Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 2

Vogelnest ignored her. "I will pay you, sir, one pound, if you push your aero across the road," he smiled slyly, "into O'Hagen's."

We shook on it. I had made a total of one pound and five s.h.i.+llings since arriving in Balliang East. My gross a.s.sets were now one pound nine s.h.i.+llings and tuppence ha'penny.

Success always went to my head. I got too excited. I went from despair to optimism in a flash. And my day was only starting, because a dangerous meeting was about to take place.

I.e.: Jack.

There was nothing to protect us from each other. We were elements like phosphorus and air which should always be kept apart. But he was already standing up from his picnic and picking pine needles from his trouser cuffs, but even if Molly had somehow known, had seen the result of that fifty-yard walk across the road, what could she have done?

Jack McGrath was a man with an obsession, about transportation. He could discuss the wheel as a wonder, and he could talk about it for hours in relations.h.i.+p to the bullock team, the horse and jinker, the dray, the cart, the T Model, the Stanley Steamer. He could talk about it in relations.h.i.+p to Australia and its distances. He never got sick of it.

He had money in the bank. He owned a Hispano Suiza, a fleet of taxis, a racehorse, but none of those things made him happy. What he liked to do was talk. And when the house was empty of guests he'd put on his hat and walk three miles down to Corio Quay where he could still find, in 1919, bullock wagons unloading wool. He could yarn with the bullockies for hours. They talked record hauls. They boasted. Jack told them how he'd got the boiler into Point's Point in 1910. He advised them to move into trucks. He spoke enthusiastically about the future of the automobile but he looked with envy on their teams: Redman, Tiger, Lofty, Yallarman, he knew the beasts almost as well as he knew the men. He shouted them "Gentleman's grog" and, in his cups, made plans to go back on the track. When Lauchie Barr's team brought thirty-two tons of bagged wheat in from Colac and broke the Australian record, Jack brought him to dinner and presented him with a handsome cup with a silver cricketer standing on its lid.

He was exactly the sort of man I had wished to land on: enthusiastic, willing, and impressed with the idea of an aeroplane. But when I saw him stride across the road in his expensive suit I didn't realize what was coming. I saw a rich man. I was never good with rich men. They made my hackles rise.

This false impression didn't last a minute. Jack whipped off his jacket and ripped off his tie. He lost his collar studs in the gra.s.s. He collected his cufflinks and rolled up his sleeves while his wife, a pretty ginger cat in fluffy white, watched from the safety of the road.

To get the craft into O'Hagen's it was necessary to remove a few fence posts. Jack picked up a crowbar and set to it like a fellow who is starved of work. He raised the crowbar and sank it into the red earth. "That's the go," he said. "That's "That's the go." He did not mean to overpower Ernest Vogelnest or s.n.a.t.c.h tools from his hand. He was being polite, useful, and although he was bursting with curiosity about the plane, he did not say a word that could be considered nosey. He gave himself wholly to the task at hand, to remove those four posts, replace them, get the plane through O'Hagen's broken fence, and hide it behind the hall. the go." He did not mean to overpower Ernest Vogelnest or s.n.a.t.c.h tools from his hand. He was being polite, useful, and although he was bursting with curiosity about the plane, he did not say a word that could be considered nosey. He gave himself wholly to the task at hand, to remove those four posts, replace them, get the plane through O'Hagen's broken fence, and hide it behind the hall.

The posts were out in a moment. Jack stacked them neatly and then I explained to them where they could push or lift and where they couldn't. You have to be careful with a plane like a Farman-you lift under a strut, never between. When I was sure they understood the requirements, I ordered a start, but although the farmer was quick to get his back under a strut, Jack McGrath would not have a bar of it.

