Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 34

"I heard you."

"Good," she said, and walked back to the fire where she was-I discovered later-punis.h.i.+ng her overcoat by boiling it.

I fiddled with the fencing wire for a bit, making a few nails to start with. I like making things. It is always soothing, and the very simple things are the most soothing of all. The squatter's wire felt as soft as lead between my pliers. I made three-inch nails, each one exactly the same as the one before.

"What are you doing?"

"Making nails."

"This camp is filthy," she said (untrue). "Your truck is filthy. I don't know how you live like this. Come on, move. Move your nails. Help me with the mattress. How long is it since you aired it? How long is it since you washed your children's clothes? Orange peel!"

She emptied the back tray of the Dodge and started scrubbing. I took the guttering over to her hut. I fetched an empty petrol drum to stand on and began to measure for the gutter. In a minute she was behind me with her wet arms folded across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her neck seemed longer, stretched, her shoulders more sloping, her eyes larger.

"Excuse me, what are you doing?"

"Fixing up."

"You sleep with me once and you think you own me."

"No." If you had seen her once you would know that she could not be owned. "Just making a place."

"This is not not your place and never can be." your place and never can be."

I recognized the tone. This was not lolly-paper talk. It was hacksaw stuff, the annoying tone with which she had entered camp.

"It is public land," I said. "It's a reserve, and if I take out a mining lease I'm ent.i.tled to build a hut here, providing I continue to demonstrate that I am actually working my lease."

"There you go, land-house, house-land, you can't help yourself, can you, Mr Badgery? You're true blue. d.i.n.ky-di. You think you can put up some shanty and that makes it your place, but you can't, and it never will be. Are you listening to me?"

I did not want to lose my temper. "Leah, what have I done to deserve this?"

"Forget what we did. The matter is obvious. The land is stolen. The whole country is stolen. The whole nation is based on a lie which is that it was not already occupied when the British came here. If it is anybody's place it is the blacks'. Does it look look like your place? Does it like your place? Does it feel feel like your place? Can't you see, even the trees have nothing to do with you." like your place? Can't you see, even the trees have nothing to do with you."

"This is my country," I said quietly, "even if it's not yours."

"Meaning, excuse me?" She put her hands on her hips.

I scratched a line on the guttering and threw it to the ground. "You're a Jew. You don't have a country."

"Of course we have a country. It was stolen from us."

"Tough. What do you want me to do?"

"I don't want you to do anything. I don't require a hut or nails."

"Leah," I held out my hand.

She brushed the hand away.

"Don't touch me," she said. "Touch me and I leave, right now." And she walked across to the kero drum, her legs perambulating beneath her rigid spine, and began to fish out her boiling coat.

I cannot stand being brushed aside. Most serious tempers begin with being brushed aside, kindness rejected, conciliation spurned. "And if I don't touch you, what then?"

"How would I know?" she said, dropping the coat back into the water. "Don't you have any ideas of your own? Don't you read anything? Don't you think about anything but skin?" She suddenly burst into tears, calling me a bully.

If you expect me to take her in my arms and quiet the tears, to stroke her hair and whisper into her ear, you have mistaken me for someone else. I lost my my temper. Not slowly, not neatly, but like an overwound clock flying into separate parts, with useful cogs and gears all converted into deadly shrapnel. I will not repeat the rough words I said. The gist of it, however, is essential: I had not invited Leah into my camp or my bed and she had no business attacking me for either. temper. Not slowly, not neatly, but like an overwound clock flying into separate parts, with useful cogs and gears all converted into deadly shrapnel. I will not repeat the rough words I said. The gist of it, however, is essential: I had not invited Leah into my camp or my bed and she had no business attacking me for either.

I turned my back on her and went back to nailing the guttering on the hut, splintering timber, bending nails, full of homicidal strength. I was as mad with fight as a bar-room brawler rolling out into the street; when her apology came it was the last thing I expected.

She did not look like a woman apologizing. Her eyes were strong, and her manner thoughtful. One could not confuse apology with surrender.

It was quite an apology, and not a short one either, although the length was not dictated by a love of words; she had a lot to say. On certain difficult matters, of which skin was perhaps the most important, she did not make herself clear, or I did not pay attention properly. Other things I grasped a little better-of all her conflicts, she admitted, the greatest was between weakness and strength. She saw herself in an alliance of the weak against the strong but (paradoxically, she thought) was much attracted to male physical strength which also (in the form of police, bailiffs, armies and Mervyn Sullivan) most terrified her in life. Her adultery had, therefore, been a more complicated betrayal and she had been wrong, she admitted, to blame me for it.

I am prepared to wager that she never laid out the central nervous system of the dogfish as carefully as she exposed these nervous systems of her own; I was much affected and stepped down from my drum, with my own confession tumbling from me. I admitted I could not read and that the landscape had, indeed, always seemed alien to me, that it made me, in many lights, melancholy and homesick for something else, that I preferred a small window in a house, and so on.

