Illywhacker (74 page)

Charles did not feel nice at all. He felt ill. This face before him was the face of his nightmares. His sister was skun and this was a face licked by camp fire. There were American baubles on the end of a fishing line, hooks, razors, blades, balloons, feathers, knives. Soon his ear would go dull and fill with blood.

“God damn, Charlie. I read about your shop last year and I wondered.…”

Charles lowered his bag. “That was a different shop.”

“And I’ve been wondering if this is the same boy I knew.”

Charles could not help himself—he smiled. He liked Americans. He liked the careful round way they spoke and the way they never hesitated to give an opinion. He liked the smart lines of the Major’s jacket and the floppy officer’s cap. Most of all he liked the sense of cleanliness that emanated from Nathan Schick. The real Nathan Schick had little to do with the grotesque figure in his recurring dream.

It was lunchtime, and the shop was busy with browsers. Charles wanted to get out of the stair entrance but Nathan, oblivious to the pushing people, wanted to talk. “Remember the corellas,” he said, releasing Charles’s shoulder and holding his upper arm instead. “The corellas you got for the show in Ballarat. And the first one shit on Shirlene Maguire.”

“Don’t talk about Sonia,” Charles said.

Nathan blinked.

“I know you weren’t going to, but… don’t….”

There was a soft part to Nathan Schick. It was as mushy as marshmallow, all sweet and sentimental. And when Charles said that to him it was almost enough to bring him undone. Charles backed off the entrance to the stairs, dragging his termite sack with him. Nathan followed him and began to pat him, comfortingly, on his shoulder but when he saw the look on the boy’s face, he stopped.

“Hell’s bells,” he laughed, a silly false laugh. He tapped out a battered Lucky Strike and lit it. “I’m not here to talk about the past, Charlie Badgery. It’s business. The U. S. of A. requires your services.”

It is difficult to convey the impact of this simple slogan on Charles Badgery. He was like a man struck by love for whom all
the world—a minute ago so clear, delineated by crisp lines and sharp colours—now runs at the edges until it is nothing more than a blurred velvet frame for the object of its affections. It did not matter that the saleswoman with the bruise on her throat wished a confirmation of the price of a children’s python or that, having smiled and excused herself to the Yank, she shouted in the direction of his hearing aid. Not two feet away an old man was stuffing breadcrumbs through the bars of a mynah bird’s cage, although there were signs forbidding it. And even when Henry’s slipper fell four levels and landed—dead on target—at his father’s feet, Charles did not react, and his children, leaning over the rail, got no fun.

“What services?” Charles put down his bag of termites.

“Professional services, what else?”

“How?”

“General MacArthur,” said Nathan Schick, “has asked me to buy him a mascot.”

And that is how Charlie Badgery came to provide MacArthur with his celebrated cockatoo. It was he who taught the bird to say, “Hello, Digger.” He put the cage on the preparation bench and sat on a cage in front of it for five hours every night. Every time the bird said “Hello, Digger” he gave it Vegemite on toast.

The important thing about this episode was not the cockatoo’s brief blaze of glory in the newsreels and newspapers, nor was it the letter MacArthur wrote to Charles declaring his emporium the best pet shop in the world. No, the important thing—our whole future hinged on it—was that he renewed his acquaintance with Nathan Schick.

Nathan Schick was a juggler. He had so many schemes going on in his head at once that he rarely got any of them going. I don’t think this disappointed him. The soft burr of sadness in his ascetic face was not produced by this, but rather, the contrary: it was the schemes that took the edge off his sadness. I do not believe that his business was to make money. It was to make schemes, and in this you must class him a runaway success. It did not matter that there were five schemes smashed and bleeding at his feet, he had another one arcing through the air and it was this his eyes concentrated on.

With Nathan, nothing was what it seemed. The show in Ballarat, for instance, was not a dry run for the Tivoli in Melbourne, although that is what he told Badgery & Goldstein. He set up the show in Ballarat to attract a certain Gloria Beaudare. There were sixteen complicated moves to checkmate, and I forget how it was meant to work, except it didn’t.

