by Peter Carey
They reared and lunged above the monotony of Melbourne's west, out across the melancholy wheat plains around Diggers' Rest where Hissao's grandfather had once sold T Model Fords to farmers who could not sign their own name. He passed over Bendigo where Badgery amp; Goldstein had first performed. They were still in the storm half an hour later above Jeparit where Sir Robert Menzies had been born and where Hissao's father met his mother in the mouse plague of 1937.
They passed the borders of the family history, but Australia stretched on for two thousand miles more and it would be another five hours before they left its coast. An International Vice-President of Uniroyal, returning from firing the Australian Managing Director, vomited his farewell drinks into a paper bag and somewhere else Hissao could hear a woman crying helplessly.
The woman beside him did not move anxiously in her seat or let out cries of fear or even sit like someone waiting for something unpleasant to pass. She was going home after her mother's funeral and her thoughts were full of death and her own mortality and a fine chill of loneliness pierced her.
She had many friends, was much loved by them, and certainly had no shortage of lovers, but both her parents were dead and she had the sensation, now, of being in the front line with none of the conventional weapons of family or children or even country to defend herself against the realities of death and nothingness. Yet she was a strong woman, and an optimist at that; she was not in the least frightened by life, so that when, above Jeparit, Hissao began to talk to her, she gave him the whole of her intelligent attention and warmed her chilled thoughts in conversation.
The most puzzling thing in the entire encounter occurred at a certain stage very late in the conversation, when she discovered she had been talking to a man. She had the feeling of a dream where things and people transmogrify, characters dissolve from one to the other like tricks in a film, monsters in a bottle. She had the sense, the very distinct sense, of her companion's female gender; she had been pleased to find it, had relaxed into it, had been even more delighted to find it coupled with an elegant wit and a sense of both joy and irony. The forces of life, she thought to herself, are flying high tonight.
Later she tried to remember if she had taken pills or perhaps drunk excessively, but there had been only one glass (of champagne) and certainly no pills and yet, in the soft whistling dark above the Arafura Sea she found herself deep in conversation with a man, as in a dream, and her nipples contracted and her vision tunnelled and the sense of what had happened and was happening was disturbed, disorientating, and intensely erotic at the same time. What she saw as through a smeared glass darkly was a Renaissance face, a Bacchus that belonged to red wine, grapes, apples with the bloom of Tuscany on them, a vision saved from decadence by a firmness, a cleanness of will that showed in the intense blue eyes.
As she leaned across the last six inches of reserve to kiss him she felt his maleness to be overlaid with a soft blue shadow, the memory of the woman she had begun to talk to.
They were in the back seat of first class. The movie was running. Hissao removed the seat divider. She held his face a moment. Hissao smiled, thinking of the lines of her life held firmly against him, the beginning of her heart line touching the beginning of his smile.
Naturally she misunderstood the smile.
"It's all right," she whispered, "I'm just trying to imagine who you are."
His intentions were not bad. It may be tempting to find in those rosy Tuscan apples the worm of self-absorption, to see in his Bacchus lips the centre of his moral universe. He has, after all, declared himself amoral. He likes to think of himself as a pirate, a brigand, a citizen of risk. But let me tell you, he has the morals of a schoolteacher. Forget the Bacchus lips. He is as careful as a clerk. Even when he removed the seat divider he was beginning to stand, to place the parrot safely amongst his folded coat.
His mistake was to expect caution on the part of his companion. After all, they were not alone. The stewards were sitting upstairs and could return at any moment. The other four first-class passengers were absorbed withThe Railway Children but that could prove to be indigestible at any moment.
But his companion, Rosa Carlobene, was not known for timidity and tonight, above the Arafura Sea, she was seeking the warm juices of life, defying the tapeworms of habit and order, luxuriating in the complexity of her sexual feelings, flying high on the side of the angels against death and despair.
Thus it was poor Rosa who, in one strong sinuous thrust, ground her pelvis into the head of the golden-shouldered parrot.
Hissao felt the skull squash and wetness spread. He leapt to his feet. He did not care for caution, discretion, customs spies, or Rosa Carlobene. He unzipped his fly, hoping against hope.
And Rosa, who had misunderstood the bump that was the parrot, now misunderstood the blood on Hissao's trembling hands.
"What is it?"
She clutched at his sleeve. He sat down again, but he was fiddling around his fly. "It's nothing," he said.
"Did I hurt you?"
"It's nothing, nothing, I promise. Don't worry." But the words did not match his tone which was cold and angry.
"I have hurt you?"
Hissao did not weep easily, but he wept there, in that aeroplane with the last of the golden-shouldered parrots dead inside his trousers.
Carla felt as if she was having a bad reaction to a drug. She patted at his lap with a handkerchief and was horrified to find it streaked with death.
"It's no good," he said. "It's dead." And he pushed her hand away.
