Illywhacker (87 page)

His father, coincidentally, had become concerned about rust, and Hissao found him with a pot of white paint trying, when it was already far too late, to hide the evidence from
Time
magazine. He had already put white paint on his good suit before Hissao managed to persuade him to give the touching-up job to Van Kraligan who, for once, did not complain or argue. Hissao watched the stern-faced Dutchman as he took the can of paint and saw that his eyes were all aglitter with excitement. Everyone was waiting for the Yanks.

Hissao then wandered up the stairs to say hello to his mother and was astonished to find all the evidence of normal family life removed. This only exacerbated his sadness. Downstairs his past was rusting, but up here it had been obliterated. It felt cold and sterile. They had removed nets and ladders, the stacks of unread newspapers, the steel drums, the piles of bricks, the abandoned children’s toys, balls of wool, lengths of dress material. They had put pot plants in Goldstein’s apartment and set her desk outside and put Mr Lo at it so that he was pretending to be a clerk. They had polished the floors and painted his mother’s cage. He could see that they had begun to brick up the arch above the RSJ, but had obviously panicked at the lack of time left, and painted over the unfinished job. The goanna had been removed, presumably not without protest from Emma, and placed in a large cage on the ground floor. It had been fed “pinkies” and was now as sleepy and inert as a sunbather.

Hissao shook hands with Mr Lo who was, as usual, so pleased to see him that he felt embarrassed. If he allowed himself to, he would become very cross with Mr Lo who was now free to stay in Australia but who would not leave the building he had lived in so long.

He found his mother in the kitchen sitting on a high stool with
her handbag in front of her. He could see that she was bright and excited about the visit too. She had put on a big feathery hat and gloves and lipstick.

He hugged and kissed her. He was pleased—he always was—to see her. She was overweight, she wore old-fashioned clothes, she had no interest in the world outside and only the most perfunctory grasp of his university studies, but she was his mother. They loved each other uncritically. She admired his bow tie and smoothed his hair and then patted the stool beside her for him to sit on.

It was then that Emma produced the old Vegemite jar.

Hissao looked at the bottle with the polite attention another son might bestow on his mother’s favourite maidenhair fern, or on a pear tree, new ducklings, a cabbage bed or white-stalked celery growing up through cardboard tubes. The ritual with the bottle was so familiar that he did not even think about it. For the most part the contents of the bottle had been as formless and unpleasant as the sort of stuff you will pull out of a blocked grease trap, but occasionally there were leeches and once a fine creature, as thin as black cotton, which swam with the graceful movements of a snake.

But on this occasion his mother showed him a foetus, half goanna and half human. And I know I said, when I mentioned the subject before, that Hissao did not look, that the liquid was murky, that he could not be sure.
BUT OF COURSE HE LOOKED.
He was not only polite, he was naturally curious and if someone says that they have your brother in a bottle, of course you have a squint at it. It had fingers (they were perfectly formed) and a face in which you could make out features which had that mixture of soft-mouthed vulnerability and blandness that is the hallmark of the unborn. Where you might expect toes there were long claws, thin, elegant, shining black like ebony; there was also a tail which was long, striped, with very obvious glistening scales.

Hissao, quite suddenly, did not know where he was. His head span. He stood up, and was dizzy, so sat down again. His mother, momentarily, took on the appearance of a total stranger. He leaned across to the kitchen tap, turned it on, and collected water in his cupped hands but when he drank he could taste only the whale-fat flavour of his mother’s lipstick. Just the same, he did not realize that he had seen a dragon, only that he was ill and frightened.

“Jesus.” He felt ill. “Oh, Emmie, Emmie.” He shook his head.

A conversation then took place and I must translate for you, for Emma would rarely speak clearly and although I must write down her question (i.e., “Is my boy cross?”) had you been there you would have heard nothing but her murmur, or, if you were lucky, the last word like “doss”.

“Just a bit of fun,” said Emma to the young boy with the Corbusier bow tie. She took the bottle back and put it amongst the muddle in her handbag. “Is my boy cross?”

