Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  Henry saw his father trailing a hose, but he did not recognize either the father or the hose. The teapot was kicked against the wall and the air was wet with alcohol and tannin. Henry shook his mother, shook and shook her, but she slept on. George was crying. The creature was cursing and fumbling with the kitchen tap.

  Charles was drunk on black-market Scotch. It took him an age to get the hose connected. He flooded the kitchen and drenched his Dedman suit. Then he turned on the lights and tried to blast his family from the cage. They would not budge. The children clung to their mother. The mother clung bleakly to the bars and, afterwards, lay shivering on a sodden mattress on the floor.

  When Charles – bawling and remorseful – tried to dry them, Emma bit his finger.

  The wind was still blowing when he woke at five a. m. He lit two kerosene radiators and placed them near his family. He went to the lavatory and tried to vomit. He bathed his finger and put mercurochrome on it. He believed he had deserved to be bitten. He thought himself loathsome.

  The idea that his wife was in the cage because he had done something wrong was now fixed very firmly in his head and could no more be dislodged than she be moved from the cage itself. The trouble was not the cage – the trouble was that she would not tell him what he had done. He asked her. He even suggested. But all Emma would do was murmur. And although he would begin calmly enough, smiling, nodding, rubbing her back, bringing her a white-fleshed peach on a plate, or a bacon sandwich or a pair of silk stockings wrapped in holly-speckled paper, although he would whisper sweet things in her small ear or make porridge with illegal butter melting on it, he would, in the end, lose his temper with all the non-specific murmuring. Then he would behave like an animal and say nasty things.

  Later, when he remembered the things he had said and done, he would easily understand why she might wish to punish him.

  Leah Goldstein, their one real friend, did nothing to help. Partly this was because Charles never lost his temper in her presence, and so she never witnessed anything as spectacular as the hosing-down. However, she was well aware that Emma, her friend, lived in a cage. Oh, she was often out of it, it is true, shopping, showering, visiting the cinema, but it was where she liked to spend her time, where she would entertain her friend, read her romances, and sleep with her children, like a silky sow contented with its litter.

  And Goldstein saw all this and would not criticize. She pretended it was all quite normal. Not once did she say to Emma that it was not a useful way to behave, was not good for the children or even herself. Instead she stubbornly stuck to her first impression which was that Emma was kind and affectionate and the thing she found remarkable about the cage was how attractive Emma made it seem. This was not merely because Charles had bought her tributes of satin sheets or that the blankets she slept in were of mohair so soft that you had to – it was quite impossible to resist – stroke it against your cheek, or that her doting husband always seemed to be able to find her fruit out of season and butter when they had no butter coupons left. Goldstein was not untouched by this luxury, although she would not let herself admit it, but what impressed her most was the way she was with her children – she whacked them across the head when they misbehaved and nuzzled them when they were good, and Leah, who so much wanted children of her own that she invented them in letters, was in no mood to criticize the woman she called "A Perfect Mother".

  There were things that you would expect to make Goldstein uneasy -the youngest boy's Asiatic face, for instance – but she does not seem to have noticed it. You would expect her, also, to have had stern words about Emma's penchant for silk stockings and leg-of-mutton sleeves, both of which were banned for the duration, and yet she did not. Even when she herself was getting blisters and a bad back in the Land Army she never saw Emma in an unfavourable light. When she had leave she would come up from Narrabri on the train and she and Emma would go to the matinee together. Sometimes they just sat and knitted and, on a rainy afternoon, with the sky falling gently on the glass above their heads, it was hard to imagine a nicer place to be.

  If Leah had once, only once, said that Emma was crazy it might have helped. It was left instead to Nathan Schick who delivered the opinion while they sat drinking in the gutter in William Street. But while his diagnosis was accurate, his advice was not good and led only to the incident with the hose.

