Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 53

Charles was considering the thing that he never considered, the thing that he could not even admit that he thought about, but which had lacerated him since that day in 1943 when he emerged from the damp little church in George Street and discovered-it was his outraged mother who brought it to his attention-that his son was not named Michael, as he had thought, but Hissao. Now, six years later, he compared, point by point, his son with the man in the cage. He saw, quickly, that the visitor bore no resemblance to his son. His eyes were round, not almond-shaped at all, and they were sunken into shadows.

Seeing the proprietor's thoughtful face, Mr Lo realized that his tenure was in question. He began to sing a small sad song he had learned from his grandmother. Charles, hearing the sadness in the song, was at once moved and disgusted. He walked around the gallery rail but he would not look at the human being performing like a monkey in a cage.

He had ordered that the door of this particular cage be made big, like a normal door to a normal room, so when he decided to enter, he entered easily enough. Still, he found it difficult to battle the nimble Mr Lo who clambered up to the barred roof and hung on.

"Please," said Charles, "I cannot have you here."

While this all took place on the north side, Leah, on the south side, extracted Mr Lo's real story from Emma and-while Charles stayed inside the cage and Mr Lo hung on to the ceiling with aching arms-Leah came to the bars to explain the situation to the proprietor. Mr Lo, she said, wished to remain in Australia. The Australian government, having regard for the colour of Mr Lo's skin and the shape of his eyes, did not wish him to stay. They had given him the same iniquitous dictation test that they had given Egon Kirsch, although they had done it in Dutch not Gaelic, and they did not wish him to stay. They were wrong. Mr Lo was right.

This opinion had a confusing effect on Charles. First he had an excessive respect for the law which he must-there is no other explanation-have picked up from the Rawleigh's man who, having failed to abort him, had nursed him instead.

Second, he had immense respect for Leah Goldstein's firm opinions.

Everyone, he knew, was watching him. Leah was saying that Mr Lo should be harboured. His wife was edging around the rail towards him. There was a man from the Customs Department-a government officer-waiting in his office downstairs, "making inquiries" about certain activities and although he had nothing to hide he was fearful about it and was now made doubly fearful by this illegal activity being conducted above the government official's head. He did not want trouble. He began to sweat. He could feel his deodorized armpits were sweating.

"Perhaps," said Mr Lo, who felt himself unable to hang on much longer, "you think I want money. No money," Mr Lo said, even though he was frightened at what he had got himself involved with. He was beyond thinking. If only he could have a night's sleep without worrying about arrest.

"No," Charles said.

Mr Lo dropped wearily to the floor and examined the painful impressions the bars had made on his hands. He had soft hands. He was proud of them, but now his hands would become rough and callused, his long nail torn, and it was just as the fortuneteller had said-"Bad fortune, much hardship, great wealth follows."

It was cramped in the cage. Mr Lo was fond of garlic. Charles was not and so-although he did not wish to-he retreated from the cage and stood, with Leah, Emma and Hissao, looking in.

Mr Lo, although weary, managed a somersault.

"Let him stay," Emma said. It was a murmur, of course, but her husband knew what it meant. He turned and looked at his wife's eyes and thought, "Do you love me?"

For answer she released the strand of pearls that she had been clutching, and touched his sleeve, a habit she had, which, for all its restraint-no skin touched, little pressure applied-signified her most tender moods.

"It's not decent," Charles said, and his tone was exactly the same one he used when he found her stroking the goanna in such a way-no one else could do it-that its pale hemipenes emerged pale and spiky from their sheaths. He said it as if he was waiting, pa.s.sively, to be contradicted, to be told it was perfectly decent.

"There's no privacy," he begged. "What if he raped you?"

"You lock me in," said Mr Lo. "Please." He shut the door and made a pa.s.sable imitation of a padlock with his soft and slender hands.

Charles would have loved to snap a heavy lock just in the place where Mr Lo suggested. He also found the idea of locking a human being in a cage disgusting. And so he stood there, staring at the marine architect's hands, caught between his humanist ideals and his s.e.xual jealousy.

In the end it was the gentle pressure on his sleeve that won the day, and Mr Lo was not only permitted to stay, but he stayed with no padlock.

You will understand how fine the balance was when you see Charles, late that night, earlier on other nights, come sneaking out of his flat, sliding his stockinged feet along the polished floorboards in case he should knock over Henry's Meccano or stab himself on Nick's donkey engine, holding his breath, the torch in his dressing-gown pocket. He gets himself right up against Mr Lo's cage before he turns on the torch. Mr Lo lies on his back, fully clothed, his dark eyes wide open.

