Illywhacker (11 page)

He could hear the voices clearly and if he sat up he could see, through a chink in the shrunken wallboards, his father pouring sweet wine from a demijohn into Herbert Badgery’s glass.

“To life,” Stu O’Hagen said.

“To life,” said Herbert Badgery.

“I’m not a drinking man,” Stu said, “but by God it warms you.”

There was a pause. Stu traced unstable patterns in the spilt wine on the oilcloth.

“I never liked the idea of lessons,” he said. “I never took a lesson in anything.”

“You’ve done well.”

Stu tilted back in his chair and surveyed the room. He picked up the kerosene light and held it above his head.

“I built it myself. I was working for a real estate agent, selling blocks of land in Melbourne. I was doing well. They wanted to promote me. But I had it in my head I wanted to make something myself. You could say I had tickets on myself, but I wanted to
make
something, not just sell things. So I bought this land and I didn’t know a sheep’s head from its arse.”

“You’ve got a lot to be proud of.”

We drank. I made appreciative smacking noises with my lips which were sweet and sticky with the wine.

“Lessons were something I had no time for. No one gave me a lesson. But look at it.”

“It’s a fine house.”

“It’s a shamozzle,” Stu said firmly.

“Come on, man….”

“It’ll fall over.”

“No.”

“You haven’t been here in a southerly. You wouldn’t know. You haven’t lain here like I have listening to the damn thing moving in the wind.” He stood up and carried the lantern across to the outside wall. The studs showed on the inside, the outside was clad with rough-nailed weatherboards. He held the lantern high in one hand and banged the wall hard with the fist of the other. The wall bowed and shuddered and a plate fell from the dresser on the other side of the room. Stu kicked at the broken pieces.

“I never learned to dance,” he said as he sat down. “I never got the hang of it.”

I was embarrassed. I had a bad conscience about my motives for visiting O’Hagen’s. I leaned to pick up the shards of plate.

“Leave them,” Stu said. “I’ve been wrong. I’ve been very wrong.”

I didn’t know where to look. “You’ve got two fine boys,” I said, “and a good wife.”

“That’s true,” he said, “about the boys at least.” His eyes were brimful of moisture. “I’ll buy the car,” he said, “and I’ll pay the three quid for the lessons.”

I had the papers in my pocket and I could have signed him up there and then. I sat there, worrying at them, folding them back and forth.

“No,” I said, “I couldn’t.”

“Yes, I’ve been a fool. I’ve been a fool in most things. The bloody German is a better farmer than I am. The little coot looks like he’ll blow over in the wind, but he’s made something of that place. He’s
made
something. He’s a lovely little farmer.”

“He is.”

“I’ll buy this Ford,” Stu said, “and I’ll take lessons.”

“I couldn’t,” I said. “I couldn’t let you.”

O’Hagen blinked.

“Well, what,” he said, pulling the demijohn back to his side of the table, “did you come here for?”

“To show you the Ford, that’s true.”

“You came here to come dancing,” O’Hagen said. “You came here to prance around my kitchen.”

“No, I assure you.”

“Well, what for?”

I could not sell a Ford to a weeping man. He made me feel grubby. I too was smitten with the desire to do something decent.

“I told you,” he said, “I’ll take the lessons. I’ll take them.” Tears were now streaming down his cheeks. “I’ll pay the three quid. I don’t care who laughs at me.”

“No one will laugh at you. That’s not the point. The point is the Ford is the wrong car.”

He wiped his eyes with his grubby sleeve. “So Patrick Hare was right then? The Dodge is a better car.”

“Not the Dodge. The Summit. It’s the Summit you should have.”

“What in the name of God is a Summit?” Stu shouted.

“A car,” I shouted back. “A vehicle, made in Australia. An Australian car.”

“An Australian car,” O’Hagen said. “What a presumption.”

“A what?”

“A presumption. Are you sitting there and telling me we can make a better car than the Yanks? God Jesus Christ in Heaven help me. Mary Mother of God,” he whispered and seemed to find her in the gloom above the roof joists. “You’re a salesman, Mr Badgery,” he said. “The country is full of bloody salesmen. You don’t have to know anything to be a salesman. All you need to do is talk. That’s why everyone does it. But if you want to really do something you need some bloody brains, some nous. Now tell me, tell me truly, is this Australian car of yours a better car than the Ford?”