It was all very well, he said, to rush into digging out a fence or putting one back in, but only a fool rushed into pus.h.i.+ng anything, whether it was a dray or an auto or an aeroplane, without first looking over the ground and a.s.sessing the problems. He knew this from all his years with bullock teams. The secret of his success had not just been, as everyone thought, that he knew his beasts, each individual, like you might know a man or woman, each one with their strengths, their weaknesses, their little quirks. His success had been sealed on all the nights he had gone to sleep thinking out a problem. The way he got that boiler into Point's Point is the most famous example, but he would approach a difficult log in the same way. His success had been in thinking it out, and often when he met someone on the track, bogged to the axles under ten tons of wool, or in trouble on a pinch, he would see that they were only in strife because they had not stopped long enough to think. So at Balliang East he walked with me over to O'Hagen's, and unearthed a nasty hollow and a tangle of barbed wire which had been hidden in the dry summer gra.s.s.

When we had cleared the wire away, we came back across the road to the craft and, seeing the daughter occupied the front c.o.c.kpit, I enquired whether the mother might not like a ride in the back.

Jack was surprised to see her accept-she was always so nervous-but he didn't reckon on my eyes. I took her hand and helped her up. She giggled like a young girl and her daughter was nice enough to say nothing of the third pa.s.senger: the king brown snake beneath her mother's seat.

When the Farman was safely behind the hall, I tied it to the fence on one side and lashed it to some heavy rocks on the other. The women stayed seated in the c.o.c.kpit. Vogelnest edged towards the road, but seemed reluctant to make the journey alone. Jack wanted to talk about knots. When he began, tucking in his s.h.i.+rt over his strong man's belly, I thought he was criticizing the knots I had tied. I missed the point-Jack liked the "idea" of a knot.

"It is a great thing, the knot," he said. "A great thing."

Vogelnest seemed to understand more than I did. He squatted on the ground and surveyed O'Hagen's paddocks with a critical eye. As Jack continued the light grew mellow and the colour started to come back into the landscape.

"What sort of fellow," he said, "would invent the Donaldson lash?"

"A fellow called Donaldson," I suggested.

"An astonis.h.i.+ng man," said Jack, mentally picturing the unsung Donaldson in some draughty shed alone with his ropes. "What a grasp he had of the principles. And what a memory. Two over, then back, down, hitch, double hitch and through. It's a knot you need to practise for a week before you get the hang of it."

I never heard of the Donaldson lash before or since, or half the other knots I heard celebrated that afternoon while the sky lost its intense cobalt and went powdery and soft, and the gra.s.ses that had looked so bleached and lifeless now turned dun and gold, pale green and russet.

Jack wondered out loud about the saddler's bow and argued the comparative merits of the reef and the double latch. Phoebe stayed in the front c.o.c.kpit with her hands folded in her lap. The late sun set her hair afire. Vogelnest saw me looking at her and smiled and ducked his head.

"Ah," said Jack who seemed, at last to have exhausted his subject, "I do like a good knot."

Everybody started to move like they do in a church when the bridal party has gone out to sign the registry. Phoebe yawned and stretched. Vogelnest stood and brushed his knees. Molly declared herself frightened of snakes and would not walk back through the long gra.s.s. Jack picked her up like a bride and carried here across the paddock and when they arrived, laughing, on the roadway, he refused to put her down.

Molly squealed like a young girl and Mrs Vogelnest, still standing guard at the fence with the long-handled shovel, allowed a small smile to break up the unhappy lines Jeparit had engraved on her tiny clenched-up face.

8.

Ernest Vogelnest sat in his kitchen. His wife was in bed, asleep. He was finis.h.i.+ng the last of the schnapps. He had been keeping the schnapps for five years and tonight had been the right time to drink it.

He could hear the music, the piano accordion and the young girl's voice. It drifted across the desolate paddocks from O'Hagen's where the aviator and the picnickers had gone to explain the aeroplane. It was a party. He guessed, quite correctly, that there was dancing. He raised his gla.s.s towards the house where Herbert Badgery and Mrs O'Hagen were doing an Irish jig.

Ernest Vogelnest had spent his pound well. He was not merely happy, he was overwhelmed by the niceness of people, the blissful absence of the aeroplane. It had been a quid well spent.