  Nathan liked Charles, but he did not understand his situation. For instance, when he saw that a wife in a cage had done nothing to deter the boy's ambition to have the best pet shop in the world, he admired him for it, and saw it as an example of that characteristic he admired most, i. e., going down the goddamn middle. This was about as big a misunderstanding of the situation as it was possible to have.

  Charles did not have his magnificent new shop in spite of Emma. He had it because of Emma. If he had not been so bluffed and bamboozled by his wife he would have been, deaf or not, in the army.

  Nathan Schick admired Charles for keeping out of uniform. Charles, on the other hand, was embarrassed to be a young man in plain clothes. He imagined himself a coward. He was the proprietor of a nonessential industry. He camouflaged himself in an old grey boiler suit. He gave an elderly impression. He walked close to the cages and kept his head down. He hired women who would have been better used as telegraphists or machinists or Land Army labourers and he paid them money so they would sell pets for him. He was ashamed of the very thing that gave him so much pleasure.

  When Nathan Schick came looking to buy that inappropriate mascot for General MacArthur, he did not have to go poking around in the dark end of Doyle's Arcade. The pet shop had moved twice and it was no longer a mere pet shop. The sign said it was an emporium. It was too. Charles was renting (and would soon buy) the old Stratford Arcade in Pitt Street. No matter how inconspicuous he might wish to be, he was still a Badgery. He had grand visions. So even though he saw that an emporium like this must draw attention to his nonessential status, he could not resist those four wooden-railed galleries stretching upwards towards that lovely skylight, a delicate thing of lacy iron and clear glass. Each gallery was a good twelve foot wide, enough to build deep cages and still have room for customers. Here you could accommodate a cockatoo in the proper manner. You could have a wallaby run. Possibly, one day, you could install a platypus. On the Pitt Street end of the gallery there were proper rooms. In one he could breed flies. In another he could place incubators in preparation for the day when the war was over and there was kerosene enough to run them. On the top floor they could have a flat and they would be able, on summer evenings, to bring deckchairs out on to the top gallery and stare down into the canyon and watch parrots flying to and fro in fifty-foot-long cages.

  Once my son, in a perfect echo of Henry Underhill, bellowed at me that I was not a business man's bootlace. He loved to style himself a practical man. It was bullshit. He was an enthusiast, a fan. He did not even calculate the money he would need to fix the arcade which had been disused since the depression. He signed the lease without getting a quote for building cages or aquariums. He did not even think about the extra cost of feed if he was going to stock the place in accordance with his dream which was, I must tell you, an expression of the purest patriotism – pure Australiana – definitely no bunny rabbits or pussy cats no matter how tearfully his little boys begged him.

  There was no one to tell him that Sydney was not big enough to support such poetry. Any real business man would have told him that the best pet shop in the world would be a failure.

  The Americans, however, saved his arse. They arrived just when he needed them and although everyone remembers them for nylons and candy bars, they also paid big money for rosellas and lorikeets, blue bonnets and golden whistlers, all varieties of cockatoos, king parrots and western parrots, finches, warblers, even a pair of dancing brolgas courtesy of Harry the rabbitoh. The GIs handed their money across the counter like children sent shopping by their mothers. You took what you wanted and you handed the rest back to them. Charles did
not cheat them, but he did put his prices up until he reached the delicate point where they no longer said they were low.

  Gang-gangs cost a fiver. Australians came to stare at the mug Yanks wasting their money. They put Charles in a temper. He thought them ignorant and illeducated and would have liked to give them a piece of his mind. But being a nonessential coward in a boiler suit he could only bump into them belligerently as they stood in front of the pretty white cages.

  Normally he tried to keep away from customers. He was happier in the fetid room where he bred his fly pupae, or away on the lakes around Kempsey collecting stock. Petrol was rationed but he had an old Essex with a gas producer and he went hunting in this.

  So when Nathan Schick did arrive he was lucky to find the boss home. Charles had a termite nest in a hessian bag. He had his head down and there was something in the walk, the suggestion of a limp, that gave the impression of someone old and smelly although he was only twenty-four.

