Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 42

"Oh," he blushed and made an arc in the sand with his boot, "bit of business."

"What sort of business would that be?"

A mouse ran across the veranda and she flicked it halfheartedly with her broom. The mouse ran up the handle of a rusting shovel, along the horizontal corrugations of the wall (Charles saw it, soft as a shadow across the silver) through the window and into the house. She removed the prop from the corrugated-iron shutter so that it dropped closed with a clang.

"Mice bad?" he asked.

"Bad everywhere," she said defensively.

"I come from Jeparit today," Charles said. "They were bad up there. By Jove they were. Eat your b.u.t.tons."

"Eat your b.u.t.tons everywhere." Charles did not hear her, nor did he notice the three safety pins on the front of her floral dress. "Eat your toenails in the night," she said.

Charles was fiddling with his hearing aid, a heavy metal box that pulled his suit coat out of shape. It came on with a roar. He grimaced.

"Sorry," he said, putting his head on one side as if he might, from this angle, penetrate the shadow. "I'm a bit hard of hearing."

"Ah," she said, suddenly sorry for him. "You didn't miss nothing. Just talking about the blankety mice."

"Got a cat?"

"Got two," she said, defensive again, "but it does no good."

Charles could smell, already, although he was not yet invited on to the veranda, the sour dank smell of mice. "I got something better than a cat, missus."

"Better talk to my husband if you're selling, but he won't buy nothing. If you've got mousetraps or that sort of thing you're better off to save your legs. He's up at the forge," she said, becoming angry, again, about the gla.s.s of water she would have to offer him.

Charles trudged around the back, past the hot silver walls, around the corner of the kitchen house. He had hoped that the man was not at home. He would rather, any day, deal with a woman for there was always a soft spot to be found in the hardest of them.

He was careful not to tread on the dead, sandy vegetable patch. He threaded his way through a rusting garden of ploughshares, tines and scarifiers and made his way, without hope, towards the dark mouth of the bright-walled shed. His hearing aid crackled and he missed the sounds of a man smithing and the cries of white c.o.c.katoos, three of them, as they pa.s.sed overhead on their way to a stand of trees above a dry water-hole; their cries, coinciding with the slow powerful movement of their wings, were like big creaking doors in need of oil. Charles saw the birds but they only depressed him. He had swapped his nets for petrol.

The forge was set up at one end of the large earth-floored shed and he saw the red glowing piece of metal in the gloom before he saw the farmer himself. As he walked towards the shower of sparks he did not take in the unusual nature of the shed-the shelves packed with odd-shaped pieces of metal, the neat handwritten labels. He walked past a drill press and a lathe without wondering why a farmer would have such equipment. What he did notice was the tractor-an old T Model cleverly converted so that the heavy chain transmitted power to large metal wheels.

"Petrol," thought Snake Boy Badgery.

The farmer was one of those quick-eyed finely built men whom farming has made strong and wiry but who, in the end, are not suited to their work because they like the company of people too much. He was pleased to see the stranger standing in his shed. He did not immediately break off what he was doing-shaping a metal wheel cleat to replace the broken one on his tractor-but he finished it only roughly and when he had dunked it, sizzling, into a drum of year-old water, took off his ap.r.o.n and shook hands.

Charles was relieved to see the man's face, and not just because it grinned at him, but because it was, anyway, a friendly face, c.o.c.ked, crooked, with pale eyebrows at extreme angles and deep wrinkles in the corner of pale blue eyes. This was Les Chaffey, a man with a dictionary on his shelf, a map of the world on his wall, a habit of poking at things with a fork or a screwdriver when they interested him.

Charles liked him immediately. He liked his waistcoat with the silver watch he had won at the rifle club. He liked the three different pens and the propelling pencil he carried in the pocket of his collarless shirt. But mostly he liked the way he c.o.c.ked his head and listened carefully to what Charles had to say.

"Is that a fact?" he said when Charles, in an untidy rush of words, had told him about the snakes, i.e., that they were not poisonous and that they ate mice. "And that's your line of business, is it?"

Charles said that it was. His price was a gallon of petrol, a meal and a place to sleep. As he named the price he feared it was too high but, when Les Chaffey shook his hand to confirm the deal being done, he was sorry he had asked so little. Charles's eyes betrayed him by suddenly watering. He hid his emotions in the dark pockets of the shed.

