Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  "Yes," Goon Tse Ying said. He pulled up his trousers as he sat down. "Yes, yes. I remember. I was a young man then, full of life, and with no family. Now I have great-grandchildren and I am writing down everything for them. All my secrets," he smiled. "In this book. I must write them in both Chinese and English. The young ones don't understand Chinese – they're real little Aussies."

  "You taught me to disappear."

  He smiled, but I know that Chinese smile. It means nothing. I repeated myself.

  "No," he said. "Oh no. I'm not a magic man. Disappear? Is that what you mean? No, no, I taught you to clean your shoes."

  "To vanish," I insisted.

  "Oh no."

  "Don't you remember? You said, T am teaching you this because I love you, but also because I hate you.' You did not like the English or the Australians."

  "My children are Australians."

  "You were at Lambing Flat. Your uncle Han", I said, "was run over by a cart. His broken bones poked out through his leg."

  "Oh," Goon smiled. "I remember you. Hao Han Bu Chi Yan Tian Kui, we called you: 'Small Bottle, Strong Smell'. You made up stories, all the time. You told me your father was dead and then you made Mae Wong cry when you said your father had beaten you and gone to Adelaide. To Hing you told another story, I forget it. Perhaps you have some barley sugar? Yes, yes, I remember you. Hing said you were a sorcerer. Mrs Wong was frightened of you. You made her frightened with a story about a snake. She could not have you in the house any more and I had to have you go to my cousin who did not want you either. Yes, yes. It all comes back. It's astonishing – you think a memory is all gone, and then there it is, clear as day. Yes, my Little Englishman. Small Bottle, Big Smell. Did you become a sorcerer after all?"

  "I disappeared. You taught me. That's why Mrs Wong got ill."

  He smiled and shook his head. "And my children tell me that there are no sorcerers in Australia, that we are all too modern for such superstitions."

  We were interrupted by the girl who had shown me up. She brought us a pot of tea and two stout chipped mugs. Her grandfather introduced her as Heather. The girl giggled and ran down the stairs.

  "No," Goon said. "No, I do not come from Lambing Flat." He poured the dark tea with a steady hand. "My father had a store in Tasmania at a place called Garibaldi. Before that he looked for gold in Queensland. He was at the Palmer rush. Then he became a pedlar, and when he married he bought the store in Garibaldi from a relation he had never met. The relation was going home to China and my father bought the store because his mother wrote from China and nagged at him until he did. I was born at Garibaldi and I don't know any magic tricks except how to", he demonstrated, "take the top off my thumb which I learned from my Australian grandson."

  "The fact remains, I have done it."

  He waved me down, like a conductor quietening a noisy brass section. "Yes, yes," he said, and called me by that insulting Chinese name. "Possibly. I don't doubt you."

  "Before witnesses."

  "Be quiet," said Goon Tse Ying. "You make too much noise."

  "So what are your secrets, Mr Goon?" I poked at his book, this splendid volume, black, red, gold, the colours of dragons.

  "Shopkeeper's secrets," he said, sliding it out of my reach. He would not hold my eye. He moved his chamber-pot, nervously, with his foot.

  "You were a small child," he said, stirring three sugars into his dark tea. "You misunderstood the things I tried to teach you. I was kind to you, but you did not understand. Perhaps your life had been too hard. Perhaps you were one of those fellows who sees tricks everywhere and thinks that nothing is what people say it is. I wanted you to know practical things, so you wouldn't be tempted to be what Hing said you were already. He was superstitious, a poor man from a village, and I did not believe him. I told you, I suppose, that you should not make a dragon. My English was not as good as I thought it was and you misunderstood me. A dragon, Little Bottle, was my mother's name for a frightening story. Also it is a name they give to liars in my mother's village. In Hokein, they say 'to sew dragon seeds' when they mean gossip. My mother also used to call the castor sugar she put on dumplings 'dragon eggs' but I wouldn't have a clue as to why."

  He pushed the bowl of sugar towards me. "Quite all right," he said, seeing my hands shaking: "Not castor sugar." And then he roared with laughter.

