Illywhacker (83 page)

“And what would you suggest?”

She was close to me now, so close I could smell the Ipana toothpaste on her breath. “I’d rather have leeches on my legs. I’d rather be damp and freezing in the fog in Dorrigo.”

“You’d rather have nails through your hands,” I said.

“Shut up,” she yelled. I thought she was going to strike me, or spit, but she turned to walk away.

Emma, Hissao, and Mr Lo were all staring at her from their separate corners.

“Pets,” she shouted. “Fools.”

She turned back towards me and brushed past on her way to the stairs.

As she ran down the stairs there was a small sound, a dzzzzt, a fine fast jagged noise like electricity passing from one surface to another.

A fine crack appeared in the southern wall and then the ‘dzzzzt’ shot across the ceiling. I ignored it. I knocked out some more bricks to give it something worth cracking over.

There is always someone who will get in a panic about a crack. Next morning the Chinaman revealed himself to be the person who would take that part. He dragged me out of the nasty bathroom (all blue laminate and aluminium edging) to show me what I already knew. You will understand, I trust, that I was irritable about a number of things and when Mr Lo drew my attention to the crack, I misunderstood his character. He spoke to me about Rowe Street Joyce but I did not inquire about who she
was. A crack is a threatening thing to a layman, but to someone like me it is an architectural instruction, more precise in its message than any draftsman’s pencil.

I thanked Mr Lo and went back to the bathroom and washed the soap off my face.

As I walked out to find my son, Mr Lo was already playing baseball and Emma was putting new curlers in her hair. I could see a light shining inside Goldstein’s latticed apartment, but I did not enter. I went downstairs to find my son in his office. I did not tell him about the crack, only that I would need cash for more materials. He took it well. He showed me a regent bower-bird he had hatched from an egg. I watched him feed it with an eye-dropper and he was as tender with it as he was when he combed the wet hair of his sullen boys.

Charles did not become alarmed till later, when the fellows from Jordan Brothers’ had their block and tackle fixed to the steel roof-trusses. He emerged from his office with an egg sandwich in his hand just as that big RSJ slowly lifted from his shop floor. An RSJ, in case you are not familiar with the term, is a steel beam, a rolled-steel joist, and in this case it was fifteen feet long, one foot deep and four inches wide. It weighed a ton.

I can understand why Charles might wish to get the customers out of the shop. But it was quite unnecessary for him to evict the staff as well. If he had not lined them up in Pitt Street in their uniforms, the newspaper would never have been alerted and the whole operation could have been done quickly and safely.

I am not saying it is his fault. I am saying it was unfortunate. The photographers wanted a pic of Charles riding the beam and so the whole thing, which was nearly in place, had to be lowered down to the ground for him to stand on. Then they wanted a photograph with me on it beside him. Then Charles wanted to tell them about the best pet shop in the world and the point is that it all took time.

When the reporters and photographers had gone, the RSJ rose again. They had it at the third gallery, and it was moving sweetly towards the fourth. The foreman was already applying pressure on the rope that was to bring it rolling sideways and his offsiders were standing ready when an entire section of skylight crazed and fell like drops of water in sunlight, like a diamond necklace dropped by a careless thief. This fleeting moment—this fleeting chandelier—was followed (or so it seemed to me—that the noise came after) by a sharp hard crack like a bullwhip.

The fellows from Jordan Brothers’ worked like aces. They got the RSJ over to one side and into place. They had the stress off the truss in a minute and so you would think no serious damage was done.

I had no time to worry about the subjective reactions of the other tenants. There was too much to do. We got the RSJ bolted into place and I saw, just as we finished, that we were going to need some more steel for the sides, just to stiffen the whole thing. There were arguments about money. I suppose I was not tactful. In the heat of the moment I may have forgotten that it had been my idea in the first place. I may have referred to it, in conversation with my son, as “this scheme of yours”.

Jordan Brothers’ went off for the extra steel, and I leaned back against Mr Lo’s quarters looking up at the skylight. Thunderclouds were tumbling in from the south pushing up great columns into the dizzy air. I would need to rent a tarpaulin and I had no money of my own.

I smelt the Chinaman behind me: soap and ironing.

