Illywhacker (90 page)

Hissao sat there with beer-wet knees in his corduroy trousers, looking across at Leah Goldstein, wondering why she had asked to meet him. She wore a pleasantly faded blue-checked shirt, the simplicity of which was contradicted, or at least underlined, by a thin gold chain she wore around her remarkably smooth neck. Her hair was untidy, flecked with grey, and she had pushed it back from her handsome face as if she were impatient with it and had more important things to consider. She lit a cigarette in a very businesslike way, inhaled, exhaled, and lined up her packet of matches with her cigarettes.

“Cheers,” she said, and raised her glass as if she were in the habit of drinking beer at eleven in the morning every day.

“Cheers,” said Hissao. He was a little frightened of her and also very curious. He had known her all his life and yet knew nothing about her. He guessed, but had never been told, that she had been his grandfather’s lover. She had been married to the notorious Izzie Kaletsky. She had been a dancer in the Great Depression. She had had an interesting life and he hoped that, in the hothouse emotions generated by his father’s suicide, they would, at last, be able to speak to each other. He felt they would have much in common.

Leah, for her part, was suddenly nervous of Hissao. She had not been expecting nervousness, but she was keyed up about her objective and she suddenly felt that tightness in the throat, the slight tremolo in her voice that she experienced when called to speak in public. She knew nothing about Corbusier and thus missed the significance of the bow tie. She thought he looked unpleasantly slick, like a real-estate salesman.

Hissao began to talk to cover the uneasiness of silence. Nothing in his manner or the timbre of his voice suggested anything but social ease. He felt shy and awkward.

He made some observations about the nature of beer gardens and wondered, out loud, about the habit of painting the slatted tables in different colours. Perhaps, he said (suddenly hit with the idea that she had brought him here to tell him that his father had not been his
father at all) perhaps the colours of the tables were really a reference to seaside umbrellas and deckchairs, a signal about leisure and working-class holidays by the sea.

Leah heard only urbane drivel of the type, she imagined, people spoke at cocktail parties. It made her less confident of success, but she waited for him to finish, smiled when he had and, having provided enough punctuation with a deep draught of cold bitter beer, told him what she had come to tell him. Her voice was too tight. She had the sense of talking into a deep well, of shouting against air. She ignored her quavering voice, and pushed on, outlining the risks for him, both legal and moral, of doing what his mother seemed to want, i.e., running the emporium as their American masters wished.

Hissao had no intention of being a lackey. He was not worried about these so-called risks. He was worried that Leah Goldstein seemed serious and unhappy.

“Ah,” he said, raising his eyebrows comically, poking gentle fun at the seriousness. He tilted back on the chair and then dropped forward. “Ah so,” he said, making himself look as Japanese as anything in Kurosawa, “Ah, so-deska?”

Leah misunderstood the performance. She was suspicious of the smiling face and all this animation at a time when he should, given what he had witnessed, be filled with grief. He was spoiled and young and corrupt and she saw, in his white collar and smarmy tie, the salesman’s desire to please.

“So I am directed to be a smuggler, eh?” Hissao smiled into his beer. It was easy to forget he was only eighteen years old. “That’s the plan. The business is viable after all?” He was being funny, so he imagined.

Leah had never been good with irony. She lit a second cigarette and frowned.

“We’ll all be rich,” Hissao said gaily. “We could have sports cars and lovers.” He was joking of course, but he dropped the word “lovers” into the stream of his talk as deliberately as a fisherman letting a mud-eye float past a watching trout. He wanted Goldstein to talk about lovers, her lovers, his mother’s lovers. He wanted confessions, secrets, all the lovely laundry of the past.

It was, however, the wrong approach for Goldstein. She thought him frivolous and silly. She gave him a stern lecture on the American takeovers of Australian industry—a subject she had been researching for the Labour Party—and talked about the political ramifications of it, both in terms of ever-increasing dependence on
American investment and the paybacks a client state must make, like fighting wars in Korea and other places.

It was all unnecessary. Hissao knew almost as much about the subject as she did. He was soon bored and boredom—because he was not a meek young man—soon gave way to irritation.

