Illywhacker

Oh shit, he thought, as the volume of the grief rose higher. Drunk women were the worst. He turned up the radio even louder, but he could still hear her howling. He drove quickly, a lot more quickly than he had planned. He dropped her outside Woolworths and she gave him a pound, pushed it into his hand and wanted no change. He saw her in the rear-vision mirror as he drove away. She was standing rigid, staring up at the building across the road.

Leah Goldstein looked up. There was Herbert Badgery, sitting in his chair, listing slightly towards the collapsed side of his brain, surrounded by the waltzing neon rosellas.

"You bastard," she said.

Passers-by made a diversion so they need not brush her. They left plenty of room.

I watched her from where I sat. I saw her cross Pitt Street at an angle. She looked neither to right nor left. When she arrived at the stair inside the emporium, I felt her. I felt the footsteps all the way to the top floor and then around the gallery rail, and through the kitchen.

The door opened.

"Kill me," she shouted. "Kill me."

She was very drunk and I was exceedingly weak. It was almost impossible for me to move, but I persuaded her to lie down on my little bed and I gave her my basin for when she was sick.

She never remembered what she had said that day, but it unnerved me just the same, as if all my carefully constructed world was unravelling in my hands.

Old men do not need sleep. I sat up all that night beside her. I watched the signs. I held everything in place by the sheer force of my will.

61

Inside that little plastic chapel the widow wailed and wept. Thank God she did. At least it was an honest noise. It was ugly, yes, and full of suffocating gulps and shrieks as big as ripping sails, but I would rather listen to it than the regurgitated pap that poured out of the smiling officiant.

"Chas", I quote his very words, "is sitting with God."

I don't know what brand of Christianity he belonged to (the dickhead) but he had modelled his style of speaking on an American tape recording. He had stood at home, miming the words into his mirror, had folded his talcum-smooth hands the way the manual told him to, had done it again and again until there was only the slightest trace of his Australian accent left and the natural nasal flavour was cloaked in a rich sugary sauce.

It was, he told us so, a happy day for us all.

There was an Acrilan carpet in mottled browns and bright aquamarine chairs to sit on.

When he had said his words they played a Wurlitzer organ and slid the coffin out on rollers just as, in the cool stores in Bacchus Marsh, they slid the cases of apples through the shed. You would never guess that that shiny box contained a man, my boy, a skin-wrapped parcel of fucked-up dreams.

We went out into the sunlight, on to the gravel. Henry's and George's wives made bookends for the widow. Goldstein tried to busy herself with taxis.

All those old people getting confused about which taxi they should be in – stooped thin Sid Goldstein with his paper-dry hands. Wheezy old Henry Underhill trying to order the ranks. Phoebe walking with exaggerated care across the sun-bright quartz worried, as always, that she would fall and break a hip. She had more black plumes than a funeral horse and she approached my wheelchair all netted in black, a pale bony hand extending.

The wheelchair had a curious effect on people. They came and stared at me as if I was a fish at the market.

"How is he?"

I said: "Not long for this old planet now."

They couldn't understand a word I said, and it didn't matter, because I was only lying to cheer them up. Death was their hobby, their dream, their fear, the only subject worth consideration.

Afterwards we went back for drinks at the emporium and George and Henry puffed and grunted carrying me up four flights of stairs.

You would not glorify the affair by calling it a wake. They were all too old and depressing and I went to my room and left them to mutter about how ill I looked, I could hear them sighing and farting and rattling their cups in their saucers, but I had serious matters to attend to -I had my Vegemite jar back.

The thing that killed my boy was not half goanna and half human at all. Neither was it one of the shifting miasmas that had so frightened Sergeant Moth. It was a dragon, a solid being, two inches tall. When it saw me the evil fucker puffed up its throat and showed its red insides to me. Oh, Christ, it was a nasty piece of work. It reared up on its hind legs and scratched at the glass with its long black claws while its whole body pulsed with rage, changing from a deep black green to a bloated pearlescent grey.