Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  The tea and jam had done nothing but accentuate Charles's hunger. He was eager that the talking finish so he could go outside and raid the chook house for eggs. He knew that anything he said would extend the conversation, but he could not help himself – he felt sorry for Mrs Chaffey and being a young man he imagined that words might help her.

  "Still," he said, "you've got the farm."

  She did not quite laugh, but she expelled some air. "He only bought the farm because it was so bad, to demonstrate the ploughs. Wally Jenkins," she explained, nodding down towards the road where an old Chev made the leading edge of a feather of soft dust. She watched Wally Jenkins's progress for a moment. "To demonstrate the ploughs," she said. "We've got a rocky paddock and a paddock full of stumps and we've got a bog which will be boggy if it ever rains again, and he was so happy when he found it. Just like a little boy. We were boarding with the Ryans in Jeparit at the same time and he came home and said, 'Marjorie, I've found the perfect bit of land.' Oh dear," she said, smoothing her dull hair back over her head.

  Charles made a sympathetic noise.

  Mrs Chaffey placed her oil-smeared hands palm downwards on the table and Charles – the urge came on him suddenly – wanted to pat them.

  "I must say I'm pleased you came," she said. "I must say you are like an angel to me." And she touched his hand. Perhaps it was the hunger, but his head started humming and he felt a not unpleasant sensation on his neck, just where the hair was cut short and prickly. She did not pat his hand, as he had considered patting hers, but grabbed it, and squeezed it hard until it hurt.

  "If you had wings on your back", she said, her forehead creased with frown marks, "and a halo round your head I couldn't be happier."

  And then she stood, made a jumble of cups and saucers, and left the room, accompanying the soft brush of her feet with the light clink of crockery.

  It was such a gloomy room. It faced the west and the mornings were spent in deep lifeless shadow. Charles sat alone with his back to his host's rifle-shooting trophies, staring down at the bright yellow ribbon of empty road. It was so still that Mr Jenkins's cloud of dust still hung like a chalky smudge across the sand-washed landscape. His head still felt odd – probably, as I said, only hunger. He looked down and found the oily mark Mrs Chaffey's hand had left on the back of his, and in the face of all the forces to the contrary, the gloomy light, his empty belly, the melancholy snoring of his host, the lost snakes, the various stinks of mice, sweat, must, seaweed, the dismembered motor cycle, the flies fucking on the jam spots on the table, this oil smudge of affection was enough to make him happy.

  When he heard Mrs Chaffey splitting firewood he went out to help her.

  15

  The next morning was as fine and clear and windless as the one before. Wally Jenkins drove past and made his chalk plume of dust. They ate porridge with golden syrup, fresh soda bread with plum jam and cocoa made from new cow's milk. Charles saw a little lump of snake's shit and kicked it under the table.

  There was no talking during the eating although Les Chaffey took out his wooden-handled pocket knife and, very carefully, cut the weather map from his two-day-old copy of theArgus. He placed this on the table where his bread and butter plate should have been; then he put on his spectacles so he could study while he ate.

  When breakfast was finished and the table cleared, Mrs Chaffey ripped a big rag from an old floral dress and gave it to her husband. Charles heard the rip but did not think about it. He was still seated in his chair, his head back, his eyes patiently combing the cobwebby rafters, looking for his snakes.

  Chaffey had to ask his guest to move. Mrs Chaffey invited him (wordlessly) to stand beside her and watch Mr Chaffey wipe down the oilskin. Mr Chaffey did not do this like a husband performing a chore, nor did Mrs Chaffey watch him as if he were.

  Mrs Chaffey smiled at Charles. Mr Chaffey spat on the rag and worked on the hardened gravy spots. He rubbed like a demon. He polished the oilcloth as if it were made of first-quality cedar. He felt the surface with the flat of his hand and was not easily satisfied.

  When he was done with spitting and rubbing, he tucked the rag in his back pocket from whence it hung like a bedraggled bantam's tail. Unconscious of the comic effect, he took down his dictionary from the shelf, opened it at the beginning, and removed his collection of yellowed newspaper weather maps. He then spread these on the table like a hand of patience.

  "Come here, Chas. I'll show you something."

  Mrs Chaffey nodded encouragingly, although she herself remained leaning against the open window.

  Charles went and stood beside his host but because he was confused as to what was happening he did not listen properly to the first part of the explanation and thus found himself saying "yes, yes" when he was, in reality, totally bamboozled.

  Les Chaffey was explaining the weather to him. He was doing it in terms of a game of snooker. There was rain coming. It was there, sure as chooks have chickens. It was not on the map yet, but it would be. There was a high, there, which would be snookered. It would wish to move across, but would be blocked. Then this low would come in and drop, plop, into the pocket in the Great Australian Bight. This itself would not bring rain, but it left the field wide open, any mug could see it, for this one, here. Les called it the "Salient Low".

