Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 22

79.

A man who wishes his tale believed does himself no service by speaking of the supernatural; I would rather have slipped in some neatly tailored lie to fill the gap, but the gap is so odd, so uniquely shaped, that the only thing that will fill it is the event that made it.

I told no one about the ghost. From March to July in 1921 I saw it often. It sat at the kitchen table. It wandered across the flats. Sometimes it was there every night. Sometimes I would think it gone for good. For two, three, four nights I would be left alone. And then I would wake up and hear it, sitting at the kitchen table, whistling out of tune. The hairs on my neck would raise themselves on end, and those on my arms, and those on my legs that had not been worn away by my straight-legged trousers. I soaked the sheet with perspiration.

The hens were my witness to the ghost. They set up the sort of fuss and panic you hear when a snake enters the chook-house late at night. One of them, a big old Rhode Island Red rooster, died of fright. Molly's verdict was that it had fallen prey to damp and I did not disagree with her. The dead rooster, however, smelt of snake.

The ghost was not a single solid shape, but rather a confluence of lights nestling in a lighter glow, like one of those puzzles for children with dots numbered from one to ninety-five. It sat at the kitchen table with the snake. The snake slithered like a necklace around the ghost, entered into it and streamed out of it. You could see the snake's innards pulsing: liquids, solids, legs of frogs and other swarming substances with tails like tadpoles.

The ghost was Jack. Its gait, as it drifted past my bedroom window, was unmistakable. I saw it move out across the gra.s.s flats and on to the mud. It hovered round the Morris Farman.

Now you can say I manufactured this ghost myself, and that it was nothing more than my guilty conscience scorched on to the night. I will have to grant it is possible, providing you also give me credit for killing the rooster and making it smell of snake. You are free to argue it, but it makes and made no difference, not to the story, not to my p.r.i.c.kling skin, or to my bowels which loosened and gave me a liquid s.h.i.+t to spray and splatter around the dunnycan at odd and unpredictable hours of the night and day.

These nocturnal visits drove me to excesses of kindness, of which the agreement I signed with Phoebe is only one. I cared for the wife and daughter of the ghost with even greater zeal, dazzling them with my attentions, bringing them gifts of ornaments from Cole's Arcade and peculiar cheeses from the Eastern Markets. I offered liquors to Molly and an array of fountain pens to Phoebe so that she might be a poet in any colour she chose. I bought her red ink and indigo, brown and cobalt blue. I built accommodation, as I've said, for Horace and begged him consider himself a member of my family. Yet none of this seemed to have any effect on the ghost who came and went as he saw fit, whistling, stamping his foot, and displaying the snake in styles that varied from the accusatory to the downright lewd.

I fancied I saw it on the night that Charles was born into the hands of the young midwife. It did a jig, a little dance, hop-ho, a shearer's prance, around the house and out across the mud of Dudley's Flat.

I waited for its return, and while young Charles bellowed with rage at those who had tried to kill him and left the household sleepless and his mother's nipples so sore she could not bear my jealous tongue to touch them, Jack did not return.

Now you may argue that the ghost had simply wished to see the continuation of its line, and now rea.s.sured had simply gone away. But a ghost does not bring a snake to flaunt and slither round its neck, to swallow down its ghostly throat and produce from between its legs, if all it wishes is to hear the cries of its a.s.sa.s.sin's child. He does not go hop-ho to celebrate his daughter's union to an unkind man. He has, therefore, other purposes and less innocent things to celebrate.

When I saw the dance I went quite cold. For I knew that I had been defeated in a battle I did not know the rules of, and my tormentor had slipped inside my defence and thrust his weapon home without his victim being aware of the nature of the wound.

Molly always believed the child was Horace's. And Horace's behaviour simply confirmed it. The truth, however, was that Horace had found, at last, his true vocation which was neither poetry nor law nor Rawleigh's Balsam, but the care of house and baby which even Molly had to admit that he did with greater skill than any of the women could have managed. The house was clean and dusted, the meals were large and simple, the child both neat and happy. Horace cooed over it. He dusted its bottom with baby powder and cleaned its napkins and only when the small puckered lips sucked at his chest could he be judged lacking as both father and mother to it. He loved to watch it stretch and curl its feet, felt relief in its burps, and sheer wonder at its small unformed intelligence.

Molly saw that I, on the other hand, was very careful with the child. I treated it with reserve and caution. I was stiff and awkward. When I held him Charles writhed against me and screamed until Horace took him back again.

