stone business man whose rare smile could so charm those who saw it. It was a smile to treasure, a smile people would try to induce, the more wonderful for being so rare. I have felt a similar emotion when splitting open a dull piece of rock to discover a fist of opal hiding inside: that such splendour could exist captive in such ugly clay.
'There is a rule of the road,' Leah told my son gently, 'that you do not go messing with another fellow's swag.'
'It's a suitcase,' Sonia contradicted, leaping to her habitual defence of her brother.
The snake moved through my son's hand, ran along Leah's arm, and stopped. They both stroked it. The creature did not seem inclined to move any more.
'It is an unusual person,' Leah said to me, 'who will be at home with a venomous snake.'
Let me tell you, I was no longer one of them. You can mistreat a horse and be forgiven it. You can kick a dog and it will come back and lick your hand. But a snake is another matter, and once you have wronged it, it will carry the memory of you with it, like a bolted convict with lash marks on its back, criss-crossed, burned in like a loaf of fancy bread. And there is no doubt that the greatest mistake I ever made in my life was to keep that Geelong snake a prisoner in a hessian bag, to starve it, to use it for tricks. Had I not been so foolish my whole life would have taken a different course: Jack would not have died, I would not have been permitted to marry Phoebe, and I would not have been troubled by the sight of my son besotted with a snake-dancer.
I was forty-five years old when I met Leah and a man, at forty-five, is meant to be mature. Certainly he should not be dependent on the good opinion and respect of total strangers who blunder into his camp.
'Most men', Leah said to me, 'will run a mile from a snake,' and I felt myself compared to my son and found lacking and I was led by my emotions rather than my common sense which told me to let my son have his moment of glory and not to worry that this blue-coated lecturer thought me a coward. My emotions, however, ruled. I could not stand it, this invasion of the one place on earth – my camp – where I might be confident of some respect.
Leah was engaged in conversation with Charles. I poked the fire irritably. 'I was doing a show once in Wollongong', she was saying, 'with one of Jack Leach's pythons, a dance show. I was a support act to Danny O'Hara's boxers and the snake got around my neck. It was choking me. I was going blue, and not one of those men would come near me. They wouldn't touch the snake.'
'I would have,' Charles said.
'I know you would have,' Leah smiled. 'That's what I'm saying.'
'What happened?' Sonia asked and I imagined she moved a fraction away from me.
'I bit its tail,' the dancer said, 'and it let go enough for me to get it off.'
'I've often considered show business,' I said.
'Oh yes,' said Leah, but she was more interested in Charles.
'Yes,' I said. God damn it. I did not even want the woman to stay. I would rather she left. I did not like her tone. I did not even care for her looks and I certainly had no thoughts of anything as dangerous as a fuck. I am Herbert Badgery, I thought, a man who nearly had an aircraft factory, a pioneer aviator anyway, a salesman of more than usual skill, and here I am being patronized by a girl who is self-important because she can touch a snake. I, who have travelled the country with a cannon behind me, have built mansions, resumed land, skinned a crow with nothing but air from my lungs, and disappeared from human sight before witnesses.
'Yes,' I said, 'the entertaining arts have always attracted me.'
'It's a hard life,' Leah said, 'and full of trickery and deception, people like Mervyn Sullivan who will steal your act and leave your picture up when you no longer work for them.'
'Magic was my field,' I said. For the admiration of a woman I did not know, I spent this little piece of gold which was not intended as currency at all. It was all I had in my empty pockets.
'Disappearing acts,' I said, the master of self-delusion, imagining I could simply say it and not have to go through with a performance.
'Very common,' she said, 'but hardly enough to run a whole show on. You'd be surprised at the number of people I meet who think that they could make a living because they can throw a few balls into the air. One trick is not enough. One dance is not enough. I do the Emu Dance, the Fan Dance, the Snake Dance, the Dance of the Seven Veils. It is the snake that gets them in, but it is not enough by itself. Anyone who has read Cole's Funny Picture Book knows how to do a disappearing act. Nothing personal,' she said quickly, seeing me rising from my log. 'I am merely pointing out the difference between a professional and an amateur.'
