Illywhacker (56 page)

“No good, Kaletsky,” she said throatily.

And there was, for that little while, great tenderness and shyness, a more sombre, subtle version of the emotions they had felt in Mrs Heller’s when she had perched pretentiously above her badly dissected dogfish.

Their problem, both of them, was that they believed too much in the scientific and the rational and they thought they could—like Marxists changing the course of rivers—prevent the floods and earthquakes of primitive emotions. They sat beside each other and spoke what they imagined was the truth. But Izzie could not untangle his anger from his love and Leah did not help him when she explained her terms: that she had come to nurse him, to be, as she called it, “of use,” but not to be his sexual partner for she would feel that to be duplicitous. She did not mention the subject of skin, but it was not to be forgotten and it was Izzie who would use his sharp knife against them both, while she was changing his bandages on his shameful stumps and trying to ignore the erection he presented her with.

She
was
useful. She found the Kaletskys’ finances in an appalling state and borrowed, in the first week, five hundred pounds from her father. Most of this was used to pay back loans that Lenny had arranged. She bought a wheelchair. With the twenty pounds that remained she bought bowls and cake tins and at night she learned to bake the rich Jewish cakes that Lenny would deliver by day. She made sure Izzie was at meetings he would never have gotten to otherwise. She arranged chauffeurs, had him wheeled here, carried there and stood beside him on platforms while he used his formidable talents in the service of a new world. But the price she paid was to become the focus of all his anger and this was less to do with his envy of those who could walk and run, more to do with the fact that she could care for him but not love him.

Rosa and Lenny, in their caravan, could not help but overhear the painful arguments of son and daughter-in-law. They moaned out loud in their separate beds, pulled pillows over their heads, and had stilted conversations whose sole function was to block out the bitter voice of their son.

“Please,” Rosa heard, “please go. I would rather crawl like a snail. I would rather sleep on a mat on the bloody floor. I would rather be lonely and shit in my pants. Please go.”

And later she would hear the sound of weeping, a nasty choking noise she had first mistaken for vomiting, but it was, she knew, the sound of her son begging Leah Goldstein to stay.

And that is how Leah Goldstein made a little hell for herself and the Kaletskys, like a child who crawls into an old-fashioned refrigerator so easily, shuts the door, and finds there is no corresponding latch inside.

Yet she was saved, as she had been saved before, by her letters, and when she continued her correspondence with me she used some of the art I had taught her and which she had once so vigorously rejected. Now she began to invent a life outside her walls, to send squares of sky to me (cobalt blue and saturated with life) to invent joy, to sustain it, and to write a hundred times about Silly Friends she must first manufacture. She arranged them on the mustard-yellow sand of Tamarama—indigos, crimsons, violet and viridian, people who were never born, walking on a beach she had stolen from 1923.

If you had seen me in 1937 you would have thought me finished. I had no suit. My hands trembled. I no longer shaved my skull and the hair that grew across it was white and wispy. Yet I was a young man, only fifty-one. My eyes were good and my muscles strong enough to ride a bicycle from Nambucca to Grafton.

I had been pumping gasoline and repairing bicycles in Nambucca and when I got my annual holidays I made the long journey up to Grafton, not for the pleasure of it, but to see the General Motors dealer, a Mr Lewis. I had filled his tank with petrol often enough and he had invited me to call on him if ever I was in Grafton. I was angling for a job.

Grafton is a prosperous town. There is sugar cane, timber,
rich river flats beside the Clarence River and I was already building mansions in my mind when I noticed the sign:
GOON & SONS: PROVIDORES
. It was just beside the bridge, as bold as brass, and I must have passed it twenty times before and not noticed it.

I could not believe that Goon would be still alive, but when I called at the providore they told me that the old man was asleep. I should come back in the morning. I left a visiting card and went to find a boarding house. I slept badly, although the weather was not yet hot, and in the morning I was back at the providore before the doors were open. I waited while they hosed down the concrete and hung out their wares by the big sliding doors.

A young girl, Chinese of course, but with a broad Australian accent, took me out the back, along a high catwalk, and up some old splintery stairs to a small room where an ancient Chinaman sat with the Clarence River running sleepily behind his shoulder.

