Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 52

I told the Parole Board I was off to write a book; I was lying. What I really had in mind was no more complicated than drawing my pension, getting visiting rights to the Kaletskys, and effecting a reconciliation with my son. This last was a difficult matter. I wrote to him once, a short note I admit it, to say I was sorry for belting him across the ear. He never wrote back, and although Goldstein explained that it was due to excess of emotion-too many thoughts and feelings for his stubby HB pencil to control-I was angry just the same.

But d.a.m.n it, I had a weakness for grand buildings and I liked the sound of his shop. It was not merely a building with a tower. It was was a tower. Goldstein, of course, had not informed me about the situation on the fourth floor. I did not know I had a grandson named Hissao or that his mother lived in a cage. I did not even know that the whole edifice depended on the Americans' enthusiasm for Australian birds and reptiles. I will tell you the truth-it would not have put me off my plan to get myself put up there. a tower. Goldstein, of course, had not informed me about the situation on the fourth floor. I did not know I had a grandson named Hissao or that his mother lived in a cage. I did not even know that the whole edifice depended on the Americans' enthusiasm for Australian birds and reptiles. I will tell you the truth-it would not have put me off my plan to get myself put up there.

Various women have threatened me with the prospect of a lonely old age. They have said it in the desire to frighten me and they have said it again when they've seen how it has worked on me.

So I admit it-I spent my ten years in Rankin Downs with one real aim, i.e., that I would end up with a place in this rotten lonely world. I invested an entire decade so that I would not end my life hiding amongst dead cabbages in the Eastern Markets. It was monomania, I admit it, but not overly ambitious. I did not seek wealth or even fame, merely a fire to sit in front of, a friend to trust, some company for the summer afternoons which are the loneliest time in a city of beaches.

I did not escape, although it would have been easy enough. It was not the type of dangerous thing M. V. Anderson would attempt. Neither, being a tea drinker, would he have an interest in a still, or kicking a football end to end inside the wire-walled enclosure. There was no adequate company there for M. V. Anderson. He was happier inside his books, resting his monstrous lower lip against the tip of his index finger. He was a person made for a sole purpose, to fit a very particular niche in life. He was no good for selling a car or anything practical, just this one purpose that I spent my ten years perfecting.

It was an eccentric jerky clock that marked those years, like one of the faulty mechanisms that drag their heavy hands upwards and then, whoosh, drop them down. Slow, yes, very slow-ten years were an eternity. But fast too-it took hardly a second.

And then, on the very eve of my release, I received a letter from Leah Goldstein. I suppose the letter was written as something joyful, i.e., that she, now, had done her time too, that she was free, available, without children, without Rosa, was unenc.u.mbered by french windows or orange trees.

Lucky man, you say, to be so old and frail and yet, at the same time, to inspire such devotion. Bulls.h.i.t, Professor. You think I squander ten years of my life on a fancy. Ten years, and there she is slaughtering children, diminishing a husband, burying a friend, rolling up a carpet, pulling down the wallpaper I had arranged myself to harmonize with. Lucky man. To become an asthmatic tea drinker, for nothing.

Suddenly I could not even remember what she looked like. I could remember nothing but how she came into my camp so long ago, criticizing me, eating my food without being asked. She took an extra piece of Bungaree trout. Four slices, she ate, and did not even beg your pardon. Four slices. I was shaking all over. I could not keep my hand still. It was not nerves, not one of those weak-tea emotions I had been refining through sixteen filters. No, this was rage of a type M. V. Anderson could not even imagine, the poor sissy. I could feel bubbles coursing through my blood and the skin around my finger joints stretched tight. I was Herbert Badgery and I was a nasty b.a.s.t.a.r.d, no doubt about it, and I traded my wireless-I had been taking it as a present-for a blade.

You would expect me to remember my exit from Rankin Downs, to remember that long jarring journey over wet-season gravel. I cannot remember a thing. I have been planning to tell you a story about those yabbies (they were as big as beer bottles) but there is no time now, and I cannot remember whether we saw any on the road out or not, or even who the "we" might be.

I remember the train when it came into the siding and the shock and disappointment when I saw how filthy it was. The seats inside were green. I was expecting brown, but they turned out green. They were sticky with jam and spilt ice-creams. I had the knife strapped on my leg with an old tie. I had the Vegemite bottle in my pocket-you shoud have felt it-hot enough to burn you-I had it wrapped up in handkerchiefs. It was full of dragons but I did not look at it. I sat on the edge of an unpleasant seat and waited. Oh Christ that train was slow. It creaked and whined and shunted itself back and forth before it began to creak dismally towards Grafton. No one could tell me how long it would take to reach Sydney.

