His Illegal Self

by Peter Carey

  They think we’re cockroaches, she whispered as they returned to the street. Fuck them, she said, her blackened cut-up hand once more around the boy’s shoulders.

  Yes, Dial, said the boy. Fuck them, Dial. Soon they could go to a motel and she would read to him. There was one on the main street. It had air-conditioning and color TV he was pretty certain.

  Instead they went to a Laundromat. There was a hippie girl emptying dirty clothes from a trash bag. They looked at her.

  Then they found an arcade where the sweet rotten sugar smell of Nambour was overcome by patchouli oil and spoiled bananas.

  Are we looking for hippies, Dial?

  She would not say.

  Maybe they sell books here?

  But it was a health food store. Above the bulk dried beans, beside the pile of empty molasses cans, was a notice board with ads for massage and meditation and moon dances. Also: four colored photographs of two log huts with cute shingle roofs. These she looked at.

  What is it, Dial?

  She read, silently, frowning and wrinkling up her nose.

  Who lives there?

  It’s a place for sale.

  Let’s just stay in a motel.

  Shush. Listen. It is fourteen acres on the edge of rain forest, she said. There is water from a spring. There are five hundred fruit trees and an established vegetable garden. See, there’s the papaya, like Trevor bought you.

  Can we stay in a motel please?

  And coffee bushes, she said, and persimmons and lemons and limes and three different varieties of bananas including lady fingers.

  What are lady fingers?

  She did not know but would not admit it.

  It’s in the jungle, isn’t it?

  She fitted her arm around his shoulder and set to stroking him again.

  Do you know what bull ants are, he asked.

  She was deaf as a dog with a good smell. There’s so much information here, she said. Everything but a phone number.

  There is no phone, said the woman behind the counter. She had a nice face, like the girl in the Beach Boys poster Cameron had stuck up on his wall. “Good Vibrations” was the single most important song of the last ten years. He knew that.

  You’re American? She had long blond hair and faded blue eyes and shiny suntanned skin.

  Buenos Aires, said Dial. South America.

  Yeah? The girl frowned. So how do youse like the Sunshine Coast?

  We were interested in this place at Yandina.

  No, the boy thought, please.

  Yand-eena.

  We’re interested in it.

  No town water. The girl shook her head and smiled. She did not like them, and the boy was pleased. No electricity, she said, sort of singsong. No TV.

  Where is this property, Dial asked.

  This property, the girl said, mocking the way Dial talked, is out at Remus Creek Road.

  Come on, Dial, the boy said, I want to go.

  But Dial folded her arms. Where is that exactly?

  The girl shrugged. She took a spotty apple from a plastic bowl and rubbed it on her stomach. You go to Yandina post office, she said at last. People hang out there. Ask them.

  She placed the apple daintily in front of her and then selected a second from the same plastic bowl. That your cat in your pocket, she asked.

  That’s exactly what it is.

  The girl put her head to one side and appeared to admire the apples. Then she took a knife and began to carefully slice the first.

  She said, I doubt they’re into cats out there.

  The boy was pleased to hear this.

  What would anyone have against a kitten, Dial asked the girl, hauling out the sleeping Buck and kissing him on the nose.

  Well there are what we call Australian birds. And the cats kill the birds. The girl looked up, unsmiling. People don’t like that.

  Well, said Dial, stroking Buck’s head, he is an Australian cat, so I guess he lives here too.

  The girl kept slicing and finally they left the store.

  We’ll find another house, the boy said. Better even.

  They hate Americans, said Dial.

  They’d like you if they knew who you were.

  We don’t want them to know, do we?

  I guess we’re underground, Dial?

  Do you like that?

  Cameron said you would come and take me underground. So I sort of knew. We’ll find a regular house, he said, thinking it must be somewhere on a regular road where his dad would find them. They would need a telephone for sure.

  They were walking through the hazy heat up toward the motel. The air was drunk with sugar and soon they were at the highway and the trucks and vans were raging, loud and foul, their tarpaulins flapping like sails on a foundering yacht. Then came a Peugeot blowing smoke, clouds of it as thick as thunder, a Peugeot 203. It was about the one car model that he knew but he was really annoyed to see Dial thumb it down.

  What about the motel?

  Shush, she said.

  Why, Dial, why? he said, still running after her, the opposite direction he wished to go.

  But she was already in the car by then.

  The Peugeot driver was a freak, long faced, long toothed, straggle bearded. He had narrow bony shoulders and real thin hairy arms like Cameron’s.

  As they slid into the front there was a rush of air like flapping canvas-a rooster, wings about six feet wide, rising in the air from the shade of the backseat.

  Christ! said Dial.

  My chooks! The driver swatted over his shoulder, even as he drove away, as the boy got down among the dust and crumpled newspapers, catching the kitty’s tail as it fled beneath the seat. He got scratched for this, right down his arm, but when he squeezed back up between the mother’s legs, he had Buck safely by his scruff.

  Adam, said the driver, peering too closely at him.

  Dial, said the mother.

  The boy was mad about the motel. He did not say anything.

  And where might we two be off to? The driver had a patchy black beard and very heavy eyebrows which rose as he peered at the boy.

