I was still standing there five minutes later when Charles and Phoebe Badgery appeared beside my little girl. Then they all looked down at me but it is Charles whose figure now comes most strongly to mind – I will not easily forget the beckoning finger he put my way.
53
I was not myself. I was not as calm as I would have wished. I knew they were within their rights, but I thought it unnecessary for them to take him away from me so soon. I know they meant to do their best for the boy, but I had not hurt him. I showed them the book of drawings, but Charles was grim and pale and he said Hissao was going to a boarding school in Melbourne.
Boarding school. He was so young. It was painful to think of him in his little cap and uniform, by himself, six hundred miles from home.
I went to Charles's office and begged him to reconsider. He was not nasty to me. He was very gentle. But he would not change his mind.
There was nothing left for me but to teach myself to be an author. It was the only scheme available.
54
Dear Mr Badgery, she wrote, her head on one side, her pencil crooked between her finger, her handwriting so tiny and exact you would never believe she had once danced so fluidly.
Dear Mr Badgery, she wrote in a room in Pitt Street while I lay in bed two miles away with half my brain collapsed and nurses whispering around my peripheries.
Dear Mr Badgery, (so sarcastic)
Dear Mr Badgery, my name is Leah Goldstein. I am forty years old and, as you have already noted, my arse has begun to drop. Sometimes I exaggerate. Sometimes I like to imagine people are better than they are. Oftentimes I prefer to overlook some little fault and make them appear more beautiful than they really are. But I am not a liar, and these notebooks of yours are – excuse me -unpardonable.
I do not mind that you have stolen so much of what I have written. Is that what you were doing crawling around on the floor pretending to kill cockroaches or kissing my feet when I already told you they were dirty? A hundred things come to me, things that amused me at the time, touched me – and now I see they were only excuses to thieve things from me. And even then you have not done me the honour of thieving things whole but have taken a bit here, a bit there, snipped, altered, and so on. You have stolen like a barbarian, slashing a bunch of grapes from the middle of a canvas.
If only you had said what you wanted, I would have helped you, gladly.
And why have you been so unfair to us, to yourself most of all? Why this desire to make yourself appear such a bad man? Do you think it is sexy? One would never know from your writing that you were a man worth knowing, a man worth waiting for. If you had not been do you not imagine I would have found another? They were there, don't make me list them, decent men too, and I was not in any case the Victorian Aunt you so smugly pass me off as. You do not, of course, mention where I went in '49 when I moved out. All you can bring yourself to say is that I was set on being an independent woman with my ten quid a week. You wonder, sarcastically, if I got my leeches and frostbite while what you worry about is that I took a young man's penis into me and you have the discomfort of knowing that young man and having met him and having his gentle brown eyes and strong features taunt you. So your casual superior tone does not match those great dramas you and I suffered in the name of 'love'.
It is not polite of me to write these words in your own book. But vandalism begets vandalism and, anyway, I am drunk. I am angry and it makes no difference that you are lying in hospital with tubes in your arms and down your throat or that I only found your little hoard of notebooks looking for your lost pyjamas.
Why do you pose as the great criminal, the cynic? Why do you always make me seem such a dull goody-two- shoes? Why do you not say how we laughed and danced together and lay in each other's arms on warm beaches and smelt jasmine and honeysuckle and admired fish with silver scales? You were a kind man, or I imagined you were, and you would cry like a woman for someone else's pain.
You seem to delight in making yourself seem stupid and I suppose that is your business if you want to. But why do you give no credit to anyone else? You know very well how it was you were transferred from Grafton to Rankin Downs and it was not because 'I knew I had to get out of there' but because Izzie worked very hard on someone at the Department of Corrective Services and that there was a large bribe involved which your son paid. Wasn't this worth remembering?
Likewise with Mr Lo – you are content to have him with his imaginary baseball and his somersaults. This is all true, but why do you leave out the part your son played fighting the Immigration Department through to the High Court? You know how expensive it was, and also how proud he was to do it, and how proud you were of him as well.
But instead you choose to dwell on things like the American ownership of the firm and our dependence on it. It's all true. But it is not the whole truth, and I admit that I spoke in a derogatory way about that dependence, that I said we were pets, but when I came back in '51 we did some good work together.
You say you had to teach yourself to be an author, which you know is a lie. But I will not dwell on that. Would you have written about the books we wrote together -Gaol Bird, particularly? Probably not, but it is just as well because you would have made them sound like smart stunts and deliberately forgotten that each one of those books had a purpose, that we tried to do some good things and were not embarrassed about it either.
Oh, Mr Badgery, what an old heartbreak you are. You have left out everything worth loving about the emporium. You left out the pianola. And when you leave out the pianola you leave out the very possibility of joy, and suddenly there is a dreadful place, gloomy, oppressive, without music. But don't you remember the singalongs we had that went to four in the morning with Charles rocking back and forth at the pedals and Nathan Schick in his seersucker singing those songs fromThe Student Prince? You used to love it. 'Come boys, let's all be gay, boys, education should be scientific play, boys.' But where the pianola sat you describe some sheets of plywood leaning against a wall, so you left it out on purpose, just as you leave out Henry and George, and this is really, I am sure, because Henry bit your finger.
You have treated us all badly, as if we were your creatures. I forgive you for not mentioning my lover, but not for omitting my membership of the Labour Party and the success of the books.
I have always been optimistic about you. I have always thought that you would finally respond to love and kindness and that, in the end, you would feel safe enough, loved enough, to have no need for bombast and exaggeration. But tonight – writing down these lines in the full knowledge that you may well recover and actually read these lines -tonight, I don't care if you die.
55
It was a cool morning in September 1961 and the fishermen on the sea wall at Deloitte Avenue, having been lured from their beds by clear skies and bright sun on their whiskered faces, now found themselves replacing their soggy baits with numb fingers. A breeze had sprung up from the south-east; you could hardly call it a wind, but it was thin and penetrating none the less and the fishermen drew their coats around themselves and clenched their soggy cigarettes between their lips while they waited for the tide to turn.
There was, however, no weather in Charles's office, nor any sign of it, unless you count the creaks and groans of the old building as it weathered the sea of commerce, as ancient floorboards adjusted to the shifting weight of the staff or anticipated the arrival and departure of customers. Because it was still early you could hear the squeaking wheel of the old pram they used to carry the trays of food to the pets. There was the distant whine of the floor polisher. Somewhere a shop assistant with a high nasal voice was relating a joke from thePerry Como
