Peter Carey - Illywhacker

"You taught me to disappear."

He smiled, but I know that Chinese smile. It means nothing. I repeated myself.

"No," he said. "Oh no. I'm not a magic man. Disappear? Is that what you mean? No, no, I taught you to clean your shoes."

"To vanish," I insisted.

"Oh no."

"Don't you remember? You said, T am teaching you this because I love you, but also because I hate you.' You did not like the English or the Australians."

"My children are Australians."

"You were at Lambing Flat. Your uncle Han", I said, "was run over by a cart. His broken bones poked out through his leg."

"Oh," Goon smiled. "I remember you. Hao Han Bu Chi Yan Tian Kui, we called you: 'Small Bottle, Strong Smell'. You made up stories, all the time. You told me your father was dead and then you made Mae Wong cry when you said your father had beaten you and gone to Adelaide. To Hing you told another story, I forget it. Perhaps you have some barley sugar? Yes, yes, I remember you. Hing said you were a sorcerer. Mrs Wong was frightened of you. You made her frightened with a story about a snake. She could not have you in the house any more and I had to have you go to my cousin who did not want you either. Yes, yes. It all comes back. It's astonishing – you think a memory is all gone, and then there it is, clear as day. Yes, my Little Englishman. Small Bottle, Big Smell. Did you become a sorcerer after all?"

"I disappeared. You taught me. That's why Mrs Wong got ill."

He smiled and shook his head. "And my children tell me that there are no sorcerers in Australia, that we are all too modern for such superstitions."

We were interrupted by the girl who had shown me up. She brought us a pot of tea and two stout chipped mugs. Her grandfather introduced her as Heather. The girl giggled and ran down the stairs.

"No," Goon said. "No, I do not come from Lambing Flat." He poured the dark tea with a steady hand. "My father had a store in Tasmania at a place called Garibaldi. Before that he looked for gold in Queensland. He was at the Palmer rush. Then he became a pedlar, and when he married he bought the store in Garibaldi from a relation he had never met. The relation was going home to China and my father bought the store because his mother wrote from China and nagged at him until he did. I was born at Garibaldi and I don't know any magic tricks except how to", he demonstrated, "take the top off my thumb which I learned from my Australian grandson."

"The fact remains, I have done it."

He waved me down, like a conductor quietening a noisy brass section. "Yes, yes," he said, and called me by that insulting Chinese name. "Possibly. I don't doubt you."

"Before witnesses."

"Be quiet," said Goon Tse Ying. "You make too much noise."

"So what are your secrets, Mr Goon?" I poked at his book, this splendid volume, black, red, gold, the colours of dragons.

"Shopkeeper's secrets," he said, sliding it out of my reach. He would not hold my eye. He moved his chamber-pot, nervously, with his foot.

"You were a small child," he said, stirring three sugars into his dark tea. "You misunderstood the things I tried to teach you. I was kind to you, but you did not understand. Perhaps your life had been too hard. Perhaps you were one of those fellows who sees tricks everywhere and thinks that nothing is what people say it is. I wanted you to know practical things, so you wouldn't be tempted to be what Hing said you were already. He was superstitious, a poor man from a village, and I did not believe him. I told you, I suppose, that you should not make a dragon. My English was not as good as I thought it was and you misunderstood me. A dragon, Little Bottle, was my mother's name for a frightening story. Also it is a name they give to liars in my mother's village. In Hokein, they say 'to sew dragon seeds' when they mean gossip. My mother also used to call the castor sugar she put on dumplings 'dragon eggs' but I wouldn't have a clue as to why."

He pushed the bowl of sugar towards me. "Quite all right," he said, seeing my hands shaking: "Not castor sugar." And then he roared with laughter.

But my shaking hand had nothing to do with sugar, either fine or coarse. It was a condition I had not been free of since my time in Sunbury. "I lost my little girl," I said. "I made a dragon and lost my little girl."

Goon looked at me warily. "What do you want?" He edged his chair back an inch or two and looked expectantly towards the door.

I tried to calm myself. I picked up the mug of tea but my hands shook so I slopped it over his desk. Goon moved his book a little further away.

"I can tell you nothing, Mr Badgery." He picked up the book and placed it in his lap. "If what you say is true, you're the sorcerer not me. Poor Hing was right. He hung himself, did you know?"

My hand trembled uncontrollably. I placed it on top of the desk. I gripped the edge to steady myself, but the desk itself began to shudder and the open bottle of ink and the cups of tea set up opposing splashing surfaces of liquid. Goon Tse Ying picked up the bottle of ink and slowly screwed its cap back on.

"If a thing can disappear, it can reappear."

"You are the sorcerer, Small Bottle, not me. I'm a business man."

He had been kind to me as a father is meant to be kind to a son. He had sat me on his bony knee and pulled my toes. He had let me smell brandy and laughed when my nose wrinkled. He had tricked me and found a whole fistful of dirt in my ear. He had taken me promenading, "doing the block" as they called it, holding my hand proudly. He dressed me in a sailor suit. And now, with polished eyes inside his wrinkled, shrunken hairless head, he dared deny me.

I did not drink his tea, nor shake his hand on leaving.

I was not well. I went to my boarding house and lay, fully clothed, on the bed and there I thought about the book that the Chinaman had been keen to keep from me. It was not an ordinary exercise book, not a journal or ledger, not the sort of thing you could buy across the counter at any newsagent or stationer's. It was bound in black leather with a bright red spine. On the front cover was a gold panel surrounded by a red border. On the gold panel were three Chinese characters.

The landlady came in without knocking. She asked me to take my shoes off her quilt and asked for money. I took off my shoes. I gave her money. I was thinking about that book. She inquired after my health but I only heard her, in my memory, after she had gone and there was little, anyway, to be said about my health. It was not what it was.

The haze of jacarandas in November gives Grafton an insubstantial look and I am no longer even certain that the Grafton I visited in 1937 is the Grafton that lives, so solidly, on the fruits of tree-killing, by the banks of the Clarence.

But certain parts of the town are very clear to me: the bridge over which I walked to and fro, the graceless metal trough which allows few views of the mighty meandering river beneath.

It was there, on that echoing bridge, I decided to steal The Book of Dragons. Dusk went; dark came. I wandered the streets, past houses where families were eating. I waited under trees, hovered by corner stores, trod the purple carpet of jacaranda petals. Cicadas trilled. The air had a sweet slightly mouldy smell. I went up to the General Motors dealer but there was nothing to see. The doors of his shed were rolled shut and padlocked. I took my bicycle from the boarding house and went up to the highway to cycle. I was nearly killed by an Arnott's Biscuit truck. I came back, once more, across that dog-legged bridge.

I crept down through the tall grasses on the steep bank of the Clarence and approached the providore from the back. The Goon family were all downstairs, sitting in their kitchen. The daughter was doing her homework. Two sons were crouching over the wireless. Such signs of domesticity cut across my heart and I thought of you, Leah, of your nipple.