I must describe this to you coldly. I step back from it a little. Excuse me, but our hands are trembling, mine and Leah's, all these naked things of ours nodding to each other, s.h.i.+ning wet and sensitive to sunlight.

We consider each other, our eyes so sharply focused that the periphery of our vision is smeared with vaseline.

We retire to bed. If there are curtains, they are drawn.

37.

It is not the skin of young women, their firm b.r.e.a.s.t.s, b.u.t.tocks, undimpled backsides, unstretched stomachs, etc., it is their expectations of life that I have l.u.s.ted after, have drunk like a vampire with a black mouth and pink tongue; I have stolen their pa.s.sions, enthusiasms, mistakes, misunderstandings, and valued these more than their superior educations.

The steps of the Bendigo Post Office are not a private place on a Friday afternoon. When you hear Leah scream at me you will think-casual bystander-that my new lover is nothing but a screaming shrew, is less attractive than the big-faced yellow-tailed black c.o.c.katoo my son has chained, temporarily, to the external rear-vision mirror of the truck, a c.o.c.katoo whose tail feathers conveniently echo the colour of the telegram in Leah's hand, a pretty coincidence not noted by the idle clergyman who stops to stare or by the two taut housewives with string bags full of sausages who do not bother to hide their interest in the Jewess, her silver shoes, and the rude-faced boy who is pulling her towards the truck.

There: Leah waving the telegram. She is a splendid creature, her whole soul trembling with love, with fear, feeling itself to be caught between good, evil, weakness, strength, duty, indulgence, crude appet.i.te and fine ascetism.

All around her people worry about sausages or neatsfoot oil.

"You will punch him down," she said. "You think you can control him because you are stronger, but you can't and never will."

The telegram, you must realize, is from Izzie who will shortly arrive in Bendigo armed with information about his wife's infidelity, and I-hurling the c.o.c.katoo into the back of the truck above my son's protests-am in love with his wife.

38.

The world was wet and smelt of rancid b.u.t.ter and they huddled into the caravan, as miserable as rain-sodden chooks. Denied the company of his comrades, this was the size of Izzie's life. He was, within these confines, like a terminally ill patient whose uncus.h.i.+oned vertebrae show through wasted flesh which is Buddhist yellow, royal purple, mottled with bruises no cus.h.i.+on can protect him from.

He was rubbed raw by his wife's letters; he spent her money; he hated her; also, perhaps, vice versa. And yet he waited for her to send him some impossible letter, some combination of words as particularly structured as laudanum.

However it was not just one letter he required, but two. The stamps of this second letter would not be perforated. They would be cut. Sometimes, courting sleep, he would imagine the scissors would cut these stamps. Now, he thought, at this moment, they are cutting the stamps from the sheets. The Comrade has mittens and red fingers with chilblains. The stamp has no adhesive. She dips a brush into a pot of paste and there, my name. In two months it will be in my hands. Sixty-one days. He willed the letter across oceans, saw it impatiently through dawdling ports where incompetent officials delayed the s.h.i.+p with unnecessary fire drills.

Rosa would give him no comfort. Perhaps she intended sympathy, but it was no help for her to criticize the Party. She would not leave it alone. She dredged through her memory for instances of stupidity, ambition, avarice she had witnessed in communists. She poured vitriol on the Comintern while she waited for a letter from her other son.

Only from his father did he draw some comfort. In these long featureless days, unable to concentrate on a book, not wanting to do anything but sleep until the letters woke him, he felt a real compa.s.sion for the man he had so often slighted. Now they made sandwiches together. Izzie held out a slice of bread in each extended palm while his father, patient and uncomplaining, brushed on the melted b.u.t.ter. When these two slices were done, Izzie waited, palms extended, while his father placed the two b.u.t.tered slices on a sheet of newspaper on the floor, cut two more slices of bread, balancing the stale loaf on his thin knees, placed these two slices on Izzie's hands, and repeated the process again.

It irritated Izzie that his father should accept this inconvenience so meekly; that he did not demand the table where Rosa now sat.

Rosa had the table. She was conducting her interview with Dora, whose theatrical career had been ruined by an unexpectedly ballooning backside and who was now well spoken of as a fortune-teller.

Dora's arms and thighs and face had quickly followed the example of her backside without ever losing the complexion ("real peaches and cream") of which she had always been so proud. She positioned herself carefully on the chair and placed a large cane basket on the table beside her. She sighed and smiled vaguely at Rosa who had not yet guessed the contents of the basket. Rosa returned the smile which offered a diffused sort of goodwill but no real affection: the two women had known each other too long; each had said too many indiscreet things about the other.

