Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 24

"I would hide."

"They would burn down your tent."

"I would fight them."

"There were too many. What would you do?"

I was caught in the terror of Lambing Flat which I imagined to be a great wilderness of rocks as sharp as needles. I had no trouble imagining the terror, the bands of men with my father's merciless eyes.

It was quiet for a moment in Wong's. Hing's mah-jong tiles stood in an unbroken wall.

"Do you know what to do?" he whispered.

"No."

"You disappear," Goon Tse Ying hissed, his great hand totally enclosing his gla.s.s. "Completely."

In the courtyard, old Mrs Wong wrung the neck of a Rhode Island Red and in the dining room Hing spat and broke open the wall of mah-jong tiles. I could not take my eyes from the gla.s.s that peeked through the fingers of Goon's hand. I did not doubt he could disappear.

"I will teach you too, little Englishman. It will do two things of great merit. The first of these things is to make you safe, and I do this for goodness, because I care for you, because you have no father to help you. But I do it also to show you the terror of we Chinese at Lambing Flat. Because it is only possible to disappear by feeling the terror. So I tell you now that I am giving you this gift as revenge. Are you old enough to understand what I am saying to you?"

"I am ten."

"Why am I telling you?"

"So I can feel the terror." I s.h.i.+vered.

"It is a magician's gift," Goon Tse Ying said. "It is both good and evil. It is because I love and hate you. Will you accept it?"

"I am only ten," I pleaded.

"It is old enough," Goon Tse Ying announced. "We will start tomorrow."

3.

Goon Tse Ying was as hard to grasp as a raging sea with waves driving one way and tides pulling the other. He could be loud, play the fool like old Mr Chan at his ugly daughter's pre-wedding feast, going from table to table with his brandy bottle and loudly, raucously even, a.s.suming the role that was expected of him, so that an Englishman, not understanding, would wish to know the name of the old man who was disgracing himself in so un-Chinese a manner. Likewise, if Goon's gravelling laugh and thumping brandy gla.s.s on Wong's scrubbed table made him appear impatient or foolish, or even mad, there was also a very cautious and serious part to his character that did not reveal itself while he was playing the rich benefactor. He had many responsibilities which he honoured ungrudgingly. These responsibilities meant that he could not always keep the promises he made to me.

His enthusiasm would have me learn all languages, understand the subtleties of astrology, s.e.x one-day-old chicks and use an abacus. He made me many promises about things which he seemed to forget about entirely. As for the business of disappearing, it could not, he told me, be begun on the next day at all. I had not inquired. But when he brought up the subject it was as a reprimand.

"Not today, little Englishman, and not tomorrow. If you rush at a thing like this you will get nowhere. There are preparations to undertake. Nick Wong must have someone to replace the little work you do for him. There is equipment I need. I must find someone else to translate for Mr Chin whose English is worse than it was a week ago. I also have a marriage to arrange for myself. There are three things," he said, no longer an Englishman, "which are unfilial. And to have no posterity is the greatest of them. What does unfilial mean?"

I did not know.

"Learn," he said, his mouth full of noodles. "What hope is there for you if you know less than a Chinaman? Next week," he said, ladling soup into his bowl, "I will teach you to disappear."

But it was not next week, it was two days later, and Goon Tse Ying shook me awake in my bed at three in the morning. "Come," he hissed, "be quiet. Do not wake old Hing."

He took me to the kitchen where he already had the big wood oven crackling. He fed me a bowl of pork porridge with an egg in it. I broke the yolk and stirred it into the porridge, and, looking up, found him staring at me intently. The flames from the open door of the firebox made his face appear slightly sinister. It accentuated all the foreign features his perfect English and his tailored suits cloaked so densely. "You are learning already," he said, still staring at me. "For now you feel warm and content. You enjoy your porridge. But by tonight you will know terror. You will know the cold of the terror and the warm of the porridge. Now s.h.i.+ne your boots and we will go."

He had a good horse and a smart sulky waiting outside. Drugged by the warm porridge in my stomach and the horse sweat and leather in my nostrils, rugged in a thick blanket, I went to sleep. When I awoke I found the dawn already gone and the sulky bouncing along a narrow gravel road through one of those flat featureless landscapes where it is the lot of sheep and their gaolers to spend their lives. Here and there were failed dams and along the fence lines, new plantations of cypress pines which might one day break the wind which now flattened the dun-coloured gra.s.ses. It was crow country.

We came to a small depression in the road where a slow creek dribbled its way over rusty rocks. A few eucalypts, spared the new settler's axe, clung to the top of the eroded banks.

