Illywhacker

Sometimes she thought it was useless and wasteful but she knew, at the same time, that it was not useless and wasteful to knit, say, a sweater to send to someone one loved. She looked at her face in her compact, peering at three a. m. for signs of selfishness. Sometimes she found them, sometimes not. Her view of her face is not worth a pinch of shit. Let me tell you it is not a selfish face. Even her comrades could tell you that much. But who would expect to see selfishness anyway? You might, more reasonably, expect to see a young woman already marked by years of waste and disappointment, to see a face corroded by her husband's acid jibes. Yet there is no trace of bitterness or disappointment and those flinty features of hers, which should have become gaunter and beakier, have done quite the opposite. The eyes, which were once so steely and unforgiving, now show something gentler. Also she has developed a way of lifting her chin and raising her eyes, an expectant look, as if someone has just knocked on the door and she is looking up to see who it might be.

She, who had made more silly decisions than anyone has a right to, now showed both curiosity and optimism.

She endured her insomnia quite calmly, not fretting after sleep. She sat up in the sexless heavy flannel pyjamas she wore in those days. Occasionally she might read, sometimes she might write, but more often she would simply sit with her hands folded on her lap. The clock ticked. Lenny coughed and spat in his room. Leah thought.

On the night of September 12th, 1939, she thought, of course, about the war. She was shocked to recognize that there was a part of her that welcomed it and, while once she would have put this part away and not examined it, now she chose to touch it. It was as if the war would blow away the house she sat in, shatter it, throw clothing and dishes and newspapers out across the smoky street. The destruction was vicious and beautiful. She day-dreamed, walking out along the street and down into laneways. She saw bodies, about five of them, piled on top of each other beside a metal garbage bin and saw, as she peered, her father's body; shining green intestines protruding from his white starched shirt.

"No," she said, out loud. Her fingers clenched. She shut her eyes, and opened them. It was three forty-six.

This was eight minutes after Charles Badgery had woken to find his wife standing beside his bed. She was holding a very sick goanna with a roughly amputated leg. The goanna was so sick it did not try to escape. It dug its claws (five-fingered and child-like) into the pink eiderdown on the bed.

"Oh, Emmie, Emmie. Emmie, what have you done to it?"

Emma had come because she thought the animal was dying. She had not come to be accused. It was his fault. He was the one who had abandoned them. She filled her lungs with air and left the room. Her blood was coursing with chemicals she had learned to make herself. She was like a plant producing flowers, seeds, berries, suckers, buds, everything, all at once. She shut the cage door behind her.

Charles was now very scared. He examined the wound and saw the leg had not been cut off, but torn. He carried the creature into the kitchen and chloroformed it and then, having removed another inch of the stump, dressed the clean wound with sulphur. He then bandaged the goanna and put it in the ferret cage. He hid the ferret cage under the bed. He would have phoned Leah then but he imagined her in bed, beside her husband, sleeping. He waited as long as the dawn before he dialled her number.

He tried to tell Leah that his wife was mad but every time he approached the dreadful word he broke down and cried. He could not say it. He did say, however, that she was in a cage and was attacking the pets.

"Oh God," said Leah. "No."

This exclamation served to frighten Charles even more and so she quickly became brisk. She was standing in the kitchen, already shedding her pyjamas. "All right," she said, "you come here and look after Izzie. I'll come to the shop."

"He hates me."

"He hates me too," she said simply, folding up the pyjamas on the kitchen table. "That's beside the point."

"Leah, she's gone mad."

She could hear him crying at the other end of the phone. It was a terrible noise. She closed her eyes. "Listen," she said. "Listen to me, Charlie. I'm leaving now. You meet me in Taylor Square with the key for the shop. I'll be there in thirty minutes." She could hear him crying still. "Hang up," she said, and waited until he had.