  When he had finished his explanation, Les put away his maps. Charles did not understand the implications of what he had heard until later when he went out to the shed and found Chaffey furiously welding the cleat on to his tractor. Mrs Chaffey had an oilcan and was going over the spring-loaded tines of the "Chaffey Patented No.4 Plough".

  No one said to him, "Excuse us, but your motor cycle will have to wait."

  Rather, Chaffey said: "Here, pull this," when he could not get the tractor linkage to line up with the plough.

  Often, during the next two weeks, Charles came to the brink of asking about when his motor cycle might be ready, but he could see the time was not right, that Chaffey was too tired, or too busy, and so he waited, working the tractor himself for the last three hours of every day. Using the ingenious Chaffey plough, they did the rocky paddock and the one full of stumps. The tractor leapt and thumped and reared and left Charles's kidneys in as painful a state as when he arrived. At night he dreamed of furrows and his sleep was tense with the problems of keeping them straight on rocky ground.

  Finally the clouds began to arrive, jumbled and panicked like bellowing beasts in a sale-yard, and Les Chaffey drove before the coming storm, seeding at last. He drove recklessly along the steeper banks in high gear, looking behind him at the bunching clouds, ahead of him for any hole or stump that might send him rolling. He had seeded the Long Adams and the Boggy Third and was on the last run of the Stumpy Thin when the rain came in great fat drops which brought out the perfumes in the soil. He finished the run in a flood of lovely aromas (minty dust, musky clay), drove out the gate, parked the tractor by the back door, put a rusty jam tin over the exhaust stack to keep out the damp, and went into the house where his wife and guest, woken from their naps by the din of rain on the roof, were celebrating with a pot of tea.

  "Now," Les Chaffey said, "now young fellow-me-lad, we can get stuck into that AJS of yours."

  The next morning there was water for baths and for washing clothes. Mrs Chaffey laboured over the copper, stirring the clothes with a big pale stick, while the rain continued to fall. It was good rain, gentle and persistent, and Les's unlaced boots, as they returned to the house from the shed, were caked with gritty red mud. He took off his boots and left them on the back porch. He came into the kitchen where his prisoner was watching flies fucking on the table.

  "There's nothing to it," he announced, filling the kettle recklessly with water. "Half a day's work, and I've got it beat."

  Charles was so elated he came and shook his host's hand. The mice were busy dying of their own plague. His snakes had all escaped. There was nothing to keep him in the Mallee any more, and he had resolved to return to Syd
ney to open a pet shop. He did not know that Les Chaffey was afflicted by a disease common in clever men: he was impatient with detail and when he had finally worked out the gearbox and seen how quickly the rest of the machine could be put together, that the problem was licked, the cat skun, etc., he no longer had any incentive to complete the job, with the result that the motor cycle would be left to lie beneath a tarpaulin like a body in a morgue and only bereaved Charles would bother to lift it, although he no longer hoped that a miracle had been performed while he slept.

  Every night Les Chaffey would promise to fix the motor cycle tomorrow, but when tomorrow came he would rise late, dawdle over breakfast, perhaps go into Jeparit to the rifle club, come home after lunch, and fall asleep while his wife shook her head or clicked her tongue.

  "Tell him stories about your family," she implored the prisoner, while they sat over empty cups of tea, weeded the vegetable garden, stirred the copper or pegged clothes on the line.

  "I tried, missus. You heard me. He's not interested." Charles, in spite of his good nature, was becoming irritated with Mrs Chaffey. He thought she should say something to her husband. Instead she put the onus on him.

  "Tell him something mechanical," she said.

  Charles tried to relate the story of his father's aeroplanes but being unable to answer such simple questions as the type of engine that powered them, he soon lost his host's attention and (unfairly, he thought) his hostess's respect.

  All Charles's stories were like matches struck in a draught, and when he had exhausted his box and Les Chaffey's enthusiasms remained unkindled, he despaired of ever seeing his motor cycle in one piece again.

  He told Marjorie Chaffey that he didn't mind, but this was false generosity intended to regain her affection. The truth was that he was so angry he could have burnt the shed down.

  Easter came and went. The weather turned clear and cold. The wheat showed green above the yellow paddocks and whatever Les Chaffey should have been doing, he didn't do it. He snored, or listened to his Tommy Dorsey record, or brooded over an old Melbourne telephone directory.

  And Mrs Chaffey began to act as if even this was Charles's fault. It was cold on the back veranda, but she pretended she had no extra blankets to give him. She no longer offered to wash his shirt. She spoke to him less often, and less kindly. In the afternoons she withdrew to the front veranda, darning socks or shelling peas in the winter sunlight, or squatting on her haunches to watch for something that never came. In the evenings she knitted mittens and scarves for her children in Geelong. When slugs got into the vegetable garden she spoke as if it was his fault. There was never any pudding at night. And when Charles offered his only money -a florin and two pennies – towards his keep, his wan hostess enraged him by accepting it – she dropped the coins into the pocket of her grubby pinafore where they stayed (he heard them) for weeks.

