Illywhacker (12 page)

“No,” I laughed, “no one you know.” And then, in a stroke that saved me, “No one I know either.”

They all laughed (everyone, that is, except Phoebe who carefully divided her slice of pudding into nine pieces and separated them, one from the other).

“What a man you are, Mr Badgery,” said Molly pouring on more custard.

“I see nothing so peculiar,” I said, happy to pretend that I was offended.

“Nothing peculiar,” Jack said, “in marrying without a bride? It’s not a thing I’d be game to have a go at myself.”

“Walking up the aisle,” Molly said, “all by yourself.”

“Here comes the bride,” sang Jack, “fair, fat and wide.”

“Here comes the groom,” recited Molly, “all by himself in the room.”

“There,” she laughed, “I’m a poet and I don’t know it.”

Phoebe sipped water and watched us all. I dared not catch her eye.

I can remember few days when Corio Bay looked really beautiful—even when the summer sun shone upon it, when one would expect to recall diamonds of light dancing on an azure field, the water appeared bleak and flat, like a paddock too long over-grazed. This, of course, is why the city fathers turned their back upon it and placed vast eyeless wool stores on its shores.

Of my evening walks with Jack McGrath, I remember no pretty colours in either sky or water but rather, on the evening now in question, only the coarse sand on its shores which were littered with the bodies of stranded jellyfish.

“You had me worried.” Jack hitched up his baggy trousers and buttoned up all four buttons of his waistcoat and all three of his suit jacket. “My word you did.”

“How’s that, Jack?”

Soiled clouds hung over the bay and the wind came from the south where there was no land at all, just a white-tipped ocean that reached all the way to Antarctica.

“There are two things I’ve never gone for. Chaps that cheat at cards and grown-up men marrying young girls.”

The wind blew through my jacket. My nipples were hard and uncomfortable. They scratched themselves against my cotton shirt. “I don’t get your meaning,” I said, but I got his damn meaning well enough.

“Molly thought you wanted to marry Phoebe,” Jack laughed. “She thought you were going to ask for her hand.”

I laughed too. It was a virtuoso performance, an isolated, technically perfect, joyless loop in the cold blue evening air. “And what,” I said, when the laugh was done, “did she think of that?”

“It’s a thing that always makes me feel ill. I can’t abide it. Old men and young girls. It makes my flesh creep.”

“Surely,” I said miserably, “there must be occasions….”

But there was a stern and unrelenting streak in gentle Jack and his big blunt face looked taut and the laugh lines refused to fall into their natural furrows.

“No, no,” he said. “No occasion. No occasion at all.”

We walked on in silence.

It was the trouble with the world that it would never permit me to be what I was. Everyone loved me when I appeared in a cloak, and swirled and laughed and told them lies. They applauded. They wanted my friendship. But when I took off my cloak they did not like me. They clucked their tongues and turned away. My friend Jack was my friend in all things but was repulsed by what I really was. I admired and loved him, even though he could not abide the Chinese; but he could only like the bullshit version of me. He would have condemned me for what happened at O’Hagen’s, for my lust, my greed, my temper, my impatience. He would not have seen the abandonment of the Ford with any sympathy.

Yet this did not put me off. Quite the opposite. All it did was make me want to tell him
more
, to grab him by the scruff of the neck and force him to look at me as I was, to make him accept me. I wanted to prop his eyelids open with matches and say, I am what I am for good reasons and a man with half a soul would understand and even sympathize.

I had vertigo. I wanted to fling myself off the edge of my confession and somehow, with the force of my passion, with the power and courage of my leap, command respect, understanding, sympathy.

Roughly equivalent, of course, to punching him in the face.

Before I could stop myself I told him that I had lied about the aircraft factory, that I had no experience in the business at all.

“You’re a queer fellow, Badgery,” he said, when I had finished. “Do I get you right when you say you have no interest in a factory?”

“Of course I have an interest?” I said. “I could think of nothing better.”

We walked on into the gloom.

“You have an interest?” he said at last.

“Of course I do.”

“And so do I.”

He stopped, and stood stamping his big boots into the sand.

“So where is the problem?” he said.

“I wasn’t going to Ballarat at all. I was broke when I met you.”