When he saw the lights of the Hispano Suiza come b.u.mping down the long dirt road from O'Hagen's he extinguished his hurricane lamp and watched the car pa.s.s by his darkened window. He thought he saw the aviator in the driver's seat, his face reflected in the glow of the instruments, and he raised his gla.s.s to him, wis.h.i.+ng him well.

9.

I always had an aversion to hotel rooms, guest houses, boarding houses or anywhere else where a man was forced into giving up money for a place to stay. I always built a place of my own when I could. I built from mud and wire netting (which is better than it sounds and more comfortable than the girl from Bacchus Marsh had realized). I was also a dab hand at a slab hut, a skill that has now died out, but which made a very satisfactory house, one that'd last a hundred years. I made houses from the wooden crates they s.h.i.+pped the T Models in. I made houses from galvanized iron (from rainwater tanks on one occasion). I even spent one summer in the Mallee living in a hole in the ground. It was cool and comfortable in that hot climate and I would have got married but a poddy calf fell in on top of us one night and broke the woman's arm. You can call that bad luck, but it was my stupidity. I should have fenced it.

You could say I was obsessed with houses, but I was not abnormal. My only abnormality was that I did not have one. I had been forced to leave my houses behind me, evicted from them, disappointed in them, fleeing them because of various events. I left them to rot and rust and be shat on by cattle on the land of the so-called legal owners who were called squatters because they'd done exactly what I'd done.

While a house was always my aim, it wasn't always possible in the short term. I was an expert, however, at getting "put up". I was not just an expert. I was an ace. I never had to be formally invited and I always left them before my welcome was worn out. Don't think I cheated the legal owners, because I never did. I delivered value in whatever way it was required.

I applied this principle to the McGraths.

I was an Aviator. That was my value to them. I set to work to reinforce this value. I propped it up and embellished it a little. G.o.d d.a.m.n, I danced around it like a b.l.o.o.d.y bower-bird putting on a display. I added silver to it. I put small blue stones around it.

By the time I swung the headlights of the Hispano Suiza on to the McGrath house in Western Avenue, Jack McGrath could see see the factory I said-it was a pleasant whim-I was going to establish, a factory that was going to build Australian-designed aircraft. It was splendid. Everyone in the car could see it, s.h.i.+mmering in the moonlight. the factory I said-it was a pleasant whim-I was going to establish, a factory that was going to build Australian-designed aircraft. It was splendid. Everyone in the car could see it, s.h.i.+mmering in the moonlight.

You call it a lie. I call it a gift.

When I saw the size of the house, I was pleased I had taken so much trouble with my story. It was the equal of the lace-decorated Victorian mansion I saw in the headlights. It was capped with a splendid tower and the tower was capped with a crown of wrought-iron lace. For a building with a tower I could not have taken too much trouble.

In an instant, it seemed, they had the mansion blazing with electric light. It poured forth in luxury from every window, washed across the flower beds and flooded the lawn. Even the yellow-brick garage had its own set of lights and as I garaged the Hispano Suiza I could hear the voices of the two women as they called to the maid who fluttered like a moth inside the kitchen windows and threw fleeting shadows out across the lawn.

I liked the electricity. I liked the sheer quant.i.ty of it. It was right that a house like this, grander than any I had ever stayed in, should be so enthusiastically illuminated.

The cicadas, as if they were wired on the same circuit, suddenly filled the garden with a loud burst of celebration. If fireworks had now illuminated the summer sky they would not have been out of keeping with my emotions. I had never seen anything like it. I had never seen anything approaching it. There was a ballroom, a music room, a library, a tower. Don't worry that there was no dancing in the ballroom, no music in the music room, and not a single book in the library. To dwell on those empty shelves would be to miss the point. There were stained-gla.s.s windows made by M. Ives of Melbourne. There were carpets, wall to wall, made in Lancas.h.i.+re from Western District wool. There were ice chests, music machines, and electric wiring everywhere.

