Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  You have treated us all badly, as if we were your creatures. I forgive you for not mentioning my lover, but not for omitting my membership of the Labour Party and the success of the books.

  I have always been optimistic about you. I have always thought that you would finally respond to love and kindness and that, in the end, you would feel safe enough, loved enough, to have no need for bombast and exaggeration. But tonight – writing down these lines in the full knowledge that you may well recover and actually read these lines -tonight, I don't care if you die.

  55

  It was a cool morning in September 1961 and the fishermen on the sea wall at Deloitte Avenue, having been lured from their beds by clear skies and bright sun on their whiskered faces, now found themselves replacing their soggy baits with numb fingers. A breeze had sprung up from the south-east; you could hardly call it a wind, but it was thin and penetrating none the less and the fishermen drew their coats around themselves and clenched their soggy cigarettes between their lips while they waited for the tide to turn.

  There was, however, no weather in Charles's office, nor any sign of it, unless you count the creaks and groans of the old building as it weathered the sea of commerce, as ancient floorboards adjusted to the shifting weight of the staff or anticipated the arrival and departure of customers. Because it was still early you could hear the squeaking wheel of the old pram they used to carry the trays of food to the pets. There was the distant whine of the floor polisher. Somewhere a shop assistant with a high nasal voice was relating a joke from thePerry Como Show but, because of the eccentricities of the building itself, it was impossible to tell where he stood. The cash register, having rung once (to have its change checked) and rung a second time (as its drawer was shut) was now silent.

  There were no windows in Charles's office, although there was a frosted-glass panel in the door which bore the legend, "Knock and Enter". Charles sat behind a large cedar desk, the surface of which was obscured by a great many papers, some flat, others crumpled. He wore a single-breasted navy linen suit and a striped navy tie. If you saw him in a photograph, Leah thought, you would see the image of a powerful business man and you would think him cruel and efficient, a cold ally of Gulf amp; Western, a smuggler of threatened species, a briber of customs officers. You would see the pouches beneath his eyes and you would not understand them; you might not even think about them but they would guide you, just the same, to the conclusion that he was debauched; it would not occur to you that the bags were caused by weeping.

  His hands were still shaking as he tried to get a Viscount Kingsize from Leah's pack. His fingers were too big and – because it was a new pack and the cigarettes were still tight and his nails were clipped short- he had difficulty. She wanted to take the pack from him and do it for him, but he was upset enough anyway, so she waited.

  "There are times", he said, when he had at last lit the cigarette, "when I could kill her."

  Nothing changes, she thought. We have the same battles over and over. He forgets how many times he has said this to me. She wondered if passion, like pain, was something that could not be truly remembered, that one could only remember that one had felt the pain but one could not remember the pain itself.

  "Kill her, really kill her."

  Perhaps he did remember. Perhaps he was trying to tell her that this time was really different, just as he had tried, on all those other occasions, to stress how different they were.

  "Murder her." He held up his two hands. The right one held a smoking cigarette. "I can imagine how her neck would feel between my hands."

  He was not capable of killing anything, Leah thought, and it would do no good to tell him that he would soon smother his anger in the warm roundness of Emma's belly.

  "I keep her, I feed her, I do anything she wants. She wants to send her sister a koala bear, I do it for her. I could go to gaol for it, but I do it. But now I ask her to do something for me, what does she do?"

  He sucked on the cigarette and exhaled it, Leah thought, just like a little boy blowing out a candle.

  Leah Goldstein was nearly fifty years old, and although she had put some weight on her backside she normally presented the world with a thin, dry, nicotine-stained cynicism. She flicked open the Viscount pack and when she lit her cigarette she revealed her liar's lump, the callus where her HB pencil fitted against her finger.

  They sat there then, the pair of them, in silence, smoking. A yellow shadow came towards the frosted door, hesitated, then turned away. Has he really forgotten, Leah thought, is he capable of forgetting the number of times she has stoked him to exactly this point?

  And then, because she was Leah Goldstein, she looked for parallels in her own life, and found them in the number of times she had left the comforts of the pet shop and returned to them again, the number of times she had immersed herself in Labour politics and then become bored and impatient and given them up for the pleasures of beer on Bondi Beach where, beneath that fool's blue sky she had sought the company of flash characters, racecourse touts, used-car salesmen, and each time, through each cycle, she had been like Charles, like a person waking from dreaming and forgetting that she had been through all these things so many times before.

  And here she was, back living in the pet shop, amongst the fatally flawed Badgerys, and here was the nicest of them feeding off his own rage.

  "How many times", she asked him, although she had intended not to, "do you think you have had rows like this one? A thousand? Two thousand?"

  Charles put out his cigarette, not neatly, but so the paper was torn and its warm tube of tobacco was exposed, lying ruptured amongst the dry ash. "This is different."

  "Oh yeah?" You could see in the smile, in the softness of the voice, that the dry cynical tone was a pose and had no more connection to the real Leah Goldstein than her black turtle-neck sweater or her brown desert boots.

