Illywhacker

Leah heard only urbane drivel of the type, she imagined, people spoke at cocktail parties. It made her less confident of success, but she waited for him to finish, smiled when he had and, having provided enough punctuation with a deep draught of cold bitter beer, told him what she had come to tell him. Her voice was too tight. She had the sense of talking into a deep well, of shouting against air. She ignored her quavering voice, and pushed on, outlining the risks for him, both legal and moral, of doing what his mother seemed to want, i. e., running the emporium as their American masters wished.

Hissao had no intention of being a lackey. He was not worried about these so-called risks. He was worried that Leah Goldstein seemed serious and unhappy.

"Ah," he said, raising his eyebrows comically, poking gentle fun at the seriousness. He tilted back on the chair and then dropped forward. "Ah so," he said, making himself look as Japanese as anything in Kurosawa, "Ah, so… deska?"

Leah misunderstood the performance. She was suspicious of the smiling face and all this animation at a time when he should, given what he had witnessed, be filled with grief. He was spoiled and young and corrupt and she saw, in his white collar and smarmy tie, the salesman's desire to please.

"So I am directed to be a smuggler, eh?" Hissao smiled into his beer. It was easy to forget he was only eighteen years old. "That's the plan. The business is viable after all?" He was being funny, so he imagined.

Leah had never been good with irony. She lit a second cigarette and frowned.

"We'll all be rich," Hissao said gaily. "We could have sports cars and lovers." He was joking of course, but he dropped the word "lovers" into the stream of his talk as deliberately as a fisherman letting a mud-eye float past a watching trout. He wanted Goldstein to talk about lovers, her lovers, his mother's lovers. He wanted confessions, secrets, all the lovely laundry of the past.

It was, however, the wrong approach for Goldstein. She thought him frivolous and silly. She gave him a stern lecture on the American takeovers of Australian industry – a subject she had been researching for the Labour Party – and talked about the political ramifications of it, both in terms of ever-increasing dependence on American investment and the paybacks a client state must make, like fighting wars in Korea and other places.

It was all unnecessary. Hissao knew almost as much about the subject as she did. He was soon bored and boredom – because he was not a meek young man – soon gave way to irritation.

"I see," he said, now parodying the very quality Leah had misread in him. He filled his beer glass from the jug. "But it doesn't matter, so long as the Resch's is still cold."

She took the bait and that made him really cross. He clicked his tongue loudly. It was an unexpected enough (and sufficiently loud) noise to make Goldstein stop.

"Do you really think", Hissao said, his cheeks burning, "that I don't know all that stuff?"

Goldstein opened her mouth combatively and then shut it cautiously. She tilted her head appraisingly. At last she said: "I don't know you."

"No," he said. "You don't."

They were both embarrassed then. Leah poured more beer for both of them and Hissao began to talk again, deliberately trying, with words and enthusiasm, to bleed the poisonous temper out of his system.

"Leah," he said, "even if I had no principles at all, I wouldn't do what she wants."

"She's your mother."

"Yes, yes, she's my mother, but I wouldn't do it. Out of pure self-interest I wouldn't do it. Out of egotism, I wouldn't. Out of pride, arrogance, ambition."

He listed motivations that, because they were a little unsavoury, he judged she would believe more readily than fine ones.

"You see," he said, smiling, but not calmly. "I'm going to be a great architect."

He took one of Goldstein's cigarettes and lit it with not-quite-steady hands.

Then he was a young man, all afire with enthusiasm and ambition. And Goldstein, who knew herself to be living amongst the rusted wrecks of lives, felt very old and grey and cynical and she envied the smooth skin of his cheeks and the clarity of his eyes and she felt herself giving way to his will as he talked about greatness, his greatness, as if it were a thing so certain that he could touch it. He said it made the skin on his fingers go taut – he showed her where -and the quick beneath his nails tingle. And Leah was entranced and repelled by him at the same time. She felt – as she had done when she saw the bow tie -that he was decadent, that his smile was overripe, his skin too smooth, his teeth too white; but there was also something else about him that contradicted this, something untarnished and tough, as precise and unblunted as a surgical blade fresh from its paper wrapping. She had seen this, this tough thing, when he had clicked his tongue.