Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  The interview was conducted as they moved around the cages. Charles hardly listened. He simply grasped the existence of thirty million Americans who would think him a bad man. They were on the stairs when the man began asking about Herr Bloom in Munich.

  Now Charles knew nothing about Herr Bloom, except that he paid his bills and sent, each year, a Christmas card showing a bird from his famous collection. He had never talked to him, not even on the telephone, and knew nothing of his affairs. But now, hearing a certain tone in the journalist's voice, he was keen to defend his customer. He began to do so.

  Hissao, on edge, skating very prettily on ice as thin as a cigarette paper, hissed at him: "Shut up."

  His own son!

  He began to feel enemies line up all around him. His son treated him like he was nothing but a piece of dog shit. His wife, his wife at least, had smiled gently and squeezed his hand while they took the photograph. When she spoke to the journalist she said that her husband had always been a good provider. The journalist had not understood her, but that was not the point.

  Charles had no idea the interview had been a triumph. He shook hands with the journalist and did not realize he had been admired, that the journalist felt himself to be soiled and compromised in comparison.

  He heard his son take the journalist down the stairs. He remained in the fourth gallery, shattered.

  Even Emma had understood that the interview had been a success. She would not, otherwise, have been so reckless as to choose this moment to display the foetus in the bottle and claim to be the creature's mother.

  Charles tried to snatch it from her, but he got the mixing bowl instead. His neck went red and blotchy. He started to say something, but the words got tangled and tripped over themselves and he ran unathletically, heavily, his arms flailing, across the gallery and down the stairs, three at a time, falling on the second landing, rising, bleeding, bawling to Van Kraligan to get a hessian bag.

  58

  She knew her babies were wrong. They were thoughts that could not be born. And, besides, they would never stay still, and you could not be sure that you had seen what you had seen. It was like looking at clouds drifting across the skylight – one minute you had a knobbly white-faced man all covered in warts and urticaria, and next it was a Spanish galleon in full sail across the top of the yellow Sydney sky.

  But this one was different – it stayed the same. It moved, and breathed. You could see the heaving of its tiny ribcage and the clutching movement, just like a real baby, of its elegant, beautiful black claws.

  You could see, anyone could see, it was related to the goanna, and she did not show it to her Charlie Barley to tease him, or taunt him, but she did not mind, either, that this had been the result.

  She did not quite know what to do with the creature she had made but she was relieved, at last, to have the thing still, and not be so frightened by it.

  She took a silk scarf from her handbag and spread it carefully on the kitchen bench. Then she took the magic foetus and placed its bottle in the centre of the scarf. She drew the corners together and knotted them. Next she swept up the shards of the mixing bowl her husband had broken. She swept up in the style of a tradesman cleaning up after a job, that is to say that although she made sure all the splintered pottery was in the dustpan where it would not hurt anyone's bare feet, she did not empty the dustpan itself but left it sitting on top of the feed bin for someone whose responsibility it really was.

  She could still hear her husband's angry voice and the voice opened gates to well-used sandy pathways in her brain. She became sleepy-lidded and puffy-lipped. She put her blue patent handbag in the crook of one bare plump arm and picked up the knotted scarf and held it in the other hand. And then she began to walk around the gallery. It was now highly polished and very slippery so she kicked off her shoes and, having let them lie where they fell, walked on. It was still too slippery so she stopped, put down bag and bottle, unclipped her nylons from her suspenders, rolled them down, took them off, picked up what she had put down, and walked on, bare foot.

