Illywhacker

But here, I must confess it, I was as nervous as a boy. I had not been sorry to put off the moment I also wanted so much, and when Charles locked me away I did not complain because it suited me. Ten years in a prison does not engender confidence in these delicate matters which one, at the same time, has spent so many hours dwelling on, so in the end one has enough material to make a palace from the leftovers. I had not, as Goldstein imagined, come seeking her out. Had I known she was waiting for me I would have stayed alone on my mattress on the floor.

A prisoner's memory turns love-making into something at once sweet and coarse, as saccharine as a pin-up, as rough as his hands on his cock, all worried whether his semen will splash on to his clothes or go into the bucket and I had forgotten the tiny intimacies of that ache I had named a fuck, the small pinching fingers on my nipples and belly, the ripe musky honey beneath the sweet bush of shampooed hair, the way a face in the dark (in the light too) changes its meaning and how words you thought yourself too old to say, sentiments you imagined dead and drowned, bubble up from the muddy floor and burst in such explosions of light, of perfume, floral yeasts and uric acid, and my Leah's eyes were huge and shining (nebulae, supernovae) and as she arched her back and locked her legs around mine so we were held hard, tight in a rack, Herbert Badgery was caught by surprise to find himself awash with gratitude, a prisoner in a rocking-horse of sighs.

46

Herbert Badgery lay in Leah Goldstein's arms. She smelt the musty odours of Rankin Downs seeping from his skin, like old rags kept in a cleaner's bucket for too long a time. He was already asleep.

Down in Pitt Street a drunk was pouring forth an endless mantra of echoing abuse against the empty summer streets.

Herbert Badgery began to snore, quietly. She was sorry she had not told him what she meant, had not said it properly. She had belittled herself. It was a stupid habit. She had made light of her ability to earn ten quid a week, as if it had been bought lightly or maintained easily. She had told him that the stories were hack work, which was true, and that they were women's stories, which was true in that they were written for the demands of the editors of women's magazines. But she had not told him that this constant production was like walking, each day, through a field of thigh-high mud. The fiction editors were arrogant and stupid enough to think themselves superior to their readers. You could only supply them with what they wished by thinking badly of human beings.

And yet she had taught herself to do this work because it was work that could be done anywhere, in a cafe in Sydney or sitting by a roadside at Goondiwindi. It would provide enough, with Herbert's pension, to live free of Charles's charity – they would not need to be family pets like Mr Lo.

She dreamed of landscapes cut with raw red roads, hills sliced by deep crimson cuttings, yellow ochre rocks striated with the long straight stabs of jack-hammers. Her mind, perversely perhaps, found peace in pictures of wide khaki seas around small treeless towns with the paling fences so new you could smell the tree sap in them. In these landscapes, by these roads, she found a shrill, ragged, unaesthetic optimism. It was ignorant and guiltless, and she had not yet told him but it was what she craved.

She could tell him tomorrow, but tonight she could now tell herself something else – she could allow herself to feel the hate she had for the pet emporium. And, indeed, lying in the unventilated dark, on a mattress on the floor, with the grease of cosmetics still on her face, she allowed a ripple of hatred, an electric jolt to pass down her body.

"I hate this place," she said. She said it out loud just to make herself hear what she thought, so that she could no longer pretend to herself that she thought otherwise.

"Signed," she whispered, "signed, L. Goldstein."

Herbert rolled on to his back and she dragged her arm out from under him. She loved him, but she would rather go and sleep in her own bed by herself. It was a habit, probably a selfish one. It was this last thought that made her stay and, also, her wish not to hurt him. She put the sheet over him and sat, hunched, on the edge of the mattress.

She hated it. She wanted to leave so much that tomorrow would not be too soon. She would not waste another moment of her life, that river filled with jetsam which had once – it looked so sad and pitiful now -been so important to her.