Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 29

In October, Leah Goldstein had to give up her dancing. Her final exams were approaching. She was also working late into the night, Roneoing pamphlets, addressing envelopes and moving from dreary street to dreary street stuffing election material in letter boxes. She felt herself engaged in a fight between good and evil. It was no longer a theory to her. In the final hectic weeks Izzie had been badly beaten by the New Guard, dragged down from the platform outside Colgate Palmolive and kicked and pummelled as he lay on the ground. He had screamed like a child, a high piercing terrible sound, and although he was ashamed of this it made Leah admire him all the more. She developed a pa.s.sionate hatred of large men, New Guardsmen, policemen, bailiffs with moustaches and returned soldier's badges. When Jack Lang was finally elected and she met him, at last, face to face, she was made uncomfortable by his size, the harshness of his voice, the width of his shoulders: the Socialist Saviour looked like a bailiff.

There were parties, of course, when Lang was finally elected, but the party she chose to remember was the one Rosa and Lenny threw for Rosa's birthday during the first week of her exams.

"My silly silly friends," Rosa had told her with an odd grimace that at once celebrated her theatrical colleagues and denied them totally. friends," Rosa had told her with an odd grimace that at once celebrated her theatrical colleagues and denied them totally.

Rosa's silly friends had red mouths and huge hats. They were walking sc.r.a.pbooks. There were dancers of every type, bit actors, second-rate cabaret performers, and short men with wide lapels who could tell jokes for three hours without repeating themselves. They filled the house, surrounded the caravan, and spilled out into the street. They chucked Izzie under the chin as if he were still a little boy and told each other different stories at the same time. Leah was entranced by them and did not notice that Rosa was bored and dissatisfied with all this vapid talk which reminded her only of the days before her expulsion when her friends had been serious people.

Mervyn Sullivan arrived in a giant black Buick, bringing two beautiful actresses and a huge bottle of champagne with a silver ribbon around its neck, and Rosa, surprising herself by the dazzling quality of her own hypocrisy, pretended to be flattered that he had come.

In the later afternoon they all walked along Bondi Beach and strolled along the sand in colourful defiance of the rude realities of life. This was the day when Mervyn Sullivan, hearing that Leah had learned dancing from Rosa, grandly presented her with his card, a deckled masterpiece like a wedding invitation. "There is always work for talent," he said and made her put the card in her handbag.

Jennifer Valamay sang a rude song about a d.i.c.ky bird and Leah, emboldened by a single gla.s.s of sweet sherry, kissed Izzie on the cheek behind the laundry. It was not an unqualified success, for the skin she had felt such compa.s.sion for when it was bruised by the fists of bullies also had an upsetting clamminess; the kiss made her shiver; she hid the shiver in a laugh.

19.

When she returned to Malvern Road at Christmas that year, Leah Goldstein had no idea that she was, already, well on the way to being a snake-dancer. She felt, inside that monstrous house, on the way to nowhere. She was bored and lonely. She listened to the magnified sounds of clinking cutlery and, in this atmosphere as thin as her mother's consomme, she found herself yearning for the coa.r.s.eness of the Kaletskys, for hunks of potato and chunks of sausage, for things not cut but torn, for breadcrumbs on the tablecloth, for shocking flatulence, accusation, discord. Even the way the male Kaletskys moved, their slightness, frailty, their sparrow-fast heads, their darting eyes, the movements of their ironic lips, all this purified in her mind until their skins became buffed and ivory smooth with so much taking out and putting away, and the Kaletskys metamorphosed into exquisite characters, like a family of little Balinese G.o.ds and exhibited a variety-show vulgarity that was, at the same time, so finely worked that the images must be wrapped-like Joseph Kaletsky's translation of Engels that Rosa had so proudly shown her-in fine layers of jeweller's tissue paper.

Her mother, it is true, saw something was amiss, but blamed Sydney for making her daughter noisy and opinionated. If she could have known that snakes would be involved she would have, of course, blamed the snake. But the snake is not a Cause but an Effect, not a Serpent but a simple snake, and if we are to be scrupulous in laying blame it is better that you know: it is the chooks that are responsible.

