Illywhacker (46 page)

We were magicians that night. We made futures and summoned up pasts. We sent up flares loaded with words that spewed like broken glass across the sky, and I knew the dancer so little I imagined this normal.

It was, my God, like Halley’s Comet—for Leah to loosen her tongue and talk for the pleasure of it (lolly-paper talk) fifteen different factors must all coincide and I will list just eight of them.

1. A dancer’s walk.
   

2. Danger overcome.
   

3. McWilliams Autumn Brown Sherry or equivalent.
   

4. Her correspondence fully up to date.
   

5. No uncertainties threatening, i.e., no camp to shift, or new hall to hire.
   

6. Puddles dry and mud absent.
   

7. No sickness in camp.
   

8. Her mood itchy, but not scratchy.
   

The style of discourse she favoured when these conditions were satisfied was totally unrelated to her normal approach which was as functional as a hacksaw. You could hardly call it flowery but it did leave room for sentimentality and whimsy and was fuelled by both optimism and remorse.

So when she summonsed up Izzie I swear I saw him stand before me on the skirts of shadow round the fire, his big eyes wet with hurt, his pointy toes kicking moodily at a fat fleshy thistle whose obstinate root would not leave the soil.

He was the Good Man.

There were, as yet, no shades of grey in Leah’s mental menagerie, and Mervyn Sullivan was summonsed up to be the Evil Man. She could not bring herself to say exactly what she meant, but made herself so clear that I could feel I was lying in bed with him too, looking at his false watery mask while his prick gave odd vibrations to my perfect hatred and I grew breasts to press against his broad hair-matted chest and sharp nails to dig into his buttocks. She had Good and Evil, Strength and Weakness, had them paired and opposed in such a tangle that I grew giddy following her.

I paraded Jack and Molly, and displayed the Parrot Poem. I listened, light-headed, while she demolished Phoebe before my eyes, pulled her to pieces like a cheap celluloid doll, flung her arms into the blackberries and her hair into the fire.

“She made the cage,” I was informed. “She was a spoiled brat.”

The smoke from the fire was pleasantly intoxicating. I hastened to find a few favourable things to present in favour of my missing wife. I made a few fast lies, jerry-built things with bright colours and badly fitting lids. I talked aeroplanes and motor cars, all the Australian products that had begun so brightly. When I talked about these failures, Leah told me later, they sounded like little swallows that had fallen from their nests and died.

She showed me her father’s suit, Wysbraum’s red lips and broad bum, the white scalp beneath Rosa’s hair, and that splendid canvas, that huge complicated composition of moulded grey forms that Marx made, which she at once admired but could not bring herself to enter.

I was not quite so frank. I was (as Leah said later) “secretive”. I made no confessions of electric belts although the battery hung heavily on my leg; nor did I talk of ghosts and snakes.

“I did not like you, Mr Badgery,” Leah said, beneath the vast star-powdered sky, “until you did your act.”

“I did not like you, Miss Goldstein, until you finished yours.”

“God, you were funny, Mr Badgery.” She snapped a gum twig happily and threw it on the fire. “You should have seen yourself.”

I made a mud map in the dark.

She said: “I thought you were a spiv, excuse me; but when I saw you on the stage I changed my mind.”

I asked her why, and for once she was not interested in teasing the greasy hairs of reality apart to find The Truth.

“I dunno,” she said. “I did. Excuse me, I can’t see your face. Come and sit over here.”

I went and sat beside her on the log. She grinned at me in the dark. “I was nearly a doctor,” she said.

“Fair dinkum?”

“Dinky-die. Pass the bottle. I’m very partial to this stuff. It’s not good for you. Nothing’s good for you, nothing nice,” getting down to the core of her problem. “How old are you, Mr Badgery?”

“Forty,” I lied.

“I’m twenty-four,” she lied.

And yes, I know I promised there would be no hanky-panky, but that was a lie as well.

“I’m partial to a number of things,” she whispered, on the log, by the camp fire, at Crab Apple Creek.

“I’m a bit partial myself,” I said.

“I’m very partial,” she said, “but for God’s sake, be careful.”

