Peter Carey - Illywhacker

She was useful. She found the Kaletskys' finances in an appalling state and borrowed, in the first week, five hundred pounds from her father. Most of this was used to pay back loans that Lenny had arranged. She bought a wheelchair. With the twenty pounds that remained she bought bowls and cake tins and at night she learned to bake the rich Jewish cakes that Lenny would deliver by day. She made sure Izzie was at meetings he would never have gotten to otherwise. She arranged chauffeurs, had him wheeled here, carried there and stood beside him on platforms while he used his formidable talents in the service of a new world. But the price she paid was to become the focus of all his anger and this was less to do with his envy of those who could walk and run, more to do with the fact that she could care for him but not love him.

Rosa and Lenny, in their caravan, could not help but overhear the painful arguments of son and daughter-in-law. They moaned out loud in their separate beds, pulled pillows over their heads, and had stilted conversations whose sole function was to block out the bitter voice of their son.

"Please," Rosa heard, "please go. I would rather crawl like a snail. I would rather sleep on a mat on the bloody floor. I would rather be lonely and shit in my pants. Please go."

And later she would hear the sound of weeping, a nasty choking noise she had first mistaken for vomiting, but it was, she knew, the sound of her son begging Leah Goldstein to stay.

And that is how Leah Goldstein made a little hell for herself and the Kaletskys, like a child who crawls into an old-fashioned refrigerator so easily, shuts the door, and finds there is no corresponding latch inside.

Yet she was saved, as she had been saved before, by her letters, and when she continued her correspondence with me she used some of the art I had taught her and which she had once so vigorously rejected. Now she began to invent a life outside her walls, to send squares of sky to me (cobalt blue and saturated with life) to invent joy, to sustain it, and to write a hundred times about Silly Friends she must first manufacture. She arranged them on the mustard-yellow sand of Tamarama -indigos, crimsons, violet and viridian, people who were never born, walking on a beach she had stolen from 1923.

If you had seen me in 1937 you would have thought me finished. I had no suit. My hands trembled. I no longer shaved my skull and the hair that grew across it was white and wispy. Yet I was a young man, only fifty-one. My eyes were good and my muscles strong enough to ride a bicycle from Nambucca to Grafton.

I had been pumping gasoline and repairing bicycles in Nambucca and when I got my annual holidays I made the long journey up to Grafton, not for the pleasure of it, but to see the General Motors dealer, a Mr Lewis. I had filled his tank with petrol often enough and he had invited me to call on him if ever I was in Grafton. I was angling for a job.

Grafton is a prosperous town. There is sugar cane, timber, rich river flats beside the Clarence River and I was already building mansions in my mind when I noticed the sign: goon amp; sons: providores. It was just beside the bridge, as bold as brass, and I must have passed it twenty times before and not noticed it.

I could not believe that Goon would be still alive, but when I called at the providore they told me that the old man was asleep. I should come back in the morning. I left a visiting card and went to find a boarding house. I slept badly, although the weather was not yet hot, and in the morning I was back at the providore before the doors were open. I waited while they hosed down the concrete and hung out their wares by the big sliding doors.

A young girl, Chinese of course, but with a broad Australian accent, took me out the back, along a high catwalk, and up some old splintery stairs to a small room where an ancient Chinaman sat with the Clarence River running sleepily behind his shoulder.

The room was sparse, containing a widower's tiny bed against one wall and a simple wooden desk near the window. On the walls were many framed photographs and advertisements for various Chinese associations; they had thin black frames. The girl ran lightly down the stairs and left me with the old Chinaman who wore an inappropriate three-piece English suit. He was shrunken as a Chinese plum and his white collar, loose around his neck, showed its stud behind a drooping tie. His hands had the transparency of the old but it was I, the young man, whose hands shook.

As I entered he looked up and gave me a fast intelligent glance; he then continued with his writing.

When he spoke at last his voice was not like gravel but as weak and thin as jasmine tea. It was also clear and the English was perfectly enunciated.

"You must excuse me", he said, standing carefully, "while I take a leak."

I stepped back so that I would not block his passage from the room, but he turned his back to me and, having fiddled with his buttons, piddled into a chamber-pot he kept behind the desk. The pot had not been empty when he started and he did not add much to it. I turned to look at the wall. "Charlie" Goon had been president of the Grafton Chinese Commercial and Cultural Association from 1923 to 1926. The sombre group photographs seldom showed more than five members.

"Better out than in," said Goon Tse Ying brightly, fiddling with his fly buttons and seating himself. "I don't suppose you carry barley sugar? No? Just as well."

"You are Goon Tse Ying?"

"Yes, yes. Please sit down. Sit on the trunk. Pull it over, that's right. They tell me we have met before, but I do not know the name. I am eighty-one years old, so I forget many things. Where was it that I had the pleasure?"

"In Melbourne. In 1895."

"Ah, Melbourne, yes, yes." His foot moved the chamber-pot further under the desk.

"Mrs Wong is your cousin."

"Mrs Wong, ah yes."

"You bought this business in 1896."

"Not this one. Another one, further down the river. But I came to Grafton about then. That's right. I couldn't forget that."

"And you translated for a herbalist."

"Poor Mr Chin, yes, I did."

"I am Herbert Badgery. Surely you remember me."

"No, no," he shook his head.

"I was a little boy. You found me at the markets. Remember the Eastern Markets? I was a little boy. You called me 'My Englishman'. I slept at Wong's. I shared a room with old Hing."

His eyes clouded. It looked as if he had stopped trying to remember. He fiddled with his fountain pen and looked down at the book on the table. I kept talking. I described everything I could remember. I told him about the things he had taught me. I showed him my brightly shone shoes. He smiled and nodded. I told him how I had eaten porridge and he had drunk brandy and the smile widened into a grin that made his rice-paper skin crinkle like an old paper bag. I became excited. With every memory I produced a nod. My teeth were aching again but I did not let that stop me. I described his horse. He agreed it was black. He had been fond of that horse, he said, and began to tell me about it, how he had haggled over its purchase. I was too impatient for politeness. I interrupted his triumph to tell him about the morning he had taken me, with this very horse between the shafts, to make a camp. I told him about the place. I described the rocks, the thistles, how he had oiled his hair flat on his head.

He interrupted me for another leak. I listened to his penis dribble while I studied the Chinese-Australian Friends' Assocation. There had been a national conference in Brisbane in 1931.

"Yes," Goon Tse Ying said. He pulled up his trousers as he sat down. "Yes, yes. I remember. I was a young man then, full of life, and with no family. Now I have great-grandchildren and I am writing down everything for them. All my secrets," he smiled. "In this book. I must write them in both Chinese and English. The young ones don't understand Chinese – they're real little Aussies."