Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 32

28.

The committee of the NSW branch of the Communist Party were, with a single exception, decent men and women. They were embarra.s.sed that they could not yet produce evidence to back up their charges, but they had no doubt that the evidence existed. They been advised of its existence by none other than the Comintern.

To understand the effect of this upon them, you must realize that they often imagined that the Comintern had forgotten that the Party ever existed in Australia. Certainly it was not in the habit of displaying an interest in individual comrades. So when they were advised that the Australian I. Kaletsky had indulged in activities against the revolution, they not only believed it, but were sure that the activities must be particularly serious.

It was a misunderstanding and it came to play an important part in Izzie's life, to be, for months, the the business of his life. And in this he was supported by his mother. business of his life. And in this he was supported by his mother.

"Fight them," she said. "If you accept it, you will always be sorry. What have you done? What have you said? Don't shake your head. There is always something."

He became like a fellow who has been sold an unsatisfactory Vauxhall who will stand in front of the town hall with his whole sad story written on a blackboard. He attacked, b.u.t.tonholed, angered and confused any comrade who would listen to him. There was a stage, in August 1931, when the CPA headquarters in Suss.e.x Street had its door locked for weeks on end and it was necessary to knock out a code to gain entrance. This was not as a precaution against fascists or Australian Intelligence but against Izzie Kaletsky who would not give up.

He wrote letters to the Tribune Tribune which were never published and to the Comintern which were opened by Intelligence and copied by hand before they were sent on their slow way by ship across the world. which were never published and to the Comintern which were opened by Intelligence and copied by hand before they were sent on their slow way by ship across the world.

Izzie changed that year, like a man who has been tortured and who, walking down the street amidst his fellows, shows no crude scars or telling limp-merely a weariness in his smile which sometimes gave the impression that his lip had curled.

He tried to live off the money Leah sent him. But just the same, when de Groot cut the ribbon on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Izzie and Lenny were there selling bright balloons.

"Buy a balloon," Leah's husband said, "buy a balloon."

29.

Both Leah Goldstein and my son seemed to have interpreted my disappearing as a clever stunt which might be useful. They did not tremble on the edge of an abyss, or question the substantiality of matter. Leah began to sew spangles on my suit and Charles tried, belligerently, to disappear in cla.s.s before the incredulous eyes of Mr Barry Edwards and twenty-eight children who suddenly erupted into wild hooting and cat-calling when Charles Badgery stood in such a queer way.

Mr Barry Edwards giggled, even while he strapped my son's winter-white legs.

The red weals of pain were still there later as my son continued his obsessive game with his sister, near the camp. He tugged at his odd socks (one bright blue, the other overchecked with brown diamonds) but the socks would not stay up. They fell, and revealed the marks of Mr Edwards's handiwork.

"I need garters," he announced.

"What are garters?"

"Hold your socks up."

My son is stubborn. He has always been stubborn. If the milky poison-that curdling creamy stuff in the whisky bottle that the actress procured in Carlton-could not budge him from his mother's womb, then neither could Barry Edwards's strap change his mind. He decided on garters, firstly to hide his marks from me, to stop me discovering that he had been playing the game he was forbidden; but also because it seemed to him-quite suddenly, but very clearly-that they were the ingredient he lacked. As a grown man he would have the same att.i.tude towards electronic equipment, hi-fi, ham radio, things in black boxes with dainty b.u.t.tons, glowing dials, esoteric wiring diagrams and languages of their own, as if these products and their a.s.sociated rituals would somehow bring about the changes he wanted in his life.

It was getting dark and the air was dank like a stone church with a defective damp course. The crows mourned above the darkening waters of Crab Apple Creek and Charles slashed at the tall column of a blackwood wattle with a heavy stick.

He was thinking about garters, about how perfect it would be to have his socks held neatly on his chubby calves. His sister watched him. She wanted to know about garters and how they worked. He stopped to explain it to her, with a solemnity that made the simple gadgets fittingly mysterious. He pulled up his socks again and folded them over an inch from the top.

"When you do that," he said, "it hides the garters."

Sonia knew he was mistaken about the garters, but she could not tell him. Unlike Charles, who saw new opportunities for escape, revenge, triumph and-most of all-making money, Sonia knew that this was not a trick. Her child's fingers had silently questioned my skin, hugged my heavy thigh, or held the fob watch that had disappeared with me, looking inquiringly at its coded face.

