Illywhacker (72 page)

She, who had made more silly decisions than anyone has a right to, now showed both curiosity and optimism.

She endured her insomnia quite calmly, not fretting after sleep. She sat up in the sexless heavy flannel pyjamas she wore in those days. Occasionally she might read, sometimes she might write, but more often she would simply sit with her hands folded on her lap. The clock ticked. Lenny coughed and spat in his room. Leah thought.

On the night of September 12th, 1939, she thought, of course,
about the war. She was shocked to recognize that there was a part of her that welcomed it and, while once she would have put this part away and not examined it, now she chose to touch it. It was as if the war would blow away the house she sat in, shatter it, throw clothing and dishes and newspapers out across the smoky street. The destruction was vicious and beautiful. She day-dreamed, walking out along the street and down into laneways. She saw bodies, about five of them, piled on top of each other beside a metal garbage bin and saw, as she peered, her father’s body; shining green intestines protruding from his white starched shirt.

“No,” she said, out loud. Her fingers clenched. She shut her eyes, and opened them. It was three forty-six.

This was eight minutes after Charles Badgery had woken to find his wife standing beside his bed. She was holding a very sick goanna with a roughly amputated leg. The goanna was so sick it did not try to escape. It dug its claws (five-fingered and child-like) into the pink eiderdown on the bed.

“Oh, Emmie, Emmie. Emmie, what have you done to it?”

Emma had come because she thought the animal was dying. She had not come to be accused. It was his fault. He was the one who had abandoned them. She filled her lungs with air and left the room. Her blood was coursing with chemicals she had learned to make herself. She was like a plant producing flowers, seeds, berries, suckers, buds, everything, all at once. She shut the cage door behind her.

Charles was now very scared. He examined the wound and saw the leg had not been cut off, but torn. He carried the creature into the kitchen and chloroformed it and then, having removed another inch of the stump, dressed the clean wound with sulphur. He then bandaged the goanna and put it in the ferret cage. He hid the ferret cage under the bed. He would have phoned Leah then but he imagined her in bed, beside her husband, sleeping. He waited as long as the dawn before he dialled her number.

He tried to tell Leah that his wife was mad but every time he approached the dreadful word he broke down and cried. He could not say it. He did say, however, that she was in a cage and was attacking the pets.

“Oh God,” said Leah. “No.”

This exclamation served to frighten Charles even more and so she quickly became brisk. She was standing in the kitchen,
already shedding her pyjamas. “All right,” she said, “you come here and look after Izzie. I’ll come to the shop.”

“He hates me.”

“He hates me too,” she said simply, folding up the pyjamas on the kitchen table. “That’s beside the point.”

“Leah, she’s gone mad.”

She could hear him crying at the other end of the phone. It was a terrible noise. She closed her eyes. “Listen,” she said. “Listen to me, Charlie. I’m leaving now. You meet me in Taylor Square with the key for the shop. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.” She could hear him crying still. “Hang up,” she said, and waited until he had.

Yet when she let herself into the pet shop she did not feel as capable as her voice suggested. She moved slowly, warily, unsure of what to expect. In all the rich variety of smell the shop contained, she now detected the unmistakable odour of human shit and, by going to the place where the smell was strongest, she found Emma and the baby in the cage next to the rabbits. She saw a wild-haired dirt-smeared woman lying amongst the damp straw on the floor of the cage. The baby’s face was covered in yellow snot and its eyes seemed gummed together. Leah held out her hand and had it taken. Emma murmured affectionately but her nails were sharp and painful. Leah looked at her eyes and wondered if she was drunk.

“All right, Emma.” She disengaged the sharp nails slowly, so as not to give offence. “We’re going to get you clean because I can’t talk to you when you’re dirty like this. So I’ll take you upstairs and get you washed and I promise you I’ll bring you back here. Is that agreeable?”