  Emma promenaded. In spite of her corsets which were very expensive, French in origin, black in colour, and her fussily fitted brassiere, which, together, pushed her form, as near as it would go, to a fashionable shape, Emma Badgery, whilst promenading, exhibited a barrelling type of sexuality – she walked with a roll of the hip, a long strong slouch, her head high, and, because she walked without self-knowledge or self-criticism, there was something rather dirty about the way she did it. She walked, round and round, unaware that she was, in the eyes of Mr Lo -whose desk she knocked, deliberately it seemed, twice – just a barbarian. She was expecting her husband to reappear and when he didn't she dropped herself, quite suddenly, into her chair which was not where it should be (outside her cage) but next to the stairwell so that she had the unexpected bonus of feeling the excitements on the stair itself, pleasant vibrations that went right through her bones and guided her thoughts, in fits and starts, towards those other vibrations she had experienced as a young dull bride-to-be in a Mercury sidecar when she and the young man had roared down from Jeparit to Bacchus Marsh and all her feelings had been like a foreign country to her and the whole of her young body had felt itself moving to the beat of the engine and she had been safe and cocooned inside with all her old textbooks full of useless knowledge jammed uncomfortably around her feet.

  They had come down the first time in the train, because Charles would not let his precious birds travel alone and then, a week later, they had gone back to Jeparit to get the AJS. They had gone together and had been ridiculed by her father for not thinking to put the motor cycle on the train in the first place. What fun he had got from his ridicule, what joy from his temper at the waste of money involved. Her daddy had stamped his polished boots, a quick tattoo, one two, one two, as he criticized them as "spendthrift fools".

  And she would never forget coming down the long snake road through the bare cold Pentland Hills towards the Marsh, to be wrapped up so cosily while even the finest winter drizzle felt like a drill of needles against the skin of her young girl's face.

  Charles was shouting on the stairs. They were both so lucky. Perhaps the children had suffered because of it, but neither of them had fallen into the businesslike habits of father and mother. She was lucky. It was a pig in a poke and who could have foreseen the poke in the pig? Who was to tell her, who could have predicted, that a man so strong-armed and bristle-faced would suddenly reveal himself to have lips like a baby's when the lights were out? All that kissing and sucking under the sheets.

  He had fetched her, from the very first morning, breakfast in bed.

  "Brekky," she murmured now, sitting alone in the chair. "Emma wants her brekky." Her Mum and Dad would never have believed that shy Emma would have the nerve to ask for such a thing and yet, precisely because she was not used to it, there was a pleasure in the request itself that was quite extraordinary. It made her nipples go hard, as if she had taken off all her clothes and was standing, brazen, in the middle of a paddock, or up to her knees in swamp water. There was no one to stop her. No one could laugh or pull her hair.

  She was lucky and she never forgot how lucky she was and she put him ahead of the children, the two eldest in particular, and they did not like her any more and kissed her only on her cheek with two lips that felt as hard and cold as abalone, all muscle – she would rather they did not kiss her at all – or kept their lips inside hard clamlike shells where they belonged. It was wrong to not love them, to love the youngest more than the eldest, the husband more than even the youngest and sometimes she did care, and she cried that she had made them unhappy, but not often and not for long, because in the end it was what she wanted.

  She was lucky to have the business, not only that, to own the walls and roof that contained the business. But she did not like to talk about the business itself, and although she understood – she understood perfectly, exactly – that he might wish to talk to her about it, she did not wis
h to hear the problems about the business. It was something she would rather not know. It was not a woman's place anyway. And even if it was, it wasn't her place. It was like being in a sidecar and sticking your head out to look at the wheels turning; it could make you fret when you saw how thin the spokes were or that three of them were rusted and five bent, and you should not know, either, about the patches on the tube, or the lack of tread on the tyre. When Charles wished to discuss business with Henry Underhill's daughter she would not permit it.

  She sat in her chair and felt that delicious sense of anticipation her teasing always produced in her. It was woman's art. He would not go roaming the streets tom-catting like Mr Schick.

  Tonight, or tomorrow night, or even the night after, he would come to her to apologize for the broken bowl. That's why she had left the broken pieces out on the dustpan, so he would not have a chance to forget them. That's why she had left it out. So he would see it when his temper had gone and he could come to her to say sorry. She would judge then what to do, to accept, and hold him in her arms, or to put it off a while longer, to spurn him, to push him to the next giddy level of pleasure.

