Illywhacker

Sonia knew he was mistaken about the garters, but she could not tell him. Unlike Charles, who saw new opportunities for escape, revenge, triumph and – most of all – making money, Sonia knew that this was not a trick. Her child's fingers had silently questioned my skin, hugged my heavy thigh, or held the fob watch that had disappeared with me, looking inquiringly at its coded face.

"If you disappear," she asked her garter-worshipping brother, "where do you go?"

"Nowhere," Charles said, hitting the tree. "You're just invisible."

Goon Tse Ying's dragon was not a great scaly monster that any fool could see. It was a tiny thing, a thread, a slippery worm. It had entered my daughter without me even glimpsing it. It slunk into her viscera and lodged there.

"You go to heaven", she whispered, "and see Jesus."

"Bullswack."

"You can't do it."

"I can. I can. If you help me, please, Sonny."

"No."

"Pur-leeese." Charles put his big arm around his sister; it was a wooden hug carved from Mallee root, the big head grotesquely askew, pleading gracelessly. "You take the stick," he said, putting it across her pleated lap and folding her little hands around it. "And you run at me, and say Ching Chong Chinaman."

"I won't."

"And hit me," Charles said, "hard."

"No," she said, and moved away from the stick which dropped to the ground.

"What do you pray?" asked ingratiating Charles.

Sonia said nothing.

"I need garters," Charles said firmly, and with that settled strode on ahead of his sister, leaving her to hurry through the last light towards the little hessian humpy I had made for Leah Goldstein who was now busy sewing spangles on to my best suit coat and arguing with me about the write-up I had got for her in the paper.

"It's all lies, Mr Badgery," she said, threading one more spangle on to her relentless needle. "I have never been to Gay Paree, as you call it. I will not dance with a death adder, not in any circumstances. And it says nothing about you and your act which you were so desperate to impress me with."

I watched the spangles unhappily and saw that I had not, as I believed I had, delivered value to her. It was a first-class write-up in anybody's language.

I tried to explain the nature of publicity to her. She listened to me patiently enough. I explained how I had been written up in papers everywhere and that a good editor expected a little exaggeration – the colours strengthened, so to speak. And it was my understanding of this that had allowed me to get a page-one write-up for her when she had been unable to get any. No one at the paper had ever heard of Mervyn Sullivan but everyone in Bendigo would now know about Leah Leonda, as I had called her.

"Well," she said, holding up the suit coat critically to the kerosene light. "I don't want to have a barney with you, Mr Badgery. You've been very kind. But if I can't do a show honestly I don't want to do a show at all. It's a good show. It's not like some old-fashioned aeroplane that you're ashamed of, no offence. I don't need to tell lies. We did ten shows in Myrniong. We got everybody in town, and some of them twice. And now we've got your act, Mr Badgery, which is really breathtaking. I think you underestimate the effect of your own act."

The aim of the write-up had been to make my so-called act unnecessary, but she was too flinty-faced to tell the truth to. I opened my mouth. I was prepared to begin a truthful sentence and not worry where I ended up, but my son barged through the doorway, demanding garters.

I told him there would be no garters but Leah, sitting on the bed I had made for her (hessian stretched across two wattle poles) had already produced some black elastic from her small cane sewing box.

Charles did not dare look at me. His lower lip went all plump, like a cherub, and he went and sat beside Leah while Sonia came and squatted beside me, hugging my calf and questioning my shoelaces.

30

Charles oiled the snakes as he was instructed and took them, one at a time, so they might attend to matters of toilet. The snake is a neat creature, and most fastidious about where it drops its shit. My son took them to a grassy patch and waited while they extruded their firm dark pellets. From time to time he adjusted his socks and examined the curious red patterns the garters made on his legs.

Sonia washed our dishes in the creek and managed not to break anything. She rubbed the greasy plates with river sand while Leah cleaned her single gramophone record with petrol and soft cloth. She did various exercises and displayed the emu feathers to the sunshine.

And I put on my spangled suit coat and was much admired.