“It’s not the point about better,” I said, “it’s a question of where the money goes. You’d be better off with a worse car if the money stayed here.”

“You’re cock-eyed, man. You’re a bloody hypocrite. You go around making a quid from selling the bloody things, and now you tell me I shouldn’t buy one. You’re making no sense,” Stu sighed. “Sell me the bloody Ford before I lose my temper.”

“I will not,” I said. “If you give me leave I’ll travel up to Melbourne and pick up a Summit and bring it down here. It’s a beautiful vehicle.”

“Is the Summit,” Stu said slowly, “as good as a Ford?”

“The difference is not worth a pig’s fart.”

“A subject,” my host said, “of which you would be ignorant.”

I was never good with drink. I got myself too excited and I did not express myself as well as I might.

“Do you want Henry Ford,” I roared, “to tell you when to get out of bed in the morning.”

“Sell me the Ford,” Stu roared. “Give me lessons.”

“I won’t.”

“Sell it to me, man, or by God I’ll learn you.”

“Learn you! Learn you! You talk as ignorant as you think.”

“Ignorant,” said O’Hagen quietly, “but not so ignorant I don’t know why you came here.” He stood and walked unsteadily to the wood stove. I paid him no attention.

The poker crashed down on the table. It missed my hand by less than an inch.

“You silly bastard,” I hollered, leaping up, and falling backwards over my chair.

And then everything was confusing. I wrestled the poker away and O’Hagen was on the floor but someone was still pummelling me.

I found Goog, in a nightshirt, punching me around the head. And then Goog was lying on the floor in the corner near the stove. A small trickle of blood came from his nose. He was whimpering.

I was sick at heart as I stumbled from the house. In my mind’s eye I could see, not Goog, but a brush-tailed possum laid waste in the fallen branches of a tree.

I woke just before dawn. The Ford was in the middle of the saltpans and my mouth tasted disgusting. I had run off the road on the north side of the crossing and the meandering wheel marks on the saltflats had left no corresponding impression on my memory.

Rain was falling in a fine drizzle. My right shoulder was wet. The line of dwarf yellow cypress pines along Blobell’s Hill was smudged by dull grey cloud and nothing else in the landscape was distinct except the particularly clear sound of a crow above the saltpans flying north towards O’Hagen’s. It sounded like barbed wire.

My whole body was stiff and sore but my hands, still clamped around the wheel, were stiffer and sorer than any other part of me. The skin on my palms was torn and blistered from the axe work and had dried hard. My knuckles were bruised and broken. I felt everything that was wrong with my character in those two painful hands—the palms and knuckles always in opposition to each other.

My mouth was parched dry. My head ached. I regretted hitting the small—eared boy. I regretted wishing to put my head between Mrs O’Hagen’s legs. I regretted that my actions confused people. I regretted being a big mouth, a bullshitter and a bully.

I was thirty-three years old. I turned the rear-vision mirror so that I could see my face. It teetered on the point of being old. One morning, I knew, I would look into a mirror and see rotting teeth and clouded eyes, battles not won, lies not believed.

It was then I decided to marry Phoebe.

It came to me quite simply, on the saltpans south of Balliang East. I would marry Phoebe, build the aeroplanes at Barwon Aeros, be a friend to Jack, a son to Molly.

When I stepped from the Ford I found the distance between the running board and the ground unexpectedly short. I stumbled and, stepping back, found the T Model up to its axles in the salt-crusted mud.

A crooked smile crossed my face.

“Serve you right,” I said.

The Ford had been a tumour in my life. I had fought battles with it in the way another man might fight battles with alcohol or tobacco. I had walked away from it and returned to it. I had rejected it only to embrace it passionately. I admired its construction, its appearance, the skill that had produced it so economically. And these were also the things I loathed.

So on this Tuesday morning at six thirty a.m., when I walked away from a T Model in the saltpans, I felt an enormous relief, a lightness. I was finished with Fords and the dizziness, the dryness in my throat, the pain in my hands, did not stop me appreciating the beauty of this landscape with the black motor car stranded and dying like a whale.

I walked ten miles back to Geelong. I could see myself. I saw how I walked. There, on the road: a man entering the first decent chapter of his life.