  How many times had she hated Herbert Badgery and then forgiven him? And why was each time so new, her feelings so fresh as if they had never been unwrapped before?

  "Look," he said.

  "I'm looking."

  "Look, if Time magazine wanted to write you up for one of your crummy books…"

  "Thank you."

  "You say they're crummy."

  "Only about some of them. Some of them are very good."

  But he was too obsessed to detour and discuss her work and even if he had not been, he had no feeling for the subject and would never see what their author now saw – that the real subject of Goldstein's work was not the people, but the landscape and its roads, red, yellow, white, ochre, mustard, dun, madeira, maize, the raw optimistic tracks that cut the arteries of an ancient culture before a new one had been born.

  "If Time magazine were coming to interview you," Charles said, "you wouldn't want them to see the circus on the top floor. How would you explain it to them?"

  "I'd say, this is my wife and this is Mr Lo who won't go home. Please excuse the mess."

  He laughed then, at last, but soon he was serious again.

  "All I wanted was for her to make an effort. For one day."

  "Simmer down, chum. Have you got an ashtray or are you going to hog it all to yourself? Nothing catastrophic has happened. You've been like this before and it'll pass. Every time she rubs the stupid goanna's belly…"

  "It's not its belly she rubs."

  "Every time she does it you want to kill her. That's why she does it. You even know that's why she does it. And you can stop enjoying your temper, it's a nasty habit."

  "I can really imagine killing her."

  "I bet you can," she said, watching him prolong his feelings, like a man getting the last drag out of his cigarette before he burnt the filter and made himself ill on the taste of burning synthetic.

  "I can feel my hands wanting to go round her neck like you want to put your arms to hold someone and…" He stopped suddenly, blushing. He hid his confusion by picking up a pile of papers, vets' reports for the month of August. "Pneumon
ia and trauma," he read out, as if this was something to do with it. "Trauma, Air Sacculitis, Too Decomposed, Trauma." He read belligerently, as if these were Emma's fault.

  "We can imagine all sorts of things, sausage," Leah said gently. "That's why we're not living in the trees any more."

  Charles flicked through the pages, and then placed them roughly in a manila envelope from a drawer. He wrote something on an envelope.

  "One day I'll do it." He placed the envelope in a wire basket. "I'm sure that's how murders happen."

  There was something rather prim and self-conscious about this. Leah did not believe it and she did not like it. She put out her cigarette and lit another one. The phone on the desk gave a small "ding" as the switchboard operator began work.

  "Will you please ask Emma to tidy up?"

  "Work is already in progress," said Leah Goldstein, grinning widely. "Your father is supervising."

  "Supervising. How can he supervise? He can't even wipe his bottom properly."

  "He's supervising."

  "She can't stand him. She won't do a thing he says."

  "She's co-operating. She listens to him very carefully."

  "I can never hear a word he says."

  "Charlie, are you listening? We are making you look ultra-respectable for tomorrow."

  "Why didn't you tell me before?"

  "I wanted you to appreciate how clever I am."

  They laughed then. They enjoyed each other's company. They always had. And I will not, in demonstrating this, discuss the first night that Leah Goldstein lived in the emporium, when she had taken up residence in the flat itself, was made a bed, had a proper room, etc. All I know is what anyone else knows which is that someone drank a bottle of whisky that night and on the following night Leah took up residence out on the gallery next to Emma.

  Charles picked up the telephone and ordered tea. He pushed back his chair and put his feet up on the desk. Leah smiled to see that he had white tennis socks showing between his navy suit and black shoes.

  "I'll tell you what I'm worried about."

  "Your socks, I hope."

  He sighted along his legs, frowned. "Maybe they're doing a story on bird smuggling. They might think that's what I'm up to."

  "Are you?"

  "Ha ha, Leah. Very funny."

  The girl brought the tea in and they watched her pour it. She was thin and fair with almost no eyebrows. She could not have been more than sixteen. Leah was shocked to see that she was nervous of bringing tea into the "boss's office" and also to see that Charles hardly noticed it, that she did not even exist for him.

  When she had gone, Charles said, "Nathan wants me to. He won't say it on the phone or put it in writing, but that's what he wants."

  "Wants what?"

  "He calls it expediting, but he means smuggling. I think the bloody government wants me to as well. Every week they ban the export of something and they wonder why the economy is in a mess."

  "What's the girl's name?"

  "What girl?" he looked up, blinking irritably. He still had his legs on the desk but he leaned forward, put sugar in her tea, stirred it for her and pushed her cup and saucer as far as he could.

  "The fair girl."

  Charles understood. He looked towards the door, staring, it seemed, at the diffused images of suspended neon lights, and then he shrugged. "Maybe it would be better not to do it. I don't have to be interviewed. They can't make me." And then, seeing the expression on Leah's face -"Glenda. Her name is Glenda."

  Leah drank her tea silently. Her view about the interview was complicated, even contradictory. She was as suspicious of it as Charles was, although for different reasons. She knew that Gulf amp; Western and Schick wished to buy out their Australian partner and she suspected this was, somehow, part of the ploy. She was wrong, but the mistake is understandable. It was a time when the Americans were making their first big push into Australian industry.

