Illywhacker

"Then you should take her to Prunier's."

"What's that?"

"Prunier's. Here, I'll write it down for you," said Izzie Kaletsky with a malice that was no longer new to him. "It's the very best restaurant in Sydney."

"That's what I want."

Charles took the piece of paper Izzie gave him and painstakingly copied the name and address into a small marbled notebook.

But he was to cross out the address the following morning when Leah, declining his invitation, laughed. It was then he knew Izzie had made a fool of him and he never tried to like him again.

6

It was Leah Goldstein who wrote to me to say my missing son was found at last. She described for me his half-grown-up face, his smell, his clothes, his croaking voice, his snake, his bankbooks. On the first morning she cooked him a big breakfast with grilled sausages, steak, kidney, onions, eggs, chops, buttered toast, cups of tea. She served this monstrous meal on a plate with a blue rim. This is what she told me, and I am not saying it wasn't kind of her, or even typical of her, only that you can't rely on it being true – by 1938 my puritanical friend was as addicted to telling lies as another woman, equally unhappy with her life, might be to a sherry bottle.

Yes, yes, I am asking you to believe that Honest Leah had become Lying Leah. I am not saying that it happened overnight. These things don't happen like that. Lies were not on her mind at all. She had sought to do no more than deliver some happiness to me, each day, for every day I lived in gaol. She wrote me letters.

She did not tell me that this enraged her husband. Neither did she describe the weather when it was unpleasant. If she was ill she would not trouble me with it; she would write as if she were well. This, of course, is not quite lying.

She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant. It was Leah who calmed down Rosa's husband and her son. It was Leah who cared for and nursed her angry friend, washed the sheets and nighties she was so ashamed of, sat with her, watched her sleep until she felt herself to be soaked in the gassy odours of death itself. Later she would think of these months, when she helped her friend die, as one of the most important times in her life.

But she wrote not a word about it to me. Instead she described long walks with Rosa along the cliff tops to Tamarama. She did not date these walks, but the impression given was that they had happened an hour or a minute before, that Rosa sat across from her at the kitchen table, drinking fragrant tea. They were beautiful letters, bulging with powerful skies and rimmed with intense yellow light. Every blade of grass seemed sharply painted, every word of conversation exact and true. Perhaps these things had once taken place. Perhaps she invented them. In any case they gave me that electric, unnatural mixture of emotions that every prisoner knows, where even the best things in the world outside come slashed with our own bitterness or jealousy. This confusion of love and hurt is very powerful. I came to crave it even while I dreaded it. It is a more potent drug than simple happiness.

Rosa died and was buried. Leah eliminated her presence from the house, threw away stubs of pencils and old ball gowns, yellowed letters, scraps of lace. No one tried to stop her. Lenny and Izzie mourned like Jews. While they sat on floors, Leah sat at the table and brought Rosa back to life. Now that, God damn it, is no longer mere politeness. She sent me descriptions of Rosa swinging her arms, Rosa burping, Rosa raising her lovely face to the sun. When it gets to this point she is no longer doing it for me alone. She is doing it for herself. And before a year is out she has the whole thing out of control and she has presented imaginary Rosa with imaginary grandchildren, made curtains, planted passionfruit and worried herself about the whooping cough in a world that exists between nine and eleven o'clock in the morning.

There was a time, when I finally learned the truth, that I could have killed her for her deception, to have made me feel so much about what revealed itself as nothing. I will tell you, later, how I got on the train with my bottle and my blade. But when I think about her now I cannot even imagine my own anger. I see only the empty air around her, the coldness of the surfaces, the gloss on the linoleum, the yellow stare of the shining cupboard doors, the brown hard glaze on the cracked bread crock, the rusty drip mark on the empty porcelain sink, and my Leah sitting alone writing these letters to me, manufacturing a happy family.

It was dangerous work and it is hardly surprising that she got herself addicted.