Illywhacker (9 page)

“He has the ladder out,” she told Alice Jones-Burton.

The two women put their hats on and plunged their hatpins home. They strolled along the promenade like policemen on the beat and on October 25th, 1917, shortly before noon, they witnessed the man with the binding-twine belt remove the
“Wirralee” and replace it with a plain piece of glass on which a single cloverleaf had been sandblasted.

To understand the effect this had on the two ladies you have to remember that there was a big fuss going on about military conscription for the Great War, that the Catholics were against conscription, and what’s more they were winning. On November 1st, 1917, the last attempt to introduce conscription would fail. In this heated climate a cloverleaf might easily be seen to be a shamrock, and the two ladies declared the McGraths not only traitorous, not only tasteless, but also Catholic.

If Jack had known all this he would have been terribly upset. He didn’t like Catholics much more than he liked Chinese, although in the case of Catholics he would always say it was not the Catholic people he objected to but the religion and the priests particularly who “swig down all the altar wine themselves, and not a drop for the rest of them”. He never knew that Molly was a Catholic, was still a Catholic, and had risked her soul by marrying him in a Protestant church in Point’s Point.

Jack put the cloverleaf above his door because he was bored and because he was lucky.

There were no end of offences. The presence of Herbert Badgery Esquire was an offence. My Gentleman’s Stroll did not impress Mrs Kentwell at all. She peered at me from behind fence or curtain and judged me a sharp character and a ruffian.

Western Avenue, she said, was on its way to being a slum, and when she saw the swagman arrive early one morning she knew her fears were well founded. She found it impossible to convey to her allies the true nature of this character. For when she referred to him as a swagman and they nodded their heads she knew she had not painted a proper picture of this grotesque.

“But, my dear,” Mrs Devonish said, “they
all
use string.” And then she prattled on about the useful nature of string and how her father, the late Reverend Devonish (who was remembered by Mrs Kentwell for being too High Church) had always kept brown paper bags of string in various parts of the house, none of which information was sensible or useful to Mrs Kentwell and anyway did not fit too well with her memory of the late High Church man who had caused more than one upset due to his fondness for silk and satin. String, Mrs Kentwell thought, was not High Church at all.

So she dispensed with the string. She snapped it up, so to
speak, with the cutting edges of her squeaky dentures and took the dryness away with a cup of sugarless tea.

“This
gentleman,”
she said, “is introducing cane toads to the area.”

Laura Devonish blinked. “Do you think, dear, we could have more hot water.”

“Hot water,” Mrs Kentwell said, “is what we have, Laura. We are in it.”

But the cleverness of this was lost on Laura Devonish who insisted the silver hot water pot was quite empty and the tea now far too strong. There was no choice but to provide the water. It took for ever, or long enough for Laura to eat the two last slices of butter cake.

“This swagman,” Mrs Kentwell said, when the tea was to Laura’s satisfaction, “is bringing in cane toads.”

“Why?”

“How would I know?” snapped Mrs Kentwell. “How would I know why they do anything? But the fact remains, cane toads! In sacks. The poor maid was screaming. There were toads all over the kitchen.”

“You saw?”

“Heard, quite distinctly. ‘Frogs,’ she screamed. I heard her perfectly.”

“Not toads?”

“Toads, frogs. It is not the point. Laura, you must listen and stop eating. Eating will not fix the problem. The swagman was given money at the back door.”

I too was sorry about the first delivery of frogs. The swagman had been too enthusiastic. He had not contented himself with two or three frogs but had kept on collecting until his sack was half full. When he arrived at Western Avenue he entered the kitchen without introducing himself to Bridget who was nervous. Then he began to show her frogs and was misunderstood. Then when yours truly at last arrived, bare-torsoed with my trousers half done up, the swagman, overcome with excitement, emptied the whole lot on to the floor. It took me some time to sort out the mess, educate the swagman, mollify Bridget and retrieve most of the frogs. For days afterwards my hostess’s scream would alert me to
the presence of a hitherto hidden frog in some corner of the mansion.

