by Peter Carey
The wall did not appear to be structural. I went down to Nock amp; Kirby's and bought a wrecking bar and took out the window without much effort. I took the door off its hinges and took out the frame. It was pleasant to do things with my hands after all those years of M. V. Anderson-type activity. I took another stroll down to Nock amp; Kirby's and bought a new hacksaw. Then I came back and took out the old kitchen sink and closed off the water pipes. It was a warm day, so I did not rush at it. I strolled at my grandson's pace. I carried my hat in my hand and my various pieces of shopping under my arm. I nodded to the staff and smiled at those members of my new family whose eyes I could catch. When it was time to get stuck into the wall I took off my jacket and folded it and put it inside Goldstein's apartment. It was dim in there. I did not notice any redness around the eyes. I warned her of impending dust and she looked up and, I thought, smiled. I did not know she was an author. If she had told me, it must have slipped my mind.
It was eleven a. m. precisely when I began my attack. I did not rush at it like a young fool. I opened out from the existing window. The bricks were old and handmade, soft and pink and very crumbly. I took them out slowly, working at it so there was a natural stepped arch left in the wall. By noon I had a space twelve foot wide and I had just decided to leave it at that for the day, to see how it settled, when Goldstein crept up and shouted in my ear.
"Fool," she said. "You impossible fool."
49
Leah had become like the old-maid aunt in a Victorian story, forever puffing up the stairs and down, first awake, last asleep, a repository of patience and kindness, taken for granted, never arousing curiosity except of the most perfunctory sort about her ambitions and her hopes because she showed the world so little sign that she had any.
But she was, of course, beneath her river-smooth exterior, full of the tumbling currents of ambitions that she had been rash enough, gambler enough, to postpone ten years.
She felt, that morning while I consulted about the wall, like a runner who has paced herself to a certain distance and when the distance is extended, cannot run another step. She was exhausted.
I asked her about the wall.
"Oh yes," she said. "What a lovely idea."
She went into her latticed room. She had a mattress there, along one wall, and a desk along the other. It was cramped, but she was used to it. She sat at the desk and arranged her papers as she would on any other morning. She took out yesterday's work and placed it at her left elbow. The tears began to drop and she rubbed them with her finger, as if they were errors to be erased.
Outside she could hear Mr Lo arguing. She did not need to look. It was an amusing performance on the first occasion, but after that the spectacle quickly palled. Mr Lo amused himself, each morning, by playing imaginary baseball. He did not even have a bat. He would walk to the eastern end of the gallery, the opposite end to Herbert Badgery's wall, and position himself above his imaginary plate. It was just as well he did not have a real bat for he would have hit a ladder on the back swing. He never swung quickly, always slowly, and it was hard to ascertain which was a strike and which a ball. It was obviously hard for the umpire too. Mr Lo was always arguing with him and for a quiet man, a polite man, these arguments had a frightening ferocity. Mr Lo bellowed. He stamped and shrieked. Leah did not know what he was saying, but at these moments she felt closest to him.
Mr Lo was like everything in this place. It was easy to understand why he did it. In one way it was perfectly sane and normal, but sometimes you could look at it with that other eye, and it was terrifying to realize this was what your life had become.
Emma was sitting on a big overstuffed armchair in front of her cage – she looked like any overweight woman in a seaside camping ground. Her skin had loosened, her face now showed a tendency to jowliness. She sat, leaning forward on her open thighs, talking on the telephone. She liked to talk on the telephone. Her sister had sent her a Bacchus Marsh phone directory and it was her great pleasure to look through it and telephone people who were often most surprised to hear from her.
Goldstein lit a cigarette and watched. She could hear me talking to Hissao but she blocked that out of her mind – that blowfly noise – and watched Emma who, having finished her first phone conversation of the day, was fossicking in a large cardboard box she always kept near her chair. She took from it a single iridescent pink hair curler and rolled her straight black hair deftly into it. She clipped in a pin and patted it. There was a finickiness, a silly vanity in her actions. That was, at any rate, one way to see it. But the other way was to see her as a great courtesan.
