Illywhacker (63 page)

“Is that so?”

“It is.” He was, suddenly, very solemn.

In the silence that followed I realized that I was not to be bashed. It was only bribery that was required. The night was full of the high-pitched whine of the swamp.

“Here, take it,” Moth said, suddenly blown along on the gust of a new mood so that where, a minute before, he had been pensive, as still as a pig on a butcher’s hook, he was now all eyes and elbows. He thrust the Vegemite bottle at me. “Here, take it. Take it for a pound. I’ll settle for a quid. It’s a nasty wormy thing you’ve done and it’s a nasty wormy thing in a bottle, and I don’t want it. I hope it gives you nightmares, Badgery. I hope it makes you see things when you’re awake.”

“Done,” I said, giddy with relief.

“Three quid,” he said, “and it’s yours.”

“Done.” I did not care about the three quid. All I had in my bank account was the money he had arrested me with: three pounds, two shillings and sixpence.

“Three pounds two and six, and you have a deal.”

“Done,” I said, and happily signed the withdrawal chit he had brought in with him.

Moth rose and, having fussily arranged his genitals, knocked on the door to be let out. This was habit, but quite unnecessary. The door was unlocked, and there was no one except prisoners to hear him knock on it. All he had to do was open it, walk down two steps, cross the so-called “quadrangle,” duck under the big rainwater tanks, cut through the big shade house full of eucalypt seedlings-a nice cool place with a pleasant smell of damp earth and sawdust—and he would be at the front gate which would not, probably not, be locked either. The prisoners were either very young and in for very short sentences or, like me, too old to consider the fifty-mile walk.

Moth stood at my door, waiting. He drummed his fingernails against the plywood.

“I’ll tell you, Badgery. I would have given it to you. I would have paid you money to take the nasty thing. Have you ever noticed,” he said, “how in a dream nothing ever stays still? Things are always moving, Badgery. Have you noticed?”

I stood up and opened the door for him. I just turned the handle and moved it in an inch so he would feel what I had done, but he no longer seemed interested in leaving.

“Always moving. You look at a face and you think you’ve got a fix on it, but it changes. The mouth opens and becomes a fish or if it’s pretty it turns ugly and all the white skin is suddenly scars. You have noticed it, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s right,” he nodded in satisfaction. “And lovely roses turn into lumps of meat. You cannot grasp it, isn’t that right, like mercury between your fingers?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said. He stared at me with those odd pale eyes that seemed to shift mercurially from belligerence to puzzlement. “I knew you’d know,” he said.

He blinked and looked at me for a moment before he realized that the door had been opened. Then, without word, he turned and left me. I watched him pass out of sight under the tank stands. A minute later—he must have been running—I heard his car start and saw the lights sweep across the so-called “cottages” where the screws were obliged to live with their unhappy wives.

I understood a little more about Sergeant Moth when I met his brother and heard he was famous in the Clarence River region for his enterprise in the field of small bribes. He made his money from after-hours drinkers, two-up schools and SP bookies and it was only natural that he would, like a careful housewife, hesitate before throwing out the scraps of an arrest.

I didn’t look at the ugly “souvenir” for weeks. I avoided it. I hid it behind Goldstein’s envelopes—those perfumed razor blades—and when I saw it again, by accident, it had gone mercifully cloudy. There was a particularly hot February night in 1939, the one in which the yabbies caused so much trouble, after which the liquid in the bottle turned gin-clear. It was then that I noticed what looked like a wart behind the knuckle. But by 1939 I had other things to worry about. I had become a student. I had the privilege of a desk and extra shelves. Never mind I cracked the asbestos sheeting putting up the shelves—I got written up in the
Rankin Downs Express
and when my exam results came out they made an even bigger fuss.

I had the bottle tucked away behind the dictionary that the governor had given to me. Every time I removed the book I could not help noticing that the wart was growing bigger. This worried me as much as if I’d found a growth on my own finger, one that frightened me so much I couldn’t confess it to myself, let alone a doctor.

I started to take the dictionary down, not for a useful word, but to glance at what I’d hidden behind it. I saw it happened just as Sergeant Moth said it did.

The finger changed. It changed all the time. It changed like a face in a dream.

