Peter Carey - Illywhacker

There were things that you would expect to make Goldstein uneasy -the youngest boy's Asiatic face, for instance – but she does not seem to have noticed it. You would expect her, also, to have had stern words about Emma's penchant for silk stockings and leg-of-mutton sleeves, both of which were banned for the duration, and yet she did not. Even when she herself was getting blisters and a bad back in the Land Army she never saw Emma in an unfavourable light. When she had leave she would come up from Narrabri on the train and she and Emma would go to the matinee together. Sometimes they just sat and knitted and, on a rainy afternoon, with the sky falling gently on the glass above their heads, it was hard to imagine a nicer place to be.

If Leah had once, only once, said that Emma was crazy it might have helped. It was left instead to Nathan Schick who delivered the opinion while they sat drinking in the gutter in William Street. But while his diagnosis was accurate, his advice was not good and led only to the incident with the hose.

Nathan liked Charles, but he did not understand his situation. For instance, when he saw that a wife in a cage had done nothing to deter the boy's ambition to have the best pet shop in the world, he admired him for it, and saw it as an example of that characteristic he admired most, i. e., going down the goddamn middle. This was about as big a misunderstanding of the situation as it was possible to have.

Charles did not have his magnificent new shop in spite of Emma. He had it because of Emma. If he had not been so bluffed and bamboozled by his wife he would have been, deaf or not, in the army.

Nathan Schick admired Charles for keeping out of uniform. Charles, on the other hand, was embarrassed to be a young man in plain clothes. He imagined himself a coward. He was the proprietor of a nonessential industry. He camouflaged himself in an old grey boiler suit. He gave an elderly impression. He walked close to the cages and kept his head down. He hired women who would have been better used as telegraphists or machinists or Land Army labourers and he paid them money so they would sell pets for him. He was ashamed of the very thing that gave him so much pleasure.

When Nathan Schick came looking to buy that inappropriate mascot for General MacArthur, he did not have to go poking around in the dark end of Doyle's Arcade. The pet shop had moved twice and it was no longer a mere pet shop. The sign said it was an emporium. It was too. Charles was renting (and would soon buy) the old Stratford Arcade in Pitt Street. No matter how inconspicuous he might wish to be, he was still a Badgery. He had grand visions. So even though he saw that an emporium like this must draw attention to his nonessential status, he could not resist those four wooden-railed galleries stretching upwards towards that lovely skylight, a delicate thing of lacy iron and clear glass. Each gallery was a good twelve foot wide, enough to build deep cages and still have room for customers. Here you could accommodate a cockatoo in the proper manner. You could have a wallaby run. Possibly, one day, you could install a platypus. On the Pitt Street end of the gallery there were proper rooms. In one he could breed flies. In another he could place incubators in preparation for the day when the war was over and there was kerosene enough to run them. On the top floor they could have a flat and they would be able, on summer evenings, to bring deckchairs out on to the top gallery and stare down into the canyon and watch parrots flying to and fro in fifty-foot-long cages.

Once my son, in a perfect echo of Henry Underhill, bellowed at me that I was not a business man's bootlace. He loved to style himself a practical man. It was bullshit. He was an enthusiast, a fan. He did not even calculate the money he would need to fix the arcade which had been disused since the depression. He signed the lease without getting a quote for building cages or aquariums. He did not even think about the extra cost of feed if he was going to stock the place in accordance with his dream which was, I must tell you, an expression of the purest patriotism – pure Australiana – definitely no bunny rabbits or pussy cats no matter how tearfully his little boys begged him.

There was no one to tell him that Sydney was not big enough to support such poetry. Any real business man would have told him that the best pet shop in the world would be a failure.

The Americans, however, saved his arse. They arrived just when he needed them and although everyone remembers them for nylons and candy bars, they also paid big money for rosellas and lorikeets, blue bonnets and golden whistlers, all varieties of cockatoos, king parrots and western parrots, finches, warblers, even a pair of dancing brolgas courtesy of Harry the rabbitoh. The GIs handed their money across the counter like children sent shopping by their mothers. You took what you wanted and you handed the rest back to them. Charles did not cheat them, but he did put his prices up until he reached the delicate point where they no longer said they were low.

Gang-gangs cost a fiver. Australians came to stare at the mug Yanks wasting their money. They put Charles in a temper. He thought them ignorant and illeducated and would have liked to give them a piece of his mind. But being a nonessential coward in a boiler suit he could only bump into them belligerently as they stood in front of the pretty white cages.

Normally he tried to keep away from customers. He was happier in the fetid room where he bred his fly pupae, or away on the lakes around Kempsey collecting stock. Petrol was rationed but he had an old Essex with a gas producer and he went hunting in this.

So when Nathan Schick did arrive he was lucky to find the boss home. Charles had a termite nest in a hessian bag. He had his head down and there was something in the walk, the suggestion of a limp, that gave the impression of someone old and smelly although he was only twenty-four.

"Charlie Badgery," said the Yank, blocking his access to the stairs.

Charles may or may not have heard him; he tried to push past.

"Charlie." The Major had a bony hand on the round fleshy shoulder. "Don't say you don't recognize me."

Maybe he did, maybe he didn't.

The Yank removed his cap and revealed a bald head. Nathan was now ten years older, but there was no denying the crooked regretful gold-toothed smile.

"How nice to see you, Mr Schick."

Charles did not feel nice at all. He felt ill. This face before him was the face of his nightmares. His sister was skun and this was a face licked by camp fire. There were American baubles on the end of a fishing line, hooks, razors, blades, balloons, feathers, knives. Soon his ear would go dull and fill with blood.

"God damn, Charlie. I read about your shop last year and I wondered…"

Charles lowered his bag. "That was a different shop."

"And I've been wondering if this is the same boy I knew."

Charles could not help himself – he smiled. He liked Americans. He liked the careful round way they spoke and the way they never hesitated to give an opinion. He liked the smart lines of the Major's jacket and the floppy officer's cap. Most of all he liked the sense of cleanliness that emanated from Nathan Schick. The real Nathan Schick had little to do with the grotesque figure in his recurring dream.

It was lunchtime, and the shop was busy with browsers. Charles wanted to get out of the stair entrance but Nathan, oblivious to the pushing people, wanted to talk. "Remember the corellas," he said, releasing Charles's shoulder and holding his upper arm instead. "The corellas you got for the show in Ballarat. And the first one shit on Shirlene Maguire."

"Don't talk about Sonia," Charles said.

Nathan blinked.

"I know you weren't going to, but… don't…"