Illywhacker (14 page)

His soul was a jellyfish stranded on the shell-grit shore of Corio Bay. All he wanted to do was feel something as good as the air on the Warburton Road in 1910.

Molly McGrath sat in the parlour with the curtains drawn and would not say why. She had Bridget bring her fingers of toast and weak black tea. There were noises. She did not like them.

On the previous night Phoebe had made jokes about possums and Molly had left the table hurriedly, leaving us to finish our jelly unchaperoned.

“She knows,” I said.

Phoebe shook her head. “More tea, Mr Badgery?”

If I had been less besotted, I would have taken more care of Molly, would have trod more cautiously, but we left her to suffer her terrors alone on her bed and were pleased to be left so dangerously together. We knew nothing about the electric belt,
and even if we had known there is every chance we would have continued to torture her.

At breakfast next morning Phoebe announced her intention of visiting the library in town. I knew exactly what she meant. Ten minutes after her departure I decided, out loud, on a stroll. I wore a three-piece suit and a watch with a gold chain. I walked up the fig tree and crossed the steep tiled roof with my shoes in my hand.

Phoebe waited for me, artfully naked, reclining in a valley on a travelling rug under a powder-blue sky.

She was like no woman I have ever known. Please note: I said woman, not girl. This was not a case, as Jack would have imagined, of a grown-up man, already fearful of death and decay, falling for the smooth untroubled skin of a young girl. (Later I will sing you some songs to ageing flesh, a woman’s body with scars, stretch marks, distended nipples, breasts no longer firm, a slow sweet song by a river, not a bay.)

She climbed naked to the roof ridge and wanted to be taken from behind while she watched the farmers and their wives promenade along Western Avenue. She licked my nipples as if I were a woman and laughed when they stood erect. She told me I had a Phoenician’s mouth and stared so hard into my eyes that I shut them to protect the poor bleak rooms of my life from such intensive scrutiny.

Phoebe looked into those blue clear eyes and thought I was the Devil. There was nothing soft about me, she thought, no soft place, just this cold blue charm. She wrote all this in her book. Sometimes she showed it to me, holding her hands to hide what was before and later.

“He is an electric light,” she wrote. She was well pleased with this description, suggesting as it did both electrocution and illumination.

Baked by hot tiles, goose-pimpled by breezes from Corio Bay, she shucked off Geelong and left it lying in the box gutter of the roof like a dull tweed suit. She held a testicle in her mouth and listened to me moan. She shocked me with the attentions of her tongue.

“I like him,” she wrote in the book, “because he is probably a liar.”

And when I protested, she said: “You have invented yourself, Mr Badgery, and that is why I like you. You are what they call a confidence man. You can be anything you want.”

Of course I loved her for more than breasts and tongue. I had never stood so naked and felt so whole. She spoke like a ventriloquist speaks, hardly moving her splendid lips. It was a constant wonder that words emerged at all and that, when they did, they were so velvet soft, the tips of fingers encircling my ears. It was she who was the magician, and I the apprentice.

“We will invent ourselves,” she said.

Geelong did not exist for us. We were oblivious to discomfort in our inconvenient nest. We lay, sat, squatted together in the valley of the roof while Molly lay, half crazy, on her bed below and Jack was entertained by his backers in gardens of Western District sheep.

“Will you teach me to fly?”

“My word, yes.”

“Could we fly to Europe?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever made love to a man?”

“Good grief, no.”

“I have made love to a woman,” she said.

I was shocked, jealous, lustful and my voice was hoarse, half strangled with it all. “What woman?”

“You must teach her to fly too.”

It is no wonder I did not take to Annette. I was jealous of her before I met her.

The hair around my penis was already damp and matted but when Phoebe extended her white hand the organ seemed to reach out towards the hand.

“Just like a flower,” she wrote complacently in her notebook, “towards the sun.”

Molly had not seen Phoebe climb on to the roof or me follow her. Yet she had a strong sense that something was wrong. This sense overpowered her and gave her what she called “her symptoms”: a feeling of vertigo, like the panic she felt on high bridges, ledges, winding mountain roads. And once this feeling had appeared, like an old crow from a childhood nightmare, it stayed there and brought its own fear with it and she bitterly regretted the day she had so rashly thrown away the electric belt.

