Peter Carey - Illywhacker

"Better talk to my husband if you're selling, but he won't buy nothing. If you've got mousetraps or that sort of thing you're better off to save your legs. He's up at the forge," she said, becoming angry, again, about the glass of water she would have to offer him.

Charles trudged around the back, past the hot silver walls, around the corner of the kitchen house. He had hoped that the man was not at home. He would rather, any day, deal with a woman for there was always a soft spot to be found in the hardest of them.

He was careful not to tread on the dead, sandy vegetable patch. He threaded his way through a rusting garden of ploughshares, tines and scarifiers and made his way, without hope, towards the dark mouth of the bright-walled shed. His hearing aid crackled and he missed the sounds of a man smithing and the cries of white cockatoos, three of them, as they passed overhead on their way to a stand of trees above a dry water-hole; their cries, coinciding with the slow powerful movement of their wings, were like big creaking doors in need of oil. Charles saw the birds but they only depressed him. He had swapped his nets for petrol.

The forge was set up at one end of the large earth-floored shed and he saw the red glowing piece of metal in the gloom before he saw the farmer himself. As he walked towards the shower of sparks he did not take in the unusual nature of the shed – the shelves packed with odd-shaped pieces of metal, the neat handwritten labels. He walked past a drill press and a lathe without wondering why a farmer would have such equipment. What he did notice was the tractor – an old T Model cleverly converted so that the heavy chain transmitted power to large metal wheels.

"Petrol," thought Snake Boy Badgery.

The farmer was one of those quick-eyed finely built men whom farming has made strong and wiry but who, in the end, are not suited to their work because they like the company of people too much. He was pleased to see the stranger standing in his shed. He did not immediately break off what he was doing – shaping a metal wheel cleat to replace the broken one on his tractor – but he finished it only roughly and when he had dunked it, sizzling, into a drum of year-old water, took off his apron and shook hands.

Charles was relieved to see the man's face, and not just because it grinned at him, but because it was, anyway, a friendly face, cocked, crooked, with pale eyebrows at extreme angles and deep wrinkles in the corner of pale blue eyes. This was Les Chaffey, a man with a dictionary on his shelf, a map of the world on his wall, a habit of poking at things with a fork or a screwdriver when they interested him.

Charles liked him immediately. He liked his waistcoat with the silver watch he had won at the rifle club. He liked the three different pens and the propelling pencil he carried in the pocket of his collarless shirt. But mostly he liked the way he cocked his head and listened carefully to what Charles had to say.

"Is that a fact?" he said when Charles, in an untidy rush of words, had told him about the snakes, i. e., that they were not poisonous and that they ate mice. "And that's your line of business, is it?"

Charles said that it was. His price was a gallon of petrol, a meal and a place to sleep. As he named the price he feared it was too high but, when Les Chaffey shook his hand to confirm the deal being done, he was sorry he had asked so little. Charles's eyes betrayed him by suddenly watering. He hid his emotions in the dark pockets of the shed.

As they walked back to the house a wind sprang up and the farmer tried not to think about his drifting paddocks, a hard thing to do when they are stinging you on the back of the neck. He took refuge in fancies about the young visitor's black eye, wondered if it had happened in a farm or a pub and whose daughter had been involved. There was something about the Snake Boy that made him confident a daughter had been involved. He got it wrong. What he was seeing was a need for affection that could have been best satisfied by a big woman with an apron and floury hands. But Les Chaffey saw the oily remains of pimples on his neck and big chin and thought he secreted an odour of sexual need as obvious and all-pervasive as the smell of the mice who covered, in their teeming breeding millions, the land from Jeparit to the South Australian border and this parallel brought him back to the very things he wished to forget – drought and mice, mice and overdrafts.

The shops in Jeparit, even the butcher's, smelt of mice, and in the grocer's you could see where they had eaten the paper around the lids of the Brockoff's biscuit tins and pushed the hinged lids open. At the railway sidings they ate the wheat bags from the bottom until the bags collapsed in on themselves, worthless, empty, a year's work inside the guts of mice. There were mice jokes and those who had children – both of his were at the Gordon Tech in Geelong – made little chariots from matchboxes and raced the diseased creatures in teams of four and six.

It was the mice that had brought Charles so far from Sydney, riding a motorbike he had never intended to buy. He had read about the plague in the Sydney papers, but he had not been prepared for the extent of it, the fearless armies of squeaking creatures, the stink you could never escape, the red sores they spread on the children's arms and faces.

No one had money to buy snakes and he had no talent to persuade them to change their minds. So he found himself broke and lonely in unfriendly towns, swapping the services of his pythons for a meal and a little petrol, knowing that tomorrow the snakes would be as sated as gluttons on Boxing Day and that if he wished to eat at all he would have to perform the Snake Trick. And it was the Snake Trick that had resulted in the black eye – his amateurish deception had been exposed in Dan Murphy's Commercial Hotel in Jeparit.

The Chaffeys' home was hot as an oven and smelt of mice and sweat but Charles was thankful to be invited inside and be formally introduced to Mrs Chaffey.

Mrs Chaffey was small and faded; however her worn pale eyes were still capable of transmitting signals of sharp alarm and warm affection on behalf of the husband called "Dad". She showed both of these emotions in the dark kitchen house as she listened to her husband explain the snake boy's business. She allowed herself to be persuaded to touch one; it was not the pythons that alarmed her, but rather the quantity of enthusiasm they might generate. Mrs Chaffey recognized enthusiasm as something vital in her husband's life, but she also knew it must be measured most precisely, like one of those potions (so beloved of quacks) that are vital in a small dose, and lethal in a larger one. When she had finished assessing the snakes she gave them back to their owner. Then she offered him a glass of water and cut extra potatoes for the Irish stew.

It is difficult to give the flavour of my son's life at this stage, and although he would later romance about it, claim that he had been a scholar of boarding houses and a citizen of the highway, that he had friends from Moe to Minyip, his grown-up eyes would still show the truth to anyone who cared to look at them: he had passed along those roads a total nonentity, had felt himself a no one, worse than a no one: shy, ugly, nervous of grown men, anxious when confronting boys his own age, a blushing fool with cafe waitresses, an easy target for teasing children.

Yet he also harboured an idea of himself that contradicted all of this: that he was someone special, someone who would one day do great things not just for himself, but for his country. And these contradictions, the triangular tensions between his shyness, arrogance, and hunger for affection, made him a difficult person to get to know, made him belligerent when nervous, a stammerer when confident, weepy when approved of, brash when he would be better off being quiet.