As they walked back to the house a wind sprang up and the farmer tried not to think about his drifting paddocks, a hard thing to do when they are stinging you on the back of the neck. He took refuge in fancies about the young visitor's black eye, wondered if it had happened in a farm or a pub and whose daughter had been involved. There was something about the Snake Boy that made him confident a daughter had been involved. He got it wrong. What he was seeing was a need for affection that could have been best satisfied by a big woman with an ap.r.o.n and floury hands. But Les Chaffey saw the oily remains of pimples on his neck and big chin and thought he secreted an odour of s.e.xual need as obvious and all-pervasive as the smell of the mice who covered, in their teeming breeding millions, the land from Jeparit to the South Australian border and this parallel brought him back to the very things he wished to forget-drought and mice, mice and overdrafts.

The shops in Jeparit, even the butcher's, smelt of mice, and in the grocer's you could see where they had eaten the paper around the lids of the Brockoff's biscuit tins and pushed the hinged lids open. At the railway sidings they ate the wheat bags from the bottom until the bags collapsed in on themselves, worthless, empty, a year's work inside the guts of mice. There were mice jokes and those who had children-both of his were at the Gordon Tech in Geelong-made little chariots from matchboxes and raced the diseased creatures in teams of four and six.

It was the mice that had brought Charles so far from Sydney, riding a motorbike he had never intended to buy. He had read about the plague in the Sydney papers, but he had not been prepared for the extent of it, the fearless armies of squeaking creatures, the stink you could never escape, the red sores they spread on the children's arms and faces.

No one had money to buy snakes and he had no talent to persuade them to change their minds. So he found himself broke and lonely in unfriendly towns, swapping the services of his pythons for a meal and a little petrol, knowing that tomorrow the snakes would be as sated as gluttons on Boxing Day and that if he wished to eat at all he would have to perform the Snake Trick. And it was the Snake Trick that had resulted in the black eye-his amateurish deception had been exposed in Dan Murphy's Commercial Hotel in Jeparit.

The Chaffeys' home was hot as an oven and smelt of mice and sweat but Charles was thankful to be invited inside and be formally introduced to Mrs Chaffey.

Mrs Chaffey was small and faded; however her worn pale eyes were still capable of transmitting signals of sharp alarm and warm affection on behalf of the husband called "Dad". She showed both of these emotions in the dark kitchen house as she listened to her husband explain the snake boy's business. She allowed herself to be persuaded to touch one; it was not the pythons that alarmed her, but rather the quant.i.ty of enthusiasm they might generate.

Mrs Chaffey recognized enthusiasm as something vital in her husband's life, but she also knew it must be measured most precisely, like one of those potions (so beloved of quacks) that are vital in a small dose, and lethal in a larger one. When she had finished a.s.sessing the snakes she gave them back to their owner. Then she offered him a gla.s.s of water and cut extra potatoes for the Irish stew.

3.

It is difficult to give the flavour of my son's life at this stage, and although he would later romance about it, claim that he had been a scholar of boarding houses and a citizen of the highway, that he had friends from Moe to Minyip, his grown-up eyes would still show the truth to anyone who cared to look at them: he had pa.s.sed along those roads a total nonent.i.ty, had felt himself a no one, worse than a no one: shy, ugly, nervous of grown men, anxious when confronting boys his own age, a blushing fool with cafe waitresses, an easy target for teasing children.

Yet he also harboured an idea of himself that contradicted all of this: that he was someone special, someone who would one day do great things not just for himself, but for his country. And these contradictions, the triangular tensions between his shyness, arrogance, and hunger for affection, made him a difficult person to get to know, made him belligerent when nervous, a stammerer when confident, weepy when approved of, brash when he would be better off being quiet.

He was hampered further by his deafness which sometimes made him imagine slights where none had been intended.

These things were quite enough to make him a poor salesman, but he suffered a further handicap-he was so eager to tell the truth that he could never simplify. I have seen in him my own dizzy desire to throw all one's being at a friend's feet, to show the tangle, the contradictions, the good and the bad, and say-there I am. I did it myself one evening with Jack McGrath. I have done it on other occasions, but with Charles the truth was an obsession. I don't know where it came from, but it made him a poor salesman. And this is not, as you may have imagined Professor, because a salesman is required to lie. It is because the truth, told thus, is of no interest to the average punter.

