Illywhacker

"And what," asked Les Chaffey, reaching for a comb which he had left at home, "what were you going to do with a firearm in a schoolyard?"

The bank manager thought that the pupils should be sent home.

"You would evacuate the school? On account of a goanna?"

The bank manager knew that Les Chaffey was a sticky-beak and a trouble-maker, but he was also nervous of the firearm. "Do you have a better idea?"

Les Chaffey did have a better idea. He ran into the general store and pulled Charles out, holding him by the collar and leading him (still holding the collar) along the main street, past the giggling draper's, in front of Dan Murphy's Commercial Hotel, and up the sandy path into the schoolyard where a high-pitched scream (the goanna had just shifted position) attracted him to Miss Underhill who stood, isolated and lonely, on a bitumen square in front of the shelter shed whilst four teachers and thirty-six pupils stood in an arc and stared at her.

"There," said Les Chaffey to his panting puzzled friend. "Isn't she lovely?"

18

Years later when she was being eccentric, had shed her corset and let her arse spread unhindered by anything but her perpetual dressing gown, Emma showed her youngest son a tiny foetus – it was no more than an inch long – which she claimed was his half-brother and which – she tried to make him look in the old Vegemite jar that contained it – was half goanna and half human.

Hissao was disgusted with his mother (who wouldn't be?) and not least because she allowed her upper denture plate to drop at the moment of this disclosure. He did not look, or looked only briefly at the "thing" floating in cloudy liquid.

He shuddered, he who accepted his mother's peculiarities more easily than any of us.

Hissao was well informed about the genitalia of goannas. He had known, from a very early age, that the male has not one penis, but two. These are pale spiny things no more than two centimetres long, and normally kept retracted in little sheaths under the rear legs. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Hissao stumbled on the mechanical reality of such a coupling, but he should have known better than to approach the problem in this way. There is no doubt that some unlikely things have happened within the wombs of the women of the family but there is no question that they have been able to affect the shape of their offspring as easily as children idly fooling with some Plasticine. Why, if not because of this, is Hissao himself not only named Hissao, but also snub-nosed and almond-eyed? Why? Because the Japanese were bombing Darwin and Emma was not a stupid woman.

The goanna foetus in the bottle was to cause us all a great upset and no one was to be more upset than Charles for whom it was to prove quite fatal.

When he stood beside Les Chaffey in the schoolyard in Jeparit he could not see what the silent girl would become and -untroubled by wild visions – he was able to admire her composure and her sturdy limbs. His hearing aid crackled and hissed. He looked at her sternly. She had pronounced hips, a barrel chest and a broad backside, but it was not simply her shape that he found agreeable; it was her stillness in the midst of all the hysteria that surrounded her. She had screamed, of course, from pain. But now the reptile (a Gould's Monitor) was still again, the girl's pleasant moon face was composed; only her brown eyes displayed any agitation. When she heard that Charles intended to remove the goanna, she smiled at him, lifting her top lip to reveal pretty pink gums and small neat teeth.

The goanna had its leathery chin resting just above her fringe. It tested the air nervously with its forked tongue. Its front claws gripped her broad shoulders, its baggy muscled body moulded itself to her cotton-clad back and its hind claws gripped the soft mound of her generous backside. Its tail, striped yellow like all its body, did not quite touch the ground.

Charles then transformed himself from an acned, red-faced, awkward youth into an expert. The schoolchildren who had whispered and giggled about his funny face and bandy legs saw the change and fell into a silence.

"Get a chaff bag," he told the bank manager, with such terseness that the man did as he was told. Charles turned off his hearing aid and walked out into the no man's land that separated the assembled pupils from the frozen girl.

Emma, seeing him stand before her, observed the hearing aid, a small brown bakelite knob protruding from his fleshy ear, and it made her trust him. He seemed older and more experienced. She felt his personality to be round and smooth and free from nasty spikes. She smiled, a smaller, shyer smile than last time, and this raised, from the ranks of the children in front of her, the same magical incantation that had greeted Leah Goldstein and Izzie Kaletsky when they embraced in a Bondi bus shelter.

"Hubba hubba," the children shouted.