There was a movement in the basket. Rosa, a red scarf over her hair, c.o.c.ked her head. Her interest was diverted by Dora who now displayed a small gaily-coloured purse. It was made from tiny beads and had a striking floral pattern. Rosa murmured her admiration. Dora's smile tightened its focus a little.

The fortune-teller's hands had too many rings on them. They were the same rings she had owned when her hands had been thinner and the flesh had risen around the rings like the bark of a tree that will shortly engulf a piece of old fencing wire. Yet here again Rosa was prevented from critical concentration because the hands were now delving into the pretty purse and producing grains of coloured wheat and scattering them at random across the table. There were many different colours, all as bright as the beads of the bag.

Rosa kept her own hands beneath the table and watched. She felt critical of herself, and foolish, just as a married man catching sight of himself in a brothel mirror may suddenly see himself in a more objective light.

Indeed, looking at the two men, she discovered them both smiling at her.

"If you don't like it," she told her son, "you don't have to stay." She imagined them sneering at her. They were smiling because they had guessed the contents of the basket and were waiting for her reaction.

When, less than a minute later, Rosa saw the chook, she did not shriek. She caught her breath silently and took herself in a notch.

"I am allergic," she said softly to Dora, begging her with her eyes to put the thing back.

"You cannot be allergic to the future," said the insensitive fat woman, clasping the bundle of white feathers so that the inert chook moulded itself to her and became a feathery extension of her bosom.

"It is blind," Dora confided.

"Ah," Izzie said, "so the future is blind?"

"No," Dora corrected him, "the future is not blind. We are blind. The chook is blind."

"I cannot believe in a chook," Rosa said, looking for help from her husband. Lenny, perfectly capable of exacting small revenges, was suddenly busy cutting bread.

"If you don't believe," Dora said hurriedly, placing the chook on the table, "it makes no difference." The chook cowered, a soft centreless thing. "It is not like a seance where you have to believe. Are you swimming?"

"No, I am not swimming."

"I am swimming, every morning." The chook stood and started tapping at the tabletop with its beak.

"I am sleeping," Rosa said.

"Ah, now, you see. It has taken a green one. You must write this down."

"You write it, Dora. I am paying you."

"No, no, you write. Quickly, now it is blue."

"I will not," Rosa folded her arms firmly and sank back against the caravan wall. "It is stupid. I am allergic."

"Suit yourself," said Dora sulkily. She produced a slim tortoisesh.e.l.l pen (Rosa withheld admiration). She wrote down the colours of the grains of wheat as the blind chook ate them. She did not write down the ones that were knocked from the table. "Tell me, why don't you swim? When you first came here, always, you were swimming. Every day, you told me."

"Can it smell colours?" Rosa asked.

"It can smell smells, not colours."

"Colours, though, have smells. I can smell yellow."

"How does yellow smell, darling?"

"It has a yellow smell-what else? Are you writing down the colours? Such a nice pen," she said. "I think it was the green again."

"How is your other business, Dora?" Izzie asked. The bread on his palms now held slices of cheese and grated lettuce.

"Miss Latimer to you," Rosa said.

"It doesn't matter," Dora said. "Mrs Davis," she added. "Not so well," she told the industrious end of the caravan.

"There is more demand for fortunes than enemas?"

"Yes, there is more fortune in the future," she giggled. "That's one of my sayings, one of my slogans. I think success makes one rather American, don't you?" (Izzie scowled.) "Now, darling," she said to her client, "we have ten colours written on our chart so we can put our chookie back in its little house. Bad times," she told Izzie, "are good times for fortune-tellers. Rosa is worried about money. She is worried about her son."

"I am her son."

"The other son, your brother, the clever one, Jacob."

"Clever?" Izzie asked. "Who told you he was clever?"

Rosa blushed. "Such a jealous little boy," she murmured. "Since he was little."

"Clever? Joseph, my brother? Clever?"

"Always this one did things," Rosa whispered. "Steel wool in with his brother's Weetbix. You understand? The same shape. He tried to kill his brother. Now his brother is in Russia," she raised her voice, "who knows what has happened to him, but this one is only worrying about itself. He is safe and sound. His wife sends him money. He does not need to work. So rich. All around him, people worry. He is a king. His father makes sandwiches to sell. See: what is the son doing? He holds out his hands."

"Leave him alone, Rosa," Lenny said. "You know why he is upset."

"He is expelled. From what? From nothing."

"Why do you pick on him? Leave him alone. Talk to your chook. Gossip with it." Then, more quietly, he told his son: "Take a walk. I'll finish these. Maybe you meet the postie."

Rosa went back to her conference with Dora who had now produced a large volume, like a telephone book, that explained the significance of the chook's choice of colours.

"He won't give me my mail," Izzie told his father. "He says it must go into the letterbox. If I stand at the gate and hold out my hand, he won't give it to me. 'How do I know this is your letterbox?' He is a little bureaucrat exercising his power."