Illywhacker

"There's nothing to it," he announced, filling the kettle recklessly with water. "Half a day's work, and I've got it beat."

Charles was so elated he came and shook his host's hand. The mice were busy dying of their own plague. His snakes had all escaped. There was nothing to keep him in the Mallee any more, and he had resolved to return to Sydney to open a pet shop. He did not know that Les Chaffey was afflicted by a disease common in clever men: he was impatient with detail and when he had finally worked out the gearbox and seen how quickly the rest of the machine could be put together, that the problem was licked, the cat skun, etc., he no longer had any incentive to complete the job, with the result that the motor cycle would be left to lie beneath a tarpaulin like a body in a morgue and only bereaved Charles would bother to lift it, although he no longer hoped that a miracle had been performed while he slept.

Every night Les Chaffey would promise to fix the motor cycle tomorrow, but when tomorrow came he would rise late, dawdle over breakfast, perhaps go into Jeparit to the rifle club, come home after lunch, and fall asleep while his wife shook her head or clicked her tongue.

"Tell him stories about your family," she implored the prisoner, while they sat over empty cups of tea, weeded the vegetable garden, stirred the copper or pegged clothes on the line.

"I tried, missus. You heard me. He's not interested." Charles, in spite of his good nature, was becoming irritated with Mrs Chaffey. He thought she should say something to her husband. Instead she put the onus on him.

"Tell him something mechanical," she said.

Charles tried to relate the story of his father's aeroplanes but being unable to answer such simple questions as the type of engine that powered them, he soon lost his host's attention and (unfairly, he thought) his hostess's respect.

All Charles's stories were like matches struck in a draught, and when he had exhausted his box and Les Chaffey's enthusiasms remained unkindled, he despaired of ever seeing his motor cycle in one piece again.

He told Marjorie Chaffey that he didn't mind, but this was false generosity intended to regain her affection. The truth was that he was so angry he could have burnt the shed down.

Easter came and went. The weather turned clear and cold. The wheat showed green above the yellow paddocks and whatever Les Chaffey should have been doing, he didn't do it. He snored, or listened to his Tommy Dorsey record, or brooded over an old Melbourne telephone directory.

And Mrs Chaffey began to act as if even this was Charles's fault. It was cold on the back veranda, but she pretended she had no extra blankets to give him. She no longer offered to wash his shirt. She spoke to him less often, and less kindly. In the afternoons she withdrew to the front veranda, darning socks or shelling peas in the winter sunlight, or squatting on her haunches to watch for something that never came. In the evenings she knitted mittens and scarves for her children in Geelong. When slugs got into the vegetable garden she spoke as if it was his fault. There was never any pudding at night. And when Charles offered his only money -a florin and two pennies – towards his keep, his wan hostess enraged him by accepting it – she dropped the coins into the pocket of her grubby pinafore where they stayed (he heard them) for weeks.

When he lay in bed at night he wore his socks and his shirt and he spread his suit across the top of the blanket. He learned to sleep on his back, very still, so that he would not crush his suit and have to borrow the iron again.

He could hear the Chaffeys talking on the other side of the wall, and he did not need to poke his hearing aid through the convenient hole in the hessian lining to understand that it was he who was the subject of their conversation.

"Fix his bike."

Silence.

"Leslie Chaffey…"

"I heard you."

Silence, then the movement of springs.

"Why won't you fix it for him?"

Charles lay still and breathless.

"He should be able to fix it himself."

"He can't."

"He should learn."

"He's a dunce," said Marjorie Chaffey, no longer whispering. "He can't learn."

"For God's sake, Marjorie, it's simple."

Another silence and then, without any warning, without so much as a spring squeak, came a bellow of pain so loud that Charles could not believe it came from his friendly-faced host.

"why is life like this?"

"Shush, it's all right, shush, Leslie, shush. It's all right."

"why?"

"I'm here."

Les Chaffey wept. His wife cooed. A mopoke cried in the scrub to the north. Charles removed his hearing aid and locked himself in, alone with the noises of his blood.

16