Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 60

No, it is no fun to watch your little boy drive out of your life and my heart, that day, was drilled with icy needles that have never melted. I feel them still, this moment, when I breathe. I cough hard, but all I get is some white dribble to run down the deep unshaven gullies on either side of my mouth which is, no more, I promise, the Phoenician's bow that so beguiled Miss Phoebe McGrath in 1919.

I sat in my chair and watched the hessianed goanna dropped into the boot. I knew, that day, that G.o.d is a glutton for grief, love, regret, sadness, joy too, everything, remorse, guilt-it is all steak and eggs to him and he will promise anything to get them. But what am I saying? There is no G.o.d. There is only me, Herbert Badgery, enthroned high above Pitt Street while angels or parrots trill attendance.

Hissao put the car into first gear, that insouciant click and clack, made a hand signal (it was the years before indicators became legal) and pulled out into the traffic of Pitt Street as if he was doing nothing more than driving to the corner shop for a Sporting Globe Sporting Globe. No one saw, no one but me. Goldstein was on her way to have lunch with Doodles Casey, her florid-faced publisher. He was my publisher too, but he thought my brain gone to porridge. Once he visited me in hospital where he wiped my nose; I have never forgiven him, the charlatan.

But Casey is a man of no importance, born for deletion; it is Charles and Hissao we are here to spy on as they cross Darling Harbour on the old Pyrmont Bridge.

They were quiet as they entered the dead-fish stench that hangs beneath the old incinerator at Pyrmont. They said not a word until they reached the hotel that is now known as Wattsies but was, in those days, the plain White Bay Hotel.

"How do I seem to you?" Charles asked.

"How do you mean?"

"How do I seem?" seem?"

It was an impossible question, and it was expressed in an unusual voice, light, with a reedy vibrato. Hissao put the car into gear when the lights went green.

"Have you seen my bottom?" Charles asked.

"What?"

"Have you," Charles sat sideways in his seat to look at his embarra.s.sed son, "seen my bottom, my b.u.m?"

Hissao smiled but it was not the charming smile of the urbane young man who had discussed the pet business with Time Time magazine. His eyes showed his embarra.s.sment and his smile hurt his face. "Not for a while," he said. magazine. His eyes showed his embarra.s.sment and his smile hurt his face. "Not for a while," he said.

"Was it wrinkled?"

"Oh, Dad! Please."

"Was it?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Yes," said Charles, with some bitterness, and then faced the front. They drove on in a silence that Hissao found almost unbearable. They crossed that bridge-I forget its name-the ugly steel box that lay, on that day, across joyless wind-whipped water the colour of a battleship.

"You shouldn't have told me to shut up."

"I'm sorry."

"I bought you your own car. I pay for your university fees, I give you money to live on. I don't ask for much from you. (Keep going up Victoria Road.) I never thought I'd ever hear you tell me to shut up."

Hissao had to change lanes to stay in Victoria Road. He tried to explain, at the same time, why it was necessary to stop his father's comments on Herr Bloom but Charles was not really listening. "Anyway," Hissao said, "he liked you."

"He thought I was a crook."

"No, really. He didn't."

"Thought I was a crook. Maybe I am a crook. Do you think I'm a crook?"

"No."

"Well, he thought I was a crook. All he saw was this big building. He thought I was a moneybags but do you know what I see when I look at that building, all those people employed, all those families fed, all those beautiful pets being shipped away all over the world? Do you know what I think?"

Hissao knew the answer. He had heard it before.

"I think it's a b.l.o.o.d.y miracle."

They kept driving along Victoria Road while Charles told the story of the business, right from the day when Emma's father had said she had a b.u.m like a horse. He went through his first meeting with a bank manager, the guarantee by Lenny Kaletsky. He could remember every bird he had brought down from Jeparit, and the price of every animal, fish, bird and reptile he had ever sold. He would recall a year in his memory because it was the year that an important specimen had died or another incubated.

At Silverwater Road he had Hissao turn left and they proceeded down through that industrial wasteland across the polluted river and on towards the Parramatta Road.

"There never was a day," Charles said, "when I did not want to be the best at what I did. Do you believe me?"

"Yes, Dad, I do."

