Illywhacker (51 page)

And when my brood were safely asleep our little rituals would begin, everything in its place, one thing at a time. Brush your teeth, Herbert, in water so cold it hurts them. Empty your bladder into the stinking mysteries of the dunnycan. Bid your mother-in-law good night and climb into bed.

Sit there, wait, toss a little, turn a little so that she, still sitting by the fire, can inquire:

“Can’t you sleep?”

“No, not yet.”

“I’ll get some warm milk.”

The warm milk is produced, yellow with cream, in a thick chipped mug that has travelled all the way from London to Point’s Point, to Geelong, to Maribyrnong, to sit beside my bed, clinking on the marble-topped dresser beside my wristwatch with the luminous dial and the sweat-sour leather band.

The milk will not work, but it must be used, as part of our ritual, as the raising of the cup is in the other.

“You must sleep, poor man. I’ll sponge your face.”

“Ah, thank you.”

Yes, step by step, through this door, up this passage, jangling our keys, we proceeded, until the last door open we were permitted, as reward for our best endeavours, to cover each other with plum-soft kisses, while the half-drunk milk wrinkles its yellow face and separates itself into an edible impersonation of ageing skin.

I never blamed the holy pictures for bringing our idyll undone. They looked down on us, I thought, benevolently: Jesus with his heart showing, like an ad in a chemist-shop window; Mary ascending into heaven. I liked to have them there. Had Molly taken them down I would have complained.

No, I blamed the Irishman at Essendon, to whom Molly—worrying about persistent pains in her insides—at last made her full confession. The pain, it turned out, was only wind, for which charcoal tablets proved quite effective. But by then the Irishman had done his work and it had been decided that Molly must not keep me from my wife.

I was plump from puddings and my hands were soft. She
bought me a brand-new Dodge. She took me to Stobbit’s in Little Bourke Street and had a suit made for me. She dressed me, weeping, in her own electric belt. She knitted a sweater for Charles and a pair of socks and a balaclava for Sonia. But in the end there was nothing more she could do but make a thermos of strong black tea—it took only fifteen minutes—and present me with two tins of cake with pussy cats painted on them.

She stood in front of the old church hall that I had stolen from the Methodists. She plucked at the tall sedge grass that had invaded the grounds. She wore an unfashionably long cream dress which billowed out in the cold morning wind. She had used too much lipstick on her smile and her skin was dusty with powder, like the wings of a moth damaged from its adventures. She wore a cloth flower, a cream rose, in her gold-dyed hair. She held out a long-gloved arm and waved.

The gearbox in the Dodge was new and stiff. It moved reluctantly into first.

Charles kicked his new boots against the floor.

Molly, her soul now guaranteed safe and sound, retreated clumsily towards the solitude of the house.

I turned and drove straight back. But two days later we made our farewells for good. I headed up the Sydney Road, accompanied by St Christopher towards whose talisman I never felt anything but sentimental affection.

My attitude towards religion was not that of a serious man, and I did not think it odd that Sonia would have herself confirmed five times, not, that is, until the Church of England man in Ballarat brought it to my attention. This was in 1934 when Badgery & Goldstein lost the Dodge and my daughter decided on another confirmation.

I had no objection. She already had the dress.

I forget the minister’s name, but I vividly remember the boiled lollies he offered me. The rooms of his manse were stacked high with cardboard boxes, large glass jars filled with Eucalyptus Diamonds, Black Babies, Humbugs, Tarzan Jubes, and Traffic Lights. He did not explain himself but I have seen the type before: clergymen with an itch for commerce who must satisfy their natural cravings in odd ways. This fellow was obsessed with
buying things in bulk. He had me taste the marmalade he favoured, an orange Seville in a four-gallon drum, enough to last him a lifetime. He was a pleasant enough man with a great pile of fair wavy hair atop a high forehead. He had a hooded brow, bright blue eyes, and a small innocent mouth carried with him from his childhood.

He postponed the discussion of heresy (there was nought else on his mind) to show me the demijohns of water he had imported seventy miles from Melbourne. In the bathroom he demonstrated the comparative softness of Melbourne and Ballarat water by lathering his thin hairy arms and wrists—smeary Ballarat on the left, creamy Melbourne on the right.

