Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 61

I said: "Not long for this old planet now."

They couldn't understand a word I said, and it didn't matter, because I was only lying to cheer them up. Death was their hobby, their dream, their fear, the only subject worth consideration.

Afterwards we went back for drinks at the emporium and George and Henry puffed and grunted carrying me up four flights of stairs.

You would not glorify the affair by calling it a wake. They were all too old and depressing and I went to my room and left them to mutter about how ill I looked, I could hear them sighing and farting and rattling their cups in their saucers, but I had serious matters to attend to-I had my Vegemite jar back.

The thing that killed my boy was not half goanna and half human at all. Neither was it one of the shifting miasmas that had so frightened Sergeant Moth. It was a dragon, a solid being, two inches tall. When it saw me the evil f.u.c.ker puffed up its throat and showed its red insides to me. Oh, Christ, it was a nasty piece of work. It reared up on its hind legs and scratched at the gla.s.s with its long black claws while its whole body pulsed with rage, changing from a deep black green to a bloated pearlescent grey.

I did not start to battle with it immediately. In fact I made myself ignore it. I began by working on the rusty lid with a little piece of wire wool. This may sound simple enough, but when your left arm does not work it is a difficult enough task to occupy all your attention. When the lid was shining clean I used meths and rag on the gla.s.s while I listened to Emma's keening through my door.

If the death had not also revealed the financial frailty of the structure on which the family relied, it may well have served to draw us all closer together.

Those jumbled pieces of paper on Charles's desk contained enough information to indicate that the business was not only making a loss, but that the situation was not acceptable to either of the other two shareholders. This was no longer, as everyone thought it was, Schick Inc. and Gulf & Western. Gulf & Western had sold their holding to a Chicago company called Jayoyo Pty Ltd whose function no one knew. The majority shareholders, it would seem-they had not said so in writing-were willing, eager even, to continue their support of the business providing the lucrative banned species could be "facilitated" out of the country. Charles had blithely ignored all such requests.

The state of the books suggested only two possibilities: either the family complied with the majority shareholders or they sold out to them.

Everybody had a different point of view. I heard them squabbling through my door and I know that it is an important part of any funeral, that the squabbling and thieving takes people's minds off their grief. That was the day Henry's wife stole a pair of rare apricot-coloured budgies which she claimed Charles had promised her. George took the mist nets. Even Henry Underhill (whose heart was bad) tried to get away with the ladder, although he had to abandon it on the first landing, where it stayed, propped against the wall, for five years.

Emma would not take any notice of them. It was a week before any one could get her to pay any attention to the question of the future. I took no direct part in this. No one, by the way, asked me to. In any case, I was busy with the Vegemite jar. I crooned to it. I sang it songs as well as I could. In the end it behaved no differently from any nervous horse which, although it may snort and rear and flare its nostrils, can be quietened in the end.

But although I took no part in the discussion I saw, from my window, big bow-legged Henry stride across the street with his pretty wife in trail. I saw all the supplicants-George, Phoebe, Van Kraligan-they all came, all of them. Some carried briefcases, others rolls of paper, others no more than a belligerent face.

Goldstein came and told me of their propositions. I kept my bottle under my rug while she fed me porridge. She talked about how stupid they were, that they could not and would not accept the situation, that the days of the pet shop were over-there was nothing left to argue over. She did not need my answers but I gave her some gurgles anyway. The building would have to be sold, the debts paid off, the company liquidated. You should have seen her eyes-all afire with her enthusiasm. She fed me fiercely, happily, shoving in porridge before I had finished swallowing the last lot. There would be just enough money, she said, to buy Emma a little house and give her a pension.

The rest of us, she said, would have to make our own arrangements.

But Goldstein's agitated happiness was premature because when the widow understood the situation, she became very quiet. She was, at the moment Goldstein finally made it clear to her, sitting behind her late husband's cedar desk, with her thumb under the edge, and her fingers flattened on the top.

"This is my home," she told Leah Goldstein.