I walked up and down the train for a while then. Do not mistake this for a celebration of freedom. I was not admiring the lovely scenery or the pretty faces of the pa.s.sengers. I was battling with spasms of anger that came on me when I thought how skilfully she had lied to me EVERY DAY FOR TEN YEARS EVERY DAY FOR TEN YEARS and I knew why she had never had the courage to visit because and I knew why she had never had the courage to visit because she could not look me in the eyes she could not look me in the eyes.

In one of the carriages I came across two fellows playing knuckles, young fellows with old eyes.

I invited myself to join the game. I still spoke droll and wheezy like Anderson but G.o.d I was fast. My frailty seemed to fall away like dandruff. I smashed my fist down on one knuckle and then the next until they were sore and blue and they asked to be let off.

It calmed me for a moment.

The bigger one told me he had travelled round Queensland playing knuckles, with his mate as a tout. He said the Spags there would bet on anything. He showed me his roll and reckoned he couldn't spend it as fast as he made it. I told him I was just out of the slammer and he gave me twenty quid. That was a lot of money in 1949-a doctor's salary for a week-and I wrote down his mother's address so I could return the money to him but I lost it and never did.

Did I tell you I was on my way to kill Goldstein? I did not form the words, but there was only one conclusion to my journey. For ten years I had suffered the exquisite pain of her letters, the mixture of jealousy and happiness, all those razor cuts, for nothing. I had bound my feet. I had cut off my b.a.l.l.s.

I had made myself into an intellectual, for nothing.

The train journey took twelve hours. It arrived at Central. I got a taxi to Bondi. New-model cars were all around me. That is what I noticed most. They gave me the feeling of riding through a dream. The weather was warm, overcast, threatening thunder. I had the money to pay for my ride, but I jumped out at the lights at the esplanade just to spite the b.a.s.t.a.r.d. The driver was up and after me. Jesus, I ran. I left asthmatic M. V. Anderson at the first corner. I was over a fence and across a rusty-roofed chook-shed, on to another chook-shed, down into a lane, up the stairs of a block of flats with steel-framed windows. My back hurt, my leg hurt but I didn't care. Everything I did was on the premise that I was an old man who would soon die and I will tell you I savoured the rasp of my breath, like a rat-tail file in my oesophagus. I was Herbert Badgery, alive.

I waited in the block of flats for a while and then I went off to find the Kaletskys' number. I have no recollection of the house itself. All I remember is the crumbling concrete path, the tall rank weeds, and the leadlight in the peeling front door. I broke the leadlight with my shoe and let myself in. There were stacks of newspapers around the walls.

The house sucked. It was a sour, dank, rotten place. You could smell it was unhappy and no little children had run along that wide corridor for a long long time.

In the front room, I found an old man sitting by the fire although, outside, as I mentioned, it was a summer day with big bruised anvil-headed clouds, the sky full of cold holes and giddy updraughts. I came into the centre of the room, holding my blade. It was a villainous thing, the best the youngsters at Rankin Downs could produce, made from car-number-plate metal and strong enough to saw its way into a rib cage.

This faded old fart with silver hair looked at me. He was sitting on an upholstered cushion of that type that is called, I believe, a pouffe. He leaned over and picked up the poker.

He put the poker between his teeth. I watched him. He looked at me and bent the poker into a U.

Then he spat out the blood and broken teeth into his lap.

35.

I robbed Lennie Kaletsky of five quid, just to throw him off the scent. Then I wandered down to Bondi Post Office and applied for the pension. I gave my address c/o Southern Cross Hotel.

I was nervous of approaching my son, not because I thought Goldstein would be in his care, but because I now suspected the pet shop itself might be a lie, that no such glorious thing existed, or that if it did it would reveal itself to be a grimy little hole with widdling guinea-pigs in sour straw.

I paid cash money for my second taxi. I checked into the Southern Cross Hotel. First I tried to sleep, but after I had lain on my lumpy mattress for an hour I got up and went to the barber's for a shave. Then I began to approach the pet shop. I pretended to myself I was not doing it. I window-shopped up Pitt Street, looking out of the corner of my eye, scuttling sideways like a crab.