Soon you will find yourself with chooks all around you, s.h.i.tting, pecking, puddling in their drinking water, but before we get to that insanitary situation, perhaps I should recount my own experience of chooks-and I do not mean the difficulties, with lice, mites, fowl pox, pullorum or b.u.m-drop about which subjects Goon's otherwise taciturn cousin gave me enough information to last a lifetime. Nor do I plan to debate with you the comparative virtues of the Plymouth Rock, the Rhode Island Red, the Silkie, the White Leghorn or the Australorp, although I have always thought the White Leghorn a particularly degenerate example of the species. Nor, madam, will I sign your protest letter about the battery hens. I wish only to recount an incident that occurred in that summer of February 1931 while Leah Goldstein was hiding in her room in Malvern Road pretending to be a socialist.

I was, at that time, still dithering around Central Victoria and giving my son the deceitful impression that Sydney and his mother were 20,000 miles from Melbourne.

Now I know I told you I had given up on the motor trade, but in February 1931, just as I was coming down the steps of the Woodend Post Office, trying to keep my hat on my head and the hot wind-blown dust out of my eyes, I ran into Bert McCulloch, the local Ford dealer.

Now dealer is a tricky word: it suggests something sharp and clever, monied, propertied, something, in short, not at all like Bert who was a blacksmith by birth, a jack of all trades, a clever wheelwright, an ace welder, a plumber of rare ingenuity. He could carry a piece of hot metal between grease-black thumb and forefinger in such a way that-even though the metal had suffered half an hour beneath his welding torch-he was not burnt. His knack, he said, was partly in the protection offered by the grease but also by the feather-lightness of his touch.

Bert told me he had a Prospect out at Morrisons, a woman with silver rings on her fingers, a cert to buy an A Model. He had offended this woman in some way. She would not speak to him. Would I, he asked, take on the job? There was fifty quid in it.

Bert needed the sale as much as I did. Before I had time to think about it his wife was ushering my children out of the northerly wind and into the shelter of the earth-floored shed where Bert did his welding and where she answered the phone and did the books. I would have taken my children with me, but she stole them away, fearful I suppose of any further hindrance to the sale being made-you could see the McCullochs were having hard times too.

Next thing I knew I was sitting behind the wheel of a brand new A Model and Bert was offering me-he held it delicately between thumb and forefinger as if it were a freshly welded intake manifold-a map, hand-drawn on gasket cork, to the property of Miss Adamson of Morrisons.

Bert had a nice face, round and regular with a fringe of snow-white hair, a tanned pate, and a pair of rimless spectacles that gave him, blue singlet or no, a distinguished air. His lower teeth, however, were stained and worn away by the hot torrents of his tea drinking and when he winked and grinned at me, the face took on a c.o.c.k-eyed malicious quality: a trick of the teeth, but unsettling to a fellow so desperate for a quid and so fearful of failure at the same time.

"This'll test you, Sonny Jim."

"Why would that be?"

"She's a spinst-ah," he leered. "And a crack lick-ah."

Bert had a healthy interest in s.e.xual matters. It had been he who informed me, years before, about what ladies who are affectionate towards each other do in private, and I suppose I must conclude he was correct about Miss Adamson's s.e.xual predilections. But the interesting thing about it is that the place where the lady was supposed to put her tongue, this delicate and private matter, so occupied the minds of all Woodend that it a.s.sumed the nature of a cloak that the hot wind of gossip wrapped around the woman so tightly, so effectively that-even while they all sn.i.g.g.e.red and pointed-it obscured from view that which otherwise would have been glaringly obvious, to wit-Miss Adamson was not the full bag of marbles.

s.e.x was their obsession, but Miss Adamson's, as I soon found out, was chooks.

I did not realize straight away. I was struck, of course, by her physical appearance which was at once eccentric and aristocratic. I remember, most of all, her hands. These were not in the least aristocratic, but were large and broad and thick-fingered, as tough as farmers'. Her fingers not only showed broad, chipped, broken cuticles but three big ornate silver rings whose cla.s.sical allusions were lost in convoluted forms and black silver oxide. Her face was strong, heavily jawed, big-nosed, but very handsome. Her hair was a l.u.s.trous grey and it was cut simply in a fringe. She wore a faded grey men's work shirt and big serge trousers of a weight unsuitable to the day. She was, I suppose, about fifty.

I liked her immediately.

Of course I liked her. I had seen Bert's wife's eyes, close to panic in the way they looked at me and when she gathered my children about her I realized, suddenly, how pinched and threadbare they were. Of course I liked Miss Adamson. I was going to sell her a car. I would have loved her if I had needed to. My stomach was swollen up with air and all that hot blown summer landscape had taken on a slightly unreal focus so that the edges of the wattle leaves looked sharp enough to slice your fingers off.