Likewise with MacArthur’s cockatoo. MacArthur was almost incidental to the scheme. He had not wanted a mascot. It was Schick who convinced him that he needed one, and the last thing on Schick’s mind was how the “Hello, Digger” would be received by the Australian public. He did not have time to worry about details. The bird had to say something. Nathan knew enough about Australia to know that people would take offence at a cockatoo calling a Yankee “Digger,” but he was in a hurry and couldn’t think of anything better. MacArthur liked it. Nathan did not care. It was not important to the scheme, because he also knew that once the cockatoo had been in the newsreels and in the papers it would be worth a lot of money. He did not bother to analyse why this should be so, that the public would pay good money to own a party to a presumption. What he knew was that one cockatoo looked exactly like another, and that he could produce fifty MacArthur’s cockatoos, or even a hundred, and sell each one as the original. It was a good scheme, as smooth and flawless as an egg.

He was not ready to discuss the scheme with Charles. When he sauntered into the shop, he had been ready, but in his memory he had confused the character of the father with that of the son. He had not been prepared for Charles’s earnestness, and he was now embarrassed by his enthusiasm for the Allied cause.

Charles did not want money. He told Nathan it would be an honour to be involved in any scheme at all—he did not even ask what the scheme might be.

Nathan smiled, a regretful smile, the smile of a man who remembers honour and knows what it feels like. He folded his soft hands behind his back and moved along the galleries behind Charles, gliding on thin-soled American shoes, as light as a dancer. He observed the silent incubators and dry-retched in the fly-breeding room. On the fourth gallery he met the three-legged goanna and Charles’s unconventional family. He did not inquire as to why Charles’s wife should have a small Japanese child at her breast. He watched the pets’ meals being prepared in the family kitchen. He then went out to the gallery again and stood and watched his countrymen in the canyon below. It was then that the
second scheme came to him. This scheme was so much bigger than the first that it immediately claimed all of his attention. When he had thought it through a little he went and found Charles and persuaded him that they should go down to King’s Cross and discuss business. He smiled at Emma, but she unnerved him, and he went to wait on the wide creaking stairs while Charles changed from his grey overalls into his Dedman suit.

They went to several clubs. They ate steak and chips and oysters. They drank Scotch. Charles had few of the social graces and he was only at ease when he could discuss birds, marsupials or mammals. Nathan was not bored at all. He was delighted to listen while Charles shouted about necrobacillosis in wallabies, neoplasia in a palm cockatoo. Nathan asked questions, nodding and frowning and showing sympathy. Charles confessed his plan for a whole factory staffed by budgerigars. He revealed his plan for a goldfish sleep-inducer. Nathan advised him to see a patent attorney.

In a taxi on the way to Double Bay Charles confessed his delight to be doing something for the war. Nathan shifted uncomfortably. In a room above a fruit shop they played poker with two giant negroes who mesmerized Charles out of five pounds. Then they walked three miles to Darlinghurst amidst streets of wind-blown garbage cans. Here, at last, they were in harmony, both becoming lyrical about the uniqueness and beauty of Australian birds and animals.

They knocked on some doors, which turned out to be wrong.

They were already drunk, but Nathan stopped a Yankee captain in Crown Street and bought the rest of his Scotch from him. They went down to William Street and sat in the gutter to drink it. The westerly wrapped newspapers around their ankles.

There is something about a westerly. When you’re inside a house, there is no nastier wind. It pulls and tugs at you. It howls and shudders. But when you’re in an open space it is a different matter entirely and it affected both of the men. Charles was struck by a desire to remove his clothes and let the wind wash around him; he was almost drunk enough to do it.

“So,” Nathan said. He detached a sheet of newspaper from his ankle, and held it up fastidiously between thumb and forefinger before releasing it.

“So,” he said. The newspaper sailed through the air and wrapped itself eagerly around a lamppost. “So what are we going to do?”

“We’re going to get drunk.”

“We’ve done that.” Nathan handed over the whisky all the same. He noticed, as he did so, that the street was totally empty, all of William Street from King’s Cross to Hyde Park. Something went tight in his chest and he put his hand to his face and held it. But then two taxis appeared beside the New Zealand Hotel and came up the hill towards them.

