Illywhacker

giggled to see it, as if the yellow sheets were a circus arranged on her behalf.

'She thinks you have enlisted. Is that right?'

Charles, stooping to pick up his precious yellow notes, straightened. 'They didn't want to know me, Leah.'

'Don't be so solemn, Charlie. Everything will be all right.'

'They rejected me. But Emma doesn't even know I went.'

'Oh, she does, Charlie Barley, Gloomy Moony. She thinks you were accepted.'

'Oh.'

'That's right. 'Oh!' Why wouldn't they have you? Of course, your hearing. I'll write to your father about this. I'll do it this morning. He'll enjoy it.'

'He hates me.'

'When you say Izzie hates you, Charlie Barley, you may have a point, although personally I think that hate is far too strong a word. But when you say your father hates you, you are very, very wrong.'

'He didn't even write when Henry got born.'

'And you didn't write to him either.'

'He hates me.'

'Wait, Charlie Barley, and you'll see.'

'He blames me for what happened to Sonia.' He assembled the yellow sheets and brought them back to the counter where he fiddled with them, taking too much trouble to make them all line up square in the stack he had made. He looked up at Leah defiantly. His eyes were puffy. He went back to the stack of paper. 'Sometimes I dream I skun her. Skun the skin off her…'

'Don't.'

'And she smiles at me. She don't know what's happening to her.'

'Shush,' Leah said, brushing hair from his suit shoulder and doing up his coat buttons. 'Only happy talk now. There's a terrible war starting and all sorts of rotten things everywhere, but go and look after your wife who loves you. Tell her you are not in the army. Do you have any money? Here, I'll lend you a pound. Go and buy -no, I'll go and buy some sparkling hock – don't argue, and you can put candles on the table tonight and you can celebrate that you won't be making her a widow after all. I'll be back in a moment. And then I must do my baking and cook something suitable for that person whom your wife', she giggled, 'insists on calling 'Hisy-door', the little rat – not her, him – do you know that he has the cunning to be having an affair with a colleague at the school? His nasty headmaster, the one who gives him the lift to work, came and told me all about it. He seems most disturbed by the horrid idea of a man with no legs having sex with a woman with two. That was at the heart of it. He just wished it stopped and he thought telling me would stop it, but I don't live in the real world any more. I write to your father and tell him how happy I am. I tell him such fibs, Charlie Farlie, can you believe that?'

'I's'pose so,' said Charles, who was disturbed by the turn of the conversation. He locked the till and then unlocked it. He did not like Leah using the word 'sex' and he liked even less the personal nature of her confession. Worst of all he did not like to hear that she told lies.

'Do you disapprove?' Leah leaned over the counter but he shrugged and pulled the handle on the till so the drawer flew open with a little 'ding'.

Charles shrugged. 'I dunno,' he said.

Leah held out her hand and he shut the till. 'Don't disapprove of me, Charlie.' She looked intently into his eyes. 'If I told him the truth I would drown. What are you thinking?'

He could not hold that gaze. It embarrassed him. 'What you taught us,' he said.

'Don't disapprove of me, Charlie. I will tell him the truth later, not now. When he gets out, I'll tell him the truth. There is plenty of time. But for the moment I will be unprincipled. Did you notice my red shoes?'

He hadn't. He came round from behind the counter to inspect them.

'I feel I have invented them.' She giggled and covered her mouth with her hand. 'I'll get the hock. You give her the good news after I've left. I think I'd weep if I was here.'

Charles listened to the red shoes tapping across the grimy floor of the arcade. He was disturbed by her confessions. He disapproved of Izzie's infidelity. He was disgusted that she should tell lies. But he was also excited by the pressure of her hand and the appeal of her grey eyes when she begged him not to judge her.

31

It was thus lodged in Charles's brain that his wife had entered a cage to punish him for something he had done, and he saw how, from her point of view, he had been insensitive and thoughtless. He did not think her mad at all, but only saw the degree to which he had made her so unhappy.

He could not apologize enough. Whenever the shop was empty they kissed, great blood-swollen kisses, tender and easily bruised. Emma huddled into her husband's strong arms and bent her broad shoulders. She shrunk herself against his chest, all the time awash with the most delicious emotions.

She did not know she had become addicted, not even at four o'clock when they could stand the ache no more, locked up the shop, pulled down the blind and made love to each other on the dirty floor and with every stroke he slid inside her, hard and big as a bull, he was, at the same time, nothing but a baby, sucking at her breast. He smeared and bubbled her with her own warm milk, spread it across her smooth white chest and in the pink maze of her little ear whence he poured – even whilst he began to bang her, push her, thump her, rearing back with bulging eyes – his milk-white apologies, his child's requests for love.

They did not know what was happening to them. They had a celebration dinner and got tipsy on Goldstein's hock. They went to bed early and were asleep, immediately, in each other's arms.

So far, you see, nothing so remarkable. And yet some time that night Emma Badgery rose from her bed, and without waking herself enough to ask herself what she was doing, crept groggily down the stairs and evicted the Gould's Monitor from its cage. And there she was to stay, on and off, not every day, not every night, but more often than not, as long as she lived.

She never felt compelled to find reasons for it. It was guilty Charles who would always torture himself with reasons. As for Emma, she never once talked about the pleasure she felt, our little queen, to be there safe and warm with her husband dancing his love dance around her, big and strong, as dangerous as a bear, begging, threatening, pleading.

The shy little plant from Bacchus Marsh was soon raging, bright red and dazzling pink like wild lantana, across the entire landscape of her husband's life.

32

Hissao was too young to remember it but everyone else (i. e., Henry and George Badgery, the famous dullards) can tell you the story of how their father acted on the night of Nathan Schick's first visit to the Pitt Street premises. It was in the season of westerly winds which would explain why the children would be wide awake when their father came stumbling in drunk at that hour of the morning. They were not used to him being drunk and did not know it was him. They lay very still in the cage, pressed tight against the smooth skin and silk-clad breasts of their snoring mother.

Emma had been eating bacon sandwiches again. They had all been eating bacon sandwiches. The monster stood on the plate and when it broke it sounded like a rifle shot.

Of course they were frightened. They were frightened even before the creature began to crash up the stairs. The westerly was howling and threatening to drag the roof, screeching, up into the night. Clouds scudded across the top of the big skylight which always illuminated their dreams and nightmares. Through this frame they saw warty faces illuminated by thunderstorms. They watched for enemy bombers and, having freed themselves from the tight clamp of their mothers's sleeping embrace, saw torn newspapers pass across the sky like migrating birds.