I will not upset myself by describing the slimy monsters that tried to free themselves from that bottle, but rather tell you about the morning I woke early and found it filled with bright blue creatures that darted in and out of delicate filigree forests, like tropical fish feeding amongst the coral.

Is it hard to understand why an old man with his dentures in his hand would suddenly show his pink gums and grin? There: Herbert Badgery, Apprentice Liar, as delighted as a baby with a bright blue rattle.

The AJS had been wheeled into Chaffey’s shed where it had been, solicitously, covered with a tarpaulin to keep off the shit of wandering chickens.

It was a hot night and the smell of the mouse plague was heavy in Charles’s nostrils as he lay in bed. He could hear the mice gnawing at the walls and scampering across the ceiling and, occasionally, a small squeak to indicate that one of his snakes was still dining.

He was hungry. His stomach was tight and he had a taste like iron filings in his mouth but it was, just the same, lovely to lie in a bed in a room by himself, even if the room was just an open back veranda. The mattress smelt a little unusual, but he was used to other people’s smells, strange sheets, hessian blankets, beds shared with bony children, pissing children, pinching children. He could sleep anywhere, on kitchen tables or in hay sheds, it made no difference, and when he was an older man, suffering insomnia, he would look back nostalgically on those lonely nights when he could escape hunger or heartache just by lying down and closing his eyes.

He slept easily, dreaming instantly of his pet shop in which environment the smell of mice (now gnawing at the salty underarms of his carelessly discarded shirt) was nothing more than the aroma of a pet’s cornucopia.

So as Charles contemplated a rare golden-shouldered parrot, a
being so beautiful that its dreamer’s face showed a beatific smile, Les Chaffey quietly slipped the tarpaulin off the H—series AJS and stood there, contemplating it. There was a look on his face that could be mistaken for hostility, the way he narrowed his eyes and pushed his head forward, but it was no more than intense curiosity, and it was easy enough to imagine that it was the sheer force of his gaze that had worn away at his wife’s face until it had taken on the look of a pretty fabric that has been laundered too often, the bright blues gone chalky pale and the pinks almost white.

The AJS, Les Chaffey thought, was an interesting machine. He squatted beside it for a moment. Then, like a fellow reaching for his pipe, he pulled a small wooden-handled screwdriver from his back pocket and, in four fast neat movements, removed the single screw from the pilgrim pump. He could see, before he touched that screw, what the pilgrim pump was, i.e., a device for automatically controlling the oil feed to the engine, but that was not enough. He wanted to know how it worked. He fetched a spanner and disconnected the pipes that led to it. He removed the little knurled nut on the pump itself and was surprised by the spring—loaded cams. He had not expected spring—loading and the spring escaped him, flying beyond the circle of lamplight. He collected what remained (a worm and roller, two cams, the knurled nut) and held them in the dry cup of his hand. He thought about the spring a moment but decided to wait for daylight.

Having fiddled with the worm and roller, having learned the rate was controlled by the magneto sprocket, the mystery was more or less explained and, glancing over the bike again, he was struck by the small clearance between rear tyre and mudguard. How, he wondered, would a fellow change a tyre on a machine like this? Indeed, at first sight, it looked impossible.

He was busy removing the chain guard when his wife came in and stood behind him, eccentric only in her nakedness.

“Come on, Dad, leave it alone.”

“Nah, Marjorie, just looking.” He looked up and gave her a creased smile and tapped her bare ankle with the screwdriver. “You go to bed.”

“What is it?” She squatted, and her body, had anyone been interested to look at it, was what you might expect of a forty-five-year-old woman accustomed to hard physical work. She was slight, like her husband, and her biceps showed a similar
wiriness. They both had suntans that stopped just above the elbow.

“A pilgrim pump,” said Les, opening his hand to show her the parts. “A wonderful thing. But what I’m worried about is this rear wheel. Could I trouble you to hold the lamp, Marjorie?”

She held the lamp for him while he placed the chain guard gently on the floor. He unclipped the chain and folded it neatly. He put the chain clip in his shirt pocket.

“I’m going to hold up the back of the bike,” he said. “Now if you could just wiggle this back wheel around, we’ll see what’s what.”

