Peter Carey - Illywhacker

Phoebe felt she had become invisible. She accompanied Jack and me to Belmont Common for flying lessons but no one spoke to her. She sat in the back seat and listened.

It never entered my head that she might want to fly. She expressed no interest. She said nothing. Sometimes I saw her listening with a little smile on her face. She made me flustered. I lost my train of thought.

She knew her father would never master the aeroplane, no matter how many lessons I gave him. He had even less feeling for it than he had for the Hispano Suiza. But she watched the circus silently, biding her time. Her father could never bring the stick down enough to land it. It was horrible to watch. The Farman floated in unsteadily, Jack in the front, Herbert in the back.

She could see me leaning forward and thumping her father in the middle of the back with my fist. She could hear me shouting, "Push it down, down, down." But nothing would persuade Jack to push the stick down towards the looming earth.

She visited Annette but they both made each other irritated. They bickered and fought. Her mother, once so concerned about the quantity of balls Phoebe attended, the parties she was invited to, and the friends she had, no longer seemed to worry. She made up her Christmas parcels for the orphanages, put money in envelopes for the men at the Ainsley Home, and fussed about with Herbert's socks.

For Phoebe the days over Christmas passed in a strange daze. Sometimes she felt so tense that she wanted to scratch her face until it bled but sometimes the feeling turned a degree or two and then what had been pain became pleasure. And in between those two extremes she spent whole days in a distracted state, a sort of mental itch that did not let her pay attention to anything or anyone.

She went to a few parties around Christmas (I watched her go, hopeless with lust and jealousy). She had her feet stood on by the sons of Western District graziers, two of whom proposed to her.

She hid amongst the throngs of bathers on Eastern Beach and burnt her creamy skin, perhaps deliberately. No one reprimanded her. She shed her ruined skin with fascination and did not answer desperate letters from poor Annette who spent her Christmas in a rejected lover's hell.

Phoebe did not speak to the person whose image remained continually in her mind's eye. She would not even ask him to pass the bread. She ignored him at bedtime and would not even say good night. She was reprimanded for her rudeness. She shed her skin in a bedroom curtained from the February heat, and waited.

It is time to deal with the neighbours and I am like Goon Tse Ying, capable of becoming invisible, sliding under doors, lifting rugs from floors on windless nights. I get a dirty pleasure sifting through their private cupboards amongst the dust and fluff and paper-dry conversations. I push my invisible nose deep into the sheets of beds and breathe in the odours of their unheard farts.

There were so many ways the McGraths had upset the upper crust in Western Avenue. The offences were as numberless as flies and even Mrs Kentwell had given up on counting them.

For a start: the yellowbrick garage Jack had built in the middle of the lawn. He had built it himself, but not too well. It was as blunt and as useful as a cow bail and two deep wheel ruts ran towards it, not neatly, for there were places where the Hispano Suiza had been bogged and other marks made by horses called to pull it out.

There was also what was known locally as "The Wall". The function of this redbrick wall which ran from the garage to almost the middle point of the house (it arrived opposite the big windows of the music room) was to protect Molly's flower beds from the winds that howled off Corio Bay. This function was not obvious to the Kentwells, the Jones-Burtons and the Devonishes who met to discuss each new offence, and if they had known it would have made no difference. They had no sympathy with Jack's bush-carpenter's approach to aesthetics.

The McGrath mansion had been built in 1863 and was originally called "Wirralee". This name had been incorporated in a leadlight window above the front door. They had seen Jack McGrath remove this window one afternoon in 1917. Mrs Kentwell saw it first.

"He has the ladder out," she told Alice Jones-Burton.

The two women put their hats on and plunged their hatpins home. They strolled along the promenade like policemen on the beat and on October 25th, 1917, shortly before noon, they witnessed the man with the binding-twine belt remove the"Wirralee" and replace it with a plain piece of glass on which a single cloverleaf had been sandblasted.

To understand the effect this had on the two ladies you have to remember that there was a big fuss going on about military conscription for the Great War, that the Catholics were against conscription, and what's more they were winning. On November 1st, 1917, the last attempt to introduce conscription would fail. In this heated climate a cloverleaf might easily be seen to be a shamrock, and the two ladies declared the McGraths not only traitorous, not only tasteless, but also Catholic.

If Jack had known all this he would have been terribly upset. He didn't like Catholics much more than he liked Chinese, although in the case of Catholics he would always say it was not the Catholic people he objected to but the religion and the priests particularly who "swig down all the altar wine themselves, and not a drop for the rest of them". He never knew that Molly was a Catholic, was still a Catholic, and had risked her soul by marrying him in a Protestant church in Point's Point.

Jack put the cloverleaf above his door because he was bored and because he was lucky.

There were no end of offences. The presence of Herbert Badgery Esquire was an offence. My Gentleman's Stroll did not impress Mrs Kentwell at all. She peered at me from behind fence or curtain and judged me a sharp character and a ruffian.

Western Avenue, she said, was on its way to being a slum, and when she saw the swagman arrive early one morning she knew her fears were well founded. She found it impossible to convey to her allies the true nature of this character. For when she referred to him as a swagman and they nodded their heads she knew she had not painted a proper picture of this grotesque.

"But, my dear," Mrs Devonish said, "they all use string." And then she prattled on about the useful nature of string and how her father, the late Reverend Devonish (who was remembered by Mrs Kentwell for being too High Church) had always kept brown paper bags of string in various parts of the house, none of which information was sensible or useful to Mrs Kentwell and anyway did not fit too well with her memory of the late High Church man who had caused more than one upset due to his fondness for silk and satin. String, Mrs Kentwell thought, was not High Church at all.

So she dispensed with the string. She snapped it up, so to speak, with the cutting edges of her squeaky dentures and took the dryness away with a cup of sugarless tea.

"This gentleman," she said, "is introducing cane toads to the area."

Laura Devonish blinked. "Do you think, dear, we could have more hot water."

"Hot water," Mrs Kentwell said, "is what we have, Laura. We are in it."

But the cleverness of this was lost on Laura Devonish who insisted the silver hot water pot was quite empty and the tea now far too strong. There was no choice but to provide the water. It took for ever, or long enough for Laura to eat the two last slices of butter cake.

"This swagman", Mrs Kentwell said, when the tea was to Laura's satisfaction, "is bringing in cane toads."

"Why?"

"How would I know?" snapped Mrs Kentwell. "How would I know why they do anything? But the fact remains, cane toads! In sacks. The poor maid was screaming. There were toads all over the kitchen."