Remembering the incident in later years each of them would physically groan out loud and shut their eyes (each one in their different country, in a different life, carrying the sharp blade of feeling that was unblunted by time or touching), yet the degree of their suffering was different and Rosa's pain, in comparison, was no more important than a stubbed toe or a faux pas. Much more was involved for Hissao – it had been his ambition to be recognized as the man who had saved the golden-shouldered parrot.
It was because of this incident, with his guilt, with his contempt for himself, that his hate unleashed itself, a steel spring unsprung, a Japanese paper flower opening up to show its livid heart in a glass of water.
He had loved his country more than he had pretended, and had tried to make something fine out of something rotten. He felt the feelings he had once described to Leah Goldstein as greatness but it was not greatness – it was the same feeling Charles described when he said he would strangle his wife.
64
A bird was a bird to Rosa Carlobene and although she knew her new lover was unhappy about its death she had little inkling of what it really meant to him. He was a smuggler. He had lost money. But he had come through customs without difficulty and, doubtless, he would smuggle again.
She woke in the night to see him climbing on to a chair in the bathroom. At first, half enmeshed by sleep, she thought he was doing himself harm, and then she saw, in the sickly green light of the UPIM sign that illuminated the room, that he was doing chin-ups. She smiled and went back to sleep.
Hissao did his exercises to make the tension go away. He did chin-ups until he could do no more. This of course, did not take place at the Rome Hilton where he was booked. There is nothing to grip on above the doors in the Rome Hilton. They stayed, instead, in a small pensione on the fifth floor of a building in the Piazza Nationale. It was a clean enough place, but noisy. Beefy-armed female singers performed for the aperitif sippers in the square below.
The exercises soothed him for a moment, and then the tension came back. He showered, but the hot water could not unclench the knotted muscles of his strong neck. Then he dressed and went down to the piazza which was now almost empty. Some men hung around the edge of the fountain and, at the last bar, they were stacking away the plastic chairs for the night.
Hissao walked down the streets towards the railway station where young toughs lit matches which illuminated their shirts: brilliant aquamarine, lolly pink, explosi
ons of colour caught in a machismo flare of phosphor.
Hissao walked past, neither frightened by the toughs nor aroused, as he might normally have been, by the erotic possibilities of a new city.
All his skin was tight at the palms and there was nothing he could do to ease it.
Somewhere in a small gritty-pathed park, beside a shuttered kiosk, under warm swaying trees, he said, in English: "I'm going to fix you bastards right up."
And when he said that he felt something click, like a vertebra shifting or a glass skylight cracking under strain. He felt a thing "go" and it made itself known as sharply as a rifle shot and it was there (smelling the sweet scent of some flowering tree whose name he did not know, hearing a nearby Fiat flatten its battery as it tried to start, become weaker and soon give no sound other than the almost mute click of the starter motor and the soft monosyllabic curse of the driver) it was then, while these other things circled his dull tight centre, like flies around something dead, that he felt the hate he had kept himself from knowing. The pain in his skin and in his joints did not go away but intensified, took up another notch, and he was possessed of an acute sensitivity to everything, even the pressure of his silk shirt where it brushed, lightly, against his hairless chest, and he was not sure that what he felt was pain or pleasure, whether he was happy or unhappy to see, at last, the family he had worked so dangerously to support for what they were – an ugly menagerie as evil as anything you might ever see, fleetingly, before your eyes in a bottle.
Then he had the idea.
He had had it before, this idea, and then forgotten it. It was one of those ideas that we find and forget, dig and bury, over and over again, and each time we forget that we have had the idea before. We unearth and bury them like sleepwalkers, frightened of the consequences and only the mud under our nails in the morning reminds us that we have let ourselves fool around with something dangerous.
"I'm going to fix you bastards right up."
He walked back to the pensione in a different style entirely, skipping impatiently at the corners. He was polite to the sleepy concierge. He went into his room and sat by the window for a long time. Rosa Carlobene tossed in her sleep. Hissao opened the window, and heard, from five storeys below, the lonely click of a whore's heels in the empty colonnade. His emotions were those of an assassin. He was small, as small as a grain of sand and also, at exactly the same time, very very large. He was pink and visceral, grey and metallic. He was nothing. He was everything.
He blamed us.
He blamed his foreign face. He blamed his mother for the fear or the opportunism that had changed his natural form. He blamed Leah Goldstein who had wished to see nothing worthwhile in him. He blamed her, particularly, for not understanding that you could enjoy the hotels, the wine, the travel, and at the same time care immensely about the little hearts that beat against your thigh.
Miss Self-righteous, Miss Grim. She would not listen to his plans for this parrot and could not see that Snr Totoro had been sincere, that he wished a breeding pair of golden-shouldered parrots and -he was a clever man, with a proven record – he would have returned parrots to Australia and they could, between them, have begun to build up a flock.
But Goldstein would not listen. No one would listen, and now the cretins would blame him for destroying the species he had set out to save.
He was all afire with blame.