  "Charlie Badgery," said the Yank, blocking his access to the stairs.

  Charles may or may not have heard him; he tried to push past.

  "Charlie." The Major had a bony hand on the round fleshy shoulder. "Don't say you don't recognize me."

  Maybe he did, maybe he didn't.

  The Yank removed his cap and revealed a bald head. Nathan was now ten years older, but there was no denying the crooked regretful gold-toothed smile.

  "How nice to see you, Mr Schick."

  Charles did not feel nice at all. He felt ill. This face before him was the face of his nightmares. His sister was skun and this was a face licked by camp fire. There were American baubles on the end of a fishing line, hooks, razors, blades, balloons, feathers, knives. Soon his ear would go dull and fill with blood.

  "God damn, Charlie. I read about your shop last year and I wondered…"

  Charles lowered his bag. "That was a different shop."

  "And I've been wondering if this is the same boy I knew."

  Charles could not help himself – he smiled. He liked Americans. He liked the careful round way they spoke and the way they never hesitated to give an opinion. He liked the smart lines of the Major's jacket and the floppy officer's cap. Most of all he liked the sense of cleanliness that emanated from Nathan Schick. The real Nathan Schick had little to do with the grotesque figure in his recurring dream.

  It was lunchtime, and the shop was busy with browsers. Charles wanted to get out of the stair entrance but Nathan, oblivious to the pushing people, wanted to talk. "Remember the corellas," he said, releasing Charles's shoulder and holding his upper arm instead. "The corellas you got for the show in Ballarat. And the first one shit on Shirlene Maguire."

  "Don't talk about Sonia," Charles said.

  Nathan blinked.

  "I know you weren't going to, but… don't…"

  There was a soft part to Nathan Schick. It was as mushy as marshmallow, all sweet and sentimental. And when Charles said that to him it was almost enough to bring him undone. Charles backed off the entrance to the stairs, dragging his termite sack with him. Nathan followed him and began to pat him, comfortingly, on his shoulder but when he saw the look on the boy's face, he stopped.

  "Hell's bells," he laughed, a silly false laugh. He tapped out a battered Lucky Strike and lit it. "I'm not here to talk about the past, Charlie Badgery. It's business. The U. S. of A. requires your services."

  It is difficult to convey the impact of this simple slogan on Charles Badgery. He was like a man struck by love for whom all the world – a minute ago so clear, delineated by crisp lines and sharp colours – now runs at the edges until it is nothing more than a blurred velvet frame for the object of its affections. It did not matter that the saleswoman with the bruise on her throat wished a confirmation of the price of a children's python or that, having smiled and excused herself to the Yank, she shouted in the direction of his hearing aid. Not two feet away an old man was stuffing breadcrumbs through the bars of a mynah bird's cage, although there were signs forbidding it. And even when Henry's slipper fell four levels and landed – dead on target – at his father's feet, Charles did not react, and his children, leaning over the rail, got no fun.

  "What services?" Charles put down his bag of termites.

  "Professional services, what else?"

  "How?"

  "General MacArthur", said Nathan Schick, "has asked me to buy him a mascot."

  And that is how Charlie Badgery came to provide MacArthur with his celebrated cockatoo. It was he who taught the bird to say, "Hello, Digger." He put the cage on the preparation bench and sat on a cage in front of it for five hours every night. Every time the bird said "Hello, Digger" he gave it Vegemite on toast.

  The important thing about this episode was not the cockatoo's brief blaze of glory in the newsreels and newspapers, nor was it the letter MacArthur wrote to Charles declaring his emporium the best pet shop in the world. No, the important thing – our whole future hinged on it -was that he renewed his acquaintance with Nathan Schick.