  But my shaking hand had nothing to do with sugar, either fine or coarse. It was a condition I had not been free of since my time in Sunbury. "I lost my little girl," I said. "I made a dragon and lost my little girl."

  Goon looked at me warily. "What do you want?" He edged his chair back an inch or two and looked expectantly towards the door.

  I tried to calm myself. I picked up the mug of tea but my hands shook so I slopped it over his desk. Goon moved his book a little further away.

  "I can tell you nothing, Mr Badgery." He picked up the book and placed it in his lap. "If what you say is true, you're the sorcerer not me. Poor Hing was right. He hung himself, did you know?"

  My hand trembled uncontrollably. I placed it on top of the desk. I gripped the edge to steady myself, but the desk itself began to shudder and the open bottle of ink and the cups of tea set up opposing splashing surfaces of liquid. Goon Tse Ying picked up the bottle of ink and slowly screwed its cap back on.

  "If a thing can disappear, it can reappear."

  "You are the sorcerer, Small Bottle, not me. I'm a business man."

  He had been kind to me as a father is meant to be kind to a son. He had sat me on his bony knee and pulled my toes. He had let me smell brandy and laughed when my nose wrinkled. He had tricked me and found a whole fistful of dirt in my ear. He had taken me promenading, "doing the block" as they called it, holding my hand proudly. He dressed me in a sailor suit. And now, with polished eyes inside his wrinkled, shrunken hairless head, he dared deny me.

  I did not drink his tea, nor shake his hand on leaving.

  58

  I was not well. I went to my boarding house and lay, fully clothed, on the bed and there I thought about the book that the Chinaman had been keen to keep from me. It was not an ordinary exercise book, not a journal or ledger, not the sort of thing you could buy across the counter at any newsagent or stationer's. It was bound in black leather with a bright red spine. On the front cover was a gold panel surrounded by a red border. On the gold panel were three Chinese characters.

  The landlady came in without knocking. She asked me to take my shoes off her quilt and asked for money. I took off my shoes. I gave her money. I was thinking about that book. She inquired after my health but I only heard her, in my memory, after she had gone and there was little, anyway, to be said about my health. It was not what it was.

  59

  The haze of jacarandas in November gives Grafton an insubstantial look and I am no longer even certain that the Grafton I visited in 1937 is the Grafton that lives, so solidly, on the fruits of tree-killing, by the banks of the Clarence.

  But certain parts of the town are very clear to me: the bridge over which I walked to and fro, the graceless metal trough which allows few views of the mighty meandering river beneath.

  It was there, on that echoing bridge, I decided to steal The Book of Dragons. Dusk went; dark came. I wandered the streets, past houses where families were eating. I waited under trees, hovered by corner stores, trod the purple carpet of jacaranda petals. Cicadas trilled. The air had a sweet slightly mouldy smell. I went up to the General Motors dealer but there was nothing to see. The doors of his shed were rolled shut and padlocked. I took my bicycle from the boarding house and went up to the highway to cycle. I was nearly killed by an Arnott's Biscuit truck. I came back, once more, across that dog-legged bridge.

  I crept down through the tall grasses on the steep bank of the Clarence and approached the providore from the back. The Goon family were all downstairs, sitting in their kitchen. The daughter was doing her homework. Two sons were crouching over the wireless. Such signs of domesticity cut across my he
art and I thought of you, Leah, of your nipple.

  There were empty molasses drums at the back. Mosquitoes bred in their rusty lids. I climbed up on one and hoisted myself up to the catwalk that led to the old man's room.

  My shoes were well shone and supple of sole; it was not they that squeaked but the filthy Chinaman's floor. I fiddled and fumbled on his desk. The mugs of tea were still there. So was Goon Tse Ying. I could hear him breathing. I knocked the pen -I had observed it earlier, can see it still, black with a thin gold band like a wedding ring – and it rolled and dropped, a little bomb, on to the floor.

  He spoke, whispered, reed-thin, my insulting Chinese name.

  I had The Book of Dragons.

