Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

You don’t want to worry about a thing, he said.

They were now on a softer road, almost sandy. The road was flat, winding between tall forest trees with shining bone-white trunks.

Do you know the place? Dial asked. Can you drop us somewhere near.

Near, said Adam, swinging the car violently to the right, fishtailing up a steep clay driveway. Five hundred fruit trees, he said, pulling on the brake.

Let the kitty go, he said. It’s free range here. One hundred percent organic.

It was awful. They could not live here, ever. As they entered the larger of the two huts and saw the small black flies crawling across the chairs and tables and the balls of gray fluff gathered between the wide cracks of the floorboards, he saw Dial’s startled gaze fall on the sick yellow tar paper. She would never buy this place.

She would be happier locked in jail. Really. It could not be worse than to be hidden away here in the leaky rain. There was a grimy kitchen sink on the back wall and the counter was piled high with pots and pans and paint cans and here, in the grim light of a small lead-light window, little Adam finally found a kettle and then he turned the spigot on a strange thin brass tap. There was a small trickle, then nothing.

Ah, he said, no water.

Even better, thought the boy.

Adam was about five foot five and the mother five foot ten. She had been looking down on him politely but now that there was no water she gently closed her eyes. She unloaded the kitten on the floor and walked out to the narrow deck where she sat cross-legged, her eyelids lowered.

His dad would never find him here.

Buck was another thing entirely. He did not know what he wished to eat the most. He stalked a silver butterfly across a low wooden table and then leaped into a sea of cushions, each one filled with tiny mirrors. These he swatted at awhile.

Adam crossed to the front wall, cups rattling as he went. He poked his peeling nose among the clutter of the workbench-a tangle of plastic irrigation pipe, a chain-saw engine, a length of guttering and so many other tools, a hammer, screwdrivers, a machete, numbers of brown paper bags which would later turn out to hold roofing screws.

Ah! He held up a pair of opera glasses.

The boy’s grandpa also had opera glasses. His grandma had been very sad when he took both pairs to his Love Nest.

Adam bared his long teeth. Come on, he said, then raised his eyebrows. Tour.

Dial did not come in from the veranda so the boy had to be polite. He followed Adam outside. He asked, Are there many stinging ants?

See that lantana, above the oranges? Adam squatted in the mud and pointed up the hill. You would want to stay away from there.

The boy planned to stay away from everything.

Adam said, Always look inside your shoes before you put them on.

But the hippie had no shoes himself. He looked mad and homeless, with big long feet and toes like fingers. The boy followed his exact steps over the warm soft ground, around the so-called veggie garden, a jungle, wild passion-fruit vines growing up its chicken-wire fence. From the big corner post they took a thin path, grass seeds tickling the boy’s bare knees like biting things with eyes and legs.

We put the goats in here, said Adam, sometimes. It was obvious he could not see what he was talking about. It was only after they had crossed the spooky shady ground of the banana plantation and had slid down a steep embankment that he raised the binoculars to his eyes.

This is the best part of the land, he said at last. The boy felt sorry for him, to be so poor he thought that the place was good.

Adam squatted and brought his instrument to bear on a bunch of insect wire tied to the pipe’s end in a sort of muddy hole.

Dig, said Adam, the water table has gone down.

Hearing “water table” the boy imagined something jewel-like and impossible, but he squatted beside the starved thin man and they both dug with their bare hands, scraping out the cacky mud and flinging it onto the dark floor of the banana grove and after a while they came to dirty water.

This is good water, said the man, peering at the yellow slime.

He found a rusty paint can and told the boy to pour yellow water from the can into the pipe while he himself lay with his bare stomach on the ground and held his ear against the pipe and then, at a certain moment, he got up. Then he pushed the pipe beneath the water, and bound back the insect wire.

There, he said. Could you do that by yourself?

The boy knew he never would. I guess, he said.

Good man, said Adam.

On the way back to the hut Adam showed him the wild tomato vines which were threaded like precious veins among the grass.

There’s always something to eat, Adam said as he picked the tomatoes, tiny like the ones in Zabar’s.

You could hide here forever, he said, looking thoughtfully at the boy.

All around them were what are called cabbage moths, their wings catching the last of the day’s sunshine, and above the moths were the bananas, their ripped-up leaves moving like fingers, and below was the inky green of rain forest where arm-thick vines wound around trees with skins like elephants. Beyond the hut, behind the car, the lonely darkness was bleeding along the course of Remus Creek and washing up into the muggy hills.

When they returned to the hut, it was time for the hurricane lamps and there, in the yellow wash of kerosene light, the man filled a kettle with dirty water and then he set to work removing the stalks from the tomatoes. The boy guessed Dial was still out on the deck and the boy was feeling kind of sad, sorry for Adam, who was trapped in a place no one else would ever want. He stayed to be companionable and watched the tomatoes turn into a sauce, dissolving in the slow spitting circles of themselves.

The kitten was asleep, curled up like a dead caterpillar on the cushions. A bat entered through the front door, circled once, and disappeared. The boy wondered when they would be able to leave.

She lay on the mudflats between nightmares and the ropy unknown day. A magpie sang. In November, the creepy Rabbitoh had told her, the magpies pecked your head and made blood pour down your face. Some country she’d been sent to.

Dial, the boy said.

She was sleeping in a nest of pillows and musty rugs beneath a ceiling of worrisome water-stained wood. She did not want to wake and deal with what she’d done. It was too hot already.

Dial.

Her skin was itchy, her hair still dirty. She had slept with her head wedged into the tight dark angle where the ceiling met the loft.

Dial!

He needed too damn much too often. She hid her face in her hands, playing peekaboo but also hiding from his breath. She must buy him a damned toothbrush.

Dial, when can we leave?

She opened her arms to him and he buried himself in the warm cave beside her neck. Whatever had happened to him you could feel he had been loved. No matter what a cow his grandma was she had cuddled him and kissed him. He had told Dial the names of the puddings Grandma had cooked: queen, sticky toffee, pineapple upside down, unbelievably Victorian.

When can we leave, he said now, but she could not deal with that. She could feel his immense fragility but what could she do? This place might be their only hope. It was in the middle of the outback, as she understood it, with no phone and no mail delivery. They were off the grid. How else could she use the money to make them safe.

No matter what happens, Dial, can we? Leave?

She looked at his small determined face, his frown, the searching intelligence in those gray eyes.

He’s worried, she said, mocking Adam, not so much to change the subject, as to begin leading the boy toward the matter that he really must address. They were not going to start drifting.