Illywhacker (91 page)

Hissao thinks her a hypocrite to accept money from an enterprise she so obviously disapproves of.

Goldstein thinks of him very much as she thought of him that day, except she no longer puts any store on his ambition. And yet it is still there and it has grown, like the roots of a tree constrained too long in a pot, so it is hard and matted and dry, the old wood and the fine hair all compressed into one hard dark knot.

They both stand to admire the effect in the mirror which is now the dominant feature of this room where Charles once incubated the eggs of lyrebirds and bower-birds, an occupation that now, contrasted with its present use, seems blameless. The incubators have long ago ceased to tumble and they stand, silent, heavy like very old-fashioned refrigerators with cumbersome hinges and big corroded brand names. Apart from the incubators there is now a mirror, a small workbench and a refrigerator.

But do not, yet, be in too much hurry with your blame, but rather look at Hissao’s reflection in the mirror and you will feel, whether you approve or not, a fondness for the young man in the expensive baggy clothes and you would guess, correctly, that this life, a life he did not choose, is not entirely repulsive to him. There is a new tendency to fleshiness in the face and his body has become, whilst not fat, not even plump, well padded. He has a good nose for good wine, speaks ten languages, three of them like a native, has educated tastes and cultured friends in many countries. He has dined with grouchy old Frank Lloyd Wright at Taelsin West and can tell, in the master’s voice, the story of how the architect thundered “strike the forms” when the nervous builder hesitated on the Kauffman job.

He does not think himself either unhappy or bitter and when he bids his mother and grandfather goodbye there is no enmity between them. As he walks down the dusty empty stairwell he does not know
how much he hates those of us who remain in those rundown galleries, living in the rusting slum that was once the best pet shop in the world.

He is alive, high on the risks of his profession, and his nostrils flare like an Arab stallion tricked up for show, the inside of those flaring nostrils rubbed with uncut cocaine and ginger powder rubbed on its arse to make it lift its tail so high.

But the hate is there, not so different to the hate that Leah Goldstein wakes with each morning, although in this case it is buried deeply, coiled in him like a stainless-steel spring. It is not obvious in any way, certainly not now, if you watch him walk—the last passenger on QF4 to Rome. You see only an urbane young man with a first-class tag on his brief case. You may notice his oddly scuffed shoes, as carefully chosen as his trousers, but you would not guess that he was holding his breath. This breath-holding is not caused by anxiety—there is no risk yet—he is trying not to smell the smell of airports in which he discerns fear, anxiety, impatience, drunkenness, fatigue, false feelings, a whole Hogarth of smells which he is, fastidious fellow, trying to lock away from the receptors of his brain. It is the breath-holding that makes his appearance slightly rigid and although this is not comical in itself it is made so by the hostess who accompanies him, circling her missing passenger like a Queensland heeler driving home a recalcitrant bullock.

Three hundred and eighty passengers awaited Hissao who had the good grace to act out some mild embarrassment as he took his first-class seat. He folded his large overcoat with exaggerated care and stubbornly refused to give it up to the uncertainties of the overhead locker. He placed it carefully beneath the seat.

The craft was now half an hour late, but when Hissao smiled at the steward, the man could no longer find it in himself to be angry.

The seat next to my grandson was occupied by a large handsome woman. She looked Italian or Spanish. She had olive skin, sloe eyes, a square jaw, and Hissao guessed her age, correctly, at thirty-four. No sooner had he clipped his seat belt together than he settled down to admire her. He did not rush into it like a glutton or a boor, but like a man carefully unfolding a napkin and watching wine being poured into a large glass.

He admired her hands (brown skin and such pink nails like seashells) which seemed to him perfectly proportioned, undecorated by nail polish or rings, but soft and supple. He watched them trace unselfconscious paths as they touched each other, her cheek,
her forehead. He enjoyed their suppleness, the easy way the fingers could bend back from the pale pink of the palm which was crossed with the clear deep lines of an unhesitant life.

Hissao relaxed into the seat and, as the craft lifted off the tarmac at Mascot Airport, touched the parrot for luck and smiled with satisfaction at the perfection of life.

