Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  Do not imagine that she was lazy in regard to her other duties. Leah, at twenty-five, worked as hard and unrelentingly as any widow who does not wish to think. She rose at five thirty every morning, washed and dressed her husband, made him breakfast, cut his lunch. At six thirty they left the house and she pushed the wheelchair up the steep hill out of Bondi, right up as far as Neil Street where they met Izzie's headmaster, a Mr Wilks of tory views. Together they would pick up the crippled teacher and strap the light wheelchair to the spare tyre. Mr Wilks would not have the chair inside the car (although it was a collapsible American model and would have fitted easily) and complained about scratch marks on the paintwork on the outside.

  Leah then walked briskly down to Campbell Parade, sparing no time to admire the pounding surf, bought a newspaper for Lenny, returned to the house, did the washing if it was a Monday, went shopping if it was Tuesday or Friday, and because these were the days of the Popular Front against Fascism and there were demonstrations, meetings, anti-war rallies, seminars and fund-raising exercises like the Artists Against War exhibition she -being only a young wife with no children to care for – was always busy organizing something, arranging a hall for an exhibition, begging paintings from artists, borrowing a tea urn from a union who wanted her to pay a deposit. She did all these things without complaint, but she would not give up the time allocated to "my bookkeeping" for anyone. During these two hours of every day she would not answer a telephone or door or even make a cup of tea. She sat at the kitchen table celebrating imaginary birthdays and picking fruit from unplanted apple trees.

  Even when Charles arrived in Sydney to find his mother, even though Leah was delighted to see him, although she may have cooked him a huge breakfast with steaks and chops and kidneys and bacon and sausages and eggs and onions, although she accepted his invitation to see the Chinese boy acrobats, she would not give up her letters to help him find his mother.

  Of course she was guilty. She probably cooked him fried bread and liver as well. She apologized more than was necessary. She hovered around him with a teapot. But she would not give up her bookkeeping.

  Instead she conscripted Lenny, who was doing nothing better than studying the racing form and worrying about his constipation, to help in the search.

  They were a bizarre pair, the neat little Jew with his dark suit and black hat (which he wore like a Riley Street larrikin, tipped forward over his eyes) and the wide-hipped, pear-headed youth who did not know what to do with his big red hands. Thus she was able, when they finally left her alone, to incorporate a truthful portrait of the pair into the letter that began "Dear Herbert"; this reflection of the real world was like a little piece of mirror glass sewn into the fanciful patterns of a Hindu bride's dress.

  7

  Charles had never talked to a "foreigner" in all his life. He had met Englishmen, of course, and the Yank who taught him how to trap the rabbits, but he had not met a real foreigner. Yet by ten o'clock on his second day in Sydney he was sitting in tea-rooms at Bondi and the tea-rooms were full of foreigners. Lenny bought him a cake and showed him how to eat it with a fork. The fork was tiny and hard to use. Charles pressed his knees together and tried to keep his elbow to his side. When the cake was finished they set out for the Bondi Post Office. It was still early, no more than ten, but there was a dance hall already open and they stopped to peer through its open lattice walls at the couples gliding on the floor. Lenny nudged him and winked. Charles blushed. He would never have the nerve to go into such a place.

  "You know how to dance?" Lenny asked him. They were walking past the newsagent's towards the Post Office.

  Charles admitted that he didn't.

  Lenny then showed him how the foxtrot was done, right in front of the newsagent's. Even though Charles was embarrassed he was also impressed at the light graceful movements of the silver-haired man. He was so dapper and neat. He held his hands out as if embracing a slightly taller woman.

  "Foxtrot," Lenny said, and smiled. "You can teach yourself." They then went into the newsagent's and picked up the Sporting Globe.

  At the Bondi Post Office they telephoned every Badgery listed in the Sydney phone book. It was Charles who supplied the pennies and Lenny who did the talking. They invested pennies in Miss A. B. Badgery and Mr W. A. Badgery, in a Badgery who imported and in another who manufactured rope; but they had no luck. Then, with hands smudged with phone-book ink, their cuffs soiled with post-office grime, they took a tram, a bus, another tram, and went to St Vincent's Hospital, not in search of Phoebe (which is what Charles had imagined as they walked up the steps) but to visit a friend of Lenny's, an old man, also a foreigner who described himself to Charles as "a common tout and racecourse urger".

