Peter Carey - Illywhacker

I could give you a long list of my complaints about Rankin Downs, that bleak, muddy, dusty, shadeless place – but I will also say this in its favour – you were permitted to look the screws in the eyes and you could sleep at night without listening to beatings. One slept without fear in that place but when Reg Moth was let into my so-called "cell" that night, my balls went tight and my mouth dry. Moth was not a screw. He was the sergeant who had arrested me, a wide square-headed fellow with big ginger eyebrows and thick hairy arms. He had a dented chin, big fleshy ear-lobes and a pair of very pale blue eyes that bulged demandingly from his florid face. He had a voice like a man who smokes forty Craven As a day – hoarse, cracked, given to phlegmy interruptions – but I don't recall him smoking. He parted his hair straight down the middle, across the flat plateau of his big head and although he was neat and polite, there was something contradictory in his eyes as if he were a neat polished chest of drawers full of tangled laddered nylon stockings.

It is not the normal practice for arresting sergeants to pay social calls upon their victims, and even if it were, it would take a keen man to make a journey up from Grafton at night. The last hour to Rankin Downs is along a straight, rutted gravel road cut right through the paperbarks. Having arrived at night I can speak with some authority on the desolate feeling the road produces: the white fire-scarred trunks, the unsettling vision of yabbies moving from one side of the road to the other. In the daytime, they tell me, the squashed yabbies make the bush smell like the Sydney fish markets.

It was the custom at Rankin Downs to receive visitors in the shade under the big tank stands. There was no provision in the "cells" for a visitor. I offered Sergeant Moth my bed. He took it and I squatted on the floor with my back against the cracked asbestos-sheet wall. When my knees got stiff and sore I asked his permission before I sat on the floor.

He talked. I watched his mouth move. I could not understand why he had come and I listened to him talking about Peter Dawson who had sung the "Floral Dance" at the Jacaranda Festival the year before. I had, on the one hand, a thirst for all the details of normal life. I wanted to hear about Dawson, what he had sung, what he had worn, how the trees had looked along the avenues of Grafton. In another way I did not want to hear at all, loathed every word he said, just as I sometimes loathed every word of Goldstein's letters. At the same time I was frightened of being bashed. His manner was not a basher's manner. It was fussy and finicky. This did not calm me, but somehow made the prospect of bashing more certain. I would have liked to stand up and not be so defenceless on the floor, but now I was there I did not like to attract his attention with any sudden movements. I could hear my next-door neighbour, a little apprentice mechanic from Coff's Harbour, crying in his sleep. It was a soft whimpering noise. At first I thought it was a bird. His name was Jacko and he was getting out next week. He wouldn't help me if I was bashed.

Moth brought a bottle from his pocket, an old Vegemite bottle with something – I took it for a little yabby – floating in it.

"I thought", Reg Moth said, giving the bottle a good shake, "that it was a shame to throw it out."

Throw what out?

"So I went", he said, "down to Phelan's, the chemist chap in Grafton, and I said, have you got a little formaldehyde and he gave me a drop of it in a Vegemite jar. It's very expensive, formaldehyde. Have you ever purchased it, Badgery? Shockingly expensive. But he gave it to me, out of the goodness of his heart. Gave it to me and I put Charlie Goon's finger in it, and here it is, see. I've kept it for you, a souvenir."

"Thank you," I said. I tried to smile politely and look grateful but I had a gagging feeling in my throat.

"You like it?" It was hard to get the meaning of those bulging eyes, but he looked surprised. I felt hot and dizzy. I was disgusted with myself for having torn off an old man's finger. It floated before my eyes, suspended in a Vegemite bottle with a little torn skirt of skin.

"You like it?" He picked his lower teeth with a big square thumbnail. "It makes me want to vomit."

For a moment I thought he was a basher after all and that he had to make himself angry before he could get his fists to me. I pulled down my shirt sleeves.

"But I can see", he said, examining his thumbnail, "that it'd be a different matter for you. It could even be valuable to you. Now, to someone like me, it's a very unsettling thing to have around the house, and there's also the question of the expense I put into it."

"But this chemist chap…"

"Phelan."

"Phelan. This Mr Phelan gave you the formaldehyde." I did not mean to argue with him. I was trying to point out that I had not put him to a lot of trouble. This is how your mind starts to work after two months in gaol.

"Gave me the formaldehyde? Who says so?" He peered around the cell. There was not much to peer at – we had the big black cockroaches that year, not the smaller German ones which, now I think of it, were probably not German at all. He studied the gaps between the floorboards, then the single shelf which was, so early, already crammed with Goldstein's letters. "Who says so?"

"There are no witnesses," I admitted.

"That's right, Badgery." He grinned and winked at me. You couldn't help liking him when he was like that. He didn't look like a copper at all, but a farmer about to set off for the pub. "So who's to know if I paid for the formaldehyde or not? Perhaps I have a receipt, here, on me, from Mr Phelan. He's not exactly what you'd call a Mason."

"Is that so?"

"It is." He was, suddenly, very solemn.

In the silence that followed I realized that I was not to be bashed. It was only bribery that was required. The night was full of the high-pitched whine of the swamp.

"Here, take it," Moth said, suddenly blown along on the gust of a new mood so that where, a minute before, he had been pensive, as still as a pig on a butcher's hook, he was now all eyes and elbows. He thrust the Vegemite bottle at me. "Here, take it. Take it for a pound. I'll settle for a quid. It's a nasty wormy thing you've done and it's a nasty wormy thing in a bottle, and I don't want it. I hope it gives you nightmares, Badgery. I hope it makes you see things when you're awake."

"Done," I said, giddy with relief.

"Three quid," he said, "and it's yours."

"Done." I did not care about the three quid. All I had in my bank account was the money he had arrested me with: three pounds, two shillings and sixpence.

"Three pounds two and six, and you have a deal."

"Done," I said, and happily signed the withdrawal chit he had brought in with him.

Moth rose and, having fussily arranged his genitals, knocked on the door to be let out. This was habit, but quite unnecessary. The door was unlocked, and there was no one except prisoners to hear him knock on it. All he had to do was open it, walk down two steps, cross the so-called "quadrangle", duck under the big rainwater tanks, cut through the big shade house full of eucalypt seedlings – a nice cool place with a pleasant smell of damp earth and sawdust -and he would be at the front gate which would not, probably not, be locked either. The prisoners were either very young and in for very short sentences or, like me, too old to consider the fifty-mile walk.

Moth stood at my door, waiting. He drummed his fingernails against the plywood.

"I'll tell you, Badgery. I would have given it to you. I would have paid you money to take the nasty thing. Have you ever noticed", he said, "how in a dream nothing ever stays still? Things are always moving, Badgery. Have you noticed?"

I stood up and opened the door for him. I just turned the handle and moved it in an inch so he would feel what I had done, but he no longer seemed interested in leaving.