All this proved Molly's theories about the child's paternity. No such thought had entered my head. I had other reasons for treating Charles so carefully. I narrowed my eyes and watched him. I spied on him as he lay in his ba.s.sinet. And as Charles grew and came slowly into focus I saw exactly what had happened: Charles was Jack with bandy legs put on.

No wonder the jig, the hop, the dance.

I did not waste time thinking about the mechanics of this conception, whether Jack's ghost had mounted Phoebe in the night, driven home his pulsing lights deep into her womb and made her cry out, or whether he sent the snake slithering electrically into the bedroom with its belly full of coded liquids, there to insinuate itself between her legs whilst she slept beside her unsuspecting husband.

Phoebe displayed little of the maternal instinct towards her son and for this I silently thanked her. We did not discuss the Little Jack who toddled silently into places it was forbidden, but I always believed we both understood that something sinister had happened.

A lesser man might have been defeated by such a setback. Yet when I recall 1921 and '22 I recall only my feverish optimism. I built for the future, with the pa.s.sion of a man who plans to start a dynasty. The house grew. It shot out long branches, covered walkways, new rooms. I built a room for Annette who had failed, as yet, to visit. I was oblivious to the world outside, and most of the world inside too.

E.g.: Dear d.i.c.ksy, you are, once again, proven right and there does not appear to be any likelihood of a more modern aeroplane. I am sure there is enough money. I am absolutely convinced. But the whole subject seems to enrage them and they will not even discuss it. He, who introduced himself into my life with all his dreams and ambitions, seems to have become an old man suddenly, weary of trying anything and content to sit in his slippers drinking tea. He is jealous of me. He led me on with all this talk of famous air races, and now he has abandoned them completely and he seems set for the life of a shopkeeper.

The poor little boy will, I suppose, suffer because of us, but at least H. has learned his lesson and seen that he is not capable of normal paternal feelings. We are, neither of us, normal people. I do do love my son, but much as I imagine fathers love their children, not in the hot entanglement of child and mother, all muddy with tears and pee. Thank G.o.d for Horace who is wonderful with him, and leaves me free to master this very antiquated aeroplane which, at least, is not forbidden me and in which I shall, any week, come to visit you. d.i.c.ksy, I cannot wait. I am a cat in heat. I lift my tail. I arch my back. I rub against your calves. And for all this, I blame the sky which is so love my son, but much as I imagine fathers love their children, not in the hot entanglement of child and mother, all muddy with tears and pee. Thank G.o.d for Horace who is wonderful with him, and leaves me free to master this very antiquated aeroplane which, at least, is not forbidden me and in which I shall, any week, come to visit you. d.i.c.ksy, I cannot wait. I am a cat in heat. I lift my tail. I arch my back. I rub against your calves. And for all this, I blame the sky which is so empty empty. You are wrong (or, should I say, Freud is wrong-you are merely wrong to quote him). It may be correct in dreams (his, yours, not mine-I only dream of engines and magnetos with faults I cannot fix) but in real life the feelings are produced by emptiness. I know I would have the same urges in the desert, or in any place where I was me, alone, with no one else to observe or censure me. I have felt the strongest desire in railway carriages when I am alone in a compartment by myself and I know I can do anything, anything at all, without anyone to interrupt. All of which is to say that they are welcome to get cross or unhappy because they have given up their dreams, but I will not.

80.

Now you have those letters in your hand it is easy enough for you take Phoebe's side and look at me as a fool, or something worse. It is your privilege and if I did not wish you to have it, I would have kept the letters hidden. Yet I did not come into possession of them until 1930, when I had the indignity of buying them from a wizened man in the saloon bar of the Railway Hotel in Kyneton. He sat at the little round table, eating a musk stick, drinking stout, and dealing out his wares with yellowed finger. He offered me an envelope marked "personal effects" which contained postcards depicting Cossacks raping village women, then a comic strip of a baby with a ten-inch c.o.c.k f.u.c.king a big-t.i.tted woman with a mole on her shoulder. Then my wife's letters to Annette. Jonathon Oakes, for that is who it was, did not recognize me and I did not ask him how his fortunes had fallen so low. I paid him five s.h.i.+llings for his stolen letters.

So this knowledge about my wife not only cost me pain, but also money. But it is yours. Take it. It goes together with the rest.

Yet I must tell you that Phoebe had not been able, or had no wish to, express herself so clearly to me. She did not deny me caresses. She did not fail to greet me with a kiss, to inquire about my work, to fetch my slippers-the slippers she appears to have hated were a gift to me from her. We played with Charles together. We pretended to love him together. My darling expected me, somehow, to be a mind-reader.