Emma looked up and smiled, presumably at her father-in-law. She then hid her face and retreated, dragging the cardboard box after her, into her cage. She shut the door behind and sat herself on a little stool with a bright blue lambswool cover. She was just a heavily built countrywoman with a pink slip. She had meaty shoulders and fleshy upper arms. Her stomach bulged against the satin of the slip. She leaned forward, pressing her face towards the glass of a small round shaving mirror which was tied – with blue electrical flex – to the wall.
"Yes," thought Leah Goldstein, "she is a great courtesan. She is not the most beautiful woman in the world. She is not overendowed with intelligence. Yet her ambitions are quite extraordinary – nothing less than to be adored and worshipped. She is a great artist. Her husband can think of nothing else but having her love him. If she was beautiful everyone would understand. She could lie around in baths of ass's milk and her behaviour would be perfectly normal. They would applaud her and write poetry about her. They would think it quite permissible for her to be her husband's pet."
But it was not permissible for her, Leah Goldstein, to live her life so uselessly. It was not permissible to be in this undignified position, to be kept by a keeper of pets. She loved Charles, but it was not permissible for her to stay here. And here was this idiot, this fool, making a home for himself, jumping from one prison to another.
It was unbearable.
She sat and tried to write. She prided herself on her professionalism, that she could write her thousand words of pap whether she was well or ill. But all she felt was an enormous anger welling up in her, that she had wasted ten years of her life on a misunderstanding.
She stood up. She had not been intending to say anything. But when she emerged Herbert Badgery turned and smiled. His blue eyes looked false, like a doll's eyes.
"You fool," she said. "You moron. You want to be a pet."
"This is my old age."
"How disgusting then. What an old age. You want to lie on your back and have your stomach rubbed."
"Shut up."
"Pet," she said.
"Why not? I've earned it."
"What about life?" she cried. She was bawling now. Her face contorted. Tears coming down, splashing her sandalled feet. "What about life? I thought you were full of it. I used to tell people you had more life in your little finger" – she held it up, indicating a pink tip with a sharp slice of her other hand's index finger – "than most people, more moral people, better people, had in their whole bodies. Now look at you."
There was nothing to say.
She kicked at a brick. I suppose it hurt her, for her foot was covered with nothing more than a small blue slipper.
"Five years we were together, Mr Badgery, and I have drawn on that time ever since. It has sustained me. Not just you – don't look so smug – the life. The life was a life. When I visit my father his house is depressing, full of death and dying, and I read the letters. You could build a country from the towns and streets that I described, even a good country, a happy one. I was alive."
"So you want to be a dancer again."
"Don't be a smart alec," she said, but she was not shouting any more and there was sadness in her voice. She rubbed the foot with which she had kicked the brick.
"Well, what do you want?"
Her shoulders slumped, not much, perhaps no more than a quarter of an inch, but it was a d
efinite movement and Mr Lo must have observed it too because he stopped staring at us and went back to his game of imaginary baseball and my daughter-in-law -standing powder-puff in hand at her doorway – winked at me.
And even I, with sweat in my eyes, could see that Goldstein did not know. She had what she always had, I thought – a yearning, and that was fine, but I would not be blamed for it. It was the same misunderstanding that had plagued me all my life. All I ever wanted was a fire and slippers. But the women never saw, or if they did, they looked the other way.
"We are going to die," said Goldstein, moving closer, speaking softly.
"So?"
"So you are out of one prison, and making another one."
"And what would you suggest?"
She was close to me now, so close I could smell the Ipana toothpaste on her breath. "I'd rather have leeches on my legs. I'd rather be damp and freezing in the fog in Dorrigo."
"You'd rather have nails through your hands," I said.
"Shut up," she yelled. I thought she was going to strike me, or spit, but she turned to walk away.
