clamlike shells where they belonged. It was wrong to not love them, to love the youngest more than the eldest, the husband more than even the youngest and sometimes she did care, and she cried that she had made them unhappy, but not often and not for long, because in the end it was what she wanted.
She was lucky to have the business, not only that, to own the walls and roof that contained the business. But she did not like to talk about the business itself, and although she understood – she understood perfectly, exactly – that he might wish to talk to her about it, she did not wish to hear the problems about the business. It was something she would rather not know. It was not a woman's place anyway. And even if it was, it wasn't her place. It was like being in a sidecar and sticking your head out to look at the wheels turning; it could make you fret when you saw how thin the spokes were or that three of them were rusted and five bent, and you should not know, either, about the patches on the tube, or the lack of tread on the tyre. When Charles wished to discuss business with Henry Underhill's daughter she would not permit it.
She sat in her chair and felt that delicious sense of anticipation her teasing always produced in her. It was woman's art. He would not go roaming the streets tom-catting like Mr Schick.
Tonight, or tomorrow night, or even the night after, he would come to her to apologize for the broken bowl. That's why she had left the broken pieces out on the dustpan, so he would not have a chance to forget them. That's why she had left it out. So he would see it when his temper had gone and he could come to her to say sorry. She would judge then what to do, to accept, and hold him in her arms, or to put it off a while longer, to spurn him, to push him to the next giddy level of pleasure.
'Brekky,' she murmured, sitting in her chair, 'Little Emma wants her brekky.'
The journalist, meantime, was walking along George Street carrying a mental picture of her husband – a bubbling baggy-suited enthusiast. He had felt his spine tingle when he saw the man handle the bower-bird. He now found himself wishing, in a way that he imagined he had long ago abandoned, that he might do something decent and sensible with his life. He wished that his days were involved with straw, feathers, simple affections, and he resolved, walking into the Marble Bar, to make Charles the good guy in his story on the fauna-smuggling racket. By the time he had made this decision, Charles had changed into a maniac. He was grappling with an old scarred goanna and pushing it belligerently into a hessian bag. He would not say what it was that he intended although the staff were nervous, knowing this was Mrs Badgery's special pet. They wished no trouble from 'her upstairs'.
Hissao watched this ruckus without pleasure. He waited to excuse himself, to go back to the university and continue his real life. He was suddenly tired of the pet shop itself, its odd echoes, ghostly floorboards, smells and, most particularly, the caged creatures which should not be caged at all. Having defended his father so skilfully he now felt disgusted, not only with himself, but with the activities he had shielded from attack.
Yet it was Hissao who held the heavy bag of struggling goanna while his father went to get his car keys. They then walked together, father and son, out into Pitt Street where the car, a new-model Holden, was parked outside Woolworths. He waited for his father to unlock the boot. Then he dumped the heavy bag inside, stepped back on to the footpath and, as he did so, his eye was caught by the whizzing parrots. The light inside his grandfather's room was very strong, a vivid blue-white neon so that when the old man sat there, as he did now, as he had before, he seemed as strongly lit as the famous sign that moved around him.
The colour of the eyes could not, surely not, have been discernible from the street, but Hissao was sure it was. He felt, later, that the eyes had bullied him, had made him hold out his hands for the key when he had been meaning to shake hands, to say goodbye.
'I'll drive,' Hissao said, and his father dropped the keys into the outstretched hand.
59
Do not think I have no feelings. A stroke may remove one side of your body but it does not cut one's passions in half. No, no, everything is doubled. Twice the pain. Twice the grief. And just because a thing must be done do not imagine that one necessarily relishes it.
No, it is no fun to watch your little boy drive out of your life and my heart, that day, was drilled with icy needles that have never melted. I feel them still, this moment, when I breathe. I cough hard, but all I get is some white dribble to run down the deep unshaven gullies on either side of my mouth which is, no more, I promise, the Phoenician's bow that so beguiled Miss Phoebe McGrath in 1919.
I sat in my chair and watched the hessianed goanna dropped into the boot. I knew, that day, that God is a glutton for grief, love, regret, sadness, joy too, everything, remorse, guilt – it is all steak and eggs to him and he will promise anything to get them. But what am I saying? There is no God. There is only me, Herbert Badgery, enthroned high above Pitt Street while angels or parrots trill attendance.
Hissao put the car into first gear, that insouciant click and clack, made a hand signal (it was the years before indicators became legal) and pulled out into the traffic of Pitt Street as if he was doing nothing more than driving to the corner shop for aSporting Globe. No one saw, no one but me. Goldstein was on her way to have lunch with Doodles Casey, her florid-faced publisher. He was my publisher too, but he thought my brain gone to porridge. Once he visited me in hospital where he wiped my nose; I have never forgiven him, the charlatan.
But Casey is a man of no importance, born for deletion; it is Charles and Hissao we are here to spy on as they cross Darling Harbour on the old Pyrmont Bridge.
They were quiet as they entered the dead-fish stench that hangs beneath the old incinerator at Pyrmont. They said not a word until they reached the hotel that is now known as Wattsies but was, in those days, the plain White Bay Hotel.
'How do I seem to you?' Charles asked.
'How do you mean?'
'How do I seem?'
It was an impossible question, and it was expressed in an unusual voice, light, with a reedy vibrato. Hissao put the car into gear when the lights went green.
'Have you seen my bottom?' Charles asked.
'What?'
'Have you', Charles sat sideways in his seat to look at his embarrassed son, 'seen my bottom, my bum?'
Hissao smiled but it was not the charming smile of the urbane young man who had discussed the pet business with Time magazine. His eyes showed his embarrassment and his smile hurt his face. 'Not for a while,' he said.
'Was it wrinkled?'
'Oh, Dad! Please.'
'Was it?'
'Yes, I suppose so.'
'Yes,' said Charles, with some bitterness, and then faced the front. They drove on in a silence that Hissao found almost unbearable. They crossed that bridge – I forget its name – the ugly steel box that lay, on that day, across joyless wind-whipped water the colour of a battleship.
'You shouldn't have told me to shut up.'
'I'm sorry.'
'I bought you your own car. I pay for your university fees, I give you money to live on. I don't ask for much from you. (Keep going up Victoria Road.) I never thought I'd ever hear you tell me to shut up.'
Hissao had to change lanes to stay in Victoria Road. He tried to explain, at the same time, why it was necessary to stop his father's comments on Herr Bloom but Charles was not really listening. 'Anyway,' Hissao said, 'he liked you.'
'He thought I was a crook.'
'No, really. He didn't.'
'Thought I was a crook. Maybe I am a crook. Do you think I'm a crook?'
'No.'
'Well, he thought I was a crook. All he saw was this big building. He thought I was a moneybags but do you know what I see when I look at that building, all those people employed, all those families fed, all those beautiful
