Peter Carey - Illywhacker

There were empty molasses drums at the back. Mosquitoes bred in their rusty lids. I climbed up on one and hoisted myself up to the catwalk that led to the old man's room.

My shoes were well shone and supple of sole; it was not they that squeaked but the filthy Chinaman's floor. I fiddled and fumbled on his desk. The mugs of tea were still there. So was Goon Tse Ying. I could hear him breathing. I knocked the pen -I had observed it earlier, can see it still, black with a thin gold band like a wedding ring – and it rolled and dropped, a little bomb, on to the floor.

He spoke, whispered, reed-thin, my insulting Chinese name.

I had The Book of Dragons.

I had great hopes for that book, and he, obviously, the same. He was on me like a spider, a hairless huntsman dropping, flop, off the ceiling, stinking of garlic. When you do battle with a master magician you do not enter the quest lightly. You know what he can do, how easily he can grease from your grasp, oil away, and take his information with him. I held him round the throat with both hands. The book dropped to the floor. You would not think a chap would get loose from a grip like that, my fingers interlocked like a golfer with a club, but he escaped me, hissing. I grabbed for the book and found it. His hand was at it too. There was, as they say, a struggle.

A moment came when I realized Goon Tse Ying was no longer there. I held The Book of Dragons in one hand, his bleeding finger in the other.

If I had not laughed out loud, I would never have gone to court and never known that musty labyrinth known as Grafton Gaol. When I entered my room in the boarding house I was not expecting laughter. I had walked the passage shoeless, had not stopped on the way for so much as a pee or a flush, had unlocked my door quietly with The Book of Dragons tucked inside my Fair Isle jumper.

Inside my room, the door locked, a chair under the knob, I sat down on the bed to study. My hands could not hold it still. I stood and laid the volume on the dresser.

On each left-hand page were Chinese characters. On each right-hand page were words in English.

A white ant hatch erupted in the night and the winged creatures pushed their way through the insect wire and flooded hungrily around the light, abandoning their wings and crawling around the shining white reflecting surfaces of my sweating face.

I approached the book no less desperately: "It is my secrets of business which I fear you, my sons, have not yet understood. Therefore I write them down for you. Please attend.

" 1 In purchasing stock, first of all, consider the demand. Do not stock a large quantity, firstly for fear of moths and secondly for fear of deterioration. If the goods are in demand at profitable prices it becomes an exception. In an exceedingly cheap article there is no harm to buy a large quantity."

The English made no more sense to me than the Chinese characters. I felt myself confronted with a code I could not decipher.

"2 Always serve your customers with courtesy and patience.

Show patiently as many samples as you can. " 3 In wrapping up articles for customers make sure there is no mistake blah blah blah.

"4 Where there are too many customers to enable you to attend to them all at the same time, then ask courteously…" (the rest obscured by a brown sticky fluid). "5 When a customer becomes lax with his account blah blah blah.

"6 At closing time lock and guard against fires." By now I was giggling. Some fool was hammering against the wall. It was my giggling, of course, that brought me undone. I could have cycled back to Nambucca. There was a splendid widow there, the owner of a shell shop and a pair of gooey romantic eyes.

" 7 In case of heavy rains. Ha-ha-ha. Loss by flood is unthinkable.

"8 Influence people by virtue, not subdue them by force. 'They who overcome men with smartness of speech for the most part procure themselves hatred.' "9 Calmness is to be prized. If you succeed in this, prosperity may be expected in a short time.

"10 If a matter does not concern you, do not forcibly interfere. It is an old saying that it is the mouth that causes shame and hostilities. If one does not meddle with anything outside his own sphere he will be free from sorrow throughout his life. So beware of it."

I was roaring with laughter, heedless of whatever fools might stamp on my ceiling and belabour my door. I was later informed my listeners thought I had hurt myself.

"Oh Wing, my son, guide your brothers Lo and Wah, and obey my commands. Do not forget that if one does not alter the way of the father he is considered filial. The Book of Poetry said 'For such filial piety without ceasing there will be confirmed blessing on you.'"

When they took that sticky brown book from my hands I had begun to weep, and Sergeant Moth – that famous entrepreneur -picked up the finger and put it in a paper bag.

I am not sure how much later it was. I could not even tell you the owner of the house; but I have described it before – it was the house I invented to frighten the draughtsman in Geelong – that hairy-knuckled Englishman – when he would not put my name at the bottom of Bradfield's aircraft plans.

This house was exactly where I had placed it: three doors from the post office. It was a big stone place with leadlight windows, encircled with elms. The lawn, I saw as Sergeant Moth's Ford rolled up the drive, was dotted with daffodils.

Inside, at the head of the table, was a man with one finger missing from his bandaged hand. It was not the Mr Regan I had once described, but Mr Goon Tse Ying whose angry eyes I could not meet.

So it was, at a time when it seemed too late, that I began to have some understanding of the power of lies.

But read on, read on, and do not concern yourself about my years in HM Prison, Rankin Downs: I found my solace where I always would – in the blue pieces of cobalt sky, the mustard-yellow lies sent to me by mail, composed by Leah Goldstein.

Marjorie Chaffey laid down her broom and squatted on the sun-silvered boards of her front veranda. A mouse ran across her bare foot; when it returned to nibble at her big toe-nail she brushed it aside. She was in her middle forties and when she squatted, she squatted comfortably, with her unusually large feet flat on the sandy floor and her thin arms folded on her knees. She could stay in that position for hours, and would do so, if the mirage would come back again.

The mirage had appeared at the bottom of the driveway. It had occupied the lonely road for four hundred yards on either side of their mailbox. There, shimmering above the hot Mallee sand, she had seen the main street of Horsham. This had occurred two years ago, two days after Boxing Day. She had been able to make out the parcels in the women's string bags. She could see the butcher cutting down a string of sausages and his name (Harris) was written on his glass window. She saw an old farmer with a bent back lead a reluctant fox-terrier on a string lead. She had seen the white-aproned grocer's boy riding on a black bicycle.

This, by itself, did not have the makings of a secret. If this had been all there was, she would have fetched her husband and they would have looked at it together.

But she had seen something else, and this "something else" had filled her with such joy, such a sweet mixture of happiness and loss, that she could tell no one. The "something else" was a young boy, dressed in cricket whites. She had only seen him for a moment. Another boy, the grocer's boy, had leaned his black bicycle against a wall and, when he had entered his employer's premises, the bicycle had fallen noiselessly to the footpath. The farmer had been led away by his fox-terrier. And then the boy in cricket whites passed the butcher's window, did a cartwheel, and was gone.