Goon reined in the sweating mare and surveyed this scene with satisfaction. "This is a good place to learn," he announced. "There are rocks, a river, ugly trees. It is a terrible place." He rubbed his hands together. "Go and play while I get ready."

I put aside my rug and reluctantly abandoned the comforting smells of the expensive sulky which had evoked memories of days when I had a father beside me and a cannon behind me.

"Play by the creek," Goon instructed.

I was not ready for the lesson. I tugged up my socks to cover my knees and s.h.i.+vered. I walked slowly down to the creek. I was cold. My chilblains itched. I did not like the sound of the crows. I lifted up the rocks and looked for beetles or mud-eyes to torment.

Goon Tse Ying had many voices, but I did not recognize the curdled cry that shortly reached my ears.

Goon Tse Ying, dressed in his formal three-piece suit, his watch chain flas.h.i.+ng in the winter sun, came bounding towards me waving an axe handle.

"Roll up," he screamed, "roll up."

The terrible Chinaman leapt from crumbling bank to gnarled root, from root to scoured clay. His face was hideous. The axe handle belted me across the shoulders and sent me sprawling.

I lay across the rocks blubbering, as broken as the beetles I had sought to injure.

"Now, you see," said Goon, standing over me. "It is not so easy. Get up. I did not hit you so hard."

I got up, bawling loudly. "I want my daddy."

"You have no daddy, little Englishman. You have only me. Now pay attention and I will show you how to stand so that you will disappear."

It was a terrible day. I learned to stand in the way he showed me, quite the opposite to what you'd expect for, rather than make me less conspicuous, it seemed to make me more so. I teetered on one leg, with one foot raised and resting on my knee. I stretched one hand in the air as if waving for attention. It did not work. He hit me time and time again. I wept. I begged. I tried to run away, but he caught me effortlessly.

"I will run you down," he bellowed as he chased. "You will go beneath my wheel."

But that night, as I nursed my wounds, he was kind to me. He stroked my head and told me stories about China to which he must return before his death. "To have ama.s.sed great wealth," he said, "and not return home is comparable to walking in magnificent clothes at night." He rubbed a cold camphor ointment on my bruises. He wrapped me in a blanket and made a soup heavy with duck. He fed me milk and brandy and put me to bed in the tent.

But on the next morning his great face had transformed. The skin was tight and waxy and the bones beneath it seemed as hard and cold as marble. The camp fire was cold and he showed no inclination to light it. He had rubbed grease in his hair.

"I have no time to play games," he told me, kicking at the dead ashes as if to deny the warmth of the night before. "I am buying a business in Grafton from a man I do not trust. You are slow and stupid. You are too English. You do not believe harm will come to you. Well, I give you my word that if you do not disappear this morning, first time, I will kill you. I do not have time to play games. I am thirty-seven years old and soon I must get married."

If you had seen him you would not have doubted him. He did not look at me. He took out his gold watch and spat on it. He rubbed its gla.s.s with a white handkerchief. Then he held it to his small flat ear and listened to it. It was obvious my death had no interest to him.

"Go and play by the creek," he said.

I did not beseech him. I did not cry. I walked down to the creek.

He did not come immediately. He squatted on his haunches and sang "Waltzing Matilda" in a wavering falsetto. I loathe the song to this day.

I did not look at him. When he had finished the song I heard him clear his throat and spit.

"No Chinese," he yelled.

I stood as I was taught. I held my shaking arm high. I teetered on my foot. Urine ran down my leg. I heard the swish of the axe handle. I began to quiver. My whole body began to hum like a tuning fork. My bones vibrated. I was a steel bridge marched on by an army. I was a gla.s.s held before a famous soprano.

I disappeared and the world disappeared from me. I did not escape from fear, but went to the place where fear lives. I existed like waves from a tuning fork in chloroformed air. I could not see Goon Tse Ying. I was nowhere.

I cannot tell how long I was like this, but finally the world came back to me and Goon Tse Ying was squatting a little way away from me grinning.

"Now," he said, "we will have a feast and I will teach you to eat chicken's innards."

4.

I know for a fact that there are easier methods of disappearing than facing a Chinaman with an axe handle. It is no more difficult to learn than driving a car and does not require real danger for its accomplishment. The terror can be summoned up in the mind, and one does not need to adopt the peculiar stance of Goon Tse Ying: all that is needed is to tense the muscles in a certain way so that they begin to quiver. His odd method of standing helped produce this state but I was a resourceful young chap and soon found I could do it even while lying down in my bed.