Mr Lo, as it turned out, was nothing but a gentleman. Every evening he lowered the pink Venetian blinds so the ladies could undress in privacy and he would inquire of them, with a small cough, before raising them each morning.

When Charles at last calmed down, he engaged Henry Lo to draw the plans for the new loading dock at the Ultimo warehouse. This activity did not stop Mr Lo trying to make himself agreeable to the customers who continued to wander on to the fourth-floor gallery.

By the time I met him he could execute a perfect triple somersault.

39.

Later, when my grandson was an international traveller, he experienced similar feelings to those I felt on the wide stairs of the pet shop. I had the sense of stepping into a vision, of every edge being sharp, of every colour intense, of viewing the whole through gla.s.s as carefully cleaned as the great skylight in the ceiling and, had I sat on the roof and gazed down into this world, like a Barrier Reef tourist in a gla.s.s-bottomed boat, I could not have felt more entranced or more alien.

I could not separate my son's industry from Goldstein's lies. I could not tell where one stopped and the other started and I dithered, my knife against my leg, my hat in my hand. All right, all right, I was intent on getting put up and I should have discarded my knife there and then and twice I tried, stooping down on a landing between galleries, pretending to retie my shoelace, only to be interrupted by loud-booted boys or gawky teenagers with comic books in their back pockets. So I left my knife where it was, although it felt too tight, and I wandered down to the ground floor, sorry I had not taken more trouble to write to my son.

On the ground floor I tried to peer up into the fourth gallery, to see if I could get some indication of the standard of accommodation, but the galleries were so deep and the canyon so narrow that it was impossible to see a thing. I should have written to him. I often wrote him letters in my head, eloquent loving letters, but when I sat down to write them my hands went cold and dry and I could not bring myself to form the words required. Now I would have to go away-it was the sensible plan-sneak down to Wollongong and start the correspondence from there, wait a year if necessary until the boy invited me up to stay. But even while I developed this careful plan, my hands began to shake. I went out into the street to calm down. I turned my attention on the little pink-nosed wallaby in the window. It was then I realized that the Badgery Pet Emporium had entered into what is known in the car game as a "joint promotion," that the whole of the window was an advertis.e.m.e.nt for the new Holden car, that the map of fake flowers the wallabies stood on bore the legend: "Australia's Own Car".

This was bulls.h.i.t. The car was about as Australian as General MacArthur, although it was not MacArthur but General Motors who had taken the government to the cleaners. It was a simple deal. GM permitted the Australian government to provide all the capital. In return the Australian government permitted GM to expatriate all the profits.

Twelve years before this piece of deception would have got me particularly excited, but now I saw it from M. V. Anderson's point of view, and noted it, not as something new, but one more element in an old pattern of self-deception. This is the great thing about being an intellectual. It is very calming. I felt no anger. Not a touch. I hoped Charles had been well paid and I was not at all offended when, via the medium of the tannoy above my head, Lou Topano and his Band of Renown gave forth with "Holding You in My Holden".

I had tied my knife too tight. It was most uncomfortable. I stopped to pull it looser but it would not come. It was then I found myself in the midst of men still arguing about a car. The tail of the tie was showing at the bottom of the trouser cuff. One of the arguing men was my son, Charles Badgery.

His suit was silk, shot with threads of silk, but it did not hide his extraordinary build. Neither did the wide-brimmed Yankee hat cast a shadow deep enough to soften the crude features of his head: that huge thick neck, that jutting jaw, the mouth that could be mistaken for cruel.

I stared at him a moment, proud of him, irritated by his loud voice, but also embarra.s.sed by my own suit which was fifteen years old and hung in great folds around me. I had lost weight in Rankin Downs. My shirt was too big and its collar sat loosely around my crepey neck. In short, I looked a no-hoper.

The car they were arguing about belonged to C. Badgery Esq. It was a Holden, one of the first. It was smooth, everywhere rounded, like a condensed Chevrolet, and the curved body panels shone seductively in the bright grey light of Pitt Street. It was like something from a letter. It glowed like a pearl and I too walked around it and felt my hand, almost against my will, go out to stroke it.

The arguers were cynics and romantics, some of them both, pretending to be rational men. Yet they were so bewitched by the thing they never once addressed themselves to the real issue but rather to such incidentals as the fact that the car was built with no cha.s.sis, that a bag of superphosphate in the back was necessary to make it handle properly. Some said it was ugly, some beautiful, and others said it was "tinny" and would crumple if you tapped it. But no one questioned that it was Australia's Own Car and nothing made a dent in Charles's excitement. He plunged his hands deep into his pockets, jiggled his keys, rocked back on his heels, looked up and down the busy street, waved to a pa.s.sing friend and declared it a great day for Australia.

