Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  Gawpers, comforters, people with gifts of fruit turned away by Bridget, who would resign next day when the snake was still not found.

  I joined the police search for the snake. I supervised the loading of the Morris Farman on to a flat-top wagon and rode with it to Barwon Common on which windswept expanse I tried to weep but all that came from me was a small ugly sound like a man might make when choking.

  53

  No point to dwell on this episode, to detail the various threats I received from men who thought themselves friends of Jack McGrath, amongst them the elder Cocky Abbot and the once friendly manager of the National Bank, or the strict instructions given mother and daughter to remove me from the house.

  They stuck by me, my only allies. And even Molly, unravelled by grief, dizzy, vomiting, summoned up enough love to tell me it was not my fault.

  When I did not leave the house as Geelong thought fit, the crowds of mourners who had followed Jack McGrath's coffin saw fit to ostracize the wife and daughter for their indiscretion.

  Geelong lined up with Mrs Kentwell and cut them dead. All the fine fellows who had taken quids and ten-bob notes from Generous Jack, who had accepted hospitality, and laughed and drank and danced and scuffed up the floors of Western Avenue, now abandoned his family to solitary grief.

  Phoebe slept with her mother. I made them bowls of bread and hot milk. I cannot remember how long this little hell went on for, only that Molly finally expressed a desire to go to Ballarat and Phoebe was sent to withdraw one thousand pounds from the bank. She also, for reasons I never understood, invited Annette Davidson to accompany us.

  54

  Ballarat, the Golden City, was in decline. The streets were peopled by dour cloth-capped men in braces. Shops were boarded up and there was a mean dispirited air about the place which was made no happier by the big white statue of Hargreaves and his Welcome Stranger nugget, the flower bed in Sturt Street or the feathery cirrus clouds that streaked pink across the pale evening sky.

  Annette Davidson was sorry she had come. She, at least, had rallied to her friend and now she wondered why her friend had wanted her. Annette, when neglected, had a tendency to cynicism. She had cancelled two days of classes for which she would lose two days' pay and Phoebe, sitting between Annette and the widow, would not even take her hand. Why ask her then? She answered herself bitterly: to witness the theatre of her grief, to be spellbound, taunted, maddened, by the pale skin and red lips behind the veil.

  It had been a terrible journey, conducted in a silence broken only by the small whimpering noises Molly made as she wound and rewound the cord from a bulky electric radiator around her wrists. No one had explained the function of the radiator to Annette and it was too grotesque to inquire after. Molly, however, had been more explicit about a large piece of cardboard cut in the shape of a toilet seat which she would not travel without. It had "up" written on one side and "down" on the other and, fearful that she might be compelled to carry the ludicrous object into a country hotel, Annette kept quiet about her most pressing and painful problem.

  She wanted a pee.

  She had assumed we would go straight to a hotel, but no one in the car seemed in any hurry at all. First, it seemed, they would have to find a Dr Grigson. Much as Annette felt pity for Molly she could not see why the visit could not be postponed until the morning.

  Annette, who could wax lyrical about the working people of Paris, did not bring this view to those of Ballarat. Small boys with no shoes ran beside the car and their faces frightened her. She thought the Hispano Suiza an insult to their condition. Groups of men on street corners stopped their conversation and stared at us in silence. She saw a drunk vomit into a gutter and another pee against the green-tiled walls of Craig's Hotel.

  Molly clutched at her wires. She could not remember the names of streets. She was as confused and shocked as a householder returning to a bombed-out city and her directions to me lacked confidence.

  "Down here," she said. "Up here."

  Phoebe stroked her mother's arms and dabbed at the beads of perspiration that appeared on her upper lip. She tried to loosen the wires which were cutting off circulation. She despatched me to ask directions. But no one knew of any Dr Grigson. They shook their heads before I had finished my question. They turned their backs. They walked away.