  "Brekky," she murmured, sitting in her chair, "Little Emma wants her brekky."

  The journalist, meantime, was walking along George Street carrying a mental picture of her husband – a bubbling baggy-suited enthusiast. He had felt his spine tingle when he saw the man handle the bower-bird. He now found himself wishing, in a way that he imagined he had long ago abandoned, that he might do something decent and sensible with his life. He wished that his days were involved with straw, feathers, simple affections, and he resolved, walking into the Marble Bar, to make Charles the good guy in his story on the fauna-smuggling racket. By the time he had made this decision, Charles had changed into a maniac. He was grappling with an old scarred goanna and pushing it belligerently into a hessian bag. He would not say what it was that he intended although the staff were nervous, knowing this was Mrs Badgery's special pet. They wished no trouble from "her upstairs".

  Hissao watched this ruckus without pleasure. He waited to excuse himself, to go back to the university and continue his real life. He was suddenly tired of the pet shop itself, its odd echoes, ghostly floorboards, smells and, most particularly, the caged creatures which should not be caged at all. Having defended his father so skilfully he now felt disgusted, not only with himself, but with the activities he had shielded from attack.

  Yet it was Hissao who held the heavy bag of struggling goanna while his father went to get his car keys. They then walked together, father and son, out into Pitt Street where the car, a new-model Holden, was parked outside Woolworths. He waited for his father to unlock the boot. Then he dumped the heavy bag inside, stepped back on to the footpath and, as he did so, his eye was caught by the whizzing parrots. The light inside his grandfather's room was very strong, a vivid blue-white neon so that when the old man sat there, as he did now, as he had before, he seemed as strongly lit as the famous sign that moved around him.

  The colour of the eyes could not, surely not, have been discernible from the street, but Hissao was sure it was. He felt, later, that the eyes had bullied him, had made him hold out his hands for the key when he had been meaning to shake hands, to say goodbye.

  "I'll drive," Hissao said, and his father dropped the keys into the outstretched hand.

  59

  Do not think I have no feelings. A stroke may remove one side of your body but it does not cut one's passions in half. No, no, everything is doubled. Twice the pain. Twice the grief. And just because a thing must be done do not imagine that one necessarily relishes it.

  No, it is no fun to watch your little boy drive out of your life and my heart, that day, was drilled with icy needles that have never melted. I feel them still, this moment, when I breathe. I cough hard, but all I get is some white dribble to run down the deep unshaven gullies on either side of my mouth which is, no more, I promise, the Phoenician's bow that so beguiled Miss Phoebe McGrath in 1919.

  I sat in my chair and watched the hessianed goanna dropped into the boot. I knew, that day, that God is a glutton for grief, love, regret, sadness, joy too, everything, remorse, guilt – it is all steak and eggs to him and he will promise anything to get them. But what am I saying? There is no God. There is only me, Herbert Badgery, enthroned high above Pitt Street while angels or parrots trill attendance.

  Hissao put the car into first gear, that insouciant click and clack, made a hand signal (it was the years before indicators became legal) and pulled out into the traffic of Pitt Street as if he was doing nothing more than driving to the corner shop for aSporting Globe. No one saw, no one but me. Goldstein was on her way to have lunch with Doodles Casey, her florid-faced publisher. He was my publisher too, but he thought my brain gone to porridge. Once he visited me in hospital where he wiped my nose; I have never forgiven him, the charlatan.

  But Casey is a man of no importance, born for deletion; it is Charles and Hissao we are here to spy on as they cross Darling Harbour on the old Pyrmont Bridge.

  They were quiet as they entered the dead-fish stench that hangs beneath the old incinerator at Pyrmont. They said not a word until they reached the hotel that is now known as Wattsies but was, in those days, the plain White Bay Hotel.