Jack had introduced the electricity himself. He hadn't messed around. He ran the wires like streamers across the ceiling, tacked them on to wooden architraves, hung them from a picture rail and looped them around the curtain rods. The neighbours in Western Avenue might not have cared for this frank approach, but I liked it. It made me comfortable. It was a house where you could put your feet up and drink French champagne or Ballarat bitter according to your mood.

The other remarkable thing about the house was chairs. There were so many of them waiting to be sat on that you could see, immediately, that the McGraths were hospitable people and they'd never pa.s.s up a chance to buy an extra chair if it took their fancy. Their taste was catholic, although that is a term they would not have used themselves. Was there Chippendale? Perhaps. And Louis-Quatorze? Probably, but the Herbert Badgery who looked on that array did not even know such names. They were all chairs to him, some old, some new, some tatty, some gilt, some comfortable, some overstuffed, some bursting with horsehair which would p.r.i.c.kle the back of your legs and make you itch. I got the feeling that my hosts expected, at any moment, a hundred people with weary legs to walk in off the street.

I could hear the women making supper. Jack showed me to a room. He opened up the big French doors on to the veranda and the room filled with the smell of flowers, salt from the bay, the humming generators of cicada engines. The cupboard was full of clothes that Molly had collected to sell for the Wyuna Nursing Home appeal.

"Help yourself," said Jack. "There's some first-rate stuff in here, I warrant you."

I got myself a new wardrobe that night, selecting carefully, thinking of the winter ahead.

"Snaffle every staver," I told myself as I admired myself in my new suit. I thought I was a real smart b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

10.

They tell me now that there was no wireless in Geelong in 1919, but I tell you there was. It had a big round dial depicting not only the stations but the world itself. We sat around it on our chairs. Phoebe drank a cordial and clinked her ice inside the gla.s.s. Molly had tea. Jack and I drank Scotch. Alcohol was always dangerous for me when I was excited: I sipped. Not Jack. He confessed he had been a teetotaller to the age of forty and he appreciated his drink the way he appreciated knots. He wiped his mouth with the back of his broad hairy hand and marvelled at its effect on his const.i.tution.

"By Jove," he said, "that was good."

There was wireless, all right, and they read the news on it. Jack, like my father before me and my son after me, was a bit on the deaf side and he leaned attentively towards the set. The rest of us stared at the amber glow behind the map of the world: there was news that night of the AustraliaEngland air race. Ulm, so the plummy-voiced announcer said, had crashed in Crete.

My G.o.d, it was the year to be an aviator. We could do no wrong. When the press wrote up a pilot he wasn't just a pilot; he was an "eagle soaring above our skies" and no matter how often some ex-RFC type crashed while publicizing War Bonds, the public never seemed to get tired of it. The AustraliaEngland air race fed them on tales of heroism and danger.

As it happened, I had known Charles Ulm. Possibly I had known Charles Ulm. To tell you the truth I can't remember whether I really did know him or if I claimed it so often I came to believe it myself. Photographs of Ulm never looked like the man I described but people always blamed the photographer for that, not me. In any case, when the news was over I told them all about Ulm, what he was like as a man, what he looked like and so on. In short, I delivered value.

I gorged myself on cold roast lamb and beans and beetroot. I hadn't had a feed in two days.

11.

Phoebe watched the man who kept a snake for a pet, who shared, it seemed, a bedroom with the creature. She thought he devoured the table with a most peculiar pa.s.sion, a pa.s.sion as cool and blue as his eyes, as controlled and modulated as her own careful speech. She watched her mother as she fluttered-a humming-bird-in the cage of the aviator's oil-stained hand.

"That is so, Mr Badgery?" said Molly who had gone all plummy-voiced. "Is it not?"

Molly was so sh.e.l.l-shocked by social life in Geelong that she had lost all confidence in her normal manner. She now crooked her finger in a monstrous way when drinking tea. People thought her affected.