  When he lay in bed at night he wore his socks and his shirt and he spread his suit across the top of the blanket. He learned to sleep on his back, very still, so that he would not crush his suit and have to borrow the iron again.

  He could hear the Chaffeys talking on the other side of the wall, and he did not need to poke his hearing aid through the convenient hole in the hessian lining to understand that it was he who was the subject of their conversation.

  "Fix his bike."

  Silence.

  "Leslie Chaffey…"

  "I heard you."

  Silence, then the movement of springs.

  "Why won't you fix it for him?"

  Charles lay still and breathless.

  "He should be able to fix it himself."

  "He can't."

  "He should learn."

  "He's a dunce," said Marjorie Chaffey, no longer whispering. "He can't learn."

  "For God's sake, Marjorie, it's simple."

  Another silence and then, without any warning, without so much as a spring squeak, came a bellow of pain so loud that Charles could not believe it came from his friendly-faced host.

  "why is life like this?"

  "Shush, it's all right, shush, Leslie, shush. It's all right."

  "why?"

  "I'm here."

  Les Chaffey wept. His wife cooed. A mopoke cried in the scrub to the north. Charles removed his hearing aid and locked himself in, alone with the noises of his blood.

  16

  It occurred to Charles that he had fallen amongst mad people and he would be wise to escape. Still, he did not rush at it, and when he did make a move it was in exactly the opposite direction to what you'd expect, not down the drive and past the mailbox, but up the back and into the scrub. He poked around amongst the tussocked grasses and stunted trees. He found a couple of mallee fowl who opened their mound each morning to let the autumn sun warm their eggs, but he did not study them. The mallee fowl is too depressing and lifeless a bird to have any commercial value and my boy's mind was occupied with the idea of the pet shop in Sydney. Had he already decided it would be the Best Pet Shop in the World? Probably. It would not matter that he had seen no more of the world's pet shops than those cramped cages in Campbell Street. He suffered from the Badgery conceit and was not concerned by what competition he would have to face. He knew only what he needed to know, which was that the Splendid Wrens he could see around him were worth five bob in Sydney. There were Golden Whistlers at half a crown. And, best of all (he could see the ticket-writing already): Blue Bonnets, 1 guinea.

  Charles was feeling belligerent towards the Chaffeys and, having lost his motor cycle, did not feel inclined to ask permission to use their binding twine for nets or fencing wire for net frames. He made his nets (badly) from two sprung halves, like big netted oyster shells. He took the garden spade and did not own up when it was missed. He dug holes in the red sandy soil in the scrub, and in these holes, amidst the amputated wattle roots, he placed stolen pudding bowls of water -the only bait necessary for the job.

  He was soon, on paper anyway, a rich man.

  And yet I must not make my son's motives appear solely mercenary and you must see how gently he handles the birds when he traps them, and how those big clumsy hands suddenly reveal themselves as instruments of affection. He worries excessively about their diet, their comfort, the size of their improvised chicken-wire cages, separates the meek from the aggressive, finds company for the gregarious. And when he at last succeeds in trapping a one-guinea blue bonnet he can sit happily for hours marvelling at the beauty of its feathers, the rich blue around its parrot's beak, the yellow of its lower breast in which lovely sea you find a softedged island of rich blood red.

  He did not feel the need to explain his growing menagerie to anyone. Marjorie Chaffey saw him using their seed wheat to feed galahs and, as was her habit when angry, said nothing. Her mood was not helped by her husband who, having passed the birds every day for a week as he walked to the dunny and back, finally noticed them, became excited and started feeding them himself.

  It was then that Marjorie Chaffey began to dig the hole. Perhaps it was for compost. Perhaps it was for something else. She didn't care. She was so angry she made it four feet deep while her thick-skinned husband squandered his intelligence and enthusiasm devising a more efficient bird-catching net. She heard his excited voice coming from the shed. She flung down the mattock and took up the crowbar. He came and showed her what he'd done. She dropped the crowbar and picked up the spade and he waited patiently for her to finish removing the loose dirt.

  Then he explained the bird net, pointing out the simplicity of the spring which he had made from an old inner tube, and the trigger release which was as sensitive as a mousetrap. He did not notice that she had been crying and when she made no comment about his invention it did not seem to dampen his enthusiasm for it.

  That night she cooked him curried lamb, a meal he hated. He ate the lot without commenting, talking to the silly boy about a pet shop.

  "Fix up his bike", she said, "so he can go."

  Charles heard her, but he was so frightened of
her he could not look her in the eye.

  "Fix it," she said, pulling her knitting out of a brown-paper bag.

  But Les Chaffey did not seem to hear, or perhaps he did hear and decided that there was no point in addressing the question until the present matter was settled. He was making some clever shipping cages. Using no more than galvanized iron and solder he was constructing a feed dispenser and a tiny water cistern that would not spill no matter how roughly the cage was handled by the railways.

  He also spent a lot of time (now he was privy to Charles's ambitions) giving advice. Half of the advice was about banks and the other half about wives. Marjorie Chaffey's knitting needles clicked as fast as a telegraph key.