I saw the word BADGERY BADGERY first, high on the pediment of the building. I felt ill, as if the thing might evaporate. My back pained me and my teeth set up a throb, my body protesting about whether it was to be frail or no, and would I please make up my mind. first, high on the pediment of the building. I felt ill, as if the thing might evaporate. My back pained me and my teeth set up a throb, my body protesting about whether it was to be frail or no, and would I please make up my mind.

I cross Pitt Street, threading my way between the queues of trams, not furtively, not like a murderer, not quite like a gentleman. I am non-committal in my movements.

I approach the shop, looking down at the footpath. Outside there is a crowd of fellows, all arguing about some motor car. I excuse myself and they make room for me so I can stare up at the building.

Of course it thrills me: BADGERY BADGERY, as bold as bra.s.s, in Pitt Street. Badgery Pet Emporium. It is better than she described. This window is thirty feet long and is set out with a design of pretty flowers. I make out the map of Australia. There are some words, but I am more taken by the little rock-wallabies which hop to and fro across this pretty scene and one of them, in particular, eating an apple, holding it daintily between its two front paws.

The men go on with their argument about the car and I get out of their way. I cannot know that the wallaby will die of influenza in Beverly Hills and I am, of course, proud of my boy. I begin to remember things more fondly than I am used to-the day he brought the yellow-tailed c.o.c.katoo down from the tree at Bendigo School, how Izzie had his finger bitten, and how Charles sold the bird when we ran out of petrol in Albury.

I enter the shop. Do I suddenly look like a Narrabri c.o.c.ky on his first day in Sydney? Well, why not. Look at those galleries, those beautiful birds behind shining white wire, the glistening snakes coiled beneath spotless gla.s.s, that huge skylight, just as Goldstein described it to me, and now, as I watch, two white-overalled men work with buckets and water, cleaning off the week's supply of pigeon s.h.i.t against a background of delicate stratoc.u.mulus.

The galleries are crowded. Ascending the stairs it is necessary to be polite, to allow two nuns to come down, to wait for three clattering boys with high voices and heavy boots.

I lean, at last, over the rail of the first gallery and look down. The cashier sits at a high desk in the middle of the floor, but he is deep in a book. I watch for some time. The cashier continues to turn the pages indolently, and yet the shop is obviously prosperous. The shop attendants are everywhere. They wear red-peaked caps and d.i.c.ky little yellow jackets. They squat beside a cage here, gesture like a fisherman there, close eyes to dredge up information from the cellars of their memories. These are not salesmen. They are enthusiasts.

I am too delighted to dwell on anything in particular. I wander from exhibit to exhibit. I find the famous regent bower-bird which is trained to dig sapphires. It takes its blue stones from a pile of sawdust and places them, one by one, on an apothecary's scales. In the next cage I put two bob in a slot and see two apricot-coloured budgies tap an illuminated b.u.t.ton. They get some seed. I get a drink coaster printed with the legend "Best Pet Shop in the World".

I slip this into my pocket. I walk up the last flight of stairs to the door marked "Private". And there, for a moment, with the door not properly locked, I hesitate. For this is the part I most care to see, to meet the affectionate wife I have read so much about, to play with my grandchildren, to be offered scones and the comfy chair. I am a coward in the face of that door. I thrust my hands in my pocket to make them still, and I am still vacillating when two youths come tearing out the door, their faces bright with embarra.s.sment, and go thumping down the stairs past me. On the floor below they suddenly burst into ugly laughter.

I funk it, and turn, not knowing the woman I have come to damage is not five feet from me, quietly knitting. I do not meet Mr Lo, puffing from his exertions, nor Emma Badgery, the real cause of the upset boys I have just witnessed, who is adjusting her dress and retiring to a corner, a well-fed spider retiring to the centre of its web.

36.

Emma knew it was wrong. She knew she would go to h.e.l.l for the things that she did. It was not right to love your husband more than your children, or to spend your afternoons in a cage or to tease him so much that he banged his head against the floor like a defeated wrestler in a Pitt Street newsreel. She was steeped in wrong, soaked in it-it was probably wrong, it felt wrong, to eat mangoes the way she did, to suck the wide flat fibrous stone and have juice running down your arms, to have it well up in sticky pools between your fingers, and who, in her father's house, would have even imagined a fruit like a mango? It would have made him angry, her dearest daddy; he would have hit her bare legs with a razor strop. What a giddy temper he would have had at the suggestion of such a fabulous and filthy fruit.

