Illywhacker (57 page)

I did not drink his tea, nor shake his hand on leaving.

I was not well. I went to my boarding house and lay, fully clothed, on the bed and there I thought about the book that the Chinaman had been keen to keep from me. It was not an ordinary exercise book, not a journal or ledger, not the sort of thing you could buy across the counter at any newsagent or stationer’s. It was bound in black leather with a bright red spine. On the front cover was a gold panel surrounded by a red border. On the gold panel were three Chinese characters.

The landlady came in without knocking. She asked me to take
my shoes off her quilt and asked for money. I took off my shoes. I gave her money. I was thinking about that book. She inquired after my health but I only heard her, in my memory, after she had gone and there was little, anyway, to be said about my health. It was not what it was.

The haze of jacarandas in November gives Grafton an insubstantial look and I am no longer even certain that the Grafton I visited in 1937 is the Grafton that lives, so solidly, on the fruits of tree-killing, by the banks of the Clarence.

But certain parts of the town are very clear to me: the bridge over which I walked to and fro, the graceless metal trough which allows few views of the mighty meandering river beneath.

It was there, on that echoing bridge, I decided to steal
The Book of Dragons
. Dusk went; dark came. I wandered the streets, past houses where families were eating. I waited under trees, hovered by corner stores, trod the purple carpet of jacaranda petals. Cicadas trilled. The air had a sweet slightly mouldy smell. I went up to the General Motors dealer but there was nothing to see. The doors of his shed were rolled shut and padlocked. I took my bicycle from the boarding house and went up to the highway to cycle. I was nearly killed by an Arnott’s Biscuit truck. I came back, once more, across that dog-legged bridge.

I crept down through the tall grasses on the steep bank of the Clarence and approached the providore from the back. The Goon family were all downstairs, sitting in their kitchen. The daughter was doing her homework. Two sons were crouching over the wireless. Such signs of domesticity cut across my heart and I thought of you, Leah, of your nipple.

There were empty molasses drums at the back. Mosquitoes bred in their rusty lids. I climbed up on one and hoisted myself up to the catwalk that led to the old man’s room.

My shoes were well shone and supple of sole; it was not they that squeaked but the filthy Chinaman’s floor. I fiddled and fumbled on his desk. The mugs of tea were still there. So was Goon Tse Ying. I could hear him breathing. I knocked the pen—I had observed it earlier, can see it still, black with a thin gold
band like a wedding ring—and it rolled and dropped, a little bomb, on to the floor.

He spoke, whispered, reed-thin, my insulting Chinese name.

I had
The Book of Dragons
.

I had great hopes for that book, and he, obviously, the same. He was on me like a spider, a hairless huntsman dropping, flop, off the ceiling, stinking of garlic. When you do battle with a master magician you do not enter the quest lightly. You know what he can do, how easily he can grease from your grasp, oil away, and take his information with him. I held him round the throat with both hands. The book dropped to the floor. You would not think a chap would get loose from a grip like that, my fingers interlocked like a golfer with a club, but he escaped me, hissing. I grabbed for the book and found it. His hand was at it too. There was, as they say, a struggle.

A moment came when I realized Goon Tse Ying was no longer there. I held
The Book of Dragons
in one hand, his bleeding finger in the other.

If I had not laughed out loud, I would never have gone to court and never known that musty labyrinth known as Grafton Gaol. When I entered my room in the boarding house I was not expecting laughter. I had walked the passage shoeless, had not stopped on the way for so much as a pee or a flush, had unlocked my door quietly with
The Book of Dragons
tucked inside my Fair Isle jumper.

Inside my room, the door locked, a chair under the knob, I sat down on the bed to study. My hands could not hold it still. I stood and laid the volume on the dresser.

On each left—hand page were Chinese characters. On each right-hand page were words in English.

A white ant hatch erupted in the night and the winged creatures pushed their way through the insect wire and flooded hungrily around the light, abandoning their wings and crawling around the shining white reflecting surfaces of my sweating face.

I approached the book no less desperately:

“It is my secrets of business which I fear you, my sons, have not yet understood. Therefore I write them down for you. Please attend.

