Illywhacker

"See," Goon Tse Ying said. "He does not know what I am saying. He does not know the meaning of 'fifty pounds' or 'roll up' either. Tell me, my pet Englishman, what is the meaning of 'roll up'?"

I didn't know.

"Pour me brandy, little Englishman, and eat your soup. It will warm your heart and make you forget this terrible country. Why am I kind to you?"

"Because you were an orphan, sir."

"No," Goon said quietly. His voice became soft, amber, vaporous as the brandy on his foreign breath. "It is to show I am not a barbarian like them."

In my confusion I thought he was referring to the Chinese.

"You will sleep here," Goon Tse Ying told me. "I have arranged with Wong. You will share a room with old Hing and his nephew. Hing will cook your meals. In the morning I will come and get you and we will sit at the herbalist's. He does not speak English but he is a good herbalist. I am helping him out for a while, to translate for him. He is a silly man to have bought the business with no English and I don't know what will happen to him when I leave."

My bedroom was on the other side of the muddy courtyard, a long lean-to made from corrugated iron with an earth floor. I could not shut my eyes. Hing coughed all night. His nephew snored. I cried in the dark, assailed by garlic and the sweet smell of Hing's evening pipe.

When, at last, I did sleep, I dreamed the Chinese came and ate my hands.

2

The herbalist was Mr Chin, the uncle of the Mr Chin to whom I would later sell my snakes. He was very handsome with his blue waving hair and his gold tooth but when he saw me his forehead scarred itself with a frown as messy as a bulldog's. Goon Tse Ying listened to what Mr Chin had to say and then he explained to me that I would not be permitted to sit in the consulting room. This was because all of Mr Chin's patients were English gentlemen and ladies and they would be embarrassed, Goon told me sternly, to repeat their complaints in front of a boy.

So I never learned the art of herbalism, nor, for that matter, did I master any of the five languages Goon had promised, although I did learn to count from one to ten in Hokein.

Goon was neither embarrassed nor apologetic about this setback. He announced that I was to return to the Eastern Markets and learn about vegetables. He himself had been a hawker in the Palmer River rush in Northern Queensland.

It is the nature of childhood to continually encounter things one does not understand, to be thrown here, to be put there, to offend without meaning to, to be praised without understanding why, and I do not remember being unduly unhappy to be sent to the Eastern Markets.

I remember the cold, the paraffin lamps in the early mornings, the chatter of Wong Li Ho, the spitting of Nick Wong. I remember the red-faced Scot with big ears who roared the virtues of his cabbages from dawn till afternoon, the gaunt women with red fingers protruding from their dirty mittens. I remember knocking my chilblains against boxes of cauliflowers. I remember bags of potatoes I could not lift. But most of all I remember that no one hit me and that when noon arrived I was permitted to depart and then I would walk up through the busy streets to Nicholson Street in Carlton and wait for Goon Tse Ying. When the last consultation was finished he would take me by the hand and escort me back to the cafe within whose walls, it seemed, there was contained everything in the world I would need to know.

In the muddy courtyard, amidst indignant hens, he not only taught me how to fight with my feet but also how to skin a crow by putting a nick in its neck, inserting a bamboo rod between skin and flesh, and blowing. Both of these skills were useful to me in later life. He took me to the kitchen and showed me how to make soup from the crow. He sat me on his knee while Hing butchered a pig and showed me how every part of it could be used for food.

He took me to the front office to instruct me in abacus, but, finding Wong busy with it, demonstrated the pressure points of the body instead, showing me how these could be used to immobilize an opponent. While Wong entered the single men's wages into his ledger, Goon Tse Ying taught me to stand in such a way that I would appear bigger than I was, or, conversely, how to appear smaller. Wong did not complain once. There was such clutter in this dark front room, such a tangle of rope and canvas, incense for jossing, shoes for horses, even a monkey foetus in a bottle of green liquid whose purpose I never discovered, such a disorder of goods, such a tangle of raffia, that the presence of a noisy rich man and a quiet sharp-faced boy did nothing extra to distract him from the wonderful order of his ledgers.