Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  "I never told a man in twenty years," said Father Moran. "And perhaps I am using the wrong term in calling it a fairy. I never studied these things. It might have been an elf or something. But I'll tell you this, Badgery, whatever he was, he was. And I suppose you're thinking that it was something else, a sparrow, or a doll, and that I was just a little fellow and easily confused. But I know what I saw because I saw its face. It was so cross. You never saw such anger on a human's face. You never saw such a filthy scowl as the one it gave me. It was the sort of expression you would expect a bull ant to have, if it had a proper face to give expressions with. Do you follow me?"

  He went on and on. I was not only alarmed by the emotion, I was also concerned for my heater. You do not accumulate these things easily, even in Rankin Downs. I had some Feltex on the floor, six bookshelves, a chair, a desk. I did not get this stuff by violence or bribery or dobbing-in my fellow prisoners. I got them by using frailty and decency. This is a very potent combination. It does things to screws who you would otherwise describe as heartless and before they can help themselves they are running to fetch you a square of carpet from their own house and smiling at you like a mother when you have it. I got this sort of treatment at some cost, for making yourself into a frail man is a dangerous thing and much of it is not reversible. I lost an inch in height during my ten years in Rankin Downs and I have had trouble with my sciatica ever since. My skin never recovered its tone. But excuse me, because the damn heater is crumbling beneath the priest and it is not cowardice that stops me telling him, but his story which is reaching a delicate stage and has become frail and flowery and as easily bruised as a baby's arm. Attendez-vous!

  "I went and got my brother. I begged him to come and look. But he wouldn't come. He laughed at me, Badgery, and he would not come. You can imagine it, can't you? Me knowing this little gent is over there, no more than a cricket pitch away, and my brother refusing to come and look. That was like him. It was so like him. He enjoyed what it did to me."

  "Perhaps your father…?"

  "My father beat me," the priest said. "For lying."

  It was getting late. I could hear the slow diesel thump of the Fergie tractor bringing the trailerful of boys back from work. The kitchen was pumping out its rancid steam and the mechanics were already showered and thumping their tennis ball (bom, bom, bom) against the wall of my hut and Father Moran was demanding something with his eyes. I felt what a dog must feel, a dog who wants to sleep and is interrupted by a master who wants something the dog can't understand. I did all a dog can do. I showed him my eyes. They were a fine colour. I also asked him how fairies might fit in with Catholicism. I thought this might be the trouble. But if it was he wasn't ready to admit it.

  It was only the kerosene heater crumpling beneath his sixteen stone that finally brought him to his senses. He broke the mantle and burst the fuel tank and when he picked the whole thing up in his big hands, kero dripping on to his boots, he looked dazed like a man after a traffic accident.

  "Oh, Badgery," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm a clumsy fool. I beg your pardon."

  There was nothing I could say. My face said what I felt. You are a lucky man to own a kero heater.

  "I'll replace it," he said desperately. "The sisters at the convent have some the same."

  "Don't worry, Father." I stood with a grunt. I made my kidneys hurt and the pain showed like a shadow on my face. I grimaced and shuffled towards him. "I'll get another."

  He looked at me: frail decent Badgery shuffling to pick up the wounded heater. My aim was to make his heart near burst, but this – as I found out later – was not the case at all. But if Moran did not think me frail and decent, he was quite alone in all the gaol.

  You would not dream of the numbers of young men in gaol who dream only of being decent men. You won't observe them in such numbers in any other place. I was first amongst them. I was their leader, their example. There was no kindness I would not stoop to perform.

  It was my frailty that gave me power. It ruined my body, but I was respected by young ruffians known to have put hot smoothing irons on young girls' faces. They came with offers to protect me.

  Was it admirable? Did I claim that it was? Of course it was not admirable. I took it up, originally, to stop myself being bullied by my fellow prisoners. If I had been younger, stronger, richer, if I could have defended myself with a fist or a knife or a bribe, then I would have done so. But I had none of these things. I had only decency and frailty to rely on.