"Emma, look at this." Goldstein pushed a bookkeeper's journal towards her, but Emma would no longer look at figures written on paper. "It is not your home at all. It belongs to the Yanks."

Emma murmured and ran her fingertip along Goldstein's arms.

"Emma, you've got to face reality. You are not calling the tune. They are."

Emma smiled. It was the first time she had smiled since Charles had died.

"My boy will look after me," she said, meaning Hissao, although she did not name him.

"Emma, he can't."

"Oh yes he can," said Emma. "You watch him, girlie."

The last person to call Goldstein "girlie" had been Mervyn Sullivan. She did not take to it at all.

62.

Leah Goldstein no longer saw the building as a construction of bricks, mortar and other inert matter. It had fibrous matted roots that pushed down into the tank stream. It sweated and groaned and sighed in the wind.

Its whole function was entrapment and its inhabitants could happily while away afternoons and years without any bigger scheme, listening to the races on the radio, reaching out for another oyster, worrying only that the beer gla.s.ses were free of detergent and kept, cold and frosted, in the fridge. They discussed the quality of the harbour prawns, got drunk, and crunched the prawns' heads, imagining themselves free and happy while all the time they were servants of the building. It made them behave in disgusting ways.

Leah looked at the cold hard look in Emma's glittering eyes. It was not grief. It was something else and Leah recognized the feeling as one she had known herself.

As she followed Emma out of the office Leah vowed, in a properly formed, silent sentence, that she would stand, one day soon, in Pitt Street and watch the emporium fall to the earth as sweetly as a dress slipping off a coat-hanger, dropping softly, lying formless, broken in the dust.

To this end she took Hissao to a beer garden in Redfern. She did not choose Redfern for any particular reason. It happened to be a hotel that she knew from Labour Party meetings and it was close to the university. Later in the day it would turn into a snake pit and, as it reached its broken-gla.s.sed climax at six p.m., it would be a place where crims paid off coppers and, occasionally, shot their compet.i.tors. But at this time, eleven in the morning, it was sunny and fresh and the wall-eyed barman had hosed down the bright gravel and driven, with the force of the water, yesterday's cigarette b.u.t.ts and dead matches out of sight. He had picked up the sodden paper napkins and the bare chop bones and Mich Crozier's was ready for another day.

The term "garden", of course, gives a misleading picture of Crozier's-it was a mostly shadeless area of crushed quartz like the Parramatta used-car yard Mich had owned in the 1950s and, in the middle of this blindingly white sea was a redbrick island labelled LADIES LADIES and and GENTS GENTS. If you did not mind the smell you could enjoy the shade the toilet block provided or, if you did mind, which Leah did, you could choose one of the tables next to the lattice that Mich or Rosalie had nailed to the paling fence and screwed to the brick wall of the printing works next door. They had planted jasmine too, but people kept p.i.s.sing on it and it died.

The tables were slatted, with each slat painted a different fairground colour and, as it was almost impossible to make the tables steady, beer spilt easily and then dripped through the slats.

Hissao sat there with beer-wet knees in his corduroy trousers, looking across at Leah Goldstein, wondering why she had asked to meet him. She wore a pleasantly faded blue-checked shirt, the simplicity of which was contradicted, or at least underlined, by a thin gold chain she wore around her remarkably smooth neck. Her hair was untidy, flecked with grey, and she had pushed it back from her handsome face as if she were impatient with it and had more important things to consider. She lit a cigarette in a very businesslike way, inhaled, exhaled, and lined up her packet of matches with her cigarettes.

"Cheers," she said, and raised her gla.s.s as if she were in the habit of drinking beer at eleven in the morning every day.

"Cheers," said Hissao. He was a little frightened of her and also very curious. He had known her all his life and yet knew nothing about her. He guessed, but had never been told, that she had been his grandfather's lover. She had been married to the notorious Izzie Kaletsky. She had been a dancer in the Great Depression. She had had an interesting life and he hoped that, in the hothouse emotions generated by his father's suicide, they would, at last, be able to speak to each other. He felt they would have much in common.

