Illywhacker

I took the Morris Farman out over the bay, above the ships at Corio Quay, turned, and began my descent. Western Avenue, bright as day, loomed large before the squatters' eyes. I dropped the craft (none too gently) across the power lines where Western Avenue turns before the park, and skimmed in under the next lot at the Gleason Street corner. I passed beside a Dodge Series 6 whose pale-faced driver swung his wheel, caught in a culvert, bounced out and veered across the road behind the aircraft where Mrs Kentwell saw it lock wheels with a horse and jinker. The jinker's wheel shattered and the Dodge came to a halt at the top of the steep grassy bank above Corio Bay.

I taxied to the McGraths' front door. When the engine was turned off the sound of the terrified horse dragging the crippled jinker made a perfect accompaniment to the old squatter's face.

I was all politeness. I helped the gentlemen from the aeroplane.

46

Madame Ovlisky, Clairvoyant of Little Mallop Street, Geelong, sat before her smudged charts and confidently predicted a resurgence of influenza. There would be deaths in North Geelong, she said, and the dance halls would be empty. She could not see the canaries her customer had lost, although she was provided with the address (Melbourne Road, North Geelong) from which they had been stolen. She saw murder, she said, that very night, and if her customer was uninterested by this news, Madame Ovlisky did not notice it. As she spoke lightning flickered above the distant You Yangs and she was not dissatisfied.

Certainly there was an irritability, a temper, in the air, and Madame Ovlisky was not the only one who felt herself tugged by the sour wind that swept Geelong. It was a mournful, depressing wind, coming from across two hundred miles of denuded landscape to Corio Bay where the shells of cuttlefish lay abandoned in the sandy dark and where Sergeant Hieronymus House stood guard around the flimsy aeroplane that threatened to tip sideways before the stronger gusts. Hieronymus, known as Harry to all except the Clerk of Records, did not need to explain his temper by anything as questionable as the wind. He had been called to duty from the arms of a ready wife, a wife not always ready, not always happy, dragged back from bliss by a boy with a message from the station who had knocked loudly, persistently, at the moment when he had taken the superior position and she had closed, at last, her staring eyes. He had left her bad-tempered and blotchy to sit and watch the fire in a smoky parlour.

And for what? To guard the property of a man who had caused a nuisance in a public place, been responsible for the death of a horse, and damage to a brand new auto. Sergeant House would have locked the bastard up in the cells at Johnston Street without a shit bucket. But the grovelling, forelock-tugging arse-licking police commissioner was closing the street and posting a guard.

Behind the lighted windows of Number 87 Western Avenue there were rich squatters. Their laughter made him feel sour and he did not wish to speak to anyone.

He did not like any of the people who lived in these grand houses in Western Avenue. He would have arrested them all, not the poor bloody swagman with the bag full of frogs they had sent him out to arrest last week. He had been doing nothing but sitting on the edge of a quiet footpath. He had two pounds five shillings and sixpence in his pocket and he said he was off to be a cook in Commaida. But the magistrate gave him three months because "three months might do you some good".

Sergeant House watched Mrs Kentwell walk down the lighted steps of her house and come towards him. He turned his back. He did not wish to speak to her. She had a bad case of "officer's back", i. e., an appearance of a broomstick inserted in the anus with the aim of providing greater rectitude.

"I wish to lodge an official complaint," the woman said. Her hair was done in a braid and she held a shawl tight across her shoulders. Her false teeth were slightly loose, a condition the Sergeant sympathized with, and his countenance softened before the whistling sibilants. He sucked in his ruddy cheeks and settled his own uncomfortable dentures into place.

"Yes, madam," he said.

"This is not an isolated incident. The girl, the flapper, ran down my brother in a similar manner a fortnight ago."

"In an aeroplane?" His hostility evaporated in the face of this unreported crime.

"Not in an aeroplane. Of course not. She ran him down."

"In a jinker?" the Sergeant suggested. He took out his notebook and flicked briskly through the pages of careful copperplate.

"Not in a jinker, or cart, not a dray or an auto. Ran him down here," she tapped her umbrella emphatically on the footpath, "on the street, pretending to break her arm."

"And why should she wish to do such a thing?"

"Because she had fallen off the roof in a naked state", whistled Mrs Kentwell, "and broke her arm then."

"So now she ran down your brother, to break it a second time."