Illywhacker (73 page)

He could not hold that gaze. It embarrassed him. “What you taught us,” he said.

“Don’t disapprove of me, Charlie. I will tell him the truth later, not now. When he gets out, I’ll tell him the truth. There is plenty of time. But for the moment I will be unprincipled. Did you notice my red shoes?”

He hadn’t. He came round from behind the counter to inspect them.

“I feel I have invented them.” She giggled and covered her mouth with her hand. “I’ll get the hock. You give her the good news after I’ve left. I think I’d weep if I was here.”

Charles listened to the red shoes tapping across the grimy floor of the arcade. He was disturbed by her confessions. He disapproved of Izzie’s infidelity. He was disgusted that she should tell lies. But he was also excited by the pressure of her hand and the appeal of her grey eyes when she begged him not to judge her.

It was thus lodged in Charles’s brain that his wife had entered a cage to punish him for something he had done, and he saw how, from her point of view, he had been insensitive and thoughtless. He did not think her mad at all, but only saw the degree to which he had made her so unhappy.

He could not apologize enough. Whenever the shop was empty they kissed, great blood-swollen kisses, tender and easily bruised. Emma huddled into her husband’s strong arms and bent her broad shoulders. She shrunk herself against his chest, all the time awash with the most delicious emotions.

She did not know she had become addicted, not even at four o’clock when they could stand the ache no more, locked up the shop, pulled down the blind and made love to each other on the dirty floor and with every stroke he slid inside her, hard and big as a bull, he was, at the same time, nothing but a baby, sucking at her breast. He smeared and bubbled her with her own warm milk, spread it across her smooth white chest and in the pink maze of her little ear whence he poured—even whilst he began to bang her, push her, thump her, rearing back with bulging eyes—his milk-white apologies, his child’s requests for love.

They did not know what was happening to them. They had a
celebration dinner and got tipsy on Goldstein’s hock. They went to bed early and were asleep, immediately, in each other’s arms.

So far, you see, nothing so remarkable. And yet some time that night Emma Badgery rose from her bed, and without waking herself enough to ask herself what she was doing, crept groggily down the stairs and evicted the Gould’s Monitor from its cage. And there she was to stay, on and off, not every day, not every night, but more often than not, as long as she lived.

She never felt compelled to find reasons for it. It was guilty Charles who would always torture himself with reasons. As for Emma, she never once talked about the pleasure she felt, our little queen, to be there safe and warm with her husband dancing his love dance around her, big and strong, as dangerous as a bear, begging, threatening, pleading.

The shy little plant from Bacchus Marsh was soon raging, bright red and dazzling pink like wild lantana, across the entire landscape of her husband’s life.

Hissao was too young to remember it but everyone else (i.e., Henry and George Badgery, the famous dullards) can tell you the story of how their father acted on the night of Nathan Schick’s first visit to the Pitt Street premises. It was in the season of westerly winds which would explain why the children would be wide awake when their father came stumbling in drunk at that hour of the morning. They were not used to him being drunk and did not know it was him. They lay very still in the cage, pressed tight against the smooth skin and silk-clad breasts of their snoring mother.

Emma had been eating bacon sandwiches again. They had all been eating bacon sandwiches. The monster stood on the plate and when it broke it sounded like a rifle shot.

Of course they were frightened. They were frightened even before the creature began to crash up the stairs. The westerly was howling and threatening to drag the roof, screeching, up into the night. Clouds scudded across the top of the big skylight which always illuminated their dreams and nightmares. Through this frame they saw warty faces illuminated by thunderstorms. They watched for enemy bombers and, having freed themselves from the tight clamp of their mothers’s sleeping embrace, saw torn newspapers pass across the sky like migrating birds.

Henry saw his father trailing a hose, but he did not recognize either the father or the hose. The teapot was kicked against the wall and the air was wet with alcohol and tannin. Henry shook his mother, shook and shook her, but she slept on. George was crying. The creature was cursing and fumbling with the kitchen tap.

