Illywhacker (8 page)

If my father had seen me hand the pound note to the swagman he would have laughed out loud.

“Here,” I said, “get yourself some flour and tea. Don’t eat frogs. Christians don’t eat frogs.”

We were both, the swaggie and I, puzzled at this development. He held Jack’s pound between the thumb and forefinger of both battered hands and turned it over and over.

“If you don’t eat frogs,” he said at last, “why the dickens do you catch them?”

“My damn snake, man,” I said. I was furious about the fate of my pound note. “I’ve got to feed my snake.”

“Of course you have,” the swagman said sympathetically, “of course you have.”

“I’m deadly serious, man.”

“Of course you are.”

His mistake was to wink.

The pound note disappeared from the swagman’s hand before the wink was over, but even when I held it, tightly crumpled, in my pocket, I did not feel any release from my confusion, I felt worse. I felt guilty, and this did not seem just.

“Charity is good for no one,” I said. “Would you like to
earn
a pound?”

Later, when I recalled how I had made the deal with the swagman, I always felt ashamed, not of the deal itself which was certainly fair. (The swagman honoured it too, delivering two frogs each morning for the snake’s breakfast.) I felt ashamed of reneging on the grander gesture which was more in keeping with how I would like to be.

I felt the swagman had looked at me and seen something less attractive in me than my bowed legs.

The whole household was in love with me, and although I knew it I doubt if I knew how much. Bridget blushed every time she put a plate in front of me, and Molly banned her from serving in the dining room, whereupon Bridget burst into tears and had to be comforted. I bought her an ice-cream from the ABC and she left the empty cone on her dressing-room table for weeks. However, she was not readmitted to the dining room. That was Molly’s territory; she cooed and fluttered, big-breasted and blowzy, over dishes of vegetables, and Phoebe saw how she took such care with the arrangement of vegetables on my plate and also (a telling point this, for a woman raised in a poor family) that she gave me bigger portions, so
discreetly
bigger, so
marginally
bigger that they were, in Phoebe’s words “like brief eye contacts made between secret lovers, like the shadow of a moth passing across a night-time window”.

This was not only lost on me, it was lost on Jack as well. He did not notice that Molly folded my three pairs of socks, how she darned them when they holed, how carefully she placed my two clean shirts in my drawer, how she dabbed and brushed at my single suit coat.

Phoebe noticed. Sometimes her mother’s behaviour embarrassed her but she also shared her mother’s silent hurt when the subtleties of the vegetable servings were lost on me. I devoured them with the same indiscriminate passion I turned on all of life, whether it was the manager of the National Bank or a roast potato.

As for Jack and me, we got on like blazing houses. It would not have mattered a damn if I had had no snake or stories about aeroplane factories, in fact it would have been a damn sight better, but it is too late to alter the past and regret is a fool’s emotion. And while we built a thousand aeroplanes and charmed a lot of snakes, there was plenty else to keep us interested. We had as many theories as peas on our plates and talked with our mouths full and spilled our drinks with sweeping gestures.

“You were like a pair of love-sick jackasses,” Phoebe said
later, “and you talked a lot of rot, but I loved you and I didn’t mind.”

“Isn’t it true,” Jack said, “that if Leichhardt had an aero, we’d have had none of the tragedy, none of the loss, poor chap.”

I pointed to the problems of landing, of clearing a strip, supplying fuel and so on.

“Ah yes,” said Jack, stamping his stockinged feet and wiping his chin, “but what about the parachute? Now there’s an idea.”

“Bourke was a poor policeman,” I said, “I doubt he could have managed it.”

“We’re not talking of Bourke, man, it’s Leichhardt. And in any case you’ve told me yourself, there’s nothing to it.”

“A bit more than nothing,” I said, “but less than a lot.”

“All right, granted,” said Jack, wiping up his gravy with grey Geelong bread, “a bit more than nothing.”

“And he was a big man too, and possibly slow-witted.”

“Leichhardt?”

“No, Bourke.”

“I never read anything that suggested it.”

“Perhaps you didn’t,” I said, being pleased to hear his ignorance was as great as mine. “But not all of it is published. He had kangaroos in his top paddock.”