  But there was another aspect to it. I was preparing myself to take my place at the Kaletskys' on Sunday afternoons. To this end I was acquiring an education. I wished to be a decent man in a grey suit. I wished to be quiet and polite. I did not want to be an ignorant fool full of noises and bombast, I wished to acquire ideas and opinions, to sit next to Rosa at the big table and talk about philosophy and politics. I wished to accept scones and tea, and walk amongst the orange groves with Leah's children, return through the French windows to play chess with her husband. I was preparing myself for a gracious old age, with friends.

  "We shall be", Leah wrote, "your de facto family."

  To this end I was busy learning to be an intellectual. I was in correspondence with the University of Sydney and you may judge, of course, that my motives were the wrong ones for the proper study of any subject, let alone History. It is true that I was often impatient, that I was in too much of a hurry to find some little snippet, some picturesque fact that would serve to impress the Kaletskys with my erudition. I persisted just the same. And all Rankin Downs was proud of me. Juvenile sadists who might otherwise have tried to rip my balls off came to stand in my cell just to watch me studying. The Anglican Bishop of Grafton, reading about me in a local paper, had books sent to me and I am much indebted to him for providing most of the dreary Australian history books that were available pre-war.

  But it was to the Catholic side, to Father Moran in particular, that I owed my real thanks, for it was he who gave me, on his very first visit to my freshly painted yellow room, M. V. Anderson's famous work which opens with that luminous paragraph which I will quote without abbreviation: "Our forefathers were all great liars. They lied about the lands they selected and the cattle they owned. They lied about their backgrounds and the parentage of their wives. However it is their first lie that is the most impressive for being so monumental, i. e., that the continent, at the time of first settlement, was said to be occupied but not cultivated and by that simple device they were able to give the legal owners short shrift and, when they objected, to use the musket or poison flour, and to do so with a clear conscience. It is in the context of this great foundation stone that we must begin our study of Australian history."

  Reading these words I always imagined the man who wrote them. M. V. Anderson was a thin stooped fellow with a big nose and a high-pitched voice, a tea drinker, a gossip with dandruff on his shoulders and nicotine on his long fingers. M. V. Anderson enjoyed himself. There was nothing to excite him as much as a lie. I imagine the glint in his eye and the pendulous lower lip as it begins to blow up and expand with blood as he tells his reader that Bourke and Wills were not involved in simple exploration but were spies for the colony of Victoria, sent to steal a piece of Western Queensland that had, by error, been omitted from the proper survey.

  It was M. V. Anderson who showed me that a liar might be a patriot and although, at the time, I thought this a lesson learned too late, it was not so. So if I say some unkind things about Father Moran they must be weighed against the positive aspect, i.e., that it was he and no one else who drove two hours along rutted gravel roads to introduce M. V. Anderson into my life. The book, of course, had another name on its flyleaf. Stephen Wall, it said, 6B. When I pointed this out to Moran, and suggested that Master Wall must miss his book, he merely said that M. V. Anderson was unsuitable for boys.

  Moran did not always annoy me. Often I was pleased to see him. He could be amusing. He had a rare ability to tell a football match from beginn
ing to end and he would sometimes arrive late on Saturday night with beer on his breath and his cheeks flushed with excitement. In fact, I realize now, he did not really give me trouble until the football season was over. It was then he started going through my bookshelves. The screws occasionally did the same. Every now and then there would be whistles and searches and they would find homemade knives or dirty pictures. Moran did not search like a screw. He did it like a man browsing in a bookshop, but he was at the same thing, pulling out books, looking behind them, flipping through the pages, peeking into Leah's letters. I waited for him to get on with his trade and start talking about God, but he was reluctant to do it. I tried to bring the subject up once or twice, but it made him hostile.

  "What would a fellow like you want to talk about God for?"

  He was right, of course, but I was surprised by the venom when he said it. It puzzled me even more as to why he came to see me and I might have been kept in suspense a lot longer if I had not blundered into the matter by mistake. I mentioned – in connection with what I now forget – Sergeant Reg Moth.

  Moran was standing there with one of Leah's letters hidden inside an Oxford Dictionary, pretending to look up some word or other while all the time he was prying into my private life. But when I mentioned Moth, his mouth opened and his brow furrowed.