“Rowe Street Joyce,” he said, emerging from his cage, as neat as a
maître d
.

“Beg yours?” My hands were blistered from the sledgehammer and my white shirt was rusty from the RSJ. I looked at Mr Lo and wondered if he could lend me a quid.

“Rowe Street Joyce,” he said. “RSJ.”

“Ah, you mean Rolled Steel Joist.”

“Of course,” he said, a little curtly, I thought. He gave me his card. I did not notice the rain begin. I was listening to Mr Lo. He had come to Sydney, he said, for only one thing, to become a top man in building Hi-Li. He saw that Hi-Li would come to Sydney before it came to Penang, so his plan had been to get experience with Hi-Li here and then go home when they started Hi-Li there.

I felt the rain. My head was running with sweat and the rain was pleasant, but I should have been out getting a tarpaulin. I got the architect to accompany me downstairs and I took some money from the till. I gave him enough to buy a T-square and kept enough for the rent of the tarp. Then, because I could not wait to brief him, I walked with him up to Sayer’s. I did hot want him worrying about the skylight, but he could get to work on the accommodation. I had a lovely plan for making rooms with walls of fish tanks and Venetian blinds in front. It would have worked. We could have had light, movement, the sky, privacy, the works. I did not realize that he did not understand, that all he
wanted to do was build Hi-Li, that I was bamboozling him with fishes.

But I made a bigger mistake, i.e., I imagined my client in the matter of the reconstruction was my son. Quite incorrect. But as I walked back through the storm with Mr Lo I did not know this. I used the phone at the town hall to order a tarpaulin from Jordan Brothers’. I entered the emporium already calculating the weight of water the fish tanks would add to the fourth gallery.

When Goldstein grinned at me I knew something was up. She stood at the rail. She smoked a cigarette and had a glass of beer in her hand. I did not realize what had changed her until I saw, not ten yards from her, Rooney’s eyes. They were, of course, in Emma Badgery’s face.

She showed me her teeth. I lifted a lip. No more was necessary between us.

While all other directions afforded great security, that eggshell roof, even when intact, sometimes made Emma giddy with anxiety. When she heard the bullwhip crack and saw the sky fall in, she felt a terror so great that it was necessary for her to crawl—she could not stand—down the stairs to find her husband.

Her arrival was heralded by the staff, and Charles, already in a panic about his building, ran up the stairs to meet her.

I knew none of this. I did not understand Emma’s requirements in terms of shelter, sustenance and protection. I did not know about the meeting on the stairs. She had defeated me, but I was not yet aware of it.

I sat, that night, on the rubble in the middle of the kitchen trying to work out a way to get the broken bricks down to the ground floor. The tarpaulin flapped like a spinnaker above the skylight and although the wind came through the missing section it was not unpleasant to me—no more than sea air and spray—and I never thought it would be to anyone else. I sat there on the pile of bricks with a leashed lightglobe circling above my head, an echo, if you like, of the old goanna who lay beneath its similarly moving ultraviolet light elsewhere in the gallery.

My view of the gallery, and the goanna’s swinging light—a necessary medication to prevent the onset of rickets—was nicely framed by the stepped edges of the high brick arch and,
within that, the hard black lines of the RSJs. On the right-hand side I could see, through the lattice, Goldstein at work at her desk. She had a moon-warm light beside her and, as I watched, I saw her stop writing and run her hands through her tangled blue-black hair. I was still under the impression that she was writing a letter, and that, of course, is the trouble with schemes, that they begin as a celebration of happiness and end up leaving you blind to the people on whom your happiness depends.

I could not see Emma, but I knew she had locked herself up in her cage and would not talk to her husband. I had seen him pacing up and down around the bars and pleading with her. She had the children in there with her and I could make them out, could see Henry’s dark unhappy eyes as he stared out into the gallery. He would not wave when I waved to him.

Mr Lo was at his drawing-board.

I sat on my pile of bricks and tried to work out a simple lift. I picked up a brick and started to scratch a plan on to it with a nail. It was then I noticed the thumb print in the corner. This is common enough with bricks of this age, produced by convicts down at Brickfields, but I had never been so struck with it before.