The electric belt had been purchased in 1890 from the Electro-Medical and Surgical Institute, a three-storey building in Sturt Street, Ballarat. Molly had been fourteen. She sat in the office of Dr Grigson with her two young brothers and her aunt, Mrs Ester. Mrs Ester’s real name was Mrs Ester McGuinness but she was known as Mrs Ester to everyone in Ballarat and she was the licensee of the Crystal Palace Hotel.

Mrs Ester was in her late thirties. She had a slim figure, thrown slightly out of kilter by the unusual length of her body in relationship to her legs. She had a high head, a longish chin and quite extraordinary cherubic lips of which (together with her small, arched feet) she was secretly proud. Her eyes had a tendency to bulge and Dr Grigson, on first sighting her, had privately diagnosed a tendency towards an overactive thyroid gland.

Mrs Ester did not much like children but she had a strong sense of responsibility and these three children beside her were her brother’s and it was her duty to safeguard them properly. The minute she knew of Molly’s mother’s madness she knew what had to be done and she used her newly installed telephone to call Grigson for an appointment, although she could, almost as easily, have walked across the street.

There were plenty of people in Ballarat who made fun of Grigson, men Mrs Ester thought should have known better. But Grigson occasionally took a small brandy in her establishment and she had felt honoured to listen to his talk of Pasteur and Lister and the Power of Electricity, the latter being a proven method for dealing not only with such things as constipation but also general debilitation and hereditary madness.

She was impressed by Dr Grigson’s offices. They were a hymn to modernism and enlightenment. Models of the human body displayed the electric invigorators. Smartly dressed secretaries used telephones, Remington typewriters, and what she later discovered to be Graphaphone dictating machines. Mrs Ester, having seen the doctor (small, neat, precise, with a slightly Prussian appearance) driving his Daimler Benz down Lydiard Street, had expected modernism, but she had not been prepared for the scale of it.

Molly McGrath was Molly Rourke and she was fourteen. She sat wedged in between Mrs Ester and her brother Walter and saw none of what was around her. One of the secretaries offered her a sweet in a coloured wrapper. Molly shook her head and triggered
off an echo of shaken heads in the two small boys. She had long copper hair that fell across her shoulders. Her young body reflected her diet of bread and potatoes. Her dimpled knees were properly hidden beneath her threadbare dress.

Walter had pooed his pants again. She had her nostrils full of the smell as she gazed down at the patterned carpet (roses and delphiniums entwined) and was unusually quiet: she thought everyone was looking at her because she was mad.

It was not like Molly to be so quiet. Her mother had called her “my song bird,” not because she sang, but because she laughed. She was cheerful, inquisitive, energetic. She did not have to be told to get up in the mornings. She dressed her brothers, lit the fires, and often as not cooked breakfast. She did not complain, as Walter did, about her chilblains or pick at her warts. She could multiply 765 by 823 in her head, or any other number you liked to give her. No one had ever thought she was mad.

It had not even occurred to her that her mother was mad. Mrs Rourke was pale and wiry with dark sunken eyes and if she spent a lot of time being angry she also laughed, and Molly loved those rare sweet moments between storms when her mother was suddenly pink and warm and the troubles of the world were a long way away and then she would sing the soft Irish songs she had learned from her own mother who had carried them to Australia on a perilous voyage and arrived to find half Victoria afire and their ship had its sails set alight by the flying ashes from the bushfires.

It was Molly who had discovered her mother, early in the morning while her father was still at the bakery. She had hanged herself in the wash-house. There was one black shoe on her foot, not properly laced, and the other dropped on the broken stool she had climbed on. The smell of her opened bowels and the bulging, black eyes fused, in that dreadful moment, into one single thing, not a shape, not a colour, not a picture, but a feeling that burned itself into her. It was, at once, as hard as steel and as ghostly as a smell and it was this feeling that enveloped her still in Geelong nearly thirty years later while Phoebe and I were possums on the roof.