“1 In purchasing stock, first of all, consider the demand. Do not stock a large quantity, firstly for fear of moths and secondly for fear of deterioration. If the goods are in demand at profitable prices it becomes an exception. In an exceedingly cheap article there is no harm to buy a large quantity.”

The English made no more sense to me than the Chinese characters. I felt myself confronted with a code I could not decipher.

“2 Always serve your customers with courtesy and patience. Show patiently as many samples as you can.

“3 In wrapping up articles for customers make sure there is no mistake blah blah blah.

“4 Where there are too many customers to enable you to attend to them all at the same time, then ask courteously …” (the rest obscured by a brown sticky fluid).

“5 When a customer becomes lax with his account blah blah blah.

“6 At closing time lock and guard against fires.”

By now I was giggling. Some fool was hammering against the wall. It was my giggling, of course, that brought me undone. I could have cycled back to Nambucca. There was a splendid widow there, the owner of a shell shop and a pair of gooey romantic eyes.

“7 In case of heavy rains. Ha-ha-ha. Loss by flood is unthinkable.

“8 Influence people by virtue, not subdue them by force. ‘They who overcome men with smartness of speech for the most part procure themselves hatred.’

“9 Calmness is to be prized. If you succeed in this, prosperity may be expected in a short time.

“10 If a matter does not concern you, do not forcibly interfere. It is an old saying that it is the mouth that causes shame and hostilities. If one does not meddle with anything outside his own sphere he will be free from sorrow throughout his life. So beware of it.”

I was roaring with laughter, heedless of whatever fools might stamp on my ceiling and belabour my door. I was later informed my listeners thought I had hurt myself.

“Oh Wing, my son, guide your brothers Lo and Wah, and obey my commands. Do not forget that if one does not alter the way of the father he is considered filial.
The Book of Poetry
said ‘For such
filial piety without ceasing there will be confirmed blessing on you.’”

When they took that sticky brown book from my hands I had begun to weep, and Sergeant Moth—that famous entrepreneur—picked up the finger and put it in a paper bag.

I am not sure how much later it was. I could not even tell you the owner of the house; but I have described it before—it was the house I invented to frighten the draughtsman in Geelong-that hairy-knuckled Englishman—when he would not put my name at the bottom of Bradfield’s aircraft plans.

This house was exactly where I had placed it: three doors from the post office. It was a big stone place with leadlight windows, encircled with elms. The lawn, I saw as Sergeant Moth’s Ford rolled up the drive, was dotted with daffodils.

Inside, at the head of the table, was a man with one finger missing from his bandaged hand. It was not the Mr Regan I had once described, but Mr Goon Tse Ying whose angry eyes I could not meet.

So it was, at a time when it seemed too late, that I began to have some understanding of the power of lies.

But read on, read on, and do not concern yourself about my years in HM Prison, Rankin Downs: I found my solace where I always would—in the blue pieces of cobalt sky, the mustard-yellow lies sent to me by mail, composed by Leah Goldstein.

Marjorie Chaffey laid down her broom and squatted on the sun-silvered boards of her front veranda. A mouse ran across her bare foot; when it returned to nibble at her big toe—nail she brushed it aside. She was in her middle forties and when she squatted, she squatted comfortably, with her unusually large feet flat on the sandy floor and her thin arms folded on her knees. She could stay in that position for hours, and would do so, if the mirage would come back again.

The mirage had appeared at the bottom of the driveway. It had occupied the lonely road for four hundred yards on either side of their mailbox. There, shimmering above the hot Mallee sand, she had seen the main street of Horsham. This had occurred two years ago, two days after Boxing Day. She had been able to make out the parcels in the women’s string bags. She could see the butcher cutting down a string of sausages and his name (Harris) was written on his glass window. She saw an old farmer with a bent back lead a reluctant fox—terrier on a string lead. She had seen the white-aproned grocer’s boy riding on a black bicycle.

This, by itself, did not have the makings of a secret. If this had been all there was, she would have fetched her husband and they would have looked at it together.