"If you disappear," she asked her garter-worshipping brother, "where do you go?"

"Nowhere," Charles said, hitting the tree. "You're just invisible."

Goon Tse Ying's dragon was not a great scaly monster that any fool could see. It was a tiny thing, a thread, a slippery worm. It had entered my daughter without me even glimpsing it. It slunk into her viscera and lodged there.

"You go to heaven," she whispered, "and see Jesus."

"Bullswack."

"You can't do it." can't do it."

"I can. I can. If you help me, please, Sonny."

"No."

"Pur-leeese." Charles put his big arm around his sister; it was a wooden hug carved from Mallee root, the big head grotesquely askew, pleading gracelessly. "You take the stick," he said, putting it across her pleated lap and folding her little hands around it. "And you run at me, and say Ching Chong Chinaman."

"I won't."

"And hit me," Charles said, "hard."

"No," she said, and moved away from the stick which dropped to the ground.

"What do you pray?" asked ingratiating Charles.

Sonia said nothing.

"I need garters," Charles said firmly, and with that settled strode on ahead of his sister, leaving her to hurry through the last light towards the little hessian humpy I had made for Leah Goldstein who was now busy sewing spangles on to my best suit coat and arguing with me about the write-up I had got for her in the paper.

"It's all lies, Mr Badgery," she said, threading one more spangle on to her relentless needle. "I have never been to Gay Paree, as you call it. I will not dance with a death adder, not in any circ.u.mstances. And it says nothing about you and your act which you were so desperate to impress me with."

I watched the spangles unhappily and saw that I had not, as I believed I had, delivered value to her. It was a first-cla.s.s write-up in anybody's language.

I tried to explain the nature of publicity to her. She listened to me patiently enough. I explained how I had been written up in papers everywhere and that a good editor expected a little exaggeration-the colours strengthened, so to speak. And it was my understanding of this that had allowed me to get a page-one write-up for her when she had been unable to get any. No one at the paper had ever heard of Mervyn Sullivan but everyone in Bendigo would now know about Leah Leonda, as I had called her.

"Well," she said, holding up the suit coat critically to the kerosene light. "I don't want to have a barney with you, Mr Badgery. You've been very kind. But if I can't do a show honestly I don't want to do a show at all. It's a good show. It's not like some old-fashioned aeroplane that you're ashamed of, no offence. I don't need to tell lies. We did ten shows in Myrniong. We got everybody in town, and some of them twice. And now we've got your act, Mr Badgery, which is really breathtaking. I think you underestimate the effect of your own act."

The aim of the write-up had been to make my so-called act unnecessary, but she was too flinty-faced to tell the truth to. I opened my mouth. I was prepared to begin a truthful sentence and not worry where I ended up, but my son barged through the doorway, demanding garters.

I told him there would be no garters but Leah, sitting on the bed I had made for her (hessian stretched across two wattle poles) had already produced some black elastic from her small cane sewing box.

Charles did not dare look at me. His lower lip went all plump, like a cherub, and he went and sat beside Leah while Sonia came and squatted beside me, hugging my calf and questioning my shoelaces.

30.

Charles oiled the snakes as he was instructed and took them, one at a time, so they might attend to matters of toilet. The snake is a neat creature, and most fastidious about where it drops its s.h.i.t. My son took them to a gra.s.sy patch and waited while they extruded their firm dark pellets. From time to time he adjusted his socks and examined the curious red patterns the garters made on his legs.

Sonia washed our dishes in the creek and managed not to break anything. She rubbed the greasy plates with river sand while Leah cleaned her single gramophone record with petrol and soft cloth. She did various exercises and displayed the emu feathers to the sunshine.

And I put on my spangled suit coat and was much admired.

The magpies chortled merrily, their feathers clean, and I was like one of those ageing farmers, Gus Housey comes to mind, who get behind the wheel of a motor car for the first time and know, before they do a thing, that they will crash. They hold the wheel rigidly. They stare ahead defiantly. They release the clutch with the jerk of someone who must get a nasty business done with. They give off the smell of men who are victims of their own excessive pride and now must pay the price. Their eyes seek out fences or trees and you cannot triumph over them in any wrestle for the wheel.

