Illywhacker (7 page)

Jack McGrath was not only flattered to find himself described as intelligent but also gratified to learn that his new friend had flown the first air mail in South Australia. He read also that I had served in the Air Corps, was a “noted zoologist” and a “motoring enthusiast whose Hispano Suiza is currently on loan to a distinguished Ballarat family”.

Photographs, supplied by yours truly, were also used by the
Advertiser
(this, mind you, at a time when photographs in the newspaper were a rarity). The most notable of these showed the Morris Farman “in three positions of flight in a storm above Digger’s Rest Racecourse”. Quite a lot of this information was correct.

A week later I was able to mail a postal order for twenty pounds to the publican in Darnham.

It was nine o’clock at night but the temperature was still above 90 degrees. There was no air in the room. There was not enough air anywhere. From the bathroom window in Villamente Street you could see the red glow in the sky: fires covered the Brisbane ranges at Anakie and Steiglitz.

The front room crawled with insects with long brown abdomens. They fell into the jug of sweet lemon squash and died there. Phoebe had placed a thin book of Swinburne’s poetry on top of the jug, but the insects still managed to enter through the pouring lip.

Annette was limp and soaked with perspiration. Her grey dress was too heavy for the climate. It clung to the back of her knees and got stuck beneath her arms. Phoebe, on the other hand, did not seem at all affected. This irritated Annette. Phoebe was so wrapped up in her own feelings that she was insensitive to everything else, even the stinking heat. Phoebe also wore grey: a soft silky grey with a slightly paler grey scarf.

“For God’s sake,” Annette said, brushing insects away from Swinburne, “aren’t you hot?”

“A little,” Phoebe said, “but not much.”

“It doesn’t make sense.” Annette knew how pasty she looked.
Her hair was plastered against her forehead, a pimple was emerging from her chin, her top lip shone. “I don’t think he’s a herpetologist at all. A man of science, surely, does not keep his charges in a jute bag in his bedroom.”

“Annette,” Phoebe said, “where else would he keep it? We really have no proper facilities for boarding snakes.”

“And yet,” Annette said, “there you are with
two
of them.”

(She is already defeated, before it has begun, while Phoebe is no more than a creamy shape in my dirty dreams.)

“You should be going back to school,” Annette said.

Phoebe smiled. “Where I’m safe from nasty men?”

They sat side by side on the One couch. Annette put her hand on Phoebe’s but it was a sticky contact and not pleasant. She removed it.

“You could go to university.”

“Ugh,” Phoebe said. “How bourgeois.”

She learned this sort of talk from Annette and it drove Annette crazy to have it thrown back at her.

“Last year you didn’t know what bourgeois meant.”

“But I know now,” Phoebe said happily and Annette had to fight an impulse to disarrange that cool copper hair which her lover had piled high on her head, perhaps for the heat, perhaps to show her long lovely milky neck to Herbert Badgery.

“Do you really want to have babies and spend your life picking up after a man?” said Annette, who later omitted certain things from her description of Bohemian life in Paris.

“Who said anything about babies?” Phoebe said. “Or picking up. I only said I liked him. I said he was ‘interesting’.”

“I know what you find ‘interesting’, you little brat.”

Annette had never met me, but she had already heard too much about this man whose only human imperfection was bow-legs. And even this was meant to be “interesting,” as if they were shaped like this to accommodate what Phoebe liked to call a “door knocker” of extraordinary dimension.

She had heard (twice) already how Herbert Badgery had brought the Farman back from Balliang East to the airstrip at Belmont Common, how he had circled over Belmont and then flown up river to the woollen mills where he banked the machine before flying it beneath the bridge. What she didn’t know is that I had done it for a bet. I got good odds because everyone remembered how Johnny O’Day had killed himself doing the same thing three months before.

It had all been in the
Advertiser
. Annette had read it the day before. But now Phoebe was telling the story a third time. She wasn’t doing it for Annette’s sake. She was yelling into an empty well, only wanting to hear her happiness amplified.

“You are going to make yourself very, very unhappy,” Annette said.