She was very civil to me. She was not the type to offer scones-she confronted me at the gate in front of her shiny little cottage-but neither was she the type to send me off without a demo. She reckoned (she ordered) that we might take a spin up to the back boundary where, she knew, the fence was sure to have been broken in a recent flood. She asked me, most politely, if the A Model could ford her river and I, having inspected the crossing, a.s.sured her, even more politely, that it could. I had the feeling in the back of my neck that I have always had when a sale will be made-that creamy tingling feeling, sharp and smooth at once, calm and excited, abrasive and soothing. I did not mind the musty smell about her person or the sour mud she introduced into the vehicle. I could not keep my eyes from the tangled wealth of story suggested by those silver rings and broad strong hands.

The river was only a foot high, the rocks small. We sailed across and didn't even get our feet wet.

The trouble was that we spent too much time on her boundary which, by the by, was the most disgraceful fence I have ever seen and it was, like dirty underwear, a contradiction to her front fences, her little green-painted cottage, closed sheds, neat haystacks-here, swept out of sight behind an unusual stand of wattles and box-thorns was a fence (which may, long ago, have been tight and strained with six bright tight strands of wire you could play a tune on) which was now as sad as a half-unravelled sweater on a scarecrow-cobbled together out of bits and pieces with not a single whole piece of wire, I swear it, more than a yard long, and most of them so rusty they broke when you twisted them, and some of them no more than poor thin binding wire, and others pieces of barbed stuff so archaic you found yourself wondering about its history. The posts were no better, most of them rotted off at ground level and the general situation was so bad that it was very easy to spend an hour there, poking around looking for bits of wire to fix it with. My feelings, so far, indicated that the sale was mine. I was already eating cafe breakfasts, hotel dinners, mixed grills, steamed puddings, ordering a beer for myself and green jelly for the children.

When the fence was fixed as well as possible, we got back into the car. Miss Adamson took in her broad belt a notch and made complimentary remarks. Not a word about Chooks or Tinkers. She even praised the paintwork, insisting that there was great depth and beauty in the black. If there were no upsets the fifty quid was mine.

We returned to the crossing, pa.s.sing slowly through the high rusty stands of dock weeds and the fleshy beds of dense paspalum. We hit no hidden rock or stump.

What, an hour before, had been a pleasant little creek was now a swollen raging torrent down which broken trees rode pell-mell and beneath the rush of waters could be heard the low rumble of boulders grinding on each other like a gravel-crusher. Anyone who knows the district knows how this can happen-you have a blue-skied day but there are storms and thunder upon the mountain. I did not know this at the time, but Miss Adamson, having lived there for twenty years, must have known. In spite of which, she turned on me.

"You tinker," she said.

I had brought the car to the crossing. I was, already, disorientated. I could not understand why the creek was the way it was. It seemed impossible and I was as confused as a fellow suddenly, without warning, rolled out of a boat trying to understand his new environment.

"Madam?" I said, but I was staring at that monstrous river whose waters were puce and bruised from so much violence.

"You pesky little tinker," she said. "A tinker's trick," she roared. "But I," her eyes were hard, hostile, her mouth suddenly thin and severe, "shall not buy."

I knew she was a crack lick-ah, but it did not occur to me that she was crazy, not even when she blamed me for a flood. It is obvious enough now, now I alert you to the condition, but had you sat there with your head awash with astonishment and worry as to how you would get home to your children, knowing one had a sore throat and temperature and that the other would make himself ill with bawling, not knowing how it was-how, anyway-that a perfectly sedate creek could convert itself like this without benefit of a single cloud, and had you sat here beside me and shared my confusion, then the accusation of being a tinker, if you bothered to take it in, would be merely one more cannon shot in the chaos of battle and you would not think it madder or less reasonable than the river itself.

So, no, I did not doubt her sanity. In fact the opposite is true: she looked at me as if I were some ant, some low form of life, and she looked at me so confidently that, in spite of the fact that her trousers were two sizes too big for her, I believed her. She was musty to smell but her eyes were eyes accustomed to deciding what way the world shall be run. At that moment I abandoned any hope of the sale.

That was my disappointment, a disappointment so great I could have cried. I wanted only to be with my family. I thought of my boy who would soon be bellowing in the foreign dark. I considered fording the river on foot, but even as the thought entered my head I saw a log, as big as a battering ram, surfing down the river as if powered by its own angry engine.

I thought the business finished. But it was, alas, merely starting, for the excitement of the river seemed to have served the function of priming the engine of Miss Adamson's madness and it began (roughly, with coughs, curses, and small explosions) to ignite, and then to turn, and soon the whole mechanism was huffing and chuffing, ready to run all through the night up and down, down and up, along one track whose point of departure and point of arrival were identical: chooks.

