It was not to be a simple day for at this very moment, while Leah was returning to her magazine, while the finger was still aloft, before the cockatoo had stretched and spread itself, levitated above the bonnet of the Dodge with its sulphur tail feathers splayed out beneath it, a black Chevrolet, with a wireless aerial running along its roof like the outlined drawing of a knife blade, rolled over the rocks into the camp with its engine cut.
It was the town police from Bendigo.
As a car salesman you have many dealings with police, particularly in regard to registration of vehicles. Up until that day I always got on well with them. At Barret's we gave them a bottle of grog at Christmas, nothing dirty, but enough to get my plates through the system quickly. In short I did not, as Leah now did, begin to shake like a leaf, nor did my face, as Izzie's did, set into a scimitar sneer.
The police were not, however, here to inquire about motor-car registration plates (although they made a note of mine before departing). They were here to advise a communist agitator and his collaborators to move out of town. They did this with a mixture of weariness and primness that I was later to recognize as characteristic. They searched no one, and made no inquiries as to why their major interest had blood streaming down his finger. We were given sixty minutes to pack and it all happened so fast I did not even argue. When they called me 'Baldy' I did not raise a fist.
Even when they departed I had no time for post mortems because now I found Izzie's wrath was focused on me. He was under the illusion that I had informed the local police. I had somehow, it seemed, done this during the night. I had walked five miles into Bendigo, like Curnow betraying the Kelly gang, to give the warning. What bullshit. I have seen drunks get themselves into this sort of passionate rage, a time for ultimatums, bottles with broken necks, drawn knives and shotguns grabbed from under car seats. But it was only nine in the morning and there was no alcohol to justify it.
The charming man I had enjoyed ten minutes before now became a hateful little sparrow to whom I would happily have fed poisoned wheat. He splashed blood on my clean shirt, and that upset me almost as much as the silly ultimatum he now proclaimed, demanding that Leah choose now, once and for all, between the pair of us.
Leah walked across from the petrol drum to which she had returned for the magazine.
'Come,' she said, holding his arm. 'I want to talk to you.'
'Talk to me here,' Izzie said.
'Izzie, please.'
'Talk here,' he said. 'What can't be said?'
'All right,' said Leah Goldstein, no longer fair, no longer rational. 'All right.'
It was then she told him, in front of everyone, she could not bear his skin.
I think of a suit of scar tissue, ripped and broken, beside which agony a lacerated finger is nothing but a young man's prank.
42
'What sustains you, Mr Badgery?' Leah asked me, rattling northwards in a hurriedly packed utility, hounded by small-town police who imagined us revolutionaries. They were waiting for us at Heathcote and Nagambie, Tatura, Kyabram and Shepparton itself. They found us entering town, or buying a pie or a few gallons of petrol. In Nagambie we got our camp set up before they were on to us, Brylcreemed Irishmen with cabbage soup on their breath. They were familiar with our names and our business which was, they informed us, the overthrow of lawful government. We packed our things and moved on, driven across the state like the legendary sparrows the Chinese eliminated by never letting land.
'What sustains you?' she asked, as I turned down one more unlabelled gravel road which promised an escape from the tyrannical coppers of the soft-fruit country.
I attempted an answer. The car crashed hard into deep potholes. I was thirsty. Dust went muddy in my throat.
'Nothing', she said, 'sustains you, Mr Badgery. You are walking on hot macadam, quickly. All that sustains you is your filthy belt, excuse me, but it is true. You are sustained by a gadget. The gadget does not believe in anything. It does not have an idea. It is just a product. The workers who make it are serving a mindless thing.'
'It prevents dizziness.'
'Dizziness, you told me, fearfulness. The verdigris on the battery makes your leg green. Have you noticed?'
'What is 'sustain'?' Charles asked, leaning forward like a scabby sultan from the pile of bedding in the back. Leah had charcoaled a small moustache on to his face and it was Leah, now, who answered his question with such patience, at such length that I derived great benefit myself.
'What is wrong with us all', she said when she had satisfied my son's curiosity, 'is that we are sustained by gadgets, or desires that are satisfied by gadgets, when someone like my husband,' she swallowed, 'whatever his faults,' a long pause, 'is sustained by something more substantial.'
'And what sustains you, Mrs Kaletsky?'
'Movement,' she said, displaying her white feet. 'I admit it. I am really the one dancing on hot macadam, not you: town to town, dancing, writing letters. I cannot stay still anywhere. It is not a country where you can rest. It is a black man's country: sharp stones, rocks, sticks, bull ants, flies. We can only move around it like tourists. The blackfeller can rest but we must keep moving. That is why I can't return with my husband as he wishes,' she announced, seeking rest in a simple theory, 'because I am selfish, addicted to movement.'
She was wrong about herself – what sustained her were the threads from the famous suit which she had woven into something new and personal, something finer than that sour greasy object which she had, if not misunderstood, at least imperfectly comprehended. With the threads of the suit she had woven kindness into a philosophy that was as simply practised as sending money to Rosa, picking up bagmen on the road, teaching me to read, sharing her food and being attentive to someone else's children. What she had made had little in common with Izzie's giant dream, was like one of her proverbial baby swallows beside his giant canvas of smooth grey forms, that complex ants' nest bathed in golden light.
'My husband is sustained by a better world, you see, not by fear or selfishness.'
'Yes.'
'He has probably killed his brother,' she said, as if talking to herself, 'and he thinks this is permissible. He thinks this is just. He thinks it is Correct.'
'And that is better than being sustained by a belt?'
'Probably,' she shivered, and tried to shut the scratched side curtains. 'The intention is better. The intention is generous, not fearful.'
'But why did he have to dob in his brother?'
'Not dob in.'
'Do the Russians have a patent out on communism? Why does he have to explain himself to them?'
'It is a science,' she said without conviction. 'And the Russians have performed the first successful experiment. You'd have to ask him, Mr Badgery,' she said bleakly. 'I don't understand either.'
'I liked him,' I said.
'People do,' she said and sat hugging her bare arms, no longer curious about the rabbits leaping from the bracken-covered paddocks we were passing through.
'No one asked me,' said the voice from the back. 'No one asked what sustains me.'
What sustained my son, it seemed, was his new friendship with the cockatoo and Leah, guilty, weary, gritty- eyed, hugged him awkwardly across the back of the seat, and, with tears running down her cheeks, told him he was a good boy.
'I won't hurt her, will I, Leah?'
'No, Charles. I know you won't.'
'I won't let her down.'
'No.'