The room was sparse, containing a widower’s tiny bed against one wall and a simple wooden desk near the window. On the walls were many framed photographs and advertisements for various Chinese associations; they had thin black frames. The girl ran lightly down the stairs and left me with the old Chinaman who wore an inappropriate three-piece English suit. He was shrunken as a Chinese plum and his white collar, loose around his neck, showed its stud behind a drooping tie. His hands had the transparency of the old but it was I, the young man, whose hands shook.

As I entered he looked up and gave me a fast intelligent glance; he then continued with his writing.

When he spoke at last his voice was not like gravel but as weak and thin as jasmine tea. It was also clear and the English was perfectly enunciated.

“You must excuse me,” he said, standing carefully, “while I take a leak.”

I stepped back so that I would not block his passage from the room, but he turned his back to me and, having fiddled with his buttons, piddled into a chamber-pot he kept behind the desk. The pot had not been empty when he started and he did not add much to it. I turned to look at the wall. “Charlie” Goon had been president of the Grafton Chinese Commercial and Cultural Association from 1923 to 1926. The sombre group photographs seldom showed more than five members.

“Better out than in,” said Goon Tse Ying brightly, fiddling with his fly buttons and seating himself. “I don’t suppose you carry barley sugar? No? Just as well.”

“You are Goon Tse Ying?”

“Yes, yes. Please sit down. Sit on the trunk. Pull it over, that’s right. They tell me we have met before, but I do not know the name. I am eighty-one years old, so I forget many things. Where was it that I had the pleasure?”

“In Melbourne. In 1895.”

“Ah, Melbourne, yes, yes.” His foot moved the chamber-pot further under the desk.

“Mrs Wong is your cousin.”

“Mrs Wong, ah yes.”

“You bought this business in 1896.”

“Not this one. Another one, further down the river. But I came to Grafton about then. That’s right. I couldn’t forget that.”

“And you translated for a herbalist.”

“Poor Mr Chin, yes, I did.”

“I am Herbert Badgery. Surely you remember me.”

“No, no,” he shook his head.

“I was a little boy. You found me at the markets. Remember the Eastern Markets? I was a little boy. You called me ‘My Englishman’. I slept at Wong’s. I shared a room with old Hing.”

His eyes clouded. It looked as if he had stopped trying to remember. He fiddled with his fountain pen and looked down at the book on the table. I kept talking. I described everything I could remember. I told him about the things he had taught me. I showed him my brightly shone shoes. He smiled and nodded. I told him how I had eaten porridge and he had drunk brandy and the smile widened into a grin that made his rice-paper skin crinkle like an old paper bag. I became excited. With every memory I produced a nod. My teeth were aching again but I did not let that stop me. I described his horse. He agreed it was black. He had been fond of that horse, he said, and began to tell me about it, how he had haggled over its purchase. I was too impatient for politeness, I interrupted his triumph to tell him about the morning he had taken me, with this very horse between the shafts, to make a camp. I told him about the place. I described the rocks, the thistles, how he had oiled his hair flat on his head.

He interrupted me for another leak. I listened to his penis dribble while I studied the Chinese-Australian Friends’ Assocation. There had been a national conference in Brisbane in 1931.

“Yes,” Goon Tse Ying said. He pulled up his trousers as he sat down. “Yes, yes. I remember. I was a young man then, full of life, and with no family. Now I have great-grandchildren and I am writing down everything for them. All my secrets,” he smiled. “In this book. I must write them in both Chinese and English. The young ones don’t understand Chinese—they’re real little Aussies.”

“You taught me to disappear.”

He smiled, but I know that Chinese smile. It means nothing. I repeated myself.

“No,” he said. “Oh no. I’m not a magic man. Disappear? Is that what you mean? No, no, I taught you to clean your shoes.”

“To vanish,” I insisted.

“Oh no.”

“Don’t you remember? You said, ‘I am teaching you this because I love you, but also because I hate you.’ You did not like the English or the Australians.”

“My children are Australians.”

“You were at Lambing Flat. Your uncle Han,” I said, “was run over by a cart. His broken bones poked out through his leg.”