Doubtless I expected the same of her. I imagined my pa.s.sion for building was shared by everyone. I did not doubt that it was understood: that my ruling love was for human warmth, for people gathered in rooms, talking, laughing, sharing stews and puddings and talk. Aeroplanes and cars seemed, in comparison, cold and soulless things, of no consequence in comparison to the family we were building. For the first time in my life I felt I had a place on earth.

But I did not explain myself. I felt it obvious. I thought my building was a language anyone could understand. Did they imagine I added rooms for no reason, that it was merely a hobby, a silly obsession? I built a room for a next child. I began tentatively. It rose as a question. I hung pink wallpaper. Phoebe admired it. I paced around her with a bucket of paste in my hand. It was a courts.h.i.+p dance. I have seen birds do the same in Mallee country. They build a mound. They show it. No words are spoken, but it is clearly understood.

So when Phoebe smiled and kissed me, her lips and eyes erased certain matters in the doc.u.ment I had so rashly signed. Still I did not contradict the cautious calendar my wife drew up. Neither did I ignore the details of the agreement in regard to ejaculatio, not, that is, until one Sunday afternoon when my wife, inflamed with pa.s.sion after two hours of dangerous flying, clenched my b.u.t.tocks tight and dug her nails in hard and then-and only then-I ripped forth a joyful sob of s.e.m.e.n, a throb, a dob, a teeming swarming flood of life.

It was only then I realized that she could no more read my building than I could read her poetry.

81.

The real bitterness did not start there, with Phoebe splas.h.i.+ng water up her c.u.n.t, but on a July morning in 1923 while Charles slopped his spoon around a plate of soggy Weeties and Horace stood cooking bacon on the stove.

Phoebe left the room to vomit. When she returned she walked up to me and spat her morning sickness in my face.

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d," she said.

I wiped the foul-smelling spittle from my face, dabbed at the small splash on my waistcoat, rolled my napkin and placed it carefully in its ring. I blinked. I walked outside. Not even Molly said a word.

Phoebe followed me. "I want to talk to you," she said.

I stopped. Everyone in that little kitchen must have heard-my voice as dead as stone, Phoebe's quivering and only just controlled.

"I will have this child," she said. "All right?"

"All right."

"That will make you happy?"

I did not answer. How could I answer about "happy" when I saw the liquid hatred in her eyes.

"Then you have my word. You don't need to guard me. I will fly for the first six months, but not the last three. I will spend the last three months writing poetry and then I will give you the child."

And from that point, with my feet frozen in the frost-thick gra.s.s outside the kitchen window, I became a different man.

I did everything in my power to regain my wife's affections. The more I tried, the more pitiful she found me. She was one of those people who admire strength and despise weakness. The more I kotowed to her the more she scorned me. She ridiculed me openly.

And yet she did not remove the possibility of hope.

82.

One September afternoon, two king parrots settled on the gables of the house while Horace sat in the suns.h.i.+ne peeling potatoes and I cut out fabric for a wing section Phoebe had ripped on a fence post down at Werribee. It was Phoebe, looking critically over my shoulder, who saw the parrots.

"Shush," she said, although n.o.body was talking.

The king parrot is a magnificent bird, and the clear blue of a Melbourne spring day sets them off perfectly. Their heads and chest are red, their wings and backs green, their long tails green. They stood on the roof and preened each other, and I, estranged from my wife, was overcome with loneliness.

They did not stay long. They landed, preened, looked around, and flew away.

I expressed my disappointment.

"Why would they stay?" said Phoebe, walking to the house. "There are no decent trees. There is nothing for them here. If you had chosen some land with decent trees there would be parrots all year round."

"Not all year," said Horace quietly. He was the only person permitted to contradict my wife. "They follow the blossoms."

"Different parrots," she said, "at different times."

"That is true," said Horace. "But in any case, we have splendid water birds which have their own charm."

"It is parrots that I love," said Phoebe. "It is parrots that I miss."

I held up the fabric to the light. Charles bellowed somewhere in the house. It was, I think, the day he ate Horace's tobacco, and it was also the day I resolved to buy Phoebe parrots.

83.

I bought the king parrot from an old bus.h.i.+e in a pub in Exhibition Street. I placed it on the kitchen table on a Friday night.

