Illywhacker (18 page)

For two weeks I had groaned in my sleep and tossed and turned. I was denied the roof. I was denied the merest civility as my plaster-armed beloved affected normality.

Did she blame me for her fall? Did she hate me for jeopardizing her life? I did not know, could get no answer, merely watch her as she took up occupations she had previously rejected. She had taken to socializing with the sons of squatters once again. She had gone, with high hemlines, to “At Homes” and balls, and left me jealous, half mad, to cluck with her parents who were concerned she might be mixing with a fast crowd. I shared their concern. I made it worse. I rubbed at it until it was red and blistered. I wished them to order her to
cease, not just the squatters but also the history lessons. I knew what those history lessons were about. But Jack was indulgent, and Molly distracted, and I could get no commitment from them to do anything.

I tried to corner Phoebe in hall or music room, but I could get no reassurance. She hissed caution and passion all at once and did nothing to calm my fears. I attempted dangerous embraces in the bathroom and was savagely repelled. I tried to catch her eyes between spoons of porridge but she refused the very possibility and smiled dutifully at her father and asked serious questions about capital, loans, the structure of companies and the future of an aircraft factory in Geelong.

Her dedication to this deception was remarkable, and was so thoroughly undertaken that, hisses notwithstanding, I felt no hope.

I lost my appetite and could not summon up sufficient interest in the aircraft factory I had so carelessly set in motion. I was forced to imitate my former self, counterfeit an enthusiasm to match that of my host who, in anticipation of our backer’s visit, wanted me to tramp around the bush looking at timbers. He had the hang of this aspect very well. We would want mountain ash or white ash for spars; blue fig for struts; cudgerie for the fuselage. He was becoming quite knowledgeable on the subject and telephoned a man at the Forest Commission who promised to conduct tests on our timbers to see they met British Aeronautical Standards. He wanted to dot the “i”s and cross the “t”s but he did not tell me it was because Cocky Abbot had his doubts. He did not wish to offend me.

“What is it, Badgery?” he would ask. “Cat got your tongue?”

“I’m down,” I admitted, “there is no denying it.”

“You’ll see,” Jack cried, clapping his hands against his knees, not worrying that his spilt Scotch was lifting polish from the table, not noticing that his wife was sitting alone in the parlour with electric flex wound absently around her wrists, encircled by electricity travelling to and fro from the crackling wireless. “My word, you’ll see.”

I wished to Christ he would leave me alone, because I had other things on my mind which had no room for Great Plans, or Vision, which in the end have never been worth a tinker’s fart in comparison with a woman.

I was busy trying to establish what the papers call A Love Nest.

Indeed, the only thing that kept me from shuffling my feet like a tramp as I walked down Ryrie Street was that I had arranged a room above a Chinese laundry. The room had a bed and a washbasin and was three shillings a week with laundry thrown in. The Chinaman knew what I was up to, and I would say he did not approve, but he let me have the room none the less, and it gave me the strength to get on with other matters. I bought a new jute sack for the snake. I stopped at Griffith’s for the
Geelong Advertiser
which contained my third article on the future of the aeroplane in the Western District of Victoria. Although my story contained such attractive fancies as the transport of wool by air, it was remarkable for its dullness, a lack of enthusiasm that set it apart from its two predecessors which had, if I say so myself, shone forth with a luminosity of style that even the editor’s meddling could not diminish.

I passed the post office as Mr Jonathon Oakes scurried down the front steps, tucking a large white envelope into his waistcoat pocket. I crossed the street, stepping carefully across a pile of steaming horse dung which lay between the two shining tramtracks.

The draughtsman’s office was in an alleyway off Ryrie Street. As I mounted the steel fire-escape I was already at war with the man. I entered the office without knocking, slapping the newspaper briskly against my leg.

It was a poky office divided by a large counter. The draughtsman, with unfounded optimism in regard to his future prospects, had left far more room for his customers than for himself. He huddled at his desk. He was like a thin spider with his web on a dusty window. He squinted at his plans through small steel spectacles.

“Shop.”

“I saw you, Mr Badgery,” the draughtsman said, spacing his words to coincide with four thin-ruled lines of graphite.