  Charles showed the man his snake and the man gave Lenny some money.

  After that they went to a cafe in Rowe Street and Lenny asked questions about Charles's mother. It was a cafe for artists and poets and he thought she might be known there.

  Lenny went patiently from table to table. He began the same way, exactly, each time. "Excuse me, please, gentlemen, perhaps you can help." Or: "Excuse me, please, sir." Charles put his hands in his pockets and jingled the pennies he had left over from the Post Office. He stared around at the posters on the wall. He tried to appear nonchalant, but he hated it. He wanted to go. He did not know why he was being stared at.

  When Lenny arrived at the last table, Charles was already at the door.

  "Excuse me, please, sir," said Lenny, "perhaps you can help."

  The man was very fat. He had wet red lips and slicked-back hair. He sat sketching in a book no bigger than a matchbox but Charles noted none of this. Neither did he listen to Lenny's speech. He was hot with embarrassment. He was wondering what item of his wardrobe was incorrect, if it was the coat or perhaps the hat.

  "Know her?" the artist's voice was high and fluting. "I should say I know her. Casually," he said, "artistically, socially, biblically."

  Charles was brought back from the open door to meet the man who knew his mother. The man's hand was soft as a pillow.

  "Your mother", he said loudly, "is one of the great characters of Sydney. One of the great hostesses. One of the great free spirits. Go," he said, tearing a page from his tiny sketchbook and giving it to Charles. "Here is her address. See her. Talk to her about your wardrobe."

  The whole cafe burst into laughter and Lenny, escorting his young charge out into the hot street, suggested he might like to look at some clothes at Anthony Hordern's.

  And that was how Charles presented himself at his mother's doorway looking for all the world (as Mr L., her visitor at the time, remarked) "like the very latest thing in bank clerks".

  8

  Svelte cats named Swinburne arched their backs above the harbour and rubbed their silver fur against the fluted plaster columns that Annette Davidson had painted chrome yellow and kingfisher blue. The walls were pale peach and the great window uncurtained. On the polished wooden floor were rugs of exotic origin and on a low table (a snazzy thing of glass and chrome) sat a single white bowl with nothing in it but a dying beetle.

  Charles, imprisoned in his new suit, pressed his knees together as he perched himself on the tiny chair. His neck burned beneath his collar. His mother had not, as yet, so much as touched his hand. There had been no embrace. No lipstick marked his cheek and every eye was free from tears. She had taken the parcel of rabbit skins but had not even opened it. He tried not to blame her. The fault was with the other visitor, this Mr L. who droned on and on in a voice that Charles, having limited experience of such things, thought must be that of a clergyman, the mistake being made because of its mellifluous nature, its lack of self-consciousness, its easy assurance that its audience would not escape.

  Charles balanced his cup and saucer on his knee. He had already finished it but he did not know where to put it and this problem occupied his entire mind. He felt himself observed and wondered what was correct. He was inclined to put the cup and saucer on the glass
table and yet it was so ostentatiously bare that he felt it might be wrong to do so and, in any case, the table was glass and would make a loud noise and draw attention to his mistake, if mistake it was. So he continued to hold the saucer on his knee and looked, with what he imagined was polite attention, in the direction of Mr L.

  The famous Mr L. sprawled in the settee while remaining, somehow, as neat as a pin. He was boom-voiced, big-nosed, with a sensuous mouth below oddly pinched, slightly disapproving nostrils. His hair was cut fringed like a boy's but was flecked with silver and Charles, attempting to understand the gist of the argument, gathered only that the speaker did not like communists, Jews or proponents of what he called "Bank Clerk Culture". He went on and on about "LCD" and it was twenty years later that an older Charles realized, one insomniac night, that he had been referring to Lowest Common Denominator and that what he was most frightened of was democracy.