And it was wrong, she did not need to be reminded, to make those two boys go running giggling down the stairs. She had heard them come through the "Private" door. She had seen them long before they had seen her, the minute they put their spotty noses inside and sniffed the musty odours of her home. Their upper lips were smudged with adolescent hair. She had watched them lift the mist nets and heard them croaking to each other. She had been in her slip and bra and she did nothing to make herself more decent. Leah was nearby, but was busy working and did not notice. Mr Lo was asleep. Emma pretended the boys were not there and she had opened her compact and dusted a little more blusher on her cheek. She heard them see her-the sucked-in breath, the whispered conference-and from the corner of her eye, as she checked her smooth reflection in her mirror, she waited to see what they would do.

But they were only boys, and easily frightened. When she turned to look at them, they fled, hooting and hollering down the stairs.

Once she had looked up and seen a policeman. He had watched her, smiling at her quietly, from the other side of the bars. Then she had become all milky and languid and had drawn on her lipstick, pouting her lips proudly towards that little mirror she owned then, and had let the clean biting line of neat teeth show underneath that firm silk-hard flesh that glistened like the innards of a freshly cut heart, bright, almost iridescent, slippery, muscled, secret.

He was not the only one of her uninvited visitors who gave her that sweet calm smile of recognition, merely the first. He had sat and smiled at her, she knew, because he knew she was like him and he like her. This kindred feeling was so soothing that her whole soul became as cool and limpid as tank water.

But to listen to most of the people who saw her, those all-but-burglars, you would think that her presence in a cage had affected some vital thing in their innards. She could not, ever, predict what it was they were going to do when they saw her, but the reactions were nearly always violent or loud or crude or angry-and she knew it was sinful to sit safely inside her cage and enjoy it, but she did anyway.

She preened herself. She had become vain and was not even ashamed of it. Once she had been a young girl and worn short socks and sensible skirts, but now she arranged her powder and her lipsticks and her rouges, mascaras, eye-liners, her emollients, astringents, foundation creams, moisturizing creams, her egg creams, her enamels, her nail-polish removers, emery boards, nail files and other aids to femininity.

And although her cage was directly opposite you as you walked on to the fourth level-so that you had only to come to the rail in front of you and look across-there was such a tangle of objects, such a confusion of lines or rope, netting, electrical cable, string, so many shapes you could not immediately understand, so many fascinating perspectives of the emporium below and the sky above, that you did not immediately notice the woman in the cage, or the child that was so often with her. In fact you were more likely to notice the lattice structure-it was very pretty and was often lit from within-that was next door to her. This was a cube measuring about ten feet in every way and you would not immediately describe it as a cage at all. It was far too pretty. It was a place for ferns and creepers and there were, indeed, some terracotta pots whose dried dead vegetation suggested that it was intended to have plants growing over it. Charles had given this to Emma in 1944, for Christmas. She had thanked him of course, and given him warm kisses, but she had not been so simple as to be tricked into living in it. And this, as it turned out, was just as well, because when Leah Goldstein arrived to live, one tear-stained afternoon, there was immediately a suitable place to put her.

There was another cage on the left as you entered from the stairway, and this one was often noticed first, and it was certainly a far more splendid structure than that rusty tin-floored affair that Emma had crawled into to remind her husband of his obligations. This latest cage was also a present from Charles. It was strong enough to hold a polar bear, but its ironwork was beautiful. There were pink Venetian blinds, a little day bed, and a fluffy rug on the floor. Originally, too, there had been bottles of Coty and Max Factor on a gla.s.s shelf, but Emma could not be induced to move.

Neither, of course, would she live in the flat itself-and this is more easily understandable because it was a small and dark and poorly ventilated area on the Pitt Street end of the fourth gallery. Charles slept there. Emma often cooked there. But the family's real home was in and around the cage where its most determined member lived, out on the gallery floor itself. This fourth gallery was more like a storehouse, a warehouse, a garden shed with spiders and old yellowing newspapers, which were dry and unpleasant to touch. It provided a marked contrast to the hygienic emporium below where the shining white-enamelled cages were so regularly wiped clean that, first thing in the morning when the staff arrived, there was a distinct change of air, as if the wind had changed its quarter and was now blowing off the sea, and then the emporium was all awash with bleaches and antiseptics, and although that might be all very comforting for some, Emma preferred the chaos of that big rectangular doughnut of private territory, the fourth gallery, where she lived amidst old mist nets, broken-down refrigerators, children's toys, mouldering laundry, lost sandwiches and those abandoned tricycles which had once raced round and round, but could no longer-Charles had stacked other cages, plainer, smaller, rusty birdcages, in such a manner that they blocked the children's favourite racetrack.

