Illywhacker

Hissao looked at the bottle with the polite attention another son might bestow on his mother's favourite maidenhair fern, or on a pear tree, new ducklings, a cabbage bed or white-stalked celery growing up through cardboard tubes. The ritual with the bottle was so familiar that he did not even think about it. For the most part the contents of the bottle had been as formless and unpleasant as the sort of stuff you will pull out of a blocked grease trap, but occasionally there were leeches and once a fine creature, as thin as black cotton, which swam with the graceful movements of a snake.

But on this occasion his mother showed him a foetus, half goanna and half human. And I know I said, when I mentioned the subject before, that Hissao did not look, that the liquid was murky, that he could not be sure, but of course he looked. He was not only polite, he was naturally curious and if someone says that they have your brother in a bottle, of course you have a squint at it. It had fingers (they were perfectly formed) and a face in which you could make out features which had that mixture of soft-mouthed vulnerability and blandness that is the hallmark of the unborn. Where you might expect toes there were long claws, thin, elegant, shining black like ebony; there was also a tail which was long, striped, with very obvious glistening scales.

Hissao, quite suddenly, did not know where he was. His head span. He stood up, and was dizzy, so sat down again. His mother, momentarily, took on the appearance of a total stranger. He leaned across to the kitchen tap, turned it on, and collected water in his cupped hands but when he drank he could taste only the whale-fat flavour of his mother's lipstick. Just the same, he did not realize that he had seen a dragon, only that he was ill and frightened.

"Jesus." He felt ill. "Oh, Emmie, Emmie." He shook his head.

A conversation then took place and I must translate for you, for Emma would rarely speak clearly and although I must write down her heard nothing but her murmur, or, if you were lucky, the last word like "doss".

"Just a bit of fun," said Emma to the young boy with the Corbusier bow tie. She took the bottle back and put it amongst the muddle in her handbag. "Is my boy cross?"

Hissao shook his head. He had a heavy feeling around his forehead as if there was a steel band clamped around his head.

"He's your half-brother, after all."

"Emma," Hissao was working hard to gather back his sense of the world. In this he was not helped by the unnaturally tidy appearance of his childhood home. "Emma, you are wicked."

She patted his cheek with a gloved hand and the feeling of kid leather where he had expected skin was also disturbing. He shivered, just as he had shivered, not ten minutes before, standing in Pitt Street.

"Don't you show that to anyone today."

Emma pouted.

"Promise me you won't show it to the journalist."

"All right," she said.

She kept her promise to the very letter, i. e., she did not show that bottle to Charles until the journalist had departed. Until that moment she did nothing but play the humble wife. She was asked two questions and she answered them both with lowered eyes and a gentle murmur. She pulled her fox fur around her shoulders and clutched her bag in front of her. Only the journalist and his photographer thought her peculiar.

Hissao did his work perfectly. When the question of smuggling was raised it was easy for him to answer honestly. He was passionate on his father's behalf. He spoke very quietly, with a sort of hiss in his voice. He attacked the "criminals" who were involved in this activity. He was enthusiastic about the Best Pet Shop in the World. He spoke at length about the necessary protection of Australian fauna. Thus he shuffled true conviction and cynicism, dealt a hand, guessed an answer, did his little act so slickly that when the journalist saw the photographs he was not only surprised to discover that he had been Japanese but that he was also diminutive.

57

Charles's opinions about himself had always been a tangled ball of string and while he thought himself stupid, clumsy and ugly, he also thought of himself as a Good Man. He was generous to his staff, he never cheated on his taxes, he supported any charity that asked him, voted for the political party which would tax him most heavily and distribute his money fairly. He was scrupulous in his business affairs, always meeting the requirements of the Health Department, the Customs Department, the rights (real and imagined) of his customers.

And although he guessed that the journalist from Time might talk about smuggling, he was not really prepared for the effect it might have on him. He could not bear to be accused of it.

Later he could not even remember the journalist's face or the sound of his voice. All he could remember was the accusation (what he imagined to be an accusation). Christ Almighty. So they had found suitcases full of dead rosellas at San Francisco airport. Why come to him?