I should have got on the bus to Wollongong as I had planned. I was in much too confused a state to meet my son. I was a man descending on to a busy railway platform in a strange city with a battered old suitcase tied with string. I was jolted by impatient travellers, b.u.mped by porters while I worried about whether my ticket was in my wallet or my fob pocket when it was in neither.

I held out my hand to him before I knew I'd done it. At first he thought me a stranger congratulating him. He shook the hand while he looked over his shoulder and shouted to someone else.

"Charles," I said. "It's Daddy." I did not know the weakness of the string that kept my emotional baggage together because there, in Pitt Street, the f.u.c.king thing broke, and everything I owned came spilling out of me, tangled pyjama pants, dirty socks, love letters, toilet rolls and old silk stockings. I hugged my boy and bawled into his deaf ear. I am not a big one for hugging men, I swear it. I never did it before that day. But I embraced my boy Charles Badgery in Pitt Street, Sydney, and frightened the bejesus out of him until he realized who I was.

It was a warm day, but I was shivering. I started to apologize for the k.n.o.b in his ear. Don't smirk-I meant it-you should have seen it, the great ugly lump of bakelite sticking out of his ear-hole. He was too young a man to have to tolerate it.

Charles wasn't interested in apologies. He was pleased to see me.

"Have you seen the shop?" He led me towards it by the elbow. The doors were big and solid. Nothing quivered or evaporated. If Goldstein had invented it she had done a d.a.m.n good job for it looked as solid as the real McCoy. "Crikey, this is wonderful. I always imagine you coming to look at it. I always wonder what you'd think. And here you are, I can't believe it."

He took me around the shop and introduced me to his staff, each one, by name, explaining the sapphire miner, loading me up with drink coasters. He was not ashamed of my ill-fitting suit or the tear marks on my cheeks. He took me into a large cage, all full of logs and ferns and running water and at the back he showed me a female lyrebird he had incubated himself. She was building a nest, he said, and was ready to mate. He was happy, because this meant he had cared for it well, but he was sad because there was no male to give her.

You could feel such a well of tenderness in the boy that I was affected by it too. A bower-bird came and perched by my shoulder and, for a moment or two, I could almost feel myself to be a nice man.

On the third gallery, we ran into a fellow, a seed importer from the Haymarket who wanted to go for a spin in the Holden. So we all clattered down those wide wooden stairs-light-coloured and worn in the centre of the treads, black on the edges-making as much noise as schoolkids let out early on a summer's afternoon, bathers in their hands, towels around their necks. Twenty-four hours before I had been in H M Prison, Rankin Downs.

At the front desk Charles remembered his family and despatched a wizened little fellow to bring "them" downstairs. I never imagined Goldstein was up there. I was trying to get rid of my knife, but Charles wanted me to get in his car. The birdseed importer came along. I got in the middle, and the importer got the window seat. And now, thank G.o.d, I could undo my tie. My companion took too much of an interest in my activities, so I merely loosened it off. I had no intentions about that knife one way or the other. I was preparing my plan to get myself put up.

It was too important a matter to leave vulnerable to the chancy winds of human emotions.

40.

Mr Lo confessed to no one how he longed to walk the streets of Sydney as a free man and he felt this need most strongly on days like this one-grey, hot steaming February days whose humidity and colour reminded him of Penang, of Sundays when you could stroll out by the sea wall with Old Mother, his sisters, his worldly brother-in-law, Old Mother flicking her fan-he could still hear the noise it made, like a clock-and he, Mr Lo, would always buy them those little glutinous rice cakes wrapped in banana leaf although he was a poor student and had less than all the others.

He would die and never see Penang again, unless it was as a ghost, alone on the sea wall looking for the cake-sellers who were home in bed.

But Mr Lo did not dwell on this. He tried to be optimistic. He dreamed, not of Penang, but of the more attainable streets in Sydney. Just the same, when the invitation was made for him to ride in Charles's new car, he declined, with thanks.

"I will hold the fort," he said, pleased with his colloquialism. "Please."

They did not try to persuade him any more. He watched Leah put on her big white hat and struggle into her shoes. He saw Emma make some last adjustment to her face, while little Hissao, his good friend, whom he entertained with ghost stories and Old Mother's songs, picked up his favourite d.i.n.ky toy and stuffed it into his bulging pockets.