  "How do I seem to you?" Charles asked.

  "How do you mean?"

  "How do I seem?"

  It was an impossible question, and it was expressed in an unusual voice, light, with a reedy vibrato. Hissao put the car into gear when the lights went green.

  "Have you seen my bottom?" Charles asked.

  "What?"

  "Have you", Charles sat sideways in his seat to look at his embarrassed son, "seen my bottom, my bum?"

  Hissao smiled but it was not the charming smile of the urbane young man who had discussed the pet business with Time magazine. His eyes showed his embarrassment and his smile hurt his face. "Not for a while," he said.

  "Was it wrinkled?"

  "Oh, Dad! Please."

  "Was it?"

  "Yes, I suppose so."

  "Yes," said Charles, with some bitterness, and then faced the front. They drove on in a silence that Hissao found almost unbearable. They crossed that bridge – I forget its name – the ugly steel box that lay, on that day, across joyless wind-whipped water the colour of a battleship.

  "You shouldn't have told me to shut up."

  "I'm sorry."

  "I bought you your own car. I pay for your university fees, I give you money to live on. I don't ask for much from you. (Keep going up Victoria Road.) I never thought I'd ever hear you tell me to shut up."

  Hissao had to change lanes to stay in Victoria Road. He tried to explain, at the same time, why it was necessary to stop his father's comments on Herr Bloom but Charles was not really listening. "Anyway," Hissao said, "he liked you."

  "He thought I was a crook."

  "No, really. He didn't."

  "Thought I was a crook. Maybe I am a crook. Do you think I'm a crook?"

  "No."

  "Well, he thought I was a crook. All he saw was this big building. He thought I was a moneybags but do you know what I see when I look at that building, all those people employed, all those families fed, all those beautiful pets being shipped away all over the world? Do you know what I think?"

  Hissao knew the answer. He had heard it before.

  "I think it's a bloody miracle."

  They kept driving along Victoria Road while Charles told the story of the business, right from the day when Emma's father had said she had a bum like a horse. He went through his first meeting with a bank manager, the guarantee by Lenny Kaletsky. He could remember every bird he had brought down from Jeparit, and the price of every animal, fish, bird and reptile he had ever sold. He would recall a year in his memory because it was the year that an important specimen had died or another incubated.

  At Silverwater Road he had Hissao turn left and they proceeded down through that industrial wasteland acro
ss the polluted river and on towards the Parramatta Road.

  "There never was a day", Charles said, "when I did not want to be the best at what I did. Do you believe me?"

  "Yes, Dad, I do."

  "When I was a little nipper no one paid attention to Australian birds and animals. It's all changed now. Me and Nathan, we did that."

  "That's terrific," Hissao said and his father looked at him in a way that made him ashamed of the ineptitude of his response.

  "I never meant anyone any harm," his father said.

  It was a grey overcast day and a low blanket of cloud sat over the industrial puddle-dotted wastes of Silverwater.

  "Nowadays you can travel all over the world and find Badgery's birds in all the big collections, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Tokyo."

  Hissao, of course, knew all this. He had heard it many times before. His father never tired of repeating the names of cities he had never been to.

  "Holland," said Charles, crossing his calf across his heavy thigh. "France, Tokyo."

  "You said Tokyo."

  "Yes," said Charles. "Turn right."

  They drove out to Parramatta in heavy silence. When they arrived at Church Street Charles had him turn right again and it occurred to Hissao that his father was not thinking about where they were going.

  "You're intelligent," Charles said as they passed the last of the Parramatta shops. "You can spell, you can write, you've got an education. Do you think there's a God?"

  "No, I guess not."

  "No," said Charles. "I suppose there isn't."

  "Will I go back into Victoria Road?"

  "Yes. We'll go to the tip at Ryde."

  As they crossed the start of Silverwater Road, Charles said: "Would you say I was a success?"