This business about Hissao and women is difficult. His continual love affairs may be interpreted as a continual need to prove himself as a man in spite of his height. It is a tempting hypothesis. Henry, having read about the Don Juan complex in
Reader’s Digest
, suggested to Hissao that his promiscuous behaviour was the result of low-quality orgasms, but Hissao smiled at his brother with such compassion that it was Henry who lost his temper and had to leave the room.

Hissao was one of those rare men who genuinely love women and who, dreaming in bars and coffee shops, amidst the steam of espresso machines, can imagine amorous delights in all the various forms the female body assumes. When he saw his fellow passenger (square-jawed, sloe-eyed) he was not reacting to her money (which he could only guess at) or her fame (which he was ignorant of) but rather his small Nipponese nose twitched to some subtle aroma, the smell of spices in doorways, musky broad-leaved grasses, the heady aroma of a foreign country with its strange alphabets which promise the obliteration of one’s personal past and the limitless possibilities of the erotic future.

The 747 landed in Melbourne to take on more passengers, but none of them came to first class. When it took off again, an hour later, Hissao had still not spoken to his companion. They took off into the face of a large black storm. Hissao gave himself up to the power of the engines. He offered himself to them. He felt no fear, only pleasure, in the even greater power of the storm as it pushed the plane relentlessly, breathlessly, upwards before throwing it fiercely into the cold holes in its boiling middle. In Melbourne, as so often happens in summer, it dropped from 35 °C to 18 °C in ten minutes and sweating men in shirt sleeves in Flinders Street prepared to make it the subject of headlines—it was autumn after all.

They reared and lunged above the monotony of Melbourne’s west, out across the melancholy wheat plains around Diggers’ Rest where Hissao’s grandfather had once sold T Model Fords to farmers who could not sign their own name. He passed over Bendigo where Badgery & Goldstein had first performed. They were still in the storm half an hour later above Jeparit where Sir Robert Menzies had
been born and where Hissao’s father met his mother in the mouse plague of 1937.

They passed the borders of the family history, but Australia stretched on for two thousand miles more and it would be another five hours before they left its coast. An International Vice-President of Uniroyal, returning from firing the Australian Managing Director, vomited his farewell drinks into a paper bag and somewhere else Hissao could hear a woman crying helplessly.

The woman beside him did not move anxiously in her seat or let out cries of fear or even sit like someone waiting for something unpleasant to pass. She was going home after her mother’s funeral and her thoughts were full of death and her own mortality and a fine chill of loneliness pierced her.

She had many friends, was much loved by them, and certainly had no shortage of lovers, but both her parents were dead and she had the sensation, now, of being in the front line with none of the conventional weapons of family or children or even country to defend herself against the realities of death and nothingness. Yet she was a strong woman, and an optimist at that; she was not in the least frightened by life, so that when, above Jeparit, Hissao began to talk to her, she gave him the whole of her intelligent attention and warmed her chilled thoughts in conversation.

The most puzzling thing in the entire encounter occurred at a certain stage very late in the conversation, when she discovered she had been talking to a man. She had the feeling of a dream where things and people transmogrify, characters dissolve from one to the other like tricks in a film, monsters in a bottle. She had the sense, the very distinct sense, of her companion’s female gender; she had been pleased to find it, had relaxed into it, had been even more delighted to find it coupled with an elegant wit and a sense of both joy and irony. The forces of life, she thought to herself, are flying high tonight.

Later she tried to remember if she had taken pills or perhaps drunk excessively, but there had been only one glass (of champagne) and certainly no pills and yet, in the soft whistling dark above the Arafura Sea she found herself deep in conversation with a man, as in a dream, and her nipples contracted and her vision tunnelled and the sense of what had happened and was happening was disturbed, disorientating, and intensely erotic at the same time. What she saw as through a smeared glass darkly was a Renaissance face, a Bacchus that belonged to red wine, grapes, apples with the bloom of Tuscany on them, a vision saved from decadence by a firmness, a cleanness of will that showed in the intense blue eyes.

