saw her in the rear-vision mirror as he drove away. She was standing rigid, staring up at the building across the road.
Leah Goldstein looked up. There was Herbert Badgery, sitting in his chair, listing slightly towards the collapsed side of his brain, surrounded by the waltzing neon rosellas.
'You bastard,' she said.
Passers-by made a diversion so they need not brush her. They left plenty of room.
I watched her from where I sat. I saw her cross Pitt Street at an angle. She looked neither to right nor left. When she arrived at the stair inside the emporium, I felt her. I felt the footsteps all the way to the top floor and then around the gallery rail, and through the kitchen.
The door opened.
'Kill me,' she shouted. 'Kill me.'
She was very drunk and I was exceedingly weak. It was almost impossible for me to move, but I persuaded her to lie down on my little bed and I gave her my basin for when she was sick.
She never remembered what she had said that day, but it unnerved me just the same, as if all my carefully constructed world was unravelling in my hands.
Old men do not need sleep. I sat up all that night beside her. I watched the signs. I held everything in place by the sheer force of my will.
61
Inside that little plastic chapel the widow wailed and wept. Thank God she did. At least it was an honest noise. It was ugly, yes, and full of suffocating gulps and shrieks as big as ripping sails, but I would rather listen to it than the regurgitated pap that poured out of the smiling officiant.
'Chas', I quote his very words, 'is sitting with God.'
I don't know what brand of Christianity he belonged to (the dickhead) but he had modelled his style of speaking on an American tape recording. He had stood at home, miming the words into his mirror, had folded his talcum-smooth hands the way the manual told him to, had done it again and again until there was only the slightest trace of his Australian accent left and the natural nasal flavour was cloaked in a rich sugary sauce.
It was, he told us so, a happy day for us all.
There was an Acrilan carpet in mottled browns and bright aquamarine chairs to sit on.
When he had said his words they played a Wurlitzer organ and slid the coffin out on rollers just as, in the cool stores in Bacchus Marsh, they slid the cases of apples through the shed. You would never guess that that shiny box contained a man, my boy, a skin-wrapped parcel of fucked-up dreams.
We went out into the sunlight, on to the gravel. Henry's and George's wives made bookends for the widow. Goldstein tried to busy herself with taxis.
All those old people getting confused about which taxi they should be in – stooped thin Sid Goldstein with his paper-dry hands. Wheezy old Henry Underhill trying to order the ranks. Phoebe walking with exaggerated care across the sun-bright quartz worried, as always, that she would fall and break a hip. She had more black plumes than a funeral horse and she approached my wheelchair all netted in black, a pale bony hand extending.
The wheelchair had a curious effect on people. They came and stared at me as if I was a fish at the market.
'How is he?'
I said: 'Not long for this old planet now.'
They couldn't understand a word I said, and it didn't matter, because I was only lying to cheer them up. Death was their hobby, their dream, their fear, the only subject worth consideration.
Afterwards we went back for drinks at the emporium and George and Henry puffed and grunted carrying me up four flights of stairs.
You would not glorify the affair by calling it a wake. They were all too old and depressing and I went to my room and left them to mutter about how ill I looked, I could hear them sighing and farting and rattling their cups in their saucers, but I had serious matters to attend to -I had my Vegemite jar back.
The thing that killed my boy was not half goanna and half human at all. Neither was it one of the shifting miasmas that had so frightened Sergeant Moth. It was a dragon, a solid being, two inches tall. When it saw me the evil fucker puffed up its throat and showed its red insides to me. Oh, Christ, it was a nasty piece of work. It reared up on its hind legs and scratched at the glass with its long black claws while its whole body pulsed with rage, changing from a deep black green to a bloated pearlescent grey.
I did not start to battle with it immediately. In fact I made myself ignore it. I began by working on the rusty lid with a little piece of wire wool. This may sound simple enough, but when your left arm does not work it is a difficult enough task to occupy all your attention. When the lid was shining clean I used meths and rag on the glass while I listened to Emma's keening through my door.
If the death had not also revealed the financial frailty of the structure on which the family relied, it may well have served to draw us all closer together.
Those jumbled pieces of paper on Charles's desk contained enough information to indicate that the business was not only making a loss, but that the situation was not acceptable to either of the other two shareholders. This was no longer, as everyone thought it was, Schick Inc. and Gulf amp; Western. Gulf amp; Western had sold their holding to a Chicago company called Jayoyo Pty Ltd whose function no one knew. The majority shareholders, it would seem – they had not said so in writing – were willing, eager even, to continue their support of the business providing the lucrative banned species could be 'facilitated' out of the country. Charles had blithely ignored all such requests.
The state of the books suggested only two possibilities: either the family complied with the majority shareholders or they sold out to them.
Everybody had a different point of view. I heard them squabbling through my door and I know that it is an important part of any funeral, that the squabbling and thieving takes people's minds off their grief. That was the day Henry's wife stole a pair of rare apricot-coloured budgies which she claimed Charles had promised her. George took the mist nets. Even Henry Underhill (whose heart was bad) tried to get away with the ladder, although he had to abandon it on the first landing, where it stayed, propped against the wall, for five years.
Emma would not take any notice of them. It was a week before any one could get her to pay any attention to the question of the future. I took no direct part in this. No one, by the way, asked me to. In any case, I was busy with the Vegemite jar. I crooned to it. I sang it songs as well as I could. In the end it behaved no differently from any nervous horse which, although it may snort and rear and flare its nostrils, can be quietened in the end.
But although I took no part in the discussion I saw, from my window, big bow-legged Henry stride across the street with his pretty wife in trail. I saw all the supplicants – George, Phoebe, Van Kraligan – they all came, all of them. Some carried briefcases, others rolls of paper, others no more than a belligerent face.
Goldstein came and told me of their propositions. I kept my bottle under my rug while she fed me porridge. She talked about how stupid they were, that they could not and would not accept the situation, that the days of the pet shop were over – there was nothing left to argue over. She did not need my answers but I gave her some gurgles anyway. The building would have to be sold, the debts paid off, the company liquidated. You should have seen her eyes – all afire with her enthusiasm. She fed me fiercely, happily, shoving in porridge before I had finished swallowing the last lot. There would be just enough money, she said, to buy Emma a little house and give her a pension.
The rest of us, she said, would have to make our own arrangements.
But Goldstein's agitated happiness was premature because when the widow understood the situation, she became very quiet. She was, at the moment Goldstein finally made it clear to her, sitting behind her late husband's cedar desk, with her thumb under the edge, and her fingers flattened on the top.
'This is my home,' she told Leah Goldstein.
'Emma, look at this.' Goldstein pushed a bookkeeper's journal towards her, but Emma would no longer look at figures written on paper. 'It is not your home at all. It belongs to the Yanks.'
Emma murmured and ran her fingertip along Goldstein's arms.
