Peter Carey - Illywhacker

Emma frowned. Leah did not notice.

"He picked up my snakes. I'll never forget it. He was just a little boy and he had no fear at all. Then we have all this." She waved a hand around the shop where lorikeets and wrens hopped and fluttered, fidgeted and fussed, forever in nervous motion. "It's tragic. He loves them all so much and then he cages them. He turns them into a product and you can look at it, if you want to, as a perversion. Izzie agrees with you. But you won't make the point by climbing into a cage. You'd be better off to discuss it with him because, I can tell you, he's missed your meaning."

"He's not the only one," said Emma, but the unusual clarity of this statement was lost amidst an outburst from the cockatoos.

"What?"

Emma murmured irritably.

"Am I barking up the wrong tree?"

Emma murmured assent.

"Is it because you are ashamed of being kept?" asked Leah, but in spite of the reasonable tone of her voice she was becoming irritated by Emma's manner.

Emma murmured again.

"For God's sake, don't make me play idiot guessing games. What is it? Tell me."

Emma blinked, and told her: Charles had enlisted in the army.

"Oh shit," said Leah. Her legs were weary from such uncomfortable squatting. She stood up. "What in the hell is the matter with you? I live with a Jew who claims he cannot distinguish between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain. But your husband is a decent man and you are lucky to have him. He feels things. He has a heart. He tries his best. I thought you were good and kind, Emma. I watched you with animals and with your baby. But you're as stupid as the rest of us."

And then she was crying – fat hot tears rolled down her cheeks. "I hate the world." The words surprised her as much as the tears did, like huge white tails on tiny blackheads. "I wish I were dead. Look at what we've done. Look at all his cages. Look at you. We are all perverted. Everything good in us gets perverted. I wanted to be good and kind and I made myself a slave instead. I lie awake at night planning how I am going to leave him, but I can't. When he touches me he makes my skin creep. He has lost his legs and he thinks that's a licence for selfishness and spite. When he speaks in public everyone admires him. A woman in Newtown told me he was a saint."

Leah sat on the floor again, crossing her legs, and not worrying about the filthy straw that prickled her legs and laddered her stockings. "Oh, Emma," she said wearily. "I'm so sick of it. I wish I was with Charlie's father, dancing and arguing and drinking sweet wine."

Emma looked at Leah Goldstein – the flinty face now contorted in misery like a crumpled newspaper unfolding in a fire, the slumped shoulders, the clenched fists, the slender crossed legs leading to a pair of bright red high-heeled shoes that had seemed so gay when they had first clicked through the early-morning gloom.

Emma murmured. She moved to one side of her cage. She was large and the cage was small but she managed to make some room. She patted the eiderdown and held out her hand.

Leah gave a self-mocking little laugh, but she joined Emma in the cage and let herself be embraced and comforted by her murmuring friend who dried her eyes with the rough sleeve of the dressing gown and stroked her hair and neck until she was, in the midst of all those pet-shop noises, sound asleep.

When Leah woke up she was so refreshed as to be almost light-hearted. Cramped by wire, prickled by straw, she was as elated and optimistic about human beings as she had been despairing an hour before. She forgot her stern judgement of Emma's selfishness and remembered only her kindness, the quality that she most closely approximated to goodness, her thirst for which would always lead her to idealize and oversimplify the characters of those who displayed it.

She kissed the sleeping woman on the forehead, and rearranged the baby's blue bunny rug around its chubby legs. She felt heady, almost silly. She crawled out of the cage and dusted the straw from her severe black suit.

She looked up to see Charles standing behind the counter. The shop was closed.

Leah hoisted her skirt a fraction and did a small dance for him, smiling broadly and tapping (dangerously) on her bright red shoes.

Charles was too worried to smile. He had returned to the shop and found two women in a cage that had previously held one.

"Treasure her," Leah said, panting a little. "She loves you. She worships you. You are a lucky man to have a wife who will be so mad on your behalf."

She sat herself, athletically, on the counter, spilling roneoed notes about the feeding requirements of various cockatoos and these yellow sheets now sliced through the air and floated so much longer than expected that Leah giggled to see it, as if the yellow sheets were a circus arranged on her behalf.

"She thinks you have enlisted. Is that right?"

Charles, stooping to pick up his precious yellow notes, straightened. "They didn't want to know me, Leah."

"Don't be so solemn, Charlie. Everything will be all right."

"They rejected me. But Emma doesn't even know I went."

"Oh, she does, Charlie Barley, Gloomy Moony. She thinks you were accepted."

"Oh."

"That's right. 'Oh!' Why wouldn't they have you? Of course, your hearing. I'll write to your father about this. I'll do it this morning. He'll enjoy it."

"He hates me."

"When you say Izzie hates you, Charlie Barley, you may have a point, although personally I think that hate is far too strong a word. But when you say your father hates you, you are very, very wrong."

"He didn't even write when Henry got born."

"And you didn't write to him either."

"He hates me."

"Wait, Charlie Barley, and you'll see."

"He blames me for what happened to Sonia." He assembled the yellow sheets and brought them back to the counter where he fiddled with them, taking too much trouble to make them all line up square in the stack he had made. He looked up at Leah defiantly. His eyes were puffy. He went back to the stack of paper. "Sometimes I dream I skun her. Skun the skin off her…"

"Don't."

"And she smiles at me. She don't know what's happening to her."

"Shush," Leah said, brushing hair from his suit shoulder and doing up his coat buttons. "Only happy talk now. There's a terrible war starting and all sorts of rotten things everywhere, but go and look after your wife who loves you. Tell her you are not in the army. Do you have any money? Here, I'll lend you a pound. Go and buy -no, I'll go and buy some sparkling hock – don't argue, and you can put candles on the table tonight and you can celebrate that you won't be making her a widow after all. I'll be back in a moment. And then I must do my baking and cook something suitable for that person whom your wife", she giggled, "insists on calling 'Hisy-door', the little rat – not her, him – do you know that he has the cunning to be having an affair with a colleague at the school? His nasty headmaster, the one who gives him the lift to work, came and told me all about it. He seems most disturbed by the horrid idea of a man with no legs having sex with a woman with two. That was at the heart of it. He just wished it stopped and he thought telling me would stop it, but I don't live in the real world any more. I write to your father and tell him how happy I am. I tell him such fibs, Charlie Farlie, can you believe that?"

"I's'pose so," said Charles, who was disturbed by the turn of the conversation. He locked the till and then unlocked it. He did not like Leah using the word "sex" and he liked even less the personal nature of her confession. Worst of all he did not like to hear that she told lies.

"Do you disapprove?" Leah leaned over the counter but he shrugged and pulled the handle on the till so the drawer flew open with a little "ding".