  "You didn't call him that?"

  "Call him what?"

  "Moth."

  "I might have called him Sergeant. Sergeant, or Moth, or Sergeant Moth." I shrugged.

  He was such a big man and it was a very small room so his moods always seemed too bulky for the space. They pushed at me, bumped at me, seemed as if they would swamp or suffocate me.

  "He cannot stand the name," he said, shutting the dictionary with the letter still in it. "It drives him mad. You would have hurt him if you called him Moth."

  "His own name."

  He put the dictionary back in the shelf and – an annoying habit of his – lined up the spine exactly with the edge of the shelf. "His nickname," he corrected me. "Aren't you going to ask me why?"

  "Why?"

  And suddenly all his big solemn red-faced officiousness was gone and he was grinning at me like a schoolboy. "The Moth – because if there's a light on, he'll turn up." He giggled. "I shouldn't laugh. It's my own brother after all."

  Of course he was the loony's brother. Of course he was. He had that same square head and bulging eyes. "Well, well…"I said.

  "Come on, Badgery," he smiled. "Don't pretend you didn't know." He started to lower himself on to my damaged heater, changed his mind and went to the bunk. His smile pulled at his face as tightly as his buttoned-up suit pulled at his big footballer's body. "I saw the way you looked when I told you about the little fellow on the mushroom. You knew what I was alluding to. You understand my intention."

  "Father, I swear, I understood nothing."

  "But what could you swear by – that is the thing. Perhaps you might tell me later, but I saw at the time that you understood my point, that my brother would not look at devilry, that he did not think such things were even possible. You appreciated the irony."

  "Now you call it devilry."

  "Of course it is devilry, man. Or would be, if I had not made it up. Do you think God makes tiny men to sit on mushrooms? Of course it is devilry, and you know it too."

  I felt disappointed. I had liked that little man on the mushroom more than I knew. I asked him why he made it up.

  "To trap you," he said, clapping his big hands together, and giving me that white picket-fence grin. "I know you've got that thing in a bottle somewhere. I thought if I told you that story, you'd bring it out. But, like my brother says, you are cunning as a rat."

  I was an old man, decent and frail. I put the cap on my pen. I smiled. I showed him my lovely violet eyes. "Come, Father, we're both grown men."

  He withstood the powerful blast of affection I sent his way. "Are we?" he said. "Are we? Are we now, men? Reginald came to me up at St Joseph's. I was taking a class. He came to the door. He said to me, 'Michael, I have seen the devil.' You know his voice, loud and rough. 'I've seen the devil,' he said. I thought he was drunk. God forgive me, I was angry because he interrupted my class. I saw the tears in his eyes and I denied him. I never got on with him, Badgery. He was never a happy man. He would not let God into his heart. Always the Moth. It wasn't the bribes he was after when he pestered the illegal drinkers. It was the company. They knew that, of course. That's why they gave him his name.

  But now he can look back on those times, when he was sneaking round Flanagan's backyard, arresting people and letting them off for a quid, he can look back on them as happy times. Father Doyle has heard his confession, but he has no peace, other than what he can get out of a whisky bottle. There have been policemen up from Sydney to witness his behaviour."

  I didn't know which brother was the maddest. There is no doubt, however, that the priest was the biggest, by a good two stone. "Father," I asked him, "do you really think I'm the devil?"

  "Perhaps you're just a witch."

  I took the bottle out of my pocket where I'd had it all along. I held it out towards him. He would not look at it. He peered away from it, into the corner, as if he was looking for cockroaches. "Is that it?" His voice was quite excitable.

  "It is."

  He took it from me, but still he did not look at it. I remember the enormous heat I felt radiating from his hand. I got out of his way. He went to the desk, I to the bed. He took out a little black book from his suit pocket and read some Latin out of it. I didn't understand the words of course, but he was a fearsome reader. I suppose he was exorcizing the devil or some other trick of his trade. When he finished he put the book away. He stayed where he was. And then he knelt. I thought he was praying, but no. "Badgery," he said, "come here."

