Illywhacker

But as it was they had no books, no brainy visitors. They made their futures in the same way that people fossicking in a tip must build a life, from the materials that come to hand. They made their philosophies from fencing wire and grew eccentrically, the one obsessed with birds and reptiles, the other with God, the insubstantial nature of life. Of birds and reptiles we will have plenty more to say later on, but on matters to do with God there will not be overmuch. And the difference, I guess now, between Charles and Sonia was that Charles, once he could see noresult from his efforts to disappear, gave up and concentrated on things that were of more use, whilst Sonia would not give up and was like someone who has survived a cyclone and can never quite believe in the solidity of a house or the permanence of a tree. She felt herself walking over ice an inch thick, and splinters all around her. She was eleven years old and did not hide her holy pictures from me. If she wished to dress like the Virgin Mary I had no objection. I was lonely and miserable. I brushed her hair one hundred strokes each night and hugged her too tightly. I spoke to Nathan about the costume and he had his wardrobe mistress make up a blue robe of the type indicated by the Catholics in Sale on their holy picture.

Dear Nathan. He was kind to me. Now I was the one who would not sleep, would not shut up. He played cards with me and listened to me talk about Leah Goldstein until the passing dunnyman announced the coming dawn. He had no use for me in his show, but he hired me as his chauffeur. I drove him here and there on matters of business, and sometimes, on Sundays when there was no show, to pursue his hobby of fishing.

It was on one of these excursions to Clunes, near Ballarat, that the incident I will now relate took place.

Nathan and I sat at the foot of a steep bark-slippery ridge where a small creek wound through a rocky eucalypt forest. The creek was reputed to contain blackfish and Nathan, dressed in plus-fours, his bald head covered with a deerstalker hat, arranged the extraordinary collection of American lures he had inherited from an uncle. Nathan did not know which lure was which or when or how to use them. Yet who could doubt the efficacy of the set-up? There was a splendid cane box with a lid and inside the cane box were those colourful mechanical creatures, an octopus with feathers hanging from its bright pink head, dazzling silver swivels, jewelled bronze blades, soft feathered bodies adorned like peacocks, transparent bubbles, all so beautiful you would never think that their purpose was death.

While the ever optimistic Nathan lit a pipe and fiddled with his gear, I made a camp fire. We were not to fish until night and we would spend the afternoon yarning about this and that, but mostly Leah Goldstein.

Charles and Sonia went up the ridge. I opened a bottle of Ballarat Bertie's famous brew, leaned against a tree and listened to the Buick's hot radiator as it contracted quietly in the cool air. I did not worry about my children. They knew the bush.

Sonia arranged her robe in the manner of the holy picture. She drew it over her head and let her auburn hair show just a fraction beneath this bonnet. She drew the cloak around her shoulders and tugged at her little white dress which would not, no matter how she tried, come down as far as the Virgin's dress had when she hovered in the clouds above the astonished worshippers below.

Charles watched her, impatiently. He had grown out of all that rubbish. He wanted his sister to give him a bunk-up on to a difficult branch of a tree where a pink-nosed possum warranted his attention. He was like an opponent in a football match trying to distract a man kicking a goal. When Sonia clasped her hands in imitation of the holy picture, Charles made vomiting noises. He waved his hands and hooted.

But Sonia arranged herself, exactly.

Charles sighed and squatted with his back against the tree. He picked at a scab. He looked up into the tree's umbrella watching birds flick to and fro. He could identify most of them, even the smallest, by their silhouette. He knew his sister's stubbornness was well equal to his. He waited for the ritual to be over. He yawned, closed his eyes. When he opened them my daughter had gone.

Charles, I can see him, gawped. He called out her name, not loudly, but politely.

"By golly," he said. "By jiminy." He forgot about his pink-nosed possum and sat and waited for his sister's return. He was always patient and he waited with his mind a blank, watching the lengthening shadows and the final loss of colour to the night.

When he came, at last, to the camp, it was already dark.

Clunes, in case you do not know it, is bored full of mine shafts.

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