His face, where you could see it through his rampant beard, was weathered and beaten by the combined forces of sun, rain and alcohol. His teeth were rotting. His bulbous nose made its own confession. His hair was grey and matted and one eye, half closed by a blow or a bee sting, gave him an untrustworthy appearance.
He was squatting on the ground like a blackfellow, quiet and still and cunning. I thought the swagman was looking at my legs.
'Good tucker?' the swagman asked.
I tried to hold the Gentleman's stance while I held the frog and walked in a modest fashion through the mud.
'You scared me, man,' I said.
'You scared me,' the swagman said. 'Walkin nekkid like that.' He watched me place the frog in the small white bag and then place the bag in the inside pocket of my folded suit coat. 'Is it good tucker?'
I was always fighting people I didn't need to fight. I feel like I've been awake all my life with a gun across my knees, waiting.
'Yes,' I told the swagman, 'very good tucker.'
'That a fect?'
'Like chicken,' I told him. 'You can't tell the difference. That is what they serve the kings and queens of France. It's only the ignorance of the average Australian toff that stops them doing the same thing.'
'That a fect?'
'Yes,' I said, tucking my singlet into my underpants, 'it's a fact.'
The swaggie shifted on his heels. His attitude was uncertain. 'I thought they killed the kings and queens of France,' he said. 'I seem to recall that they were killed. They had their heads chopped off, so I was told. They don't have kings and queens in France any more.'
This was all news to me. If I had not been a pig-headed fool I might have learned something, but I was more worried about two contradictory things – my dignity and the other frog. I went back into the soak while the swagman took the opportunity to have a closer look at my suit.
'I used to have a suit like that,' he said, 'but it was took from me up in Albury.'
'That a fact?' I mocked.
'Well,' the swaggie shrugged away his suit, 'you know those Albury types.'
I got my second frog and walked carefully back to solid ground. The swaggie watched me put it in its bag.
'We ate roof rats in Albury but we never tried the frogs, never even thought of them. I'm much obliged to you for the information, I must say, much obliged.'
I perched on the edge of the stream and washed my feet and then my hands. I managed to dress standing on a grass tussock.
I was given to doing things suddenly. I had strong emotions like unexpected guests and the urge to laugh or fight often overwhelmed me without warning. Similarly I was often beset with the desire to be good and generous, and I have no idea where this part of me comes from. Certainly not from my father who was never held back by his scruples. He was a fine man for talk of Empire and loyalty but it wasn't the Empire or loyalty that made him successful: he was a liar and a bullshitter and hungry for a quid.
If my father had seen me hand the pound note to the swagman he would have laughed out loud.
'Here,' I said, 'get yourself some flour and tea. Don't eat frogs. Christians don't eat frogs.'
We were both, the swaggie and I, puzzled at this development. He held Jack's pound between the thumb and forefinger of both battered hands and turned it over and over.
'If you don't eat frogs,' he said at last, 'why the dickens do you catch them?'
'My damn snake, man,' I said. I was furious about the fate of my pound note. 'I've got to feed my snake.'
'Of course you have,' the swagman said sympathetically, 'of course you have.'
'I'm deadly serious, man.'
'Of course you are.'
His mistake was to wink.
The pound note disappeared from the swagman's hand before the wink was over, but even when I held it, tightly crumpled, in my pocket, I did not feel any release from my confusion, I felt worse. I felt guilty, and this did not seem just.
'Charity is good for no one,' I said. 'Would you like to earn a pound?'
Later, when I recalled how I had made the deal with the swagman, I always felt ashamed, not of the deal itself which was certainly fair. (The swagman honoured it too, delivering two frogs each morning for the snake's breakfast.) I felt ashamed of reneging on the grander gesture which was more in keeping with how I would like to be.
I felt the swagman had looked at me and seen something less attractive in me than my bowed legs.
16
The whole household was in love with me, and although I knew it I doubt if I knew how much. Bridget blushed every time she put a plate in front of me, and Molly banned her from serving in the dining room, whereupon Bridget burst into tears and had to be comforted. I bought her an ice-cream from the ABC and she left the empty cone on her dressing-room table for weeks. However, she was not readmitted to the dining room. That was Molly's territory; she cooed and fluttered, big-breasted and blowzy, over dishes of vegetables, and Phoebe saw how she took such care with the arrangement of vegetables on my plate and also (a telling point this, for a woman raised in a poor family) that she gave me bigger portions, so discreetly bigger, somarginally bigger that they were, in Phoebe's words 'like brief eye contacts made between secret lovers, like the shadow of a moth passing across a night-time window'.
This was not only lost on me, it was lost on Jack as well. He did not notice that Molly folded my three pairs of socks, how she darned them when they holed, how carefully she placed my two clean shirts in my drawer, how she dabbed and brushed at my single suit coat.
Phoebe noticed. Sometimes her mother's behaviour embarrassed her but she also shared her mother's silent hurt when the subtleties of the vegetable servings were lost on me. I devoured them with the same indiscriminate passion I turned on all of life, whether it was the manager of the National Bank or a roast potato.
As for Jack and me, we got on like blazing houses. It would not have mattered a damn if I had had no snake or stories about aeroplane factories, in fact it would have been a damn sight better, but it is too late to alter the past and regret is a fool's emotion. And while we built a thousand aeroplanes and charmed a lot of snakes, there was plenty else to keep us interested. We had as many theories as peas on our plates and talked with our mouths full and spilled our drinks with sweeping gestures.
'You were like a pair of love-sick jackasses,' Phoebe said later, 'and you talked a lot of rot, but I loved you and I didn't mind.'
'Isn't it true,' Jack said, 'that if Leichhardt had an aero, we'd have had none of the tragedy, none of the loss, poor chap.'
I pointed to the problems of landing, of clearing a strip, supplying fuel and so on.
'Ah yes,' said Jack, stamping his stockinged feet and wiping his chin, 'but what about the parachute? Now there's an idea.'
'Bourke was a poor policeman,' I said, 'I doubt he could have managed it.'
'We're not talking of Bourke, man, it's Leichhardt. And in any case you've told me yourself, there's nothing to it.'
'A bit more than nothing,' I said, 'but less than a lot.'
'All right, granted,' said Jack, wiping up his gravy with grey Geelong bread, 'a bit more than nothing.'
'And he was a big man too, and possibly slow-witted.'
'Leichhardt?'
'No, Bourke.'
