Peter Carey - Illywhacker

"Always moving. You look at a face and you think you've got a fix on it, but it changes. The mouth opens and becomes a fish or if it's pretty it turns ugly and all the white skin is suddenly scars. You have noticed it, haven't you?"

"Yes," I said.

"That's right," he nodded in satisfaction. "And lovely roses turn into lumps of meat. You cannot grasp it, isn't that right, like mercury between your fingers?"

"Yes," I said.

"That's right," he said. He stared at me with those odd pale eyes that seemed to shift mercurially from belligerence to puzzlement. "I knew you'd know," he said.

He blinked and looked at me for a moment before he realized that the door had been opened. Then, without word, he turned and left me. I watched him pass out of sight under the tank stands. A minute later -he must have been running -I heard his car start and saw the lights sweep across the so-called "cottages" where the screws were obliged to live with their unhappy wives.

I understood a little more about Sergeant Moth when I met his brother and heard he was famous in the Clarence River region for his enterprise in the field of small bribes. He made his money from after-hours drinkers, two-up schools and SP bookies and it was only natural that he would, like a careful housewife, hesitate before throwing out the scraps of an arrest.

I didn't look at the ugly "souvenir" for weeks. I avoided it. I hid it behind Goldstein's envelopes – those perfumed razor blades -and when I saw it again, by accident, it had gone mercifully cloudy. There was a particularly hot February night in 1939, the one in which the yabbies caused so much trouble, after which the liquid in the bottle turned gin-clear. It was then that I noticed what looked like a wart behind the knuckle. But by 1939 I had other things to worry about. I had become a student. I had the privilege of a desk and extra shelves. Never mind I cracked the asbestos sheeting putting up the shelves -I got written up in theRankin Downs Express and when my exam results came out they made an even bigger fuss.

I had the bottle tucked away behind the dictionary that the governor had given to me. Every time I removed the book I could not help noticing that the wart was growing bigger. This worried me as much as if I'd found a growth on my own finger, one that frightened me so much I couldn't confess it to myself, let alone a doctor.

I started to take the dictionary down, not for a useful word, but to glance at what I'd hidden behind it. I saw it happened just as Sergeant Moth said it did.

The finger changed. It changed all the time. It changed like a face in a dream.

I will not upset myself by describing the slimy monsters that tried to free themselves from that bottle, but rather tell you about the morning I woke early and found it filled with bright blue creatures that darted in and out of delicate filigree forests, like tropical fish feeding amongst the coral.

Is it hard to understand why an old man with his dentures in his hand would suddenly show his pink gums and grin? There: Herbert Badgery, Apprentice Liar, as delighted as a baby with a bright blue rattle.

The AJS had been wheeled into Chaffey's shed where it had been, solicitously, covered with a tarpaulin to keep off the shit of wandering chickens.

It was a hot night and the smell of the mouse plague was heavy in Charles's nostrils as he lay in bed. He could hear the mice gnawing at the walls and scampering across the ceiling and, occasionally, a small squeak to indicate that one of his snakes was still dining.

He was hungry. His stomach was tight and he had a taste like iron filings in his mouth but it was, just the same, lovely to lie in a bed in a room by himself, even if the room was just an open back veranda. The mattress smelt a little unusual, but he was used to other people's smells, strange sheets, hessian blankets, beds shared with bony children, pissing children, pinching children. He could sleep anywhere, on kitchen tables or in hay sheds, it made no difference, and when he was an older man, suffering insomnia, he would look back nostalgically on those lonely nights when he could escape hunger or heartache just by lying down and closing his eyes.

He slept easily, dreaming instantly of his pet shop in which environment the smell of mice (now gnawing at the salty underarms of his carelessly discarded shirt) was nothing more than the aroma of a pet's cornucopia.

So as Charles contemplated a rare golden-shouldered parrot, a being so beautiful that its dreamer's face showed a beatific smile, Les Chaffey quietly slipped the tarpaulin off the H-series AJS and stood there, contemplating it. There was a look on his face that could be mistaken for hostility, the way he narrowed his eyes and pushed his head forward, but it was no more than intense curiosity, and it was easy enough to imagine that it was the sheer force of his gaze that had worn away at his wife's face until it had taken on the look of a pretty fabric that has been laundered too often, the bright blues gone chalky pale and the pinks almost white.

The AJS, Les Chaffey thought, was an interesting machine. He squatted beside it for a moment. Then, like a fellow reaching for his pipe, he pulled a small wooden-handled screwdriver from his back pocket and, in four fast neat movements, removed the single screw from the pilgrim pump. He could see, before he touched that screw, what the pilgrim pump was, i. e., a device for automatically controlling the oil feed to the engine, but that was not enough. He wanted to know how it worked. He fetched a spanner and disconnected the pipes that led to it. He removed the little knurled nut on the pump itself and was surprised by the spring-loaded cams. He had not expected spring-loading and the spring escaped him, flying beyond the circle of lamplight. He collected what remained (a worm and roller, two cams, the knurled nut) and held them in the dry cup of his hand. He thought about the spring a moment but decided to wait for daylight.

Having fiddled with the worm and roller, having learned the rate was controlled by the magneto sprocket, the mystery was more or less explained and, glancing over the bike again, he was struck by the small clearance between rear tyre and mudguard. How, he wondered, would a fellow change a tyre on a machine like this? Indeed, at first sight, it looked impossible.

He was busy removing the chain guard when his wife came in and stood behind him, eccentric only in her nakedness.

"Come on, Dad, leave it alone."

"Nah, Marjorie, just looking." He looked up and gave her a creased smile and tapped her bare ankle with the screwdriver. "You go to bed."

"What is it?" She squatted, and her body, had anyone been interested to look at it, was what you might expect of a forty-five-year-old woman accustomed to hard physical work. She was slight, like her husband, and her biceps showed a similar wiriness. They both had suntans that stopped just above the elbow.

"A pilgrim pump," said Les, opening his hand to show her the parts. "A wonderful thing. But what I'm worried about is this rear wheel. Could I trouble you to hold the lamp, Marjorie?"

She held the lamp for him while he placed the chain guard gently on the floor. He unclipped the chain and folded it neatly. He put the chain clip in his shirt pocket.

"I'm going to hold up the back of the bike," he said. "Now if you could just wiggle this back wheel around, we'll see what's what."

She sat on the dusty floor behind the cycle, heedless of the dirt on her naked backside and, while her husband took the weight off the back tyre, she wiggled it as asked.

"Did you ask his permission, Leslie Chaffey?"

"For God's sake, Marjorie, don't nag."

"I weren't nagging."

The back wheel suddenly found its way free, just where it had appeared impossible, slipped neatly out beside the guard, and, taking Mrs Chaffey by surprise, rolled gently away from her to fall down in the shadows.