Illywhacker

I dare say you're right, but the house was my present to her and as it represented no more than the core of the mansion I intended to finally construct, could be altered, pulled apart, demolished and rebuilt, I saw no harm in it. Saw no harm in it! I saw great benefit. It was my gift, my surprise, my work, my love, my tribute to her.

She loved it. As we bounced along the pot-holed track through yellow summer grass she exclaimed with joy. There was confetti spangled on her fur hat. The blustering northerly wind blew dust into her eyes.

She jumped from the car before I stopped. She ran through the house in echoing high heels. She kissed and hugged me. She called me husband.

I never guessed how differently she saw the place. That while her delight summoned up future towers and libraries in my mind, winding paths, flower borders, shrubbery, ancient elms, ponds and statues, children running with hoops and spinning-tops, my confetti-spangled wife saw nothing more than a camp.

It was this she thought so wonderful, and when she wrote her letters to Annette she would talk about it like a gypsy, a place to sing and dance and make love in, but nothing permanent. Phoebe loved it because it wasn't bourgeois. She loved it because it seemed to reject rose bushes and afternoon tea. She enjoyed (my perverse beloved) the rank foul smell that came drifting from the abattoirs, that gave an odd dimension to sunsets and storms in the sky above, and an unexpected perfume to the long-legged ibises.

Our wedding day was a dangerous day for flying. The howling northerly stole great fistfuls of red dust from the over-settled Mallee country, and carried it three hundred miles to throw it spitefully into our faces. But Phoebe, if she felt the spite, ignored it. She wished to consummate our partnership by flying. When she shed her splendid clothes it was not to lie between the stolen sheets, but to dress again in her flying suit and strap on her goggles.

I could not deny her, yet as I swung the prop, I was taken suddenly by the fear that was soon to become the dominant emotion of my life, that an accident would take my treasure from me. I saw her, as I grasped the prop and she, inside her cockpit, flicked the little bakelite switch to the "on" position; I saw her broken, bleeding. She held her thumb up, such a fragile thing, the bone a mere three-eighths of an inch, the skin as snug and fragile as the dope-tight fabric on an aircraft wing. The engine sputtered, then took, and I ran through the swirl of dust, carrying my butcher-shop nightmares, pulling my goggles over my eyes.

We were blown into the air before we had speed, kangaroo-hopped twice, swayed and tilted dangerously before we got the height to clear the dull red brick of the abattoirs. We bounced in the turbulent sky above the Maribyrnong, our noses full of the stink of rendering sheep boiling into tallow just below.

That twenty-minute flight was as frightening as any I ever made, and although I let my bride take the dual controls momentarily, I was forever overriding her, and I took a course out and along Port Phillip Bay, following the hot white beaches in case it was necessary to put down.

When I judged (incorrectly) that she had had enough, I brought the craft back to the river to land it. The ground ran east-west and made no allowance for the blustering northerly. I made no less than five attempts and aborted them as the gusts threatened to smash us sideways to the ground. When, on the sixth attempt, I landed it gracelessly, I whispered a small prayer to the god I did not believe existed and made a number of extravagant promises as payment for our safe delivery.

The exhilaration Phoebe showered on me was sufficient to make me forget the promises, one of which was related to obtaining a divorce from Marjorie Thatcher Badgery, a matter I had neglected to attend to so far and one that I would continue to neglect until it was brought to my attention in a manner I was to find uncomfortable.

We will come, in more detail, later, to the aphrodisiac effect of flying on Phoebe Badgery. Let me merely say that when we returned to the house Phoebe gave not a damn that the floor was adrift with Mallee dust and when she made love to her new husband she accompanied herself with a torrent of words, a hot obscenity that shocked me even while it brought a seemingly endless flow of semen pumping from my balls. It was an auspicious beginning for Charles Badgery who was conceived on that afternoon from the joining of his dry-mouthed father and ecstatic mother in a house whose dry Coolgardie safe contained nothing more than a loaf of stale bread and a tin billy of melted butter.

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