Illywhacker

Everyone was silent, but Charles was at that point – I know it well – where the climax of a rage is not quite reached and something, some definite thing, must be done to cap it off. The flag must be driven into the snow.

"But," he said, thrusting his hand into his jacket pocket and pulling out a crumpled quid note, "but, seeing you are all so independent, here's a quid from me towards the food and grog. I'm sure you can all pay for yourselves. Put that thingdown," he said to Emma, but his wife was entranced by the Vegemite jar and did not even look up when her husband left the room and stamped down the stairs into the night.

Henry and George sat rigid. Emma and Hissao were already busy with my bottle.

"Well," Phoebe said brightly. "I must be off, too." She kissed me briskly on the cheek and she had been borne out into the night on black feathers before anyone had a chance to ask her for a penny towards the meal.

I must have looked miserable because Goldstein kicked my ankle and smiled at me.

"Don't worry," she said. "He'll be back in a minute."

It happened just as she predicted. He was away no longer than it takes to walk around the block, up Castlereagh, into Liverpool, and back. He came into the room holding his hat in his hand with his shoulders rounded, his long arms pressed against his sides. I did not want him to apologize. I thought him entitled to say what he said, even if I did think he had been tricked by the Yanks. I tried to stop him, but he insisted. He did not do it briefly. He went on and on and I had to listen. He was in the habit of it: apologizing for things he was not to blame for. I could not look at him, only at the tablecloth.

"I hope you will stay," he said.

"Oh yes," I said.

"Not just tonight."

"Thank you."

"But always."

It went on, we will leave it there. Let me say only that there were soon more tears – even Goldstein joined in – and soon I was walking through the warm bright streets of Sydney with my dancer on one arm and my gentle son upon the other. We proceeded towards my tower and you will understand that at a time like this a Chinaman's dead finger might easily escape my notice.

45

You, my dear sticky-beak, already know the conditions of life on the fourth gallery, but for me it was a revelation.

My son had made his workplace like a cathedral and I had expected him, therefore, to live in a palace, not a prison. It was easy to see why the most normal person would not wish to sleep in the so-called flat where my boy (presuming me well past such a grubby thing as copulation) made up a bunk for me, throwing on children's bunny rugs and heavy eiderdowns although the night was warm and the air stifling. The flat had no windows, merely small opaque skylights which -I could see the rusty trails – leaked every time it rained. No wonder his children preferred the company of their mother. There was a ripe odour of horse meat and ageing apples, both of them pervasive smells that get themselves soaked into every surface so that a fellow trying to block his nose from them will find his blankets are as contaminated as the air itself.

How could you compare this with the prospect from the fourth gallery where you could gaze upwards and find the sky full of bruised thunderclouds or blinding blue, on whose varnished rail you could lean, like a first-class passenger on an ocean liner and watch the customers perform their antics on the ground floor below? Here you could have the most beautiful birds on earth to amuse you, and at night you could find your way into the green watery depths of sleep via the cool tanks of dreaming reef fish.

And yet, for all this possibility, the style of life on the fourth gallery had none of the poetry I had imagined when, just that morning, I had stood below and craned my neck to catch a glimpse of it. And yes, I admit it, I was disappointed at first and I did not like the way they permitted the overweight goanna to drag its peeling belly across the floor so that one had to be reminded – constantly – not to trip over the nasty thing. Emma tried to persuade me to pat it, but I merely touched it.

They had made a slum of it.

It is true that Mr Lo kept his cage tidy. And Goldstein, likewise, living in the rejected lattice, kept everything neat and spartan. She had a chair and a little desk. There was a newspaper photograph of me hanging on the wall in a neat black frame. But the rest of the place was – you know already – like a toolshed, a warehouse, a junk room, a repository for broken toys, empty saucepans, dispossessed chairs, unhung curtains, rope, nails, women's magazines and leftovers laid out for the goanna and then not found suitable by the recipient who spent its mornings next to Emma's cage, basking under an ultraviolet light.