The gift acted like honey on Phoebe's bitter tongue. Her eyes shone. "Oh," she said, "how beautiful. How splendid. Herbert, you must build it a cage."

"It has a cage," said Molly, "a very expensive one too."

"No, no. It deserves a big cage. A room."

Was I suspicious? Did I perhaps detect the faintest whiff of irony? Was there any there to smell? I still think this first enthusiasm of Phoebe's was genuine, and it was only later, when she saw me working on that cage, that she allowed her bitterness to warp her original spontaneous feeling, to convert it into something artful, ironic and sarcastic.

I did not understand poetry in those days. I imagined it involved rhymes, and if not rhymes at least words. But now I know a poem can take any form, can be a sleight of hand, a magician's trick, be built from string and paper, fish or animals, bricks and wire.

I never knew I was a hired hand in the construction of my wife's one true poem. I knew only, in the midst of its construction, that Horace would puzzle me with his sympathetic eyes which would not hold mine when I confronted him. I observed how he left the room when cages were discussed, how he picked up Charles and plopped him on his pudgy hip and took him outside to play.

Sonia, growing up inside my wife's womb, became accustomed to the noise of hammering and sawing-the king parrot was merely the first bird I housed beneath my spreading roof. My family soon included lorikeets and parakeets, western rosellas, gold-winged friar birds and a cat bird from Queensland.

The cat bird had a forlorn cry, like a whimpering child or the animal it is named for. The c.o.c.katoos screeched. The parrots hawked. The house pushed out and grew-rows of cages radiated like the spokes of a wheel.

84.

Here: the photograph of the taxi drivers' picnic on September 23rd, 1923. I am trapped in the heart of Phoebe's poem, teetering at the apex of my empire. The photograph shows Molly, Annette, Phoebe, Horace, Charles, baby Sonia, me, and the taxi drivers and their wives and children. It does not show the house, only a little of the lattice I erected to shade the cages from the westerly sun.

The gra.s.s was fresh mown, already fermenting, and I was a s.e.xton happily asleep in a fresh-dug grave, my hands muddy, the smile of a fool upon my face.

My house was full. All rooms were occupied. Annette's towel lay drying in the sun on her window ledge. Her bed was made. Sonia's nursery awaited her, but now she lay in her pram in the suns.h.i.+ne, kicking her long straight legs, curling her toes, and gurgling happily while all around her the taxi drivers and their wives and children admired her: just like her mother, but with her father's eyes.

Horace played the waiter. He carried wobbling jellies and drunken trifles, dispensed bread and b.u.t.ter and hundreds and thousands to the children.

The drivers were an independent lot, sharp, shrewd, cloth-capped and street-wise, but you could see they liked Molly who moved amongst them in a vast white dress, her copper hair cascading from beneath a straw hat, dispensing cordial. She was a lady. They called her "Ma'am". When the photographer arrived they lined up their taxis: "Boomerang," the signs said, "fast as an arrow, Australian to the marrow."

I stood between Phoebe and Annette. Annette, I can see, had put her arm through mine. She was nice to me that day, and I to her. I asked her to describe the streets of Paris, and she did, and I enjoyed hearing about it.

Phoebe seemed as happy as I ever knew her to be. When I see her in that photograph, see that proud chin, that soft smile, I can imagine, if I half close my eyes, the way she moved her lips when speaking, the throaty lazy voice. Her eyes, though, are shaded by her hat, and it is just as well they are shaded, those eyes that made the poem.

And it was through her poem I walked, I took the children on tours of my splendid cages. The birds were clean and healthy. They preened themselves in honour of spring. The parrots hung upside down on their perches. The friar birds drove their beaks into the sweet white flesh of Bacchus Marsh apples.

The trees, now three years old, stood as tall as young men, taller than Charles who tottered along in his ghost's gait, following Horace and holding on to his chubby legs.

That night, in the heart of my empire, my wife and I made love in the style that permitted no conception and that, in any case, was the one she now preferred. It no longer hurt her and left her free to increase the tempo of her own pleasure with her hand, but that night she wept when I entered her and her tears wet my nose where it pressed against her neck.

"Poor Herbert," she said.

I did not understand her.

"You'll be all right," she said. She choked. She shook.

"I am," I said. "I am, I am."

But whatever I said to her only made her weep more and I now know what I did not know then, she was suffering from the melancholy that all poets feel at the completion of their work.

"You'll survive," she said.

I did not doubt her. The bedsprings creaked beneath the strokes of my greasy confidence, and if there was s.h.i.+t to smell, I missed it totally.