But it was she who burst into tears, not Phoebe.

Phoebe tried to comfort her but she jerked away. She picked up the Swinburne and threw it at the wall.

“It’s ridiculous,” she screamed. “It’s stupid. You haven’t even
spoken
to him.”

I did not like the Geelong snake, nor did I trust it. But I was stuck with it, this cranky creature in the hessian sack beneath my bed. I had considered “losing” it, but I’d already had some nasty experiences “losing” snakes. A lost snake can unhinge the most stable household and produce conditions that are most unfavourable for a man who wants to be put up. That aside, the McGraths were almost as proud of my relationship with the snake as they were of my connection with aviation. Jack brought an odd collection of characters home from the racetrack to view my performance with the snake. Sharp-looking punters and toffee-nosed horse owners all collected in Western Avenue and were as different from each other as the chairs they sat on. I was called upon to demonstrate my “pet”. The manager of the National Bank, whose cast-off Pelaco shirt I wore, was nearly bitten on his beckoning index finger and was foolish enough to giggle about it.

You can do nothing to protect yourself from a brown snake except keep well away from it. You cannot milk its poison for (in summer especially) it’ll have another batch ready in seconds. There would be no peace with the snake, no treaty. It would not become tame or even accept its captivity. All day long it pushed its head against the sack, as persistent as a blowfly against glass. It was a cunning thing and not capable of being bought off.

By the Wednesday morning I had found no one to supply me with either mice or frogs and I set off early to walk along the Melbourne Road where, one of the punters had told me, there was a soak with plenty of frogs in it. I left the Ford at home and walked. I always liked to walk. I strolled like a Gentleman.

I had observed, very early in life, that the way a man or woman walked gave a much better indication of their place in society than their accent. Although I was now very careful not to say “ain’t” and “I never done it” and other habits of speech I had picked up working for Wongs at the Eastern Market, I was happy enough to use the natural nasal Australian accent which had so enraged that imaginary Englishman who sired me. I despised those people who pommified their speech but I was, always, very particular about my walk.

A man who lives by physical labour will move in a different way. A man who lumps wheat will move differently from a man who shears sheep—he will carry his muscled arms like loaves of bread; he will lock the muscles at the base of his spine and lean forward to take some imaginary weight. I had thousands of classifications of walks and I adopted the “Gentleman’s Stroll” because I fancied it would make people trust me without ever knowing why.

It wasn’t a very scenic route to the soak, but that didn’t worry me. I followed the main Melbourne Road beside the railway line. There were few houses out there in those days, just a few weatherboard workmen’s cottages dotted here and there along the road. A wagon or two, piled high with ingeniously balanced goods for country towns, passed me and I gave them a nod. I didn’t pay much attention to the look of things, the colour of the horses, their breath in the early air, the quality of the light, and so on. But I did enjoy my movements. The walk not only convinced others, it convinced me and, strolling in the manner of a Gentleman, I became one.

The soak lay in the shadow of a towering redbrick flour mill. I got down in the gully out of sight of the road, but the blank windows of the flour mill continued to stare down at me. I didn’t like it, but I had no choice: I took off my suit coat, my trousers, my socks. I stood in my underwear in sight of the flour mill and felt self—conscious about my bowed legs. I walked through the black squelching mud, to the far side of the swamp. The calls of frogs drew me on like sirens, although I had no hessian bag.

It is my belief that there are few things in this world more useful than a hessian bag, and no matter what part of my story I wish to reflect on I find that a hessian bag, or the lack of one, assumes some importance. They soften the edge of a hard bench, can be split open to line a wall, can provide a blanket for a cold night, a safe container for a snake, a rabbit, or a duck. They are useful
when beheading hens or to place under car tyres in sandy soil. You can stuff them full of kapok to make a decent cushion and there is nothing better to carry frogs in.

Which is why it is surprising that in all the McGraths’ possessions I could not find a single hessian bag. I had been forced to come in search of frogs with two small white paper bags which smelt as if they had held confectionery and, indeed, when the snake eventually devoured the first frog he would find it lightly dusted with icing sugar like a special treat from the ABC Tea Rooms.

