Illywhacker (31 page)

Here: the photograph of the taxi drivers’ picnic on September 23rd, 1923. I am trapped in the heart of Phoebe’s poem, teetering at the apex of my empire. The photograph shows Molly, Annette, Phoebe, Horace, Charles, baby Sonia, me, and the taxi drivers and their wives and children. It does not show the house, only a little of the lattice I erected to shade the cages from the westerly sun.

The grass was fresh mown, already fermenting, and I was a sexton happily asleep in a fresh-dug grave, my hands muddy, the smile of a fool upon my face.

My house was full. All rooms were occupied. Annette’s towel lay drying in the sun on her window ledge. Her bed was made. Sonia’s nursery awaited her, but now she lay in her pram in the sunshine, kicking her long straight legs, curling her toes, and gurgling happily while all around her the taxi drivers and their wives and children admired her: just like her mother, but with her father’s eyes.

Horace played the waiter. He carried wobbling jellies and drunken trifles, dispensed bread and butter and hundreds and thousands to the children.

The drivers were an independent lot, sharp, shrewd, cloth-capped and street-wise, but you could see they liked Molly who moved amongst them in a vast white dress, her copper hair cascading from beneath a straw hat, dispensing cordial. She was a lady. They called her “Ma’am”. When the photographer arrived they lined up their taxis: “Boomerang,” the signs said, “fast as an arrow, Australian to the marrow.”

I stood between Phoebe and Annette. Annette, I can see, had put her arm through mine. She was nice to me that day, and I to her. I asked her to describe the streets of Paris, and she did, and I enjoyed hearing about it.

Phoebe seemed as happy as I ever knew her to be. When I see her in that photograph, see that proud chin, that soft smile, I can imagine, if I half close my eyes, the way she moved her lips when speaking, the throaty lazy voice. Her eyes, though, are shaded by her hat, and it is just as well they are shaded, those eyes that made the poem.

And it was through her poem I walked, I took the children on tours of my splendid cages. The birds were clean and healthy. They preened themselves in honour of spring. The parrots hung upside down on their perches. The friar birds drove their beaks into the sweet white flesh of Bacchus Marsh apples.

The trees, now three years old, stood as tall as young men, taller than Charles who tottered along in his ghost’s gait, following Horace and holding on to his chubby legs.

That night, in the heart of my empire, my wife and I made love in the style that permitted no conception and that, in any case, was the one she now preferred. It no longer hurt her and left her free to increase the tempo of her own pleasure with her hand, but that night she wept when I entered her and her tears wet my nose where it pressed against her neck.

“Poor Herbert,” she said.

I did not understand her.

“You’ll be all right,” she said. She choked. She shook.

“I am,” I said. “I am, I am.”

But whatever I said to her only made her weep more and I now know what I did not know then, she was suffering from the melancholy that all poets feel at the completion of their work.

“You’ll survive,” she said.

I did not doubt her. The bedsprings creaked beneath the strokes of my greasy confidence, and if there was shit to smell, I missed it totally.

Colonel Barret had long ago abandoned the manufacture of his Barret car in order to be an agent for King Henry Ford. And now, in 1923, he assembled us amongst the spare-part bins on the first floor and made a speech to us, the details of which I forget, but the gist of which I still retain.

“It would appear,” he told us, “that Mr Ford is strapped for cash, and now wishes me to pay cash in advance for every car I order. In short, he wishes me to finance his venture and I find I am unable to raise the money he requires. I have informed the Ford company of my position and they have cabled me to say that I may no longer be an agent for the company’s vehicles. I have therefore decided to close down the business and retire to Rosebud. I am sorry to have let you down.”

It was quiet and still inside that dusty space. Outside we could hear the Chinese children bouncing a ball against the wall. Barret hated that noise but today he sent no one to chase them off.

“I will pay you all your week’s wages and a small bonus,” he said. “It’s the best I can do.”

Then he shook hands with all of us. I did not, like the other fellows did, go to the pub and get drunk. I handed in the key of my demonstration model, shook Colonel Barret by the hand, wished him well in his retirement, and caught the tram out to Haymarket. As far as I am concerned that day was the first of the Great Depression.