“I see,” he said, now parodying the very quality Leah had misread in him. He filled his beer glass from the jug. “But it doesn’t matter, so long as the Resch’s is still cold.”

She took the bait and that made him really cross. He clicked his tongue loudly. It was an unexpected enough (and sufficiently loud) noise to make Goldstein stop.

“Do you really think”, Hissao said, his cheeks burning, “that I don’t know all that stuff?”

Goldstein opened her mouth combatively and then shut it cautiously. She tilted her head appraisingly. At last she said: “I don’t know you.”

“No,” he said. “You don’t.”

They were both embarrassed then. Leah poured more beer for both of them and Hissao began to talk again, deliberately trying, with words and enthusiasm, to bleed the poisonous temper out of his system.

“Leah,” he said, “even if I had no principles at all, I wouldn’t do what she wants.”

“She’s your mother.”

“Yes, yes, she’s my mother, but I wouldn’t do it. Out of pure self- interest I wouldn’t do it. Out of egotism, I wouldn’t. Out of pride, arrogance, ambition.”

He listed motivations that, because they were a little unsavoury, he judged she would believe more readily than fine ones.

“You see,” he said, smiling, but not calmly. “I’m going to be a great architect.”

He took one of Goldstein’s cigarettes and lit it with not-quite-steady hands.

Then he was a young man, all afire with enthusiasm and ambition. And Goldstein, who knew herself to be living amongst the rusted wrecks of lives, felt very old and grey and cynical and she envied the smooth skin of his cheeks and the clarity of his eyes and she felt herself giving way to his will as he talked about greatness,
his
greatness, as if it were a thing so certain that he could touch it. He said it made the skin on his fingers go taut—he showed her where—and the quick beneath his nails tingle. And Leah was entranced and repelled by him at the same time. She felt—as she had done when
she saw the bow tie—that he was decadent, that his smile was overripe, his skin too smooth, his teeth too white; but there was also something else about him that contradicted this, something untarnished and tough, as precise and unblunted as a surgical blade fresh from its paper wrapping. She had seen this, this tough thing, when he had clicked his tongue.

And yet, through prejudice no doubt, she began to distance herself from him. She leaned back in her chair and dropped her cigarette into the gravel. She listened carefully to what he said—as if the words were a typewritten transcript with no passion or any inflexion. It seemed to her that all he believed in was his ambition. She was wrong, of course, but she was also stubborn in her opinions, and clung to first impressions long past the time when a reasonable person would give them up. And now she remembered a time—she had thought a great deal about this time recently—when everyone she knew seemed occupied with the problems of belief and principle. They had gone about it inelegantly, stumblingly, stupidly often, but at least it had mattered to them and even Herbert Badgery, a blue-eyed illywhacker, had so wished himself to be a man of principle that he had imitated a Wobbly and fought the railway police.

But architecture, she thought, was no better than bird—smuggling. She was not insensitive to architecture. (Quite the opposite, as we have seen already.) The new buildings of Sydney cowed her and seemed, in their intentions, no better than the old ones she wished destroyed. They seemed merciless and uncaring, like machines of war. They rose in disciplined ranks and cast shadows in the streets while the night sky was all abloom with their alien flowers. And this, because it was the only architecture that seemed to matter, was the only architecture she could see. She therefore interrupted Hissao to demand that he confront the path he was choosing, that he admit the companies he worked for (she assumed companies and he did not contradict her assumption) would almost certainly have values that were against the interests not only of fish and birds, but also of marsupials and mammals, human beings included.

By then they were drunk, although neither of them realized it. Their combativeness was not without joy and when Leah dragged him out the side gate (she intended to show him the city skyline, but there were plane trees in the street which blocked the view) she took him by his hand and laughed when he resisted. When the skyline would not reveal itself, no matter how they jumped, they went into the bar and bought another jug of beer. Then they went back into the
bright garden which was now, at lunchtime, redolent with burning meat and alive with the small blue flashes of burning chop fat as Mich Crozier’s customers cooked themselves their famous five-bob barbecues.