While we waited for the pudding, Jack discoursed on flying.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Molly said, holding her small hands across her ears. “It makes me giddy, upon my word it does. It makes me giddy and faint.”

Jack prized a hand from the side of his wife’s head and placed it on his napkined lap.

“I’ll fall,” she said, not daring to look down at the floor.

It was not easy to understand Molly’s antics, because they were only partly a joke. She performed these girly-girly acts continually.

“You won’t fall, my petal,” Jack said, “and if you did fall, I’d catch you. And if I didn’t you wouldn’t get hurt—no more,” he smiled, “than a bruise on your backside, a big blue one.”

“Shush,” said Molly, colouring.

They both coloured, husband and wife. It was a dirty sight, because anyone could see that Jack’s blush was not caused by embarrassment but by excitement.

“Like a map of Tasmania,” he said.

“I’m going to lie down,” she said, but must have remembered the pudding, for she sat down almost as soon as she had stood up. There was something very odd about her eyes which were flirtatious but also fearful. Of course this was a game (Jack loved it) but sometimes you could feel real terror in it. She clung to Jack as a giddy person clings to a tree on a steep mountain when everything underfoot is dry and slippery with dead gum leaves and shiny grasses. She held his hand, patted his knee, tugged his sleeve, tucked in his shirt tail, filled his glass, took lint from his shoulder.

Only puddings seemed to soothe her. She cooked them in plenty: steamed puddings with jam sauces, queen puddings with wild wavy egg-white toppings, roly-poly puddings, plum puddings out of season, apple charlottes and rhubarb pies. She had small ankles, shapely legs, delicate bones, but her body was a tribute to puddings and the bread and hot milk Phoebe made for her when she had queer feelings.

There was something definitely wrong with Molly’s brain, but whatever it was she so churned up with imitations of helplessness, knowingness, self-mockery and God knows what else that it would have been easy to forget it entirely if Phoebe (silent Phoebe) had not watched over her with such a protective air.

I did not mind these frailties. I loved my new family. I was an old dog lying before an open fire, warming myself before them. I liked to see them show affection to each other.

I had shone my shoes before this dinner. I swung my legs beneath the table. I whistled. I brimmed with marriage. It radiated from my skin in heady waves like sweet-smelling gasoline, and I whistled, not even aware that I was doing it, or that my companions at the dinner table (even Phoebe) were starting to smile because of it.

Bridget, restored to the dining room, hovered with a large steamed pudding—a treacly lava of jam sauce engulfed the yellow mountain in a slow sweet flood. She tried not to giggle at the whistling guest who now gave her a broad, lewd wink. She coloured to the roots of her dark Irish hair, placed the pudding heavily in front of Jack, and fled to the kitchen for the custard.

A veil of marriage fell across the table. I watched my future father-in-law dole out the pudding in heavy country slices and could easily have got up and hugged him. My mother-in-law was busy with the custard. My bride sat pale and beautiful with her head bowed.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said at last, “of marriage.” My head was so full of it, it did not occur to me that they might find this news surprising.

But I was too enthusiastic to notice any puzzlement. I was carried away, and relying, as I always relied, on the heat of my enthusiasm to ignite my listeners. By these means, by the sheer force of my will, I had seduced women and talked my audiences into the air above astonished cities.

The silence did not trouble me. I did not think to liken Phoebe’s pale silence to that of a prisoner staring at a judge with a black cap. I did not notice Bridget run from the room, or Molly pull in her lips on disapproving drawstrings. Jack ate in a dedicated manner, with his head down, and all that any of this meant to me was that I had not properly communicated my feelings to them.

I allowed the hot jam sauce to cool while I devoted myself to my new enthusiasm. I praised the joys of children, and contrasted married life with that of the lonely bachelor. I praised women. I placed candles in their hands and gave them credit for great wisdom. I celebrated motherhood. I pushed against the silence like an old stubborn bull who will lean hard against a fence until it falls.

“Who,” asked Jack, without very much enthusiasm, “is the lucky girl?”

“Ah,” I said, “that would be giving the game away.”

“Is it,” asked bleak Molly, “anyone we know?”

I hesitated. The heat was leaving me and my sense of the world around me was becoming clearer. I saw I was in danger of committing a serious blunder.