“Oh,” Goon smiled. “I remember you. Hao Han Bu Chi Yan Tian Kui, we called you: ‘Small Bottle, Strong Smell’. You made up stories, all the time. You told me your father was dead and then you made Mae Wong cry when you said your father had beaten you and gone to Adelaide. To Hing you told another story, I forget it. Perhaps you have some barley sugar? Yes, yes, I remember you. Hing said you were a sorcerer. Mrs Wong was frightened of you. You made her frightened with a story about a snake. She could not have you in the house any more and I had to have you go to my cousin who did not want you either. Yes, yes. It all comes back. It’s astonishing—you think a memory is all gone, and then there it is, clear as day. Yes, my Little Englishman. Small Bottle, Big Smell. Did you become a sorcerer after all?”

“I disappeared. You taught me. That’s why Mrs Wong got ill.”

He smiled and shook his head. “And my children tell me that there are no sorcerers in Australia, that we are all too modern for such superstitions.”

We were interrupted by the girl who had shown me up. She brought us a pot of tea and two stout chipped mugs. Her grandfather introduced her as Heather. The girl giggled and ran down the stairs.

“No,” Goon said. “No, I do not come from Lambing Flat.” He
poured the dark tea with a steady hand. “My father had a store in Tasmania at a place called Garibaldi. Before that he looked for gold in Queensland. He was at the Palmer rush. Then he became a pedlar, and when he married he bought the store in Garibaldi from a relation he had never met. The relation was going home to China and my father bought the store because his mother wrote from China and nagged at him until he did. I was born at Garibaldi and I don’t know any magic tricks except how to,” he demonstrated, “take the top off my thumb which I learned from my Australian grandson.”

“The fact remains, I have done it.”

He waved me down, like a conductor quietening a noisy brass section. “Yes, yes,” he said, and called me by that insulting Chinese name. “Possibly. I don’t doubt you.”

“Before witnesses.”

“Be quiet,” said Goon Tse Ying. “You make too much noise.”

“So what are your secrets, Mr Goon?” I poked at his book, this splendid volume, black, red, gold, the colours of dragons.

“Shopkeeper’s secrets,” he said, sliding it out of my reach. He would not hold my eye. He moved his chamber-pot, nervously, with his foot.

“You were a small child,” he said, stirring three sugars into his dark tea. “You misunderstood the things I tried to teach you. I was kind to you, but you did not understand. Perhaps your life had been too hard. Perhaps you were one of those fellows who sees tricks everywhere and thinks that nothing is what people say it is. I wanted you to know practical things, so you wouldn’t be tempted to be what Hing said you were already. He was superstitious, a poor man from a village, and I did not believe him. I told you, I suppose, that you should not make a dragon. My English was not as good as I thought it was and you misunderstood me. A dragon, Little Bottle, was my mother’s name for a frightening story. Also it is a name they give to liars in my mother’s village. In Hokein, they say ‘to sew dragon seeds’ when they mean gossip. My mother also used to call the castor sugar she put on dumplings ‘dragon eggs’ but I wouldn’t have a clue as to why.”

He pushed the bowl of sugar towards me. “Quite all right,” he said, seeing my hands shaking: “Not castor sugar.” And then he roared with laughter.

But my shaking hand had nothing to do with sugar, either fine or coarse. It was a condition I had not been free of since my time in
Sunbury. “I lost my little girl,” I said. “I made a dragon and lost my little girl.”

Goon looked at me warily. “What do you want?” He edged his chair back an inch or two and looked expectantly towards the door.

I tried to calm myself. I picked up the mug of tea but my hands shook so I slopped it over his desk. Goon moved his book a little further away.

“I can tell you nothing, Mr Badgery.” He picked up the book and placed it in his lap. “If what you say is true, you’re the sorcerer not me. Poor Hing was right. He hung himself, did you know?”

My hand trembled uncontrollably. I placed it on top of the desk. I gripped the edge to steady myself, but the desk itself began to shudder and the open bottle of ink and the cups of tea set up opposing splashing surfaces of liquid. Goon Tse Ying picked up the bottle of ink and slowly screwed its cap back on.

“If a thing can disappear, it can reappear.”

“You are the sorcerer, Small Bottle, not me. I’m a business man.”

He had been kind to me as a father is meant to be kind to a son. He had sat me on his bony knee and pulled my toes. He had let me smell brandy and laughed when my nose wrinkled. He had tricked me and found a whole fistful of dirt in my ear. He had taken me promenading, “doing the block” as they called it, holding my hand proudly. He dressed me in a sailor suit. And now, with polished eyes inside his wrinkled, shrunken hairless head, he dared deny me.