As she leaned across the last six inches of reserve to kiss him she felt his maleness to be overlaid with a soft blue shadow, the memory of the woman she had begun to talk to.

They were in the back seat of first class. The movie was running. Hissao removed the seat divider. She held his face a moment. Hissao smiled, thinking of the lines of her life held firmly against him, the beginning of her heart line touching the beginning of his smile.

Naturally she misunderstood the smile.

“It’s all right,” she whispered, “I’m just trying to imagine who you are.”

His intentions were not bad. It may be tempting to find in those rosy Tuscan apples the worm of self-absorption, to see in his Bacchus lips the centre of his moral universe. He has, after all, declared himself amoral. He likes to think of himself as a pirate, a brigand, a citizen of risk. But let me tell you, he has the morals of a schoolteacher. Forget the Bacchus lips. He is as careful as a clerk. Even when he removed the seat divider he was beginning to stand, to place the parrot safely amongst his folded coat.

His mistake was to expect caution on the part of his companion. After all, they were not alone. The stewards were sitting upstairs and could return at any moment. The other four first-class passengers were absorbed with
The Railway Children
but that could prove to be indigestible at any moment.

But his companion, Rosa Carlobene, was not known for timidity and tonight, above the Arafura Sea, she was seeking the warm juices of life, defying the tapeworms of habit and order, luxuriating in the complexity of her sexual feelings, flying high on the side of the angels against death and despair.

Thus it was poor Rosa who, in one strong sinuous thrust, ground her pelvis into the head of the golden-shouldered parrot.

Hissao felt the skull squash and wetness spread. He leapt to his feet. He did not care for caution, discretion, customs spies, or Rosa Carlobene. He unzipped his fly, hoping against hope.

And Rosa, who had misunderstood the bump that was the parrot, now misunderstood the blood on Hissao’s trembling hands.

“What is it?”

She clutched at his sleeve. He sat down again, but he was fiddling around his fly. “It’s nothing,” he said.

“Did I hurt you?”

“It’s nothing, nothing, I promise. Don’t worry.” But the words did not match his tone which was cold and angry.

“I have hurt you?”

Hissao did not weep easily, but he wept there, in that aeroplane with the last of the golden-shouldered parrots dead inside his trousers.

Carla felt as if she was having a bad reaction to a drug. She patted at his lap with a handkerchief and was horrified to find it streaked with death.

“It’s no good,” he said. “It’s dead.” And he pushed her hand away.

Remembering the incident in later years each of them would physically groan out loud and shut their eyes (each one in their different country, in a different life, carrying the sharp blade of feeling that was unblunted by time or touching), yet the degree of their suffering was different and Rosa’s pain, in comparison, was no more important than a stubbed toe or a
faux pas
. Much more was involved for Hissao—it had been his ambition to be recognized as the man who had saved the golden-shouldered parrot.

It was because of this incident, with his guilt, with his contempt for himself, that his hate unleashed itself, a steel spring unsprung, a Japanese paper flower opening up to show its livid heart in a glass of water.

He had loved his country more than he had pretended, and had tried to make something fine out of something rotten. He felt the feelings he had once described to Leah Goldstein as greatness but it was not greatness—it was the same feeling Charles described when he said he would strangle his wife.

A bird was a bird to Rosa Carlobene and although she knew her new lover was unhappy about its death she had little inkling of what it really meant to him. He was a smuggler. He had lost money. But he had come through customs without difficulty and, doubtless, he would smuggle again.

She woke in the night to see him climbing on to a chair in the bathroom. At first, half enmeshed by sleep, she thought he was doing himself harm, and then she saw, in the sickly green light of the UPIM sign that illuminated the room, that he was doing chin-ups. She smiled and went back to sleep.

Hissao did his exercises to make the tension go away. He did chin-ups until he could do no more. This of course, did not take place at the Rome Hilton where he was booked. There is nothing to
grip on above the doors in the Rome Hilton. They stayed, instead, in a small pensione on the fifth floor of a building in the Piazza Nationale. It was a clean enough place, but noisy. Beefy-armed female singers performed for the aperitif sippers in the square below.