Illywhacker

I shrugged. I am not a shrugger by nature but I wished to avoid saying anything hurtful.

"Come on. Come on." He put his ape arm behind Leah's chair and beamed at me.

When I had done my years of study in Rankin Downs this was not the context in which I had planned to unleash my learning. I had imagined dispassionate discourse, conversation as restrained as teacups quietly kissing their saucers. But still I answered my son in a considered way, avoiding anything that could be considered personal.

"I would say", I told him, "that we Australians are a timid people who have no faith in ourselves."

It was then that the trouble started. It was not with my comment, which was quiet and civilized. It was my son's reply. He roared with laughter as unmusical as the chair he scraped beneath him. I felt my temper begin to rise. I tried to bottle it. I had my heart intent on entering his household and I would not – not this time, please God – go hurling snakes around the room, ranting with a young man's passion, destroying the very thing I wanted.

"You don't believe me?" I asked him quietly. I fancy you could describe my smile as wry but my eyes, I felt them, were small and showed themselves as an intense violet blue.

Charles laughed again.

I did not lose my temper. I spoke sweetly, so softly that he had to produce his machine again and listen with a strained expression. "Then why…"I said.

"Speak up."

"Then why", I waited for him to get the thing adjusted, "are we so easy to fool? Why do we let them call it 'Australia's Own Car'?"

He did not obey the rules. He did not know them, the bloody ignoramus.

"Because it is." He thumped his fist on the table and made the plates jump. Emma's eyes slanted and she hunched her shoulders. Leah stared at the tablecloth. Phoebe examined the little watch she had pinned to her breast and the two bigger boys, the apprentice dullards, put on their deadman's eyes and looked to the front.

"No," I said. I was still quite calm. "It's a lie. And the shame is, it's not our lie; it's their lie."

"Your father", Leah said, "uses the word lie' in a slightly eccentric way," and she touched my leg again, beneath the table, recalling the tender conversation we had conducted over our Bundaberg rum.

"There are several meanings to the word 'lie'," said Phoebe, speaking as a professional in matters to do with language, "but only one to the word 'liar'."

"A lie", I said, "is something that isn't true at the moment you say it."

I saw Goldstein's smile – it spread to her eyes and suffused her skin as pervasive as a blush.

"E. g.?" my son demanded.

I had lived with my Vegemite jar so long that I did not find its contents disgusting. Often it was frightening but mostly it reminded me of the trivial nature of my imagination – for I had no doubt that it was this that controlled its contents. I could do no better than some warts, a fish, and – for a week or two – a tiny fox-terrier (it was only half an inch long) that finally changed into something like a cauliflower. Even mad Moran had made angels.

"E. g.?" my son demanded.

When I placed the bottle on the table, I was pointing out our lack of courage and imagination. It was all so clear to me that I felt no need to explain it further.

"E. g.," I said.

But all they saw was a finger floating in a bottle.

Emma grabbed for it, but it was Charles who won possession. He looked at me with disgust but I was too far along the line of my argument to go back and explain it to the slower ones.

"What is this thing?"

"Almost anything you're brave enough to make it into."

"I don't understand you," Charles roared.

"I don't understand you either, mug." (I was blowing it. Tough shit. Rough tit. Too bad.) "How can you turn your shop into a wing-ding for a Yankee card trick? Australia's Own Car! It's bullshit, boy. You've been done like a dinner."

"I haven't been done, Father. I have done. I've done more than you ever did. You lied and cheated and passed dud cheques. You never fed us. We never had clothes. We were cold and hungry when you looked after us. Now look at you. Look at you all. Jeez, you get up my nose. I'm sorry, Leah, but it's true. I feed you all. I put food in your mouth, and yours, and yours, and yours, and yours. It's my worry, my responsibility, and no one here lifts a finger to help me." His voice went up an octave. "You come along here with your socialism or your poetry or your sarcasm or this, thisthing, but none of you actually do anything. In real life, someone has to talk to the bank manager. It's me. I'm the one. I'm a business man. All those years, Father, you talked as if you were a business man, but I can see now you weren't a business man's bootlace. You moaned and groaned about the Pommies and the Yanks but you never did anything. And now you've got the nerve to criticize my car. Well it's Our Car. There's not another one like it in all the world. Is there one in Russia? Ha. In America? No, it's ours and we made it."