I had been expelled from houses for smaller upsets, and I waited for a little note slid under my bedroom door, the quiet chat after dinner, an eruption of anger on the lawn. My hosts surprised me. They laughed. They repeated the story and derived pleasure from telling it. When I accompanied Jack on his daily round of what he was pleased to call “interests” the story had often preceded me and I was forced to take another step closer to becoming a herpetologist by discoursing on the dietary habits of the brown snake.

I had never been in a situation before where my lies looked so likely to become true. I did not achieve this alone. So many people contributed creamy coats of credibility to my untruth that the nasty speck of grit was fast becoming a beautiful thing, a lustrous pearl it was impossible not to covet.

The aircraft factory began to achieve a life of its own. Letters were despatched to various suppliers in Melbourne and Sydney and Jack, who loved the telephone with a passion, was chasing timber suppliers in Queensland and waking up squatters in the middle of the night to talk about investing in a wonderful new enterprise.

I can still hear his giant deaf “Hellos” echoing through the house.

We had meetings with solicitors to draw up the company for “Barwon Aeros”. We looked at a piece of land at Belmont which Jack already owned. I engaged a draughtsman in Geelong to draw up my plans which incorporated an Avro engine, although we later planned a totally Australian motor. I engaged the services of a stenographer and began to dictate my series on aviation for the
Geelong Advertiser
. I began to think of marrying Phoebe. I gave back Jack the money he had lent me. And even while all this was happening I still continued selling T Models.

I sold T Models with such ease that the local agent could not understand why a man who could acquit himself like this on the ground could contemplate risking his life and his capital by taking to the air. He made this opinion known to me on one stinking February afternoon while the blustering northerly brought red dust down into Ryrie Street and rattled a loose sheet of corrugated iron on the top of the dark hot garage. I flicked flies away from my mouth and, without really trying to, made the agent uneasy. What the agent could not have guessed, what prompted the slight
madness in my cold-eyed stare, the ambiguous movement of my lips, was that I loathed Fords on principle, that I was eaten up with selling them, that I did it from laziness because the Ford had the name, because it was American and people were more easily persuaded to buy a foreign product than a local one.

There was another factor in all this, and one I would not have admitted to myself in 1919, and it was that the Tin Lizzie was a better car for the money. It wasn’t much to look at but it was deceptively strong and very reliable. This, however, did not suit my idea of how things should be. And if there was a suggestion of arrogance in my lips as I talked to the Ford agent it was prompted by my thought that if there had been an agent for an Australian-made car (like the Summit) in Geelong I would have taken great pleasure in out-selling the Ford agent. It would not have been easy, but I could have done it. I would have applied myself to it, not done it like I now sold Fords which was in a sloppy, showy sort of style, like an expert tennis player disdainfully defeating novices, only deriving pleasure from a loose-limbed flashness and not from any great demands on his skill or any pride in the final victory.

“Any mug can sell a T Model,” I told the agent, and was not liked any better for the comment which was not only untrue but also unflattering to the man himself who watched me drive away with feelings, I warrant you, identical to the ones I had every time I put the snake back in his hessian bag.

I did not, if I am honest, intend to sell the O’Hagens a Ford. Had I really meant to make a sale I would not have called so early in the day when a salesman is a nuisance to a farmer, but at the end of the day when he is coming in from the paddocks. I would have helped him unharness his horses and then joined the family for dinner. At the end of the meal I could have helped the farmer clear the table, and if he assisted with the washing up (and many did) then I’d have done my share.

As I motored along the Bacchus Marsh Road it was about ten in the morning and the hot blustering wind suddenly fell away and I could feel, before I saw it, the storm building up in the south. I swore softly. The farmers did not want rain yet—they were busy ploughing in the stubble of the last harvest. I did not want rain
either. I wanted the O’Hagens to stay outside so I could have a chat with Mrs O’Hagen. It was because of Mrs O’Hagen, I admit it now, that I was arriving early on this day. I had seen a light in her young eyes that I recognized.