It was a madhouse, so he said.

When he was angry he said that they were all demented, himself included, and that their children would grow up to be insane, capable of theft and suicide. He called her a slattern and a s.l.u.t and madwoman and then she would go cold as ice and she could do that trick with her eyes so they went blind and hard as steel ball-bearings and it frightened him and he thought she would never love him again. Then he would come to her in the night, begging as if she were a queen in satin and silk, a queen in a cage, and then she would spurn him.

Oh, what a game they had, what a sweet lovely perversion it was. You could feel the rage. You could feel the whole building, the actual building, shimmering with it until it was a violin filled with parrots, fluttering, panicked in their cages, and the fish in terror, swimming round and round in their bubbling tanks and some timid possum, illegally trapped, in the boss's office, lying mute with fear while its heart, no more than half an inch across, drove itself into a red and dangerous frenzy.

It was wrong, of course it was. She did not need to be told. She thought up the most disgusting things, G.o.d strike her. She took his big bull's pizzle in her mouth and made him weep and moan and once she dreamed she had decorated it with lipstick and rouge and smoothed depilatory cream on his hairy sac. She read the women's magazines but it seemed that they would not address themselves to what a woman's life might really be.

And dear Jesus, how he had tried to get her out of that cage. He thought he wanted her to be like "normal" people, but he did not really. Who would want to be normal after this? They would die of boredom, and besides, she had grown to love the cage when it was quiet and calm, and she would lie in there on the long sweet sunny afternoons and listen to the goanna drag its handbag belly across the dark wooden boards and lie beneath its ultraviolet light and when the late afternoon began to turn to early evening it would come right to her door, like a cat at feeding time, and she would open the box the staff brought to her and feed it "pinkies," those baby rats they bought for the reptiles.

Hissao would help her sometimes. Henry and George were not at home with pinkies or goannas. They would hide themselves away at the far end amongst the wire netting and make themselves tunnels and cages and hide in case-they never told her but she knew-in case a schoolfriend came and saw them. But Hissao was never ashamed. He was different from the beginning. They both liked it in the cage. Leah Goldstein said it was not good for Hissao to see his mother in the cage all the time. She did not say it sternly, but gently, as a womanly friend, while she brushed her hair. So Emma tried, she really did, to play outside with him for a certain portion of the day, but he also liked the cage.

It was the inner sanctum in which they were both, mother and son, loved and cared for, protected from the world, and they felt themselves to be circled by so many loving defences, walls, moats and drawbridges that it was a shock, sometimes, to look up and see the skylight was thin, so brittle, so fragile a barrier between their comfort and the cold of a storm.

So when uninvited guests found her and became angry with her for being in a cage, Emma truly believed that they were jealous.

Indeed, in just eight hours' time from my hesitation on the stairway, she was to offer me, as a mark of special favour, a cage of my own. This, I am pleased to say, was already taken by Mr Lo, and I must, in all politeness, ask you to bear with me, juddering, sh.e.l.l-shocked in the doorway, give me time to take a breather while I tell you a little about Mr Lo and how he found himself in such an odd accommodation.

37.

One day, and not too many days before my own arrival-more than a month but less than a year-Leah Goldstein returned from shopping, her string bag heavy with potatoes with which she planned to make a lovely cake, and found a gentleman sitting in the cage with the pink venetian blinds. He was twenty-two years old, a professional man, and was very nicely turned out in a grey double-breasted suit. He had a golden heart-shaped face and dark, sunken, unhappy eyes. He was Mr Henry Lo, marine architect, illegal immigrant.

Leah turned left as she came, puffing slightly, through the door, and there he was. Mr Lo smiled. Leah smiled. Mr Lo held out his business card. Leah placed the heavy string bag on the floor, very carefully and slowly in case a potato should tumble out and roll with the natural fall of the floor, and drop four storeys by which time it would be a lethal weapon falling at 200 miles per hour and capable of breaking the cranium and lodging itself, pulped and soggy behind the eyes-Charles had told her this, even shown her the mathematics of the fall, kindly provided by a staff member-and so, even though Leah was interested to read the new arrival's card, she was particularly careful with the potatoes, washed King Edwards from Dorrigo, picked early from loose red soil, and so round and easily rolled.

When she had the potatoes as stable as was likely, she placed her feet on either side of them, smiled apologetically at the young man in the cage, and read the card carefully.