  I had great hopes for that book, and he, obviously, the same. He was on me like a spider, a hairless huntsman dropping, flop, off the ceiling, stinking of garlic. When you do battle with a master magician you do not enter the quest lightly. You know what he can do, how easily he can grease from your grasp, oil away, and take his information with him. I held him round the throat with both hands. The book dropped to the floor. You would not think a chap would get loose from a grip like that, my fingers interlocked like a golfer with a club, but he escaped me, hissing. I grabbed for the book and found it. His hand was at it too. There was, as they say, a struggle.

  A moment came when I realized Goon Tse Ying was no longer there. I held The Book of Dragons in one hand, his bleeding finger in the other.

  60

  If I had not laughed out loud, I would never have gone to court and never known that musty labyrinth known as Grafton Gaol. When I entered my room in the boarding house I was not expecting laughter. I had walked the passage shoeless, had not stopped on the way for so much as a pee or a flush, had unlocked my door quietly with The Book of Dragons tucked inside my Fair Isle jumper.

  Inside my room, the door locked, a chair under the knob, I sat down on the bed to study. My hands could not hold it still. I stood and laid the volume on the dresser.

  On each left-hand page were Chinese characters. On each right-hand page were words in English.

  A white ant hatch erupted in the night and the winged creatures pushed their way through the insect wire and flooded hungrily around the light, abandoning their wings and crawling around the shining white reflecting surfaces of my sweating face.

  I approached the book no less desperately: "It is my secrets of business which I fear you, my sons, have not yet understood. Therefore I write them down for you. Please attend.

  " 1 In purchasing stock, first of all, consider the demand. Do not stock a large quantity, firstly for fear of moths and secondly for fear of deterioration. If the goods are in demand at profitable prices it becomes an exception. In an exceedingly cheap article there is no harm to buy a large quantity."

  The English made no more sense to me than the Chinese characters. I felt myself confronted with a code I could not decipher.

  "2 Always serve your customers with courtesy and patience.

  Show patiently as many samples as you can. " 3 In wrapping up articles for customers make sure there is no mistake blah blah blah.

  "4 Where there are too many customers to enable you to attend to them all at the same time, then ask courteously…" (the rest obscured by a brown sticky fluid). "5 When a customer becomes lax with his account blah blah blah.

  "6 At closing time lock and guard against fires." By now I was giggling. Some fool was hammering against the wall. It was my giggling, of course, that brought me undone. I could have cycled back to Nambucca. There was a splendid widow there, the owner of a shell shop and a pair of gooey romantic eyes.

  " 7 In case of heavy rains. Ha-ha-ha. Loss by flood is unthinkable.

  "8 Influence people by virtue, not subdue them by force. 'They who overcome men with smartness of speech for the most part procure themselves hatred.' "9 Calmness is to be prized. If you succeed in this, prosperity may be expected in a short time.

  "10 If a matter does not concern you, do not forcibly interfere. It is an old saying that it is the mouth that causes shame and hostilities. If one does not meddle with anything outside his own sphere he will be free from sorrow throughout his life. So beware of it."

  I was roaring with laughter, heedless of whatever fools might stamp on my ceiling and belabour my door. I was later informed my listeners thought I had hurt myself.

  "Oh Wing, my son, guide your brothers Lo and Wah, and obey my commands. Do not forget that if one does not alter the way of the father he is considered filial. The Book of Poetry said 'For such filial piety without ceasing there will be confirmed blessing on you.'"

  When they took that sticky brown book from my hands I had begun to weep, and Sergeant Moth – that famous entrepreneur -picked up the finger and put it in a paper bag.

  61

  I am not sure how much later it was. I could not even tell you the owner of the house; but I have described it before – it was the house I invented to frighten the draughtsman in Geelong – that hairy-knuckled Englishman – when he would not put my name at the bottom of Bradfield's aircraft plans.

  This house was exactly where I had placed it: three doors from the post office. It was a big stone place with leadlight windows, encircled with elms. The lawn, I saw as Sergeant Moth's Ford rolled up the drive, was dotted with daffodils.

  Inside, at the head of the table, was a man with one finger missing from his bandaged hand. It was not the Mr Regan I had once described, but Mr Goon Tse Ying whose angry eyes I could not meet.