I shifted the position of my balls in my underpants, adjusted a penis I imagined had a life of its own, and drove north towards the O’Hagens with my erect member pointing optimistically upwards.

I could hear the ring of axes. The air was still and heavy and smelt of dust and treacle. I guessed, correctly, that Stu O’Hagen and his sons were clearing new land in the scrub to the north.

I knocked on the wooden frame of the flapping fly-wire door at the back of the house while a yellow dog flung itself against its chain in fury.

“Anyone home?”

But even before I entered I knew that Mrs O’Hagen was not inside and had not been inside for many days. It was a man’s kitchen. Flies crawled across the unwashed dishes. An open can of bully beef occupied pride of place amongst the crumbs on the oil-cloth table. It stank of depression, like unwashed sheets on unmade beds.

Mrs O’Hagen, stone sober, had danced like a woman drunk on city dreams. I did not doubt that she had left and I knew I would never savour her as I had imagined in all the miles that led here: my mouth at her breast, buried between her sturdy legs, my nostrils filled with warm wet perfumes.

I would have to sell a Ford after all.

I took off my coat and undid my tie. I hung the coat on the back of a chair and placed studs and cufflinks and collar in the inside pocket.

I did not hurry across the stubble-slippery paddocks. I strolled with my hands in my pockets and when the axes became silent I knew the O’Hagens were watching me.

I would have walked properly, but I had come in city shoes, and it is almost impossible to walk across slippery stubble in smooth-soled shoes without moving like a draper’s assistant. To walk correctly in a paddock you need boots, and heavy boots at that.

The O’Hagens, having paused to examine me, went back to work. As I listened to the axes I had a sympathy for them and what drove them on. I had hacked at life like the O’Hagens hacked at the bush, ring-barking, chopping, blistering my hands to bring it to heel, always imagining a perfect green kikuyu pasture where life would be benevolent and gentle. But where the bush had been bracken and thistles always appeared and then these had to be conquered as well.

I walked sideways down an eroded gully and when I reached the other side I could make out the three O’Hagens on the slope ahead. Two saplings dropped and three rosellas danced a pretty path across the thunder-ink sky. Black cockatoos screeched and scratched at the bark of a big old manna gum as if they couldn’t wait to see it done for.

When I climbed the last fence I could see their faces. I remembered, with a shock, how ugly they were. They had heads like toby jugs. They had large square heads with ruddy complexions. Their hair was fair and thin. There was a meanness in their faces that conveyed an unaccountable sense of superiority. They were not easy to like.

The father had ears that stuck out from the side of his head and the youngest boy, who was as tall as me and only fifteen, had inherited his father’s ears. They were ugly, of course, but they were quite at home with those square red heads, high, bent noses, and small pale blue eyes. They were faces squeezed from the one lump of clay.

But the eldest son, who was eighteen, had different ears. He had his mother’s tiny delicate ears. They sat, flat and lonely, on the side of his great head like beautiful objects stolen by an ignoramus. Although you wouldn’t have looked twice at him in the street in Geelong, out here, beside his brother and father, his head was as embarrassing to look at as a withered hand or an ex-soldier with his chin shot off. If the O’Hagens had been butterflies this one would be valuable—a rare exception to countless generations of O’Hagens with big ears.

He was known as Goog, which, until we started to forget our language, was the common name for a hen’s egg. I always supposed he was called Goog because the tiny flattened ears did nothing to interrupt the goog-like sweep from crown to jaw.

The O’Hagens (Stu, Goog and Goose) did not stop working as I approached them. They swung their axes and chopped the small trees and scrub off level with the ground. They ring-barked the
large trees and those of in-between size were chopped at waist height, after which they belted the bark from them with the back of their axes and piled this bark around the splintered stumps. When the burning season arrived the bark would help burn them to the ground.

They did not acknowledge me. I was a pest, arriving at the wrong time. I squatted with my back to a tree and waited. It was Goose who broke. He came to sharpen his axe with a file. He squatted near me, studying the axe with great care before he pulled the file from a hessian bag (a use for hessian bags I neglected to mention earlier).