Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  Consider though, as they scrape their plastic chairs around and order espressos, that here are two people who can watch a Chinaman's finger change into a leech without suffering any great alarm. The woman once saw a man disappear before her eyes. The young man has a face that no one can satisfactorily explain. Yet they do not greet each other like beings who might, between them, change the shape of cities, of past, of future. They do not, as they might, embrace as the children of magicians, as magicians themselves who could, if they decided to, fill the night sky with brand new neon. No, they behave like servants. They giggle like idiots because of a… coincidence.

  They drank strong black Italian coffee and ate great fat Italian doughnuts with that little blob of jam always lying unpredictably just at the place where you cannot, even if you wish, save it to last.

  Hissao, perhaps influenced by his surroundings, looked rosy-cheeked and Tuscan. Goldstein wore a silver medallion with her black roll-necked sweater. She wore a white leather coat, not because of the weather, which she had been unaware of as she dressed, but because of a shyness about her widening bum which no one who knew her would have guessed at.

  "But why can't he ask me himself?" Hissao asked when Leah had made Charles's request. He was pleased, just the same, to be asked. His father had never before thought of him in so adult a way.

  "You know he's shy."

  "I'm his son."

  "Then you should understand him. He's frightened you'd say no."

  "But why me?"

  "Oh, you Badgerys." Leah was smiling, but the irritation she expressed was real enough. "Why do you always angle for compliments? Youknow why."

  Hissao coloured, but he also grinned.

  "It's because I'm personable." And Leah marvelled that it did not sound in the least conceited. It was conceited, of course. It was a classic Badgery conceit. (Perhaps not a conceit, in that it was true, but it was unpleasantly complacent.) She realized, looking at this young man whose ructious christening she had attended, that she did not know him at all, only in the way an aunt might know a nephew. He was so pretty and so sure of himself that she gave him no credit for any ambitions other than selfish ones, and even while she admitted that she was prejudiced against him, she believed her prejudice well founded.

  "Whoever this man is from Time," Hissao said, still smiling at her, "I'll get on with him. That's why you're asking me."

  "That's about it, I suppose."

  "I won't lose my temper, no matter what he says."

  Leah nodded.

  "This is very important to him," Hissao said, spilling sugar from the shaker into a neat pile on the table. "It is probably the most important thing in his life. It is like an exam for him, what do you think?"

  Leah shrugged. She lacked the young's enthusiasm for simple explanations. She was irritated by the growing pile of sugar on the table, by Hissao's very red lips, by the dark long-lashed eyes he held her eyes with.

  Don't you try and con me, you little smarty pants, she thought.

  "I wish he would ask me himself, just the same."

  "Oh, he will," Goldstein said, standing suddenly, and she left the little coffee lounge without even shaking hands.

  That afternoon his father visited him in his rented room and, as one man speaking to another, asked his help. Hissao was very moved. He shook hands with the grating firmness that men use to express their gentler emotions.

  That night he went to find the clarinettist but she had returned to Melbourne and he found himself, at half-past ten at night, in bed with her friend, a very plump young lady who liked to drink rum with clove cordial in it.

  Eighteen is an age that gives a false impression of life, as if every day will bring with it similar surprises. The next day was only to confirm this. Hissao still had half a reefer, a gift from the departed clarinettist. He smoked it looking at himself in the mirror of his wardrobe. The room itself was very small and gave no indication of being the room of an architecture student. There was no hint, no sketch or notebook, no paperback or snapshot, to suggest the importance of the work he would later undertake: the building that might yet – who knows – change the history of his country. Neither would you guess, from the evidence presented by either the room or its occupant, at the fierce nationalism that fuelled him. This was not a boy who would be waylaid by Henry Ford or be seduced by the beauties of cockatoos or the soft hands of Nathan Schick. He had an education. There was money behind him. He did not need to rush out and make a quid and he had an ambition that he had nurtured within him as long as he could remember.

