Illywhacker

The snake, of course, disrupted this calm a little, but Charles was soon found playing in the street and introduced to the ashen barmaid and then the dour licensee. And while those drinkers who remained found themselves huddled together in a suddenly talkative group, the snake (a Children's Python) worked its way across the slippery linoleum towards an extraordinary-looking man in a yellow-checked suit. He had a bald head, a little goatee beard, an ascetic high-boned face, and gold-framed spectacles over sunken thoughtful eyes. While Charles, blushing red as usual, conducted his stubborn negotiation, this other fellow carried on his own silent conversation with himself, resting a gold-ringed finger on his pale lower lip. He rolled his eyes like a fellow trying to multiply 23 by 48 without using a pencil.

It was easy to see the licensee was not an easy man with a quid. It was not that he haggled, but that he did not move. He regarded Charles with sleepy-eyed suspicion. I expressed the view that the snake was venomous, and relied upon the fact that pythons are not native to Ballarat. The snake paused, lifted its head from the linoleum, and flicked its tongue at the smoky air.

"God damn," said the man in the yellow-checked suit. He spoke in the purest American.

The licensee blinked his lizard-lidded eyes; the snake lay flat as a fallen stick. A green pound note was passed, at last, into my son's custody.

"God damn. You're Lee-anne. The snake-dancer. I saw your show." He picked up his hat, stepped over the snake, and took two gliding steps across the floor, his hand extended to my blushing lover who was huddled back against the photographs of racehorses, pretending snake-fear. "Nathan Schick," he said, smiling crookedly but charmingly to reveal a gold-filled mouth, "I saw your act in Nambour, Queensland."

I did not see Charles leave, but a scream from Sturt Street told me he was accompanied by the python.

Nathan Schick seemed quite unaffected. He fussed around the table and forced Leah to sit down. He shoved out his pale hand and gave me that charming, weary, gold-speckled smile.

"Badgery," I said, trying to keep the publican in view.

"I know, I know," said the splendid American, patting a small round stomach which looked like a tiny cushion shoved down his trousers. "You, sir, are a funny man. A very funny man." I could not listen to him. I watched the cardiganed licensee approach. I kept my eye on the door and smiled at Nathan Schick. "Yes, sir, I saw your show. You should see her," he told the dour-faced publican who had come to block my exit. "You should see this young lady work with snakes."

The licensee had the fine red veins and slow poached eyes of his caste. "I just have, Mr Schick."

Nathan Schick blinked and made his mouth into an "O". What a ham he was. I am nine-tenths convinced he betrayed us to the licensee and then rescued us to that we would feel ourselves in his debt.

He gave the licensee a crisp new pound note, ordered a round of drinks, sent Sonia to fetch her brother, and told the barmaid she was lucky to have such talented performers patronizing her bar. Schick could talk a line of bullshit like I never heard before, and in this he had the distinct advantage of being American and therefore never hesitant about expressing an opinion. Australians, in comparison, lack confidence, and it is this, not steel mills or oilwells, that is the difference between the two nations.

Schick also had that peculiar deafness that Americans adopt towards Australians (not dissimilar to the deafness city people adopt when listening to country people). It comes from not understanding the rhythms of their speech and assuming they would not live where they did if they were more resourceful.

So Nathan Schick, while regarding us benevolently, misunderstood our ironies and took them for firmly held beliefs, contradicted them, dropped names around the bar, criticized the act he had recently praised, suggested "improvements" without a beg-your-pardon, asked us to join his troupe which would soon play the Tivoli in Melbourne, then thought better of it and asked us to audition.

This, for people who had lost ten rosellas and a Dodge utility, was very heady stuff. When Nathan ordered straight gin, so did we. The angry blotches left Leah's neck and rearranged themselves into a rosy aura. She toasted me silently across the gin-wet tabletop, and even the line of her Victorian shoulders suggested relief.

Nathan Schick had ideas to take our act to America, or so he claimed. He caught me pulling a funny face at Leah, and hamming up his hurt feelings, produced a little gold-embossed notebook in which he had written: "Lee-anne, snakes". We had left Nambour, he said, before he could talk to us. He was full of ideas. Most of them – he freely admitted it – were lousy.