  I went. He was looking at the bottle, moving his big square head around, peering from one angle then another. There was a strong odour of camphor, but that came from his suit. He looked up at me and smiled, a lovely smile, not that straight picket fence of a thing he'd shown me up to now.

  "What a lovely thing," he said. "What a lovely thing."

  Indeed it was.

  "Would you deny to me that these are angels?"

  I could not.

  "Angels, whizzing around in a bottle."

  "Take it," I said. "Have it. Keep it. Please, for Chrissakes."

  It was the blasphemy that changed him. He jerked like a fellow who has given himself a shock off his own car battery. He dropped the bottle as if it were a spanner. He was going to shake hands with me -he usually did when he was leaving – but something made him change his mind. He shivered. The silly ninny thought I was the devil. I know I cannot prove it, but I am sure it's what he thought. In any case he did not visit me again and, when the football season came again, I missed him.

  I was saddened to hear that he had died on the Kokoda Trail. I thought of that big strong body lying broken in the mud and I wished I had been with him, not a useless old man in a gaol, anxious that my families would be killed and taken from me. I dreamed, often, that Charles had been broken on some battlefield. I dreamed about his pets, unattended. They ate their last corn, expecting more. They had no idea that anything was wrong.

  25

  When people recall the character of that infamous goanna it is always devious and bitter, given to counterfeit affection, slow sidlings followed by razor-sharp attacks, but it was not always so and (as Emma would later point out) this change coincided with the loss of its front left leg on September 11th, 1939, and was the direct responsibility of Charles Badgery and a result of his inconsistency about the King of England. On the one hand he considered England and the English the scourge of all humanity; he knew them as hypocrites, snobs, snivellers, and past masters of the economic swifty; but on the other hand who was it (she asked) who, on that clear September Monday when the newspaper declared Australia would stand side by side with England in the war, who was it who went to enlist in the
company of that well-known urger and bulldust merchant, Harry the rabbitoh?

  They stood in a long winding queue at Victoria Barracks. It was ten in the morning. The rabbitoh was drunk. He botted cigarettes from the younger men and told them stories about "Good Ol' Jack Monash". Charles was nervous and solemn. He carried the two gang-gang cockatoos in a ferret box. The ferret box was on loan, but he had purchased the gang-gangs from the rabbitoh in a lane behind the Ship's Inn at Circular Quay.

  While Emma knew all about the purchase of the gang-gangs, she knew nothing about the dreadful queue at Victoria Barracks, the very smell of which would have been enough to frighten her, for the group of men shuffling their shoes, rustling their newspapers, plunging their hands into their pockets, feeling their balls, tilting their hats, had the distinct odour (as pungent as sweat) of war. Even had she smelt the smell, had she known about the queue, Emma would have been confident, complacent even, that her husband would never stand in such a thing -she knew, she thought, where he stood vis-a-vis the King of England.

  There were problems, that morning, more pressing than war. It was unseasonably hot and the arcade was packed with schoolchildren who had been brought in to see Charles's latest merchandising idea: the Cockatoo Exhibition. ("Every cockatoo known to science", theSydney Morning Herald said, "will be presented this week by a George Street business man, Mr pushed and prodded at their charges and shouted at them to quell the noise. O'Dowd the jeweller sent his handsome nephew across to complain that the schoolchildren were keeping away customers, which he did, but not before he had complimented Emma on the beauty of their window display: the palm cockatoo with its katzenjammer haircut and bright red cheek, the pink cockatoo whose raised crest was a sunrise of red and yellow, whose plump chest showed a pretty blush that descended as far as its leather-gloved claws. There were red-tailed cockatoos, casuarina cockatoos, a little corella and a galah. Only the gang-gangs were missing, but their food tray contained the long blackened seed pods of wattles and some hawthorn berries for which exotic food gang-gangs have a great weakness. Emma had hung a carefully printed sign on its front door: "On its way". There was some confusion about this sign (some imagining that it meant that the bird had departed) but not nearly so had stuck in the window when Henry had been born; this gave a misleading impression about the sex and weight of the long-billed corella now gorging itself on Wimmera wheat.