  We circled the streets. The Crystal Palace Hotel had vanished. Nothing was the same. People came from their houses to watch the Hispano Suiza go by. They shouted and grinned and sometimes jeered. Annette found none of this reassuring. As a sympathetic student of the Bolsheviks she considered the working class of Ballarat with some trepidation.

  "All gone," Molly said, "all gone."

  But Dr Grigson's building in Lydiard Street was precisely where it had always been. It was one of those buildings that disappear from the eyes of a city's inhabitants. It no longer had any part in their lives and they did not trouble to spell out the bleached and peeling letters on the rotting fascia of the veranda. We passed it four times before Molly located it in the wrecked map of her memory and experienced, in that drop from memory to reality, the chronological equivalent of an exceedingly large air pocket.

  "Oh dear," she said as she confronted this desolation. "Oh dearie, dearie me."

  Annette was ready to pee on the footpath.

  "The good Dr Grigson", she said dryly, "appears to be no more."

  "Herbert will knock," Phoebe said and Annette sighed in irritation and held her hands between her knees. Oh God, she prayed, find me somewhere to pee.

  I did as I was bidden and gained Annette's best cynical smile for my attempts at kindness.

  The windows facing the street were painted cream like a dentist's surgery. I knocked on them. I hammered on the door from which the ancient paint, unused to such agitation, fell in a flurry of green flakes and adhered stubbornly to the sleeves of my dark suit. I stooped to look through the generous keyhole and when I shouted I could hear my voice echo through the empty passage.

  I had no idea why Molly wished to see Dr Grigson. It would be another year or two before I became privy to such delicate secrets. For the moment, all I knew was that it was a pressing matter. I did not need to be instructed to go round to the back of the building. I signalled this intention to my passengers.

  I scaled the high wooden gate in Dr Grigson's back fence, although the padlock was so rusted I might have snapped it with my bare hands. A pale light glowed in the upstairs window. I picked up a piece of coal and threw it at the window. I fancied I heard a cough. I threw another, larger lump and knew, before it hit the glass, that the throw had been too hard. I sucked in my breath as the window broke.

  "Beg your pardon," I yelled.

  "Go away," a voice came quavering back.

  "Dr Grigson?"

  "I have the telephone," Dr Grigson said fearfully. "I shall call the police."

  "Mrs McGrath wishes to see you, Dr Grigson. She motored all the way from Geelong to see you."

  "Go away."

  "Out the front," I pleaded. "Look out the front. In the Hispano Suiza."

  "Hispano Suiza?" asked Dr Grigson (whose Daimler Benz sat quietly rusting in the shed beside which I stood). "Did you say Hispano Suiza?" A shard of glass fell to the courtyard and shattered at my feet.

  "I did, sir."

  The figure disappeared from the window and I went to stand at the back door. I heard footsteps descending the stairs at quite astonishing speed. Minutes later I heard high heels and the voice of my beloved echoing through the house.

  I waited. No one came for me. Only after Annette Davidson, unprotected by cardboard, had released a loud cascade of urine into what had once been Ballarat's only upstairs water closet, was I able to make my presence known.

  55

  Dr Grigson was two days past his seventy-fifth birthday which he had celebrated alone. His hair was almost gone and his neck and spine had stiffened to such an extent that, in order to alter his point of view, it was necessary that he change the posi
tion of his tiny feet, which he did with small shuffling movements.

  He had been washing his dishes and his rolled sleeves revealed skin of an almost unbearable limpidity, like a fish who has lived at such a remove from the sun that its internal organs are displayed beneath its transparent skin, a spectacle to make the sensitive squirm and turn away at such a display of the squishy vulnerability of life.

  It was Annette (her bladder bursting) who had kept him from the motor car. She had taken him by his narrow shoulders and turned him in his tracks.

  "I am sorry to be so blunt, Dr Grigson," she said, "but I need your toilet as a matter of some urgency."

  Dr Grigson found himself incapable of arguing with such firm resolve and, under the impression that his visitors had driven in an Hispano Suiza simply to make use of his water closet, led them to it without complaint.