And even with someone like Les Chaffey, it seldom brings a benefit.

Chaffey was interested in every word my son had to say. He sat him in his big gloomy dining room before the sun was down and put a big plate of stew in front of him. There was gristle on the meat and fat floating in the gravy, but Charles was so hungry that both his head and his belly ached. He picked up his yellow bone-handled knife and his verdigrised fork without waiting to hear if the Chaffeys said grace or not. Then Mrs Chaffey gave him a napkin so he put his knife and fork down and spread the linen on his lap.

It was then Les Chaffey asked him where the pythons came from.

Now if Charles had been able to forget an isolated pocket in Papua and a reported sighting in the Gulf, he could have answered this question in four words and got a potato into his mouth before the next question arrived. But he was not capable of such deceit and there was, anyway, such interest in the faces of both host and hostess, that he wished to present them with everything, not only about the snakes, but in the way that he himself, in the daily course of his life, had collected the information. So he not only mentioned the isolated pocket in Papua and the sighting in the Gulf which, he had to confess it, he had not read about himself but had been told by a man who he had met in a cafe in Ararat, a schoolteacher, a Mr Gibson, originally from Moe, who was not a teacher of natural science but of English but who read science as a hobby.

I am abbreviating. For every road Charles took he came to a fork that had to be noted if not explored. He covered many points, including the origin of his suit and the explanation of the oil stain on the cuff, before he revealed that Mr Gibson had told him that the sighting in the Gulf was not the python in question-there had certainly been no scale count-but another python or rather a snake commonly called a python, but in fact not a python at all.

His host and hostess were mopping up their gravy with big lumps of snowy baker-shop bread and Charles was still trying to get the first lump of spud into his mouth but he had not, even though he had abandoned Mr Gibson, been able to complete his answer.

He sat talking, his elbows resting on the checked oilskin table, while his pythons ate their fill, lazily doubling their bodyweight; they oozed their way through holes in the hessian wall-lining and lay plump and lumpy amidst the dry black seaweed insulation Les Chaffey had brought all the way from Geelong. Charles watched a skin form on the top of his stew. He spoke faster and faster. He was grateful for his host's kind attention and, at the same time, although he knew it was wrong of him to feel it, he was angry and resentful that they would not let him eat.

And yet he might have eaten in the end for his answer, although it seemed, as it uncoiled itself, to be never-ending, eventually began to taper and, finally, showed the divided subcaudal scales of the very tip of the tail itself. He should have had time for a quick mouthful before his host's next query, and would have, had he not noticed the aforementioned person leaning forward and staring unashamedly at his black eye. He was, as I have already said, ashamed of the story behind his injury but if he were asked a direct question about it he would have no choice but to tell the truth in all its humiliating detail.

The sun had now gone and kerosene lamps had appeared in the course of Charles's answer. They cast a deep blue shadow and it was the quest for this soft hiding place that made him push his chair back and turn his head in such an awkward way. Once he had his eye tucked safely out of sight, there was nothing the Chaffeys could do to persuade him to eat. He patted his stomach and declared himself satisfied. He could have cried with disappointment.

"Did you," Les Chaffey said, helping himself to his guest's uneaten food, "have a barney?"

Charles stared at his host, transfixed.

"A blue?"

He had a headache, and his neck hurt too.

"A stoush?" Les Chaffey suggested, leaning across his laden plate with knife and fork poised, his eyebrows skew-whiff in antic.i.p.ation.

Charles shrugged miserably.

And then, as Marjorie Chaffey watched in the soot-curtained lamplight, something occurred that she would remember for a long time but never be able to do justice to in words except to say: "What a lovely smile."

But this is an inadequate description of such a miraculous thing. The smile that Les and Marjorie Chaffey received from their guest was a request not to persist with the question and a generous reward for not doing it. But it was also much more than this and his Messianic grandfather, had he possessed such a gift, would have had all Victoria queuing up to buy his cannon.

That night Les Chaffey would dream of chopping wood, splitting open an ironbark log and discovering a red rose, miraculously untouched, within its hollow core.