Dear Izzie, she wrote, I love you and miss you. I have done it, again, and I detest myself. There is no point in my lying about it. I must tell you and you must forgive me if you can. I have also said things about you to strangers which I should not have said and did not mean. You are the only man I ever cared about or respected. You believe what I believe. You stand for what I stand for. You are brave and good and I send you letters that cause you pain.

I dreamed about you two nights ago. You were in an odd black suit with belled cuffs and you were weeping. When I tried to comfort you, you did not know who I was and I woke up crying myself.

Anyway, here is a money order. It is less than it should be because I wasted four shillings on wine. Izzie, one day we will be like ordinary people. We will have a house and a baby with big black eyes and Rosa and Lenny will play with it. I am frightened of
everything. Everything seems dark and ignorant. I try to read the Gramsci but am so tired. My mind is rusted and full of rubbish. Please be careful. I am sending you a map of the camp site as usual so if your work calls you this way, you could find me.
DO NOT MAKE A SPECIAL TRIP
. It is only in case you are doing Party work in the area. Will be in Bendigo some days yet I imagine.

Your loving wife,

Leah

The flesh of the morning was pink and tasted of mud like a rainbow trout, and I was the Prince of the Bedroom, the King of Liars. The urge to build was on me already and I looked at the world through imaginary windows and possible doorways. Leah snored in her palace and I hardly saw my children, although I must have dressed them, inspected their shoes, their socks, their nails, parted Charles’s hair and retied the ribbons on Sonia’s plaits.

I remember nothing of driving them to school. I was under the illusion that it was my day; it was really my son’s. On this day, the 23rd September 1931, he added the final card to his hand and climbed a giant eucalypt and carried down a yellow-tailed black cockatoo. Expressed thus, it sounds easy. But this is not your sulphur-crested cockatoo, often caught, usually caged, taught to speak Pet’s Lingo. This is the giant cockatoo sometimes called funereal, and if you have ever watched these monsters ripping branches to pieces, seen them screeching at the top of river casuarinas, or seen, at close range, their odd faces (more like a devil’s koala than a bird) then you would know, without being told, this is not an easy bird to catch or tame.

He did not choose it. He was driven to it by Barry Edwards’s sarcastic comments when the birds were observed above the schoolyard. Badgery was good with animals, he said, and would bring them down a cockatoo.

My son had warts and smelly breath, but he was not a fool. He knew there was no choice but to up the ante in this game with his teacher. Having driven him out with snakes he would shame him with a cockatoo.

The cockatoo, therefore, was a means, not an end, an instrument of revenge, a card in a game, but yet, when Charles was finally eighty feet above the ground, wrapping his useful bandy legs
around the rough-barked eucalypt, edging carefully out towards his goal, he had forgotten what it was an instrument for; he began to coo.

He swung in the high branches above the schoolyard where Sonia stood, with all the school—it was now recess—whispering eccentric self-taught prayers to Sweet Jesus Meek and Mine.

The headmaster was yelling at Mr Edwards and Mr Edwards was biting his moustache and trying to get the headmaster to yell at him in private but the headmaster ordered Miss Watkins to ring the fire brigade and then he could not wait, and—he was a young man—tried to climb the tree himself but tore his Fletcher Jones trousers and showed his bottom and Miss Watkins took the girls to practise assembly drill in front of the shelter shed.

The fuss in the playground hardly intruded on Charles’s consciousness, for he was blessed with very particular powers of concentration. The commotion below merely warmed him as he moved closer to communion with the dark brown eye with its delicate pink surround. My son had a great store of affection he could not give to people properly; he just didn’t have the knack. He could not hug his little sister without awkwardness, but when he confronted this steel-beaked bird his affection issued from him readily, like a net, a finely knotted gauze which the bird felt and stayed still to accept. As he took the bird it emitted a small noise, not the loud raucous noise of a yellow-tailed black cockatoo, but a small grizzle, like a new puppy will give, as it surrendered itself to the webs of Charles’s affection.

Charles descended, to applause, down the ladders of the Bendigo Volunteer Fire Brigade and into the anxious care of Barry Edwards who gave him no trouble—quite the opposite—from that day. In class that afternoon he sat with the cockatoo who, having entered an alien universe, was ministered to as a royal guest, was brought gifts of hakea pods and pine cones, was permitted to screech and shit, and was thus given the illusion that it was a god, being waited on by superstitious savages.