Phoebe would one day grow into the most formidable sn.o.b yet she did not judge or reject her mother for her anxious affectations-her mother was vulgar, but she loved her. Phoebe put the whole responsibility upon Geelong. It is in matters to do with Geelong that she was a sn.o.b and she would, given half a chance, have made invidious comparisons with Paris. She did not get a quarter of a chance. The talk was all aviation. They quoted the farmer from MyahMyah who built an aeroplane in 1910 based solely on a newspaper photograph of the Wright Brothers' plane. They talked of Smithy and Ulm and were momentarily silent for the first Kingsford Smith, Ross. And Phoebe missed the point: the talk was really a celebration of towns as plain (and plainer than) Geelong. They were eyries, the birthplaces of the great. Australians, it seemed that night in Western Avenue, were born to rule the skies.

We drank a toast: "To our eagles." The owner of the antiquated Morris Farman on whose side was strapped a bicycle for seeking help, did not even have the grace to blush.

Phoebe, however, invented me according to her needs. She imagined she saw Jewish blood, or Semitic blood anyway. She thought of Arabs in s.h.i.+ps with odd-shaped sails, traders from Sumer, Phoenicians selling their rare purple dyes swept here in the eddies of time to a dull bay and an electrically-illuminated supper in Geelong.

But she saw also, in an ebb in the conversation, that I suddenly looked so sad, so lost, that my mouth lost its shape. In my eyes she saw the shape of brilliant dreams, and also (like a private drawer stupidly left open) the stubbornness, the wilfulness in my lips, a cruelty, a fear of my own weakness. Her perceptions were a dangerous mixture of deadly accuracy and pure romance.

I did not speak to Phoebe during that meal during which she silently, picking at lamb gristle, nibbling at lip-staining beetroot, made a number of decisions that were to affect her for the rest of her life. The first of these was that she would learn to fly and the second was that I should teach her.

That night she would glide into sleep on the double wings of a Morris Farman. I stayed up talking to Jack for another four hours but when I lay, at last, on the cool sheets of my bed, I spat carefully on my forefinger and rubbed, ever so lightly, the head of my p.e.n.i.s which was filled to bursting with dreams of creamy skin.

12.

I had some funny dreams about Jack McGrath in later life, but there is no benefit to be obtained from discussing them here, even if I do compare that first night to the first night with a new lover.

There was pa.s.sion, sympathy, excitement. We were tireless. We were so pleased pleased. We talked of aeroplanes and motor cars, bullock teams and the bush. We recited Lawson and Banjo Paterson. We were still beneath the naked light globes in the ballroom when the milk cart went clopping down Western Avenue. We heard the clink of the ladle in the bucket, the sweet sound of pouring milk, the seagulls restless on the Quay a mile away.

Jack must have been dressed in the suit he had worn in honour of A. D. Collins, but I choose to remember him differently, with stubble on his folded face, the patch of dark hair on his ruddy cheek, his collarless s.h.i.+rt unironed, his old vest, his patched trousers, his unlaced boots placed beneath his chair (where they would be lost on the morrow), his toes curling and uncurling inside his carefully darned navy blue socks.

He told me the story of his life, and I'll tell you too, later.

I also told him the story of my life, or rather the parts of it I had never told a man before. It has to be told again now, and I find it harder than I did when I looked at Jack's soft eyes in his crumpled sympathetic face.

This story concerns my father who I always imagined to be an Englishman, who made such a thing, as long as I knew him, of his Englishness, who never missed a chance to say, "I am an Englishman" or, "as an Englishman" that I was surprised to find out he was born in York Street, Warrnambool, the son of a shopkeeper. Yet for all that, I must carry his lie for him. For he made himself into an Englishman and my first memory of him is being chastised for the way I spoke.

"Cahstle," he roared at me, "not kehstle." He did not like my accent. He did not, I think, like much about me. My brothers were older and they got on with him better. They were useful to him in his business and I was too young to do any more than feed the animals and jump down to apply the brake on hills.

His business was to represent the English firm of Newby whose prime product was the Newby Patented 18 lb. Cannon, and with this machine in tow we covered the rutted, rattling, dusty pot-holed roads of coastal Victoria, six big Walers in front, the cannon at the rear, and that unsprung cart they called a "limber" in the middle.

