Illywhacker

She was like no woman I have ever known. Please note: I said woman, not girl. This was not a case, as Jack would have imagined, of a grown-up man, already fearful of death and decay, falling for the smooth untroubled skin of a young girl. (Later I will sing you some songs to ageing flesh, a woman's body with scars, stretch marks, distended nipples, breasts no longer firm, a slow sweet song by a river, not a bay.)

She climbed naked to the roof ridge and wanted to be taken from behind while she watched the farmers and their wives promenade along Western Avenue. She licked my nipples as if I were a woman and laughed when they stood erect. She told me I had a Phoenician's mouth and stared so hard into my eyes that I shut them to protect the poor bleak rooms of my life from such intensive scrutiny.

Phoebe looked into those blue clear eyes and thought I was the Devil. There was nothing soft about me, she thought, no soft place, just this cold blue charm. She wrote all this in her book. Sometimes she showed it to me, holding her hands to hide what was before and later.

"He is an electric light," she wrote. She was well pleased with this description, suggesting as it did both electrocution and illumination.

Baked by hot tiles, goose-pimpled by breezes from Corio Bay, she shucked off Geelong and left it lying in the box gutter of the roof like a dull tweed suit. She held a testicle in her mouth and listened to me moan. She shocked me with the attentions of her tongue.

"I like him", she wrote in the book, "because he is probably a liar."

And when I protested, she said: "You have invented yourself, Mr Badgery, and that is why I like you. You are what they call a confidence man. You can be anything you want."

Of course I loved her for more than breasts and tongue. I had never stood so naked and felt so whole. She spoke like a ventriloquist speaks, hardly moving her splendid lips. It was a constant wonder that words emerged at all and that, when they did, they were so velvet soft, the tips of fingers encircling my ears. It was she who was the magician, and I the apprentice.

"We will invent ourselves," she said.

Geelong did not exist for us. We were oblivious to discomfort in our inconvenient nest. We lay, sat, squatted together in the valley of the roof while Molly lay, half crazy, on her bed below and Jack was entertained by his backers in gardens of Western District sheep.

"Will you teach me to fly?"

"My word, yes."

"Could we fly to Europe?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever made love to a man?"

"Good grief, no."

"I have made love to a woman," she said.

I was shocked, jealous, lustful and my voice was hoarse, half strangled with it all. "What woman?"

"You must teach her to fly too."

It is no wonder I did not take to Annette. I was jealous of her before I met her.

The hair around my penis was already damp and matted but when Phoebe extended her white hand the organ seemed to reach out towards the hand.

"Just like a flower", she wrote complacently in her notebook, "towards the sun."

32

Molly had not seen Phoebe climb on to the roof or me follow her. Yet she had a strong sense that something was wrong. This sense overpowered her and gave her what she called "her symptoms": a feeling of vertigo, like the panic she felt on high bridges, ledges, winding mountain roads. And once this feeling had appeared, like an old crow from a childhood nightmare, it stayed there and brought its own fear with it and she bitterly regretted the day she had so rashly thrown away the electric belt.

The electric belt had been purchased in 1890 from the Electro-Medical and Surgical Institute, a three-storey building in Sturt Street, Ballarat. Molly had been fourteen. She sat in the office of Dr Grigson with her two young brothers and her aunt, Mrs Ester. Mrs Ester's real name was Mrs Ester McGuinness but she was known as Mrs Ester to everyone in Ballarat and she was the licensee of the Crystal Palace Hotel.

Mrs Ester was in her late thirties. She had a slim figure, thrown slightly out of kilter by the unusual length of her body in relationship to her legs. She had a high head, a longish chin and quite extraordinary cherubic lips of which (together with her small, arched feet) she was secretly proud. Her eyes had a tendency to bulge and Dr Grigson, on first sighting her, had privately diagnosed a tendency towards an overactive thyroid gland.

Mrs Ester did not much like children but she had a strong sense of responsibility and these three children beside her were her brother's and it was her duty to safeguard them properly. The minute she knew of Molly's mother's madness she knew what had to be done and she used her newly installed telephone to call Grigson for an appointment, although she could, almost as easily, have walked across the street.