"When I was a little nipper no one paid attention to Australian birds and animals. It's all changed now. Me and Nathan, we did that."

"That's terrific," Hissao said and his father looked at him in a way that made him ashamed of the inept.i.tude of his response.

"I never meant anyone any harm," his father said.

It was a grey overcast day and a low blanket of cloud sat over the industrial puddle-dotted wastes of Silverwater.

"Nowadays you can travel all over the world and find Badgery's birds in all the big collections, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Tokyo."

Hissao, of course, knew all this. He had heard it many times before. His father never tired of repeating the names of cities he had never been to.

"Holland," said Charles, crossing his calf across his heavy thigh. "France, Tokyo."

"You said Tokyo."

"Yes," said Charles. "Turn right."

They drove out to Parramatta in heavy silence. When they arrived at Church Street Charles had him turn right again and it occurred to Hissao that his father was not thinking about where they were going.

"You're intelligent," Charles said as they pa.s.sed the last of the Parramatta shops. "You can spell, you can write, you've got an education. Do you think there's a G.o.d?"

"No, I guess not."

"No," said Charles. "I suppose there isn't."

"Will I go back into Victoria Road?"

"Yes. We'll go to the tip at Ryde."

As they crossed the start of Silverwater Road, Charles said: "Would you say I was a success?"

"Yes."

"And your mother?" His voice was actually shaking. Hissao saw that his cheeks were wet. He did not know what to do. "Would you say she was a success too?"

He tried to hold his father's hand but it was clenched into a fist and did not respond to holding.

"Drive," Charles said. "Is she?"

"Yes, in her way."

Later Hissao was to regret his wooden awkwardness, his stiff inadequate answers to all these questions and yet they were not really questions at all, but echoes made by Charles's ricocheting thoughts.

Hissao found the tip and drove, at last, through the low scrub. They bounced over a bush track and arrived at a large bulldozed clearing the perimeters of which were piled with garbage. Magpies and crows rose and settled. Small black flies entered the car through the open windows and then cl.u.s.tered on the inside of the windscreen trying to get out again. The place stank.

Hissao was under the impression that his father was going to release his mother's pet. There would be trouble, he knew, but he did not judge or interfere. He knew that goannas were natural scavengers and imagined his father had chosen the tip because-in all the city-it was the best source of food for it.

Yet when Charles lifted the animal from the boot he also picked up a rifle. He dumped the bag on the ground and clipped a ten-round magazine of .22 bullets into the rifle. Then he untied the string of the bag and emptied the goanna on to the dusty clay ground.

The goanna was nearly twenty-four years old now and rarely moved if it was not necessary. It would lie with its head resting in its food tray and when Emma placed its food there it would eat without altering position. Now it seemed oblivious to any danger, although its tongue flicked in and out as it tasted the new air.

Hissao was frightened.

"You b.i.t.c.h," he heard his father say. "You f.u.c.king evil rotten b.i.t.c.h."

Two bullets struck the reptile in fast succession. The noise was empty and metallic. It looked as if he had missed, although the range was only twenty-four inches. Then Hissao saw the blood oozing from eye, and mouth. There were more light, sharp shots. Red marks appeared on the big head, no more serious than sores on the flaking scaly skin. The reptile did not rise up on its rear legs, inflate its throat, slash out with its claws. It tried to get under the car. Charles fired three more times, from the hip, with the tip of the muzzle three inches from the victim.

Hissao turned away. He looked over towards the city. He tried not to hear the things his father said about his mother. He could see the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the AWA tower and he did not see his father do it. He heard a grunt.

It takes only a second, this sort of thing. I have gone through the motions myself-it takes only a second to reverse the rifle and put it in your mouth. It had nothing to do with his financial affairs or his loss of control to his American partners. It was a mistake, most likely because the day was overcast, because the grey sky sucked all the joy from the land, because there were puddles at Silverwater, because the goanna did not die cleanly, because it suffered its wounds in silence, because it could not scream, because there was rust and enteritis and because he misunderstood what he had seen in a bottle.

He left us in charge of Emma, his sole heir, sole proprietor of the Best Pet Shop in the World.

60.