Emma, Hissao, and Mr Lo were all staring at her from their separate corners.
"Pets," she shouted. "Fools."
She turned back towards me and brushed past on her way to the stairs.
As she ran down the stairs there was a small sound, a dzzzzt, a fine fast jagged noise like electricity passing from one surface to another.
A fine crack appeared in the southern wall and then the 'dzzzzt' shot across the ceiling. I ignored it. I knocked out some more bricks to give it something worth cracking over.
50
There is always someone who will get in a panic about a crack. Next morning the Chinaman revealed himself to be the person who would take that part. He dragged me out of the nasty bathroom (all blue laminate and aluminium edging) to show me what I already knew. You will understand, I trust, that I was irritable about a number of things and when Mr Lo drew my attention to the crack, I misunderstood his character. He spoke to me about Rowe Street Joyce but I did not inquire about who she was. A crack is a threatening thing to a layman, but to someone like me it is an architectural instruction, more precise in its message than any draftsman's pencil.
I thanked Mr Lo and went back to the bathroom and washed the soap off my face.
As I walked out to find my son, Mr Lo was already playing baseball and Emma was putting new curlers in her hair. I could see a light shining inside Goldstein's latticed apartment, but I did not enter. I went downstairs to find my son in his office. I did not tell him about the crack, only that I would need cash for more materials. He took it well. He showed me a regent bower-bird he had hatched from an egg. I watched him feed it with an eye-dropper and he was as tender with it as he was when he combed the wet hair of his sullen boys.
Charles did not become alarmed till later, when the fellows from Jordan Brothers' had their block and tackle fixed to the steel roof-trusses. He emerged from his office with an egg sandwich in his hand just as that big RSJ slowly lifted from his shop floor. An RSJ, in case you are not familiar with the term, is a steel beam, a rolled-steel joist, and in this case it was fifteen feet long, one foot deep and four inches wide. It weighed a ton.
I can understand why Charles might wish to get the customers out of the shop. But it was quite unnecessary for him to evict the staff as well. If he had not lined them up in Pitt Street in their uniforms, the newspaper would never have been alerted and the whole operation could have been done quickly and safely.
I am not saying it is his fault. I am saying it was unfortunate. The photographers wanted a pic of Charles riding the beam and so the whole thing, which was nearly in place, had to be lowered down to the ground for him to stand on. Then they wanted a photograph with me on it beside him. Then Charles wanted to tell them about the best pet shop in the world and the point is that it all took time.
When the reporters and photographers had gone, the RSJ rose again. They had it at the third gallery, and it was moving sweetly towards the fourth. The foreman was already applying pressure on the rope that was to bring it rolling sideways and his offsiders were standing ready when an entire section of skylight crazed and fell like drops of water in sunlight, like a diamond necklace dropped by a careless thief. This fleeting moment – this fleeting chandelier – was followed (or so it seemed to me – that the noise came after) by a sharp hard crack like a bullwhip.
The fellows from Jordan Brothers' worked like aces. They got the RSJ over to one side and into place. They had the stress off the truss in a minute and so you would think no serious damage was done.
I had no time to worry about the subjective reactions of the other tenants. There was too much to do. We got the RSJ bolted into place and I saw, just as we finished, that we were going to need some more steel for the sides, just to stiffen the whole thing. There were arguments about money. I suppose I was not tactful. In the heat of the moment I may have forgotten that it had been my idea in the first place. I may have referred to it, in conversation with my son, as "this scheme of yours".
Jordan Brothers' went off for the extra steel, and I leaned back against Mr Lo's quarters looking up at the skylight. Thunderclouds were tumbling in from the south pushing up great columns into the dizzy air. I would need to rent a tarpaulin and I had no money of my own.
I smelt the Chinaman behind me: soap and ironing.
"Rowe Street Joyce," he said, emerging from his cage, as neat as a maitre d.
"Beg yours?" My hands were blistered from the sledgehammer and my white shirt was rusty from the RSJ. I looked at Mr Lo and wondered if he could lend me a quid.