I was walking down the little lane beside the stockyards when I ran into Horace who was walking the other way, banging a heavy suitcase against his chubby thigh. He was embarrassed to see me.

I told him I had been dismissed and asked him where he was off to.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “you have been very kind to me.”

I understood that he was leaving. I assumed it was because of Annette whom I imagined he did not like.

“Sonia will miss you.”

“Yes.”

“And Charles.”

“Yes. I’ll miss him.”

“Where are you off to?” I pushed my hand into my pocket, in search of jiggling keys which were not there.

Horace shifted uncomfortably and kicked at a stone.

“Sydney,” he said.

“I hear it’s a beautiful city.”

I should have known that something odd was happening. He wanted to make a speech, but he could not get the words together.

“I want to thank you,” he said, “and to say I never bore you any ill will or did anything I was ashamed of either.”

“Thank you, Horace, but if you’re leaving because of Annette, she’ll be gone soon.”

“Oh no,” he said, “not Annette. Just time to be pushing on.”

We shook hands. He picked up his suitcase. He opened his little red mouth, closed it, hesitated, and then went out of my life, trudging up the pot-holed track towards the Haymarket terminus.

I was still three hundred yards from the house. Phoebe and Annette were at the Morris Farman. The motor was turning, running rough with too much choke. The craft was straining at the chocks.

As I watched, Annette threw a bag into the passenger compartment and pulled out the chocks. Charles came trundling towards her like a little wombat, dense, solid, screaming. My wife opened the throttle. She took a course downwind, away from her bellowing son who tripped and fell. She was lucky the wind was only blowing a knot or two—ten yards from the boundary fence she got the craft into the air.

She left me with two children and a savage poem.

I learned a lot about poets and poetry that day and it is my contention that poets are weak shy people who will not look you in the eye. They are like Horace, scribbling spidery things in dark corners, frightened of their fathers, the law, and everything else. They are women who expect their husbands to be mind-readers. They are resentful and cruel. They spend sunny days planning dark revenges where they will punish those who wish them well.

They sit like spiders in the centre of their pretty webs. They
are harsh judges with wigs and buckled shoes. They place black caps upon their heads but let others attend the executions for them.

The poem that taught me so much is not the set of rhyming words I found clasped to the king parrots’ cage, skewered with a pin from Sonia’s dirty napkin. This was just the mud-map, just enough to make sure I did not miss the turning to the Scenic View. While Charles tugged at my trouser legs and bellowed I stared at this crumpled paper as if I could take in its meaning by the sheer force of my will. It would not reveal itself. It contained nothing I recognized, neither the word Badgery or Ford, and it was two hours before Molly arrived to read it to me.

No, this was not the poem. She had no talent for poetry, never did.

Witness:

Do not rush to your bookshop for more of the same. There is none. Phoebe’s great poem was not built from words, but from corrugated iron and chicken wire. She did not even build it herself but had me, her labourer, saw and hammer and make it for her. She had me rhyme a cage with a room, a bird with a person, feathers with skin, my home with a gaol, myself with a warder, herself with the splendid guileless creatures who had preened themselves so lovingly on the roof on one sad, lost, blue-skied day.

And it does not matter that she sold the Morris Farman for one hundred pounds and used the money to buy a dress for the Arts Ball in Sydney in 1924. Nor is it of any importance that she spent the rest of her life putting all her wiles and energies into being kept, cared for, loved or that the love she gave in return was of such a brittle quality that Annette Davidson would finally take her own life rather than endure its cutting edges.

It is of no importance that she would reveal herself to be self-indulgent, selfish, admiring herself like a budgie in a cage.

She was a liar, but who cares? The poem was made, set hard, could never be dismantled or unravelled, although on that dreadful night in September 1923 I did not understand, and
battled against its timbers with an axe, howling more loudly than my terrified son. I did not guess how long I was destined to live with it.

In a moment I must tell you how, competing with my son for the affection of a woman, I misused the valuable art I had learned from Goon Tse Ying and brought misfortune on my daughter. I would rather not repeat it. It is bad enough to have done it and I would as soon tear it up, wipe my arse with it, hide it under my lumpy mattress or feed it to my neighbour, the three-legged goanna with bad breath.