  But it was to my wife that Charles gave the bulk of his attention, and it was not the polite uncomfortable look he felt obliged to give the self-satisfied Mr L., but something its object felt to be a reprimand. Charles stared, his eyes heavy with love and censure. His mother was, in her mid-thirties, still a young woman. If there was something dark and shadowy around her eyes it suggested no more than the burdens of beauty. Charles's mother was like a gypsy. She was totally beyond imagining. Everthing about her (the painted pillars, the arching cats, the smooth honey colour of her skin) was unlike anything Charles had ever seen. She wore a scarf wrapped around her head and its tail fell, a cascade of tiny roses, over one bare shoulder. Her hands were shapely, the fingers long, flexible and expressive. When she spoke a throaty contralto came from lips which hardly seemed to move and yet enunciated her vowels in a manner that her son could only describe as posh; the manner of speaking suggested great passion and great control.

  He waited for a pause in the man's speech, imagining that, when it came, his mother would have a chance to explain that he was Charles Badgery, her son, and that they would, of course, wish time together and then the man might look at him less oddly. She had introduced him, with a jerky motion of her hand, as Charles, then held her bare throat and laughed. It was a jarring, silly outburst. Mr L. had blinked and continued with his speech.

  The pause, at last, arrived. His mother stood. She took the saucer and cup from his knees and departed, with a murmur, to the kitchen.

  Charles, disappointed, stretched himself inside the confines of his suit. He knew that Mr L. was staring at his brown boots and knew that Lenny had been right and that he should have bought shoes, or, if he were intent on boots, at least black boots. Now he was sorry he had been stubborn about the brown boots, but he had always wanted them, although this would be difficult to explain, just as he knew – looking at the man's pale sleepy supercilious eyes – that he could not explain that the suit was only so ill-fitting because he had been in a hurry to get here, that it was to be returned to Anthony Hordern's tomorrow where the legs would be lengthened, the sleeves let down, the backside made more generous.

  "Nice day," he said to Mr L., unable to stand his staring.

  "Noice day," said Mr L., and Charles could not believe that he was being mocked.

  Meanwhile Phoebe clattered around the kitchen in a tizz, not knowing what it was she should do. Afterwards she would regret (particularly when in her cups) not having sent the famous little satyr away and thus removed the problem of having to socialize with two such different personalities at once. Yet both of them had arrived, almost together, and both without warning; she had found herself trapped between what she had once been and what she would like to be.

  One always gave boys biscuits. She looked for biscuits but Annette had been up in the night, prowling the house, and had eaten them all. Her son (she found it hard to credit she had ever had one) and not even a damn biscuit to give him. He had smelt (she wrinkled her nose, looking for sugar lumps) distinctly odd. He was like a yokel in a suit. He was odd, repelling, ugly, with frighteningly demanding eyes that she was tempted to label as insolent but could not, of course, because she was his mother. Also there was this: that he was disconcertingly familiar, like photographs of her father as young man, and she felt towards this image a halting pulse of affection that was no weaker than the undertow of her irritation.

  Yet she could not send Mr L. away. She had laboured long to get his attention, had done what she always had – mixed up her literary ambitions and her powers of sexual persuasion. It was, as Annette was never slow to remind her, a bad habit to have fallen into. But to this Phoebe would bitterly reply that their whole life was a bad habit, a habit none of them could break, not even Horace who, although he was presently away, working as a purser on a coastal steamer, would return as soon as he had forgotten how sharply he was cut by frustration and jealousy, or when he was dismissed for epilepsy and put off the ship, whichever was the sooner.

  There were other bad habits too that Phoebe was not aware of, the worst being the whole system of illusion whereby Horace and Annette propped up Phoebe and made her believe herself a poet. Perhaps Horace, aroused by the sensational subject-matter, could not see the awfulness of the poems; but Annette (sarcastic, bitter, put-upon Annette, the history mistress with the wide beseeching mouth), Annette said nothing, perhaps from fear that Phoebe would, at last, turn on her and reject her totally, unconditionally, for ever. The nearest Annette would ever come to speaking the unutterable was, when most miserable, "We have spoiled you."