It seemed to be. Leah escorted mother and child up to the concrete=floored bathroom where she found both of them equally dependent. She did not talk except to say which way she wanted the woman to turn, simple practical requests, e.g. lift your arm, your leg, turn your head, now we wash your botty, etc. She was not used to handling women’s bodies and although she tried to do what she had to do without looking, she was fascinated by the difference between herself and Emma who had such large nipples on her shiny swollen breasts and white stretch marks on her young stomach and hips, like white rivers on the map of a foreign country. Leah tried not to stare, but Emma was as lacking in modesty as her little boy and closed her eyes happily to let the shampoo be rinsed from her hair by saucepan after saucepan of steaming water.

When Leah had them both washed and had combed their hair,
dried between their toes and the cheeks of their bottoms and powdered them with talc, she took them downstairs, the one in a clean napkin, the other in her husband’s dressing gown. She changed the straw in the cage and, before returning them to it, introduced the pink eiderdown as a mattress—the baby had several scratches from that rough straw.

She then squatted on the floor beside the cage and, amidst the piercing din of birds, the low hum of aquariums, and the baby’s gentle gurgling, tried to talk to Emma quietly.

She understood, she thought, what it was that Emma was up to, and she said so.

This single comment produced such a look of hope in her friend’s eyes that she immediately set out to explain, in detail, what it was she understood.

“I know,” she said, wondering if she should towel Emma’s hair dry. “He loves them so much, and then he cages them. He has always loved them, ever since he was little.”

Emma frowned. Leah did not notice.

“He picked up my snakes. I’ll never forget it. He was just a little boy and he had no fear at all. Then we have all this.” She waved a hand around the shop where lorikeets and wrens hopped and fluttered, fidgeted and fussed, forever in nervous motion. “It’s tragic. He loves them all so much and then he cages them. He turns them into a product and you can look at it, if you want to, as a perversion. Izzie agrees with you. But you won’t make the point by climbing into a cage. You’d be better off to discuss it with him because, I can tell you, he’s missed your meaning.”

“He’s not the only one,” said Emma, but the unusual clarity of this statement was lost amidst an outburst from the cockatoos.

“What?”

Emma murmured irritably.

“Am I barking up the wrong tree?”

Emma murmured assent.

“Is it because you are ashamed of being kept?” asked Leah, but in spite of the reasonable tone of her voice she was becoming irritated by Emma’s manner.

Emma murmured again.

“For God’s sake, don’t make me play idiot guessing games. What is it? Tell me.”

Emma blinked, and told her: Charles had enlisted in the army.

“Oh shit,” said Leah. Her legs were weary from such uncomfortable squatting. She stood up. “What in the hell is the
matter with you? I live with a Jew who claims he cannot distinguish between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain. But your husband is a decent man and you are lucky to have him. He feels things. He has a heart. He tries his best. I thought you were good and kind, Emma. I watched you with animals and with your baby. But you’re as stupid as the rest of us.”

And then she was crying—fat hot tears rolled down her cheeks. “I hate the world.” The words surprised her as much as the tears did, like huge white tails on tiny blackheads. “I wish I were dead. Look at what we’ve done. Look at all his cages. Look at you. We are all perverted. Everything good in us gets perverted. I wanted to be good and kind and I made myself a slave instead. I lie awake at night planning how I am going to leave him, but I can’t. When he touches me he makes my skin creep. He has lost his legs and he thinks that’s a licence for selfishness and spite. When he speaks in public everyone admires him. A woman in Newtown told me he was a saint.”

Leah sat on the floor again, crossing her legs, and not worrying about the filthy straw that prickled her legs and laddered her stockings. “Oh, Emma,” she said wearily. “I’m so sick of it. I wish I was with Charlie’s father, dancing and arguing and drinking sweet wine.”

Emma looked at Leah Goldstein—the flinty face now contorted in misery like a crumpled newspaper unfolding in a fire, the slumped shoulders, the clenched fists, the slender crossed legs leading to a pair of bright red high-heeled shoes that had seemed so gay when they had first clicked through the early-morning gloom.

Emma murmured. She moved to one side of her cage. She was large and the cage was small but she managed to make some room. She patted the eiderdown and held out her hand.

Leah gave a self-mocking little laugh, but she joined Emma in the cage and let herself be embraced and comforted by her murmuring friend who dried her eyes with the rough sleeve of the dressing gown and stroked her hair and neck until she was, in the midst of all those pet-shop noises, sound asleep.