I stood before them. I can still see their eyes in the firelight, the Dodge, in the distance, half hidden by mist, the frying pan sitting amongst the cracked river rocks of the fireplace, the sheen on the snake's black back as it pressed itself against the warmth of a child's and a woman's body.
I made the dragon.
I put my foot on my knee. I held my arm in the air. I teetered on my toes. I summoned up the terrible flag of the English, the pipes and drums of the band, their blue shirts and white moleskins, the brains of Goon's father like the brains of the pig. The river banks flowed with the Chinese, a yellow river of fear over boulders as smooth and unyielding as dragons' eggs. The cart ran down Han and the bone splintered his leg: it thrust outwards like a dagger, drove through his smooth hairless thigh and he looked at it with astonishment: this enemy he had harboured innocently within him. My father galloped his team, his eyes bright, clear blue, dragging his cannon, cracking his whip.
I wanted to call out but I could not. The dragon came and it was bigger than the dragon I knew before, for a child does not know enough to make a powerful dragon. A child makes a childish dragon from children's fears, a cub with soft paws and breath that smells of warm milk.
Thirty-four years of locked-up terror came spurting at me and I knew I would drown in it. I tried to talk, but the dragon had me and dragged me away into the spaces between the mist of Crab Apple Creek while my audience, I must suppose, innocently applauded such a clever trick.
7
I am forced to tell you more about the history of this woman who finally trapped me into appearing beside her on a dusty stage in Bendigo, and if I begin by showing you her funny-looking family as they take their constitutional it is not so I can blame her parents for her character, but that I may point out the odd silence of the group as they walk. There are five of them, all with sloping shoulders and tall overcoats, but it is not the height I am concerned with, nor the graceful angle of descent from neck to arm, but the lack of chatter. It is my contention that the behaviour of these five people (and to a lesser degree, their appearance) is not the result of genes, but of a house, an odd redbrick place in Malvern Road, Malvern, a drumming, echoing construction which has finally triumphed over them, made them as sparing with their talk as Mallee farmers are with drinking-water: they are at their most comfortable (I must except the mother from the generalization) sitting in armchairs, wordless, bookless, their hands clasped in patient laps. Even released from the house (I except the mother, again) they will only talk for a purpose and never for amusement or diversion. I do not mean to suggest that they are lonely and unhappy because of it. Let me hypothesize the opposite: as they move along the battle-grey St Kilda seafront one can sense a rare harmony between them, although it may be a trick of the light, or a product of their uncanny physical similarities. But there are no tricks of light in the brightly illuminated lounge room in Malvern Road and when they sit with their hands in their laps after dinner – there is no wireless, naturally – one can look at them as, say, a field of poppies which, moving slightly on a windless day, give the distinct impression that some silent conversation is going on. And this impression is confirmed when one of them smiles, another chuckles, and a third stares hard at the ceiling as if trying to catch the gist of it. This, I must warn you, is merely an 'impression', a fancy. There is no ESP taking place. The Goldsteins (pere et filles) are merely engaging in their own quite separate thoughts in the way that has given them reputations for eccentricity in the world outside, and made poor Edith Goldstein have small fits of madness as rare as sunspots when – all this poppy-waving getting too damn much -she leaps to her feet, smashes plates, talks gibberish and (while the poppies stay ramrod stiff) sweeps up the broken pieces and sits down again with a sigh.
Edith Goldstein knew it was the house. The silence had not been natural to Sid who had arrived in Melbourne as a poor refugee from Tsarist Russia. He stepped off the ship with a swagger in his walk, a glide to his step not out of keeping with a man who will shortly make his first hundred pounds in a dancing school in Exhibition Street.