“An expression,” Jack said, pushing back his chair and holding Molly’s hand, “I never understood.”

“It is clear enough,” I said. “Anyone with any presence of mind does not permit a kangaroo, or a wallaby for that matter, into his top paddock.”

Jack stroked his wife’s hand. He was always at it. Sometimes at dinner I would look and see father and daughter both stroking the mother’s hands, one on the left, one on the right.

“I have seen it,” Jack said, “on the best properties.”

“In exceptional circumstances.”

“Granted, yes. A tree across a fence in a storm.”

“Well,” I said, “you understand well enough.”

“I don’t like expressions,” Jack said, suddenly becoming serious, “that are like officious coppers, with no sympathy in them. The sort of expression like a beak throwing the book at you without allowing for all the circumstances. An expression like that is not fair or sensible. What would you say, for instance, to the term galah being used in the way it is?”

“The galah is a pest,” I said. “No one would doubt it.”

“But not stupid.”

“No,” I said, “I grant you, the galah is not a stupid bird.”

“I don’t think,” Jack said, “that we have taken the same trouble with our expressions that the English have.”

And off we would go again, not just on one night, but every night, with company or without it. We talked right through breakfast and then went for a stroll along the beach together and we never stopped talking.

Phoebe watched me. In truth we both spent a lot of time watching each other. We fooled each other so much we believed we were mutually invisible.

I had to be away from Western Avenue at times. I was selling T Models again although I was ashamed to admit it. I told them it was for business, related to the aircraft factory.

When I was not there, Jack was listless. He sat in front of the wireless and changed stations and banged his hearing aid with the heel of his hand. He was like a bored child on Sunday afternoon. He did not go down to the taxi company he owned. He did not visit the stud to see his horses, or the track to lose money. The bludgers at the Corio Quay Hotel (who knew him as “Here’s-ten-bob” McGrath) did not see him. He had long “naps” and waited for my return. And then, in the summer evening, Phoebe would see us on the beach again. Her father was built like a bullock driver, was the son of a bullock driver, and there was still, as he walked along the beach with his friend, plenty of bullock driver left in his walk and she could see in those broad shoulders, those heavy arms, that thick neck, a man made to endure the dusty day and the solitary night, a man whose natural style would be reserved, who would be shy with men and women alike, but yet here he was—Phoebe saw it—building an aeroplane factory with a stranger. But yet it was not so simple, this factory. We did not approach it so directly. We approached it like Phoebe and I approached each other, shyly, at a tangent, looking the other way, pretending to be interested in other things while all the time we could see that big slab—sided shed of corrugated iron with “Barwon Aeros” written in big black letters on the side.

“The wheel,” Jack said, “seems an easy thing when you have it, but if you don’t have it then how would you ever know you needed it? Flying is an easier thing to imagine. You can see a magpie doing it. But tell me, Badgery, where is an animal, or bird, with
wheels?”

“There is a snake,” I said, “that makes itself into a wheel and chases you.”

“Is that a fact now? In what country is that?”

“In this country. A friend of mine was chased by one up at Jindabyne.”

“There is no doubt,” Jack said, “that if an animal would do it in any country, this is the country for it. It is the country for the aeroplane as well. But if you take up the question of your Jindabyne snake, there was no white man here to see it when it was wanted.”

“They say it was a Chinaman invented the wheel,” I said. I said it out of loyalty to Goon Tse Ying, but this is not the place to discuss Jack’s attitude towards the coloured races.

“Is that so?”

“It is.”

“And not a white man?”

“A Chinaman.”

Jack shook his head. He found it hard to credit it. “Do you know his name?” he said.

“I don’t,” I said. “It was too long ago.”

“I doubt a blackfellow could have managed it just the same. He’d be watching the snakes wheeling past and never give them a thought except eating them for his dinner. It was a wasted opportunity,” he said. “If we’d had the wheel here we would be well ahead of Europe.”

“If the blackfellow had the wheel,” I said, “he’d have run rings around us.”

“But you forget,” Jack said, “that by the time we arrived we had the wheel ourselves, and gunpowder too.”

“It was a Chinaman invented gunpowder,” I said.