Always we were in a hurry. There was never a time when we might stop at a pretty spot, or a morning when we could lie late in bed. Always there was some group of squatters who had got themselves together or-and this must be what really happenedwho my father thought could be persuaded to get together to buy a cannon to protect themselves from Russians or Chinese or shearers.

He was a man who saw threat everywhere-thin but very strong, pale-skinned, blue-eyed, black-bearded and as cold to his children as he was charming to his customers. I have seen him at table with fat mayors and muscle-gutted squatters, laughing, telling jokes, playing them as sweetly as if they were his own violin, warming them up, getting their pores wide open before he hit them with the icy blast of fear that was his specialty.

It was from my father that I learned about the Chinese and he painted pictures of such depravity that when I met my first Chinaman I expected him to kill me.

G.o.d knows what I learned from my mother. I did not have her for long. I cannot tell you what she looked like, although, of course, I thought her pretty. I can remember sitting beside her on the limber-she is nothing more than a shape, but warm and soft, quite different to my two brothers and father who rode postilion on those huge Walers-they were as hard as the iron leg guards they wore on their right legs.

My father dispensed with my mother when I was still very young and I always a.s.sumed that he sent her away, but it is more likely that she died. Only two things are certain. The first is that he would not discuss it. The second is that I blamed him. I was left alone on the bench seat with only the rounds of ammunition to keep me company. The limber was unsprung and iron-wheeled. They steered a course over logs and pot-holes just to jar me. And although I saw a lot of country it was not much of a childhood, moving as we did through threatening visions of Russians, Lascars, Jews, Asiatics, n.i.g.g.e.rs and other threats to our safety.

My father was always very mean with his ammunition, and it was because of this that we finally parted. There was never a group of men, or an individual man, who did not like to see the cannon fired and there was nothing guaranteed to get him into a fury more than firing off a salvo for someone who did not buy a machine. He never showed his anger to the men who caused it ("A sale," he said, "is never lost, only temporarily postponed") but only to his family and we soon learned what to expect.

My brothers seemed to accept their beatings but then they spent their day on horseback and shared their task, their understanding of life, with my father, while I sat alone on the limber with my thoughts which were only interrupted by my father hollering "brake". There was such weight in that cannon that the brake must be applied at the top of hills, and I was meant to know without being told, to jump down off the moving limber and turn the big wheel at the back of the cannon; this applied wooden blocks directly to the cannon wheels and, making a G.o.d Almighty scream, prevented disaster on steep hills.

My father did not normally beat me badly, but there was an incident during the shearers' strike that resulted in a b.l.o.o.d.y beating. It was his fault, not mine. He got carried away with some wool c.o.c.kies in Terang, and although I was only ten years old at the time, I could see that he wouldn't get the sale. These were fellows who wanted some fireworks, but my father missed the signs. He drew them pictures of mad-eyed shearers coming down to rape their wives and burn down their sheds. He let off ten sh.e.l.ls and demolished a stand of iron-barks, leaving nothing but bleeding sap and torn splinters as soft as flesh. When it was over I could see the look on the men's faces-you see the same look outside brothels as they put on their hats and hurry away-a flaccid, shamed, satiated look.

These squatters told my father: "We'll think about it."

Well, he was nice as pie to them, but I felt the skin around my little t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es go hard and leathery and I sweated around my b.u.m-hole and I will not describe for you the beating he gave me on account of this, but rather paint you the picture of my revenge, for it is this that I count as the day of my birth, just as it is from 1919, from the day I landed at Balliang East, that I count the days of my adult life.

My revenge did not take place immediately, but I did have an idea. I imagined, as I sat alone on the limber with my bruises, that I lacked the courage to carry it out. But the idea would not go away. It grew inside me. At night it comforted me. Soaked to the skin on the road to Melbourne-we were covering about twenty miles a day-the idea made me smile, but I remained dutiful, applying the brake and letting it off as required.