There is an arrogance that seems to come naturally to a certain type of Englishman and this one had it. There was nothing in his gloomy little office above the alley that justified it. There was nothing in his bearing, his physique or his dress that could explain it. He picked up a roll of plans from the desk and brought them to the counter. The undersides of his pale wrists were dirty and his cuffs were frayed.

My eyes narrowed. My squiggly mouth straightened itself into an ungenerous line which left no trace of the lower lip that so
entranced Phoebe and along which she had loved to run the tip of her red-cuticled finger.

“There is just one particular,” he said (I stared at the pale scalp that shone through his thin black hair), “in which I have not been able to oblige.”

“Oh, yes.”

“In the matter of the copyright which is already registered and held, you see,” the pointing finger had three long black hairs on its bony knuckle, “by a Mr Bradfield of Sydney.”

“Do you recall my instructions?”

“Oh, exactly, Mr Badgery.”

The draughtsman removed his spectacles and cleaned them with his handkerchief. The watery eyes, thus revealed, showed no respect for his customer.

“My instructions were that you should put my name on the plan in respect,” I said, “in respect of the substantial changes I have made to the aileron designs.”

Of course I had stolen the damn plans. Never mind that my method of getting them had been clever or that Bradfield himself was never able to get a backer to make his six-seater B3, and that I was, in this way, actually doing the man a favour by attempting to make the craft he had laboured so long on.

Bradfield would have sympathized with me. He would not have grudged me his drawings, his technical data or the stress diagrams and calculations which he had, with typical thoroughness, had checked and passed by Captain Frank Barnwell, the man who designed the Bristol Fighter.

There was only one reason Bradfield could not make his B3—British interests didn’t want him to.

Now another member of the master race was trying to do the same to me. I held my temper nicely: “You don’t understand, it would appear, that these drawings you have executed are the foundation stone on which the Australian aircraft industry shall be built.”

The draughtsman allowed himself a thin smile at the very thought of such a thing. “Legally, Mr Badgery, a very shaky foundation.”

It was very quiet in the office. A horse and dray rattled down the laneway, its driver singing “Annie Laurie”.

“Have you ever been to Grafton?” I asked, leaning across the counter as one might lean across a bar.

“No,” the draughtsman said, and blinked.

“As you enter Grafton from the south,” I said pleasantly, “there is a rather large house on the left-hand side, a big stone place with leadlight windows, three houses before the post office. There is a gentleman who resides there, a Mr Regan, the Town Clerk of Grafton. Perhaps you know him.”

“No.”

“A pity, because you would know that Mr Regan has only four fingers on his left hand.”

The draughtsman tried to look me in the eye, but could not hold it. He blew his nose to hide his confusion. “Why do you tell me this?” he said.

“Because it was I who tore one off,” I smiled. “Just like a chicken wing.”

“You are threatening me?”

“The same in his case,” I said. “Now would you please place my name as the designer of the craft.” And I spelt my name out for him slowly.

This Regan story was, at least for the moment, a lie. Unnecessary, of course, but I enjoyed it. I liked the detail of it, the quick fabrication of the large stone house and the nine-fingered inhabitant within, forever sitting at a table which, although I did not trouble the Englishman with the details, was set for dinner. I silently encircled the house with elms and dotted daffodils across its brilliant lawns while the draughtsman hesitated before his vision of the stricken Regan whose four-fingered hand was torn and bloody.

“I will need this amendment by next Tuesday afternoon,” I said, putting on my hat. “You will oblige me by delivering them to Mr McGrath’s house in Western Avenue.”

It was because of this visit to the draughtsman that many people in Geelong said that I was a Chicago-style mobster. It was merely one of the conflicting stories I would leave behind me when I finally departed.

Molly unplugged herself, released her anxious coils of wire, and recaptured the kitchen from Bridget who was bidden to make stuffing for the goose. Bridget watched her mistress sew up the goose with too much thread and drop knives and forks in her hurry to have it done with.