Emma was wearing her pearls and her New Look suit. She was out of the cage and playing dutifully with her youngest son over on the southern gallery, racing a heavy lead motor car up and down and fighting for possession of it without taking the slightest trouble to protect her expensive nylons.

Leah offered Mr Lo his card back, but he insisted-he held up his soft pale palm to indicate his meaning-that she keep it. Leah and Mr Lo then bobbed at each other and Leah picked up her dangerous potatoes and squeezed her way past the rusty birdcages and made her way round to Emma's side. She squatted, not only because she was tired, but because she wished to speak to her friend in confidence.

"Who's that?" asked Leah Goldstein.

"That's Mr Lo." Emma gave Hissao the car and found herself a wooden truck to crash into it with. "There," she told the pretty rouge-cheeked boy, "now you're dead."

"Not dead," Hissao said. He started running around the gallery but stopped when he saw the adults were more interested in whispering than chasing.

"Why is he there?" Leah Goldstein hissed and Hissao came back to listen. He snuggled in against his mother, picking at the soft cotton of her dress, rubbing it against his cheek and smudging it, although no one realized.

"He wants to stay," Emma said. "He wants a job, so I gave him one."

"Gave him what?"

"I gave him a job," said Emma and, although she did not smile, there was something happening with her face, as subtle as her perfume.

"Emma!"

Emma pouted but she was not unhappy. She was almost never unhappy. Soon Leah would be going away, as soon as Charles's daddy came to get her, and she would miss her, miss the custard and rich soups, the games of canasta, the long companionable silences, but she would not be unhappy.

"Dear Leah," she said. She was about to fetch some perfume to dab on her friend's wrists when she heard her husband's great big feet-she saw them in her mind's eye, those punched brown brogues, size eleven, on the worn stair treads-they were coming this way. She could hear Charles and cranky Van Kraligan shouting at each other about the budgie factory. Van Kraligan's voice came up over the gallery-he was working below-but Charles was already up the stairs to the fourth level.

"Balt," Van Kraligan said. "I am not a b.l.o.o.d.y Balt. Balt is from Baltic. I am not Baltic. Fix it," he yelled, "fix it your b.l.o.o.d.y self, mate."

Charles strode through the door. He had shed his wartime camouflage and emerged with tailor's st.i.tching on his gaberdine lapels. His suits were pressed each day by the American Pressers in Angel Place. He came through the stairs like a wealthy man, turned right rather than left, and thus missed the melancholy but hopeful Mr Lo standing at attention inside the cage Charles had commissioned from Spikey Dawson.

Charles walked-twenty-eight years old and still lifting his feet too high-round to the west side, as far as the door to the kitchen, and then he leaned over the railing so he could shout at Van Kraligan on the gallery below. Don't worry what he said-it was all to do with his ignorance about geography-but rather that Mr Lo heard the tone of voice and did not need to look for a gold watch to know that this hairy giant was definitely the boss.

He therefore readied himself, exposing his cuffs the correct amount and placing a white handkerchief in his breast pocket. When Charles had finished with Van Kraligan, Mr Lo gave a cough, very small, and very polite, which Charles did not hear-he noticed, instead, Emma and Leah staring in the direction of the cage.

When Mr Lo saw that he had the boss's attention, he proceeded to show him what he could do.

38.

He did not mind if she was mad-he would look after her, just as he had looked after Leah when she arrived, with one thin summer dress crammed in her handbag; just as he gave money to his mother and provided for his children. He got great pleasure from providing. It was a miracle that he could do it. He, Charles Badgery (who did not know what order the letters of the alphabet went in, who was ugly, awkward, shy, deaf, bandy), could provide.

When he threatened to call in doctors, which he often did, it was not because of her madness or lack of it. It was because of the thought that she mocked him. It was the look in her eye, secretive, malevolent, wrapped in thin clear plastic.

And it was this look that he saw, or feared he saw, on the day she put the Asiatic in the cage.

Charles leaned across the rail and watched Mr Lo thoughtfully, as though he were nothing more than a newly arrived c.o.c.katoo whose responses he was attempting to judge, to see if he would adapt to his cage readily or would end up noisy and a nuisance to his fellows.

Mr Lo bowed to Charles, bowed as he had not bowed except to Grandfather. Then he spoke a high-flown poem, badly remembered, which his accomplished sister had often recited before visitors. (The poem was in Mandarin. Charles Badgery did not notice the mistakes.) Finally he turned five somersaults and would have done a sixth except that he was out of practice and feared a disgrace.

"Please," said Mr Lo, suppressing his greedy lungs.