Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 33

"Oh G.o.d," roared A-plus-B, "G.o.d save me, this is wonderful."

Charles opened his mouth in pain.

My son gripped his hands together and was given coiled visions of revenge no less luminous than Sonia's angelic hosts who fluttered in her mind's eyes, as disturbed as pigeons who find their coop door boarded shut.

I crawled off the stage and left the show to Leah Goldstein. My daughter came down off her chair and held my hand, but I did not want the shy sympathy of children, not that my son offered any. He would not even look at me. He put his precious jam tin on the kitchen sink and sat on the stairs where he could adore Leah without obstruction.

The Emu Dance was a great success. When the emu chick hatched they applauded the cleverness (Charles also, noisily). When she did the Veil Dance even the woman whistled her (Charles stamped). The tap was a triumph and when she returned for the great finale, the Snake Dance, the hall was as quiet and vibrant as a shiver.

My bleeding hands curled into fists and I could have punched the dancer on her little parrot's nose. I was far too jealous to watch her, and thus missed the moment when it started to go wrong. Perhaps, as I have seen her do, she held a clutch of a.s.sorted snakes in her hands and let them drop on to her head. It was called the Shower of Snakes. In any case, she attempted too much for the credulity of the big-voiced woman who a.s.serted, loudly, that the serpents had obviously been defanged, their poison sacs removed and that fraud was being openly committed on stage. This was not, in itself, what stopped the show and Leah did not, as she often did later, make a simple speech about the technical difficulties of either defanging or removing poison sacs. She could explain the operation required with scientific precision and point out the adverse affect on the health and happiness of the snake. What did stop the show was A-plus-B's footnote to the charge of fraud and this was made sotto voce sotto voce, beneath his hand, under his beard. I did not hear the complete sentence, but heard him say "three by two" which is, in case you did not know it, rhyming slang.

The arm of the gramophone dredged a painful channel across "The Blue Danube" and left a repeating click which was to accompany Leah's dancing for many months to come.

Leah, shivering in a harem suit, decked in gauze and goose-pimples, stood with hands on her hips, her head thrust forwards, trembling. She ordered the lights turned on and singled out the man with the large black beard who seemed not the least perturbed by becoming the focus of attention. He folded his hands complacently in his lap and chewed his large moustache.

"I heard you," said Leah Goldstein, "and I heard your name."

"What if you did?" said the big-voiced woman now revealed to be quite tiny, weathered and shrunken like an old iris bulb. She had a fox-stole round her shoulders and a large fur hat jammed over her head. "What diff does it make what he said? The point is, Jew or no Jew, their sacs are gone." She nudged her bearded companion with her sharp elbow. "Jew or no Jew," she said to A-plus-B, "what's the diff?"

There were dragons breeding in that hall: they cloaked their activities in the smell of stale orange peel and leaking gas, and Leah, getting a whiff of it, felt her guts knot hard.

"There is no 'diff 'diff, Kathleen," said the ironic pedagogue, "until she starts to make money under false pretences. Then," he smiled at the shivering dancer, "it means everything. Here we have, in Bendigo, a perfect ill.u.s.tration of the world financial crisis. You, madam," he told Leah Goldstein, "are a cartoon."

"Your name is A-plus-B," said Leah.

"Correct weight," said the woman. "What's his birthday?"

"Shut up, Kath," said an equally weathered man in grey overalls who was sitting at the back of the hall. "You've had a fair innings."

"They call you A-plus-B because you believe in Douglas Credit. It's a fraud," said Leah Goldstein, launching into a five-minute attack on the whole system of Douglas Credit, the history of which she briefly provided, with special emphasis on its derivation from Social Credit from which system it had excluded all radical and humanitarian aspects. Further, she implied, Douglas Credit was a breeding ground for fascists, Jew-haters, and worse, the central algebraic proof of its feasibility (in which A-plus-B plays a central role) was a trick, a fraud more serious than anything to do with snakes and poison sacs. "You can't even add up," she said, in conclusion.

"Spoken like a Jew," said A-plus-B. "Always adding up," he said, "and subtracting."

"Substracting," hollered fur-hatted Kathleen. "Very good."

