Illywhacker

His suit was silk, shot with threads of silk, but it did not hide his extraordinary build. Neither did the wide-brimmed Yankee hat cast a shadow deep enough to soften the crude features of his head: that huge thick neck, that jutting jaw, the mouth that could be mistaken for cruel.

I stared at him a moment, proud of him, irritated by his loud voice, but also embarrassed by my own suit which was fifteen years old and hung in great folds around me. I had lost weight in Rankin Downs. My shirt was too big and its collar sat loosely around my crepey neck. In short, I looked a no-hoper.

The car they were arguing about belonged to C. Badgery Esq. It was a Holden, one of the first. It was smooth, everywhere rounded, like a condensed Chevrolet, and the curved body panels shone seductively in the bright grey light of Pitt Street. It was like something from a letter. It glowed like a pearl and I too walked around it and felt my hand, almost against my will, go out to stroke it.

The arguers were cynics and romantics, some of them both, pretending to be rational men. Yet they were so bewitched by the thing they never once addressed themselves to the real issue but rather to such incidentals as the fact that the car was built with no chassis, that a bag of superphosphate in the back was necessary to make it handle properly. Some said it was ugly, some beautiful, and others said it was "tinny" and would crumple if you tapped it. But no one questioned that it was Australia's Own Car and nothing made a dent in Charles's excitement. He plunged his hands deep into his pockets, jiggled his keys, rocked back on his heels, looked up and down the busy street, waved to a passing friend and declared it a great day for Australia.

I should have got on the bus to Wollongong as I had planned. I was in much too confused a state to meet my son. I was a man descending on to a busy railway platform in a strange city with a battered old suitcase tied with string. I was jolted by impatient travellers, bumped by porters while I worried about whether my ticket was in my wallet or my fob pocket when it was in neither.

I held out my hand to him before I knew I'd done it. At first he thought me a stranger congratulating him. He shook the hand while he looked over his shoulder and shouted to someone else.

"Charles," I said. "It's Daddy." I did not know the weakness of the string that kept my emotional baggage together because there, in Pitt Street, the fucking thing broke, and everything I owned came spilling out of me, tangled pyjama pants, dirty socks, love letters, toilet rolls and old silk stockings. I hugged my boy and bawled into his deaf ear. I am not a big one for hugging men, I swear it. I never did it before that day. But I embraced my boy Charles Badgery in Pitt Street, Sydney, and frightened the bejesus out of him until he realized who I was.

It was a warm day, but I was shivering. I started to apologize for the knob in his ear. Don't smirk – I meant it – you should have seen it, the great ugly lump of bakelite sticking out of his ear-hole. He was too young a man to have to tolerate it.

Charles wasn't interested in apologies. He was pleased to see me.

"Have you seen the shop?" He led me towards it by the elbow. The doors were big and solid. Nothing quivered or evaporated. If Goldstein had invented it she had done a damn good job for it looked as solid as the real McCoy. "Crikey, this is wonderful. I always imagine you coming to look at it. I always wonder what you'd think. And here you are, I can't believe it."

He took me around the shop and introduced me to his staff, each one, by name, explaining the sapphire miner, loading me up with drink coasters. He was not ashamed of my ill-fitting suit or the tear marks on my cheeks. He took me into a large cage, all full of logs and ferns and running water and at the back he showed me a female lyrebird he had incubated himself. She was building a nest, he said, and was ready to mate. He was happy, because this meant he had cared for it well, but he was sad because there was no male to give her.

You could feel such a well of tenderness in the boy that I was affected by it too. A bower-bird came and perched by my shoulder and, for a moment or two, I could almost feel myself to be a nice man.

On the third gallery, we ran into a fellow, a seed importer from the Haymarket who wanted to go for a spin in the Holden. So we all clattered down those wide wooden stairs – light-coloured and worn in the centre of the treads, black on the edges – making as much noise as schoolkids let out early on a summer's afternoon, bathers in their hands, towels around their necks. Twenty-four hours before I had been in H M Prison, Rankin Downs.