Leah, for her part, was suddenly nervous of Hissao. She had not been expecting nervousness, but she was keyed up about her objective and she suddenly felt that tightness in the throat, the slight tremolo in her voice that she experienced when called to speak in public. She knew nothing about Corbusier and thus missed the significance of the bow tie. She thought he looked unpleasantly slick, like a real-estate salesman.

Hiss...o...b..gan to talk to cover the uneasiness of silence. Nothing in his manner or the timbre of his voice suggested anything but social ease. He felt shy and awkward.

He made some observations about the nature of beer gardens and wondered, out loud, about the habit of painting the slatted tables in different colours. Perhaps, he said (suddenly hit with the idea that she had brought him here to tell him that his father had not been his father at all) perhaps the colours of the tables were really a reference to seaside umbrellas and deckchairs, a signal about leisure and working-cla.s.s holidays by the sea.

Leah heard only urbane drivel of the type, she imagined, people spoke at c.o.c.ktail parties. It made her less confident of success, but she waited for him to finish, smiled when he had and, having provided enough punctuation with a deep draught of cold bitter beer, told him what she had come to tell him. Her voice was too tight. She had the sense of talking into a deep well, of shouting against air. She ignored her quavering voice, and pushed on, outlining the risks for him, both legal and moral, of doing what his mother seemed to want, i.e., running the emporium as their American masters wished.

Hissao had no intention of being a lackey. He was not worried about these so-called risks. He was worried that Leah Goldstein seemed serious and unhappy.

"Ah," he said, raising his eyebrows comically, poking gentle fun at the seriousness. He tilted back on the chair and then dropped forward. "Ah so," he said, making himself look as j.a.panese as anything in Kurosawa, "Ah, so-deska?"

Leah misunderstood the performance. She was suspicious of the smiling face and all this animation at a time when he should, given what he had witnessed, be filled with grief. He was spoiled and young and corrupt and she saw, in his white collar and smarmy tie, the salesman's desire to please.

"So I am directed to be a smuggler, eh?" Hissao smiled into his beer. It was easy to forget he was only eighteen years old. "That's the plan. The business is viable after all?" He was being funny, so he imagined.

Leah had never been good with irony. She lit a second cigarette and frowned.

"We'll all be rich," Hissao said gaily. "We could have sports cars and lovers." He was joking of course, but he dropped the word "lovers" into the stream of his talk as deliberately as a fisherman letting a mud-eye float past a watching trout. He wanted Goldstein to talk about lovers, her lovers, his mother's lovers. He wanted confessions, secrets, all the lovely laundry of the past.

It was, however, the wrong approach for Goldstein. She thought him frivolous and silly. She gave him a stern lecture on the American takeovers of Australian industry-a subject she had been researching for the Labour Party-and talked about the political ramifications of it, both in terms of ever-increasing dependence on American investment and the paybacks a client state must make, like fighting wars in Korea and other places.

It was all unnecessary. Hissao knew almost as much about the subject as she did. He was soon bored and boredom-because he was not a meek young man-soon gave way to irritation.

"I see," he said, now parodying the very quality Leah had misread in him. He filled his beer gla.s.s from the jug. "But it doesn't matter, so long as the Resch's is still cold."

She took the bait and that made him really cross. He clicked his tongue loudly. It was an unexpected enough (and sufficiently loud) noise to make Goldstein stop.

"Do you really think", Hissao said, his cheeks burning, "that I don't know all that stuff?"

Goldstein opened her mouth combatively and then shut it cautiously. She tilted her head appraisingly. At last she said: "I don't know you."

"No," he said. "You don't."

They were both embarra.s.sed then. Leah poured more beer for both of them and Hiss...o...b..gan to talk again, deliberately trying, with words and enthusiasm, to bleed the poisonous temper out of his system.

"Leah," he said, "even if I had no principles at all, I wouldn't do what she wants."

"She's your mother."