"Shut up, Kath," said the man in grey overalls. "You're p.i.s.sed."

"Subtraction," said A-plus-B, "as in cheating."

"Address yourself to the question," shrieked Leah.

"Shut up, Kath," said the man up the back, and fell off his chair.

"I'm a Jew all right," said Leah. She summoned Charles to her side (the first time he ever walked the boards). She whispered in his bright red ear. He returned with the jam tin of money. Leah took the tin and emptied all eleven shillings into the canvas snake bag. Then she took the two remaining black snakes, who had remained gently entwined around their mistress's warm body during the entire argument, and lowered them with their fellows. "I'm a Jew all right. I don't take money from fascists." She was having trouble speaking and I, who minutes before had wanted to punch her on her lovely nose, felt nothing but admiration for her courage. She, who could be so lithe and sensuous, stood in her harem suit, skinny, trembling, small-breasted, no longer in control of the shape of her normally austere lower lip.

Barry Edwards, previously fl.u.s.tered by a philosophically literate snake-dancer, could now smile confidently. He was blessed with a bully's subtle sensitivity-he was taking his cues from her voice. He was not thinking about the snakes which were now being carried towards him by Charles Badgery who felt then, that night, the shiver of power of a snake-handler. He would feel it all his life, but never so intensely, so exquisitely, as now, as his warty hand goes into the bag, glides sweetly past the sleeping python, in amongst the black-snake coils, smelling like a friend. The grubby little hand finds a shilling and holds it up to A-plus-B.

His garters itch, a pleasant feeling, providing the sweet antic.i.p.ation of a gentle scratch.

Barry Edwards's hands reach out, greedy for the shilling, are nearly there, the nicotine-stained pincers, when Charles (you little b.a.s.t.a.r.d!) drops the shilling back into the sack.

How sweet my little son looked on that night. How angelic was his smile as he looked at his teacher's thoughtful face.

No one else would put their hand into the sack. Charles was enjoying himself, could have prolonged his little pantomime for minutes, hours; but Leah screamed at him to give the man his shilling; which he did. People sc.r.a.ped their chairs across the floor and gathered coats. They swarmed, moved erratically towards the door and back to where Barry Edwards remained stubbornly in his chair.

So Charles began to lay his pretty snakes at Barry Edwards's feet. He held the little black snake and showed its oil-glistening red belly and its smooth little head. He let it crawl around his neck and then he placed it on the floor like a child playing with a moulded-lead toy car. He pointed it carefully towards Edwards's odd scuffed shoes and watched as the aforesaid shoes moved themselves, one after the other, towards the door.

Imagine the Mechanics' Inst.i.tute as a box of yellow wood with cold sickly light globes like a necklace around its picture rail. Arranged at random, pointing this way and that: some wooden chairs. In their midst: a jut-jawed child in short pants, playing with a red-bellied black snake, cooing to it on the floor.

33.

We were magicians that night. We made futures and summoned up pasts. We sent up flares loaded with words that spewed like broken gla.s.s across the sky, and I knew the dancer so little I imagined this normal.

It was, my G.o.d, like Halley's Comet-for Leah to loosen her tongue and talk for the pleasure of it (lolly-paper talk) fifteen different factors must all coincide and I will list just eight of them.

1. A dancer's walk.

2. Danger overcome.

3. McWilliams Autumn Brown Sherry or equivalent.

4. Her correspondence fully up to date.

5. No uncertainties threatening, i.e., no camp to shift, or new hall to hire.

6. Puddles dry and mud absent.

7. No sickness in camp.

8. Her mood itchy, but not scratchy.

The style of discourse she favoured when these conditions were satisfied was totally unrelated to her normal approach which was as functional as a hacksaw. You could hardly call it flowery but it did leave room for sentimentality and whimsy and was fuelled by both optimism and remorse.

So when she summonsed up Izzie I swear I saw him stand before me on the skirts of shadow round the fire, his big eyes wet with hurt, his pointy toes kicking moodily at a fat fleshy thistle whose obstinate root would not leave the soil.

He was the Good Man.

