Illywhacker

George Fipps was thirty-six years old. He was a big, handsome, sleepy-lidded man whose blond hair, after twenty-one years of Brylcreem, had begun to take on a slightly green tinge. In his youth he had been a larrikin and a street-brawler and he was still proud of his strength and his fighter's skills. He rolled his white shirt sleeves as high as they would go.

He had not intended to go to Spain himself. But then he had not realized, until his meeting with my innocent son, how much he hated permitting young comrades to fight when he could have done it better himself. He helped collect the money for their fares -those painfully arrived at zacs and deeners – but he had never let himself know, until he saw that envelope, how much he loathed being one of those old men who send young men off to war.

This was not a thing he could confess to afterwards. All he would say was that Charles had not been suitable. He told Izzie: "He was a keen young fellow, but he didn't have no theory. Jeez, mate, I couldn't let him. I couldn't have the comrades in Spain think we was all so bloody ignorant."

But to Charles he said nothing so cruel. He talked to him gently, talked so softly that he might have been with a woman in bed and Charles had to bring out his hearing machine and put it amongst the spilled beer on the bar. By the third glass he had convinced Charles that the best thing for the international working class would be for Charles to buy George's motorbike and sidecar and for George to go to Spain instead.

You would expect both men to be surprised by the outcome, but in the daylight darkness of the bar, with the soft nasal excitement of the horse races on the wireless, it had seemed – to both of them -sensible. It was only in the street outside that they saw what they had done. George Fipps began to spit and slap his hands together. Charles stood and grinned at his new motorbike – it was black and gold and it gleamed, it dazzled, in the sun.

George quickly taught him how to drive it and then they went over to the Balmain Police where George's brother-in-law issued a driving licence.

Outside in Darling Street the two men grinned at each other and shook hands. George Fipps spat three times into the gutter, winked, and set off towards his boarding house. Charles drove back to Bondi, drunk in charge, singing tunelessly, with a sidecar full of whitewash cans.

It was only when he started to tell the story to Izzie and Leah and he saw the look on Izzie's face that Charles saw his story could be looked at from other angles, i. e., that he had been cheated, that he had let himself be cheated because he was a coward. It was then, his head aching from beer, that he shouted at his host and threatened to punch him. He said he hated Sydney. He said it was full of liars and cheats and snobs. But what made him really angry, what he couldn't admit, was that he suddenly felt the sneer on Izzie's face was deserved. He was relieved he no longer had the money and no longer had to go.

The next day he read about the mouse plague in Victoria.

11

It was seven in the morning, and although it was not cold, although he had wrapped himself in a greatcoat, my boy's teeth were chattering in his head. He sat on the crackling AJS while Leah talked intensely, holding his gloved wrist as if, by doing this, she would retain him.

He had overfilled the machine with oil and it sounded, idling, like someone slapping jelly on a plate. Lenny came and stood on the front doorstep in his pyjamas, his hands, comically, over his ears. When Charles did not see him he went back inside and waited for Leah to fetch him his paper.

But Leah was suddenly too overcome with guilt to notice anything as silly as Lenny. She had neglected the boy. She had been selfish. She had left him alone to be patronized and insulted by city people. He was alone in the world and she, his only friend, had betrayed him.

"Listen to me," Leah said. "Somebody has to give you advice. Don't stay in the country whatever you do. The city is a lot better than you think. When you come back I will have more time. I'll forget my bookkeeping. I'll take a holiday. I promise. When you come back I'll work on an education for you somehow. You can live here with us. You can go to night school. Would you like that? You could have a pet shop, anything, to make a living."

Charles' ears crackled, shrieked and knocked. The AJS slapped and spluttered. Against all odds, like a willow seed lodging in a hair-split rock, the pet shop slipped through the explosions and found a welcome.

"You could have a pet shop, anything, to make a living."

12

Kevin Simmons (and that other chap whose name eludes me) escaped from Long Bay in 1958 and you may remember what celebrities they were, running all over the country with the coppers panting at their tails. It was Simmons who was the smart one, and it was him the coppers hated.