  So it was, at a time when it seemed too late, that I began to have some understanding of the power of lies.

  But read on, read on, and do not concern yourself about my years in HM Prison, Rankin Downs: I found my solace where I always would – in the blue pieces of cobalt sky, the mustard-yellow lies sent to me by mail, composed by Leah Goldstein.

  Book 3

  1

  Marjorie Chaffey laid down her broom and squatted on the sun-silvered boards of her front veranda. A mouse ran across her bare foot; when it returned to nibble at her big toe-nail she brushed it aside. She was in her middle forties and when she squatted, she squatted comfortably, with her unusually large feet flat on the sandy floor and her thin arms folded on her knees. She could stay in that position for hours, and would do so, if the mirage would come back again.

  The mirage had appeared at the bottom of the driveway. It had occupied the lonely road for four hundred yards on either side of their mailbox. There, shimmering above the hot Mallee sand, she had seen the main street of Horsham. This had occurred two years ago, two days after Boxing Day. She had been able to make out the parcels in the women's string bags. She could see the butcher cutting down a string of sausages and his name (Harris) was written on his glass window. She saw an old farmer with a bent back lead a reluctant fox-terrier on a string lead. She had seen the white-aproned grocer's boy riding on a black bicycle.

  This, by itself, did not have the makings of a secret. If this had been all there was, she would have fetched her husband and they would have looked at it together.

  But she had seen something else, and this "something else" had filled her with such joy, such a sweet mixture of happiness and loss, that she could tell no one. The "something else" was a young boy, dressed in cricket whites. She had only seen him for a moment. Another boy, the grocer's boy, had leaned his black bicycle against a wall and, when he had entered his employer's premises, the bicycle had fallen noiselessly to the footpath. The farmer had been led away by his fox-terrier. And then the boy in cricket whites passed the butcher's window, did a cartwheel, and was gone.

  It was the cartwheel, the slender tanned arms, the careless joy of it, that pierced her heart, for she thought she recognized -although she knew it was impossible – her husband. She knew it was not her husband. She could hear him then, could hear him now, up at the forge. His nose had grown and his eyebrows had skewed like a house whose foundations are sunk in shifting shale. And yet it was her husband and she remembered wha
t he had been like when he was a young boy, swift and pretty as a rabbit. He had played on the wing for Jeparit and he had such a dainty, fast, brave stab kick – it fairly zinged – and she had married him for a young girl's reasons not like they said.

  But now she heard a motor cycle approach and her interest shifted towards it. It was not a mirage. It was a real motor cycle, a hard metal object that was causing a soft orange feather of dust to rise into the cobalt sky behind it. Watching the motor cycle she began to forget her boy in cricket whites and, although she had no idea who rode the motor cycle, she willed it to stop.

  "Stop," she said, not loudly, but very clearly.

  The motor cycle stopped. It was beside the mailbox, four hundred yards from the veranda. It stayed there, its engine beating erratically.

  When the rider got off his machine, Marjorie Chaffey felt – it came on her suddenly – irritated. She stood and picked up her broom.

  She would have to offer the visitor some water.

  2

  The motor cycle fired and misfired, hesitated, surged ahead, misfired and spluttered. Charles gritted his teeth and felt the sand between his fillings. His kidneys ached. He had tied a woollen scarf around them, then tightened his money belt around the scarf, but the bruised kidneys still ached and the cause of their pain – roads made from saplings laid side by side, a technique known locally as corduroy – showed no signs of getting any smoother.

  There was nothing wrong with the motor cycle, a ten-year-old 1927 H-series AJS. The fault was with the petrol. In all this drought-stricken Mallee it was the one place a traveller could be sure of finding water.

  My son was seventeen years old. He had powerful thighs and thick arms hanging low from sloping shoulders. His great carved wooden head was marked with a black eye that was more yellow than black and from this spectacular bed of bruised flesh the eye itself, sand-irritated, bloodshot, as wild as a currawong's, stared out at a landscape in which the tops of fences protruded from windswept sand.