Jack arranged chairs in the music room which were destined to be unused (the meeting with the squatters would never move beyond the dining room). He ran new wires to the front porch and hooked them up to a globe of extraordinary dimensions which would give the backers a floodlit entrance and bathe the inside of Jonathon Oakes’s bedroom whether he liked it or not.

The snake, confused by winter heating, shed its skin out of season and began to search for frogs which were not forthcoming. It moved at summer speed, its tongue flicking, and bit its discarded skin in irritation.

“It knows something is up,” Jack insisted. “Animals can feel these things and if you put it down to heating you are missing half the point.”

He was inclined to philosophize on this but I had too much on my mind to take pleasure from conversations about snakes or knots or wheels. I had to take the Morris Farman down to Colac to pick up a squatter for the meeting, an easy enough assignment, but I also had business with Phoebe in Geelong. Time was running short, and I left Jack at the dining-room table, rolling a rubber band off the plans which he had already made worn and grubby in his enthusiasm.

I flicked open my fob watch. It was already two o’clock. I should have been at Barwon Common.

I stood on one side of Little Maude Street, Phoebe on the other. She was in front of the milliner’s, her plastered arm in a cerise silk scarf which did not make her the least less attractive, not to me, not, I assumed, to the lanky boy who had come, the night before, to drive her to a gathering in an American Stutz. She wore the latest straight-line dress, a dazzling yellow, against which her breasts pushed most attractively and below which her wonderful calves (calves she had wrapped around me, calves I had licked and stroked) were there for total strangers to have dirty dreams about. I ached to hold her, but was totally forbidden.

When Stu O’Hagen drove between us in a brand new T Model with his straw-hatted wife sitting proudly beside him I did not even see him. When Jonathon Oakes (whose pockets included a stolen letter his own sister had written to Jack McGrath Esquire) tipped his hat to me I was unaware of him. Only later, in the air
above Warn Ponds, would I recognize these incidents as things from a dream, forgotten on waking, can be remembered later in the day.

Phoebe would not speak to me in public, but she had agreed to inspect the room. Her terms had been clear, hissed quickly. She would inspect it on her own, without me. She knew things that I did not. She had already intercepted one letter from Mrs Kentwell, a terrifying thing with an ultimatum like a scorpion’s tail. As for telling me why she was dancing with boys she had once rejected, she assumed that I would know exactly why she did it.

Yet there I was, across the street in front of the ironmonger’s, like some moon-eyed boy, and there was Jonathon Oakes, the wrinkled spy, picking his fussy way along the footpath, his little head turning this way and that, observing everything.

The pig-tailed Chinaman was watching too. He stood in the doorway of his laundry and Phoebe was her father’s daughter because she saw, not a man, but a cartoon from the
Bulletin:
John Chinaman outside his den.

I could stand it no more. I began to walk across the street towards her. The sweating Clydesdales of the brewer dray missed me by inches and the cockney driver’s abuse fell upon love-deaf ears.

Phoebe, having stopped to see me safe, turned angrily upon her heel and carried her broken arm sedately into Maude Street. I reached the milliner’s and stopped. Phoebe pretended to be interested in something in a baker’s window on the corner—let’s call it a dead fly, beside a tray of vanilla slices. I turned and saw that the Chinaman had come to stand in the middle of Little Maude Street to watch our love dance. I walked back towards the grinning sticky-beak who took a few steps backwards before fleeing for the steamy safety of his laundry. When I turned to look for Phoebe, she was no longer looking at flies or vanilla slices and Maude Street was empty except for a tram and a young man in a natty suit swinging on the crank handle of his Chevrolet. The Chevrolet was straddled squarely across the tramlines and the Newtown tram was bearing down on it, its bell clanging loudly.

I felt empty and angry all at once. I walked down Yarra Street to Little Mallop Street and then turned into Moorabool Street with the intention of going to the airfield. It was market day and the streets were filled with the low-crowned, broad-brimmed hats of farmers. They poured in and out of the ABC Grill Rooms and Cake
Shop where I, on a happier day, had bought Bridget her ice-cream cone. On an inspiration I pushed my way in and found my frightened lover sitting at a booth all alone with a dish of vanilla ice-cream whose melted mounds she prodded with a silver spoon held awkwardly in her left hand.