"Yes, yes, she's my mother, but I wouldn't do it. Out of pure self- interest I wouldn't do it. Out of egotism, I wouldn't. Out of pride, arrogance, ambition."

He listed motivations that, because they were a little unsavoury, he judged she would believe more readily than fine ones.

"You see," he said, smiling, but not calmly. "I'm going to be a great architect."

He took one of Goldstein's cigarettes and lit it with not-quite-steady hands.

Then he was a young man, all afire with enthusiasm and ambition. And Goldstein, who knew herself to be living amongst the rusted wrecks of lives, felt very old and grey and cynical and she envied the smooth skin of his cheeks and the clarity of his eyes and she felt herself giving way to his will as he talked about greatness, his his greatness, as if it were a thing so certain that he could touch it. He said it made the skin on his fingers go taut-he showed her where-and the quick beneath his nails tingle. And Leah was entranced and repelled by him at the same time. She felt-as she had done when she saw the bow tie-that he was decadent, that his smile was overripe, his skin too smooth, his teeth too white; but there was also something else about him that contradicted this, something untarnished and tough, as precise and unblunted as a surgical blade fresh from its paper wrapping. She had seen this, this tough thing, when he had clicked his tongue. greatness, as if it were a thing so certain that he could touch it. He said it made the skin on his fingers go taut-he showed her where-and the quick beneath his nails tingle. And Leah was entranced and repelled by him at the same time. She felt-as she had done when she saw the bow tie-that he was decadent, that his smile was overripe, his skin too smooth, his teeth too white; but there was also something else about him that contradicted this, something untarnished and tough, as precise and unblunted as a surgical blade fresh from its paper wrapping. She had seen this, this tough thing, when he had clicked his tongue.

And yet, through prejudice no doubt, she began to distance herself from him. She leaned back in her chair and dropped her cigarette into the gravel. She listened carefully to what he said-as if the words were a typewritten transcript with no pa.s.sion or any inflexion. It seemed to her that all he believed in was his ambition. She was wrong, of course, but she was also stubborn in her opinions, and clung to first impressions long past the time when a reasonable person would give them up. And now she remembered a time-she had thought a great deal about this time recently-when everyone she knew seemed occupied with the problems of belief and principle. They had gone about it inelegantly, stumblingly, stupidly often, but at least it had mattered to them and even Herbert Badgery, a blue-eyed illywhacker, had so wished himself to be a man of principle that he had imitated a Wobbly and fought the railway police.

But architecture, she thought, was no better than bird-smuggling. She was not insensitive to architecture. (Quite the opposite, as we have seen already.) The new buildings of Sydney cowed her and seemed, in their intentions, no better than the old ones she wished destroyed. They seemed merciless and uncaring, like machines of war. They rose in disciplined ranks and cast shadows in the streets while the night sky was all abloom with their alien flowers. And this, because it was the only architecture that seemed to matter, was the only architecture she could see. She therefore interrupted Hissao to demand that he confront the path he was choosing, that he admit the companies he worked for (she a.s.sumed companies and he did not contradict her a.s.sumption) would almost certainly have values that were against the interests not only of fish and birds, but also of marsupials and mammals, human beings included.

By then they were drunk, although neither of them realized it. Their combativeness was not without joy and when Leah dragged him out the side gate (she intended to show him the city skyline, but there were plane trees in the street which blocked the view) she took him by his hand and laughed when he resisted. When the skyline would not reveal itself, no matter how they jumped, they went into the bar and bought another jug of beer. Then they went back into the bright garden which was now, at lunchtime, redolent with burning meat and alive with the small blue flashes of burning chop fat as Mich Crozier's customers cooked themselves their famous five-bob barbecues.

Neither Hissao nor Leah ate. He was telling her that there was not yet an Australian architecture, only a colonial one with verandas tacked on. She said the only suitable architecture should be based on the tent. He agreed with her. She was surprised. She then talked resentfully-Hissao thought-of Mr Lo who was happy to stay where he was and be fed and did not need to worry about what it meant to be Chinese and that she, for her part, was sick to death of trying to decide what it meant to be Australian. She then began to contradict herself, to say there could never be an Australian architecture and he was a fool for trying because there was no such thing as Australia or if there was it was like an improperly fixed photograph that was already fading.