Mr Lo smiled and showed them great happiness, but when the door was shut behind them and he had carefully locked it, he sighed, and his eyes lost their fraudulent gloss in an instant, like cheap baubles from the thieves' market which tarnish in their wrapping on the way home.

Once, only once, had he ventured out into the street. But he had only gone a block before he was overcome with his vulnerability, his illegal status, the thought that there was nothing to protect him from questioning, officials, exportation, a gaol sentence in Penang and, finally, conscription to fight the communists in the jungle.

So he returned, and stayed, and did not try to go out again, sad to be locked away from the world and fearful lest he be forced into it.

Mr Lo was an intelligent young man. His teachers had all remarked on his understanding and his diligence. Things did not need to be explained to him twice. Yet he could not, in his present situation, ever understand how he was permitted to stay or what function he had in the workings of Mr Badgery's establishment. He had asked and been answered, but he had not understood and he behaved as he had when, as a child, when his father was still alive, he had gone fishing. He was too young to understand fishing, but he followed the example of his father and uncles. When they jiggled their lines, he did likewise. When they changed bait, so did he. But he did not understand. So it was in Mr Badgery's emporium: he did his somersaults and spoke in languages, but he could be overcome, mid-somersault, with a panic that there was no meaning to his antics. He no longer imagined that he was to be sold. That misconception had not lasted a week, and he had been relieved to realize it, and yet he also dreamed of the day when a beautiful young lady would come through the door-it did not even matter if she was not beautiful, or even if she was no longer young-and she would see him: neat, clever, nimble and she would fall helplessly in love with him. She would not even notice Mrs Badgery and if she did would not be so impolite as to laugh or point. She would stand shyly and lower her eyes, and he would speak to her. On the first visit she would not answer, but she would return, and sooner or later she would speak. She would want to marry him, but he would have to ask her, of course. And then they would walk the streets of Sydney together. He would buy her rice cakes, bright red ones wrapped in green leaf.

Mr Lo began to straighten chairs. He unlocked the little nest of wooden legs that Hissao had made into a "Ghosts' Cage" and lined the chairs neatly along the rail of the gallery. When he had done this he took out his handkerchief and dusted the seats. Then he sat down. He thought optimistic thoughts.

41.

I have never been a great one for returning to my past and thus experiencing that giddy gap between past and present where, in a second, you trip and teeter and, with arms flailing, fingernails sc.r.a.ping against egg-smooth walls, you fall through twenty years.

Yet on that day in Sydney, that muggy steaming day, I breathed the odour of my little boy's manly sweat and plunged and soared in the turbulent air of time.

I met the mad woman. I looked into Hissao's eyes and saw my lost daughter, for whatever Emma had made of him, there was no mistaking that similarity, that sweet nature, that pretty face.

Charles, I a.s.sume, introduced me once again to Leah, but there was such a commotion in my mind that I did not hear. I did not recognize her and so wondered at the particular attention this handsome woman bestowed on me.

The birdseed importer had a fat b.u.m and took up too much of the front seat. It was hard to turn. I was blocking Charles's view in the rear-vision mirror. We roared up George Street and headed towards the bridge. Charles was shouting various facts about the car and its performance, accelerating, braking, and showing off. He drove no better than Jack McGrath.

"Mother is in Sydney," he shouted.

"Who?"

"Phoebe, your wife. My mother is in Sydney."

"Oh," I said. I did not wish to hear about wives. I was taken by the handsome woman in the back seat. I wanted to turn so I could see her wedding finger, but the birdseed importer was trying to question me about my business and Charles wanted a coin for the bridge toll. I got my hand into my pocket, gave him the two bob, and saw it safely into the tollkeeper's hand, and then, as we lurched savagely on to that ugly steel structure all Australia is so proud of, I managed to squirm free of the importer's attention and turn in my seat to look at the woman.

I groan out loud to remember what I did. I tipped my hat, although there was little room to do it, "Herbert Badgery," I said, "I don't believe we've been introduced."

For answer I received a whack across the face.

42.

Leah Goldstein had a lovely face. All the angles had become rounded, like a river rock that is so smooth that all you wish to do is place it in your hand, and once it is there it gives you a comfort and a happiness you could not begin to explain, that such a smooth sun-warm rock should fit your cupped palm so perfectly.

