arrived and, imagining that his mother might, once again, have a competing visitor, he departed. At another time, a steamy Sunday afternoon, he entered the flat itself. There was a party in progress and the room was full of very peculiar-looking people. Charles took a piece of cheese and ate it defiantly before he lost his nerve and fled.
For the most part, however, he wandered the streets of the city itself, hot, tired, too shy to do business with the impatient tram conductors. He took his suit back to Anthony Hordern's to be altered and repaired and was roared up by the old salesman for treating it so badly. He spent a lot of time in Campbell Street pricing birds in those dark crowded little pet shops most of which – although he did not know it at the time – had whorehouses out the back. He stared at French sailors at the Quay and bought half a pint of prawns from an itinerant barrow man. And in Bathurst Street, amongst the shops of pawnbrokers, second-hand clothes shops and tyre vulcanizers, he found Desmond Moore's now famous bookshop where he inquired after a book of poetry by Phoebe Badgery.
The bookseller was a slim young man with a blond moustache. He looked at Charles and frowned. He took in the loud checks, the large hat, the hearing aid, the shape of the head, the width of the neck, the bow of the legs, the size of the boots, all the time wondering how such an apparition fitted in with Phoebe Badgery whose charms he much admired.
The bookseller asked where it was he'd heard of such a book.
Charles fiddled with his hearing aid, banged it with his fist, and placed it on the counter. His eyes were as big and soft as a sheepdog's. His hands were large and tightly clenched. His fingernails were broken.
'Where', the bookseller said, unnecessarily loud, 'did you hear of this book?'
''I was told.' Charles's face was aflame. He wished he had never come to Sydney where everyone wished to insult and abuse him.
'By whom?' said the bookseller, enjoying the game of speaking so loudly. He glanced around to collect the tributes of his fellow workers, the rolled eyes, the wry smiles, the hand across the lipsticked laugh. 'By whom', he said, ending the word with a real hum, 'were you told?'
Charles became angry and stamped his foot. 'That's for me to know, and you to find out.'
'Now, now.' The bookseller extended a pale placating palm. 'I meant no offence.'
'None taken.' His voice was too loud. He could not hear it exactly, but he could feel it was too loud. 'Just get me the book.'
'There is no book.'
'Then I'll go elsewhere.' He began to stuff his hearing aid away in his jacket pocket.
'There is no elsewhere. There is no book by Phoebe Badgery. I take it', he said, 'that you are a friend of Mrs Badgery's?'
Charles's ear suffered a hurt, a sharp crack, and he misheard.
'Then you're a fool for saying so,' he said.
In the street outside, amidst the stink of car tyres, he burst into tears, and when he arrived back in Bondi (having spent ten shillings on a taxi rather than put up with the rudeness of one more tram conductor) Leah was alarmed to see his swollen face. She asked him what the matter was and he burst into tears again.
It was then he told her the whole story and they sat at the kitchen table, drinking tea, both crying together.
It was in the aftermath of this incident that he decided he would go to Spain. There was much in his decision, of course, that was immature and there was a part of him that looked forward to his death in Spain as a suitable punishment for the mother who had not loved him sufficiently. Yet there were other, finer threads to the fabric of his character, motives so simple and obvious that when Izzie and Leah quizzed him about them, he moved them, even Izzie, with the simplicity of his answer.
Charles said: 'Because I am for the weak and against the strong, not the strong against the weak, and I've got the money for the fare.'
That, at least, is what Leah reports him to have said, and I have always intended to ask if he really did make so fine a speech. I was much affected by it at the time.
Whatever he said, Izzie Kaletsky was the one who wrote down the address of a comrade who would help make the arrangements 10 George Fipps was not meant to vet Charles. Nor was he meant to accept the fare money from him. All he was meant to do was provide the boy with a letter of introduction to the International Brigade in London. And, indeed, he came to the meeting with the letter neatly folded in the breast pocket of his shirt.
But in the steamy beer-sour shadows of the Sussex Hotel, Charles -who had misunderstood the purpose of the meeting -pushed an envelope towards the comrade who left it where it was, not an inch from his beer glass. The envelope contained one hundred and twenty pounds in purple fivers.
Perhaps George Fipps already sensed what the outcome of the meeting would be and that was why he neither pushed the envelope away nor picked it up. He studied it, as if it were fate itself lying there on the damp towelling, slowly darkening.
George Fipps was thirty-six years old. He was a big, handsome, sleepy-lidded man whose blond hair, after twenty-one years of Brylcreem, had begun to take on a slightly green tinge. In his youth he had been a larrikin and a street-brawler and he was still proud of his strength and his fighter's skills. He rolled his white shirt sleeves as high as they would go.
He had not intended to go to Spain himself. But then he had not realized, until his meeting with my innocent son, how much he hated permitting young comrades to fight when he could have done it better himself. He helped collect the money for their fares -those painfully arrived at zacs and deeners – but he had never let himself know, until he saw that envelope, how much he loathed being one of those old men who send young men off to war.
This was not a thing he could confess to afterwards. All he would say was that Charles had not been suitable. He told Izzie: 'He was a keen young fellow, but he didn't have no theory. Jeez, mate, I couldn't let him. I couldn't have the comrades in Spain think we was all so bloody ignorant.'
But to Charles he said nothing so cruel. He talked to him gently, talked so softly that he might have been with a woman in bed and Charles had to bring out his hearing machine and put it amongst the spilled beer on the bar. By the third glass he had convinced Charles that the best thing for the international working class would be for Charles to buy George's motorbike and sidecar and for George to go to Spain instead.
You would expect both men to be surprised by the outcome, but in the daylight darkness of the bar, with the soft nasal excitement of the horse races on the wireless, it had seemed – to both of them -sensible. It was only in the street outside that they saw what they had done. George Fipps began to spit and slap his hands together. Charles stood and grinned at his new motorbike – it was black and gold and it gleamed, it dazzled, in the sun.
George quickly taught him how to drive it and then they went over to the Balmain Police where George's brother-in-law issued a driving licence.
Outside in Darling Street the two men grinned at each other and shook hands. George Fipps spat three times into the gutter, winked, and set off towards his boarding house. Charles drove back to Bondi, drunk in charge, singing tunelessly, with a sidecar full of whitewash cans.
It was only when he started to tell the story to Izzie and Leah and he saw the look on Izzie's face that Charles saw his story could be looked at from other angles, i. e., that he had been cheated, that he had let himself be cheated because he was a coward. It was then, his head aching from beer, that he shouted at his host and threatened to punch him. He said he hated Sydney. He said it was full of liars and cheats and snobs. But what made him really angry, what he couldn't admit, was that he suddenly felt the sneer on Izzie's face was deserved. He was relieved he no longer had the money and no longer had to go.
The next day he read about the mouse plague in Victoria.
11
It was seven in the morning, and although it was not cold, although he had wrapped himself in a greatcoat, my boy's teeth were chattering in his head. He sat on the crackling AJS while Leah talked intensely, holding his gloved wrist as if, by doing this, she would retain him.
He had overfilled the machine with oil and it sounded, idling, like someone slapping jelly on a plate. Lenny