Leah Goldstein had worn her suit expecting to be taken some-where smart, but Doodles Casey had taken her for a counter lunch instead. At first she had been miffed and had drunk quickly and angrily. Then she had seen the funny side of it and drunk quickly and gaily. They had rough red wine and her lips now showed a cracked black mark around their perimeter.

The taxi driver, of course, had not been close enough to see the thin black outline to her lips. He had seen a respectable woman in a suit in Macleay Street and he had picked her up.

Only when she got into the car did he smell the grog. She directed him to an address in Pitt Street.

He drove quickly but also-having had to scrub out the back seat once this week-went very gently on the corners and did nothing to jolt his pa.s.senger or make her giddy.

He turned up the radio so that he would not have to talk and thus protected himself from the risk of drunken acrimony.

The news came on 2UE as they were heading up William Street. The first item was about a man who had shot a goanna and then shot himself. The announcer, you could hear it, was smiling while he read the item about the "Bizarre Double Suicide". When the item finished he played "See you later, Alligator".

The taxi driver, in spite of his resolve not to speak to his pa.s.senger, made a comment. He looked in the rear-vision mirror and saw his pa.s.senger's face collapsed in grief.

Oh s.h.i.t, he thought, as the volume of the grief rose higher. Drunk women were the worst. He turned up the radio even louder, but he could still hear her howling. He drove quickly, a lot more quickly than he had planned. He dropped her outside Woolworths and she gave him a pound, pushed it into his hand and wanted no change. He saw her in the rear-vision mirror as he drove away. She was standing rigid, staring up at the building across the road.

Leah Goldstein looked up. There was Herbert Badgery, sitting in his chair, listing slightly towards the collapsed side of his brain, surrounded by the waltzing neon rosellas.

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d," she said.

Pa.s.sers-by made a diversion so they need not brush her. They left plenty of room.

I watched her from where I sat. I saw her cross Pitt Street at an angle. She looked neither to right nor left. When she arrived at the stair inside the emporium, I felt her. I felt the footsteps all the way to the top floor and then around the gallery rail, and through the kitchen.

The door opened.

"Kill me," me," she shouted. "Kill she shouted. "Kill me." me."

She was very drunk and I was exceedingly weak. It was almost impossible for me to move, but I persuaded her to lie down on my little bed and I gave her my basin for when she was sick.

She never remembered what she had said that day, but it unnerved me just the same, as if all my carefully constructed world was unravelling in my hands.

Old men do not need sleep. I sat up all that night beside her. I watched the signs. I held everything in place by the sheer force of my will.

61.

Inside that little plastic chapel the widow wailed and wept. Thank G.o.d she did. At least it was an honest noise. It was ugly, yes, and full of suffocating gulps and shrieks as big as ripping sails, but I would rather listen to it than the regurgitated pap that poured out of the smiling officiant.

"Chas," I quote his very words, "is sitting with G.o.d."

I don't know what brand of Christianity he belonged to (the d.i.c.khead) but he had modelled his style of speaking on an American tape recording. He had stood at home, miming the words into his mirror, had folded his talc.u.m-smooth hands the way the manual told him to, had done it again and again until there was only the slightest trace of his Australian accent left and the natural nasal flavour was cloaked in a rich sugary sauce.

It was, he told us so, a happy day for us all.

There was an Acrilan carpet in mottled browns and bright aquamarine chairs to sit on.

When he had said his words they played a Wurlitzer organ and slid the coffin out on rollers just as, in the cool stores in Bacchus Marsh, they slid the cases of apples through the shed. You would never guess that that shiny box contained a man, my boy, a skin-wrapped parcel of f.u.c.ked-up dreams.

We went out into the sunlight, on to the gravel. Henry's and George's wives made bookends for the widow. Goldstein tried to busy herself with taxis.

All those old people getting confused about which taxi they should be in-stooped thin Sid Goldstein with his paper-dry hands. Wheezy old Henry Underhill trying to order the ranks. Phoebe walking with exaggerated care across the sun-bright quartz worried, as always, that she would fall and break a hip. She had more black plumes than a funeral horse and she approached my wheelchair all netted in black, a pale bony hand extending.

The wheelchair had a curious effect on people. They came and stared at me as if I was a fish at the market.

"How is he?"