With paper bag in hand, I felt foolish. I imagined lines of women in white aprons behind the windows of the flour mill. They were laughing at my legs.

I was confident enough of my shoulders and my arms. I was proud of my height and even arrogant about my general carriage. Even my calves, in isolation, met with my approval. But my bowed legs mortified me and I turned sideways to the staring windows, presenting myself at my least ludicrous angle.

That was the problem with a Gentleman’s Stroll. It produced expectations that could not be met. It was not the right walk for a man who must, when it is over, take off his clothes and walk in black mud.

When the editor of the
Geelong Advertiser
had used the word “herpetologist” to describe me, I had readily agreed. Later, in answer to a question from my host, I persuaded him to look it up in the dictionary. At the time it had seemed an interesting thing to be, but now, in the middle of the soak, it did not seem so fine.

I found my first frog where the small stream disappeared into the soak. It sat there, brown, shiny and horny-skinned. Its eyes bulged up at me and I grabbed it with a shudder.

It was then I heard the cough.

The first thing I thought of was my legs. I turned, still holding the frog in both hands, and saw a swagman, although that is not much of a description of the fellow. He was a swagman who had let himself go, a swagman who had long ago given up trying to wash his shirt once a week in summer, a swagman whose natural affection for pieces of string and odd discarded rags had entered a virulent phase where it overwhelmed any of the conventional restraints placed on fashion and became a style of its own.

His face, where you could see it through his rampant beard, was weathered and beaten by the combined forces of sun, rain and alcohol. His teeth were rotting. His bulbous nose made its
own confession. His hair was grey and matted and one eye, half closed by a blow or a bee sting, gave him an untrustworthy appearance.

He was squatting on the ground like a blackfellow, quiet and still and cunning. I thought the swagman was looking at my legs.

“Good tucker?” the swagman asked.

I tried to hold the Gentleman’s stance while I held the frog and walked in a modest fashion through the mud.

“You scared me, man,” I said.

“You scared me,” the swagman said. “Walkin nekkid like that.” He watched me place the frog in the small white bag and then place the bag in the inside pocket of my folded suit coat. “Is it good tucker?”

I was always fighting people I didn’t need to fight. I feel like I’ve been awake all my life with a gun across my knees, waiting.

“Yes,” I told the swagman, “very good tucker.”

“That a fect?”

“Like chicken,” I told him. “You can’t tell the difference. That is what they serve the kings and queens of France. It’s only the ignorance of the average Australian toff that stops them doing the same thing.”

“That a fect?”

“Yes,” I said, tucking my singlet into my underpants, “it’s a fact.”

The swaggie shifted on his heels. His attitude was uncertain. “I thought they killed the kings and queens of France,” he said. “I seem to recall that they were killed. They had their heads chopped off, so I was told. They don’t have kings and queens in France any more.”

This was all news to me. If I had not been a pig-headed fool I might have learned something, but I was more worried about two contradictory things—my dignity and the other frog. I went back into the soak while the swagman took the opportunity to have a closer look at my suit.

“I used to have a suit like that,” he said, “but it was took from me up in Albury.”

“That a fact?” I mocked.

“Well,” the swaggie shrugged away his suit, “you know those Albury types.”

I got my second frog and walked carefully back to solid ground. The swaggie watched me put it in its bag.

“We ate roof rats in Albury but we never tried the frogs, never even thought of them. I’m much obliged to you for the information, I must say, much obliged.”

I perched on the edge of the stream and washed my feet and then my hands. I managed to dress standing on a grass tussock.

I was given to doing things suddenly. I had strong emotions like unexpected guests and the urge to laugh or fight often overwhelmed me without warning. Similarly I was often beset with the desire to be good and generous, and I have no idea where this part of me comes from. Certainly not from my father who was never held back by his scruples. He was a fine man for talk of Empire and loyalty but it wasn’t the Empire or loyalty that made him successful: he was a liar and a bullshitter and hungry for a quid.