“That’s Ballarat’s loss,” he said.

He turned back towards the house.

“The point is not whether you’re an engineer or whether you’re broke. The point is that you’ve got a grand idea. And you’ve also got enthusiasm, which is the only quality that makes a business go. We can buy engineers, Badgery, but we can’t buy enthusiasm. You say you’re a liar, but I’ve seen nothing dishonest in you. You paid me back my thirty pounds. You don’t go ogling my daughter. I’d be happy to have you for a partner.”

I couldn’t understand why, but he made me feel unclean. He gave me no comfort.

“I’ve got a few acquaintances,” Jack said, “wealthy men down at Colac who are interested in this venture. To hell with Ballarat,” he laughed as the street lights came on in a long electric line above our heads. “We’ll do it. By Jove, see if they can stop us.”

Hooper the grocer, cantering his team home along Western Avenue, saw two men standing with their hands in their pockets by the side of the road. He tipped his hat to Jack McGrath who stared right through him as if he and his wagon were glass things in a dream.

Jack was arranging his expedition to Colac and he could not leave the telephone alone. His deafness made him bellow. When he was engaged in telephoning the whole house stood still and waited for him to finish. It was a big house, but even in the music room you could not escape his optimism. He did not give a damn for the expense. He talked on and on.

In the midst of all this, the roof above Phoebe’s bed had begun to leak. Jack was too excited to give much of his mind over to such a mundane thing.

“It’s a tile come off,” Jack said, still puffing from the exertion of his phone call and putting four spoons of sugar in his tea, “that’s all.”

Phoebe said nothing.

“Mr Johnstone used to do the tiles,” Molly said. “But he’s dead, at Gallipoli, and he borrowed your bicycle,” she told her daughter, “so he could go up to Ryrie Street to enlist. Do you remember, Jack? Do you remember Bob Johnstone coming here to borrow Phoebe’s bike? I said to him, you’ll look funny, a big man like you on a girl’s bicycle, but he didn’t seem to worry.”

“It’s hard to get a man to do one tile,” Jack said. “I’ll get up in the weekend, when I come back from Colac.”

“I’ll do it,” I said. “Let me.”

“We couldn’t,” Molly said, “could we, Jack?”

“No,” Jack said, “we couldn’t.” His mind, however, was on other things.

I smiled. They all (except Phoebe) smiled in return.

“I am not frightened of heights,” I said (I looped the loop in the skies of their imagination). “Just tell me where the ladder is.”

It was late March and the morning had a fresh edge to its sunlight. When I folded my napkin and placed it on the table it looked, with its eggshell white and blue shadows, like a detail from a painting by the impressionist Dussoir.

Phoebe lay on her bed. It was five minutes past nine on the monstrous black clock her father had given her for her fifteenth birthday. She could hear me on the roof above her bed. She stood. Her feet were bare. Her mother did not like her to have bare feet, but her mother had taken Bridget to the market in Moorabool Street and as Phoebe stepped out on to the veranda she looked forward to the cool feeling the wet dewy grass would give her unnaturally hot feet.

At the back of the house there was an old fig tree, an easy-climbing tree whose branches now shaded the roof of the back veranda. When she was younger she had played in it. Now she could walk up the branch without so much as stopping. She ran lightly across the veranda roof and crawled, loose as a cat (arched back, purring) to the next ridge.

I was somewhere in the next valley, fiddling inexpertly with wire and pliers. In a moment I would look up and see, perched on the ridge above me, a beautiful young woman with hair the colour of copper, her bare legs dangling towards me, her face a shaded secret, dark against the pale blue morning sky.

I sucked in my breath. I stood there, staring.

I stopped breathing. I put down the pliers. They made a small noise (clink) against the tiles.

Did I speak? Later I tried to remember. Probably I said “come” in my mind, silently, and motioned with my hand. She came down the ridge, that steep face of red tiles, standing up, her lovely
feet sure-footed. Only the blind eyes of the empty tower looked down on us.

