Illywhacker (42 page)

He was curled inside a weather-worn piece of soft yellow stone a hundred feet above the sucking sea. If he had wrists like a girl, he suffered hurt like a man, privately, ashamed of tears or perhaps, Leah thought, seeing the black ball of pain in the arms of the rock, like an animal withdrawing from the herd. It seemed to her to be a deeply conservative attitude to pain—to withdraw from society as if one would be destroyed for one’s weakness or incapacity.

All away to the south the sky was hung with thunder blue and down along the beach at Bondi the sand glowed an odd deep mustard yellow and she wished she had been up on the cliffs on the day of Rosa’s birthday party to see the procession along the beach: the mauves, the yellows, blacks and pinks, the wonderful Silly Friends parading noisily and emptily along the sand.

She chose a course towards Izzie that would allow him to witness her approach and thus have time to compose herself. She walked with her head down, one hand on her hat, the other controlling her dress which rose recklessly to show the sky her dancer’s legs.

When she arrived at the rock he was sitting up, looking sheepish. She sat down beside him and took his hand, not as a lover might, but as a concerned stranger taking a pulse, and indeed it crossed her mind to wonder if such skin could ever be truly familiar, if it might not always be slightly alien.

“Talking to my mother,” Izzie said, not looking at her. “Talking to my mother is not a game you can win. You are in check from the first move.”

“Do you know what I think?” Leah said at last.

“What do you think?”

“I think the chooks are making everyone unhappy.” She smiled, but she was quite serious. When Izzie had made the chooks they had been snow-white creatures with wise black eyes but now they were malevolent and mad-eyed and their red combs were obscene.

Izzie shrugged his shoulders irritably.

“She has never been any different,” he said. “It was always
Joseph who could do no wrong. Whatever I did, it didn’t matter-I was wrong. Oh, Goldstein, if only you could meet my slimy big brother. She loves him. She thinks he’s the ant’s pants. Have you seen how she wraps up his dull translations in tissue paper? Jesus Christ! He’s such a fraud.”

“Izzie, why didn’t you tell me about Rosa?”

“I am telling you, Goldstein,” he smiled, “now.”

“She’s unhappy. She looks sick and miserable. And your father has a funny look too—disappointed and bitter.”

“I forgot.”

Leah looked at him incredulously.

“How could you forget?”

“I
forgot
. And there’s a southerly buster coming.” He pulled her to her feet and they began to stroll back to Bondi. “You don’t know how busy I am. You don’t understand what I do. You haven’t even
asked.”

He gave her an odd sideways look. “I’ve got more to worry about than Rosa and Lenny.” He pulled his grubby hands out of his pockets and started striking off points on his dainty little fingers. “Each day I teach. I get up at five. I do my preparation. I get to school at eight thirty. I’m busy till four. Then there’s work to do with the local branch. Then,” he hesitated, “I’ve got other stuff.”

“I am going to take Rosa on a picnic.”

“Leah, it is a secret. I’m working for the UWU.”

“Oh,” she said. “I see.” But in fact she didn’t understand at all.

“The Unemployed Workers’ Union.”

“Good,” she said, still not appreciating what this meant, that the UWU was mostly communist and that Izzie’s membership of it was enough to have him expelled from the Labour Party.

“I train speakers,” he said.

“You’re a good speaker, Izzie.”

As they walked back to Campbell Parade he began to talk about his dissatisfaction with Lang, that he was nothing but a fraud, and Leah—who remembered all those nights they had worked to get Lang elected—suddenly felt weary and sick of all these bright futures.

Campbell Parade was rich in leather shoes and double-coned ice-creams dripped frivolously on to the sweaty footpath. Izzie was still talking, gesticulating, bumping into people.

“Izzie,” she said when he, at last, paused for breath.

“Yes-sie,” he grinned.

“What Rosa said about Jack Lang was right.”

“Yes.”

“Well, why don’t you tell her so?”

“I will,” he said. “I promise.” And then he went on telling her how he took his speaker’s course at the UWU at Glebe, how a man named Bill Darcy introduced him to the class: “Youse fellows reckons you’re not too impressive on the platform. Well, I want youse to cast your eyes on this little fellow I saw some of youse laughing at when he stepped in. Well, youse can start laughing on the other side of your faces because he is the darndest little speaker we got, so better sit there and listen to him while he gives you the drum and if you clean out your ear-holes you might get a bit of sense into your heads.”