There were, as yet, no shades of grey in Leah's mental menagerie, and Mervyn Sullivan was summonsed up to be the Evil Man. She could not bring herself to say exactly what she meant, but made herself so clear that I could feel I was lying in bed with him too, looking at his false watery mask while his p.r.i.c.k gave odd vibrations to my perfect hatred and I grew b.r.e.a.s.t.s to press against his broad hair-matted chest and sharp nails to dig into his b.u.t.tocks. She had Good and Evil, Strength and Weakness, had them paired and opposed in such a tangle that I grew giddy following her.

I paraded Jack and Molly, and displayed the Parrot Poem. I listened, light-headed, while she demolished Phoebe before my eyes, pulled her to pieces like a cheap celluloid doll, flung her arms into the blackberries and her hair into the fire.

"She made the cage," I was informed. "She was a spoiled brat."

The smoke from the fire was pleasantly intoxicating. I hastened to find a few favourable things to present in favour of my missing wife. I made a few fast lies, jerry-built things with bright colours and badly fitting lids. I talked aeroplanes and motor cars, all the Australian products that had begun so brightly. When I talked about these failures, Leah told me later, they sounded like little swallows that had fallen from their nests and died.

She showed me her father's suit, Wysbraum's red lips and broad b.u.m, the white scalp beneath Rosa's hair, and that splendid canvas, that huge complicated composition of moulded grey forms that Marx made, which she at once admired but could not bring herself to enter.

I was not quite so frank. I was (as Leah said later) "secretive". I made no confessions of electric belts although the battery hung heavily on my leg; nor did I talk of ghosts and snakes.

"I did not like you, Mr Badgery," Leah said, beneath the vast star-powdered sky, "until you did your act."

"I did not like you, Miss Goldstein, until you finished yours."

"G.o.d, you were funny, Mr Badgery." She snapped a gum twig happily and threw it on the fire. "You should have seen yourself."

I made a mud map in the dark.

She said: "I thought you were a spiv, excuse me; but when I saw you on the stage I changed my mind."

I asked her why, and for once she was not interested in teasing the greasy hairs of reality apart to find The Truth.

"I dunno," she said. "I did. Excuse me, I can't see your face. Come and sit over here."

I went and sat beside her on the log. She grinned at me in the dark. "I was nearly a doctor," she said.

"Fair d.i.n.k.u.m?"

"d.i.n.ky-die. Pa.s.s the bottle. I'm very partial to this stuff. It's not good for you. Nothing's good for you, nothing nice," getting down to the core of her problem. "How old are you, Mr Badgery?"

"Forty," I lied.

"I'm twenty-four," she lied.

And yes, I know I promised there would be no hanky-panky, but that was a lie as well.

"I'm partial to a number of things," she whispered, on the log, by the camp fire, at Crab Apple Creek.

"I'm a bit partial myself," I said.

"I'm very partial," she said, "but for G.o.d's sake, be careful."

34.

Dear Izzie, she wrote, I love you and miss you. I have done it, again, and I detest myself. There is no point in my lying about it. I must tell you and you must forgive me if you can. I have also said things about you to strangers which I should not have said and did not mean. You are the only man I ever cared about or respected. You believe what I believe. You stand for what I stand for. You are brave and good and I send you letters that cause you pain.

I dreamed about you two nights ago. You were in an odd black suit with belled cuffs and you were weeping. When I tried to comfort you, you did not know who I was and I woke up crying myself.

Anyway, here is a money order. It is less than it should be because I wasted four shillings on wine. Izzie, one day we will be like ordinary people. We will have a house and a baby with big black eyes and Rosa and Lenny will play with it. I am frightened of everything. Everything seems dark and ignorant. I try to read the Gramsci but am so tired. My mind is rusted and full of rubbish. Please be careful. I am sending you a map of the camp site as usual so if your work calls you this way, you could find me. DO NOT MAKE A SPECIAL TRIP DO NOT MAKE A SPECIAL TRIP. It is only in case you are doing Party work in the area. Will be in Bendigo some days yet I imagine.

Your loving wife, Leah

35.

