Illywhacker

Hissao began to answer. Charles was in such a fury he did not appreciate the great skill with which he was being defended. He plunged his hands so hard into his pocket that he burst the fabric it was made from and his car keys fell down his leg and on to the floor. The journalist's parries were turned aside, but Charles did not notice the turning aside, only the parries themselves, these razor-sharp slashes, stabs and lunges and the proprietor was pricked and cut – there was no shield could save him.

So the McMahons' parrot was extinct? Why come to him? He was Charles Badgery. He had ordered people off the premises for suggesting lesser things, backed them down the stairs and locked them out in the street, for intimating, say, that he used special lights to brighten the colours of a parrot's feathers. These incidents were all family history, funny to recall, but nothing had ever happened like this before and it would never be funny.

The interview was conducted as they moved around the cages. Charles hardly listened. He simply grasped the existence of thirty million Americans who would think him a bad man. They were on the stairs when the man began asking about Herr Bloom in Munich.

Now Charles knew nothing about Herr Bloom, except that he paid his bills and sent, each year, a Christmas card showing a bird from his famous collection. He had never talked to him, not even on the telephone, and knew nothing of his affairs. But now, hearing a certain tone in the journalist's voice, he was keen to defend his customer. He began to do so.

Hissao, on edge, skating very prettily on ice as thin as a cigarette paper, hissed at him: "Shut up."

His own son!

He began to feel enemies line up all around him. His son treated him like he was nothing but a piece of dog shit. His wife, his wife at least, had smiled gently and squeezed his hand while they took the photograph. When she spoke to the journalist she said that her husband had always been a good provider. The journalist had not understood her, but that was not the point.

Charles had no idea the interview had been a triumph. He shook hands with the journalist and did not realize he had been admired, that the journalist felt himself to be soiled and compromised in comparison.

He heard his son take the journalist down the stairs. He remained in the fourth gallery, shattered.

Even Emma had understood that the interview had been a success. She would not, otherwise, have been so reckless as to choose this moment to display the foetus in the bottle and claim to be the creature's mother.

Charles tried to snatch it from her, but he got the mixing bowl instead. His neck went red and blotchy. He started to say something, but the words got tangled and tripped over themselves and he ran unathletically, heavily, his arms flailing, across the gallery and down the stairs, three at a time, falling on the second landing, rising, bleeding, bawling to Van Kraligan to get a hessian bag.

58

She knew her babies were wrong. They were thoughts that could not be born. And, besides, they would never stay still, and you could not be sure that you had seen what you had seen. It was like looking at clouds drifting across the skylight – one minute you had a knobbly white-faced man all covered in warts and urticaria, and next it was a Spanish galleon in full sail across the top of the yellow Sydney sky.

But this one was different – it stayed the same. It moved, and breathed. You could see the heaving of its tiny ribcage and the clutching movement, just like a real baby, of its elegant, beautiful black claws.

You could see, anyone could see, it was related to the goanna, and she did not show it to her Charlie Barley to tease him, or taunt him, but she did not mind, either, that this had been the result.

She did not quite know what to do with the creature she had made but she was relieved, at last, to have the thing still, and not be so frightened by it.

She took a silk scarf from her handbag and spread it carefully on the kitchen bench. Then she took the magic foetus and placed its bottle in the centre of the scarf. She drew the corners together and knotted them. Next she swept up the shards of the mixing bowl her husband had broken. She swept up in the style of a tradesman cleaning up after a job, that is to say that although she made sure all the splintered pottery was in the dustpan where it would not hurt anyone's bare feet, she did not empty the dustpan itself but left it sitting on top of the feed bin for someone whose responsibility it really was.