4.

Les Chaffey was a man who could not see a loose thread in a pullover without pulling at it, or spy a horse without trying to pat it. If he met an Italian he would want to hear the Italian language spoken and then have many common English words translated ("Now then, what would be the Italian word for 'generator'?"). If he ate a stew he wanted to know how it was cooked and what went into it. This behaviour gave him a name as a sticky-beak and a gossip. It made no difference that he had also invented several ploughs and a device for grubbing Mallee country or that people had journeyed all the way from Melbourne to inspect them. This gave him the additional reputation, not totally undeserved, of being dangerous.

He had a gramophone and several Tommy Dorsey records. He sat in the hot dining room or on the veranda with shirt sleeves rolled up, his waistcoat unb.u.t.toned, his white ankles showing above his slippers, his head c.o.c.ked on one side, listening like a dog to an inexplicable sound. He did not give the impression of a man listening for pleasure, but one wishing to make sense of a complex language.

Les Chaffey had left school on the day he turned fourteen and he had always regretted it. But he had come to believe that if he asked enough people enough things he would end up with an education regardless. He had, therefore, trained himself to ask questions.

So as his wife stacked up the dinner plates, Les smiled at his guest and combed his wavy fair hair, not from vanity, but in the style of a good mechanic who wishes everything in order before a machine is stripped down. He removed the odd hairs from his comb and dropped them fastidiously on to the floor.

A mouse, running for its life, slipped and fell from the rafters, upset the sugar bowl and scampered off the table.

Les Chaffey sat, smiling, in the lamplight.

Charles shifted in his seat. He had the feeling something was about to start and he did not know what it was. They were waiting, it would appear, for Mrs Chaffey to return from the kitchen.

She hurried in, shuffling softly in her slippers, and sc.r.a.ped her chair and folded her hands in her lap.

"What would you make," Les Chaffey began, tucking his comb neatly into his shirt pocket, "in your line of work, in an average week?"

Charles was wondering if they might give him an aspirin or a slice of bread, but he decided to deal with the question first. But when he had answered, it was quickly replaced by another.

What was his experience with the red-bellied black snake? How did it differ from the blue-bellied variety? What was his mother before she was a Badgery? Would they be any relation to the Minyip McGraths? What does your father do? What do you reckon about Mo McCaughey? Who do you vote for? What's your opinion of General Franco?

Charles answered this last question carefully, but when he discovered his host was both a nationalist and a socialist he told him the truth: that he had been on the brink of going to fight against "that mongrel Franco" when he had been waylaid.

Les, of course, was interested. He herded the spilled grains of sugar with the edge of his hand and when he had them into a little pile he swept them into the sugar bowl. Then he placed the sugar bowl on the shelf behind his head.

"Now," he said, "how did it happen?"

Charles was thinking about the Harrises' house at Horsham-they had served him six lamb chops for breakfast and cut a lunch for him to take when he left. They had put sweet gherkins on his cheese sandwiches and he had thrown them away because he did not like gherkins. Now he regretted it. He could, for instance, have taken the gherkins off the sandwiches. He could even have washed the gherkin taste off the cheese. He had been a mug. He would never throw away good food ever again. Even if he could not have got rid of the gherkin taste from the cheese he could, at least, have kept the bottom slice of bread which the gherkin had never touched.

"You were on the boat?" Les Chaffey suggested.

"No, I never saw the boat."

"He had the ticket," suggested Mrs Chaffey. It was the first time she had spoken, but Charles liked the way she leaned towards him as she spoke.

"I had the money for the ticket to get to London."

"Right," said Les. "You had the do-re-mi. You had it in your pocket."

"In my money belt."

"In your money belt, right you are. Then what happened?"

The shutters were all propped wide open and Charles could hear the cry of a solitary owl, Mo-poke, Mo-poke Mo-poke, Mo-poke. He was about to ask for a slice of bread and then he looked up, the question on his lips, and he saw how keenly Mrs Chaffey was listening. He decided to tell the story first.

5.

He had, in the beginning, no intention of going to Spain at all. He had been going to Sydney, to find his mother. As the train swung and swayed in between the dingy backyards of Sydney he felt that his life was about to begin. He imagined his mother would live in a house similar to the ones he saw by the railway line and this did not dismay him at all, quite the contrary. He was expecting warm embraces and hot tears, soft beds, big dinners; the noise of the trains pa.s.sing his window could only increase his happiness.

