– go hurling snakes around the room, ranting with a young man's passion, destroying the very thing I wanted.
'You don't believe me?' I asked him quietly. I fancy you could describe my smile as wry but my eyes, I felt them, were small and showed themselves as an intense violet blue.
Charles laughed again.
I did not lose my temper. I spoke sweetly, so softly that he had to produce his machine again and listen with a strained expression. 'Then why…'I said.
'Speak up.'
'Then why', I waited for him to get the thing adjusted, 'are we so easy to fool? Why do we let them call it 'Australia's Own Car'?'
He did not obey the rules. He did not know them, the bloody ignoramus.
'Because it is.' He thumped his fist on the table and made the plates jump. Emma's eyes slanted and she hunched her shoulders. Leah stared at the tablecloth. Phoebe examined the little watch she had pinned to her breast and the two bigger boys, the apprentice dullards, put on their deadman's eyes and looked to the front.
'No,' I said. I was still quite calm. 'It's a lie. And the shame is, it's not our lie; it's their lie.'
'Your father', Leah said, 'uses the word lie' in a slightly eccentric way,' and she touched my leg again, beneath the table, recalling the tender conversation we had conducted over our Bundaberg rum.
'There are several meanings to the word 'lie',' said Phoebe, speaking as a professional in matters to do with language, 'but only one to the word 'liar'.'
'A lie', I said, 'is something that isn't true at the moment you say it.'
I saw Goldstein's smile – it spread to her eyes and suffused her skin as pervasive as a blush.
'E. g.?' my son demanded.
I had lived with my Vegemite jar so long that I did not find its contents disgusting. Often it was frightening but mostly it reminded me of the trivial nature of my imagination – for I had no doubt that it was this that controlled its contents. I could do no better than some warts, a fish, and – for a week or two – a tiny fox-terrier (it was only half an inch long) that finally changed into something like a cauliflower. Even mad Moran had made angels.
'E. g.?' my son demanded.
When I placed the bottle on the table, I was pointing out our lack of courage and imagination. It was all so clear to me that I felt no need to explain it further.
'E. g.,' I said.
But all they saw was a finger floating in a bottle.
Emma grabbed for it, but it was Charles who won possession. He looked at me with disgust but I was too far along the line of my argument to go back and explain it to the slower ones.
'What is this thing?'
'Almost anything you're brave enough to make it into.'
'I don't understand you,' Charles roared.
'I don't understand you either, mug.' (I was blowing it. Tough shit. Rough tit. Too bad.) 'How can you turn your shop into a wing-ding for a Yankee card trick? Australia's Own Car! It's bullshit, boy. You've been done like a dinner.'
'I haven't been done, Father. I have done. I've done more than you ever did. You lied and cheated and passed dud cheques. You never fed us. We never had clothes. We were cold and hungry when you looked after us. Now look at you. Look at you all. Jeez, you get up my nose. I'm sorry, Leah, but it's true. I feed you all. I put food in your mouth, and yours, and yours, and yours, and yours. It's my worry, my responsibility, and no one here lifts a finger to help me.' His voice went up an octave. 'You come along here with your socialism or your poetry or your sarcasm or this, thisthing, but none of you actually do anything. In real life, someone has to talk to the bank manager. It's me. I'm the one. I'm a business man. All those years, Father, you talked as if you were a business man, but I can see now you weren't a business man's bootlace. You moaned and groaned about the Pommies and the Yanks but you never did anything. And now you've got the nerve to criticize my car. Well it's Our Car. There's not another one like it in all the world. Is there one in Russia? Ha. In America? No, it's ours and we made it.'
Everyone was silent, but Charles was at that point – I know it well – where the climax of a rage is not quite reached and something, some definite thing, must be done to cap it off. The flag must be driven into the snow.
'But,' he said, thrusting his hand into his jacket pocket and pulling out a crumpled quid note, 'but, seeing you are all so independent, here's a quid from me towards the food and grog. I'm sure you can all pay for yourselves. Put that thingdown,' he said to Emma, but his wife was entranced by the Vegemite jar and did not even look up when her husband left the room and stamped down the stairs into the night.
Henry and George sat rigid. Emma and Hissao were already busy with my bottle.
'Well,' Phoebe said brightly. 'I must be off, too.' She kissed me briskly on the cheek and she had been borne out into the night on black feathers before anyone had a chance to ask her for a penny towards the meal.
I must have looked miserable because Goldstein kicked my ankle and smiled at me.
'Don't worry,' she said. 'He'll be back in a minute.'
It happened just as she predicted. He was away no longer than it takes to walk around the block, up Castlereagh, into Liverpool, and back. He came into the room holding his hat in his hand with his shoulders rounded, his long arms pressed against his sides. I did not want him to apologize. I thought him entitled to say what he said, even if I did think he had been tricked by the Yanks. I tried to stop him, but he insisted. He did not do it briefly. He went on and on and I had to listen. He was in the habit of it: apologizing for things he was not to blame for. I could not look at him, only at the tablecloth.
'I hope you will stay,' he said.
'Oh yes,' I said.
'Not just tonight.'
'Thank you.'
'But always.'
It went on, we will leave it there. Let me say only that there were soon more tears – even Goldstein joined in – and soon I was walking through the warm bright streets of Sydney with my dancer on one arm and my gentle son upon the other. We proceeded towards my tower and you will understand that at a time like this a Chinaman's dead finger might easily escape my notice.
45
You, my dear sticky-beak, already know the conditions of life on the fourth gallery, but for me it was a revelation.
My son had made his workplace like a cathedral and I had expected him, therefore, to live in a palace, not a prison. It was easy to see why the most normal person would not wish to sleep in the so-called flat where my boy (presuming me well past such a grubby thing as copulation) made up a bunk for me, throwing on children's bunny rugs and heavy eiderdowns although the night was warm and the air stifling. The flat had no windows, merely small opaque skylights which -I could see the rusty trails – leaked every time it rained. No wonder his children preferred the company of their mother. There was a ripe odour of horse meat and ageing apples, both of them pervasive smells that get themselves soaked into every surface so that a fellow trying to block his nose from them will find his blankets are as contaminated as the air itself.
How could you compare this with the prospect from the fourth gallery where you could gaze upwards and find the sky full of bruised thunderclouds or blinding blue, on whose varnished rail you could lean, like a first-class passenger on an ocean liner and watch the customers perform their antics on the ground floor below? Here you could have the most beautiful birds on earth to amuse you, and at night you could find your way into the green watery depths of sleep via the cool tanks of dreaming reef fish.
And yet, for all this possibility, the style of life on the fourth gallery had none of the poetry I had imagined when, just that morning, I had stood below and craned my neck to catch a glimpse of it. And yes, I admit it, I was disappointed at first and I did not like the way they permitted the overweight goanna to drag its peeling belly across the floor so that one had to be reminded – constantly – not to trip over the nasty thing. Emma tried to