We then sat in the front parlour and watched my pretty daughter play too roughly with his son. She did somersaults on the rough green lawn outside the leadlight windows and did not worry that she showed her panties.

Was I aware, he wished to know, of my daughter’s frequent confirmations?

You cannot suck a man’s humbug and be uncivil to him. I admitted to having seen her in her confirmation dress in another town, in other towns, with the Catholics in Sale, the Methodists in Yass. I had the photographs in my wallet—the pretty girl with the prayer book looking at the camera, sometimes alone, or, at Sale, in front of that redbrick barn of a thing, lined up with all those Irish eyebrows, pale skin, dark hair, squinting at the sun.

Did I believe? The reverend man inquired of me, proffering a second humbug which I declined.

In God?

His mouth wrapped around his humbug. His forehead creased. The big head nodded.

I confessed that I did not.

I did not, however, confuse the issue by admitting the pleasure I got from my daughter’s confirmations—to see her there with her mother’s green eyes alight with a passion not entirely selfish, that Bible clutched in her gloved hand. I envied her faith like I envied her careless tangle-armed sleep.

The clergyman did not come to the point right away. I realize now that he must have been busy with his humbug, wearing it down to a manageable size so that he might speak unimpeded, but at the time I was confused by his frown of concentration, his inexplicable pauses and frequent swallowing. Finally he got
his sweetmeat into a suitable state and he was able to explain the nature of my daughter’s heresy which he was now convinced she had inherited from that popish lot in Sale. He showed me the holy picture he had taken from her: the Assumption of the Virgin.

It was a beauty.

The Virgin rose above a great cloud of smoke while down below the adoring crowd raised their heads to what they could not see.

Sonia had assured the clergyman that she herself intended to do likewise and that her father Herbert Badgery (who art in heaven) could do it any time he liked.

“Oh dear.”

“Oh dear,” agreed the minister and bit his humbug so hard that it shattered in his mouth.

I looked at my daughter. I could not imagine what constellations whirled within her brain, how many angels she fitted on the heads of her pins, let alone how many she wedged under the edge of her broken fingernails.

I promised to attend to the matter as soon as possible but explained that we were newly arrived in Ballarat and busily establishing ourselves.

So if I may leave my daughter to tumble innocently upon the fresh-cut lawn, I must get down to explaining how it was we were in the Golden City at all.

By November 1934 I was a different man. I could read without moving my lips. I was an old python with his opaque skin now shed, his blindness gone, once again splendid and supple, seeing the world in all its terrifying colours. I had been drip-fed on Rosa’s letters and Leah’s monologues. I read the newspapers with the sensitivity of one liar regarding the work of another. An unemployed boilermaker from Williamstown, picked up on the road, was not just a witty fellow with a runny nose and a knowledge of horses, he was a symbol of the injustices that threaded all the way from the railway police who had most recently bashed him to Adolf Hitler and Mussolini.

People were still starving in Australia although the newspapers now denied it. When the Australian car industry at last
capitulated and General Motors began manufacturing the press trumpeted the triumph.

I had become an armchair expert, busting for a fight.

I built my huts wherever we stayed, and left them for others to shelter in. This pitiful charity was hardly satisfying to a man like me. And yet I could think of nothing better. I slandered the communists for mindlessness and the Labour Party for racism. And at the same time I envied Izzie whose letters rubbed at me, irritated me, judged me, were sand between the skins of Badgery & Goldstein.

And it was in this mood that I took on the railway police.

I would not have minded the railway police if they were weak or unprincipled men trying to survive. Christ knows I have been both, am both, will always be both. But the railway police did not have the grace to lower their eyes in the face of decency, acquitted themselves like bully boys, enjoying the thwack of their three-foot batons. They evicted human beings from carriages carpeted with sheep shit and thought themselves righteous for doing it.