He had brought his last two, his best two, rabbit skins to give her. She could make them into a hat or a stole. They were hard on one side and soft on the other and when you bent them, they made a crinkly noise. They were his best-quality skins and he took them out of his bluey on the last leg up from Liverpool. He showed them to the sailor.

"They're for my mum," he said. "I haven't seen her since I was a little nipper."

The sailor advised him to find his mother whatever effort it took. He himself had grown up in an orphanage. He offered to help, but Charles said he already had a friend who was helping him. When the sailor learned the friend was a female he showed Charles a French letter in a paper envelope. It was stamped "air-tested" and he insisted on Charles taking it.

Leah Goldstein was not expecting him. If she had seen him in the street it is doubtful if she would have recognized him, for he had grown large and the dress he now adopted was of his own choosing-a combination of cast-offs from munic.i.p.al tips and certain flash items for which he had paid too much money. Thus he wore a big checked jacket with bright blue and gold squares which had been refashioned from a man's dressing gown, a pair of heavy hobnailed work boots which, judging from the number of eyelets, might have been thirty years old, and a big white Texan hat bought by mail order from Smith's Weekly Smith's Weekly. He carried a rolled bluey, but not across his shoulders. He had made a leather handle to buckle on to its straps so that he could carry the bluey at his side, like a suitcase. He did not wish to be thought a swagman.

Leah Goldstein would not have recognized him in the street, but she could do it-did do it-before she turned on the porch light and saw him standing there still holding his tram ticket in his hand. The smell of tea-tree oil came to her, blown on the westerly wind, and the austere set of her face was already softening and her lips were forming the shape of his name before she reached the light switch.

For a moment she feared he would, like a new puppy, burst through the flywire. But he contained himself and in a second, with the flimsy screen door still intact, he was crushing her to him and she was laughing out loud. She was pleased to see him, more pleased than she would have imagined, but just the same she had to shush his croaking voice, his joyful shouts, because there was a meeting in progress inside and she-the minute book was in her hand-was secretary. She put her finger to her lips and said he could come in and listen, that they would not (she pulled a face) be too much longer.

In the little room, sitting on the floor, on broken chairs, on the bed, were a number of men and women who would be, or already were, famous as artists and writers. They were meeting to organize an exhibition to raise money to send Australians to fight against General Franco and when Charles entered they smiled at him in a good-natured way and went back to their business. Charles blushed bright red and sat in a corner against the wall.

There was a fierce argument proceeding about whether there could be any such thing as proletarian art. Charles was surprised to see that Leah, whom he remembered most for her strong opinions, took no part in this. Neither did she write down anything that was said. She sat beside and a little behind Izzie's wheelchair and, twice, smiled at Charles. No one seemed to take any notice of Izzie's mutilation and Charles was shocked that he did not take the trouble to throw a rug across those trousered stumps.

Charles felt self-conscious and ill at ease. He understood almost nothing about the room or the situation. He could not see why a man should wear a fur hat or a woman have green stockings. He did not understand the abstract print on the wall or even the language that they spoke. He listened to Izzie Kaletsky pouring scorn on the possibility of proletarian art but he could not understand what he was talking about.

And yet he had trapped rabbits and sold birds. He had been fencing in Western New South Wales. He could trap rosellas with no other bait than a cup of water. The total of his savings was a hundred and five pounds six shillings and twopence. This was more, he thought, than most of these people were worth. They had no right to make him feel so stupid. He sought a way to move the ground to something that would be more favourable to him. He was not so ambitious as to attempt to make the Pica.s.so print disappear or the problems of proletarian art vanish, and yet this is precisely what he succeeded in doing-he opened his swag and took out his snake, a little green and yellow tree snake, startlingly beautiful and very active, which he had bought that afternoon in Campbell Street.

He sat in the corner, casting secret smiles at Leah and soon the meeting was finished because everyone was looking at the snake and no one could concentrate on what anyone else was saying.

It was not long before he was telling them about his work with the fencing contractor and his experience with snakes out west. He was, after all, a Badgery.