  Thus, Phoebe: surrounded by her menagerie: Annette, Horace, the cats arching their backs. She had allowed herself to become ridiculous and did not know it. Mr L., who sat in the next room idly and elegantly mocking her son, was not about to publish her poetry inIsis although he was doubtless aroused by the potency of some of the sexual imagery which made up for in literalness what it lacked in subtlety. He could not take the poems as anything other than a menu for the pleasure that might await him in the curtained bed referred to with such passion in one infamous unpublished sonnet that the men who drank at La Boheme would never publish no matter how often they passed it, smiling, from hand to hand.

  While she looked for biscuits she knew already eaten, Phoebe imagined herself on the brink of publication and she could not ask Mr L. to leave to allow herself to have time with her son and she resolved to ask Charles if he would come back tomorrow. She intended to take him aside, and explain all the complexities. She would cook him a lunch tomorrow, or perhaps Annette might cook something tonight, and she would serve it to him tomorrow.

  She returned to make this arrangement at a time when Charles had at last realized the snobbish and malicious nature of his interrogator and, having had his suit insultingly admired for ten minutes, was at the end of his tether. Phoebe, seeing the wildness in his eyes, panicked, and made her request there and then with the result that he stood in an urgent rush of limbs, scraping the chair along the floor, his eyes imploring, clutching for some sign from hers, but ready, belligerently, to reject it. She found herself rushing after him, up the steps and out into the road, where he stood trembling all over like a difficult horse. She quieted him, slowly, but ruined it again by being worried about Mr L. to whom she must return. She leaned towards him to kiss his burning cheek and he – realizing her intention -flinched from her and stamped off down the street where he was to become hopelessly lost, split his trousers, and all but ruin the rest of the suit in a storm that all of Sydney had seen coming.

  When Phoebe returned to her flat she found that her guest had drawn a caricature of her son as a wombat which was as marvellously executed as it was cruelly accurate. He inscribed it to her, and signed it. She laughed and thanked him and made a great fuss about how she must have it framed.

  But later, after they had disported in the curtained bed, a bitterness welled up in her so strong that she could not maintain her silence. It is to her credit that she told the artist that the wombat was her missing son and resembled her late father. It is also characteristic of her that she
should also have the work framed and display it prominently; for although she would have loved to destroy the caricature she could not bear to part with the inscription.

  9

  He could not admit to anyone that his mother had not hugged him or asked him to come back and live with her. Neither would he lie about it. Yet his actions were lying actions, for he stayed out at dinnertime and generally behaved like a young man with a busy social calendar.

  Leah imagined him being entertained by Phoebe while all the while he was mooching along George Street eating a pie from a paper bag or sitting in the stalls at the Lyceum by himself. When she asked him about his evenings she received the same smile the Chaffeys had when they wanted to know about his black eye; she squeezed his hand hard and felt, in the answering squeeze, what she thought was joy. He was miserable.

  He went back to Neutral Bay where Phoebe lived, not once, but three times. He walked up the steep street from the ferry and stood across the road from her flat. On one occasion a man entered the building just as he arrived and, imagining that his mother might, once again, have a competing visitor, he departed. At another time, a steamy Sunday afternoon, he entered the flat itself. There was a party in progress and the room was full of very peculiar-looking people. Charles took a piece of cheese and ate it defiantly before he lost his nerve and fled.

  For the most part, however, he wandered the streets of the city itself, hot, tired, too shy to do business with the impatient tram conductors. He took his suit back to Anthony Hordern's to be altered and repaired and was roared up by the old salesman for treating it so badly. He spent a lot of time in Campbell Street pricing birds in those dark crowded little pet shops most of which – although he did not know it at the time – had whorehouses out the back. He stared at French sailors at the Quay and bought half a pint of prawns from an itinerant barrow man. And in Bathurst Street, amongst the shops of pawnbrokers, second-hand clothes shops and tyre vulcanizers, he found Desmond Moore's now famous bookshop where he inquired after a book of poetry by Phoebe Badgery.