But she had seen something else, and this “something else” had filled her with such joy, such a sweet mixture of happiness and loss, that she could tell no one. The “something else” was a young boy, dressed in cricket whites. She had only seen him for a moment. Another boy, the grocer’s boy, had leaned his black bicycle against a wall and, when he had entered his employer’s premises, the bicycle had fallen noiselessly to the footpath. The farmer had been led away by his fox-terrier. And then the boy in cricket whites passed the butcher’s window, did a cartwheel, and was gone.

It was the cartwheel, the slender tanned arms, the careless joy of it, that pierced her heart, for she thought she recognized—although she knew it was impossible—her husband. She knew it
was not her husband. She could hear him then, could hear him now, up at the forge. His nose had grown and his eyebrows had skewed like a house whose foundations are sunk in shifting shale. And yet it was her husband and she remembered what he had been like when he was a young boy, swift and pretty as a rabbit. He had played on the wing for Jeparit and he had such a dainty, fast, brave stab kick—it fairly zinged—and she had married him for a young girl’s reasons not like they said.

But now she heard a motor cycle approach and her interest shifted towards it. It was not a mirage. It was a real motor cycle, a hard metal object that was causing a soft orange feather of dust to rise into the cobalt sky behind it. Watching the motor cycle she began to forget her boy in cricket whites and, although she had no idea who rode the motor cycle, she willed it to stop.

“Stop,” she said, not loudly, but very clearly.

The motor cycle stopped. It was beside the mailbox, four hundred yards from the veranda. It stayed there, its engine beating erratically.

When the rider got off his machine, Marjorie Chaffey felt—it came on her suddenly—irritated. She stood and picked up her broom.

She would have to offer the visitor some water.

The motor cycle fired and misfired, hesitated, surged ahead, misfired and spluttered. Charles gritted his teeth and felt the sand between his fillings. His kidneys ached. He had tied a woollen scarf around them, then tightened his money belt around the scarf, but the bruised kidneys still ached and the cause of their pain—roads made from saplings laid side by side, a technique known locally as corduroy—showed no signs of getting any smoother.

There was nothing wrong with the motor cycle, a ten-year-old 1927 H-series AJS. The fault was with the petrol. In all this drought-stricken Mallee it was the one place a traveller could be sure of finding water.

My son was seventeen years old. He had powerful thighs and thick arms hanging low from sloping shoulders. His great carved wooden head was marked with a black eye that was more yellow than black and from this spectacular bed of bruised flesh the eye
itself, sand—irritated, bloodshot, as wild as a currawong’s, stared out at a landscape in which the tops of fences protruded from windswept sand.

The hearing aid was in his ear but not connected. The ear spluttered and exploded, crackled and fizzed as it always did, whether connected to the hearing aid or not. With this ear he remembered me—the grief-mad father who had struck him one awful evening at Clunes.

The new Mercury sidecar, a heavy attachment better suited to a large motorbike, proclaimed his business: “Snake Boy Badgery” and the crudely painted warning (“Take Care. Snakes in Here.”) did not lie.

He saw the mailbox when he was still a mile from it—a pale blue thing sitting on the sand which slowly revealed itself to be what he had known it was anyway—a four-gallon drum on its side with a small veranda soldered on to keep the weather out. A soft sandy track led from the mailbox through a stand of stunted Mallee gums and up a gentle rise to where a house—its corrugated iron walls gleaming silver in the heat—stood on a bare orange patch of earth.

Charles stopped at the mailbox and read the sign. “Chaffey.” He was already nervous. He wondered what sort of person Chaffey would be, if he would be suspicious, or sarcastic or rude, if he had sons who would taunt him or daughters who would laugh at his funny looks, if they would refuse him water, deny him a feed, or give him both and then send him out into the dark unfriendly night without wondering if he had a bed to go to.

The gate was not made from wood or iron, was more of a trap than a gate, a strained contraption made from fencing wire and a complicated series of loops and levers that served to tension the wire and slacken it off. He had not come across the system before (not surprisingly—it was the product of Les Chaffey’s ingenious mind) and so took some time to get it open and even more time to get it shut.