  Dial said, We need to get to Remus Creek Road.

  The boy groaned out loud.

  Shush, said Dial. We have to do this first.

  Adam was sitting very, very close to the wheel. He cradled it against his chest, and his peeling nose was now stretching toward the glass.

  What’s that? He pointed, screwing up his face at a big gas station with palm trees for sale. He was a total dork, but he peered directly at the boy who felt he had to answer.

  You mean the trees?

  Is it Ampol?

  The boy could not understand the way Australians spoke, words like ground beef in their mouths. He did not like them generally.

  The brand, the freak cried, the bloody brand.

  Esso, said Dial.

  Right, the freak said, of course. We’re fine now, he said, but obviously he could not see. Tell me when you see the caravan park, he said. Who are you visiting at Remus Creek?

  We saw a place for sale.

  Ah-hah, said Adam and beamed at each of them in turn. He should watch the road.

  Fourteen acres, said Adam. Five hundred fruit trees.

  That’s it.

  What’s that?

  It’s a kitten.

  Is that the caravan park?

  Can’t you see? the boy asked. He didn’t care that it was rude.

  The driver had stopped in the middle of the highway, opposite a tractor yard. A semitrailer passed them on the inside, its siren blaring, the trailer snaking, huge clouds of dust drifting into the sky.

  Little more, said Dial.

  And then they swerved through the dust and did not die and the rooster rose and the tailpipe thumped and they were clattering along a corrugated track and the car was filled with dust and feathers.

  The boy was not going where this freak was going.

  I think we’ve got some problem with the cat, he said.
/>   Dial elbowed him, hard. It hurt.

  Adam peered right and left-How could there be a problem with a cat?

  Some girl at the health food shop.

  Adam made a farting noise. Health food. Oh mate. Mate! Molasses merchants. Pesticides, he said. Insecticides. They are putting genes from bloody jellyfish in sugarcane. That’s health food.

  That’s where we saw the place for sale.

  Ah yes, said Adam, well there you are. There you are. Indeed, he continued, careening down a steep rutted hill and splashing across a narrow ford.

  You don’t want to worry about a thing, he said.

  They were now on a softer road, almost sandy. The road was flat, winding between tall forest trees with shining bone-white trunks.

  Do you know the place? Dial asked. Can you drop us somewhere near.

  Near, said Adam, swinging the car violently to the right, fishtailing up a steep clay driveway. Five hundred fruit trees, he said, pulling on the brake.

  Let the kitty go, he said. It’s free range here. One hundred percent organic.

  18

  It was awful. They could not live here, ever. As they entered the larger of the two huts and saw the small black flies crawling across the chairs and tables and the balls of gray fluff gathered between the wide cracks of the floorboards, he saw Dial’s startled gaze fall on the sick yellow tar paper. She would never buy this place.

  She would be happier locked in jail. Really. It could not be worse than to be hidden away here in the leaky rain. There was a grimy kitchen sink on the back wall and the counter was piled high with pots and pans and paint cans and here, in the grim light of a small lead-light window, little Adam finally found a kettle and then he turned the spigot on a strange thin brass tap. There was a small trickle, then nothing.

  Ah, he said, no water.

  Even better, thought the boy.

  Adam was about five foot five and the mother five foot ten. She had been looking down on him politely but now that there was no water she gently closed her eyes. She unloaded the kitten on the floor and walked out to the narrow deck where she sat cross-legged, her eyelids lowered.

  His dad would never find him here.

  Buck was another thing entirely. He did not know what he wished to eat the most. He stalked a silver butterfly across a low wooden table and then leaped into a sea of cushions, each one filled with tiny mirrors. These he swatted at awhile.

  Adam crossed to the front wall, cups rattling as he went. He poked his peeling nose among the clutter of the workbench-a tangle of plastic irrigation pipe, a chain-saw engine, a length of guttering and so many other tools, a hammer, screwdrivers, a machete, numbers of brown paper bags which would later turn out to hold roofing screws.

  Ah! He held up a pair of opera glasses.

  The boy’s grandpa also had opera glasses. His grandma had been very sad when he took both pairs to his Love Nest.

  Adam bared his long teeth. Come on, he said, then raised his eyebrows. Tour.

  Dial did not come in from the veranda so the boy had to be polite. He followed Adam outside. He asked, Are there many stinging ants?

  See that lantana, above the oranges? Adam squatted in the mud and pointed up the hill. You would want to stay away from there.

  The boy planned to stay away from everything.

  Adam said, Always look inside your shoes before you put them on.

  But the hippie had no shoes himself. He looked mad and homeless, with big long feet and toes like fingers. The boy followed his exact steps over the warm soft ground, around the so-called veggie garden, a jungle, wild passion-fruit vines growing up its chicken-wire fence. From the big corner post they took a thin path, grass seeds tickling the boy’s bare knees like biting things with eyes and legs.

  We put the goats in here, said Adam, sometimes. It was obvious he could not see what he was talking about. It was only after they had crossed the spooky shady ground of the banana plantation and had slid down a steep embankment that he raised the binoculars to his eyes.

  This is the best part of the land, he said at last. The boy felt sorry for him, to be so poor he thought that the place was good.