I was in an excellent mood. I called in at the tip and found good roof guttering awaiting me. On my way back to camp I nicked twenty foot of fencing wire from the bottom string of a squatter’s fence. I never bought a nail in my life and I never understood why
anyone would bother when there are millions of miles of fencing wire available to do the job. Eight gauge is best. Cut it square one end, angle it at the other, and there’s your nail.

I drove back to the camp constructing towers with pretty windows.

I parked the Dodge and noticed Leah was boiling something up in a four-gallon drum. She did not look up to greet me and, imagining she was washing her female particulars, I did not intrude. Instead I busied myself with the guttering and the fencing wire. When Leah spoke she was right behind me. She made me jump.

“One,” she said, “I was drunk. Two, it won’t happen again. Three, I don’t love you.”

I covered my confusion by dropping the rest of the guttering on the ground.

“Did you hear me?” she asked.

“I heard you.”

“Good,” she said, and walked back to the fire where she was-I discovered later—punishing her overcoat by boiling it.

I fiddled with the fencing wire for a bit, making a few nails to start with. I like making things. It is always soothing, and the very simple things are the most soothing of all. The squatter’s wire felt as soft as lead between my pliers. I made three-inch nails, each one exactly the same as the one before.

“What are you doing?”

“Making nails.”

“This camp is filthy,” she said (untrue). “Your truck is filthy. I don’t know how you live like this. Come on, move. Move your nails. Help me with the mattress. How long is it since you aired it? How long is it since you washed your children’s clothes? Orange peel!”

She emptied the back tray of the Dodge and started scrubbing. I took the guttering over to her hut. I fetched an empty petrol drum to stand on and began to measure for the gutter. In a minute she was behind me with her wet arms folded across her breasts. Her neck seemed longer, stretched, her shoulders more sloping, her eyes larger.

“Excuse me, what are you doing?”

“Fixing up.”

“You sleep with me once and you think you own me.”

“No.” If you had seen her once you would know that she could not be owned. “Just making a place.”

“This is
not
your place and never can be.”

I recognized the tone. This was not lolly-paper talk. It was hacksaw stuff, the annoying tone with which she had entered camp.

“It is public land,” I said. “It’s a reserve, and if I take out a mining lease I’m entitled to build a hut here, providing I continue to demonstrate that I am actually working my lease.”

“There you go, land-house, house-land, you can’t help yourself, can you, Mr Badgery? You’re true blue. Dinky-di. You think you can put up some shanty and that makes it your place, but you can’t, and it never will be. Are you listening to me?”

I did not want to lose my temper. “Leah, what have I done to deserve this?”

“Forget what we did. The matter is obvious. The land is stolen. The whole country is stolen. The whole nation is based on a lie which is that it was not already occupied when the British came here. If it is anybody’s place it is the blacks’. Does it
look
like your place? Does it
feel
like your place? Can’t you see, even the trees have nothing to do with you.”

“This is my country,” I said quietly, “even if it’s not yours.”

“Meaning, excuse me?” She put her hands on her hips.

I scratched a line on the guttering and threw it to the ground. “You’re a Jew. You don’t have a country.”

“Of course we have a country. It was stolen from us.”

“Tough. What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t want you to do anything. I don’t require a hut or nails.”

“Leah,” I held out my hand.

She brushed the hand away.

“Don’t touch me,” she said. “Touch me and I leave, right now.” And she walked across to the kero drum, her legs perambulating beneath her rigid spine, and began to fish out her boiling coat.

I cannot stand being brushed aside. Most serious tempers begin with being brushed aside, kindness rejected, conciliation spurned. “And if I don’t touch you, what then?”

“How would I know?” she said, dropping the coat back into the water. “Don’t you have any ideas of your own? Don’t you read anything? Don’t you think about anything but skin?” She suddenly burst into tears, calling me a bully.

If you expect me to take her in my arms and quiet the tears, to stroke her hair and whisper into her ear, you have mistaken
me for someone else. I lost
my
temper. Not slowly, not neatly, but like an overwound clock flying into separate parts, with useful cogs and gears all converted into deadly shrapnel. I will not repeat the rough words I said. The gist of it, however, is essential: I had not invited Leah into my camp or my bed and she had no business attacking me for either.