Peter Carey - Illywhacker

Les Chaffey waited until his wife was clear, then lowered the rear of the bike. "I'll have it back together by morning."

"You forget."

"What do I forget? Hold this a sec."

He handed her the chain while he fetched, from a high shelf in the unlit upper half of the shed, a stack of old newspapers. He spread these out, slowly, like a man laying out a hand of patience.

"You forget," she said, holding the oily chain in her two outstretched palms. "You forget."

He was now at the clutch, or rather at the place where the clutch cable attached itself to a small lever on the gearbox casing. She came and squatted beside him and, when he held out the lamp to her, she placed the oily chain on the newspaper and took it from him. "You forget," she repeated. "The threshing machine."

"For God's sake," he grunted, "that was twenty years ago. You didn't even know me."

"I heard about it just the same. You forget what you're like." Just the same, she held the lamp high, and helped him to find the small metal ball when it popped off the end of the gearbox spindle.

"The thing I can't understand", said Les Chaffey, digging out the parts of the pilgrim pump from his pocket and rolling them around his open palm, "is how they got the bank manager to lend them the money. How could you explain it to a bank manager?"

"Oh, pity's sake, don't go on about it."

"It was a good plough, Marjorie. Everybody said so."

"They did," she said. She stood up. "I'm filthy and we've got two hundred gallons of water." When he didn't answer she shrugged and walked back to the house, hanging her head and kicking out her legs like a fourteen-year-old girl. She washed quietly, with three cups of water, and left the dirty water at the back door for her husband to use later.

She lay on her bed and was asleep almost immediately. She opened her eyes – it seemed like a minute later – to see her husband standing there with a piece of glistening metal in his oil-black hands.

"Marjorie, come and look at this."

"I want to sleep."

"Marjorie, this is a beautiful thing."

"Oh, for Pete's sake." She sat up. She was cold. It was the cold that made her look at the clock. "Dad, it's five in the morning."

"I know, I know, look how it's turned."

"Oh God," she realized what it was. "God, it's the crankshaft." If he had stood before her with a pulsing red heart in his hands she could hardly have appeared more horrified.

Charles would never have any understanding of machinery. It eluded him. His mind, confronted by something as simple as a tyre valve, would suddenly go blank and refuse to function sensibly. This was not such a disadvantage later in life when he could afford to pay a mechanic to do the work for him, but it made things difficult when he was young and poor, and never more so than on the occasion that Les Chaffey went to work on the AJS. Charles woke early and went to sit in the dining room. He waited for ten or fifteen minutes. His stomach was drum-tight and very noisy. He stood up and walked around, examining the map on the wall, the dictionary on the shelf, the trophies from the rifle club. He was not so interested in these things but hoped that the sound of his boots on the floorboards might attract attention -he imagined his host and hostess sound asleep. He coughed once or twice, then he went out to the kitchen house where he found the stove cold. He opened the bread crock and discovered the end of a loaf of bread. He ate it in a nervous rush, chewing it so little, swallowing the crust in such a big lump, that he thought he had cut his oesophagus. He opened the sugar tin and ate a cupped handful, leaning over the sink so he would not put sticky signs on the floor. He brushed the spilt sugar down the plug hole and stepped outside. He did up all three buttons of his suit and walked (lifting his boots high as though his path were sticky mud) across to the shed where he hoped he might find Les Chaffey blacksmithing.

It was gloomy in the shed but he saw, with some relief, that his host and hostess were both there. But even when his eyes adjusted to the light he did not understand what they were doing. He certainly did not recognize his AJS which was spread, in little pieces, across the freshly newspapered floor while Chaffey and his pyjamaed wife argued with each other about the gearbox.

He did notice the amputated sidecar, but his brain, eager to find the most pleasant explanation, suggested to him that Les Chaffey must have a sidecar of his own. There was nothing to connect the oily parts spread across the MelbourneArgus with the motor cycle he had parked so carefully the night before.

"Ah," said Les Chaffey. He looked up at Charles with weary red-rimmed eyes. "The man himself. Did you sleep well?"

Mrs Chaffey, in oil-smeared striped pyjamas, smiled apologetically.

"You weren't in a hurry to be off?" Chaffey asked him. "You could spare us another day I take it?"

"Yes, Mr Chaffey," said Charles, who had noticed tell-tale sugar on the front of his suit. He brushed off the granules and thought himself bold for doing so. "Thank you," he said, and stepped closer to see what it was Chaffey was fiddling with.

"How's this work?" Chaffey asked. "When I took it out I assumed that the primary shaft must mesh like this but the knurls on second gear go in an anti-clockwise direction, so I must have been mistook." He looked up at Charles. "Am I right or am I wrong?"

"I dunno."

"It's your cycle, son, and you should know."

Charles's ears started to buzz. His eyes swept the shed as if tracing the flight of bats. Mrs Chaffey made sympathetic clucking noises but he did not hear them. He looked at the oily puzzle in Chaffey's hands. "This ismy bike?"

"It's not mine," said Les Chaffey who did not realize the distress he was causing. He was not inclined to offer an apology or even an explanation. In fact, he seemed to be chastising the owner for his lack of knowledge and it was with something close to disgust that he put the gears to one side and started fiddling with the engine mountings, but a rubber grommet was missing and he had to abandon even this for the moment.

"You'll never drive it properly," he said, putting on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles which gave him a severe owl-like appearance, "you'll never drive it properly if you don't know what makes it tick."

Charles then asked how long the reassembly might take.

Mrs Chaffey smiled at him, shaking her head, but her meaning was not clear.

As for the mechanic himself, he would not be drawn. He knew, like any experienced tradesman working in such circumstances, that it is a mistake to make a promise you cannot keep. In a job like this one all sorts of unexpected problems can crop up. A broken ring may be discovered where none was guessed at, and then there is the delay in waiting for the new part, going to the parcels office at the Jeparit railway station once a week, irate thirteen-word telegrams to the distributor in Melbourne, and so on. Besides this, there are the problems of rogue dogs, or packs of them, who can sneak into the workshop in the heat of the afternoon and carry away a con-rod to bury or play with. Or, even more likely, the English manufacturers, typically ignorant of life in the colonies, unaware of the technical effects of mice plagues, might have made some part from a milk by-product – an insulator perhaps – and this is then lost to the mice and can only be replaced by the previously described rigmarole involving railway stations and thirteen-word telegrams – a costly and time-consuming business. So when Les Chaffey, in due course, made his answer about the length of time required, he answered sensibly.

"No longer", he said, "than it takes, I promise you."

If this had happened in the city, Charles would have seen plots and thievery all around him, but he was eight miles from Jeparit and so he blinked and tried to understand why his host, a kind and decent man, would pull his AJS to pieces in a draughty shed, gritty with abrasive Mallee sand and redolent of Mallee mice.