football season came again, I missed him.
I was saddened to hear that he had died on the Kokoda Trail. I thought of that big strong body lying broken in the mud and I wished I had been with him, not a useless old man in a gaol, anxious that my families would be killed and taken from me. I dreamed, often, that Charles had been broken on some battlefield. I dreamed about his pets, unattended. They ate their last corn, expecting more. They had no idea that anything was wrong.
25
When people recall the character of that infamous goanna it is always devious and bitter, given to counterfeit affection, slow sidlings followed by razor-sharp attacks, but it was not always so and (as Emma would later point out) this change coincided with the loss of its front left leg on September 11th, 1939, and was the direct responsibility of Charles Badgery and a result of his inconsistency about the King of England. On the one hand he considered England and the English the scourge of all humanity; he knew them as hypocrites, snobs, snivellers, and past masters of the economic swifty; but on the other hand who was it (she asked) who, on that clear September Monday when the newspaper declared Australia would stand side by side with England in the war, who was it who went to enlist in the company of that well-known urger and bulldust merchant, Harry the rabbitoh?
They stood in a long winding queue at Victoria Barracks. It was ten in the morning. The rabbitoh was drunk. He botted cigarettes from the younger men and told them stories about 'Good Ol' Jack Monash'. Charles was nervous and solemn. He carried the two gang-gang cockatoos in a ferret box. The ferret box was on loan, but he had purchased the gang-gangs from the rabbitoh in a lane behind the Ship's Inn at Circular Quay.
While Emma knew all about the purchase of the gang-gangs, she knew nothing about the dreadful queue at Victoria Barracks, the very smell of which would have been enough to frighten her, for the group of men shuffling their shoes, rustling their newspapers, plunging their hands into their pockets, feeling their balls, tilting their hats, had the distinct odour (as pungent as sweat) of war. Even had she smelt the smell, had she known about the queue, Emma would have been confident, complacent even, that her husband would never stand in such a thing - she knew, she thought, where he stood vis-a-vis the King of England.
There were problems, that morning, more pressing than war. It was unseasonably hot and the arcade was packed with schoolchildren who had been brought in to see Charles's latest merchandising idea: the Cockatoo Exhibition. ('Every cockatoo known to science', theSydney Morning Herald said, 'will be presented this week by a George Street business man, Mr pushed and prodded at their charges and shouted at them to quell the noise. O'Dowd the jeweller sent his handsome nephew across to complain that the schoolchildren were keeping away customers, which he did, but not before he had complimented Emma on the beauty of their window display: the palm cockatoo with its katzenjammer haircut and bright red cheek, the pink cockatoo whose raised crest was a sunrise of red and yellow, whose plump chest showed a pretty blush that descended as far as its leather-gloved claws. There were red-tailed cockatoos, casuarina cockatoos, a little corella and a galah. Only the gang-gangs were missing, but their food tray contained the long blackened seed pods of wattles and some hawthorn berries for which exotic food gang-gangs have a great weakness. Emma had hung a carefully printed sign on its front door: 'On its way'. There was some confusion about this sign (some imagining that it meant that the bird had departed) but not nearly so had stuck in the window when Henry had been born; this gave a misleading impression about the sex and weight of the long-billed corella now gorging itself on Wimmera wheat.
It was a noisy and confusing day. Emma tried to feed the baby behind a plywood screen but was interrupted by children wanting to know how much the cockatoos cost. She had stained the front of her dress and was embarrassed. The proprietor of the sandwich shop, a woman with a growth on her hand the size of an apple, came to tell her about the war and all the men rushing off to enlist. Emma murmured vaguely, nodding her head, patting Henry regularly on the back, feeling the damp spreading from his napkin on to her dress. She was not worrying that her husband would leave her to fight a war. It was bad enough that he was away for two hours. She was in a panic about technical questions.
A murmur did not suffice. Perspiration formed on her lip and she observed, helplessly, an old lady poking her soft pink fingers into cages where they had no place. The bed was not made. The kitchen was littered with millet and cake crumbs. The whole flat stank of bad apples and overripe horsemeat and, although they said you couldn't get pregnant when you were breast-feeding, she knew she was.
Through all this confusion the goanna wandered and was, as usual, quite at home. He could be trusted to stay within the confines of the shop and he was learning, Emma thought, not to frighten the birds who died easily from what the vet called 'trauma'. It seemed never to have occurred to the goanna that he was a prisoner, rather that he had blundered into some cornucopia and his manner, although hardly charming, was amiable enough. He pressed himself against the bubbling aquariums and blinked a slow, meaningless, reptile's blink.
But on the day that war broke out all this was to change. First the woman from the sandwich shop returned to say that Mr Badgery was enlisting. He had been seen, she said, at Victoria Barracks.
Emma dissented, struggling with a napkin pin on the shop counter, watching two boys poking at the goanna's pale underbelly.
'No,' she told the boys, but lacked confidence.
'With two galahs', the woman from the sandwich shop said, 'in a cage, in a queue.'
Only when the galahs were described in detail did Emma realize that the story was correct.
The front of her dress was stained with milk and damp with pee, but she did not pause to change, nor, when she issued her instructions, did she murmur. She put the baby firmly on her hip. 'Look after the shop,' she said to the woman from the sandwich shop. 'I'll be back in half a mo.'
'It's the lunch hour. My Sylvie's by herself.'
'I'll tell her where you are,' said Emma Badgery and pushed herself through a panic of children's legs into the confusion of George Street where the war was declaring itself, flapping on the wings of newspapers.
It was then that the goanna who had, perhaps, been prodded one time too many, decided to make its move. Under the illusion that it was a free agent it dragged its leathery belly along the cool tiles of the arcade, passed safely through a forest of thin legs and got itself as far as the fruit shop, right on George Street itself. The fruiterer, a young fox-faced man, took fright and slammed down the mesh grille with which he locked his shop at night.
The goanna was alarmed and climbed to safety. He got to the top of the grille and stayed there, thus preventing the fruiterer from opening his door again. The fruiterer could afford to wait a minute or two, but he was not prepared to see good business pass him by. He therefore began poking at the goanna with a broom handle. His wife managed to sell two bananas through the grille, but had her situation exploited by the customer who walked away without giving money in exchange.
The escaped prisoner was dashed to the floor with a broom stick and set upon by a passing fox-terrier.
The monitor reared up and stood on its back legs. Its throat inflated and it hissed like a dragon. The fox- terrier was small and fat. It had its teeth into the monitor's front leg and hung there, its back legs quite off the ground. No one passing seemed to notice. The monitor was six foot tall and it brought up its back legs and raked the fox-terrier's belly. The foxie yelped, dropped, walked a few yards, and collapsed, its green-grey intestines spilling out while it died, twitching, in the George Street gutter. It was Sylvie from the sandwich shop who put the rubbish bin down over the goanna. The greengrocer then helped her turn it and put the lid on. He swept its amputated leg out into George Street.
The Gould's Monitor was never quite the same again and all because, as Emma pointed out, Charles Badgery had gone off to enlist on behalf of the King of England.
26
Emma never did like those old toast-rack trams. She did not understand which was the green line and which the red. She was confused by the hieroglyphics they displayed on their front. She did not like the way they threatened to throw you out the door on bends. She had organized her life so that she avoided them