It was too much for Jack. He could not abide Chinamen, no matter what I told him. He sucked in his cheeks and blew them out. He kicked a jellyfish back into the water.

“Twist and giggle,” he said, “turn and spin / Squirm and spit and grin / Just like a bally Chinaman / When someone pulls his string.”

“There is no kinder soul on earth than the Chinaman,” I said.

He narrowed his eyes a fraction and stared at me hard. By God he would have been a hard man in a fight, but he would never allow himself to get into one-he would always find a comfortable way to take in the most uncomfortable things.

“The poor little chap,” he said. “Poor little fellow.” I was Romulus and Remus to Jack, a poor little chap suckled on the tits of wolves.

Phoebe felt she had become invisible. She accompanied Jack and me to Belmont Common for flying lessons but no one spoke to her. She sat in the back seat and listened.

It never entered my head that she might want to fly. She expressed no interest. She said nothing. Sometimes I saw her listening with a little smile on her face. She made me flustered. I lost my train of thought.

She knew her father would never master the aeroplane, no matter how many lessons I gave him. He had even less feeling for it than he had for the Hispano Suiza. But she watched the circus silently, biding her time. Her father could never bring the stick down enough to land it. It was horrible to watch. The Farman floated in unsteadily, Jack in the front, Herbert in the back.

She could see me leaning forward and thumping her father in the middle of the back with my fist. She could hear me shouting, “Push it down, down, down.” But nothing would persuade Jack to push the stick down towards the looming earth.

She visited Annette but they both made each other irritated. They bickered and fought. Her mother, once so concerned about the quantity of balls Phoebe attended, the parties she was invited to, and the friends she had, no longer seemed to worry. She made up her Christmas parcels for the orphanages, put money in envelopes for the men at the Ainsley Home, and fussed about with Herbert’s socks.

For Phoebe the days over Christmas passed in a strange daze. Sometimes she felt so tense that she wanted to scratch her face until it bled but sometimes the feeling turned a degree or two and then what had been pain became pleasure. And in between those two extremes she spent whole days in a distracted state, a sort of mental itch that did not let her pay attention to anything or anyone.

She went to a few parties around Christmas (I watched her go, hopeless with lust and jealousy). She had her feet stood on by the sons of Western District graziers, two of whom proposed to her.

She hid amongst the throngs of bathers on Eastern Beach and burnt her creamy skin, perhaps deliberately. No one reprimanded her. She shed her ruined skin with fascination and did not answer desperate letters from poor Annette who spent her Christmas in a rejected lover’s hell.

Phoebe did not speak to the person whose image remained continually in her mind’s eye. She would not even ask him to pass the bread. She ignored him at bedtime and would not even say good night. She was reprimanded for her rudeness. She shed her skin in a bedroom curtained from the February heat, and waited.

It is time to deal with the neighbours and I am like Goon Tse Ying, capable of becoming invisible, sliding under doors, lifting rugs from floors on windless nights. I get a dirty pleasure sifting through their private cupboards amongst the dust and fluff and paper-dry conversations. I push my invisible nose deep into the sheets of beds and breathe in the odours of their unheard farts.

There were so many ways the McGraths had upset the upper crust in Western Avenue. The offences were as numberless as flies and even Mrs Kentwell had given up on counting them.

For a start: the yellowbrick garage Jack had built in the middle of the lawn. He had built it himself, but not too well. It was as blunt and as useful as a cow bail and two deep wheel ruts ran towards it, not neatly, for there were places where the Hispano Suiza had been bogged and other marks made by horses called to pull it out.

There was also what was known locally as “The Wall”. The function of this redbrick wall which ran from the garage to almost the middle point of the house (it arrived opposite the big windows of the music room) was to protect Molly’s flower beds from the winds that howled off Corio Bay. This function was not obvious to the Kentwells, the Jones-Burtons and the Devonishes who met to discuss each new offence, and if they had known it would have made no difference. They had no sympathy with Jack’s bush-carpenter’s approach to aesthetics.

The McGrath mansion had been built in 1863 and was originally called “Wirralee”. This name had been incorporated in a leadlight window above the front door. They had seen Jack McGrath remove this window one afternoon in 1917. Mrs Kentwell saw it first.