completely.
But on this day she had no choice. She and the baby travelled by tram to Victoria Barracks. The army had set up a tent at the front gates and the men all queued to have their particulars taken down. She smelled the smell all right. She did not like it, but she would not be beaten by it. She pushed her way to where the odour was strongest, inside the tent itself, and demanded to see her husband. The men smiled at her. She saw the smiles, distant detached things like little red purses full of teeth. It was some time before she could be made to understand that if her husband was not in the queue and not in the tent then he had already been 'done'.
She turned to face the terrors of the trams again. She was dizzy. She went to a milk bar at the tram stop and asked for a glass of water. It was unthinkable that he would leave her. He had promised, in a church. She did not wait for the water. There was no time. She was dizzy like the other time, but worse. She was his possum, his mouse, his cherub, his delight. She rode down Oxford Street in a daze and when she found herself close enough to home – she recognized Hyde Park – she got out of the tram and began to walk. It was not her strong legs or countrywoman's walk that drew comments from passers-by. It was the unfocused look in her big round eyes. The pin (never properly clipped) dropped from the napkin in Liverpool Street, and the napkin itself flopped to the footpath on the corner of Pitt Street. There was something in her manner that prevented it being returned to her.
She pushed through the schoolchildren outside the shop and, finding her place behind the desk already taken by the lady with the growth, crawled quietly into the big cage that rightfully belonged to the goanna. The goanna, however, was in a rubbish bin behind the counter and so Emma was able to stay where she was, curled up, quite still, while conferences took place around her. The jeweller's nephew tried to speak to her but she did not seem to hear. It was decided best to leave it to her husband and so they put up the closed sign and shut the door.
Charles did not get home until six at night. He had been rejected from the tent because of his hearing and told, loudly, that there was no point in his name being written down. The rabbitoh persuaded him to go out to Bankstown where there was a fellow with his backyard full of golden-shouldered parrots. So when he arrived home he had the gang-gangs and a pair of golden-shouldered parrots as well. He did not realize anything was wrong.
He busied himself making the gang-gangs at home, whistling to himself all the while. He assumed Emma to be upstairs with the baby and took the pair of parrots up to show her. When he found the flat empty he came downstairs again and only when his son, asleep on his wife's breast, gurgled, did Charles see the situation.
He squatted before the cage.
'Emma,' he said.
She murmured.
'Emma, what are you doing?'
Emma was not so dizzy any more. She drank some water from a bowl. He could not go and leave her without water. When it got cold in the night, she moved enough to let him push a blanket in around her.
27
Charles did not know what to do. He did not dare telephone a doctor in case they took her from him and locked her away in an asylum. He was still only eighteen and had no experience of such things. He was very close to panic and because he was so frightened himself he adopted a very firm approach that gave no indication of his true feelings.
He prepared a meal and set a place for her. He told her the meal was there, but he did not bring it down to her.
That night he slept on his own side of the bed with his hearing aid connected and turned up loud. In the morning he found Emma's side of the bed still empty, disturbed only by his dream-churned limbs. He had a headache. He rose wearily, tucked his hearing aid into his pyjama pocket, slipped his big feet into felt slippers (once the very symbol of his perfect happiness) and padded into the kitchen. He sat on a bin of millet and stared for a long time at the meal he had left out for her. The heavy mantel clock struck seven. He stood. He examined the meal closely and found two tiny scratch marks where a mouse had sampled the congealed white fat on the plate. Towards the centre of the table were two small droppings.
A cacophony of cockatoos vibrated the diaphragm of his ear. He could make out, in the midst of this din, the peculiar calls of the gang-gangs, cries they would normally have made in flight, but he was too depressed and frightened to take pleasure from anything so simple and everything that might have delighted him on a normal day now caused him pain, even – in the bathroom -the sight of Emma's worn-out toothbrush produced an agony that could not have been greater had she actually died.
He washed his hands fastidiously and returned to the chops. He fetched a sharp knife and began, slowly, to cut them into cubes of a size that might be acceptable to a puppy. Then, with one chop still to go, he changed his mind, laid down his knife, tied up his dressing gown, licked his larded fingers, and went downstairs.
Emma already had the baby at her breast. She looked up at him and murmured. There was nothing mad about her face, nor the slightest sign of any hostility. But when she made goldfish motions with her lips there was a look in her eyes that did not go with kissing.
'Emma,' Charles said, squatting beside her. 'Emma, I'm going to make you a really good breakfast.'
Emma made goldfish kisses.
'But you've got to cut this out. Stop it. Stop it, Emmie. You've got to come upstairs and eat like a human.'
No matter what words he said, his voice betrayed him and Emma saw that she did not have to do anything. She showed him her gums and her teeth but her eyes remained alien, connected to rooms full of curtained thoughts.
'Please, Emmie.'
She frowned and shifted her bulk within the tight confines of the cage. At this stage she still wanted to get out. She was hungry. She wanted to eat bacon and eggs and chops and then have kisses. She wanted everything to be normal, as it had been before, and she did not guess that she was already clearing a path for her emotions to travel along, that the path would soon be a highway, cambered, sealed, with concrete guttering along its edges. She wrenched the baby gently and shifted him to her other breast and felt his lips begin their pleasant rhythmic contractions.
'All right,' said Charles, standing so suddenly that the guinea-pigs next door suffered a nearly fatal terror. 'All right,' he said, stamping his foot, causing the ceiling of the fishes' world to see-saw, sickeningly, upsetting the sea perch which now began to bite the rufous redfish, tearing its pretty tail which flowed behind like a bloodied bride's dress.
'All right,' he said, 'if that's what you want.'
He started to clean out the finches' cage, then, with tears streaming down his face, slammed the door shut.
He inspected his cockatoos and found the Major Mitchell already biting its feathers so severely that its glory was almost gone. The moth-eaten bird only reflected his emotions.
'All right,' he said. 'All right.'
Emma saw his face as it came back to her cage. It was red and terrible. The eyes were bloodshot and the forehead creased. He squatted in front of the cage and groaned and Emma felt a pulse of pure pleasure. It did not last long. There was fear as well, fear mixed up with it, but the feeling was lovely. Those great red hands clenched and unclenched as if they would circle her white neck and throttle her and those brimming wet eyes were worshipping her, begging her. Henry Underhill's daughter had never experienced such a thing. She felt trembling weakness and steely power, was tiny and huge, was a wren within an all-protecting hand that might, at any moment, crush her.
Charles did not know what he had just done. His temper left him on the stairs. He went to the kitchen and fussed over the second chop, cutting it even more finely than the first. He placed the meat in a cereal bowl together with some mashed-up vegetables. He brought the offering downstairs and placed it in front of his wife's cage.
When she saw the bowl, Emma knew that she was stronger than the men in the tent. Her big straight toes