Yet only twice did I disappear as a trick and the two incidents are separated by thirty years.

If you know what winter's mornings are like in Melbourne, if you have seen the blue fingers of the Chinese protruding from their grey mittens as they handle the cauliflowers and kale in the Eastern Market, if you have seen their breath suspended before kerosene lights, you might understand why an eleven-year-old might choose to disappear in order to lie in bed of a winter's morning.

I had not calculated the upset I would cause: the prodding hands, the chattering voice of old Hing, the running feet of his timid nephew, the shriek of old Mrs Wong whose heart was bad. I lay, invisible, in the heart of a storm.

When I finally regained my normal consciousness Goon Tse Ying was sitting on old Hing's bed reading the racing form.

"Mr Chin is with Mrs Wong," he said. "She is very sick. She is an old woman and has no use for demons. Look at my eyes and listen to me. I am going to Grafton soon and will not be here to teach you any more. I have already taught you too much. If you make yourself feel the terror when there is no terror to feel, you are making a dragon. If you meet a real dragon, that is the way of things. But if you make dragons in your head you are not strong enough and you will have great misfortune. Do you understand me?"

"I am sorry, Mr Goon."

"You made a terror and now Mrs Wong has been taken by it and you are lucky that Mr Chin is here to care for her. The Wongs will not have you any more and I have spent the morning persuading my nephew to take you. I have had to pay him money and he is only taking you because his greed is greater than his fear, but it is only just greater," he held his thumb and forefinger apart, "that much, and if you make dragons in his house he will send you away and no one will talk to you or help you any more. Further, you will now work all day. When you have finished at the market you will go to the market garden and you will do whatever it is they ask you to do. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," I said.

"Well, s.h.i.+ne your shoes," Goon Tse Ying said to me, "and when you walk into my nephew's house make yourself into a small man."

Mrs Wong, so I heard, recovered from the terror I had given her, but I never set foot in Wong's cafe again and when I had reason to pa.s.s by the worn wooden door stoop in Little Bourke Street I made myself small and walked quickly, with short steps and bowed head.

I made use of all the things I learned from Goon Tse Ying-how to appear bigger or smaller, how to skin a crow, butcher a pig, wear expensive shoes when my suit was inferior, how to change my accent, how to modulate my walk, but I always kept my word to him about making dragons until I was stupid enough to compete with my son for the affection of a woman.

5.

There is nothing as good as bananas on the breath when it comes to making a horse feel it is akin to you. And it has always been my contention that it was for reasons very similar to this that Charles mistook Leah Goldstein for his mother.

When, on that chilblained afternoon in 1931, he grabbed her around the legs, he imagined his seven years of wandering were at an end, that the declared goal of our travels had been achieved, that we would return to the splendid home he could not remember and abandon the converted 1924 Dodge tourer in which we slept each night, curled up together amidst the heavy fug, the warm odours of humanity, which so comforted his battered father.

You would have met Leah, you might have embraced her and not noticed the smell of snake, buried your nose in the nape of her long graceful neck and smelt nothing but Velvet soap. But Charles-although he had never met a snake-recognized the odour of his flesh and blood and all his belligerence and suspicion melted away like the frost in a north-south valley when it finally gets the sun at noon.

We were camped on Crab Apple Creek, just outside of Bendigo, still six hundred miles from Phoebe Badgery. If I am inclined to refer to frost when referring to Charles's emotions, it is because it was a frosty place. When the frost melted it soaked into the mud. Even the magpies were muddy in that place. They scrounged around the camp, snapping irritably at the currawongs, and held out their filthy wings to the feeble sun, making themselves an easy target for Charles's shanghai.

On the day in question I was panning for gold while I tried to keep an eye on Charles who was reading a (probably stolen) comic on the running board of the Dodge while Sonia was floating sticks down the creek (a rain-muddied torrent that hid the pretty slate you can see in summer). I was getting a little colour, just a few specks, and my time would have been more profitably spent trapping rabbits. However I had a few bob in my pocket and we were on our way up to Darkville where one of Barret's clerks now had a still for making tea-tree oil. He had promised me a month's work cutting the tea tree and I had sent a wire saying we were on our way.

There was a depression on. Everyone knows that now. But I swear to you that I did not. I had lived seven years in an odd coc.o.o.n, criss-crossing Victoria, writing bad cheques when I could get hold of a book, running raffles in pubs, buying stolen petrol, ransacking local tips for useful building materials. I had long since stopped trying to impress motor-car dealers and agents. I had a salesman's vanity and could not bear rejection. I could not tolerate talking to men who would not even open my book of yellowed write-ups. Those Ford and Dodge agents in Ballarat, Ararat, Shepparton, Kaniva, Warragul and Colac finished off the work that Phoebe's poem had begun and I entered my own private depression and kept away from anything that might damage my pride any more.

