Part 36 (2/2)

Leah did not laugh. She put her hand on my knee. ”Do you become afraid, Mr Badgery?”

”Sometimes.”

”Let's buy alcohol,” she said suddenly. ”Let's buy alcohol in Violet Town.”

43.

Alcohol sustained us, it is true, and had it not been for this (and a packet of French letters I was forced to buy in Benalla) we would have made it across the border with petrol in the tank and five bob to spare, free, ready to make an honest quid without the help of the Victorian Police Force.

Alas we ran out of petrol in Wodonga and Charles, to his everlasting pride and eternal shame, sold his yellow-tailed black c.o.c.katoo to the man in the pet shop outside whose establishment fortune decreed we should come to rest.

There is nothing to tell about this except to let you see the expression on my son's face when he had bid up the price from ten s.h.i.+llings to one pound. His face seemed to swell, as if ruled by air or fluids; it became quite pink and taut and his eyes brightened with moisture and his mouth quivered at that odd uncertain point-a point I would like to leave it at forever-where, tickled by pride, made loose with relief, it may burst into the broadest smile or, alternatively, fall in on itself, feed on itself, a bitter meal of self-hatred that might sustain a man forever.

44.

I would rather fill my history with great men and women, philosophers, scientists, intellectuals, artists, but I confess myself incapable of so vast a lie. I am stuck with Badgery & Goldstein (Theatricals) wandering through the 1930s like flies on the face of a great painting, travelling up and down the curlicues of the frame, complaining that our legs are like lead and the glare from all that gilt is wearying our eyes, arguing about the nature of life and our place in the world while-I now know-Niels Bohr was postulating the presence of the neutrino, while matter itself was being proved insubstantial, while Hitler-that black spider-was weaving his unholy lies.

Lies, dreams, visions-they were everywhere. We brushed them aside as carelessly as spider webs across a garden path. They clung to us, of course, adhered to our clothes and trailed behind us but we were too busy arguing to note their presence.

So while Arthur Dempster discovered Uranium 235 I was learning to be a funny man, mocking the dragon, standing on a dusty stage in Bellingen, NSW, and looking like a fool while an emu pecked my b.u.m.

I had painted a map of Australia on the soft canopy of the Dodge and marked our path in red. ”Badgery & Goldstein (Theatricals)” it said. Later I added ”& Pet Suppliers” in acknowledgement of Charles's role in our survival.

Charles grew large and strong, but in an awkward way, with powerful bullock driver's thighs atop his bandy legs. He had a long trunk, a huge head with a powerful jaw, a face painful with pimples. He suffered his adolescence, talking to various animals in a breaking voice. When he should have been masturbating or spying on girls in the changing sheds of s.h.i.+re swimming pools, he was caressing some bright parrot or persuading a carpet snake to give up its freedom.

During some bad times in the Northern Rivers, it was fourteen-year-old Charles who kept us alive, selling birds to a charming old American, a fellow named Parson who wore rimless gla.s.ses like Teddy Roosevelt. He robbed us, of course, but we didn't know any better. He paid us a s.h.i.+lling for king parrots, sixpence for a galah, and we stayed in Grafton while the jacarandas dropped their lilac carpets across the streets and Charles went out each day with his nets and his climbing boots, a sanctimonious look on his face.

We paid for all this, the rest of us, paid for it in Charlie's moods, his slammed car doors, his stamped foot, his flood of tears.

It was also in Grafton that I bought Sonia a pretty white dress so she could go to Church of England Sunday School. Leah, who dressed drably off stage, disapproved of this. I was never religious myself but I thought it a harmless sort of thing. I would rather have my daughter pray to Jesus and sing Christmas carols than flirt with dragons. Besides, I had nothing against a pretty dress and I liked to dress up my beautiful daughter, to brush her hair and tie her ribbons. I was not approved of and later, in a moment of heat, Leah would scream at me: ”All you saw of her were pretty dresses, not who she was. She was just skin to you.”

Ah, skin.

We cannot avoid it. Ever since her husband had walked, gla.s.s-eyed, mask-faced, from our camp, skin had been an obsession with my puritanical partner who suffered her guilt, that she had rejected her husband for an unworthy reason. She did not even understand her own reasons. She put all the weight on that poor envelope and would not let herself see beyond it.

She wrote to Izzie once a week, but she said nothing to him of skin. I was the one who bore the brunt of her obsession.

45.

Sonia was at Sunday School in her pretty dress and Charles had been taken up to Mapleton in the schoolteacher's jinker to remove an alleged taipan from the Post Office toilet. Leah and Itemporarily rich-had retired to bed in our room at Donaldson's Commercial Hotel, Nambour. It was the wet season: mosquitoes hung in clouds outside our net; the air was sweet with the smell of the sugar mill just up the road.

A romantic afternoon had been planned. Bundaberg rum was purchased. And then Izzie and his skin came greasingly into the room, sliding into the bed, and I found my lover looking at me with that calculating grey gaze of hers as if, had she been able to focus her stare finely enough, she would have cut away the bone on my shaven head and laid bare the smelly secrets of my dogfish soul.

”In what respect,” she said, at last, ”am I like your wife?” She propped herself up on her elbow and displayed her small flaw, the nipple of her left breast which had the habit of popping inwards and which she, when was.h.i.+ng, and I when kissing, popped out again, in readiness for the day when she would feed a child. Sometimes we discussed this possibility, this furry-edged future, but not today. The nipple remained inverted.

”I will tell you in what respect,” she said, ”it is skin. Give me the rum.”

”Empty.”

”Show me.”

I dropped my hands into the skirts of mosquito net and dragged the empty bottle into bed. I held it up against the light. The bottle was empty but she drank from it anyway.

”Young women's skin,” she said. ”She was twenty-three when you left her.”

”She left me.”

”So you claim, but who could believe you? You told the newspaper in Grafton you were an ex-serviceman. You believe whatever falls out of your mouth because you don't really believe anything, just Product. You don't care about people, you only care about skin.”

”Leah, Leah, I love you.”

”Skin,” she said. ”Skin, you told me-the feel of skin.”

”Let me....”

”And when it stretches and sags you'll throw me out, trade me in for a new one.”

”Let me tell you a story.”

”Don't touch me.”

”A story.”

”A lie.”

”A true story. How I got my electric belt.”

”How you got your Product to wors.h.i.+p.”

”It's about skin. Do you want to hear it or not?”

”Yes,” she said, suspecting a trap.

The story was, more or less, as follows. Most of it is lies, but I could think of no other way to tell Leah Goldstein that I loved her and not her skin.

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