Illywhacker

"Spoken like a Jew," said A-plus-B. "Always adding up", he said, "and subtracting."

"Substracting," hollered fur-hatted Kathleen. "Very good."

"Shut up, Kath," said the man in grey overalls. "You're pissed."

"Subtraction," said A-plus-B, "as in cheating."

"Address yourself to the question," shrieked Leah.

"Shut up, Kath," said the man up the back, and fell off his chair.

"I'm a Jew all right," said Leah. She summoned Charles to her side (the first time he ever walked the boards). She whispered in his bright red ear. He returned with the jam tin of money. Leah took the tin and emptied all eleven shillings into the canvas snake bag. Then she took the two remaining black snakes, who had remained gently entwined around their mistress's warm body during the entire argument, and lowered them with their fellows. "I'm a Jew all right. I don't take money from fascists." She was having trouble speaking and I, who minutes before had wanted to punch her on her lovely nose, felt nothing but admiration for her courage. She, who could be so lithe and sensuous, stood in her harem suit, skinny, trembling, small-breasted, no longer in control of the shape of her normally austere lower lip.

Barry Edwards, previously flustered by a philosophically literate snake-dancer, could now smile confidently. He was blessed with a bully's subtle sensitivity – he was taking his cues from her voice. He was not thinking about the snakes which were now being carried towards him by Charles Badgery who felt then, that night, the shiver of power of a snake-handler. He would feel it all his life, but never so intensely, so exquisitely, as now, as his warty hand goes into the bag, glides sweetly past the sleeping python, in amongst the black-snake coils, smelling like a friend. The grubby little hand finds a shilling and holds it up to A-plus-B.

His garters itch, a pleasant feeling, providing the sweet anticipation of a gentle scratch.

Barry Edwards's hands reach out, greedy for the shilling, are nearly there, the nicotine-stained pincers, when Charles (you little bastard!) drops the shilling back into the sack.

How sweet my little son looked on that night. How angelic was his smile as he looked at his teacher's thoughtful face.

No one else would put their hand into the sack. Charles was enjoying himself, could have prolonged his little pantomime for minutes, hours; but Leah screamed at him to give the man his shilling; which he did. People scraped their chairs across the floor and gathered coats. They swarmed, moved erratically towards the door and back to where Barry Edwards remained stubbornly in his chair.

So Charles began to lay his pretty snakes at Barry Edwards's feet. He held the little black snake and showed its oil-glistening red belly and its smooth little head. He let it crawl around his neck and then he placed it on the floor like a child playing with a moulded-lead toy car. He pointed it carefully towards Edwards's odd scuffed shoes and watched as the aforesaid shoes moved themselves, one after the other, towards the door.

Imagine the Mechanics' Institute as a box of yellow wood with cold sickly light globes like a necklace around its picture rail. Arranged at random, pointing this way and that: some wooden chairs. In their midst: a jut-jawed child in short pants, playing with a red-bellied black snake, cooing to it on the floor.

33

We were magicians that night. We made futures and summoned up pasts. We sent up flares loaded with words that spewed like broken glass across the sky, and I knew the dancer so little I imagined this normal.

It was, my God, like Halley's Comet – for Leah to loosen her tongue and talk for the pleasure of it (lolly-paper talk) fifteen different factors must all coincide and I will list just eight of them.

1 A dancer's walk.

2 Danger overcome.

3 McWilliams Autumn Brown Sherry or equivalent.

4 Her correspondence fully up to date.

5 No uncertainties threatening, i.e., no camp to shift, or new hall to hire.

6 Puddles dry and mud absent.

7 No sickness in camp.

8 Her mood itchy, but not scratchy.

The style of discourse she favoured when these conditions were satisfied was totally unrelated to her normal approach which was as functional as a hacksaw. You could hardly call it flowery but it did leave room for sentimentality and whimsy and was fuelled by both optimism and remorse.

So when she summonsed up Izzie I swear I saw him stand before me on the skirts of shadow round the fire, his big eyes wet with hurt, his pointy toes kicking moodily at a fat fleshy thistle whose obstinate root would not leave the soil.

He was the Good Man.