She sat on the dusty floor behind the cycle, heedless of the dirt on her naked backside and, while her husband took the weight off the back tyre, she wiggled it as asked.

“Did you ask his permission, Leslie Chaffey?”

“For God’s sake, Marjorie, don’t nag.”

“I weren’t nagging.”

The back wheel suddenly found its way free, just where it had appeared impossible, slipped neatly out beside the guard, and, taking Mrs Chaffey by surprise, rolled gently away from her to fall down in the shadows.

Les Chaffey waited until his wife was clear, then lowered the rear of the bike. “I’ll have it back together by morning.”

“You forget.”

“What do I forget? Hold this a sec.”

He handed her the chain while he fetched, from a high shelf in the unlit upper half of the shed, a stack of old newspapers. He spread these out, slowly, like a man laying out a hand of patience.

“You forget,” she said, holding the oily chain in her two outstretched palms. “You forget.”

He was now at the clutch, or rather at the place where the clutch cable attached itself to a small lever on the gearbox casing. She came and squatted beside him and, when he held out the lamp to her, she placed the oily chain on the newspaper and took it from him. “You forget,” she repeated. “The threshing machine.”

“For God’s sake,” he grunted, “that was twenty years ago. You didn’t even know me.”

“I heard about it just the same. You forget what you’re like.” Just the same, she held the lamp high, and helped him to find the small metal ball when it popped off the end of the gearbox spindle.

“The thing I can’t understand,” said Les Chaffey, digging out
the parts of the pilgrim pump from his pocket and rolling them around his open palm, “is how they got the bank manager to lend them the money. How could you explain it to a bank manager?”

“Oh, pity’s sake, don’t go on about it.”

“It was a good plough, Marjorie. Everybody said so.”

“They did,” she said. She stood up. “I’m filthy and we’ve got two hundred gallons of water.” When he didn’t answer she shrugged and walked back to the house, hanging her head and kicking out her legs like a fourteen-year-old girl. She washed quietly, with three cups of water, and left the dirty water at the back door for her husband to use later.

She lay on her bed and was asleep almost immediately. She opened her eyes—it seemed like a minute later—to see her husband standing there with a piece of glistening metal in his oil—black hands.

“Marjorie, come and look at this.”

“I want to sleep.”

“Marjorie, this is a beautiful thing.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake.” She sat up. She was cold. It was the cold that made her look at the clock. “Dad, it’s five in the morning.”

“I know, I know, look how it’s
turned.”

“Oh God,” she realized what it was. “God, it’s the crankshaft.” If he had stood before her with a pulsing red heart in his hands she could hardly have appeared more horrified.

Charles would never have any understanding of machinery. It eluded him. His mind, confronted by something as simple as a tyre valve, would suddenly go blank and refuse to function sensibly. This was not such a disadvantage later in life when he could afford to pay a mechanic to do the work for him, but it made things difficult when he was young and poor, and never more so than on the occasion that Les Chaffey went to work on the AJS.

Charles woke early and went to sit in the dining room. He waited for ten or fifteen minutes. His stomach was drum-tight and very noisy. He stood up and walked around, examining the map on the wall, the dictionary on the shelf, the trophies from the rifle club. He was not so interested in these things but hoped that the sound of his boots on the floorboards might attract attention—he imagined his host and hostess sound asleep. He coughed once
or twice, then he went out to the kitchen house where he found the stove cold. He opened the bread crock and discovered the end of a loaf of bread. He ate it in a nervous rush, chewing it so little, swallowing the crust in such a big lump, that he thought he had cut his oesophagus. He opened the sugar tin and ate a cupped handful, leaning over the sink so he would not put sticky signs on the floor. He brushed the spilt sugar down the plug hole and stepped outside. He did up all three buttons of his suit and walked (lifting his boots high as though his path were sticky mud) across to the shed where he hoped he might find Les Chaffey blacksmithing.

It was gloomy in the shed but he saw, with some relief, that his host and hostess were both there. But even when his eyes adjusted to the light he did not understand what they were doing. He certainly did not recognize his AJS which was spread, in little pieces, across the freshly newspapered floor while Chaffey and his pyjamaed wife argued with each other about the gearbox.