"There is population in this town," Leah told me, "and there is money, and we are not leaving until we have shown them what we can do."

Antic.i.p.ating disaster, I persuaded my partner to let me negotiate a suitable venue for our premiere.

31.

I have heard people describe Bendigo as a country town. They mention it in the same breath as Shepparton or Ararat. These people have never been to Bendigo and don't know what they're talking about. The Town Hall is the equal of anything in Florence; the Law Courts would not look frumpish in Versailles. And if there are farmers in the streets, dark cafes with three courses for two and sixpence and, in Hayes Street, a Co-op dedicated to Norfield Wire Strainers and Cattle Drench, it does not alter the fact that Bendigo is a town of the Gold Age. If cattle are driven through the streets on the way to the ammoniacal sale-yards it does not make the streets less grand, does not diminish their width by as much as half a chain, and even the bellowing cattle must see, if not understand, the great white fountain near the Kerang turn-off that promised (and promises still, for all I know) a return to days when men would once again build solicitors' offices like wedding cakes and put towers on hotels and art schools alike. One could ignore, as I had chosen to, as the townspeople tried to, the men with cardboard tied to the bottom of their shoes who shuffled through the town with billycans clanking and sugar bags tied across their bent shoulders.

There was no shortage of good venues for a variety act. For instance, there was a great big place near the Town Hall (gone now) that had a great circular upstairs gallery, electrically operated curtains, and a bank of lights which the caretaker, a newsagent and cricket fanatic named Perry Thoma.s.sen, was at great pains to show me, but not before he had demonstrated the correct wrist action for a googly and told me that he had been on the wireless, in a sporting quiz, in Melbourne. He was a lanky stooped fellow and too clumsy to be trusted with a cricket bat, let alone the fifty-foot ladder he mounted to demonstrate the spots, dimmer and floods. He got his pigeon toes tangled in the rungs and dropped pennies from his pockets while he recited the names of the men who made Australia the greatest sporting nation in the world. So keen was he to establish his case that he added Dame Nellie Melba and Mo McCaughey to his list, the point being (I think) that both of them had performed in this very hall. He was promising to show me Mo's braces (left behind in a dressing room in amusing circ.u.mstances) when I slipped quietly out into the street. I had no intention of making an idiot of myself in such a central location. Instead I booked the little wooden Mechanics' Inst.i.tute in a laneway behind the back entrance to the Catholic Seminary. I got the place for two bob but had to sign a piece of paper saying I would not hold a political meeting.

I had to tell lies, of course, to explain this miserable location to Leah, but she was naive about halls at this stage of her career, never having had to hire one herself.

So there I was, at seven o'clock of a rainy night, shivering before the fly-spotted mirror while spiders kept on at their business on the bare tin roof above my head.

Leah made tea and talked to me softly about stage fright, but it was not stage fright that was the point at all: if the business in hand had been juggling or card tricks, I would have been in my element. I would have enjoyed those spangles and thought them my right for they provided an aura no less dazzling than the one that surrounded me when I walked down Ryrie Street in Geelong with my dreams intact and a Shaftesbury Patented Umbrella in my hand.

32.

Charles marched before the gaping entrance, squeaking back and forth on his brand-new boots, clicking on steel toecaps, clacking at the heels, his garters itchy-tight around his wounded calves, his short tweed trousers rubbing at the knee, his jacket b.u.t.toned tight below his jutting chin, his hair parted with a knife edge and held flat with shining oil, his b.u.t.ton eyes afire with dragon light.

Before him he held a jam tin. He jangled it-prouder than a blackboard monitor-jiggled the eleven separate shillings up and down and was pleased (triumphant) that the audience contained his hateful teacher and giggling strapper, Mr Barry Edwards Esq. who was known to grown-ups, it seemed, as 'A-plus-B'.

So Charles marched before that door waiting for his revenge or, at least, his vindication. His bald-headed father would soon arrange himself in the style that Barry Edwards had mocked, had compared to both standard lamp and ballerina.

The walls and ceiling of the little hall were lined with tongue-and-groove boards that had been, mistakenly, coated with kalsomine. Along each wall some well-intentioned person had placed coloured light globes (blue, yellow, green) at six-foot intervals, just below the empty picture rail.