Hissao shook his head. He had a heavy feeling around his forehead as if there was a steel band clamped around his head.

“He’s your half-brother, after all.”

“Emma,” Hissao was working hard to gather back his sense of the world. In this he was not helped by the unnaturally tidy appearance of his childhood home. “Emma, you are wicked.”

She patted his cheek with a gloved hand and the feeling of kid leather where he had expected skin was also disturbing. He shivered, just as he had shivered, not ten minutes before, standing in Pitt Street.

“Don’t you show that to anyone today.”

Emma pouted.

“Promise me you won’t show it to the journalist.”

“All right,” she said.

She kept her promise to the very letter, i.e., she did not show that bottle to Charles until the journalist had departed. Until that moment she did nothing but play the humble wife. She was asked two questions and she answered them both with lowered eyes and a gentle murmur. She pulled her fox fur around her shoulders and clutched her bag in front of her. Only the journalist and his photographer thought her peculiar.

Hissao did his work perfectly. When the question of smuggling was raised it was easy for him to answer honestly. He was passionate on his father’s behalf. He spoke very quietly, with a sort of hiss in his voice. He attacked the “criminals” who were involved in this activity. He was enthusiastic about the Best Pet Shop in the World. He spoke at length about the necessary protection of Australian fauna. Thus he shuffled true conviction and cynicism, dealt a hand, guessed an answer, did his little act so slickly that when the journalist saw the photographs he was not only surprised to discover that he had been Japanese but that he was also diminutive.

Charles’s opinions about himself had always been a tangled ball of string and while he thought himself stupid, clumsy and ugly, he also thought of himself as a Good Man. He was generous to his staff, he never cheated on his taxes, he supported any charity that asked him, voted for the political party which would tax him most heavily and distribute his money fairly. He was scrupulous in his business affairs, always meeting the requirements of the Health Department, the Customs Department, the rights (real and imagined) of his customers.

And although he guessed that the journalist from
Time
might talk about smuggling, he was not really prepared for the effect it might have on him. He could not bear to be accused of it.

Later he could not even remember the journalist’s face or the sound of his voice. All he could remember was the accusation (what he imagined to be an accusation). Christ Almighty. So they had found suitcases full of dead rosellas at San Francisco airport. Why come to him?

Hissao began to answer. Charles was in such a fury he did not appreciate the great skill with which he was being defended. He plunged his hands so hard into his pocket that he burst the fabric it was made from and his car keys fell down his leg and on to the floor. The journalist’s parries were turned aside, but Charles did not notice the turning aside, only the parries themselves, these razor-sharp slashes, stabs and lunges and the proprietor was pricked and cut—there was no shield could save him.

So the McMahons’ parrot was extinct? Why come to him? He was Charles Badgery. He had ordered people off the premises for suggesting lesser things, backed them down the stairs and locked them out in the street, for intimating, say, that he used special lights to brighten the colours of a parrot’s feathers. These incidents were all family history, funny to recall, but nothing had ever happened like this before and it would never be funny.

The interview was conducted as they moved around the cages. Charles hardly listened. He simply grasped the existence of thirty million Americans who would think him a bad man. They were on the stairs when the man began asking about Herr Bloom in Munich.

Now Charles knew nothing about Herr Bloom, except that he
paid his bills and sent, each year, a Christmas card showing a bird from his famous collection. He had never talked to him, not even on the telephone, and knew nothing of his affairs. But now, hearing a certain tone in the journalist’s voice, he was keen to defend his customer. He began to do so.

Hissao, on edge, skating very prettily on ice as thin as a cigarette paper, hissed at him: “Shut up.”

His own son!

He began to feel enemies line up all around him. His son treated him like he was nothing but a piece of dog shit. His wife, his wife at least, had smiled gently and squeezed his hand while they took the photograph. When she spoke to the journalist she said that her husband had always been a good provider. The journalist had not understood her, but that was not the point.

Charles had no idea the interview had been a triumph. He shook hands with the journalist and did not realize he had been admired, that the journalist felt himself to be soiled and compromised in comparison.