We sat on the Argyle steps beneath a Morton Bay fig which is still there today, and I unstrapped the tie and gave her the knife. G.o.d, it was an ugly thing-there was no elegance to the weapons made in Rankin Downs. I never did say what it was I planned to do with that blade, but I always a.s.sumed she understood. Perhaps she never did, but merely saw it as a symbol of my criminality, something that could be discarded as easily as the dank gaol smell which-she told me later-permeated my clothes and my skin. In any case we dropped the knife into Darling Harbour that afternoon and I wept, for the fourth time that day, and Goldstein wept with me, but perhaps she did not understand. I thought about this often, later. I wondered if I should not make it more clear. When we were lovers again I would be stricken by visions that would make me groan. I would touch her chest or feel her lovely ribcage or lie with my head against her breast listening to her beating heart (it had an odd skip to it, that heart) and think of that steel blade with its grubby rag-and-string glued handle.

I did not ask why she had told me lies so long. All I cared about was the future. I undid my shirt on the Argyle steps. I told you I was a vain man, but I had less to be vain about than I once had. The quacks had been through my back, mining for a kidney stone they never found, but what damage they had done was nothing to what I had done myself in my quest for frailty. I showed her the crepe-skin around my neck, and the place where my biceps had once been tight before I so cleverly dissolved them in the acid of my lying mind.

I swear to G.o.d I will never understand Goldstein's criteria about skin, for she found nothing wrong with mine. She touched it and looked at me with her velvety cat's eyes. She did not flinch. She smiled. So did an old lady who was standing on the wrought-iron balcony above those narrow steps. She was hanging out her washing between her canary and the wall and she stopped, with wooden pegs in her mouth, and smiled.

Once the skin was settled, we moved on. My back hurt like h.e.l.l, but I did not confess it. There were pains shooting up my legs and my teeth set up an ache as vague and persistent as people talking in the next room. I drew myself up and tried to tell myself I was a young man. I drew up my forearms a fraction and imagined myself on the sand at Bondi Beach. But you do not slough off a shuffle so quickly, and I soon had to admit that I would be an old fellow for a little while and that I could not match the dancer's walk beside me.

At sixty-five years of age, women do not see you. You are invisible. Until, that is, you walk down George Street with a young woman with a dancer's walk and then you go from invisible (flip-flop) to neon-signed and you are, take my word for it, a celebrity, a ballet master, a painter, a famous anarchist, a free-thinker, a revolutionary, an inventor of note, a criminal of power and influence, but look at me, I am only Herbert Badgery and once I was shy about my legs and now all I want is to lie down on my bed and take an Aspro and hope my toothache will go away.

I should have quietly withdrawn myself, gone back alone to my hotel, read an uncensored newspaper and gone to bed early. Charles, however, was busy arranging my life for me.

43.

In all her fifty years Phoebe had never once worked for money. She was not ashamed of this. On the contrary. She had, after all, given her life to art and as for money, it always turned up somehow. Visitors to her little flat would look around at the pretty walls, the small works by famous artists, the rugs on the floor, the view of the harbour out the window and-feeling themselves steeped in nasty compromises, pot-boilers, jobs with newspapers, unpleasant sinecures with the Education Department-not only envied her but admired her.

Her poetry, of course, was little known, but by the end of the war she had begun the little magazine that historians now talk about so seriously-Malley's Urn, a private joke amongst the literati at the time and if you don't get the joke, don't worry-it was never very funny.

There were those who imagined her to have inherited wealth, but if Phoebe even smelt a whiff of this misunderstanding, she set it straight-her mother had left five coal mines to the Catholic Church. Imagine!

So where had the money come from? First from Horace until his ship had sunk, torpedoed in the English Channel. Also from Annette Davidson until, at an age when you might think her past it, she had run away to Perth-in the middle of a school term-with her own PE instructress. She had arranged a telegram to Phoebe which announced her death but everybody even Phoebe-knew the two women had a "horrid little milk bar" in Nedlands.

So it was left to Charles to be a patron of the arts and he was not at all displeased by this. You could buy (if you wished-few did) Malley's Urn Malley's Urn in the pet emporium-there was always a stack on the cashier's desk and Charles had a complete set of that quarterly green magazine in his musty bedroom which he read on his insomniacal nights. in the pet emporium-there was always a stack on the cashier's desk and Charles had a complete set of that quarterly green magazine in his musty bedroom which he read on his insomniacal nights.

Now all of this seemed firm and settled until the day that I arrived in Sydney and Charles decided that his mother should have the flat in the pet emporium. Charles was so excited by this idea that he did not even wait for the reunion dinner he was planning for that night. He got his mother on the telephone and came straight to the point.

"And leave my flat? My lovely flat?"