"Rowe Street Joyce," he said. "RSJ."
"Ah, you mean Rolled Steel Joist."
"Of course," he said, a little curtly, I thought. He gave me his card. I did not notice the rain begin. I was listening to Mr Lo. He had come to Sydney, he said, for only one thing, to become a top man in building Hi-Li. He saw that Hi-Li would come to Sydney before it came to Penang, so his plan had been to get experience with Hi-Li here and then go home when they started Hi-Li there.
I felt the rain. My head was running with sweat and the rain was pleasant, but I should have been out getting a tarpaulin. I got the architect to accompany me downstairs and I took some money from the till. I gave him enough to buy a T-square and kept enough for the rent of the tarp. Then, because I could not wait to brief him, I walked with him up to Sayer's. I did not want him worrying about the skylight, but he could get to work on the accommodation. I had a lovely plan for making rooms with walls of fish tanks and Venetian blinds in front. It would have worked. We could have had light, movement, the sky, privacy, the works. I did not realize that he did not understand, that all he wanted to do was build Hi-Li, that I was bamboozling him with fishes.
But I made a bigger mistake, i. e., I imagined my client in the matter of the reconstruction was my son. Quite incorrect. But as I walked back through the storm with Mr Lo I did not know this. I used the phone at the town hall to order a tarpaulin from Jordan Brothers'. I entered the emporium already calculating the weight of water the fish tanks would add to the fourth gallery.
When Goldstein grinned at me I knew something was up. She stood at the rail. She smoked a cigarette and had a glass of beer in her hand. I did not realize what had changed her until I saw, not ten yards from her, Rooney's eyes. They were, of course, in Emma Badgery's face.
She showed me her teeth. I lifted a lip. No more was necessary between us.
51
While all other directions afforded great security, that eggshell roof, even when intact, sometimes made Emma giddy with anxiety. When she heard the bullwhip crack and saw the sky fall in, she felt a terror so great that it was necessary for her to crawl -she could not stand -down the stairs to find her husband.
Her arrival was heralded by the staff, and Charles, already in a panic about his building, ran up the stairs to meet her.
I knew none of this. I did not understand Emma's re
quirements in terms of shelter, sustenance and protection. I did not know about the meeting on the stairs. She had defeated me, but I was not yet aware of it.
I sat, that night, on the rubble in the middle of the kitchen trying to work out a way to get the broken bricks down to the ground floor. The tarpaulin flapped like a spinnaker above the skylight and although the wind came through the missing section it was not unpleasant to me -no more than sea air and spray – and I never thought it would be to anyone else. I sat there on the pile of bricks with a leashed lightglobe circling above my head, an echo, if you like, of the old goanna who lay beneath its similarly moving ultraviolet light elsewhere in the gallery.
My view of the gallery, and the goanna's swinging light – a necessary medication to prevent the onset of rickets – was nicely framed by the stepped edges of the high brick arch and, within that, the hard black lines of the RSJs. On the right-hand side I could see, through the lattice, Goldstein at work at her desk. She had a moon-warm light beside her and, as I watched, I saw her stop writing and run her hands through her tangled blue-black hair. I was still under the impression that she was writing a letter, and that, of course, is the trouble with schemes, that they begin as a celebration of happiness and end up leaving you blind to the people on whom your happiness depends.
I could not see Emma, but I knew she had locked herself up in her cage and would not talk to her husband. I had seen him pacing up and down around the bars and pleading with her. She had the children in there with her and I could make them out, could see Henry's dark unhappy eyes as he stared out into the gallery. He would not wave when I waved to him.
Mr Lo was at his drawing-board.
I sat on my pile of bricks and tried to work out a simple lift. I picked up a brick and started to scratch a plan on to it with a nail. It was then I noticed the thumb print in the corner. This is common enough with bricks of this age, produced by convicts down at Brickfields, but I had never been so struck with it before.