The battle was not planned in advance and started quite by chance. We were carrying a swag of rosellas down to Melbourne and stopped, somewhere between Maldon and Bendigo, to inquire directions from a group of bagmen who were milling around the railway line. They were trying to get up to Shepparton to pick fruit. Fifty yards up the line I could see the cause of the blockage—there were half a dozen railway police leaning against a siding platform. They leant like men in a bar, sticking out their potato bellies.

There was a communist amongst the bagmen. He had got up a deputation and had conferences, but with no useful result—the johns had sworn to massacre the swaggies if they jumped the rattler. The men were now in disarray, some for fighting, some for staying, some for walking into Maldon to get the dole there.

What I did was not done like a nice man. It was done with spit on my shoe, swagger in my walk, a nasty glint in my eye, a charming smile on my face. As I walked up that railway track to talk to the bully boys I was my father’s son. I had a vision of myself that sunny morning as I had not had a vision of myself for years: I could
see
Herbert Badgery again. I was delighted to hear the crunch of railway gravel. I was pleased my shoes were spit-bright, my handsome head newly shaved. I adopted the
bearing of a brigadier and swung the silver-topped cane I used in my act as an idiot. I could feel Leah’s eyes (wet, bright, big) boring into my broad straight back, but I was not doing this for her admiration. I was doing it for my own.

I tipped my Akubra to the gentlemen in blue who hung around the siding drinking tea from their thermos. They had, of course, observed me speaking with their enemies, but they had also witnessed my walk towards them (need I stress,
again
, the importance of the correct approach to walking?). They were uncertain as to how to take me. Perhaps they brought me an inspector in disguise and they offered me tea and gave up the rest of their soiled lumpy sugar when I demanded it.

I was, by then, an accomplished Thespian; I understood the value of silence on a stage, how it can be used to induce suspense, and then hysteria. I used a long cloak of silence to examine them. The smallest one was the most dangerous. He was none other than John Oliver O’Dowd, the same who was later responsible for Izzie’s misfortune at Albury, a bully of a rare and dedicated sort, short, broad-shouldered, small-eyed, a type often mistaken for homosexual by people trying to explain the odd seepings of sentimentality in that otherwise impassive, excessively masculine face.

The others were bully boys to be sure, all leaning towards one another for support, thick-necked, broad-armed followers of orders, and my game made them edgy and uncertain. John Oliver O’Dowd was a good ten years older than his “bhoys” and it was to him that I addressed my remarks. I informed him of the numbers of men who waited on the track and said they only wished lawful work in the orchards, that they would be using carriages intended for animals already slaughtered or still in the fields, that they would be causing no financial loss to state or individual enterprise and that, if John Oliver O’Dowd should turn his official back, then these presently useless men might get on with producing wealth for the benefit of the state.

I spoke to him nicely. I could have sold him a Ford or a cannon. I did not permit him easily to hate me. I stroked the bastard like a trout until my demands made him turn, reluctantly, from me.

“All very decent, Mr Badgery,” O’Dowd said at last (carefully, carefully). He pulled a hair from his nose and gazed at it a second. “I dare say. But we are policemen and we have our orders and intend to obey them.”

His zombies dragged their heels through gravel, intent on underlining their boss’s remarks.

“If you obey your orders, Mr O’Dowd, I will drill these men for half a day and then I shall march up here and we will go through you lot like a hot knife,” I smiled, “through a block of lard.” I made myself
like
him as I spoke to him. And liking him, of course, was more than half of it, to understand why this miserable O’Dowd with his short arms and thick wrists should be the animal he was, to imagine his miserable cot, his nights beneath hessian bags sewed into quilts, his early frosty mornings, his loveless dusks, his unbending father, his withered disappointed mother. You cannot fake this affection, and O’Dowd knew, in the very moment I threatened him, that I also
liked
him. It weakened him horribly.

“That’s as may be,” he said, smiling himself.

“As will be.”

“Come, Mr Badgery, those buggers is all commos.”

“Have you not heard of me?” I inquired, spitting out my tea-leaves daintily at his feet. He shifted a boot sideways just in time.

“Can’t say I have.”

“You would be familiar with the International Workers of the World?” Oh, what pleasure it was to counterfeit this belief, this membership, to see his small eyes blink at my lovely, shiny lie.