  33

  Nathan Schick was a juggler. He had so many schemes going on in his head at once that he rarely got any of them going. I don't think this disappointed him. The soft burr of sadness in his ascetic face was not produced by this, but rather, the contrary: it was the schemes that took the edge off his sadness. I do not believe that his business was to make money. It was to make schemes, and in this you must class him a runaway success. It did not matter that there were five schemes smashed and bleeding at his feet, he had another one arcing through the air and it was this his eyes concentrated on.

  With Nathan, nothing was what it seemed. The show in Ballarat, for instance, was not a dry run for the Tivoli in Melbourne, although that is what he told Badgery amp; Goldstein. He set up the show in Ballarat to attract a certain Gloria Beaudare. There were sixteen complicated moves to checkmate, and I forget how it was meant to work, except it didn't.

  Likewise with MacArthur's cockatoo. MacArthur was almost incidental to the scheme. He had not wanted a mascot. It was Schick who convinced him that he needed one, and the last thing on Schick's mind was how the "Hello, Digger" would be received by the Australian public. He did not have time to worry about details. The bird had to say something. Nathan knew enough about Australia to know that people would take offence at a cockatoo calling a Yankee "Digger", but he was in a hurry and couldn't think of anything better. MacArthur liked it. Nathan did not care. It was not important to the scheme, because he also knew that once the cockatoo had been in the newsreels and in the papers it would be worth a lot of money. He did not bother to analyse why this should be so, that the public would pay good money to own a party to a presumption. What he knew was that one cockatoo looked exactly like another, and that he could produce fifty MacArthur's cockatoos, or even a hundred, and sell each one as the original. It was a good scheme, as smooth and flawless as an egg.

  He was not ready to discuss the scheme with Charles. When he sauntered into the shop, he had been ready, but in his memory he had confused the character of the father with that of the son. He had not been prepared for Charles's earnestness, and he was now embarrassed by his enthusiasm for the Allied cause.

  Charles did not want money. He told Nathan it would be an honour to be involved in any scheme at all – he did not even ask what the scheme might be.

  Nathan smiled, a regretful smile, the smile of a man who remembers honour and knows what it feels like. He folded his soft hands behind his back and moved along the galleries behind Charles, gliding on thin-soled American shoes, as light as a dancer. He observed the silent incubators and dry-retched in the fly-breeding room. On the fourth gallery he met the three-legged goanna and Charles's unconventional family. He did not inquire as to why Charles's wife should have a small Japanese child at her breast. He watched the pets' meals being prepared in the family kitchen. He then went out to the gallery again and stood and watched his countrymen in the canyon below. It was then that the second scheme came to him. This scheme was so
much bigger than the first that it immediately claimed all of his attention. When he had thought it through a little he went and found Charles and persuaded him that they should go down to King's Cross and discuss business. He smiled at Emma, but she unnerved him, and he went to wait on the wide creaking stairs while Charles changed from his grey overalls into his Dedman suit.

  They went to several clubs. They ate steak and chips and oysters. They drank Scotch. Charles had few of the social graces and he was only at ease when he could discuss birds, marsupials or mammals. Nathan was not bored at all. He was delighted to listen while Charles shouted about necrobacillosis in wallabies, neoplasia in a palm cockatoo. Nathan asked questions, nodding and frowning and showing sympathy. Charles confessed his plan for a whole factory staffed by budgerigars. He revealed his plan for a goldfish sleep-inducer. Nathan advised him to see a patent attorney.

  In a taxi on the way to Double Bay Charles confessed his delight to be doing something for the war. Nathan shifted uncomfortably. In a room above a fruit shop they played poker with two giant negroes who mesmerized Charles out of five pounds. Then they walked three miles to Darlinghurst amidst streets of wind-blown garbage cans. Here, at last, they were in harmony, both becoming lyrical about the uniqueness and beauty of Australian birds and animals.

  They knocked on some doors, which turned out to be wrong.

  They were already drunk, but Nathan stopped a Yankee captain in Crown Street and bought the rest of his Scotch from him. They went down to William Street and sat in the gutter to drink it. The westerly wrapped newspapers around their ankles.