Illywhacker

It was cold at Crab Apple Creek and Leah Goldstein tugged at her long black woollen socks, pulled so hard that the perfect round white hole that had occupied a spot at the very centre of her left shin now suddenly became long and thin, almost invisible, as it darted up towards her lovely knee. She wrapped her blue-dyed greatcoat tight around herself. She found a half-burnt stick on the ground and threw it back into the flames of the fire. She shivered.

"Well," she said.

Charles moved closer to her and she felt his warty hand come creeping towards her, like a lost crab wandering in the dark. The hand was so hungry and cold she held it in both of hers. Its back was hard and rough, its underbelly soft.

"Where's your father hiding?" She rubbed the rough-textured skin, trying to warm it. "If he thinks he's entertaining us, he's upter."

She looked across at the little girl who sat exactly where she had been before the con-man had done his trick. All Leah could see of her emotions was the camp fire reflected in her eyes.

"Timing, Mr Badgery," the dancer said sarcastically to the night. But she spoilt the effect by the way she jerked her head to look, bird-fast and nervous, over her shoulder.

"He disappeared," Sonia said and Leah did not know her well enough to realize that the tone was not quite normal.

"An illywhacker," Leah Goldstein said loudly like someone fearful of burglars who descends the stairs, flashlight in hand, in the middle of the night.

"What's an illywhacker?" said Charles.

"Spieler," explained Leah, who was not used to children. "Eelerspee. It's like pig Latin. Spieler is ieler-spe and then iely-whacker. Illywhacker. See?"

"I think so," Charles said.

"A spieler," Leah gently loosened the painful crab hold of the boy's hand. "Your nails are sharp. A trickster. A quandong. A ripperty man. A con-man."

Sonia pulled her cardigan down over her knees and stared into the fire where solid matter was reappearing in thin blue cloaks of turbulent gas.

"When will he come back?" asked the dancer.

In later life Charles would recall only the brilliance of his father's magic, but now, hearing the nervousness in the adult's voice, he was suddenly very frightened. He began to cry. Sonia immediately moved to comfort her brother.

So they sat, the three of them, side by side on one log, huddled against each other, waiting for Herbert Badgery to reappear. And you, dear reader, will do me the kind favour of emulating my patient daughter and neither make sarcastic comments like the ill-informed Goldstein (who thinks me engaged in some simple trick) nor snivel like my fearful son who is so easily convinced that I am gone for good. Thus you will not waste time staring out into the night but will, alone with Sonia, appreciate the thin green tower of flame which rises from the wattle log to meet – like a comet on a chance collision – the blue penumbra of the yellow flower made by the dancer's broken stick.

11

When Edith Goldstein questioned her husband about their eldest daughter's accommodation in Sydney he realized he did not even know the name of the street it stood in. It was this, not weariness, that gave him flu symptoms. It was panic that his carelessness would be uncovered. His normally sallow face coloured and he opened the taxi window to get air. Edith watched her husband with alarm as he began to talk. She held his hand and, without making any comment about what she was doing, felt his pulse. The room, Sid told her breathlessly, had a good bed. It was a double bed. He considered this quite appropriate. She could keep this bed forever. It was good enough to marry with, of first quality, made in America. The room had an excellent view ("You could not stop himself) the tapestries on the wall and he saw (now he thought about it) that these depicted not only camels, men in red fezzes, pyramids and dancing girls but also, in the bottom right-hand corner, a small shrub that looked very like an Australian Bottlebrush. The landlady was a widow. Her husband had been a Commissioner of Police in Cairo. This is where the tapestries in their daughter's bedroom had come from.

"Stop, stop," cried Edith Goldstein. "I will write to her. She will tell me. Poke out your tongue."

But to write she would need the address. She did not have an address. He could not put out his tongue, "I will write," he said, so firmly that his wife – although surprised – did not question him.

"I will write," he repeated, saying nothing about the concrete steps, the odd smells, the nasturtiums, although these were things that troubled him deeply. "I have written", he declared, "already. On the train. The porter is posting it for me."

Thus was invented that rickety thing, the Missing Letter. Edith was too worried about her husband's health to query him as to why he would give a letter to a porter, and so the Missing Letter was allowed to survive. It is mentioned often in the early correspondence between father and daughter, e. g. "Have you yet received the Missing Letter?"