I, Herbert Badgery, aviator, nationalist, now wore Molly's belt and chose not to see that the roads were full of ghosts, men with their coats too short, their frayed trousers too long, clanking their billycans like doleful bells.

I gave up having the newspapers read aloud to me on the day Goble and McIntyre made their flight around Australia in a seaplane. I concentrated instead on the things I could hope to achieve: keeping my children clean and neat, turning the collars of my frayed s.h.i.+rts, polis.h.i.+ng my boots and hoping that the brave new signs I painted on the door of the Dodge would convince people who saw me that I was a success and not a failure. The people I imagined were those who peer from a farmhouse window as a glistening custom-made utility goes by, a butcher in Benalla unlocking his shop at seven a.m., a cow-c.o.c.ky driving his herd of jerseys from one side of the Warragul road to the other, a whiskered garage owner pumping four gallons up into the gla.s.s reservoir of a petrol bowser before taking my bad cheque. As for women, the only ones I spoke to were barmaids whose permission I sought before raffling sausages.

I panned for gold whenever I had a spare moment but I no longer hoped for anything remarkable. It was miserable work in winter and on the day Sonia found the emu my bare feet were blue with cold and my bandy legs were as white as an Englishman's below my billowing woollen underpants.

She had crept upstream while I was busy panning. I looked up and found her missing. I bellowed her name above the roaring yellow water that tugged malevolently at my feet. I threw the unwashed gravel back and scrambled up the slippery clay bank just as she came running through the bush with her finger held (sshh) to her lips. My heart was beating so loudly I could hardly hear what she said. I crushed her to me but she wormed out of my arms impatiently.

"Papa, it's an emu." Her appearance, her manner, were a continual joy and a pain to me for she was like her mother in so many ways, in her murmuring throaty speech, in the extraordinary green of her eyes. Yet she was without the imbalances in either her character or her face: Phoebe's low forehead and long chin had rearranged themselves into a more harmonious relations.h.i.+p.

"With feathers, papa." She pulled the sleeves of her woollen cardigan over her hands and flapped them with impatience and excitement. "An emu."

I expected a goldfinch or a chook, but I pulled on my trousers and my boots while she danced impatiently around me, stretching her cardigan out of shape.

"Hurry. Hurry."

I followed her, my laces dangling, mimicking her exaggerated stealth.

Charles came bellowing behind, enraged that he was being abandoned. He did not understand me: I would never have left him behind in any circ.u.mstances. I explained this to him. I, after all, knew better than anyone the horrors of being alone at ten years of age. Had I not lived amongst the garbage in the Eastern Markets, living on old cabbage leaves, too frightened to taste the saucer of warm milk the Wongs left for me each night? Charles knew this story. I wished him to know I would never abandon him. I explained it endlessly, but he could not be comforted. He worried that I would forget to pick him up after school. If I was five minutes late I would find him blubbering or running in panic down the street. If I got up in the night he wanted to know what I was doing and on more than one occasion I have had a nocturnal s.h.i.+t interrupted by my son blundering through the dark in search of me. He was my policeman. He would stand beside me s.h.i.+vering while I wiped my a.r.s.e and only then would he return to bed.

Sonia took her brother's warty hand to lead him to the emu. She never flinched from the feel of those warts, but ministered to them constantly, gathering milk thistles and carefully squeezing their juices on to the ugly lumps that were always marked with ink from one unhappy well or another.

Sonia's hand did not comfort Charles. Now he was with us he became surly. He dragged his boots along in the gravelly mud and scratched the leather I had worked so hard to s.h.i.+ne for him.

"Where are we going?" (It was his continual cry, here, and on the road where he kicked against the confines of the Dodge.) "Where are we going?" going?"

"There is an emu," Sonia said, "with feathers."

"There ain't emus."

"I think think it's an emu." Sonia was always ready to defer to her brother but just the same she parted the blackberry briars stealthily. it's an emu." Sonia was always ready to defer to her brother but just the same she parted the blackberry briars stealthily.

There are no crab apples on Crab Apple Creek. There is a tangle of blackberries and a number of giant river blackwoods. We came under the blackwood canopy to a clear bit of land by the bridge on the Castlemaine Road and there, amongst the ash of swaggies' fires and the dried pats of cattle dung, was an emu.