Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  She could tell him tomorrow, but tonight she could now tell herself something else – she could allow herself to feel the hate she had for the pet emporium. And, indeed, lying in the unventilated dark, on a mattress on the floor, with the grease of cosmetics still on her face, she allowed a ripple of hatred, an electric jolt to pass down her body.

  "I hate this place," she said. She said it out loud just to make herself hear what she thought, so that she could no longer pretend to herself that she thought otherwise.

  "Signed," she whispered, "signed, L. Goldstein."

  Herbert rolled on to his back and she dragged her arm out from under him. She loved him, but she would rather go and sleep in her own bed by herself. It was a habit, probably a selfish one. It was this last thought that made her stay and, also, her wish not to hurt him. She put the sheet over him and sat, hunched, on the edge of the mattress.

  She hated it. She wanted to leave so much that tomorrow would not be too soon. She would not waste another moment of her life, that river filled with jetsam which had once – it looked so sad and pitiful now -been so important to her.

  No longer would she be understanding Leah. She liked and cared for Charles but her feelings for Emma and her children were false emotions and she tasted their taste in the cosmetics on her face. She had cooked their bland meals for them, wiped their noses, mended their socks, done all the simple things they all appeared to be incapable of doing. She had accepted the mindless ordinariness of their lives because she did not wish to live alone, perhaps, or because she could never explain to Charles why she might want to leave his custody.

  But she was not a young girl any more. She was thirty-seven years old and had a crease beneath her bottom and a little roll of fat on her middle. She was thirty-seven and had, for the most part, wasted her life as if she hated it.

  She started to make pictures in her closed eyes, a habit she had developed on her insomniac nights in Bondi. She could make perfect pictures: twisted white eucalypts at a corner of a white road near Cooma, bristling khaki banksias in the foot-burning sand at Coolum, Gymea lilies in the scrub around Dural, like burning weapons on long shafts placed defiantly to warn intruders. She saw the cliffs and waters of the Hawkesbury lying in the water like the scaly back of a partly-submerged reptilian hand.

  "Cdwerther," said Herbert Badgery.

  She turned her head. He also was sitting upright.

  "What?" she asked.

  "C-wder. Ah, strewth, I can't even say it." Then, laughing, he lay down again, still asleep.

  Leah Goldstein started giggling.

  Tonight, when he lost his temper with his naive son, she had been so pleased. She had been pleased, anyway, to see again her blue-eyed scoundrel and confidence man, but she was pleased, particularly, to see that he still could care about a thing like that, care enough to lose his temper.

  At last, she thought, I've done something right.

  "You're so much nicer," she told the sleeping man. "You're not hard and scratchy any more. Can you hear me?"

  "Mm," said Herbert Badgery, and started snoring.

  "I love you," said Leah Goldstein.

  She peered at him closely in the dark. His eyes were shut. He was breathing through his partly open mouth. "You are asleep, aren't you?"

  "I hate this place," said Leah Goldstein.

  47

  You may recall me mentioning a certain widow in Nambucca. I said she had a shell shop and it was her I left behind when I cycled up to Grafton looking for a job with the General Motors dealer.

  In truth it was a milk bar, but I always liked the idea of a shell shop. I had a picture in my mind of glass cases with those twisted shapes, soft and pink on the inside, all set out neatly on beds of tissue paper. I had no objection to cleaning the glass myself. I knew all the bus drivers on that route and many of them said they would have stopped there if there had been shells but we never got around to it.

  I came into that shop in 1937. I had been working for an oyster farmer down at Port, and that was pleasant work most of the year, but I was not getting ahead. I did not have a scheme in mind, but I bought a second-hand Malvern Star bicycle and thought I'd ride it up to Queensland. There was a small buckle in the back wheel, but in every other respect it was a good machine. I left Port at sun-up and I was in Nambucca for lunch and that was where I found Shirl's Milk Bar (although it was not called that at the time) and I parked the bike and went in for a pie.

  You know the sort of place. It stands back from its own little patch of yellow gravel. It has a peppercorn tree or a big old gum tree in front of it. There is a wooden veranda with its floors a few feet up from the ground. The boards are a bit rotten. When you walk into the shop there is a torn fly-screen and a little bell rings down the back. You look at the curtain hung across the passage and you expect to meet a big-bellied woman with breathing troubles, or a bent one with a dangerous mole in the middle of her forehead. You look at the lollies behind the streaky glass -tarzan jubes, traffic lights, licorice allsorts, musk sticks in three colours, freddo frogs, jelly babies, eucalyptus diamonds, and just the way they sit there in their cardboard boxes tells you to expect goitre, canker, wall-eye, gout, crutches.

  So when I heard Shirl coming – click, click, click, click – it was not the right walk for a shop like this. I knew what she looked like the minute I heard her – short, broad, verging on muscly, with brown skin and a nice set of lines around very lively eyes. She emerged from behind her curtain with her make-up properly done, the seams of her stockings straight, and her hair fresh from the domed oven at Mrs M. Donnelly, the Nambucca hairdresser. She could not have been more than fifty.

  I put off the pie a moment and bought a threepenny glass of lemonade, to give me time to consider the matter.

