Illywhacker (70 page)

Moran did not always annoy me. Often I was pleased to see him. He could be amusing. He had a rare ability to tell a football match from beginning to end and he would sometimes arrive late
on Saturday night with beer on his breath and his cheeks flushed with excitement. In fact, I realize now, he did not really give me trouble until the football season was over. It was then he started going through my bookshelves. The screws occasionally did the same. Every now and then there would be whistles and searches and they would find homemade knives or dirty pictures. Moran did not search like a screw. He did it like a man browsing in a bookshop, but he was at the same thing, pulling out books, looking behind them, flipping through the pages, peeking into Leah’s letters. I waited for him to get on with his trade and start talking about God, but he was reluctant to do it. I tried to bring the subject up once or twice, but it made him hostile.

“What would a fellow like you want to talk about God for?”

He was right, of course, but I was surprised by the venom when he said it. It puzzled me even more as to why he came to see me and I might have been kept in suspense a lot longer if I had not blundered into the matter by mistake. I mentioned—in connection with what I now forget—Sergeant Reg Moth.

Moran was standing there with one of Leah’s letters hidden inside an Oxford Dictionary, pretending to look up some word or other while all the time he was prying into my private life. But when I mentioned Moth, his mouth opened and his brow furrowed.

“You didn’t call him
that?”

“Call him what?”

“Moth.”

“I might have called him Sergeant. Sergeant, or Moth, or Sergeant Moth.” I shrugged.

He was such a big man and it was a very small room so his moods always seemed too bulky for the space. They pushed at me, bumped at me, seemed as if they would swamp or suffocate me.

“He cannot stand the name,” he said, shutting the dictionary with the letter still in it. “It drives him mad. You would have hurt him if you called him Moth.”

“His own name.”

He put the dictionary back in the shelf and—an annoying habit of his—lined up the spine exactly with the edge of the shelf. “His nickname,” he corrected me. “Aren’t you going to ask me why?”

“Why?”

And suddenly all his big solemn red-faced officiousness was gone and he was grinning at me like a schoolboy. “The Moth—
because if there’s a light on, he’ll turn up.” He giggled. “I shouldn’t laugh. It’s my own brother after all.”

Of course he was the loony’s brother. Of course he was. He had that same square head and bulging eyes. “Well, well….” I said.

“Come on, Badgery,” he smiled. “Don’t pretend you didn’t know.” He started to lower himself on to my damaged heater, changed his mind and went to the bunk. His smile pulled at his face as tightly as his buttoned-up suit pulled at his big footballer’s body. “I saw the way you looked when I told you about the little fellow on the mushroom. You knew what I was alluding to. You understand my intention.”

“Father, I swear, I understood nothing.”

“But what could you swear by—that is the thing. Perhaps you might tell me later, but I saw at the time that you understood my point, that my brother would not look at devilry, that he did not think such things were even possible. You appreciated the irony.”

“Now you call it devilry.”

“Of course it is devilry, man. Or would be, if I had not made it up. Do you think God makes tiny men to sit on mushrooms? Of course it is devilry, and you know it too.”

I felt disappointed. I had liked that little man on the mushroom more than I knew. I asked him why he made it up.

“To trap you,” he said, clapping his big hands together, and giving me that white picket-fence grin. “I know you’ve got that thing in a bottle somewhere. I thought if I told you that story, you’d bring it out. But, like my brother says, you are cunning as a rat.”

I was an old man, decent and frail. I put the cap on my pen. I smiled. I showed him my lovely violet eyes. “Come, Father, we’re both grown men.”

He withstood the powerful blast of affection I sent his way. “Are we?” he said. “Are we? Are we now,
men?
Reginald came to me up at St Joseph’s. I was taking a class. He came to the door. He said to me, ‘Michael, I have seen the devil.’ You know his voice, loud and rough. ‘I’ve seen the devil,’ he said. I thought he was drunk. God forgive me, I was angry because he interrupted my class. I saw the tears in his eyes and I denied him. I never got on with him, Badgery. He was never a happy man. He would not let God into his heart. Always the Moth. It wasn’t the bribes he was after when he pestered the illegal drinkers. It was the company. They knew that, of course. That’s why they gave him his name.
But now he can look back on those times, when he was sneaking round Flanagan’s backyard, arresting people and letting them off for a quid, he can look back on them as happy times. Father Doyle has heard his confession, but he has no peace, other than what he can get out of a whisky bottle. There have been policemen up from Sydney to witness his behaviour.”