I will go to my grave remembering the high flush in her face as she came to me, the cool of her arm (hot and cold) and, oh my God, such a kiss. I would have been content, would have ventured no further than the kiss (it was a meal, a feast in itself) but Phoebe had not come climbing trees and roofs merely to taste my mouth and stare at my glittering eyes, and when I felt those fingers like birds’ wings fluttering at the buttons of my fly I closed my eyes and moaned. The pliers skipped across the tiles and clattered down into the box gutter in the valley.

Her eyes were a match for mine. They did not falter or flutter, but gazed straight back. She undressed me and I did not fight or attempt to assert the masculine prerogative. She undressed me to my farmer’s body: tanned arms, tanned neck, and the blue-white skin traced by veins and, most curious of all, a hard but soft-skinned penis with its toadstool head and its great blue vein stretching along its length. She had talked with Annette about men’s organs and how they would look, but nothing had prepared her for the softness, the baby skin stretched so tight.

When she touched me with her finger, I moaned (“So sweetly,” she wrote, “the sound enough to make me cry.”). She bent and touched me with her lips, just brushed me, silk on silk.

Somewhere, in another world, a door slammed.

I straightened her and removed her dress, a dress left over from a younger summer with daisies repeated on a blue field. I lay the dress against the slope of the roof and she lay there quickly before the dress slid down the slope. The tiles were rough on her back, hurt but did not hurt. She had a mole on her shoulder. She thought my penis was silky and strong. I knelt before her. She took it in her hand and introduced it, ever so gently, into her.

When she hurt, her mouth opened and her green eyes went wide. My left knee was on a roll of copper wire, my right on tiles. I trembled. My eyes never left her. She thought I was a Phoenician with a bow to my bottom lip. She sent the pain away, dismissed it, pulled me to her and felt like she had felt on the day she discovered surf, fear and pleasure, pulled this way, tumbled that without being able to control or understand it; but there was also a place in the water where you melted into it and she found the place and gave herself over to it until the swoon, the swoon she had felt in Annette’s arms started to approach like a cloud of distant bees.

“Mr Badgery!” Down below us, unseen, Molly McGrath, in apron, her arms full of snapdragons.

“Yes,” I called. “Yes.”

“Would you like a cup of tea when you’ve finished?”

Phoebe giggled. I placed my hand across her mouth, but gently.

“Thank you, Mrs McGrath.”

We smiled at each other and she nibbled the fingers of my censoring hand, but her mother’s voice had changed me and I moved swiftly, thrust guiltily, made love to her like a thief with the eyes of the tower glaring down on me.

I reared back suddenly.

Phoebe watched the semen spurt in the sunlight. I held her hand. She looked at the cloudy sperm, red tiles. As she scrambled for her clothes, she did not have time to think about how she felt.

“You go first,” she told me. “Go and have tea with her.” The first words she’d spoken to me in eight weeks.

“What about the ladder?”

“I don’t need a ladder.”

Phoebe McGrath kissed Herbert Badgery. She kissed him on the nose. She kissed him on his Phoenician’s mouth.

And then I was gone, scurrying off like a burglar, leaving behind my pliers and my wet cloud of semen. Phoebe tried to think what she felt but could not touch what it was. The semen on the roof looked like mucus from your nose, yet it was full of life. It was dying in the sun where no one could see it.

She put her finger in it and wrote “Phoebe loves Herbert” on a tile.

She held her finger to her nose. It smelt like flour and water.

I cannot say that Jack’s feelings did not enter my head, but rather that I trussed and tethered them and threw them into some back room in my mind where I would not hear them struggling. Now, as I drag these old items out, I am surprised at the number I chose to forget (a wife and child in Dubbo come to mind) and how effectively I did it.

I felt strong and confident and wonderful to be alive. I poured tea for Molly in the front parlour and accepted one of Bridget’s heavy lamingtons as my right. I devoured it with pleasure, and
took a second one when it was offered. In the afternoon I would go to the Barwon Common and service the Morris Farman. I looked forward to it. I had brand new plugs to fit, a new oil seal, and twenty feet of piano wire for new rigging. I would clean the magneto again, time it, and have the Renault engine looking clean and splendid for the backers to whom I would demonstrate the wonders of flight.

I stretched and yawned. There was a soft noise above the ceiling, a pattering.

My hostess stared at the ceiling, a deep frown creasing her forehead, a lamington held between thumb and forefinger. I returned her anxious smile.