When the taxis passed, Nathan tried to light a cigarette but the wind was too strong. “What,” he put his Lucky Strike back in its crumpled packet, “are we going to do when your customers have gone home?”

This was the Intro to the Scheme. It confused Charles. He could not see how the “we” had got itself messed into “your customers”. He pulled the cork out of the bottle and raised it to his lips.

“The war can’t last forever,” Nathan said. “Then all your rich Yanks will go home. My question to you, Charlie, is have you thought about this?”

Of course he’d thought about it. It had kept him awake at night, wandering around his galleries, sitting in pyjamas on those wide lonely stairs, staring into the aquariums in search of sleep.

“I want the war to end tomorrow,” he said. “I would give my right arm.”

“Yes, yes, I know.” Nathan did know. He was not without sympathy. He merely wished to get to the scheme. “But what will you do?”

Suddenly Charles was lurching to his feet and roaring into the face of the westerly.

“How in the fuck do I know?” His eyes were watering, but possibly it was only the wind. “How … in … the fuck … do … I … know?” Some girls in a taxi drove past and waved at him, and he waved at them. His mood suddenly changed. He stood smiling after their tail-lights before returning to sit, more or less neatly, beside Nathan. “I’m shikkered. I’ve never been so shikkered before. Do you know how I know? Because,” he started giggling, “because I don’t normally fucking swear. Nathan, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

It was then that Nathan said all that stuff about Emma needing treatment. It was unnecessary. He regretted having said it immediately.

“What do you mean, treatment?”

“Believe me, Charlie, it costs. I know. My first wife is the same.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Emma.”

“Charlie.…”

“There’s nothing wrong with her. I love her….”

“Charlie….”

“Do you love your wife? Course you don’t. You said you didn’t. I feel sorry for you, Mr Schick, but I love my wife and my boys.”

Nathan took the bottle and felt the golden liquid dull the pain in his cigarette—sore throat. It was a long drink, as long as drowning, and when he had finished, and fumbled with the cork, and got it, at last, firmly into the throat of the bottle, he looked up and saw that his partner had gone.

Then he saw him, lurching at an angle across William Street.

“Shit,” said Nathan Schick.

The big pear-shaped figure paused in the middle of the street. It turned and shouted (“I love her”) and before the cry had been swallowed by the wind the figure turned and stumbled on its crumbled way. It tripped on the kerb on the other side of the street, kept its balance with vaudevillian precision, and disappeared into the darkness of the Forbes Street steps.

Nathan moved lightly across William Street. He regretted having said anything about his wife. He could never guess that his comment, so vigorously denied, would lead to a hosing down within the hour. Nathan took special care at the kerb. He crossed the footpath as dainty as a shadow and started to ascend the unlit steps.

“How the fuck do I know?” said a voice from the sixth step.

Nathan threaded his way past a nest of knees and elbows and sat on the step above him. He felt the cold in the old stone steps and resisted the strong desire he felt to talk about love and loneliness.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“How in the fuck do I know?”

“Charlie, listen.”

“I listen.”

“Do you want to go back to selling puppy dogs in a one-room dump?”

“I never sold a puppy dog in my life.”

“All right, Mr Clever Dick.” He gave the boy the Scotch and watched him drink it. There was a lighted window in a house above their heads and he could see the flow of the whisky as it ran down the boy’s big chin and dripped, in a dotted line of liquid light, on to his shirt and tie. “All right, Mr Wise Guy, you tell me. How are we going to make a quid when the Yanks go home?”

Charles saw the answer, right there, in the piss-sour gloom of the Forbes Street steps. The whisky stung a cut on his hand and he saw it—this patch of dazzling clarity in the middle of the murk.

“Export,” he said.

Nathan leaned forward and tried to hug him. He poked a finger in his eye before he got an arm around his head and squeezed his ears. “That’s my scheme,” he said.

“Me here, you there.”

“That’s right.”

“Hands across the fucking ocean.”

It is true that the discussion on the Forbes Street steps led to the hosing down and thus contributed to the loss of the affection of his two eldest boys, but it also led to the formation of a company with Nathan Schick, to the printing of letterheads with a Los Angeles address, and to one (only) cockatoo that could say, “Hello, Digger.”