I didn’t know which brother was the maddest. There is no doubt, however, that the priest was the biggest, by a good two stone. “Father,” I asked him, “do you really think I’m the devil?”

“Perhaps you’re just a witch.”

I took the bottle out of my pocket where I’d had it all along. I held it out towards him. He would not look at it. He peered away from it, into the corner, as if he was looking for cockroaches. “Is that it?” His voice was quite excitable.

“It is.”

He took it from me, but still he did not look at it. I remember the enormous heat I felt radiating from his hand. I got out of his way. He went to the desk, I to the bed. He took out a little black book from his suit pocket and read some Latin out of it. I didn’t understand the words of course, but he was a fearsome reader. I suppose he was exorcizing the devil or some other trick of his trade. When he finished he put the book away. He stayed where he was. And then he knelt. I thought he was praying, but no. “Badgery,” he said, “come here.”

I went. He was looking at the bottle, moving his big square head around, peering from one angle then another. There was a strong odour of camphor, but that came from his suit. He looked up at me and smiled, a lovely smile, not that straight picket fence of a thing he’d shown me up to now.

“What a lovely thing,” he said. “What a lovely thing.”

Indeed it was.

“Would you deny to me that these are angels?”

I could not.

“Angels, whizzing around in a bottle.”

“Take it,” I said. “Have it. Keep it. Please, for Chrissakes.”

It was the blasphemy that changed him. He jerked like a fellow who has given himself a shock off his own car battery. He dropped the bottle as if it were a spanner. He was going to shake hands with me—he usually did when he was leaving—but something made him change his mind. He shivered. The silly ninny thought I was the devil. I know I cannot prove it, but I am
sure it’s what he thought. In any case he did not visit me again and, when the football season came again, I missed him.

I was saddened to hear that he had died on the Kokoda Trail. I thought of that big strong body lying broken in the mud and I wished I had been with him, not a useless old man in a gaol, anxious that my families would be killed and taken from me. I dreamed, often, that Charles had been broken on some battlefield. I dreamed about his pets, unattended. They ate their last corn, expecting more. They had no idea that anything was wrong.

When people recall the character of that infamous goanna it is always devious and bitter, given to counterfeit affection, slow sidlings followed by razor-sharp attacks, but it was not always so and (as Emma would later point out) this change coincided with the loss of its front left leg on September 11th, 1939, and was the direct responsibility of Charles Badgery and a result of his inconsistency about the King of England. On the one hand he considered England and the English the scourge of all humanity; he knew them as hypocrites, snobs, snivellers, and past masters of the economic swifty; but on the other hand who was it (she asked) who, on that clear September Monday when the newspaper declared Australia would stand side by side with England in the war, who was it who went to enlist in the company of that well-known urger and bulldust merchant, Harry the rabbitoh?

They stood in a long winding queue at Victoria Barracks. It was ten in the morning. The rabbitoh was drunk. He botted cigarettes from the younger men and told them stories about “Good Ol’ Jack Monash”. Charles was nervous and solemn. He carried the two gang-gang cockatoos in a ferret box. The ferret box was on loan, but he had purchased the gang-gangs from the rabbitoh in a lane behind the Ship’s Inn at Circular Quay.

While Emma knew all about the purchase of the gang—gangs, she knew nothing about the dreadful queue at Victoria Barracks, the very smell of which would have been enough to frighten her, for the group of men shuffling their shoes, rustling their newspapers, plunging their hands into their pockets, feeling their balls, tilting their hats, had the distinct odour (as pungent as
sweat) of war. Even had she smelt the smell, had she known about the queue, Emma would have been confident, complacent even, that her husband would never stand in such a thing—she knew, she thought, where he stood
vis-à-vis
the King of England.