I did not notice at the beginning. I did not notice that she was speaking about her chooks in a peculiar way. She was worried about them. That was only natural. She said Maisie had no idea how to look after them. But she was not cross with Maisie, but with me, for luring her across the river.

She pulled a notebook from her pocket and showed me her breeding plan, all little tiny boxes and arrows at angles, but still I did not think her mad, merely unfriendly. She accused me of not understanding the diagrams. She was right. She did not do this in any hysterical way, but as proof, if you like, of my inferiority, that I was a man so stupid I could not understand a chook. My ignorance was a thing I was, I have admitted it before, most sensitive about. I collapsed easily before her attack.

She may have stopped talking, but I don't remember it.

At dusk a woman with a kerosene lamp came down to the crossing and waved it about. Miss Adamson got out of the car and screamed instructions at the raging river. It was quite obvious Maisie could not hear her, but Miss Adamson shouted at the light until, at last, it went away.

It was night before I really started to understand that I was trapped with a mad woman. By then she was stretched out on the back seat, her muddy boots on the upholstery, smoking.

"We have no right," she said, lighting a cigarette (I did not ask her where she was putting the ash and b.u.t.ts). "We have no right to make them so stupid. G.o.d did not make them stupid. Men did. All we do here is repair the damage."

"What damage?" I asked, but I was thinking of the damage she was doing to Bert's upholstery.

Then she sat up. The moon was just rising. I could see her very clearly. "Does nothing stay in your head, tinker?"

She then set off up and down her one track. Half the night she huffed and puffed while I drifted in and out of nightmares.

Her opinion, as I gathered it, was that the chook should be discontented. She found their content and their stupidity to be unnatural. She gave me chooks, chapter and verse, history, breeding, the Asian jungle fowl, the works. She had some jungle fowl which, she said-and I am sure she meant nothing vulgar-would put some s.p.u.n.k into her leghorns. They were on a verge of flight, she said, of freedom, anguish, life, love. She shook me awake to make sure I understood.

I had not eaten for three days. I told her this, but it did not affect her. She would not permit me to escape my hunger with sleep.

At dawn we saw a slight middle-aged woman in a black Edwardian dress. She was standing on the other side of the much reduced river. She was compressed by severe stays. She wore high-laced boots and a netted little black hat. She was carrying a bucket and hollering and pointing, but I could not make out what she was on about.

The object of her excitement was obscured by the tall avenue of blackwoods that lined the river, and then, in the grey imperfect light I witnessed what was, I suppose, in the history of noxious weeds and feral beasts, an important moment.

I thought at first they were sulphur-crested c.o.c.katoos.

But they were not. They were white leghorns, the most stupid of chooks, rising, white and heavy into the soupy summer air.

Miss Adamson was standing beside me. "There," she said to me, her eyes no longer cold and hard, but wet and shining and full of hurt like a wronged child. "There, tinker," she said. "You see."

There they were all right: ignorance, stupidity, malice, flying free and unfettered. They circled, their overdeveloped wings working at too fast a rate for birds so big. They set off south, the least hesitant one leading, down between the river blackwoods.

These were the progenitors of the wild chooks that caused so much trouble in the Wimmera wheatfields and of the leghorns who were soon to invade Leah Goldstein's story.

20.

On her first day back in Sydney Leah went with Izzie to Bondi. The world shone with the light of picnics and Leah was delighted with everything she saw. The ordinariness of those little Bondi streets did not dismay her. She loved their mess, their cra.s.s. She liked the paspalum growing in the gra.s.s strips, the white clover with its rusty heart, the nettles poking out of chain-mail fences. A man in a cotton singlet was asleep in a kitchen chair on the footpath and around the corner came a nanny-goat, its chain rattling behind it, pursued by a woman in Sunday curlers and her husband's dressing gown.

"You mongrel," said the woman to the clever goat. "Lovely day," she said to Leah and did not even seem to see that Izzie, the source of Leah's happiness, was busy being a chook, not just any chook, but a chook belonging to Lenny and Rosa's new tenants.

Last night, on the platform at Central, he had tried to kiss her and she had found herself, involuntarily, shrinking from him. She had felt a flinch of disappointment exactly equal to the gap between her ivory-smooth idea of Izzie and Izzie himself, this little scarecrow with rag-doll sleeves, bad skin and hair (she wrinkled her nose) that badly needed washing.