In this evil light the eleven paying customers, all great supporters of Douglas Credit, all from the one bar of the Shamrock Hotel, hawked and spat and conversed in echoing voices about the banner for the Eaglehawk Bowling Club which, having been left behind five years before, now billowed in the draughts above the proscenium arch.

Sonia stood on a chair in a kitchen, her hand already on the heavy bra.s.s switch that would soon plunge the hall into darkness while her father transported himself, she had no doubts, into the arms of Jesus Christ Himself. She took her hand from the switch and pressed it against her arm, nervously a.s.suring herself of her own solidity.

Leah had wrapped herself in a moth-eaten red robe which covered her emu feathers in a lumpy sort of fashion. She shivered. She rubbed her legs. It was not cold. She jumped up and down and declared that she was petrified, that she hated this life, that she would vomit any moment. A huge flake of silver paint detached itself from her shoe and revealed a bright red slash, like a wound.

"Please, Mr Badgery," she said. "Don't let me down." And went on stage, before I had a chance to make an escape. I sat hunched on my chair. I saw the back of her cloak disappear around the corner of the tea urn, and then she was on stage, making a very formal speech. Her voice was a tight-stretched mirror of anxiety as she publicly confessed the lies I had persuaded the newspaper to print. This unexpected piece of entertainment fell, shivering, in spooky silence: there were to be no death adders, no Gay Paree. They shuffled their boots. Charles clicked his money together apprehensively.

"But," the snake-dancer said (Charles' boots creaked), "I am one h.e.l.l of a dancer."

There was applause.

"And I will dance with venomous snakes. I will dance with two red-bellied black snakes and also a python big enough to choke a grown man. But if this is not enough, you can have your money back now."

Charles held his jam tin very still, but he need not have worried: no one wanted their money back. Someone wanted a drink. Someone else wanted to see Leah's legs. They were in a good mood and did not complain about the leaking roof.

"But," Leah said, and her voice was suddenly sleek, groomed on the oil of their approbation. "But," she said, "there is more." She was so confident about my act I could not bear to listen to her. I plugged my ears and sucked in my breath. I stood up. Sonia smiled at me. She jumped down from her chair and kissed me on the hand, then jumped again to stand guard beside that dreadful switch which was to put me in the centre of attention.

Leah finished singing my praises. The applause was strong and riveted with whistles. I began my walk towards the stage. On the steps: Leah, pink, glowing. She patted my bald head and I got a laugh as I stumbled (missing floorboard) on to the dusty stage.

And there I stood.

I stood there for a long time without doing anything. Neither did the audience. We regarded each other. I blinked and peered miserably into the gloom.

Charles creaked at the back of the hall and it was for him that I arranged myself in the position for summoning dragons, the foot on knee, the stretched hand, etc. It was, I stress, merely the position, nothing more, as harmless as an unarmed grenade.

"Badgery," roared Barry Edwards in the dark. I peered out at him. "I swear it must be a Badgery."

The hall t.i.ttered. Charles's boots creaked in antic.i.p.ation of a delicious revenge. His dragon stretched itself.

"Ha ha," said A-plus-B, "Two ballerinas, two lampstands. Not one, but two."

"Shut up, A-plus-B," a woman hissed. "We come for his show, not yours."

"Sorry, Kathleen," said brown-voiced Edwards. "A million pardons but I thought you come for the beer."

This was considered funny. They laughed for a while and when they had finished I was still standing there. I shut my eyes.

"G.o.d help us, he's gone to sleep."

I opened them.

"He's awake," they shrilled, "he's awake."

There was a rush of feathers and I received a clip across the head and a push in the back. I fell, heavily. A four-letter word escaped but was stamped to death by the hooting, squealing audience. There was an emu dancing over me. It lifted its net-stockinged legs high. It stamped on my hands and on my legs. I retreated, crawling, but did not escape the final indignity-a simulated peck on my dusty backside.

"Get off," the emu hissed, putting on the gramophone with its beak.

"Get off," the mob echoed joyfully, for no matter what faults the Bendigo Mechanics' Inst.i.tute may have had, bad accoustics could not be numbered amongst them.