  The room will reveal no secrets to you, but I will tell you, anyway, what was in it. It had a window on to a laneway, a very narrow bed beneath the window, a dressing table opposite, and a large walnut wardrobe with a mirror, this last on the wall between bed and dressing table. There was a mirror on the dresser too, but it was the mirror on the door of the walnut wardrobe he looked into as he smoked the reefer. His inquiry was not narcissistic but scientific – he wished to see what the drug did to his perceptions now that he had the opportunity to concentrate on something more neutral than the smooth texture and unexpected perfumes of a woman's skin. He was disappointed to find that nothing altered very much.

  "We", he told the mirror, "are going to fix this bastard right up."

  He was referring, of course, to the gentleman employed by Henry Luce and you will note, at once, the slightly unpleasant and combative tone of the salesman but there is also so much glee contained in it, an anticipation of the joys of a difficult battle, that even a person of fine scruples, sensitive to the vulgarity of the salesman type (such as yourself, Professor) need not be offended but rather challenged by the contradiction contained herein, ie. that this crass aggression can co-exist with an ability to draw very fine moral distinctions and to see, very objectively, the damage his father's business was doing to the fauna of the country he loved and that, further – like real estate for instance – it was one of those great Australian enterprises that generate wealth while making nothing new.

  When Hissao set out to charm the fellow from Time he did it because he loved his naive father and wanted to protect him from hurt. But he did not approve of the pet shop and although he imagined his father as an innocent he thought him a very dangerous innocent. He did not extend the same generosity towards his two elder brothers who were embarrassed by the pet shop for other reasons but who took money, when their father offered it, to help buy suburban houses.

  So the boy was acting in bad faith? Perhaps. But he was also an optimist. He knew that the signs in the sky of this city were made only from gas and glass. He knew gas and glass could be broken, the gas set free, the glass bent into other shapes and that even the city itself was something imagined by men and women, and if it could be imagined into one form, it could be imagined into another.

  He arrived by taxi outside the emporium at eight thirty to find the footpath had already been swept and hosed. This was a warm morning and the water on the footpath was evaporating. It felt humid, luxurious, grubby, tropical. The window was full of little firetails and the background had been painted with the dun-khaki that is the firetail's dominant colour so that as the little birds flew to and fro their bodies disappeared and only their ember-red tails showed, like flying sparks. This was Van Kraligan's work, not his father's. Hissao checked his reflection in the window. He had worn a conservative suit to make his father feel confident and relaxed, but the bow tie was a secret code addressed only to himself and to those few who might read it – he had stolen it, of course, from Corbusier.

  The door was unlocked for the staff. Hissao, however, did not enter immediately but crossed Pitt Street and stood amongst the crowds waiting for the Woolworth's sale. He looked across at Badgery's Pet Emporium, at the neon-signed parrots circling his grandfather's brightly lit window.

  His grandfather, Hissao thought, was dying. So he was surprised to see him there, sitting bolt upright in his chair, like the captain on the bridge. He was dressed
in a grey linen suit and a panama hat. The elastic of his tie was limp and showing at the edges of the knot, but his eyes were that splendid violet colour they would always show at the beginning of the day. Hissao, without knowing why, shivered.

  "Oh, Master," he said, and giggled.

  When he entered the emporium the cannabis played its gentle tricks on him and exaggerated the rust on the white-painted cages and the odour of mildew on the stairwell. He suddenly felt very sad.

  He went into his father's office – it was tucked in neatly underneath the stairs – and stood staring at the framed photographs that had so impressed him as a boy. But Ava Gardner was already mouldy and Lee Marvin had been damaged by a leaking aquarium on the floor above and even his good wishes, sincerely meant too, had dissolved into a smudged watermark.

