Illywhacker

There is no duller man on earth than a Mitsubishi Sarariman. Once you understand how conservative they are, you can easily imagine what distress, what physical pain, not to mention panic, they would feel to do business with a curly-headed, Bacchus-lipped, baggy-suited Australian with scuffed shoes.

Hissao therefore transformed himself. He became dullness personified. He had his hair neatly barbered. He bought the correct English suits and a wristwatch that would declare his rank more clearly than the business cards he had no time to print. In the corridors of Mitsubishi he was all but invisible. It was his destiny. He felt it. He took pleasure from his new politeness, the excessive courtesies, the slow progress, circular, but sometimes spiral, towards consensus.

He still knew himself to be an architect but there, in the endless meetings in Tokyo, the lunches in carefully graded restaurants, the ever-ascending levels of expense and status, he knew that he was born for this, that he was a great salesman, the best the family had yet produced.

He returned on a JAL flight to Sydney with a commitment of one million dollars (US), all of which was to be invested in the best pet shop in the world.

There was a recession on. He was written up in the papers.

65

He ripped the guts out of the old building as if he were a goanna feeding on a turkey. He attacked it viciously, took its entrails first, and left it clean inside, a great empty cavern of slippery ribs.

I lost my window, of course. I was shunted and shifted from ground floor to basement. I did not care. They fed me and wiped my bum. What more can a man want when his grandson is all afire with a scheme? He was my flesh and blood, my creature, my monster. I loved him, loved his barrelled chest, his red-rimmed eyes, the strong broad hands that unrolled the plans amidst the mortar and sawdust. He was opening out the pet shop, living out the destiny I had mapped for him when I took him to the South Pylon of the Bridge. He did not remember, of course, and that is as it should be and I could drink his hate as happily as his love because here, in the city of illusions, he was building a masterpiece.

No one, not even Emma, dared stand in his way. Such was the force of his vision that they all gave way before it and even Goldstein, increasingly gaunt and dark-eyed, Goldstein who would not speak to him, teetered on the brink of admiration for she saw he was pursuing an idea without compromise, that he really did have greatness within his grasp, but that was before she saw what he was up to.

The architects of Sydney all came, sooner or later, for a sticky-beak. They knew that Hissao Badgery, that gourmand, dilettante, deviant, was not capable of such work. They decided he was a front, a shadow for a Japanese architect, and they argued only about which Master it was.

The cretins. There was nothing Japanese in it except the money. He built like a jazz musician. He restated and reworked the melody of the old emporium. The creaking galleries were gone now, but you saw them still, in your imagination. He built like a liar, like a spider -steel ladders and walkways, catwalks, cages in mid-air, in racks on walls, tumbling like waterfalls, in a gallery spanning empty spaces like a stainless Bridge of Sighs.

When Goldstein, at last, saw what he was up to, she tried to stab him in the chest with a knife but she was now an old lady in paisley with weak wrists and arthritic hands and he easily knocked the blade away and then, for good measure, spat right in her face, a great glob of clouded spittle which landed on her ruined cheek and predicted, in its course, the bed along which her hopeless tears would shortly run.

What drove him to this rage was not the knife, but the lack of imagination she displayed, that she could not see what he was doing, what passions ruled him, what love his hate was based in.

66

I have no great pains, no searing agonies to make me scream and weep, but I have nausea, giddiness, the discomforts of incontinence, the itch of psoriasis, and I lie here, with my skin scaling, peeling like a withered prawn.

Naturally they come to see me, not just the men with callipers and bottles, but the ordinary visitors. They journey up the aluminium walkways, they brave their vertigo, they grasp the rail, they tremble to see what a human being can become.

I wish I were well enough to enjoy it properly. I used to enjoy it. I remember the first day he had the boys from Bondi Surf Lifesaving Club bring me up here. They carried me with two poles and a canvas sling.