'You like it?' He picked his lower teeth with a big square thumbnail. 'It makes me want to vomit.'
For a moment I thought he was a basher after all and that he had to make himself angry before he could get his fists to me. I pulled down my shirt sleeves.
'But I can see', he said, examining his thumbnail, 'that it'd be a different matter for you. It could even be valuable to you. Now, to someone like me, it's a very unsettling thing to have around the house, and there's also the question of the expense I put into it.'
'But this chemist chap…'
'Phelan.'
'Phelan. This Mr Phelan gave you the formaldehyde.' I did not mean to argue with him. I was trying to point out that I had not put him to a lot of trouble. This is how your mind starts to work after two months in gaol.
'Gave me the formaldehyde? Who says so?' He peered around the cell. There was not much to peer at – we had the big black cockroaches that year, not the smaller German ones which, now I think of it, were probably not German at all. He studied the gaps between the floorboards, then the single shelf which was, so early, already crammed with Goldstein's letters. 'Who says so?'
'There are no witnesses,' I admitted.
'That's right, Badgery.' He grinned and winked at me. You couldn't help liking him when he was like that. He didn't look like a copper at all, but a farmer about to set off for the pub. 'So who's to know if I paid for the formaldehyde or not? Perhaps I have a receipt, here, on me, from Mr Phelan. He's not exactly what you'd call a Mason.'
'Is that so?'
'It is.' He was, suddenly, very solemn.
In the silence that followed I realized that I was not to be bashed. It was only bribery that was required. The night was full of the high-pitched whine of the swamp.
'Here, take it,' Moth said, suddenly blown along on the gust of a new mood so that where, a minute before, he had been pensive, as still as a pig on a butcher's hook, he was now all eyes and elbows. He thrust the Vegemite bottle at me. 'Here, take it. Take it for a pound. I'll settle for a quid. It's a nasty wormy thing you've done and it's a nasty wormy thing in a bottle, and I don't want it. I hope it gives you nightmares, Badgery. I hope it makes you see things when you're awake.'
'Done,' I said, giddy with relief.
'Three quid,' he said, 'and it's yours.'
'Done.' I did not care about the three quid. All I had in my bank account was the money he had arrested me with: three pounds, two shillings and sixpence.
'Three pounds two and six, and you have a deal.'
'Done,' I said, and happily signed the withdrawal chit he had brought in with him.
Moth rose and, having fussily arranged his genitals, knocked on the door to be let out. This was habit, but quite unnecessary. The door was unlocked, and there was no one except prisoners to hear him knock on it. All he had to do was open it, walk down two steps, cross the so-called 'quadrangle', duck under the big rainwater tanks, cut through the big shade house full of eucalypt seedlings – a nice cool place with a pleasant smell of damp earth and sawdust -and he would be at the front gate which would not, probably not, be locked either. The prisoners were either very young and in for very short sentences or, like me, too old to consider the fifty-mile walk.
Moth stood at my door, waiting. He drummed his fingernails against the plywood.
'I'll tell you, Badgery. I would have given it to you. I would have paid you money to take the nasty thing. Have you ever noticed', he said, 'how in a dream nothing ever stays still? Things are always moving, Badgery. Have you noticed?'
I stood up and opened the door for him. I just turned the handle and moved it in an inch so he would feel what I had done, but he no longer seemed interested in leaving.
'Always moving. You look at a face and you think you've got a fix on it, but it changes. The mouth opens and becomes a fish or if it's pretty it turns ugly and all the white skin is suddenly scars. You have noticed it, haven't you?'
'Yes,' I said.
'That's right,' he nodded in satisfaction. 'And lovely roses turn into lumps of meat. You cannot grasp it, isn't that right, like mercury between your fingers?'
'Yes,' I said.
'That's right,' he said. He stared at me with those odd pale eyes that seemed to shift mercurially from belligerence to puzzlement. 'I knew you'd know,' he said.
He blinked and looked at me for a moment before he realized that the door had been opened. Then, without word, he turned and left me. I watched him pass out of sight under the tank stands. A minute later -he must have been running -I heard his car start and saw the lights sweep across the so-called 'cottages' where the screws were obliged to live with their unhappy wives.
I understood a little more about Sergeant Moth when I met his brother and heard he was famous in the Clarence River region for his enterprise in the field of small bribes. He made his money from after-hours drinkers, two-up schools and SP bookies and it was only natural that he would, like a careful housewife, hesitate before throwing out the scraps of an arrest.
I didn't look at the ugly 'souvenir' for weeks. I avoided it. I hid it behind Goldstein's envelopes – those perfumed razor blades -and when I saw it again, by accident, it had gone mercifully cloudy. There was a particularly hot February night in 1939, the one in which the yabbies caused so much trouble, after which the liquid in the bottle turned gin-clear. It was then that I noticed what looked like a wart behind the knuckle. But by 1939 I had other things to worry about. I had become a student. I had the privilege of a desk and extra shelves. Never mind I cracked the asbestos sheeting putting up the shelves -I got written up in theRankin Downs Express and when my exam results came out they made an even bigger fuss.
I had the bottle tucked away behind the dictionary that the governor had given to me. Every time I removed the book I could not help noticing that the wart was growing bigger. This worried me as much as if I'd found a growth on my own finger, one that frightened me so much I couldn't confess it to myself, let alone a doctor.
I started to take the dictionary down, not for a useful word, but to glance at what I'd hidden behind it. I saw it happened just as Sergeant Moth said it did.
The finger changed. It changed all the time. It changed like a face in a dream.
I will not upset myself by describing the slimy monsters that tried to free themselves from that bottle, but rather tell you about the morning I woke early and found it filled with bright blue creatures that darted in and out of delicate filigree forests, like tropical fish feeding amongst the coral.
Is it hard to understand why an old man with his dentures in his hand would suddenly show his pink gums and grin? There: Herbert Badgery, Apprentice Liar, as delighted as a baby with a bright blue rattle.
13
The AJS had been wheeled into Chaffey's shed where it had been, solicitously, covered with a tarpaulin to keep off the shit of wandering chickens.
It was a hot night and the smell of the mouse plague was heavy in Charles's nostrils as he lay in bed. He could hear the mice gnawing at the walls and scampering across the ceiling and, occasionally, a small squeak to indicate that one of his snakes was still dining.
He was hungry. His stomach was tight and he had a taste like iron filings in his mouth but it was, just the same, lovely to lie in a bed in a room by himself, even if the room was just an open back veranda. The mattress smelt a little unusual, but he was used to other people's smells, strange sheets, hessian blankets, beds shared with bony children, pissing children, pinching children. He could sleep anywhere, on kitchen tables or in hay sheds, it made no difference, and when he was an older man, suffering insomnia, he would look back nostalgically on those lonely nights when he could escape hunger or heartache just by lying down and closing his eyes.
He slept easily, dreaming instantly of his pet shop in which environment the smell of mice (now gnawing at the salty underarms of his carelessly discarded shirt) was nothing more than the aroma of a pet's cornucopia.