There were problems, that morning, more pressing than war. It was unseasonably hot and the arcade was packed with schoolchildren who had been brought in to see Charles’s latest merchandising idea: the Cockatoo Exhibition. (“Every cockatoo known to science,” the
Sydney Morning Herald
said, “will be presented this week by a George Street business man, Mr Charles Badgery.”) The arcade became hot and airless. The teachers pushed and prodded at their charges and shouted at them to quell the noise. O’Dowd the jeweller sent his handsome nephew across to complain that the schoolchildren were keeping away customers, which he did, but not before he had complimented Emma on the beauty of their window display: the palm cockatoo with its katzenjammer haircut and bright red cheek, the pink cockatoo whose raised crest was a sunrise of red and yellow, whose plump chest showed a pretty blush that descended as far as its leather-gloved claws. There were red-tailed cockatoos, casuarina cockatoos, a little corella and a galah. Only the gang-gangs were missing, but their food tray contained the long blackened seed pods of wattles and some hawthorn berries for which exotic food gang-gangs have a great weakness. Emma had hung a carefully printed sign on its front door: “On its way”. There was some confusion about this sign (some imagining that it meant that the bird had departed) but not nearly so much confusion as the other sign (“It’s a boy. 9 lbs.”) that Charles had stuck in the window when Henry had been born; this gave a misleading impression about the sex and weight of the long-billed corella now gorging itself on Wimmera wheat.

It was a noisy and confusing day. Emma tried to feed the baby behind a plywood screen but was interrupted by children wanting to know how much the cockatoos cost. She had stained the front of her dress and was embarrassed. The proprietor of the sandwich shop, a woman with a growth on her hand the size of an apple, came to tell her about the war and all the men rushing off to enlist. Emma murmured vaguely, nodding her head, patting Henry regularly on the back, feeling the damp spreading from his napkin on to her dress. She was not worrying that her husband would leave her to fight a war. It was bad enough that he was away for two hours. She was in a panic about technical questions.
A murmur did not suffice. Perspiration formed on her lip and she observed, helplessly, an old lady poking her soft pink fingers into cages where they had no place. The bed was not made. The kitchen was littered with millet and cake crumbs. The whole flat stank of bad apples and overripe horsemeat and, although they said you couldn’t get pregnant when you were breast-feeding, she knew she was.

Through all this confusion the goanna wandered and was, as usual, quite at home. He could be trusted to stay within the confines of the shop and he was learning, Emma thought, not to frighten the birds who died easily from what the vet called “trauma”. It seemed never to have occurred to the goanna that he was a prisoner, rather that he had blundered into some cornucopia and his manner, although hardly charming, was amiable enough. He pressed himself against the bubbling aquariums and blinked a slow, meaningless, reptile’s blink.

But on the day that war broke out all this was to change. First the woman from the sandwich shop returned to say that Mr Badgery was enlisting. He had been seen, she said, at Victoria Barracks.

Emma dissented, struggling with a napkin pin on the shop counter, watching two boys poking at the goanna’s pale underbelly.

“No,” she told the boys, but lacked confidence.

“With two galahs,” the woman from the sandwich shop said, “in a cage, in a queue.”

Only when the galahs were described in detail did Emma realize that the story was correct.

The front of her dress was stained with milk and damp with pee, but she did not pause to change, nor, when she issued her instructions, did she murmur. She put the baby firmly on her hip. “Look after the shop,” she said to the woman from the sandwich shop. “I’ll be back in half a mo.”

“It’s the lunch hour. My Sylvie’s by herself.”

“I’ll tell her where you are,” said Emma Badgery and pushed herself through a panic of children’s legs into the confusion of George Street where the war was declaring itself, flapping on the wings of newspapers.

It was then that the goanna who had, perhaps, been prodded one time too many, decided to make its move. Under the illusion that it was a free agent it dragged its leathery belly along the cool tiles of the arcade, passed safely through a forest of thin legs and
got itself as far as the fruit shop, right on George Street itself. The fruiterer, a young fox-faced man, took fright and slammed down the mesh grille with which he locked his shop at night.

The goanna was alarmed and climbed to safety. He got to the top of the grille and stayed there, thus preventing the fruiterer from opening his door again. The fruiterer could afford to wait a minute or two, but he was not prepared to see good business pass him by. He therefore began poking at the goanna with a broom handle. His wife managed to sell two bananas through the grille, but had her situation exploited by the customer who walked away without giving money in exchange.