  Adam squatted and brought his instrument to bear on a bunch of insect wire tied to the pipe’s end in a sort of muddy hole.

  Dig, said Adam, the water table has gone down.

  Hearing “water table” the boy imagined something jewel-like and impossible, but he squatted beside the starved thin man and they both dug with their bare hands, scraping out the cacky mud and flinging it onto the dark floor of the banana grove and after a while they came to dirty water.

  This is good water, said the man, peering at the yellow slime.

  He found a rusty paint can and told the boy to pour yellow water from the can into the pipe while he himself lay with his bare stomach on the ground and held his ear against the pipe and then, at a certain moment, he got up. Then he pushed the pipe beneath the water, and bound back the insect wire.

  There, he said. Could you do that by yourself?

  The boy knew he never would. I guess, he said.

  Good man, said Adam.

  On the way back to the hut Adam showed him the wild tomato vines which were threaded like precious veins among the grass.

  There’s always something to eat, Adam said as he picked the tomatoes, tiny like the ones in Zabar’s.

  You could hide here forever, he said, looking thoughtfully at the boy.

  All around them were what are called cabbage moths, their wings catching the last of the day’s sunshine, and above the moths were the bananas, their ripped-up leaves moving like fingers, and below was the inky green of rain forest where arm-thick vines wound around trees with skins like elephants. Beyond the hut, behind the car, the lonely darkness was bleeding along the course of Remus Creek and washing up into the muggy hills.

  When they returned to the hut, it was time for the hurricane lamps and there, in the yellow wash of kerosene light, the man filled a kettle with dirty water and then he set to work removing the stalks from the tomatoes. The boy guessed Dial was still out on the deck and the boy was feeling kind of sad, sorry for Adam, who was trapped in a place no one else would ever want. He stayed to be companionable and watched the tomatoes turn into a sauce, dissolving in the slow spitting circles of themselves.

  The kitten was asleep, curled up like a dead caterpillar on the cushions. A bat entered through the front door, circled once, and disappeared. The boy wondered when they would be able to leave.

  19

  She lay on the mudflats between nightmares and the ropy unknown day. A magpie sang. In November, the creepy Rabbitoh had told her, the magpies pecked your head and made blood pour down your face. Some country she’d been sent to.

  Dial, the boy said.

  She was sleeping in a nest of pillows and musty rugs beneath a ceiling of worrisome water-stained wood. She did not want to wake and deal with what she’d done. It was too hot already.

  Dial.

  Her skin was itchy, her hair still dirty. She had slept with her head wedged into the tight dark angle where the ceiling met the loft.

  Dial!

  He needed too damn much too often. She hid her face in her hands, playing peekaboo but also hiding from his breath. She must buy him a damned toothbrush.

  Dial, when can we leave?

  She opened her arms to him and he buried himself in the warm cave beside her neck. Whatever had happened to him you could feel he had been loved. No matter what a cow his grandma was she had cuddled him and kissed him. He had told Dial the names of the puddings Grandma had cooked: queen, sticky toffee, pineapple upside down, unbelievably Victorian.

  When can we leave, he said now, but she could not deal with that. She could feel his immense fragility but what could she do? This place might be their only hope. It was in the middle of the outback, as she understood it, with no phone and no mail delivery. They were off the grid. How else could she use the money to make them safe.

  No matte
r what happens, Dial, can we? Leave?

  She looked at his small determined face, his frown, the searching intelligence in those gray eyes.

  He’s worried, she said, mocking Adam, not so much to change the subject, as to begin leading the boy toward the matter that he really must address. They were not going to start drifting.

  He has to confer with someone, she said, and rolled her eyes.

  Can we stay in a motel? Can we?

  The dope is worried the pigs will grab him for having U.S. dollars.

  Finally, she saw him understand. It made his body rigid. You’re trying to buy it!

  Baby, you said you wanted to stop going places.

  He jerked away from her. She hardly saw him go, but heard him on the ladder, half falling, landing heavily. As she rose from her blankets the flies rose too and she felt one crawl along her bare arm. She slapped herself.

  Che? I’m trying to look after you. She pulled on some underpants so she could decently descend the ladder. The rungs were thin. They hurt her feet.

  All I have is U.S. dollars. I don’t have a lot of choices.

  He did not answer.

  She said, It’s useless to them, you heard that. We’re rich, but the money’s worth nothing.

  She took his hand. He snatched it back. Come on, she said. She was pleading with him, really, to understand what had happened to her life.

  Come on, she said, show me all the stuff you found yesterday.

  He kept his hand to himself but he led her out into the long wet grass and took an obvious sulky pleasure showing her to the so-called bathroom, a rusty four-gallon can inside a square wooden box.

  Come on, she said. The place itself is sort of pretty. Let’s look in the other hut.

  And it would have been pretty, in photographs, the varied greens, the log-clad huts with their low sagging verandas. Inside the second hut they found shirts and trousers hanging from four-inch nails. A netted bed faced two windows. Between the windows was a door which opened onto a low dark veranda where bats hung like broken rags.

  It’s a real jungle, she said. It looked poisonous to her.