Illywhacker

The goanna was alarmed and climbed to safety. He got to the top of the grille and stayed there, thus preventing the fruiterer from opening his door again. The fruiterer could afford to wait a minute or two, but he was not prepared to see good business pass him by. He therefore began poking at the goanna with a broom handle. His wife managed to sell two bananas through the grille, but had her situation exploited by the customer who walked away without giving money in exchange.

The escaped prisoner was dashed to the floor with a broom stick and set upon by a passing fox-terrier.

The monitor reared up and stood on its back legs. Its throat inflated and it hissed like a dragon. The fox-terrier was small and fat. It had its teeth into the monitor's front leg and hung there, its back legs quite off the ground. No one passing seemed to notice. The monitor was six foot tall and it brought up its back legs and raked the fox-terrier's belly. The foxie yelped, dropped, walked a few yards, and collapsed, its green-grey intestines spilling out while it died, twitching, in the George Street gutter. It was Sylvie from the sandwich shop who put the rubbish bin down over the goanna. The greengrocer then helped her turn it and put the lid on. He swept its amputated leg out into George Street.

The Gould's Monitor was never quite the same again and all because, as Emma pointed out, Charles Badgery had gone off to enlist on behalf of the King of England.

26

Emma never did like those old toast-rack trams. She did not understand which was the green line and which the red. She was confused by the hieroglyphics they displayed on their front. She did not like the way they threatened to throw you out the door on bends. She had organized her life so that she avoided them completely.

But on this day she had no choice. She and the baby travelled by tram to Victoria Barracks. The army had set up a tent at the front gates and the men all queued to have their particulars taken down. She smelled the smell all right. She did not like it, but she would not be beaten by it. She pushed her way to where the odour was strongest, inside the tent itself, and demanded to see her husband. The men smiled at her. She saw the smiles, distant detached things like little red purses full of teeth. It was some time before she could be made to understand that if her husband was not in the queue and not in the tent then he had already been "done".

She turned to face the terrors of the trams again. She was dizzy. She went to a milk bar at the tram stop and asked for a glass of water. It was unthinkable that he would leave her. He had promised, in a church. She did not wait for the water. There was no time. She was dizzy like the other time, but worse. She was his possum, his mouse, his cherub, his delight. She rode down Oxford Street in a daze and when she found herself close enough to home – she recognized Hyde Park – she got out of the tram and began to walk. It was not her strong legs or countrywoman's walk that drew comments from passers-by. It was the unfocused look in her big round eyes. The pin (never properly clipped) dropped from the napkin in Liverpool Street, and the napkin itself flopped to the footpath on the corner of Pitt Street. There was something in her manner that prevented it being returned to her.

She pushed through the schoolchildren outside the shop and, finding her place behind the desk already taken by the lady with the growth, crawled quietly into the big cage that rightfully belonged to the goanna. The goanna, however, was in a rubbish bin behind the counter and so Emma was able to stay where she was, curled up, quite still, while conferences took place around her. The jeweller's nephew tried to speak to her but she did not seem to hear. It was decided best to leave it to her husband and so they put up the closed sign and shut the door.

Charles did not get home until six at night. He had been rejected from the tent because of his hearing and told, loudly, that there was no point in his name being written down. The rabbitoh persuaded him to go out to Bankstown where there was a fellow with his backyard full of golden-shouldered parrots. So when he arrived home he had the gang-gangs and a pair of golden-shouldered parrots as well. He did not realize anything was wrong.

He busied himself making the gang-gangs at home, whistling to himself all the while. He assumed Emma to be upstairs with the baby and took the pair of parrots up to show her. When he found the flat empty he came downstairs again and only when his son, asleep on his wife's breast, gurgled, did Charles see the situation.

He squatted before the cage.

"Emma," he said.

She murmured.

"Emma, what are you doing?"

Emma was not so dizzy any more. She drank some water from a bowl. He could not go and leave her without water. When it got cold in the night, she moved enough to let him push a blanket in around her.

27