Leah began laughing.

“You’d be proud of me,” he said.

“I am proud of you,” she said, suddenly serious. She was pleased that in all this awful world there was someone who was trying to do something decent and she wondered what was wrong with her, that her emotions ran so hot and cold about this man who now, as they withdrew into a bus shelter, shyly took her hand.

It was then that he told her what he had begun by hiding, that he had lost his job. The Lang Machine, with cold vindictiveness, had not only expelled him from the Labour Party but dismissed him from his job at a state school. He had been arrested after a fight with police at evictions in Glebe and it was this, his new criminal record, that was used as the excuse.

“Oh, Izzie. The bastards.”

The bus shelter was a bleak place. Drunks had pissed in it. Someone had gouged “Bread not Bullets” into the seat. The letters were jagged. She found herself embracing Izzie. His hair was greasy and unpleasant, and confused, in her mind, with the smell of the stale urine. It was an appropriate perfume for such an evil, loveless world.

Small boys ran past. “Hubba-hubba,” they called to the embracing couple. “Hubba-hubba.”

Leah did not hear them.

When she looked, at last, at Izzie’s face, she was startled to find him grinning.

“I’ve joined the Party,” he said.

She remembered thinking that Rosa, at least, would be pleased.

But Rosa was not pleased. She called him names: ultra-leftist, adventurist, names, it seemed, that described his behaviour in fighting policemen.

But then, all squeezing in around that table again, they became quiet as they realized the bleakness of the position.

Leah’s mind spun. She considered wiring her father for money, and then, quite properly, dismissed it.

“But what will happen?” she asked.

No one answered her. It wasn’t necessary. She knew herself exactly what would happen: they would have to live on handouts. There would be government stooges around the house asking questions about chooks and tenants. If they received payment for either they would get no hand-out. Rosa would unleash her tongue on officious felt-hatted spies who would never believe they had no income and, even if they did, life would be a misery, trudging all the way down to Number 7 wharf for a meal ticket, then back up to the other end of the city to collect a gunnysack of food—no vegetables, no fruit, and a lump of meat chopped up just anyhow.

“I think, Lenny,” Leah said, “that you will have to rent your house, for money.”

Lenny ran his hand through his wiry grey hair. He opened his mouth a fraction and his false teeth—Leah had never noticed them before—gave a small clack.

“Leah, Leah,” Rosa said. “Do you really think we would evict them?”

“We would do no such thing,” said Lenny quietly. “It would kill us.”

“But you must do something.” Leah was impatient, not for the first time, with the Kaletskys. They seemed helpless to her, like children, and now they were, it seemed, overcome with some family emotion that excluded her completely.

Rosa put her arm around Izzie and hugged him to her. “You are a good boy, Izzie.”

“An ultra—leftist,” he reminded her, but their cheeks, mother and son, were still pressed together.

“Better an ultra-leftist than a Menshevik,” said Rosa Kaletsky.

Leah had forgotten what a Menshevik was and, anyway, did
not care. She did not see what application the in-fighting in Russia had to do with a caravan in Bondi where the immediate problems had to be solved, i.e., how to feed the stubborn Kaletskys who were blowing noses and smiling to each other unaware that there, in their midst, was a girl imbued by the dangerous ambition to do One Fine Thing.

Whenever Leah thought of Mervyn Sullivan she thought of liquids, water, tears, sweat, the whole of his large handsome face surrounded by an envelope of liquid that, itself invisible, left a fine smear of condensation on his big features and made him appear sentimental or weepy when in fact he was neither.

She had carried his card ever since he had given it to her that afternoon at Bondi.

“You never know,” he had said.

“You never know,” she repeated to herself on every occasion she had considered throwing it out.

His office she discovered on the fifth floor above an arcade at the dingy end of Elizabeth Street down near Central.

The sign on the door proclaimed
MERVYN SULLIVAN THEATRICAL AGENT
but the scene inside the door showed nothing but disarray. There were open filing cabinets with their insides falling out and, on the floor, yellowed clippings, photographs, letters lying next to indentations in the carpet that betrayed the recent removal of a desk and chair. A woman’s dress, brilliant with spangles, hung from the picture rail.