Charles was drunk on black-market Scotch. It took him an age to get the hose connected. He flooded the kitchen and drenched his Dedman suit. Then he turned on the lights and tried to blast his family from the cage. They would not budge. The children clung to their mother. The mother clung bleakly to the bars and, afterwards, lay shivering on a sodden mattress on the floor.

When Charles—bawling and remorseful—tried to dry them, Emma bit his finger.

The wind was still blowing when he woke at five a.m. He lit two kerosene radiators and placed them near his family. He went to the lavatory and tried to vomit. He bathed his finger and put mercurochrome on it. He believed he had deserved to be bitten. He thought himself loathsome.

The idea that his wife was in the cage because he had done something wrong was now fixed very firmly in his head and could no more be dislodged than she be moved from the cage itself. The trouble was not the cage—the trouble was that she would not tell him what he had done. He asked her. He even suggested. But all Emma would do was murmur. And although he would begin calmly enough, smiling, nodding, rubbing her back, bringing her a white-fleshed peach on a plate, or a bacon sandwich or a pair of silk stockings wrapped in holly-speckled paper, although he would whisper sweet things in her small ear or make porridge with illegal butter melting on it, he would, in the end, lose his temper with all the non-specific murmuring. Then he would behave like an animal and say nasty things.

Later, when he remembered the things he had said and done, he would easily understand why she might wish to punish him.

Leah Goldstein, their one real friend, did nothing to help. Partly this was because Charles never lost his temper in her presence, and so she never witnessed anything as spectacular as the hosing-down. However, she was well aware that Emma, her friend, lived in a cage. Oh, she was often out of it, it is true, shopping, showering, visiting the cinema, but it was where she liked to spend her time, where she would entertain her friend, read her romances, and sleep with her children, like a silky sow contented with its litter.

And Goldstein saw all this and would not criticize. She pretended it was all quite normal. Not once did she say to Emma that it was not a useful way to behave, was not good for the children or even herself. Instead she stubbornly stuck to her first impression which was that Emma was kind and affectionate and the thing she found remarkable about the cage was how attractive Emma made it seem. This was not merely because Charles had bought her tributes of satin sheets or that the blankets she slept in were of mohair so soft that you had to—it was quite impossible to resist—stroke it against your cheek, or that her doting husband always seemed to be able to find her fruit out of season and butter when they had no butter coupons left. Goldstein was not untouched by this luxury, although she would not let herself admit it, but what impressed her most was the way she was with her children—she whacked them across the head when they misbehaved and nuzzled them when they were good, and Leah, who so much wanted children of her own that she invented them in letters, was in no mood to criticize the woman she called “A Perfect Mother”.

There were things that you would expect to make Goldstein uneasy—the youngest boy’s Asiatic face, for instance—but she does not seem to have noticed it. You would expect her, also, to have had stern words about Emma’s penchant for silk stockings and leg-of-mutton sleeves, both of which were banned for the duration, and yet she did not. Even when she herself was getting blisters and a bad back in the Land Army she never saw Emma in an unfavourable light. When she had leave she would come up from Narrabri on the train and she and Emma would go to the matinée together. Sometimes they just sat and knitted and, on a rainy afternoon, with the sky falling gently on the glass above their heads, it was hard to imagine a nicer place to be.

If Leah had once, only once, said that Emma was crazy it might have helped. It was left instead to Nathan Schick who delivered the opinion while they sat drinking in the gutter in William Street. But while his diagnosis was accurate, his advice was not good and led only to the incident with the hose.

Nathan liked Charles, but he did not understand his situation. For instance, when he saw that a wife in a cage had done nothing to deter the boy’s ambition to have the best pet shop in the world, he admired him for it, and saw it as an example of that characteristic he admired most, i.e.,
GOING DOWN THE GODDAMN MIDDLE
. This was about as big a misunderstanding of the situation as it was possible to have.

Charles did not have his magnificent new shop in spite of Emma. He had it because of Emma. If he had not been so bluffed and bamboozled by his wife he would have been, deaf or not, in the army.