  "There is no hurry," he told Annette as she closed the door, "we will look at the car in a moment."

  By the time Annette had relieved herself and admitted me through the back door, Molly had made the nature of her business clear and was already locked away with Dr Grigson in the consulting room.

  Very little had changed in the waiting room in thirty years. The roses and delphiniums still entwined on the carpet which, if threadbare in places, and faded everywhere, was spotlessly clean. The telephones and Remington typewriters and Graphaphone dictating machines lay ready for the use of secretaries who were now grandmothers, their generous bosoms soft pillows for the bumping heads of their daughters' children.

  Phoebe was giggling.

  "My God," she whispered as Annette and I came up the stairs, "what an extraordinary place. It's a museum."

  "What sort of doctor is he?"

  Phoebe shrugged. We stood in the middle of the room. The ancient chairs had the appearance of valuable exhibits easily damaged by the simple demands of everyday life. We hesitated to sit on them.

  The consulting room door opened. We had a brief view of the widow in her underwear. She scuttled behind the door as Dr Grigson emerged and shuffled mechanically, jointlessly, amiably across the roses and delphiniums.

  He began to fuss at a large wooden filing cabinet whose small drawers were packed with musty filing cards. Long-bottled odours flooded gratefully into the room.

  "Ah," he said to me, "the driver!" He nodded to me as a kindred spirit. "Rourke," he called out to Molly who was now safely tucked away behind the door. "There were Rourkes at Creswick. Were you a Creswick Rourke?"

  "Ballarat East," said Molly in a wobbly falsetto that betrayed her state of undress. "Mrs Ester's niece."

  "Ah, Mrs Ester, yes. Yes, yes." He took out a grey card. "Please help yourself to sweetmeats." He offered the bowl of confections to me. I obliged by offering it to the two ladies while Dr Grigson shuffled back into his consultation.

  The sweets had faded wrappers whose substance had long ago melted with what they were intended to contain. We chewed and made faces. I was spitting mine into my handkerchief when I was nearly discovered by the doctor as he scurried out again, turning head and body this way and that, but whether from curiosity or fear of attack was not exactly clear. He flung open a high glass-fronted cupboard and began sorting through cardboard boxes. The odours of perished rubber and elastic joined the must from the index cards in our wrinkled noses.

  "I had the first automobile in Ballarat," he said over his shoulder, "a Daimler Benz. They thought I was crazy. When I recommended sewerage at a town meeting Harry Wall said he would throw me into it."

  He held up an astonishing elastic and metal contraption for the benefit of his audience.

  "There," he said, "she's lucky. Or should I say, fortunate." The distinction was obviously important in Dr Grigson's mind and he did not lower the contraption until I had smiled and nodded my head in agreement. Grigson, satisfied, returned to Molly who burst into tears the minute the door was closed.

  "He's a quack," Annette said. "It's obvious. We should take her out of here."

  I was inclined to agree with her but one glance at Phoebe showed that she would have none of it. Annette quickly took the place beside her and left me to find less attractive accommodation.

  56

  Grigson placed Molly's hand on the velvet cushion and stroked it with his parchment-dry hands.

  "There," he said, "does that feel better?"

  "Yes, doctor," she smiled through her tears. "Oh yes, thank you."

  "We are only electricity," the doctor said, and she did not doubt him. She gave herself to the belt and to the soothing strokes of the old hands which became inseparable in her mind. She closed her eyes. She multiplied some numbers, slowly at first.

  "Of course," Grigson said, "it offends people to acknowledge it. It offends their primitive idea of themselves. It offends their religious principles. But if there is a god, perhaps", he smiled, "he is an electric charge. And why not? The Ark of the Covenant was an electric generator, although I have been physically threatened for saying such a thing."

  Molly silently worshipped the electric god and begged its forgiveness.

  "You are fortunate to find me still here," he said, not for a moment stopping the stroking. "I have been considering moving to Dubbo."

  Molly shuddered at the thought.