But she had forgotten: Izzie was funny. And now, as he thrust out his bantam's chest and drew his hands into his flapping wings, she laughed in delight. G.o.d, what a chook he was. He clucked and chortled and scratched amongst the clover. He had feathers and a comb. He clicked along the paving stones on his pointed shoes.

"Teddy's chooks," he whispered, "do not stand on pavement cracks."

"Teddy's chooks," he leaped on to a low brick wall, "riding on the tram to Bondi."

The chook was so well behaved on the tram seat. It tucked its head in and snoozed absently. And this (it was now history) was how the tenants' chooks had travelled to Bondi after their eviction from Newtown, their right to free travel defended by three militant members of the Tramways Union, one of whom-the famous Arthur McKay-insisted on paying full fare for the rooster.

"I cannot wait," Leah said-and felt how pleased Izzie was when she took his arm-"to meet your famous chooks."

She could not have avoided them. The new tenants' chooks had taken possession like a conquering army. The front fence-never a pretty sight-was now ugly with chicken wire. The chooks scratched and pecked at the remains of the front lawn. Their droppings marked the concrete path around the side of the house and-in the ravaged back garden, between house and caravan-she walked into a scene of execution: a headless Rhode Island Red spurted its last spasms of bright red blood beneath the picnic sky and then fell, drunkenly, and lay twitching in the dust.

A man in a woollen round-necked singlet and serge trousers stood watching the bird with an air of puzzled curiosity. He had a big boozer's nose, tender with fragile capillaries, and-as he saw Izzie and tucked his lower lip beneath his upper-a manner that was at once self-effacing and sly. He pushed the dead bird with the head of his axe.

Izzie introduced Leah. Teddy called her "missus". He squatted and poked at the small fire he had lit beneath Lenny's copper cauldron. The bottom of the cauldron was streaked with black and it was full of dark steaming water.

"Hang on," Teddy said. "Got a prezzie for you." He rose and disappeared into the house and they could hear a woman's voice shouting at him in anger.

"Nice bloke," Izzie said.

"Where are Sid and Rosa?"

Izzie nodded his head towards the caravan and, seeing Leah's confusion, explained: "Teddy's got a wife and four kids."

"Oh," said Leah, looking at the dead chook and wondering how it was possible to be evicted in Jack Lang's state.

"Here ya are," Teddy said. He had returned with a chipped bowl full of hen's eggs. "Nice fresh cackleberries for your mum and dad."

As they walked the few steps to the caravan, Teddy dunked the headless chook into the cauldron and the rank smell of its steaming feathers filled Leah's nostrils.

21.

One expected discord amongst the Kaletskys, but nothing had prepared Leah for the dull air of misery she found inside that caravan on whose floor the sand of lost holidays, sand that had once stuck between Izzie's toes or clung to Rosa's brown calves, still lingered, cold, hard-edged, abrasive.

Rosa looked ill. Her face was sallow. Those lovely lines around her eyes and mouth had deepened and set into unhappy patterns, and although she embraced Leah and made a fuss of her, her eyes stayed as dull as the windows of that gloomy s.p.a.ce. They crammed in together around a tiny table, oppressed by the weight of uncomfortably placed cupboards.

Leah had returned to Sydney vowing to work hard at her studies, to give up her picnics and her dancing, but she had not been in the caravan five minutes before she found herself resolving to get Rosa out on a picnic.

"So," she said, bright as a nurse, "you have tenants, Rosa."

"I hate them," Rosa hissed. "I want my house back."

Lenny sighed and screwed his eyes shut. "If you want them to go," he said, "all you have to do is tell them." He lit a cigarette, made a face, then put it out.

"Why should I tell them? He," He," Rosa pointed a finger at her son who stared, ostentatiously, at the metal ceiling, Rosa pointed a finger at her son who stared, ostentatiously, at the metal ceiling, "he "he is the one who asked them here." is the one who asked them here."

"You have a short memory, Rosa," Izzie said. "Who offered them the house?"

"How could they live in the caravan? It is hard enough for two people."

Lenny was trying to catch Leah's eye. He was making secret fun of his wife. Leah was embarra.s.sed. She took Rosa's hand and stroked it but Rosa did not seem connected to her hand. "I am a prisoner in this nasty box," she said, but to no one in particular. "I cannot go into my garden, I have to ask them if I might please use the shower. The shower is filthy. The walls in the kitchen are covered with grease...."

"Whose grease?" said Lenny.

"It smells. I hate it."