The flesh of the morning was pink and tasted of mud like a rainbow trout, and I was the Prince of the Bedroom, the King of Liars. The urge to build was on me already and I looked at the world through imaginary windows and possible doorways. Leah snored in her palace and I hardly saw my children, although I must have dressed them, inspected their shoes, their socks, their nails, parted Charles's hair and retied the ribbons on Sonia's plaits.

I remember nothing of driving them to school. I was under the illusion that it was my day; it was really my son's. On this day, the 23rd September 1931, he added the final card to his hand and climbed a giant eucalypt and carried down a yellow-tailed black c.o.c.katoo. Expressed thus, it sounds easy. But this is not your sulphur-crested c.o.c.katoo, often caught, usually caged, taught to speak Pet's Lingo. This is the giant c.o.c.katoo sometimes called funereal, and if you have ever watched these monsters ripping branches to pieces, seen them screeching at the top of river casuarinas, or seen, at close range, their odd faces (more like a devil's koala than a bird) then you would know, without being told, this is not an easy bird to catch or tame.

He did not choose it. He was driven to it by Barry Edwards's sarcastic comments when the birds were observed above the schoolyard. Badgery was good with animals, he said, and would bring them down a c.o.c.katoo.

My son had warts and smelly breath, but he was not a fool. He knew there was no choice but to up the ante in this game with his teacher. Having driven him out with snakes he would shame him with a c.o.c.katoo.

The c.o.c.katoo, therefore, was a means, not an end, an instrument of revenge, a card in a game, but yet, when Charles was finally eighty feet above the ground, wrapping his useful bandy legs around the rough-barked eucalypt, edging carefully out towards his goal, he had forgotten what it was an instrument for; he began to coo.

He swung in the high branches above the schoolyard where Sonia stood, with all the school-it was now recess-whispering eccentric self-taught prayers to Sweet Jesus Meek and Mine.

The headmaster was yelling at Mr Edwards and Mr Edwards was biting his moustache and trying to get the headmaster to yell at him in private but the headmaster ordered Miss Watkins to ring the fire brigade and then he could not wait, and-he was a young man-tried to climb the tree himself but tore his Fletcher Jones trousers and showed his bottom and Miss Watkins took the girls to practise a.s.sembly drill in front of the shelter shed.

The fuss in the playground hardly intruded on Charles's consciousness, for he was blessed with very particular powers of concentration. The commotion below merely warmed him as he moved closer to communion with the dark brown eye with its delicate pink surround. My son had a great store of affection he could not give to people properly; he just didn't have the knack. He could not hug his little sister without awkwardness, but when he confronted this steel-beaked bird his affection issued from him readily, like a net, a finely knotted gauze which the bird felt and stayed still to accept. As he took the bird it emitted a small noise, not the loud raucous noise of a yellow-tailed black c.o.c.katoo, but a small grizzle, like a new puppy will give, as it surrendered itself to the webs of Charles's affection.

Charles descended, to applause, down the ladders of the Bendigo Volunteer Fire Brigade and into the anxious care of Barry Edwards who gave him no trouble-quite the opposite-from that day. In cla.s.s that afternoon he sat with the c.o.c.katoo who, having entered an alien universe, was ministered to as a royal guest, was brought gifts of hakea pods and pine cones, was permitted to screech and s.h.i.t, and was thus given the illusion that it was a G.o.d, being waited on by superst.i.tious savages.

36.

I was in an excellent mood. I called in at the tip and found good roof guttering awaiting me. On my way back to camp I nicked twenty foot of fencing wire from the bottom string of a squatter's fence. I never bought a nail in my life and I never understood why anyone would bother when there are millions of miles of fencing wire available to do the job. Eight gauge is best. Cut it square one end, angle it at the other, and there's your nail.

I drove back to the camp constructing towers with pretty windows.

I parked the Dodge and noticed Leah was boiling something up in a four-gallon drum. She did not look up to greet me and, imagining she was washing her female particulars, I did not intrude. Instead I busied myself with the guttering and the fencing wire. When Leah spoke she was right behind me. She made me jump.

"One," she said, "I was drunk. Two, it won't happen again. Three, I don't love you."

I covered my confusion by dropping the rest of the guttering on the ground.

"Did you hear me?" she asked.