Illywhacker

Hooper the grocer, cantering his team home along Western Avenue, saw two men standing with their hands in their pockets by the side of the road. He tipped his hat to Jack McGrath who stared right through him as if he and his wagon were glass things in a dream.

27

Jack was arranging his expedition to Colac and he could not leave the telephone alone. His deafness made him bellow. When he was engaged in telephoning the whole house stood still and waited for him to finish. It was a big house, but even in the music room you could not escape his optimism. He did not give a damn for the expense. He talked on and on.

In the midst of all this, the roof above Phoebe's bed had begun to leak. Jack was too excited to give much of his mind over to such a mundane thing.

"It's a tile come off," Jack said, still puffing from the exertion of his phone call and putting four spoons of sugar in his tea, "that's all."

Phoebe said nothing.

"Mr Johnstone used to do the tiles," Molly said. "But he's dead, at Gallipoli, and he borrowed your bicycle," she told her daughter, "so he could go up to Ryrie Street to enlist. Do you remember, Jack? Do you remember Bob Johnstone coming here to borrow Phoebe's bike? I said to him, you'll look funny, a big man like you on a girl's bicycle, but he didn't seem to worry."

"It's hard to get a man to do one tile," Jack said. "I'll get up in the weekend, when I come back from Colac."

"I'll do it," I said. "Let me."

"We couldn't," Molly said, "could we, Jack?"

"No," Jack said, "we couldn't." His mind, however, was on other things.

I smiled. They all (except Phoebe) smiled in return.

"I am not frightened of heights," I said (I looped the loop in the skies of their imagination). "Just tell me where the ladder is."

It was late March and the morning had a fresh edge to its sunlight. When I folded my napkin and placed it on the table it looked, with its eggshell white and blue shadows, like a detail from a painting by the impressionist Dussoir.

28

Phoebe lay on her bed. It was five minutes past nine on the monstrous black clock her father had given her for her fifteenth birthday. She could hear me on the roof above her bed. She stood. Her feet were bare. Her mother did not like her to have bare feet, but her mother had taken Bridget to the market in Moorabool Street and as Phoebe stepped out on to the veranda she looked forward to the cool feeling the wet dewy grass would give her unnaturally hot feet.

At the back of the house there was an old fig tree, an easy-climbing tree whose branches now shaded the roof of the back veranda. When she was younger she had played in it. Now she could walk up the branch without so much as stopping. She ran lightly across the veranda roof and crawled, loose as a cat (arched back, purring) to the next ridge.

I was somewhere in the next valley, fiddling inexpertly with wire and pliers. In a moment I would look up and see, perched on the ridge above me, a beautiful young woman with hair the colour of copper, her bare legs dangling towards me, her face a shaded secret, dark against the pale blue morning sky.

I sucked in my breath. I stood there, staring.

I stopped breathing. I put down the pliers. They made a small noise (clink) against the tiles.

Did I speak? Later I tried to remember. Probably I said "come" in my mind, silently, and motioned with my hand. She came down the ridge, that steep face of red tiles, standing up, her lovelyfeet sure-footed. Only the blind eyes of the empty tower looked down on us.

I will go to my grave remembering the high flush in her face as she came to me, the cool of her arm (hot and cold) and, oh my God, such a kiss. I would have been content, would have ventured no further than the kiss (it was a meal, a feast in itself) but Phoebe had not come climbing trees and roofs merely to taste my mouth and stare at my glittering eyes, and when I felt those fingers like birds' wings fluttering at the buttons of my fly I closed my eyes and moaned. The pliers skipped across the tiles and clattered down into the box gutter in the valley.

Her eyes were a match for mine. They did not falter or flutter, but gazed straight back. She undressed me and I did not fight or attempt to assert the masculine prerogative. She undressed me to my farmer's body: tanned arms, tanned neck, and the blue-white skin traced by veins and, most curious of all, a hard but soft-skinned penis with its toadstool head and its great blue vein stretching along its length. She had talked with Annette about men's organs and how they would look, but nothing had prepared her for the softness, the baby skin stretched so tight.

When she touched me with her finger, I moaned ("So sweetly," she with her lips, just brushed me, silk on silk.

Somewhere, in another world, a door slammed.