Nathan Schick admired Charles for keeping out of uniform. Charles, on the other hand, was embarrassed to be a young man in plain clothes. He imagined himself a coward. He was the proprietor of a non-essential industry. He camouflaged himself in an old grey boiler suit. He gave an elderly impression. He walked close to the cages and kept his head down. He hired women who would have been better used as telegraphists or machinists or Land Army labourers and he paid them money so they would sell pets for him. He was ashamed of the very thing that gave him so much pleasure.

When Nathan Schick came looking to buy that inappropriate mascot for General MacArthur, he did not have to go poking around in the dark end of Doyle’s Arcade. The pet shop had moved twice and it was no longer a mere pet shop. The sign said it was an emporium. It was too. Charles was renting (and would soon buy) the old Stratford Arcade in Pitt Street. No matter how inconspicuous he might wish to be, he was still a Badgery. He had grand visions. So even though he saw that an emporium like this must draw attention to his non-essential status, he could not resist those four wooden-railed galleries stretching upwards towards that lovely skylight, a delicate thing of lacy iron and clear glass. Each gallery was a good twelve foot wide, enough to build deep cages and still have room for customers. Here you could accommodate a cockatoo in the proper manner. You could have a wallaby run. Possibly, one day, you could install a platypus. On the Pitt Street end of the gallery there were proper rooms. In one he could breed flies. In another he could place incubators in preparation for the day when the war was over and there was kerosene enough to run them. On the top floor they could have a flat and they would be able, on summer evenings, to bring deckchairs out on to the top gallery and stare down into the canyon and watch parrots flying to and fro in fifty-foot-long cages.

Once my son, in a perfect echo of Henry Underhill, bellowed at me that I was not a business man’s bootlace. He loved to style himself a practical man. It was bullshit. He was an enthusiast, a fan. He did not even calculate the money he would need to fix the arcade which had been disused since the depression. He signed
the lease without getting a quote for building cages or aquariums. He did not even think about the extra cost of feed if he was going to stock the place in accordance with his dream which was, I must tell you, an expression of the purest patriotism—pure Australiana—definitely no bunny rabbits or pussy cats no matter how tearfully his little boys begged him.

There was no one to tell him that Sydney was not big enough to support such poetry. Any real business man would have told him that the best pet shop in the world would be a failure.

The Americans, however, saved his arse. They arrived just when he needed them and although everyone remembers them for nylons and candy bars, they also paid big money for rosellas and lorikeets, blue bonnets and golden whistlers, all varieties of cockatoos, king parrots and western parrots, finches, warblers, even a pair of dancing brolgas courtesy of Harry the rabbitoh. The GIs handed their money across the counter like children sent shopping by their mothers. You took what you wanted and you handed the rest back to them. Charles did not cheat them, but he did put his prices up until he reached the delicate point where they no longer said they were low.

Gang-gangs cost a fiver. Australians came to stare at the mug Yanks wasting their money. They put Charles in a temper. He thought them ignorant and ill-educated and would have liked to give them a piece of his mind. But being a non-essential coward in a boiler suit he could only bump into them belligerently as they stood in front of the pretty white cages.

Normally he tried to keep away from customers. He was happier in the fetid room where he bred his fly pupae, or away on the lakes around Kempsey collecting stock. Petrol was rationed but he had an old Essex with a gas producer and he went hunting in this.

So when Nathan Schick did arrive he was lucky to find the boss home. Charles had a termite nest in a hessian bag. He had his head down and there was something in the walk, the suggestion of a limp, that gave the impression of someone old and smelly although he was only twenty-four.

“Charlie Badgery,” said the Yank, blocking his access to the stairs.

Charles may or may not have heard him; he tried to push past.

“Charlie.” The Major had a bony hand on the round fleshy shoulder. “Don’t say you don’t recognize me.”

Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.

The Yank removed his cap and revealed a bald head. Nathan was now ten years older, but there was no denying the crooked regretful gold-toothed smile.

“How nice to see you, Mr Schick.”