Amongst all this Mervyn Sullivan sat hunched over a metal waste—paper basket, his left hand on his chest, carefully keeping his silk tie from harm whilst he ate a meat pie, the watery contents of which dripped messily and landed noisily amongst the crumpled papers in the bin.

She carried her emu suit in a paper bag.

“Mr Sullivan,” she began, “I am Leah Goldstein and you met me at Rosa Kaletsky’s birthday party at Bondi. You gave me your card and invited me to call on you.”

Mervyn Sullivan did not say anything. In fact, he did not even look up. He had, always, tremendous concentration on anything he took a mind to tackle, and the meat pie did not allow anything else.

It was to this concentration on the task at hand that Mervyn Sullivan attributed his now doubtful success.

Leah waited for a reply. If there had been a chair to sit on she would have sat, but as there was none she stood uncertainly at the doorway and waited. She watched Mervyn Sullivan complete his meat pie and carefully wipe his fingers with newspaper cuttings.

Then he stood up and did up his suit coat.

“Mr Sullivan …” Leah began again.

“A long way from Romano’s,” Mervyn Sullivan said. “Lobster thermidor and French champagne, crêpes Suzette and yes sir, no sir. A long way too, girlie, from when I saw you last. Don’t you want to be a lawyer any more?”

“Doctor,” Leah said. “You see, Izzie lost his job and….”

Mervyn Sullivan held up his hand. “Spare me, please. I listen to these stories all day. Please.”

“You said you’d get me work.”

“I’m packing in this game,” Mervyn Sullivan said, indicating that Leah should sit in the chair next to the waste-paper basket. “I’m finished. I can’t make a quid any more.”

Leah looked at the shining handsome face and mistook the liquids for signs of emotion. In the middle of her own disappointment she found room to be sorry for him.

“How terrible,” she said.

Mervyn Sullivan did not seem to notice her sympathy. “I have girls like you in here every day. Dancers are a dime a dozen, girlie, I promise you. There’s nothing. If you don’t believe me go and see All-Star, go and talk to Jim Sharman. Ask him about dancers. They all think they’re star material. They come in here and then they want to argue with me. Anyway, I’m packing up, I’m going on the road again. Who would have thought it? Fifty years of age, and back on the road. Jesus wept.”

“I’ll do anything,” Leah said. “I learn quickly.”

“Dancers are too much trouble,” Mervyn said. “Give me a good vocalist, a fat lady and a magician. Why do I want to break my heart with dancers?”

“I brought my costume.”

“What difference does a costume make?”

“It’s an emu costume,” Leah said, and held up the feathers. “Don’t you remember Rosa Kaletsky’s Emu Dance?”

“So why would feathers make you co-operate? It’s your age, girlie. You’ll think you know everything. Give you a week and
you’ll think you’re it. You’ll be telling me how to run my business, you’ll be arguing with me, having headaches, going sick, falling in love with the first decent-looking cocky who comes ogling you in the front seat.”

He was standing now, staring at a photograph on the floor. He stooped and picked it up. “Prunier’s,” he said, handing it to Leah who saw Mervyn Sullivan with a beautiful woman on either side of him. “I was the King,” he said. “I got Sheila Bradbury, that’s her on the left, a hundred quid a week. She’s an alcoholic now. If you want sense from her see her at breakfast while she’s still shaking.”

“I don’t drink.”

“But could I trust you?” Mervyn Sullivan said softly, his eyes watering and his upper lip swelling. “You’re at the university. You think you’ve got brains. You think you can dance. You’d argue with me all day long. I’m getting too old to argue, girlie. Mervyn knows what’s right. You’re a good kid,” he said, coming to look at the photograph over her shoulder. He was very close, but she was not frightened. But when she felt his hand on her neck, she knew, with a shock, what was required.

“Would you co-operate?” Mervyn Sullivan said. “That is the question.”

They were five floors above the street. A fine rain was falling and obscuring the outlines of the world outside. Leah shivered.

“You see,” he said, and took his hand away.

They stood there, staring intently at the photograph of Mervyn Sullivan and two women at Prunier’s. There was a vase of flowers, roses, on the table. The black-trousered legs of a waiter hovered by Mervyn’s left shoulder. The woman who was now an alcoholic had her hand on Mervyn’s right shoulder. Lost in the black and grey world of the photograph, Leah made her decision.