Illywhacker

That night she would glide into sleep on the double wings of a Morris Farman. I stayed up talking to Jack for another four hours but when I lay, at last, on the cool sheets of my bed, I spat carefully on my forefinger and rubbed, ever so lightly, the head of my penis which was filled to bursting with dreams of creamy skin.

12

I had some funny dreams about Jack McGrath in later life, but there is no benefit to be obtained from discussing them here, even if I do compare that first night to the first night with a new lover. There was passion, sympathy, excitement. We were tireless. We were sopleased. We talked of aeroplanes and motor cars, bullock teams and the bush. We recited Lawson and Banjo Pater son. We were still beneath the naked light globes in the ballroom when the milk cart went clopping down Western Avenue. We heard the clink of the ladle in the bucket, the sweet sound of pouring milk, the seagulls restless on the Quay a mile away.

Jack must have been dressed in the suit he had worn in honour of A. D. Collins, but I choose to remember him differently, with stubble on his folded face, the patch of dark hair on his ruddy cheek, his collarless shirt unironed, his old vest, his patched trousers, his unlaced boots placed beneath his chair (where they would be lost on the morrow), his toes curling and uncurling inside his carefully darned navy blue socks.

He told me the story of his life, and I'll tell you too, later.

I also told him the story of my life, or rather the parts of it I had never told a man before. It has to be told again now, and I find it harder than I did when I looked at Jack's soft eyes in his crumpled sympathetic face.

This story concerns my father who I always imagined to be an Englishman, who made such a thing, as long as I knew him, of his Englishness, who never missed a chance to say, "I am an Englishman" or, "as an Englishman" that I was surprised to find out he was born in York Street, Warrnambool, the son of a shopkeeper. Yet for all that, I must carry his lie for him. For he made himself into an Englishman and my first memory of him is being chastised for the way I spoke.

"Cahstle," he roared at me, "not kehstle." He did not like my accent. He did not, I think, like much about me. My brothers were older and they got on with him better. They were useful to him in his business and I was too young to do any more than feed the animals and jump down to apply the brake on hills.

His business was to represent the English firm of Newby whose prime product was the Newby Patented 18 lb. Cannon, and with this machine in tow we covered the rutted, rattling, dusty pot-holed roads of coastal Victoria, six big Walers in front, the cannon at the rear, and that unsprung cart they called a "limber" in the middle.

Always we were in a hurry. There was never a time when we might stop at a pretty spot, or a morning when we could lie late in bed. Always there was some group of squatters who had got themselves together or -and this must be what really happened -who my father thought could be persuaded to get together to buy a cannon to protect themselves from Russians or Chinese or shearers.

He was a man who saw threat everywhere – thin but very strong, pale-skinned, blue-eyed, black-bearded and as cold to his children as he was charming to his customers. I have seen him at table with fat mayors and muscle-gutted squatters, laughing, telling jokes, playing them as sweetly as if they were his own violin, warming them up, getting their pores wide open before he hit them with the icy blast of fear that was his specialty.

It was from my father that I learned about the Chinese and he painted pictures of such depravity that when I met my first Chinaman I expected him to kill me.

God knows what I learned from my mother. I did not have her for long. I cannot tell you what she looked like, although, of course, I thought her pretty. I can remember sitting beside her on the limber -she is nothing more than a shape, but warm and soft, quite different to my two brothers and father who rode postilion on those huge Walers -they were as hard as the iron leg guards they wore on their right legs.

My father dispensed with my mother when I was still very young and I always assumed that he sent her away, but it is more likely that she died. Only two things are certain. The first is that he would not discuss it. The second is that I blamed him. I was left alone on the bench seat with only the rounds of ammunition to keep me company. The limber was unsprung and iron-wheeled. They steered a course over logs and pot-holes just to jar me. And although I saw a lot of country it was not much of a childhood, moving as we did through threatening visions of Russians, Lascars, Jews, Asiatics, Niggers and other threats to our safety.