  The sounds of the morning were all around him: the whining floor polisher, the creaking wheels of the old food pram, the groaning noises of the building itself which seemed to wheeze and fart like an old labrador, old, moth-eaten, too stubborn to die. He sat at his father's desk and began to tidy it for him (and you can look at this fastidiousness of his as one of the few obvious reactions against his upbringing). There were consignment notes from carriers, letters from collectors, trade magazines from all over the world, the vets' reports that his father had read out, so belligerently, to Leah Goldstein. These vets' reports, being roneoed copies and therefore on hydroscopic paper, were damp.

  It was the first occasion in his life when he had felt the sadness of time. He was overcome with it there, in his father's office, with the damp paper between his fingers. He felt it in everything. He felt it in the rust and mildew, even in the box housing for the neon tubes above his head which he had once, in his innocence, thought so modern.

  He knew why the building was so damp. Its damp courses were defective and it was built on top of the tank stream. He tried to cheer himself by imagining opening up the basement, going down to reveal the historic stream itself, having it run through transparent pipes, but he knew now what the tank stream must look like – a drain, a sewer, no different from other drains and sewers.

  His father, coincidentally, had become concerned about rust, and Hissao found him with a pot of white paint trying, when it was already far too late, to hide the evidence fromTime magazine. He had already put white paint on his good suit before Hissao managed to persuade him to give the touching-up job to Van Kraligan who, for once, did not complain or argue. Hissao watched the stern-faced Dutchman as he took the can of paint and saw that his eyes were all aglitter with excitement. Everyone was waiting for the Yanks.

  Hissao then wandered up the stairs to say hello to his mother and was astonished to find all the evidence of normal family life removed. This only exacerbated his sadness. Downstairs his past was rusting, but up here it had been obliterated. It felt cold and sterile. They had removed nets and ladders, the stacks of unread newspapers, the steel drums, the piles of bricks, the abandoned children's toys, balls of wool, lengths of dress material. They had put pot plants in Goldstein's apartment and set her desk outside and put Mr Lo at it so that he was pretending to be a clerk. They had polished the floors and painted his mother's cage. He could see that they had begun to brick up the arch above the RSJ, but had obviously panicked at the lack of time left, and painted over the unfinished job. The goanna had been removed, presumably not without protest from Emma, and placed in a large cage on the ground floor. It had been fed "pinkies" and was now as sleepy and inert as a sunbather.

  Hissao shook hands with Mr Lo who was, as usual, so pleased to see him that he felt embarrassed. If he allowed himself to, he would become very cross with Mr Lo who was now free to stay in Australia but who would not leave the building he had lived in so long.

  He found his mother in the kitchen sitting on a high stool with her handbag in front of her. He could see that she was bright and excited about the visit too. She had put on a big feathery hat and gloves and lipstick: He hugged and kissed her. He was pleased – he always was – to see her. She was overweight, she wore old-fashioned clothes, she had no interest in the world outside and only the most perfunctory grasp of his university studies, but she was his mother. They loved each other uncritically. She admired his bow tie and smoothed his hair and then patted the stool beside her for him to sit on.

  It was then that Emma produced the old Vegemite jar.

  Hissao looked at the bottle with the polite attention another son might bestow on his mother's favourite maidenhair fern, or on a pear tree, new ducklings, a cabbage bed or white-stalked celery growing up through cardboard tubes. The ritual with the bottle was so familiar that he did not even think about it. For the most part the contents of the bottle had been as formless and unpleasant as the sort of stuff you will pull out of a blocked grease trap, but occasionally there were leeches and once a fine creature, as thin as black cotton, which swam with the graceful movements of a snake.

  But on this occasion his mother showed him a foetus, half goanna and half human. And I know I said, when I mentioned the subject before, that Hissao did not look, that the liquid was murky, that he could not be sure, but of course he looked. He was not only polite, he was naturally curious and if someone says that they have your brother in a bottle, of course you have a squint at it. It had fingers (they were perfectly formed) and a face in which you could make out features which had that mixture of soft-mouthed vulnerability and blandness that is the hallmark of the unborn. Where you might expect toes there were long claws, thin, elegant, shining black like ebony; there was also a tail which was long, striped, with very obvious glistening scales.