When Molly discovered her mother she did not scream. She dressed her brothers and took them next door to Mrs Henderson. She then walked two miles to the bakery where her father worked. She was made to wait for half an hour before she was permitted to see her father and then she watched while the big
flour-dusted man roared and wept and rolled in the icy street while the cold winds blew through her thin dress. She listened to the loud cracks as he hit his head and thought that he must die too. She did not cry.

Mrs Ester was called in. She took the necessary steps. A funeral was organized and there was a wake at the Crystal Palace Hotel, in the private rooms, where Mrs Ester surprised everybody by singing “The Shan Van Vogt” and everybody became very Irish and very stirred and chose to remember that the dead woman’s father had had his leg broken by policemen at the Eureka Stockade. They embraced Molly and made her eat slices of bread and butter.

After the wake Mrs Ester took the business of madness in hand. She had a small talk with Molly in the Ladies’ Parlour of the Crystal Palace Hotel.

“I’m telling you cause you’re the eldest—it wasn’t just your mother.”

Molly played with her dress which had been dyed black for mourning. The dye was not holding. It left black marks on her fingers. She knew that this conversation was not easy for Mrs Ester who had closed the hatch to the bar and shut the door to the passage. It was dark in the parlour and it smelt of floor polish and Brasso and stale stout and smoke.

Mrs Ester was not at ease with children. “Do you see what I’m getting at?”

“No, Mrs Ester.”

“What I am saying is that it wasn’t just your mother. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

But Molly did not.

Mrs Ester sighed. She fiddled with the big ring of keys she always wore hanging from her waist. “Your Granny Keogh was the same.”

Same as what? Molly looked miserably at the painting of the green-eyed cat that hung crookedly beneath the shelf of china ornaments that were intended to make the parlour cosy.

“Do you see my point? For heaven’s sake, girl, she drowned herself in Lake Wendouree.”

This news was horrible but made no sense. It got mixed up with the smell of whisky on her aunt’s breath, the darkness of the room, the green eyes of the cat and the reverence with which Patchy the barman, having blundered into the room, retreated from it, his larrikin’s head oddly bowed.

Mrs Ester was at her best dealing with the brewery or asking a drinker to leave without offence. She was, by habit, a blunt woman, and this beating around the bush did not suit her at all. She did not intend to be unkind. She was now merely intent on not prolonging the agony.

“I am not having you hanging yourself,” she said, “here or elsewhere, now or later.”

And having, at last, delivered herself of her burden, she sat with her hands folded on her lap and her head on one side.

“Oh,” Molly said, “I promise you. I promise, Mrs Ester, I never would.”

“It is not a thing you can promise, poor child,” said Mrs Ester, suddenly hugging her fiercely, and crushing the child’s nose into a brooch. “It will come up on you. One minute you will be singing and happy and the next…. I will take you to Grigson,” she said.

Molly had wailed. She had howled, sentenced in the Ladies’ Parlour, and felt the black dye of her dress insinuate itself into the pores of her skin.

Dr Grigson, as it turned out, was strange, but not unpleasant. The nicest thing about him was his hands which were soft and dry like talcum powder. When he touched her face or held her hand it had a lovely ministering quality which the girl found comforting. Everything about Dr Grigson was very neat and very clean. Molly had never smelt such a clean smell, on a man or a woman. He had small, stiff movements and when he turned his head he turned his shoulders as well, as if his head and body were all of a piece and had no independence at all.

“I see no reason,” he said, “why you should end the same way as your mother and grandmother. Modern Science,” said the promoter of Lister and Pasteur, “can do much for your condition.”

“She doesn’t understand,” said Mrs Ester, who was accompanying each of the children on their interviews.

“Do you understand?” Dr Grigson asked her.

She nodded her head.

“Tell me, my child.”

She did not want to say it. She did not have to repeat, with words, the fallen chair, the shoe still on the foot, the smell.

“I will go mad,” she said in a very small voice, “and get up on a chair, and jump off.”

“You will do no such thing,” said Dr Grigson, “if I can help it.”

She was relieved when he took her hand back. He asked her
many questions. Did she see things falling? Did she hear voices? Was she prone to laughter in an excessive degree? (“Yes,” said Mrs Ester.) Did she touch herself between the legs? Did she wake with palpitations?