I was looking at this, considering a man’s thumb print baked into a clay brick, when Charles came up the stairs he had exited so furiously an hour before and, rather than going grovelling to his wife, he came to me.

I was pleased to see him. I made room for him on my pile of broken bricks.

“You see this brick,” I said. “You see the thumb print. You know how that got there? Some poor bugger working at Brickfields a hundred-and-fifty years ago did that. He turned the brick out of the mould and, as he did it, he had to give the wet clay a little shove with his thumbs, see. This one, and this one. They’ve all got it. So there you are. All around you, in your walls, you’ve got the thumb prints of convicts. How do you reckon that affects you?”

We, both of us, looked around. It was a big building. It was a lot of thumb prints to consider.

“Father,” he said, “do you know how much money you’ve spent today?”

I was very tired, but I did my best to be polite. I explained that once you start a job there is no going back. Then, to get us
back on a peaceful plane, I started to talk to him about bricks. I told him how some of them have special marks, the shape of clubs or spades for instance, pressed into them.

“For God’s sake,” he shouted in my ear, “at least have the grace to say you’re sorry.”

“I’m not,” and, by Christ, I wasn’t. I looked out from where I sat. Anyone could see I’d improved it out of sight.

“Not sorry?”

“Charlie, look what I’ve done.”

“It’s a mess.”

“I’ll clean it up. All I need is….” I was going to tell him about the cables, but he wouldn’t let me.

“There’s no water.”

“I’ll connect it.”

“Don’t touch it.” He moved himself off the rubble and stood over me. I stood up too. “I’ll get a tradesman.”

“Why pay a tradesman?”

“You’re retired, Father. You’re on the pension.”

“I’ve got to do something.”

“Go to the beach.”

“I’m too old for the beach. No one wants to look at an old man on the beach. I’ll trap birds for you.”

“I already employ people to trap for me.”

“Then let me finish this.” My voice went a little strange. I didn’t realize I felt so emotional about it.

He came and put two hands on my shoulder. “Father….”

Then I saw her. She was out of her cage. She was standing in the corridor between Leah’s lattice and the gallery rail. She had my Vegemite jar in her hand, but if there was a time for getting it back, it was past.

“Father … it’s the money.”

Emma was smiling at me, but the smile was not friendly.

“Have the grace to admit the truth.”

“What truth?”

But we never got into it, because Emma came past me and embraced her husband. There, right in front of me, she hugged and kissed him. She gobbled his nose and licked his ear. I had to go away. I could not stand it. It was not the kissing and cooing. It was the bloody words.

“Oh, Emmie,” I heard my son say—a big man, fifteen stones—“Oh, Emmie, Emmie, I’m sorry.”

Rosellas fucked, fertilized their eggs, laid them, hatched their young and did all the hard work feeding them. Fish, marsupials, and snakes all reproduced themselves for our benefit. We were, it seemed, sitting on a gold mine. There was no shortage of anything. My son bought me shirts and suits. Anything I wanted I could sign for at Hordern’s or Grace Brothers’. A Parker pen? Yes, sir. Crocodile-skin shoes? Please be seated. A blue dress for the little girl? Fifth floor, sir.

At home there was a special room for me, to compensate, I suppose, for my disappointment. When I say special, I mean it was the same room they put me into in the beginning, but they let me put a window in the wall so that I could look out into Pitt Street. I chose a modern window, steel-framed, and when they put the neon sign out on the front of the building—only a month later—Charles made them design it around my window although Claude Neon, the manufacturers, wanted him to brick it up.

They were so nice to me. They bought me a bed with a drawer under it for my underpants and socks. They built in a cupboard, and then they left me alone. They all had lives of their own, worries, occupations, hobbies, whatever. The bed they bought me was only two foot wide. There was no question of me sharing with Goldstein, not if it was ten foot wide.

Yes, I blamed her for having my scheme stopped. Yes, I was wrong. Yes, I knew at the time. Yes, I was a cranky, bad-tempered old man. All that much would be clear to you anyway. Goldstein, to top it all, had problems of her own and very shortly afterwards she moved out to be an independent woman on her ten pounds a week. As to whether she got leeches on her legs or frostbite on her hands, I have no idea.