  Her second thought was that it was rather pathetic to need to be well thought of by Time magazine, to tidy your life, to sanitize it enough to be acceptable to Henry Luce.

  But when she had finished her tea and placed the cup carefully in its saucer she knew that she would say neither of these things to him, that it would not only be cruel but also fruitless. And it was to compensate for her secret unkindness in thinking such thoughts that she let her other feelings, her simple love for Charlie Badgery, dominate.

  "Maybe", she said, "it would help if Hissao was here. He could talk to them first and if there was going to be trouble, you wouldn't need to talk to them at all." She did not really trust Hissao, but she judged him perfect for this job.

  "Do you think he would?"

  "For God's sake, you're his father. He'd love to." And when she saw him hesitating, measuring, again, how much he was loved by his family, "Come on, Charlie Barley, do you want the Yanks to write you up or not?"

  It was a speech that she was to remember afterwards with much regret.

  56

  Hissao remembers the day well. Really they were two days -September 11th and 12th, 1961 – but in his mind they are only one day. He remembers them as days full of unlikely events, days that coincided with the real beginning of life as an adult, days of great beauty, but also of grief. Actually one must include a third day, although, placed in order, it is not the third day, but the first of three. On this day, September 10th, a Monday that had predicted the full-blown arrival of spring, he had smoked marijuana for the first time, lost his heterosexual virginity in the back of a '52 Humber, and listened to a record – forever to be associated with these events – of Miles Davis and John Coltrane playing "Round Midnight".

  The next day, the eleventh, was quite cold, cold enough for him to huddle into his leather jacket as he sat in his corner seat at Gino's, a small Italian coffee bar which was tucked away in a little lane on the edge of Chinatown. He was hardly in hiding – the place was a common meeting place for a certain set of students from the university – but it was a most unlikely place to meet any of his family.

  Hissao liked Gino's. You could buy a minestrone and a bread roll for two and sixpence. There was a printed menu that showed a cartoon of a beatnik type walking up the walls above the heads of jiving couples; he left footprints on the ceiling and these footprints were repeated, in real life, up the walls and across the ceiling of Gino's although no one had ever been known to dance there.

  Hissao had been there, at the same table, the evening before, and had bought the willowy clarinettist a Bacci which, she insisted, was Italian for kiss. So he was not hiding. He was merely sitting there, playing with the sugar bowl, writing her name with salt on the table, dreaming through the clouds of espresso steam. He had finished his coffee, had scraped out the rim of remaining froth with his teaspoon, and he sat there wondering what he would do next.

  Hissao was eighteen years old. He was unnaturally short for a Badgery, a little over five foot tall, but he was also nicely proportioned. When he removed his shirt, men were either surprised or thrilled (depending on their sexual predilections). He had a gymnast's body and it was obviously the product of some serious work; yet it was made charming, almost comic, by the biscuit-barrel chest which had come to him, via his mother, from Henry Underhill.

  The chest excluded (or even included) he had somehow slipped through the genetic minefields his progenitors had laid for him. Not only were his legs straight but he avoided the lonely excesses of masculinity represented by his bull-necked, jut-jawed Easter Island father. He had curling black hair, smooth olive skin, and red cherubic lips which suggested, strongly at some times, weakly at others, an oriental parent who did not exist.

  This, the question of Hissao's name and his face, was not a thing that was, any longer, discussed in the family. It had been discussed on only one day, the day of Hissao's christening in October 1943, when Charles had emerged into the bright light of George Street and discovered – it was brought to his attention by his angry mother – that his son was not called
Michael at all but had – his mother was so cross she was spitting as she spoke – an enemy name. You could not, to be precise about it, really call this ruckus a discussion, so we can say then that the matter had never, ever, been discussed within the family. Outside the family, of course, was another matter and, as a boy at school, he had been granted no immunity.

  By 1961, however, the only signs left of his childhood battles were the gymnast's chest, the unexpected biceps, the pronounced pectorals, and the tendency to slur his name on occasions so that it came out "Sau" which was often mistaken for "Sal" or "Saul".

  For the most part he did not act like a damaged young man and his laugh, that great indicator of personality, gave the clue. When he laughed (which was often) he produced a singularly awkward noise, a great tottering tower of a laugh with chains hanging off it and odd cubicles protruding from its shaking upper storeys; not quite normal, but not damaged either, and endearing for being so awkward and, once you had got over the shock, infectious. It was a laugh to stop an old man being cynical, to make him smile, toothlessly perhaps, but smile to see that the product of a fearful imagination could turn out to be so likeable a young man.

  The laugh made everyone in Gino's look up, not at Leah Goldstein, whose unexpected entrance had precipitated it, but at Hissao.

  "I want to talk to you, laddie," said Leah and made him laugh even more and thump his foot as well. He was laughing at the joy of coincidence, the magic of chance, that Leah, who had never walked up this cabbage-dank, milky-drained laneway before should not only do it now, but choose to open Gino's unwelcoming door, just at the time she wished to speak with him.