it would be like to lie in bed with skin touching skin and the two of you looking, sighing, staring at the rings of Saturn.

  My thoughts then, although occupied in the most sentimental way with copulation, were really more concerned with architecture, the placing of the concrete pier in such a way that I did not destroy the open space I loved so much.

  I was, as they say, a million miles away, when Leah Goldstein put her lips one inch away from my ear.

  "I'm a bit partial," she said.

  We will forget the fright she gave me, the wild alarm of skipping rhythms she triggered in my heart so that, for a moment, it careered around like a car on a wet corner, and remember rather, that we kissed, most gently, and retired to the privacy of my room.

  But here, I must confess it, I was as nervous as a boy. I had not been sorry to put off the moment I also wanted so much, and when Charles locked me away I did not complain because it suited me. Ten years in a prison does not engender confidence in these delicate matters which one, at the same time, has spent so many hours dwelling on, so in the end one has enough material to make a palace from the leftovers. I had not, as Goldstein imagined, come seeking her out. Had I known she was waiting for me I would have stayed alone on my mattress on the floor.

  A prisoner's memory turns love-making into something at once sweet and coarse, as saccharine as a pin-up, as rough as his hands on his cock, all worried whether his semen will splash on to his clothes or go into the bucket and I had forgotten the tiny intimacies of that ache I had named a fuck, the small pinching fingers on my nipples and belly, the ripe musky honey beneath the sweet bush of shampooed hair, the way a face in
the dark (in the light too) changes its meaning and how words you thought yourself too old to say, sentiments you imagined dead and drowned, bubble up from the muddy floor and burst in such explosions of light, of perfume, floral yeasts and uric acid, and my Leah's eyes were huge and shining (nebulae, supernovae) and as she arched her back and locked her legs around mine so we were held hard, tight in a rack, Herbert Badgery was caught by surprise to find himself awash with gratitude, a prisoner in a rocking-horse of sighs.

  46

  Herbert Badgery lay in Leah Goldstein's arms. She smelt the musty odours of Rankin Downs seeping from his skin, like old rags kept in a cleaner's bucket for too long a time. He was already asleep.

  Down in Pitt Street a drunk was pouring forth an endless mantra of echoing abuse against the empty summer streets.

  Herbert Badgery began to snore, quietly. She was sorry she had not told him what she meant, had not said it properly. She had belittled herself. It was a stupid habit. She had made light of her ability to earn ten quid a week, as if it had been bought lightly or maintained easily. She had told him that the stories were hack work, which was true, and that they were women's stories, which was true in that they were written for the demands of the editors of women's magazines. But she had not told him that this constant production was like walking, each day, through a field of thigh-high mud. The fiction editors were arrogant and stupid enough to think themselves superior to their readers. You could only supply them with what they wished by thinking badly of human beings.

  And yet she had taught herself to do this work because it was work that could be done anywhere, in a cafe in Sydney or sitting by a roadside at Goondiwindi. It would provide enough, with Herbert's pension, to live free of Charles's charity – they would not need to be family pets like Mr Lo.

  She dreamed of landscapes cut with raw red roads, hills sliced by deep crimson cuttings, yellow ochre rocks striated with the long straight stabs of jack-hammers. Her mind, perversely perhaps, found peace in pictures of wide khaki seas around small treeless towns with the paling fences so new you could smell the tree sap in them. In these landscapes, by these roads, she found a shrill, ragged, unaesthetic optimism. It was ignorant and guiltless, and she had not yet told him but it was what she craved.