  "The town has gone backwards. I blame it on the gold," he said. "A marvellous conductor. The best conductor of electricity known to man and they waste it on decoration. This was a city of great potential, built on gold, and the fools squandered it. There has been no progress, nothing. They would rather go to spiritualists, herbalists. There is no belief in science," said Dr Grigson who had, just the same, borrowed the idea of the velvet cushion from a Chinese herbalist of my acquaintance.

  "Rhinoceros horn, monkey foetus, snake livers," he sighed. "It is quite extraordinary. Which is why", he said, "it is an especial pleasure to help someone in an Hispano Suiza."

  Molly was weak with relief and gratitude. She smiled at him dreamily. She would have offered him the car as payment.

  "Would you like…"

  "… a drive?" Grigson smiled. "Would you offer?"

  "Of course," Molly said, arranging her stole. She could have sung. "It would give me pleasure."

  "I can ask no other fee", the doctor said, "than to drive around the streets of Ballarat in an Hispano Suiza."

  57

  "No," Annette said as we trooped down the stairs. "Please, Mr Badgery," she whispered in my ear. "Stop him. He'll kill us."

  I had no intention of stopping it. I opened the car doors politely and sat beside the tiny doctor in the front seat while I explained the machine's controls.

  I have had worse drives, although possibly not quicker ones, for Dr Grigson took to the Hispano Suiza like a demon. He displayed a sensitivity towards the controls that was surprising in such a stiff-necked man and although his frail legs were barely strong enough for the clutch he certainly had no trouble with the accelerator.

  He drove recklessly up Lydiard Street and screeched around into Sturt Street where people, queuing for the cinema, turned to stare.

  "Barbarians," said Grigson, puffing as he swung the wheel into Battery Hill Road, running down a fox terrier that was too slow to appreciate the danger.

  Annette shut her eyes, but Phoebe, unaware of the dead dog behind her, only giggled.

  They travelled up the highway and killed nothing more except a Rhode Island Red cockerel outside the Buninyong Post Office.

  He drove back into town at a more leisurely pace. "That will teach them," he said, and I was never sure whether it was the display of the automobile, the demonstration of skill or the execution of two animals that was intended to have such an instructive effect on the people of Ballarat who remained stubbornly indoors, leaving Dr Grigson and his passengers to pursue their pagan rites in solitude.

  58

  Molly disowned the electric radiator. She was irritated, she said, by the amount of space the silly thing took up. She kicked at it with her tiny patent shoes. On
the way from Grigson's to Craig's Hotel she made me stop and put it in the boot. There was not sufficient room and I was reduced to tying it on to the spare wheel with its cord – it bumped and rattled over the neglected streets, breaking all four elements and leaving sharp fragments of ceramic to find their way into the hooves of the dunnyman's horses.

  Molly held her daughter's hand and kissed her. She fussed over the pale hand where it emerged from the fraying cast. She spat on her handkerchief and cleaned the skin beneath the ledge of plaster. She retied the sling. She pinned up loose wisps of hair that had straggled down from underneath her hat.

  The hotel kitchen was closed when we arrived and it was Molly who persuaded them to open it again. When we sat at table in the big high-ceilinged dining room (famous for its pendulum clock and its original oil painting of Alfred Deakin) she ate heartily, demolishing two helpings of very grey roast lamb and only announcing herself stonkered after scraping clean the large monogrammed plate of steamed pudding.

  Annette, as usual, was disgusted by the Australian habit of consuming large quantities of lamb, great slabs of dead dark meat smothered in near-black gravy. She scorned her knife and picked moodily at her shepherd's pie with fork alone and wondered what drug the quack doctor had prescribed for the widow's grief. If it had been the gonads of monkeys she would hardly have been surprised. The widow was all fluffed up like a hotel cat. Her plump cheeks were smooth as a china doll's and her fine nose, which had seemed so pinched, now flared its nostrils as if greedy for air and life. She held her knife and fork with a graceless enthusiasm more suitable for cricket bats.