Illywhacker

She chose a course towards Izzie that would allow him to witness her approach and thus have time to compose herself. She walked with her head down, one hand on her hat, the other controlling her dress which rose recklessly to show the sky her dancer's legs.

When she arrived at the rock he was sitting up, looking sheepish. She sat down beside him and took his hand, not as a lover might, but as a concerned stranger taking a pulse, and indeed it crossed her mind to wonder if such skin could ever be truly familiar, if it might not always be slightly alien.

"Talking to my mother," Izzie said, not looking at her. "Talking to my mother is not a game you can win. You are in check from the first move."

"Do you know what I think?" Leah said at last.

"What do you think?"

"I think the chooks are making everyone unhappy." She smiled, but she was quite serious. When Izzie had made the chooks they had been snow-white creatures with wise black eyes but now they were malevolent and mad-eyed and their red combs were obscene.

Izzie shrugged his shoulders irritably.

"She has never been any different," he said. "It was always Joseph who could do no wrong. Whatever I did, it didn't matter-I was wrong. Oh, Goldstein, if only you could meet my slimy big brother. She loves him. She thinks he's the ant's pants. Have you seen how she wraps up his dull translations in tissue paper? Jesus Christ! He's such a fraud."

"Izzie, why didn't you tell me about Rosa?"

"I am telling you, Goldstein," he smiled, "now."

"She's unhappy. She looks sick and miserable. And your father has a funny look too – disappointed and bitter."

"I forgot."

Leah looked at him incredulously.

"How could you forget?"

"I forgot. And there's a southerly buster coming." He pulled her to her feet and they began to stroll back to Bondi. "You don't know how busy I am. You don't understand what I do. You haven't evenasked."

He gave her an odd sideways look. "I've got more to worry about than Rosa and Lenny." He pulled his grubby hands out of his pockets and started striking off points on his dainty little fingers. "Each day I teach. I get up at five. I do my preparation. I get to school at eight thirty. I'm busy till four. Then there's work to do with the local branch. Then," he hesitated, "I've got other stuff."

"I am going to take Rosa on a picnic."

"Leah, it is a secret. I'm working for the UWU."

"Oh," she said. "I see." But in fact she didn't understand at all.

"The Unemployed Workers' Union."

"Good," she said, still not appreciating what this meant, that the UWU was mostly communist and that Izzie's membership of it was enough to have him expelled from the Labour Party.

"I train speakers," he said.

"You're a good speaker, Izzie."

As they walked back to Campbell Parade he began to talk about his dissatisfaction with Lang, that he was nothing but a fraud, and Leah -who remembered all those nights they had worked to get Lang elected -suddenly felt weary and sick of all these bright futures.

Campbell Parade was rich in leather shoes and double-coned ice-creams dripped frivolously on to the sweaty footpath. Izzie was still talking, gesticulating, bumping into people.

"Izzie," she said when he, at last, paused for breath.

"Yes-sie," he grinned.

"What Rosa said about Jack Lang was right."

"Yes."

"Well, why don't you tell her so?"

"I will," he said. "I promise." And then he went on telling her how he took his speaker's course at the UWU at Glebe, how a man named Bill Darcy introduced him to the class: "Youse fellows reckons you're not too impressive on the platform. Well, I want youse to cast your eyes on this little fellow I saw some of youse laughing at when he stepped in. Well, youse can start laughing on the other side of your faces because he is the darndest little speaker we got, so better sit there and listen to him while he gives you the drum and if you clean out your ear-holes you might get a bit of sense into your heads."

Leah began laughing.

"You'd be proud of me," he said.

"I am proud of you," she said, suddenly serious. She was pleased that in all this awful world there was someone who was trying to do something decent and she wondered what was wrong with her, that her emotions ran so hot and cold about this man who now, as they withdrew into a bus shelter, shyly took her hand.

It was then that he told her what he had begun by hiding, that he had lost his job. The Lang Machine, with cold vindictiveness, had not only expelled him from the Labour Party but dismissed him from his job at a state school. He had been arrested after a fight with police at evictions in Glebe and it was this, his new criminal record, that was used as the excuse.

"Oh, Izzie. The bastards."

The bus shelter was a bleak place. Drunks had pissed in it. Someone had gouged "Bread not Bullets" into the seat. The letters were jagged. She found herself embracing Izzie. His hair was greasy and unpleasant, and confused, in her mind, with the smell of the stale urine. It was an appropriate perfume for such an evil, loveless world.