  I asked her if the shop was hers. I was surprised to hear her say yes, because it was a shop for dying in, and she did not look like the dying sort. Then she told me about her dead husband and I understood.

  When I finished the lemonade, I ordered a strawberry spider. I told her she didn't belong there. I came straight out with it and although she did not look up – she had her arm deep into the ice-cream tub, scratching around to get enough into the scoop to make my spider – I could tell she was pleased to hear me say it.

  "No," she said. "I deserve a ruddy big palace, and silk sheets and a little black boy to do the housework and rub my back." She dropped the scoop of ice-cream into the glass, ladled on the strawberry and splashed in the lemonade. The spider frothed up pink inside the glass and spilled down the sides. She had bright red nail polish on and her nails looked pretty holding that frothing pink glass.

  "You do," I said.

  If I'd been stuck with the shop I would have opened the place out a bit, like one of those Queensland fruit stalls, or even like a Sydney milk bar where all you have at the front is a sliding door, and once it is open you are truly open. You smell the ocean and the dust. You'd be alive, not half dead.

  The truth does no harm on occasions. I told her what was on my mind. I gave her a bit of a sketch. I used a piece of wrapping paper which she was kind enough to tear off a loaf of bread.

  She leaned across the counter. She had that smell of a woman fresh from the hairdresser. "That's all very good," she said, "but you're forgetting the westerly."

  "Your shop faces east."

  "That's so," she said, but she did not lean back, or start wiping down the counter. She ran her finger over the plan, as if it were a road map. "So you're a handyman, are you?"

  She looked up and we considered each other a moment.

  "I was looking for a place to board," I said. "Give me a room and my keep and I'll do the job for you. It'd be a pleasure. You could have oranges in racks right down the wall…"

  I could see the choice of oranges, or perhaps the numbers I suggested, puzzled her.

  "And sea shells," I said, "in glass cases, for the tourists. The main thing though is the light. It's that mongrel wall that makes the shop so misera
ble."

  "What about materials?"

  "Don't worry. I'll supply them."

  "You'd have to have a permit from the council."

  "You like to dance?" I asked her.

  "Don't mind."

  "There's a dance down at Port tonight."

  "Oh yes."

  "You want to go?"

  She pursed her lips and looked at me. "How would we get there?"

  "I got a bike."

  She laughed. I laughed too. Any mug could see we were not discussing bicycles.

  "You're going to double-dink me," she said. I always liked women with lines around their eyes. "Put me in my ball gown on your bar."

  "I'll double-dink you," I said. "It'd be a pleasure."

  "You think you're capable?"

  "More than."

  I was too, and by three o'clock we'd made a mess of her clean sheets and I was lying on my back with her hair in my nose, thinking how much nicer the room would be if we could lift the roof like the hatch on a ferret box.

  Shirl was a good woman. She had a great appetite for life and would have a go at anything. We went rabbit shooting, fishing at night, swimming, dancing. We won a silver cup for mixed doubles at Taree. She liked to play the piano and sing.

  She wasn't much of a cook but neither was I. We ate meat pies and baked beans and fried eggs. She used to fart in her sleep.

  I got a job at Bobby Nelson's garage, working the pumps when he was away driving the school bus. This gave me enough cash to buy materials and I soon had the front of the shop pulled out and I put a big steel RSJ right across the front of it. Then I built the sliding doors myself, modelling them on the ones at Nelson's garage. This was more expensive than I thought, but Shirl made up the difference. I felt happy ripping open that bloody coffin of a shop. I rigged up a clever canvas canopy to go out the front for the summer mornings, and we started to buy in fruits and vegetables and I would stack these out there.

  I put signs up and down the highway, "shirl the girl for FRUIT amp; VEG", "SHIRL THE GIRL FOR ICE COLD DRINKS", "SHIRL THE GIRL FOR A CUPPA TEA".

  Naturally it wasn't long before she wanted to marry me. I was not averse to the idea at all, although there were a couple of previous arrangements I would have to sort out, and I think I went as far as to write off for my old wedding certificates. I was under the impression, I think, that they might have lost the old ones, but this was not so.

  But the impediment to marriage was nothing technical. It was a dog.

  If the dog had been there on my first day, I would not have spent my money buying lemonades and spiders. I would have doffed my hat and off up the road. But little Rooney (that's right, and yes, named after Mickey) was in the care of the vet at the time, suffering from mange, being shaved and painted with some violet-coloured tincture.

  Now I have never liked corgies. So you can imagine how I felt, a week after having got myself a woman, a house, a scheme, to see her cuddling a purple one to her bosom.

  I was prepared to be friends with Rooney but Rooney did not feel the same way about me. He would growl and bare his teeth if I went near him. He would lie across doorways and snarl as I stepped over him. He did not bite me once, but he managed to take the edge off my happiness. He would lie in a corner and watch me. He had mad eyes, and when we made love he would lie under the dresser growling.

  We were so well suited, Shirl and I. We had arguments about nothing else but Rooney, and the worst ones were about the chocolate logs she gave the little rat. It was disgusting to watch.

  "Dogs don't eat chocolate."

  "Rooney does. Don't you, Rooney?"

