Peter Carey - Illywhacker

This was not only lost on me, it was lost on Jack as well. He did not notice that Molly folded my three pairs of socks, how she darned them when they holed, how carefully she placed my two clean shirts in my drawer, how she dabbed and brushed at my single suit coat.

Phoebe noticed. Sometimes her mother's behaviour embarrassed her but she also shared her mother's silent hurt when the subtleties of the vegetable servings were lost on me. I devoured them with the same indiscriminate passion I turned on all of life, whether it was the manager of the National Bank or a roast potato.

As for Jack and me, we got on like blazing houses. It would not have mattered a damn if I had had no snake or stories about aeroplane factories, in fact it would have been a damn sight better, but it is too late to alter the past and regret is a fool's emotion. And while we built a thousand aeroplanes and charmed a lot of snakes, there was plenty else to keep us interested. We had as many theories as peas on our plates and talked with our mouths full and spilled our drinks with sweeping gestures.

"You were like a pair of love-sick jackasses," Phoebe said later, "and you talked a lot of rot, but I loved you and I didn't mind."

"Isn't it true," Jack said, "that if Leichhardt had an aero, we'd have had none of the tragedy, none of the loss, poor chap."

I pointed to the problems of landing, of clearing a strip, supplying fuel and so on.

"Ah yes," said Jack, stamping his stockinged feet and wiping his chin, "but what about the parachute? Now there's an idea."

"Bourke was a poor policeman," I said, "I doubt he could have managed it."

"We're not talking of Bourke, man, it's Leichhardt. And in any case you've told me yourself, there's nothing to it."

"A bit more than nothing," I said, "but less than a lot."

"All right, granted," said Jack, wiping up his gravy with grey Geelong bread, "a bit more than nothing."

"And he was a big man too, and possibly slow-witted."

"Leichhardt?"

"No, Bourke."

"I never read anything that suggested it."

"Perhaps you didn't," I said, being pleased to hear his ignorance was as great as mine. "But not all of it is published. He had kangaroos in his top paddock."

"An expression," Jack said, pushing back his chair and holding Molly's hand, "I never understood."

"It is clear enough," I said. "Anyone with any presence of mind does not permit a kangaroo, or a wallaby for that matter, into his top paddock."

Jack stroked his wife's hand. He was always at it. Sometimes at dinner I would look and see father and daughter both stroking the mother's hands, one on the left, one on the right.

"I have seen it," Jack said, "on the best properties."

"In exceptional circumstances."

"Granted, yes. A tree across a fence in a storm."

"Well," I said, "you understand well enough."

"I don't like expressions", Jack said, suddenly becoming serious, "that are like officious coppers, with no sympathy in them. The sort of expression like a beak throwing the book at you without allowing for all the circumstances. An expression like that is not fair or sensible. What would you say, for instance, to the term galah being used in the way it is?"

"The galah is a pest," I said. "No one would doubt it."

"But not stupid."

"No," I said, "I grant you, the galah is not a stupid bird."

"I don't think," Jack said, "that we have taken the same trouble with our expressions that the English have."

And off we would go again, not just on one night, but every night, with company or without it. We talked right through breakfast and then went for a stroll along the beach together and we never stopped talking.

Phoebe watched me. In truth we both spent a lot of time watching each other. We fooled each other so much we believed we were mutually invisible.

I had to be away from Western Avenue at times. I was selling T Models again although I was ashamed to admit it. I told them it was for business, related to the aircraft factory.

When I was not there, Jack was listless. He sat in front of the wireless and changed stations and banged his hearing aid with the heel of his hand. He was like a bored child on Sunday afternoon. He did not go down to the taxi company he owned. He did not visit the stud to see his horses, or the track to lose money. The bludgers at the Corio Quay Hotel (who knew him as "Here's-ten-bob" McGrath) did not see him. He had long "naps" and waited for my return. And then, in the summer evening, Phoebe would see us on the beach again. Her father was built like a bullock driver, was the son of a bullock driver, and there was still, as he walked along the beach with his friend, plenty of bullock driver left in his walk and she could see in those broad shoulders, those heavy arms, that thick neck, a man made to endure the dusty day and the solitary night, a man whose natural style would be reserved, who would be shy with men and women alike, but yet here he was – Phoebe saw it – building an aeroplane factory with a stranger. But yet it was not so simple, this factory. We did not approach it so directly. We approached it like Phoebe and I approached each other, shyly, at a tangent, looking the other way, pretending to be interested in other things while all the time we could see that big slab-sided shed of corrugated iron with "Barwon Aeros" written in big black letters on the side.

"The wheel", Jack said, "seems an easy thing when you have it, but if you don't have it then how would you ever know you needed it? Flying is an easier thing to imagine. You can see a magpie doing it. But tell me, Badgery, where is an animal, or bird, withwheels?"

"There is a snake", I said, "that makes itself into a wheel and chases you."

"Is that a fact now? In what country is that?"

"In this country. A friend of mine was chased by one up at Jindabyne."

"There is no doubt", Jack said, "that if an animal would do it in any country, this is the country for it. It is the country for the aeroplane as well. But if you take up the question of your Jindabyne snake, there was no white man here to see it when it was wanted."

"They say it was a Chinaman invented the wheel," I said. I said it out of loyalty to Goon Tse Ying, but this is not the place to discuss Jack's attitude towards the coloured races.

"Is that so?"

"It is."

"And not a white man?"

"A Chinaman."

Jack shook his head. He found it hard to credit it. "Do you know his name?" he said.

"I don't," I said. "It was too long ago."

"I doubt a blackfellow could have managed it just the same. He'd be watching the snakes wheeling past and never give them a thought except eating them for his dinner. It was a wasted opportunity," he said. "If we'd had the wheel here we would be well ahead of Europe."

"If the blackfellow had the wheel," I said, "he'd have run rings around us."

"But you forget," Jack said, "that by the time we arrived we had the wheel ourselves, and gunpowder too."

"It was a Chinaman invented gunpowder," I said.

It was too much for Jack. He could not abide Chinamen, no matter what I told him. He sucked in his cheeks and blew them out. He kicked a jellyfish back into the water.

"Twist and giggle," he said, "turn and spin / Squirm and spit and grin / Just like a bally Chinaman / When someone pulls his string."

"There is no kinder soul on earth than the Chinaman," I said.

He narrowed his eyes a fraction and stared at me hard. By God he would have been a hard man in a fight, but he would never allow himself to get into one – he would always find a comfortable way to take in the most uncomfortable things.

"The poor little chap," he said. "Poor little fellow." I was Romulus and Remus to Jack, a poor little chap suckled on the tits of wolves.