Illywhacker

"For God's sake, you're his father. He'd love to." And when she saw him hesitating, measuring, again, how much he was loved by his family, "Come on, Charlie Barley, do you want the Yanks to write you up or not?"

It was a speech that she was to remember afterwards with much regret.

56

Hissao remembers the day well. Really they were two days -September 11th and 12th, 1961 – but in his mind they are only one day. He remembers them as days full of unlikely events, days that coincided with the real beginning of life as an adult, days of great beauty, but also of grief. Actually one must include a third day, although, placed in order, it is not the third day, but the first of three. On this day, September 10th, a Monday that had predicted the full-blown arrival of spring, he had smoked marijuana for the first time, lost his heterosexual virginity in the back of a '52 Humber, and listened to a record – forever to be associated with these events – of Miles Davis and John Coltrane playing "Round Midnight".

The next day, the eleventh, was quite cold, cold enough for him to huddle into his leather jacket as he sat in his corner seat at Gino's, a small Italian coffee bar which was tucked away in a little lane on the edge of Chinatown. He was hardly in hiding – the place was a common meeting place for a certain set of students from the university – but it was a most unlikely place to meet any of his family.

Hissao liked Gino's. You could buy a minestrone and a bread roll for two and sixpence. There was a printed menu that showed a cartoon of a beatnik type walking up the walls above the heads of jiving couples; he left footprints on the ceiling and these footprints were repeated, in real life, up the walls and across the ceiling of Gino's although no one had ever been known to dance there.

Hissao had been there, at the same table, the evening before, and had bought the willowy clarinettist a Bacci which, she insisted, was Italian for kiss. So he was not hiding. He was merely sitting there, playing with the sugar bowl, writing her name with salt on the table, dreaming through the clouds of espresso steam. He had finished his coffee, had scraped out the rim of remaining froth with his teaspoon, and he sat there wondering what he would do next.

Hissao was eighteen years old. He was unnaturally short for a Badgery, a little over five foot tall, but he was also nicely proportioned. When he removed his shirt, men were either surprised or thrilled (depending on their sexual predilections). He had a gymnast's body and it was obviously the product of some serious work; yet it was made charming, almost comic, by the biscuit-barrel chest which had come to him, via his mother, from Henry Underhill.

The chest excluded (or even included) he had somehow slipped through the genetic minefields his progenitors had laid for him. Not only were his legs straight but he avoided the lonely excesses of masculinity represented by his bull-necked, jut-jawed Easter Island father. He had curling black hair, smooth olive skin, and red cherubic lips which suggested, strongly at some times, weakly at others, an oriental parent who did not exist.

This, the question of Hissao's name and his face, was not a thing that was, any longer, discussed in the family. It had been discussed on only one day, the day of Hissao's christening in October 1943, when Charles had emerged into the bright light of George Street and discovered – it was brought to his attention by his angry mother – that his son was not called Michael at all but had – his mother was so cross she was spitting as she spoke – an enemy name. You could not, to be precise about it, really call this ruckus a discussion, so we can say then that the matter had never, ever, been discussed within the family. Outside the family, of course, was another matter and, as a boy at school, he had been granted no immunity.

By 1961, however, the only signs left of his childhood battles were the gymnast's chest, the unexpected biceps, the pronounced pectorals, and the tendency to slur his name on occasions so that it came out "Sau" which was often mistaken for "Sal" or "Saul".

For the most part he did not act like a damaged young man and his laugh, that great indicator of personality, gave the clue. When he laughed (which was often) he produced a singularly awkward noise, a great tottering tower of a laugh with chains hanging off it and odd cubicles protruding from its shaking upper storeys; not quite normal, but not damaged either, and endearing for being so awkward and, once you had got over the shock, infectious. It was a laugh to stop an old man being cynical, to make him smile, toothlessly perhaps, but smile to see that the product of a fearful imagination could turn out to be so likeable a young man.

The laugh made everyone in Gino's look up, not at Leah Goldstein, whose unexpected entrance had precipitated it, but at Hissao.