Neither Hissao nor Leah ate. He was telling her that there was not yet an Australian architecture, only a colonial one with verandas tacked on. She said the only suitable architecture should be based on the tent. He agreed with her. She was surprised. She then talked resentfully—Hissao thought—of Mr Lo who was happy to stay where he was and be fed and did not need to worry about what it meant to be Chinese and that she, for her part, was sick to death of trying to decide what it meant to be Australian. She then began to contradict herself, to say there could never be an Australian architecture and he was a fool for trying because there was no such thing as Australia or if there was it was like an improperly fixed photograph that was already fading.

When Hissao objected she told him he was immoral and politically naïve.

Hissao then told her that he had smoked a reefer and had sex with a sailor on the night his father died. He tried to talk about the jumble of emotions he felt about this death and which she too, presumably, felt; he looked for some good thing in the aftermath of the nightmare.

Goldstein was shocked and revolted, but also astonished, that in spite of all the things about the boy that offended her (the sailor most of all, but also the drug-taking, the lack of belief, the lonely egotism of ambition) that they could at least agree on this question of the Badgery Pet Emporium, that it was a business that could no longer be innocently pursued.

She had the numbers. The pet shop had been done in. Stumbling through the glare of Abercrombie Street towards the city, they stopped to formally shake hands on their agreement.

So when she arrived back at the pet shop with a bad headache and blistered feet, she did not pay very much attention to the mumbling grunting conversation being conducted by Emma and Herbert Badgery. She saw the widow had regained possession of her Vegemite bottle. Its lid was now rustfree and, had she cared to look inside, she would have seen it contained filigree, like coral, and that bright blue fish were flitting in and out of it.

The matter of Hissao’s future had been decided in her absence.

Blame? You wish to discuss blame?

But look—I am growing tits. You may worry about that before you worry about blame. So bring on the dancing girls, bring on your young men with callipers, your snotty-nosed physiologists. Let them poke and calibrate if you think it will tell you anything.

Take my photograph any way you like. I told you already, I don’t care about the legs. You wish to know why the breast on the left is different from the one on the right, why their skin, in all my withered chest, is there so taut, so smooth and marble white that you get a bulge in your pants examining me? No? You are more interested in blame?

You wish to know who was to blame for the death of the last-recorded gold-shouldered parrot.

Very well.

The last-recorded golden-shouldered parrot was destined to take its species into extinction, to breathe its last breath in the honey-sweet embrace of a beautiful woman.

Its golden shoulder (or, more precisely, wing) was the least remarkable feature of this creature which now, as the crime commences, is being gently sedated by my grandson Hissao who has been good enough to put his personal ambitions to one side for the welfare of his family.

The beak is now carefully—fastidiously even—tied together with fine white thread and its precious jewel-like wings are likewise being battened down for travelling. This bird is very valuable—the proceeds of its sale will feed us, clothe us, pay our overheads for three months, publish
Malley’s Urn
, contribute several thousand dollars to the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, and keep my grandson in the George V for six weeks if he wishes it. So naturally he handles it with great respect. Even when he sews it inside a small pocket where it will lie, head downwards, for the next thirty hours on its journey to Rome there is a gentleness in his movements, a sadness even, a sensitivity unimaginable in a man who felt himself called to be a smuggler. Hissao is not one of those greedy fellows whose suitcases, full of dead birds, incorrectly drugged and badly packed, are occasionally intercepted by customs officers.

This bird is as beautiful as a Persian carpet and it will travel in no suitcase, but nestle inside Hissao’s baggy trousers, just beside his penis.

The snakes have already settled inside the lining of his jacket. There are two children’s pythons, one in each sleeve. The young man has a natural affinity with snakes and they will, he knows, find the warmth of his body agreeable. No sedation is required.

Hissao now holds out his arm for the coat which Leah Goldstein, having first inspected him critically, hands to him silently. It is ten years since they met in Mich Crozier’s and their relationship is cool and formal, and yet neither of their passions is any less and Goldstein, in particular, seems eaten away by her feelings so she has become very thin and gaunt and her eyes have dropped into the shade of their sockets so she gives the appearance of a stern and rather malevolent bird.