  Hissao, quite suddenly, did not know where he was. His head span. He stood up, and was dizzy, so sat down again. His mother, momentarily, took on the appearance of a total stranger. He leaned across to the kitchen tap, turned it on, and collected water in his cupped hands but when he drank he could taste only the whale-fat flavour of his mother's lipstick. Just the same, he did not realize that he had seen a dragon, only that he was ill and frightened.

  "Jesus." He felt ill. "Oh, Emmie, Emmie." He shook his head.

  A conversation then took place and I must translate for you, for Emma would rarely speak clearly and although I must write down her heard nothing but her murmur, or, if you were lucky, the last word like "doss".

  "Just a bit of fun," said Emma to the young boy with the Corbusier bow tie. She took the bottle back and put it amongst the muddle in her handbag. "Is my boy cross?"

  Hissao shook his head. He had a heavy feeling around his forehead as if there was a steel band clamped around his head.

  "He's your half-brother, after all."

  "Emma," Hissao was working hard to gather back his sense of the world. In this he was not helped by the unnaturally tidy appearance of his childhood home. "Emma, you are wicked."

  She patted his cheek with a gloved hand and the feeling of kid leather where he had expected skin was also disturbing. He shivered, just as he had shivered, not ten minutes before, standing in Pitt Street.

  "Don't you show that to anyone today."

  Emma pouted.

  "Promise me you won't show it to the journalist."

  "All right," she said.

  She kept her promise to the very letter, i. e., she did not show that bottle to Charles until the journalist had departed. Until that moment she did nothing but play the humble wife. She was asked two questions and she answered them both with lowered eyes and a gentle murmur. She pulled her fox fur around her shoulders and clutched her bag in front of her. Only the journalist and his photographer thought her peculiar.

  Hissao did his work perfectly. When the question of smuggling was raised it was easy for him to answer honestly. He was passionate on his father's behalf. He spoke very quietly, with a sort of hiss in his voice. He attacked the "criminals" who were involved in this activity. He was enthusiastic about the Best Pet Shop in the World. He spoke at length about the necessary protection of Australian fauna. Thus he shuffled true convicti
on and cynicism, dealt a hand, guessed an answer, did his little act so slickly that when the journalist saw the photographs he was not only surprised to discover that he had been Japanese but that he was also diminutive.

  57

  Charles's opinions about himself had always been a tangled ball of string and while he thought himself stupid, clumsy and ugly, he also thought of himself as a Good Man. He was generous to his staff, he never cheated on his taxes, he supported any charity that asked him, voted for the political party which would tax him most heavily and distribute his money fairly. He was scrupulous in his business affairs, always meeting the requirements of the Health Department, the Customs Department, the rights (real and imagined) of his customers.

  And although he guessed that the journalist from Time might talk about smuggling, he was not really prepared for the effect it might have on him. He could not bear to be accused of it.

  Later he could not even remember the journalist's face or the sound of his voice. All he could remember was the accusation (what he imagined to be an accusation). Christ Almighty. So they had found suitcases full of dead rosellas at San Francisco airport. Why come to him?

  Hissao began to answer. Charles was in such a fury he did not appreciate the great skill with which he was being defended. He plunged his hands so hard into his pocket that he burst the fabric it was made from and his car keys fell down his leg and on to the floor. The journalist's parries were turned aside, but Charles did not notice the turning aside, only the parries themselves, these razor-sharp slashes, stabs and lunges and the proprietor was pricked and cut – there was no shield could save him.

  So the McMahons' parrot was extinct? Why come to him? He was Charles Badgery. He had ordered people off the premises for suggesting lesser things, backed them down the stairs and locked them out in the street, for intimating, say, that he used special lights to brighten the colours of a parrot's feathers. These incidents were all family history, funny to recall, but nothing had ever happened like this before and it would never be funny.