When Leah woke up she was so refreshed as to be almost light—hearted. Cramped by wire, prickled by straw, she was as elated and optimistic about human beings as she had been despairing an
hour before. She forgot her stern judgement of Emma’s selfishness and remembered only her kindness, the quality that she most closely approximated to goodness, her thirst for which would always lead her to idealize and oversimplify the characters of those who displayed it.

She kissed the sleeping woman on the forehead, and rearranged the baby’s blue bunny rug around its chubby legs. She felt heady, almost silly. She crawled out of the cage and dusted the straw from her severe black suit.

She looked up to see Charles standing behind the counter. The shop was closed.

Leah hoisted her skirt a fraction and did a small dance for him, smiling broadly and tapping (dangerously) on her bright red shoes.

Charles was too worried to smile. He had returned to the shop and found two women in a cage that had previously held one.

“Treasure her,” Leah said, panting a little. “She loves you. She worships you. You are a lucky man to have a wife who will be so mad on your behalf.”

She sat herself, athletically, on the counter, spilling roneoed notes about the feeding requirements of various cockatoos and these yellow sheets now sliced through the air and floated so much longer than expected that Leah giggled to see it, as if the yellow sheets were a circus arranged on her behalf.

“She thinks you have enlisted. Is that right?”

Charles, stooping to pick up his precious yellow notes, straightened. “They didn’t want to know me, Leah.”

“Don’t be so solemn, Charlie. Everything will be all right.”

“They rejected me. But Emma doesn’t even know I went.”

“Oh, she does, Charlie Barley, Gloomy Moony. She thinks you were accepted.”

“Oh.”

“That’s right. ‘Oh!’ Why wouldn’t they have you? Of course, your hearing. I’ll write to your father about this. I’ll do it this morning. He’ll enjoy it.”

“He hates me.”

“When you say Izzie hates you, Charlie Barley, you may have a point, although personally I think that hate is far too strong a word. But when you say your father hates you, you are very, very wrong.”

“He didn’t even write when Henry got born.”

“And you didn’t write to him either.”

“He hates me.”

“Wait, Charlie Barley, and you’ll see.”

“He blames me for what happened to Sonia.” He assembled the yellow sheets and brought them back to the counter where he fiddled with them, taking too much trouble to make them all line up square in the stack he had made. He looked up at Leah defiantly. His eyes were puffy. He went back to the stack of paper. “Sometimes I dream I skun her. Skun the skin off her….”

“Don’t.”

“And she smiles at me. She don’t know what’s happening to her.”

“Shush,” Leah said, brushing hair from his suit shoulder and doing up his coat buttons. “Only happy talk now. There’s a terrible war starting and all sorts of rotten things everywhere, but go and look after your wife who loves you. Tell her you are not in the army. Do you have any money? Here, I’ll lend you a pound. Go and buy—no, I’ll go and buy some sparkling hock—don’t argue, and you can put candles on the table tonight and you can celebrate that you won’t be making her a widow after all. I’ll be back in a moment. And then I must do my baking and cook something suitable for that person whom your wife,” she giggled, “insists on calling ‘Hisydoor’, the little rat—not her, him—do you know that he has the cunning to be having an affair with a colleague at the school? His nasty headmaster, the one who gives him the lift to work, came and told me all about it. He seems most disturbed by the horrid idea of a man with no legs having sex with a woman with two. That was at the heart of it. He just wished it stopped and he thought telling me would stop it, but I don’t live in the real world any more. I write to your father and tell him how happy I am. I tell him such fibs, Charlie Farlie, can you believe that?”

“I s’pose so,” said Charles, who was disturbed by the turn of the conversation. He locked the till and then unlocked it. He did not like Leah using the word “sex” and he liked even less the personal nature of her confession. Worst of all he did not like to hear that she told lies.

“Do you disapprove?” Leah leaned over the counter but he shrugged and pulled the handle on the till so the drawer flew open with a little “ding”.

Charles shrugged. “I dunno,” he said.

Leah held out her hand and he shut the till. “Don’t disapprove of me, Charlie.” She looked intently into his eyes. “If I told him the truth I would drown. What are you thinking?”