  "It'll rot his teeth."

  "It's a reward."

  "What for?"

  "It encourages him to eat his dinner."

  "You don't need to encourage a dog to eat. He'll eat anything. Look at him."

  "Rooney needs to be encouraged."

  "How does he know? Jesus, Shirley, how does he know why you're giving him chocolate?"

  "He knows, don't you, darling?"

  Rooney turned and looked at me. He tried to stare me down, and I would have won if I had not had more important things to do.

  I made inquiries. I learned that corgies lived to ten or twelve. There was only eight years to go, and I should have been patient and waited him out, but I was a young man with a young man's ignorance about time, so I tried to hurry it up. I did not actually do anything, but I discussed it with Bobby Nelson. I gave him to understand that I would not mind if someone put Rooney in a sugar bag and dropped him in the estuary. This was a very stupid thing to do, because it got back to Shirl who came flying at me with red nails and bared teeth.

  "I was only joking, Shirl. I was just joking with him."

  "Get out."

  I had been there exactly six months. I got my bicycle clips off the mantelpiece and put them on. I hadn't had breakfast so I took a cold pie. I got on the Malvern Star and I expected her to say to me to come back, but she didn't. She stood there in the shade of the canvas awning. It was a lovely place, cool and breezy and you could smell water and dust in it. She stood there with her arms folded and Rooney sitting at her feet. I don't remember what expression she had on her face, but I remember the dog's eyes. I never expected to find eyes like that in a human being, but that is another story and we will come to it in a moment.

  48

  There is nothing like a bit of opening out to get people to declare their position. You'll find that this does not happen until the bricks are actually falling and you have your handkerchief wrapped around your nose to keep the mortar dust out of your lungs and, with your twelve-pound hammer making that lovely soft noise as it gets in amongst the bricks, you will find people all around you, each one expressing a point of view about what you are doing, some saying it is dangerous, some illegal, others beautiful, and there is always someone else who will be concerned about the temporary and trivial inconveniences, e. g. the problems of mortar dust which they insist is poisonous to certain fishes.

  And you can say that I should have left well enough alone, that I should have been grateful to have a roof over my head and not be some poor wretch shuffling along the passage of a Darlinghurst boarding house. Of course I was grateful, but what do you want me to do? Put up a cordon, take out an injunction, call the National Trust to make sure no one changed so much as a window and that the smell of old socks, bad apples, stale horse meat, minced liver, that this rich brew would be embalmed forever just the way it was? Would you have me sit on my arse and die – in the midst of my new happiness – of boredom?

  Of course not.

  You would have me go ahead, but cautiously. You would advise me to be democratic, to consult those who lived here before I arrived. This, you would imagine, would prevent the onset of blind enthusiasm and monomania.

  I imagined so myself. I did consult. But there are many difficulties with consultation. The first of these is that it relies on people having an eye for what you are talking about. They can say yes but not understand. It also presupposes that they have some idea of why they are living the way they are. So you can hold all the discussions you like and the truth is that it will make no difference – you will only get your final yes or no when the bricks are falling.

  The second difficulty is with those who will not tell you the truth. Goldstein was in this category. She told me yes, when she meant no. She went into her little latticed box and how was I to know she was dropping fat tears on to her writing paper while I, she told me later, marched around the fourth gallery like a little sergeant major, ignoring Mr Lo, flattering Emma, going down into the shop to find my son and frightening the customers with my enthusiasm.

  Young Hissao, of course, thought the whole thing great fun. He marched up and downstairs with me (whoops-a-daisy) hand in hand. But young Henry and George were not my sort of people. I had looked forward to their friendship but they stood at a distance with their arms pressed against their sides and stared at me with an expression that -had you not k
nown the innocent nature of my work- you could have mistaken for terror. You could already see that their great passion in life would be normality and they would seek out the tiled roof, the small window, the locked door, the clipped hedge, the wife who never farted, lacy pillows on the marital bed. They were frightened by my opening out. They did not see the beauty of the process – how the great four-storey space was filled with dust like an old cathedral and motes of light came slicing into the canyon, as if Jesus Christ himself was standing above the skylight and you might as well know it – it was the skylight I was really interested in, not the kitchen wall. I am not saying that the kitchen wall was not best removed. It was vital. It was, if you like, the Overture. The point is this – that the best approach to opening out is to begin cautiously – you do not, not ever, leap straight to the main performance. A patient man would be wise to begin with a small window and enlarge it a fraction at a time. A less patient man does best to content himself with a wall. This will give the occupants some confidence. They will appreciate that they have previously lived their lives inside a coffin and now they may begin to stretch and breathe. When you have them at this stage you can safely begin to discuss the roof. A roof is a much more emotional matter than a wall, and in Nambucca, for instance, I was just starting to hint at it when Rooney finally won his battle and I was handed my bicycle clips.

  So I told no one, not even Goldstein, that I had a plan for the skylight. What I had in mind was to rip off the roof completely and set up a system which would open and shut like an eyelid above us. This sort of idea tends to strike the uneducated as impractical, possibly dangerous, so for the time being I kept it to myself and pottered around with my sledge-hammer.