Yet, I see, I can postpone it a moment. For first I must tell you how I learned the art itself. I refer to the ability to become invisible, and you may wonder, if I really did possess such an unlikely power, why I should not have already used it to my own advantage.

To explain this I must go back to the days when my father’s horses had to be shot at the bottom of the Punt Road Hill and I, a self-appointed orphan, was living, thin, half wild, cunning as a shit-house rat amidst the crates and spoiled vegetables at the back of the Eastern Market. I cannot have lived there for more than a week, but it seems like months that I lay amidst that stinking refuse, making tunnels and nests for myself at night, lying sleepless listening to the rats, shivering amidst the smell of bad cabbage in the early morning, peering through gaps at the family of Chinese whose stall was next to my midden heap. They knew I was there. They left me a bowl of milk on the first day but I would not touch it. I was my father’s son. My head was full of stories about John Chinaman: opium, slavery, how they ate the hands of Christian babies.

In the end, hunger might have broken the impasse, but certainly the Wongs, whose stall it was, would never have. They were nervous, polite and law-abiding. Their cousin Goon, however, was a different man and it was he who strode right in, knocking crates aside with his gold-capped stick, who grabbed me by the scruff of my dirty neck and lifted me, screaming and kicking, into the air: pale, skinny, hatchet-faced with hunger. I bit his hand and made it bleed. He laughed out loud, this giant in a butterfly collar and gold-rimmed glasses. I wet myself in terror.

I sometimes wonder if Goon would have taken me in if I had displayed less terror, if his compulsion to prove his benign intentions was not what any human will feel when confronted with a petrified wild animal one wishes to help—the mistaken terror is an insult to our good motives, a goad to greater efforts. But Goon, in any case, was a man driven by a desire to prove himself civilized to the English he despised. He adopted their dress when it suited him and spoke their language without a trace of accent. He was a giant of a man, not in the sense that he might tower over you, my long-limbed reader. Oh, he was large for a Chinese, but that is not the point—he towered over every man I ever met in the size of his spirit, his indignation, his energy, his laugh, and his ability to drink a tumbler of rough brandy in a single gulp.

He was not one of the Chinese who wrote to the legislature: “Dear kind sirs, we the Chinese miners do beg you to treat us fairly as we most respectfully beg you to do. We work hard and mean no harm …” or words to that effect.

For these Chinese, Goon had nothing but scorn.

“Roll up,” he would taunt them, “roll up.”

When he became an old man with a successful business in Grafton, these facts about his younger days would cause him embarrassment and he would deny it all. He joined Chinese–Australian associations and had grandchildren with names like Heather and Walter. He ate chops and sausages, roast beef on Sundays, and the only invisibility he would acknowledge was that which comes from dressing like everyone else.

The Goon of old age is not worth a pinch of shit. It is the forty-year-old Goon we want and to reach him I must walk down Little Bourke Street, Melbourne, as it was in 1896, past drays piled high with wicker baskets, shivering men with long coats and pigtails, past Mr Choo, the fortune-teller with the clever canary, to the worn wooden stoop that led to Wong’s cafe. There was no sign at Wong’s to proclaim its business, no window to display its wares. There was simply the stoop where old Mrs Wong sat in all weathers, breathing heavily and plucking ducks, the feathers of which drifted down Little Bourke Street and caught themselves in the nostrils of indignant mares, fresh from Port Melbourne with another load of travel-stained Chinese. Over the stoop was a small carved timber arch, its wood grey and cracked. Behind the arch was a trellised veranda, and behind this wooden skirt Wong, his family, and his customers hid their business from the English.

As you came in the door there was a small office on the right where the younger Mr Wong sat at his books, crowded in upon by bundles of goods, some in crates, some wrapped in raffia. There was the smell of dried fish, but also of steel, of grease. Long-handled shovels leaned against jute sacks of mushrooms criss-crossed with sunlight from the latticed window. You would think there was no order here until you looked at Wong’s book and saw the neat rows of Chinese characters and Arabic figures and watched his bony fingers as they worked the abacus.