He sat by the window and waited for the dawn, fidgeting in his chair. When the sky began to lighten- a cold hard yellow conquering a bluish grey – he took out his Mont Blanc pen and wrote a very sad and sentimental note for Rosa Carlobene. He placed this on her bedside table and then he took down his coat from its hanger, turned it inside out and lay it across the chair by the window. From his trouser pocket he took a small pearl-handled pocket knife which he now used to slit the lining of the coat. He retrieved the first children's python, very gently, stroked its head and then, in a quick flick, broke its neck.
He made a little noise, like a loud gulp for air.
Then he repeated the process.
He stood, for a moment, very still with a dead snake in his hand. Then he went to the window and threw the two of them out. When he walked out of the room he left his suitcase behind.
He smiled at the concierge and talked to her about the weather. He apologized for waking her in the night. When Rosa came looking for him later the concierge described him – your husband, a real Florentine, she said; such a gentleman.
But by then Hissao was on board the aeroplane to Tokyo where he met Mr Tacheuchi and Mr Mori, both customers. They travelled up to Tokyo, one from Yokohama, one from Mishima, and Hissao entertained them, first in the Ginza and later that grotesque palace of five hundred hostesses, the Mikado.
Did they sense in Hissao the cold fury, the lovelessness of the perfect warrior? Did they realize, that even while he laughed and insisted they take another Scotch, he was not thinking about them but the revenge he planned against his family?
Ah, he was his grandfather's grandson and unkindness was his strongest card. Mr Tacheuchi, a lecherous drunk, was able to put him in touch with the right people at Mitsubishi.
There is no duller man on earth than a Mitsubishi Sarariman. Once you understand how conservative they are, you can easily imagine what distress, what physical pain, not to mention panic, they would feel to do business with a curly-headed, Bacchus-lipped, baggy-suited Australian with scuffed shoes.
Hissao therefore transformed himself. He became dullness personified. He had his hair neatly barbered. He bought the correct English suits and a wristwatch that would declare his rank more clearly than the business cards he had no time to print. In the corridors of Mitsubishi he was all but invisible. It was his destiny. He felt it. He took pleasure from his new politeness, the excessive courtesies, the slow progress, circular, but sometimes spiral, towards consensus.
He still knew himself to be an architect but there, in the endless meetings in Tokyo, the lunches in carefully graded restaurants, the ever-ascending levels of expense and status, he knew that he was born for this, that he was a great salesman, the best the family had yet produced.
He returned on a JAL flight to Sydney with a commitment of one million dollars (US), all of which was to be invested in the best pet shop in the world.
There was a recession on. He was written up in the papers.
65
He ripped the guts out of the old building as if he were a goanna feeding on a turkey. He attacked it viciously, took its entrails first, and left it clean inside, a great empty cavern of slippery ribs.
I lost my window, of course. I was shunted and shifted from ground floor to basement. I did not care. They fed me and wiped my bum. What more can a man want when his grandson is all afire with a scheme? He was my flesh and blood, my creature, my monster. I loved him, loved his barrelled chest, his red-rimmed eyes, the strong broad hands that unrolled the plans amidst the mortar and sawdust. He was opening out the pet shop, living out the destiny I had mapped for him when I took him to the South Pylon of the Bridge. He did not remember, of course, and that is as it should be and I could drink his hate as happily as his love because here, in the city of illusions, he was building a masterpiece.
No one, not even Emma, dared stand in his way. Such was the force of his vision that they all gave way before it and even Goldstein, increasingly gaunt and dark-eyed, Goldstein who would not speak to him, teetered on the brink of admiration for she saw he was pursuing an idea without compromise, that he really did have greatness within his grasp, but that was before she saw what he was up to.
The architects of Sydney all came, sooner or later, for a sticky-beak. They knew that Hissao Badgery, that gourmand, dilettante, deviant, was not capable of such work. They decided he was a front, a shadow for a Japanese architect, and they argued only about which Master it was.
The cretins. There was nothing Japanese in it except the money. He built like a jazz musician. He restated and reworked the melody of the old em
porium. The creaking galleries were gone now, but you saw them still, in your imagination. He built like a liar, like a spider -steel ladders and walkways, catwalks, cages in mid-air, in racks on walls, tumbling like waterfalls, in a gallery spanning empty spaces like a stainless Bridge of Sighs.
When Goldstein, at last, saw what he was up to, she tried to stab him in the chest with a knife but she was now an old lady in paisley with weak wrists and arthritic hands and he easily knocked the blade away and then, for good measure, spat right in her face, a great glob of clouded spittle which landed on her ruined cheek and predicted, in its course, the bed along which her hopeless tears would shortly run.
What drove him to this rage was not the knife, but the lack of imagination she displayed, that she could not see what he was doing, what passions ruled him, what love his hate was based in.
66
I have no great pains, no searing agonies to make me scream and weep, but I have nausea, giddiness, the discomforts of incontinence, the itch of psoriasis, and I lie here, with my skin scaling, peeling like a withered prawn.
Naturally they come to see me, not just the men with callipers and bottles, but the ordinary visitors. They journey up the aluminium walkways, they brave their vertigo, they grasp the rail, they tremble to see what a human being can become.