When Hissao objected she told him he was immoral and politically naive.

Hissao then told her that he had smoked a reefer and had s.e.x with a sailor on the night his father died. He tried to talk about the jumble of emotions he felt about this death and which she too, presumably, felt; he looked for some good thing in the aftermath of the nightmare.

Goldstein was shocked and revolted, but also astonished, that in spite of all the things about the boy that offended her (the sailor most of all, but also the drug-taking, the lack of belief, the lonely egotism of ambition) that they could at least agree on this question of the Badgery Pet Emporium, that it was a business that could no longer be innocently pursued.

She had the numbers. The pet shop had been done in. Stumbling through the glare of Abercrombie Street towards the city, they stopped to formally shake hands on their agreement.

So when she arrived back at the pet shop with a bad headache and blistered feet, she did not pay very much attention to the mumbling grunting conversation being conducted by Emma and Herbert Badgery. She saw the widow had regained possession of her Vegemite bottle. Its lid was now rustfree and, had she cared to look inside, she would have seen it contained filigree, like coral, and that bright blue fish were flitting in and out of it.

The matter of Hissao's future had been decided in her absence.

63.

Blame? You wish to discuss blame?

But look-I am growing t.i.ts. You may worry about that before you worry about blame. So bring on the dancing girls, bring on your young men with callipers, your snotty-nosed physiologists. Let them poke and calibrate if you think it will tell you anything.

Take my photograph any way you like. I told you already, I don't care about the legs. You wish to know why the breast on the left is different from the one on the right, why their skin, in all my withered chest, is there so taut, so smooth and marble white that you get a bulge in your pants examining me? No? You are more interested in blame?

You wish to know who was to blame for the death of the last-recorded gold-shouldered parrot.

Very well.

The last-recorded golden-shouldered parrot was destined to take its species into extinction, to breathe its last breath in the honey-sweet embrace of a beautiful woman.

Its golden shoulder (or, more precisely, wing) was the least remarkable feature of this creature which now, as the crime commences, is being gently sedated by my grandson Hissao who has been good enough to put his personal ambitions to one side for the welfare of his family.

The beak is now carefully-fastidiously even-tied together with fine white thread and its precious jewel-like wings are likewise being battened down for travelling. This bird is very valuable-the proceeds of its sale will feed us, clothe us, pay our overheads for three months, publish Malley's Urn Malley's Urn, contribute several thousand dollars to the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, and keep my grandson in the George V for six weeks if he wishes it. So naturally he handles it with great respect. Even when he sews it inside a small pocket where it will lie, head downwards, for the next thirty hours on its journey to Rome there is a gentleness in his movements, a sadness even, a sensitivity unimaginable in a man who felt himself called to be a smuggler. Hissao is not one of those greedy fellows whose suitcases, full of dead birds, incorrectly drugged and badly packed, are occasionally intercepted by customs officers.

This bird is as beautiful as a Persian carpet and it will travel in no suitcase, but nestle inside Hissao's baggy trousers, just beside his p.e.n.i.s.

The snakes have already settled inside the lining of his jacket. There are two children's pythons, one in each sleeve. The young man has a natural affinity with snakes and they will, he knows, find the warmth of his body agreeable. No sedation is required.

Hissao now holds out his arm for the coat which Leah Goldstein, having first inspected him critically, hands to him silently. It is ten years since they met in Mich Crozier's and their relationship is cool and formal, and yet neither of their pa.s.sions is any less and Goldstein, in particular, seems eaten away by her feelings so she has become very thin and gaunt and her eyes have dropped into the shade of their sockets so she gives the appearance of a stern and rather malevolent bird.

Hissao thinks her a hypocrite to accept money from an enterprise she so obviously disapproves of.

