Illywhacker

Outside she could hear Mr Lo arguing. She did not need to look. It was an amusing performance on the first occasion, but after that the spectacle quickly palled. Mr Lo amused himself, each morning, by playing imaginary baseball. He did not even have a bat. He would walk to the eastern end of the gallery, the opposite end to Herbert Badgery's wall, and position himself above his imaginary plate. It was just as well he did not have a real bat for he would have hit a ladder on the back swing. He never swung quickly, always slowly, and it was hard to ascertain which was a strike and which a ball. It was obviously hard for the umpire too. Mr Lo was always arguing with him and for a quiet man, a polite man, these arguments had a frightening ferocity. Mr Lo bellowed. He stamped and shrieked. Leah did not know what he was saying, but at these moments she felt closest to him.

Mr Lo was like everything in this place. It was easy to understand why he did it. In one way it was perfectly sane and normal, but sometimes you could look at it with that other eye, and it was terrifying to realize this was what your life had become.

Emma was sitting on a big overstuffed armchair in front of her cage – she looked like any overweight woman in a seaside camping ground. Her skin had loosened, her face now showed a tendency to jowliness. She sat, leaning forward on her open thighs, talking on the telephone. She liked to talk on the telephone. Her sister had sent her a Bacchus Marsh phone directory and it was her great pleasure to look through it and telephone people who were often most surprised to hear from her.

Goldstein lit a cigarette and watched. She could hear me talking to Hissao but she blocked that out of her mind – that blowfly noise – and watched Emma who, having finished her first phone conversation of the day, was fossicking in a large cardboard box she always kept near her chair. She took from it a single iridescent pink hair curler and rolled her straight black hair deftly into it. She clipped in a pin and patted it. There was a finickiness, a silly vanity in her actions. That was, at any rate, one way to see it. But the other way was to see her as a great courtesan.

Emma looked up and smiled, presumably at her father-in-law. She then hid her face and retreated, dragging the cardboard box after her, into her cage. She shut the door behind and sat herself on a little stool with a bright blue lambswool cover. She was just a heavily built countrywoman with a pink slip. She had meaty shoulders and fleshy upper arms. Her stomach bulged against the satin of the slip. She leaned forward, pressing her face towards the glass of a small round shaving mirror which was tied – with blue electrical flex – to the wall.

"Yes," thought Leah Goldstein, "she is a great courtesan. She is not the most beautiful woman in the world. She is not overendowed with intelligence. Yet her ambitions are quite extraordinary – nothing less than to be adored and worshipped. She is a great artist. Her husband can think of nothing else but having her love him. If she was beautiful everyone would understand. She could lie around in baths of ass's milk and her behaviour would be perfectly normal. They would applaud her and write poetry about her. They would think it quite permissible for her to be her husband's pet."

But it was not permissible for her, Leah Goldstein, to live her life so uselessly. It was not permissible to be in this undignified position, to be kept by a keeper of pets. She loved Charles, but it was not permissible for her to stay here. And here was this idiot, this fool, making a home for himself, jumping from one prison to another.

It was unbearable.

She sat and tried to write. She prided herself on her professionalism, that she could write her thousand words of pap whether she was well or ill. But all she felt was an enormous anger welling up in her, that she had wasted ten years of her life on a misunderstanding.

She stood up. She had not been intending to say anything. But when she emerged Herbert Badgery turned and smiled. His blue eyes looked false, like a doll's eyes.

"You fool," she said. "You moron. You want to be a pet."

"This is my old age."

"How disgusting then. What an old age. You want to lie on your back and have your stomach rubbed."

"Shut up."

"Pet," she said.

"Why not? I've earned it."

"What about life?" she cried. She was bawling now. Her face contorted. Tears coming down, splashing her sandalled feet. "What about life? I thought you were full of it. I used to tell people you had more life in your little finger" – she held it up, indicating a pink tip with a sharp slice of her other hand's index finger – "than most people, more moral people, better people, had in their whole bodies. Now look at you."

There was nothing to say.

She kicked at a brick. I suppose it hurt her, for her foot was covered with nothing more than a small blue slipper.