He heard his son take the journalist down the stairs. He remained in the fourth gallery, shattered.

Even Emma had understood that the interview had been a success. She would not, otherwise, have been so reckless as to choose this moment to display the foetus in the bottle and claim to be the creature’s mother.

Charles tried to snatch it from her, but he got the mixing bowl instead. His neck went red and blotchy. He started to say something, but the words got tangled and tripped over themselves and he ran unathletically, heavily, his arms flailing, across the gallery and down the stairs, three at a time, falling on the second landing, rising, bleeding, bawling to Van Kraligan to get a hessian bag.

She knew her babies were wrong. They were thoughts that could not be born. And, besides, they would never stay still, and you could not be sure that you had seen what you had seen. It was like looking at clouds drifting across the skylight—one minute you had a knobbly white-faced man all covered in warts and urticaria, and next it was a Spanish galleon in full sail across the top of the yellow Sydney sky.

But this one was different—it stayed the same. It moved, and breathed. You could see the heaving of its tiny ribcage and the clutching movement, just like a real baby, of its elegant, beautiful black claws.

You could see, anyone could see, it was related to the goanna, and she did not show it to her Charlie Barley to tease him, or taunt him, but she did not mind, either, that this had been the result.

She did not quite know what to do with the creature she had made but she was relieved, at last, to have the thing still, and not be so frightened by it.

She took a silk scarf from her handbag and spread it carefully on the kitchen bench. Then she took the magic foetus and placed its bottle in the centre of the scarf. She drew the corners together and knotted them. Next she swept up the shards of the mixing bowl her husband had broken. She swept up in the style of a tradesman cleaning up after a job, that is to say that although she made sure all the splintered pottery was in the dustpan where it would not hurt anyone’s bare feet, she did not empty the dustpan itself but left it sitting on top of the feed bin for someone whose responsibility it really was.

She could still hear her husband’s angry voice and the voice opened gates to well-used sandy pathways in her brain. She became sleepy-lidded and puffy-lipped. She put her blue patent handbag in the crook of one bare plump arm and picked up the knotted scarf and held it in the other hand. And then she began to walk around the gallery. It was now highly polished and very slippery so she kicked off her shoes and, having let them lie where they fell, walked on. It was still too slippery so she stopped, put down bag and bottle, unclipped her nylons from her suspenders, rolled them down, took them off, picked up what she had put down, and walked on, bare foot.

Emma promenaded. In spite of her corsets which were very expensive, French in origin, black in colour, and her fussily fitted brassière, which, together, pushed her form, as near as it would go, to a fashionable shape, Emma Badgery, whilst promenading, exhibited a barrelling type of sexuality—she walked with a roll of the hip, a long strong slouch, her head high, and, because she walked without self-knowledge or self-criticism, there was something rather dirty about the way she did it. She walked, round and round, unaware that she was, in the eyes of Mr Lo—whose desk she knocked, deliberately it seemed, twice—just a barbarian. She was expecting her husband to reappear and when
he didn’t she dropped herself, quite suddenly, into her chair which was not where it should be (outside her cage) but next to the stairwell so that she had the unexpected bonus of feeling the excitements on the stair itself, pleasant vibrations that went right through her bones and guided her thoughts, in fits and starts, towards those other vibrations she had experienced as a young dull bride-to-be in a Mercury sidecar when she and the young man had roared down from Jeparit to Bacchus Marsh and all her feelings had been like a foreign country to her and the whole of her young body had felt itself moving to the beat of the engine and she had been safe and cocooned inside with all her old textbooks full of useless knowledge jammed uncomfortably around her feet.

They had come down the first time in the train, because Charles would not let his precious birds travel alone and then, a week later, they had gone back to Jeparit to get the AJS. They had gone together and had been ridiculed by her father for not thinking to put the motor cycle on the train in the first place. What fun he had got from his ridicule, what joy from his temper at the waste of money involved. Her daddy had stamped his polished boots, a quick tattoo, one two, one two, as he criticized them as “spendthrift fools”.