Goldstein thinks of him very much as she thought of him that day, except she no longer puts any store on his ambition. And yet it is still there and it has grown, like the roots of a tree constrained too long in a pot, so it is hard and matted and dry, the old wood and the fine hair all compressed into one hard dark knot.

They both stand to admire the effect in the mirror which is now the dominant feature of this room where Charles once incubated the eggs of lyrebirds and bower-birds, an occupation that now, contrasted with its present use, seems blameless. The incubators have long ago ceased to tumble and they stand, silent, heavy like very old-fashioned refrigerators with c.u.mbersome hinges and big corroded brand names. Apart from the incubators there is now a mirror, a small workbench and a refrigerator.

But do not, yet, be in too much hurry with your blame, but rather look at Hissao's reflection in the mirror and you will feel, whether you approve or not, a fondness for the young man in the expensive baggy clothes and you would guess, correctly, that this life, a life he did not choose, is not entirely repulsive to him. There is a new tendency to fleshiness in the face and his body has become, whilst not fat, not even plump, well padded. He has a good nose for good wine, speaks ten languages, three of them like a native, has educated tastes and cultured friends in many countries. He has dined with grouchy old Frank Lloyd Wright at Taelsin West and can tell, in the master's voice, the story of how the architect thundered "strike the forms" when the nervous builder hesitated on the Kauffman job.

He does not think himself either unhappy or bitter and when he bids his mother and grandfather goodbye there is no enmity between them. As he walks down the dusty empty stairwell he does not know how much he hates those of us who remain in those rundown galleries, living in the rusting slum that was once the best pet shop in the world.

He is alive, high on the risks of his profession, and his nostrils flare like an Arab stallion tricked up for show, the inside of those flaring nostrils rubbed with uncut cocaine and ginger powder rubbed on its a.r.s.e to make it lift its tail so high.

But the hate is there, not so different to the hate that Leah Goldstein wakes with each morning, although in this case it is buried deeply, coiled in him like a stainless-steel spring. It is not obvious in any way, certainly not now, if you watch him walk-the last pa.s.senger on QF4 to Rome. You see only an urbane young man with a first-cla.s.s tag on his brief case. You may notice his oddly scuffed shoes, as carefully chosen as his trousers, but you would not guess that he was holding his breath. This breath-holding is not caused by anxiety-there is no risk yet-he is trying not to smell the smell of airports in which he discerns fear, anxiety, impatience, drunkenness, fatigue, false feelings, a whole Hogarth of smells which he is, fastidious fellow, trying to lock away from the receptors of his brain. It is the breath-holding that makes his appearance slightly rigid and although this is not comical in itself it is made so by the hostess who accompanies him, circling her missing pa.s.senger like a Queensland heeler driving home a recalcitrant bullock.

Three hundred and eighty pa.s.sengers awaited Hissao who had the good grace to act out some mild embarra.s.sment as he took his first-cla.s.s seat. He folded his large overcoat with exaggerated care and stubbornly refused to give it up to the uncertainties of the overhead locker. He placed it carefully beneath the seat.

The craft was now half an hour late, but when Hissao smiled at the steward, the man could no longer find it in himself to be angry.

The seat next to my grandson was occupied by a large handsome woman. She looked Italian or Spanish. She had olive skin, sloe eyes, a square jaw, and Hissao guessed her age, correctly, at thirty-four. No sooner had he clipped his seat belt together than he settled down to admire her. He did not rush into it like a glutton or a boor, but like a man carefully unfolding a napkin and watching wine being poured into a large gla.s.s.

He admired her hands (brown skin and such pink nails like seash.e.l.ls) which seemed to him perfectly proportioned, undecorated by nail polish or rings, but soft and supple. He watched them trace unselfconscious paths as they touched each other, her cheek, her forehead. He enjoyed their suppleness, the easy way the fingers could bend back from the pale pink of the palm which was crossed with the clear deep lines of an unhesitant life.

Hissao relaxed into the seat and, as the craft lifted off the tarmac at Mascot Airport, touched the parrot for luck and smiled with satisfaction at the perfection of life.