Illywhacker

I remember nothing of driving them to school. I was under the illusion that it was my day; it was really my son's. On this day, the 23rd September 1931, he added the final card to his hand and climbed a giant eucalypt and carried down a yellow-tailed black cockatoo. Expressed thus, it sounds easy. But this is not your sulphur-crested cockatoo, often caught, usually caged, taught to speak Pet's Lingo. This is the giant cockatoo sometimes called funereal, and if you have ever watched these monsters ripping branches to pieces, seen them screeching at the top of river casuarinas, or seen, at close range, their odd faces (more like a devil's koala than a bird) then you would know, without being told, this is not an easy bird to catch or tame.

He did not choose it. He was driven to it by Barry Edwards's sarcastic comments when the birds were observed above the schoolyard. Badgery was good with animals, he said, and would bring them down a cockatoo.

My son had warts and smelly breath, but he was not a fool. He knew there was no choice but to up the ante in this game with his teacher. Having driven him out with snakes he would shame him with a cockatoo.

The cockatoo, therefore, was a means, not an end, an instrument of revenge, a card in a game, but yet, when Charles was finally eighty feet above the ground, wrapping his useful bandy legs around the rough-barked eucalypt, edging carefully out towards his goal, he had forgotten what it was an instrument for; he began to coo.

He swung in the high branches above the schoolyard where Sonia stood, with all the school – it was now recess – whispering eccentric self-taught prayers to Sweet Jesus Meek and Mine.

The headmaster was yelling at Mr Edwards and Mr Edwards was biting his moustache and trying to get the headmaster to yell at him in private but the headmaster ordered Miss Watkins to ring the fire brigade and then he could not wait, and – he was a young man – tried to climb the tree himself but tore his Fletcher Jones trousers and showed his bottom and Miss Watkins took the girls to practise assembly drill in front of the shelter shed.

The fuss in the playground hardly intruded on Charles's consciousness, for he was blessed with very particular powers of concentration. The commotion below merely warmed him as he moved closer to communion with the dark brown eye with its delicate pink surround. My son had a great store of affection he could not give to people properly; he just didn't have the knack. He could not hug his little sister without awkwardness, but when he confronted this steel-beaked bird his affection issued from him readily, like a net, a finely knotted gauze which the bird felt and stayed still to accept. As he took the bird it emitted a small noise, not the loud raucous noise of a yellow-tailed black cockatoo, but a small grizzle, like a new puppy will give, as it surrendered itself to the webs of Charles's affection.

Charles descended, to applause, down the ladders of the Bendigo Volunteer Fire Brigade and into the anxious care of Barry Edwards who gave him no trouble – quite the opposite – from that day. In class that afternoon he sat with the cockatoo who, having entered an alien universe, was ministered to as a royal guest, was brought gifts of hakea pods and pine cones, was permitted to screech and shit, and was thus given the illusion that it was a god, being waited on by superstitious savages.

36

I was in an excellent mood. I called in at the tip and found good roof guttering awaiting me. On my way back to camp I nicked twenty foot of fencing wire from the bottom string of a squatter's fence. I never bought a nail in my life and I never understood why anyone would bother when there are millions of miles of fencing wire available to do the job. Eight gauge is best. Cut it square one end, angle it at the other, and there's your nail.

I drove back to the camp constructing towers with pretty windows.

I parked the Dodge and noticed Leah was boiling something up in a four-gallon drum. She did not look up to greet me and, imagining she was washing her female particulars, I did not intrude. Instead I busied myself with the guttering and the fencing wire. When Leah spoke she was right behind me. She made me jump.

"One," she said, "I was drunk. Two, it won't happen again. Three, I don't love you."

I covered my confusion by dropping the rest of the guttering on the ground.

"Did you hear me?" she asked.

"I heard you."

"Good," she said, and walked back to the fire where she was -I discovered later – punishing her overcoat by boiling it.

I fiddled with the fencing wire for a bit, making a few nails to start with. I like making things. It is always soothing, and the very simple things are the most soothing of all. The squatter's wire felt as soft as lead between my pliers. I made three-inch nails, each one exactly the same as the one before.

"What are you doing?"

"Making nails."