Illywhacker

There was an emu dancing over me. It lifted its net-stockinged legs high. It stamped on my hands and on my legs. I retreated, crawling, but did not escape the final indignity – a simulated peck on my dusty backside.

"Get off," the emu hissed, putting on the gramophone with its beak.

"Get off," the mob echoed joyfully, for no matter what faults the Bendigo Mechanics' Institute may have had, bad accoustics could not be numbered amongst them.

"Oh God," roared A-plus-B, "God save me, this is wonderful."

Charles opened his mouth in pain.

My son gripped his hands together and was given coiled visions of revenge no less luminous than Sonia's angelic hosts who fluttered in her mind's eyes, as disturbed as pigeons who find their coop door boarded shut.

I crawled off the stage and left the show to Leah Goldstein. My daughter came down off her chair and held my hand, but I did not want the shy sympathy of children, not that my son offered any. He would not even look at me. He put his precious jam tin on the kitchen sink and sat on the stairs where he could adore Leah without obstruction.

The Emu Dance was a great success. When the emu chick hatched they applauded the cleverness (Charles also, noisily). When she did the Veil Dance even the woman whistled her (Charles stamped). The tap was a triumph and when she returned for the great finale, the Snake Dance, the hall was as quiet and vibrant as a shiver.

My bleeding hands curled into fists and I could have punched the dancer on her little parrot's nose. I was far too jealous to watch her, and thus missed the moment when it started to go wrong. Perhaps, as I have seen her do, she held a clutch of assorted snakes in her hands and let them drop on to her head. It was called the Shower of Snakes. In any case, she attempted too much for the credulity of the big-voiced woman who asserted, loudly, that the serpents had obviously been defanged, their poison sacs removed and that fraud was being openly committed on stage. This was not, in itself, what stopped the show and Leah did not, as she often did later, make a simple speech about the technical difficulties of either defanging or removing poison sacs. She could explain the operation required with scientific precision and point out the adverse affect on the health and happiness of the snake. What did stop the show was A-plus-B's footnote to the charge of fraud and this was made sotto voce, beneath his hand, under his beard. I did not hear the complete sentence, but heard him say "three by two" which is, in case you did not know it, rhyming slang.

The arm of the gramophone dredged a painful channel across "The Blue Danube" and left a repeating click which was to accompany Leah's dancing for many months to come.

Leah, shivering in a harem suit, decked in gauze and goose-pimples, stood with hands on her hips, her head thrust forwards, trembling. She ordered the lights turned on and singled out the man with the large black beard who seemed not the least perturbed by becoming the focus of attention. He folded his hands complacently in his lap and chewed his large moustache.

"I heard you," said Leah Goldstein, "and I heard your name."

"What if you did?" said the big-voiced woman now revealed to be quite tiny, weathered and shrunken like an old iris bulb. She had a fox-stole round her shoulders and a large fur hat jammed over her head. "What diff does it make what he said? The point is, Jew or no Jew, their sacs are gone." She nudged her bearded companion with her sharp elbow. "Jew or no Jew," she said to A-plus-B, "what's the diff?"

There were dragons breeding in that hall: they cloaked their activities in the smell of stale orange peel and leaking gas, and Leah, getting a whiff of it, felt her guts knot hard.

"There is no 'diff, Kathleen," said the ironic pedagogue, "until she starts to make money under false pretences. Then", he smiled at the shivering dancer, "it means everything. Here we have, in Bendigo, a perfect illustration of the world financial crisis. You, madam", he told Leah Goldstein, "are a cartoon."

"Your name is A-plus-B," said Leah.

"Correct weight," said the woman. "What's his birthday?"

"Shut up, Kath," said an equally weathered man in grey overalls who was sitting at the back of the hall. "You've had a fair innings."

"They call you A-plus-B because you believe in Douglas Credit. It's a fraud," said Leah Goldstein, launching into a five-minute attack on the whole system of Douglas Credit, the history of which she briefly provided, with special emphasis on its derivation from Social Credit from which system it had excluded all radical and humanitarian aspects. Further, she implied, Douglas Credit was a breeding ground for fascists, Jew-haters, and worse, the central algebraic proof of its feasibility (in which A-plus-B plays a central role) was a trick, a fraud more serious than anything to do with snakes and poison sacs. "You can't even add up," she said, in conclusion.