Illywhacker

Molly silently worshipped the electric god and begged its forgiveness.

"You are fortunate to find me still here," he said, not for a moment stopping the stroking. "I have been considering moving to Dubbo."

Molly shuddered at the thought.

"The town has gone backwards. I blame it on the gold," he said. "A marvellous conductor. The best conductor of electricity known to man and they waste it on decoration. This was a city of great potential, built on gold, and the fools squandered it. There has been no progress, nothing. They would rather go to spiritualists, herbalists. There is no belief in science," said Dr Grigson who had, just the same, borrowed the idea of the velvet cushion from a Chinese herbalist of my acquaintance.

"Rhinoceros horn, monkey foetus, snake livers," he sighed. "It is quite extraordinary. Which is why", he said, "it is an especial pleasure to help someone in an Hispano Suiza."

Molly was weak with relief and gratitude. She smiled at him dreamily. She would have offered him the car as payment.

"Would you like…"

"… a drive?" Grigson smiled. "Would you offer?"

"Of course," Molly said, arranging her stole. She could have sung. "It would give me pleasure."

"I can ask no other fee", the doctor said, "than to drive around the streets of Ballarat in an Hispano Suiza."

57

"No," Annette said as we trooped down the stairs. "Please, Mr Badgery," she whispered in my ear. "Stop him. He'll kill us."

I had no intention of stopping it. I opened the car doors politely and sat beside the tiny doctor in the front seat while I explained the machine's controls.

I have had worse drives, although possibly not quicker ones, for Dr Grigson took to the Hispano Suiza like a demon. He displayed a sensitivity towards the controls that was surprising in such a stiff-necked man and although his frail legs were barely strong enough for the clutch he certainly had no trouble with the accelerator.

He drove recklessly up Lydiard Street and screeched around into Sturt Street where people, queuing for the cinema, turned to stare.

"Barbarians," said Grigson, puffing as he swung the wheel into Battery Hill Road, running down a fox terrier that was too slow to appreciate the danger.

Annette shut her eyes, but Phoebe, unaware of the dead dog behind her, only giggled.

They travelled up the highway and killed nothing more except a Rhode Island Red cockerel outside the Buninyong Post Office.

He drove back into town at a more leisurely pace. "That will teach them," he said, and I was never sure whether it was the display of the automobile, the demonstration of skill or the execution of two animals that was intended to have such an instructive effect on the people of Ballarat who remained stubbornly indoors, leaving Dr Grigson and his passengers to pursue their pagan rites in solitude.

58

Molly disowned the electric radiator. She was irritated, she said, by the amount of space the silly thing took up. She kicked at it with her tiny patent shoes. On the way from Grigson's to Craig's Hotel she made me stop and put it in the boot. There was not sufficient room and I was reduced to tying it on to the spare wheel with its cord – it bumped and rattled over the neglected streets, breaking all four elements and leaving sharp fragments of ceramic to find their way into the hooves of the dunnyman's horses.

Molly held her daughter's hand and kissed her. She fussed over the pale hand where it emerged from the fraying cast. She spat on her handkerchief and cleaned the skin beneath the ledge of plaster. She retied the sling. She pinned up loose wisps of hair that had straggled down from underneath her hat.

The hotel kitchen was closed when we arrived and it was Molly who persuaded them to open it again. When we sat at table in the big high-ceilinged dining room (famous for its pendulum clock and its original oil painting of Alfred Deakin) she ate heartily, demolishing two helpings of very grey roast lamb and only announcing herself stonkered after scraping clean the large monogrammed plate of steamed pudding.

Annette, as usual, was disgusted by the Australian habit of consuming large quantities of lamb, great slabs of dead dark meat smothered in near-black gravy. She scorned her knife and picked moodily at her shepherd's pie with fork alone and wondered what drug the quack doctor had prescribed for the widow's grief. If it had been the gonads of monkeys she would hardly have been surprised. The widow was all fluffed up like a hotel cat. Her plump cheeks were smooth as a china doll's and her fine nose, which had seemed so pinched, now flared its nostrils as if greedy for air and life. She held her knife and fork with a graceless enthusiasm more suitable for cricket bats.

Under the influence of a number of shandies, Molly began to reminisce about her life.