Illywhacker

Annette, who could wax lyrical about the working people of Paris, did not bring this view to those of Ballarat. Small boys with no shoes ran beside the car and their faces frightened her. She thought the Hispano Suiza an insult to their condition. Groups of men on street corners stopped their conversation and stared at us in silence. She saw a drunk vomit into a gutter and another pee against the green-tiled walls of Craig's Hotel.

Molly clutched at her wires. She could not remember the names of streets. She was as confused and shocked as a householder returning to a bombed-out city and her directions to me lacked confidence.

"Down here," she said. "Up here."

Phoebe stroked her mother's arms and dabbed at the beads of perspiration that appeared on her upper lip. She tried to loosen the wires which were cutting off circulation. She despatched me to ask directions. But no one knew of any Dr Grigson. They shook their heads before I had finished my question. They turned their backs. They walked away.

We circled the streets. The Crystal Palace Hotel had vanished. Nothing was the same. People came from their houses to watch the Hispano Suiza go by. They shouted and grinned and sometimes jeered. Annette found none of this reassuring. As a sympathetic student of the Bolsheviks she considered the working class of Ballarat with some trepidation.

"All gone," Molly said, "all gone."

But Dr Grigson's building in Lydiard Street was precisely where it had always been. It was one of those buildings that disappear from the eyes of a city's inhabitants. It no longer had any part in their lives and they did not trouble to spell out the bleached and peeling letters on the rotting fascia of the veranda. We passed it four times before Molly located it in the wrecked map of her memory and experienced, in that drop from memory to reality, the chronological equivalent of an exceedingly large air pocket.

"Oh dear," she said as she confronted this desolation. "Oh dearie, dearie me."

Annette was ready to pee on the footpath.

"The good Dr Grigson", she said dryly, "appears to be no more."

"Herbert will knock," Phoebe said and Annette sighed in irritation and held her hands between her knees. Oh God, she prayed, find me somewhere to pee.

I did as I was bidden and gained Annette's best cynical smile for my attempts at kindness.

The windows facing the street were painted cream like a dentist's surgery. I knocked on them. I hammered on the door from which the ancient paint, unused to such agitation, fell in a flurry of green flakes and adhered stubbornly to the sleeves of my dark suit. I stooped to look through the generous keyhole and when I shouted I could hear my voice echo through the empty passage.

I had no idea why Molly wished to see Dr Grigson. It would be another year or two before I became privy to such delicate secrets. For the moment, all I knew was that it was a pressing matter. I did not need to be instructed to go round to the back of the building. I signalled this intention to my passengers.

I scaled the high wooden gate in Dr Grigson's back fence, although the padlock was so rusted I might have snapped it with my bare hands. A pale light glowed in the upstairs window. I picked up a piece of coal and threw it at the window. I fancied I heard a cough. I threw another, larger lump and knew, before it hit the glass, that the throw had been too hard. I sucked in my breath as the window broke.

"Beg your pardon," I yelled.

"Go away," a voice came quavering back.

"Dr Grigson?"

"I have the telephone," Dr Grigson said fearfully. "I shall call the police."

"Mrs McGrath wishes to see you, Dr Grigson. She motored all the way from Geelong to see you."

"Go away."

"Out the front," I pleaded. "Look out the front. In the Hispano Suiza."

"Hispano Suiza?" asked Dr Grigson (whose Daimler Benz sat quietly rusting in the shed beside which I stood). "Did you say Hispano Suiza?" A shard of glass fell to the courtyard and shattered at my feet.

"I did, sir."

The figure disappeared from the window and I went to stand at the back door. I heard footsteps descending the stairs at quite astonishing speed. Minutes later I heard high heels and the voice of my beloved echoing through the house.

I waited. No one came for me. Only after Annette Davidson, unprotected by cardboard, had released a loud cascade of urine into what had once been Ballarat's only upstairs water closet, was I able to make my presence known.

55

Dr Grigson was two days past his seventy-fifth birthday which he had celebrated alone. His hair was almost gone and his neck and spine had stiffened to such an extent that, in order to alter his point of view, it was necessary that he change the position of his tiny feet, which he did with small shuffling movements.