Illywhacker

She was still on the veranda, a black sentry with a black umbrella, when yours truly, Herbert Badgery, the ruffian aviator, walked across the roof of the McGrath house and climbed down a fig tree, arranged clothes, and strode out of sight around the north side of the house which had once been known as "Wirralee".

She tapped the umbrella once, a full stop to everything, and returned to her letters whose fine calligraphy danced before her eyes, unravelling before the pull of her anger.

39

When Phoebe fell from the slippery roof she knew, before she hit the ground, that her life was ruined. As the real world rushed up to meet her, she knew she was not brave enough to be what she would like to be. In mid-air, naked, she wished for death, her chest crushed, her heart pierced, her legs snapped like quail bones. Her feelings were not those of a radical, Bohemian, free-lover, but a seventeen-year-old girl in Geelong who faces social ruin.

When her arm cracked she knew it broken. She leapt to her feet. The light was shining into her mother's window the wrong way, and she could not see Molly, only the reflection of her own nakedness. She was winded.

She heard Mrs Kentwell's umbrella tattoo. They locked eyes a second: the naked girl and the black soldier with the umbrella rifle. She moaned as she ran across the veranda in full sight of two Dodges which were racing fast along Western Avenue. One blew its horn.

Damn them, damn them, damn them all.

Yet before she had closed her bedroom door behind her, a change had come over my beloved who was no longer wishing for death but already making plans for her survival.

It is no struggle to imagine the desperate alibis that came to her -half-formed jelly-like things with no proper legs or faces, desperate creatures that fell to powder when inspected, invisible cloaks with holes in them. They swarmed through the sea of pain as she awaited her mother's inevitable arrival. The arm was useless. She dressed none the less. She bit into her lip to stop the hurt. She had mud on her bottom. She managed to get herself inside a dress, and in all this desperation she was careful to choose a yellow dress that was very similar to the one she had abandoned on the roof.

Inept stories came to her, e. g. she had gone on to the roof to fix a tile; she had taken off her dress to avoid ruining it in the rain; worn no underwear for similar reason.

No, damn it.

When the knock on the door came she was still not ready.

"Come in," she said brightly.

She prepared her face for her mother, opened the door with her good arm, and found not Molly, but me, my face livid with fear, my hands trembling.

"Go away," she hissed, "for God's sake."

I was so pleased to see her in one piece, alive, felt such relief that I was faint and wanted to sit down. I opened my mouth and croaked relief.

"Your buttons are undone. Go away." She pushed at me. She "was more than my equal. She was definitely my superior, for she had, at last, a plan, flimsy, fragile, but one she would make work by the sheer force of her green-eyed will. "I am not in the house," she whispered. "Take them to sit in the parlour at lunchtime andwatch the esplanade."

"Are you all right?"

"Yes, yes, but did you hear me? Then please, I beg you, do what I say."

She closed the door and locked it. I did up my buttons as Jack skidded the Hispano Suiza to a halt and left a new set of skid marks on the bright green lawn.

40

The morning's drizzle had turned into heavy rain and the wagon driver with his high load of turnips huddled inside the black oilskin while his fox terrier ran along beneath.

The rain bit into her, sweeping across a bay so hateful that anyone could see the town was right to turn its back on it.

"So much the better," she thought, "so much the better for me to run in this, and slip." But when she came around the corner of Martha Street where she had waited for her wet-glassed wrist-watch to bring its hands to one o'clock, the pain was so intense that she almost fainted. She was soaked through and shivering. She stopped and huddled against one of the esplanade's few trees.

At the other end of the avenue a small grey figure with an umbrella battled into the wind.

It was one minute past one. She prayed her audience were assembled in the parlour, that some talk about aeroplanes would not distract them from her fall.

Jonathon Oakes, the Kentwells' brother, beat into the wind with his illicit letters bulging fat inside the pocket of his waistcoat. He did not lift his umbrella. He was nearly home. He would run the bath and read his letters in delicious privacy.

Phoebe seized this chance that fate had thrown up. She waited for the umbrella to come a little closer to her parents' house before she began to run.

Every step jolted her. She ran with a pitiful "oh, oh, oh" which she said to herself for comfort, a soft cotton-wool bandage of sound around the pain.

For a second he believed he had speared the girl with his umbrella.

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