Peter Carey - Illywhacker

It was eleven a. m. precisely when I began my attack. I did not rush at it like a young fool. I opened out from the existing window. The bricks were old and handmade, soft and pink and very crumbly. I took them out slowly, working at it so there was a natural stepped arch left in the wall. By noon I had a space twelve foot wide and I had just decided to leave it at that for the day, to see how it settled, when Goldstein crept up and shouted in my ear.

"Fool," she said. "You impossible fool."

Leah had become like the old-maid aunt in a Victorian story, forever puffing up the stairs and down, first awake, last asleep, a repository of patience and kindness, taken for granted, never arousing curiosity except of the most perfunctory sort about her ambitions and her hopes because she showed the world so little sign that she had any.

But she was, of course, beneath her river-smooth exterior, full of the tumbling currents of ambitions that she had been rash enough, gambler enough, to postpone ten years.

She felt, that morning while I consulted about the wall, like a runner who has paced herself to a certain distance and when the distance is extended, cannot run another step. She was exhausted.

I asked her about the wall.

"Oh yes," she said. "What a lovely idea."

She went into her latticed room. She had a mattress there, along one wall, and a desk along the other. It was cramped, but she was used to it. She sat at the desk and arranged her papers as she would on any other morning. She took out yesterday's work and placed it at her left elbow. The tears began to drop and she rubbed them with her finger, as if they were errors to be erased.

Outside she could hear Mr Lo arguing. She did not need to look. It was an amusing performance on the first occasion, but after that the spectacle quickly palled. Mr Lo amused himself, each morning, by playing imaginary baseball. He did not even have a bat. He would walk to the eastern end of the gallery, the opposite end to Herbert Badgery's wall, and position himself above his imaginary plate. It was just as well he did not have a real bat for he would have hit a ladder on the back swing. He never swung quickly, always slowly, and it was hard to ascertain which was a strike and which a ball. It was obviously hard for the umpire too. Mr Lo was always arguing with him and for a quiet man, a polite man, these arguments had a frightening ferocity. Mr Lo bellowed. He stamped and shrieked. Leah did not know what he was saying, but at these moments she felt closest to him.

Mr Lo was like everything in this place. It was easy to understand why he did it. In one way it was perfectly sane and normal, but sometimes you could look at it with that other eye, and it was terrifying to realize this was what your life had become.

Emma was sitting on a big overstuffed armchair in front of her cage – she looked like any overweight woman in a seaside camping ground. Her skin had loosened, her face now showed a tendency to jowliness. She sat, leaning forward on her open thighs, talking on the telephone. She liked to talk on the telephone. Her sister had sent her a Bacchus Marsh phone directory and it was her great pleasure to look through it and telephone people who were often most surprised to hear from her.

Goldstein lit a cigarette and watched. She could hear me talking to Hissao but she blocked that out of her mind – that blowfly noise – and watched Emma who, having finished her first phone conversation of the day, was fossicking in a large cardboard box she always kept near her chair. She took from it a single iridescent pink hair curler and rolled her straight black hair deftly into it. She clipped in a pin and patted it. There was a finickiness, a silly vanity in her actions. That was, at any rate, one way to see it. But the other way was to see her as a great courtesan.

Emma looked up and smiled, presumably at her father-in-law. She then hid her face and retreated, dragging the cardboard box after her, into her cage. She shut the door behind and sat herself on a little stool with a bright blue lambswool cover. She was just a heavily built countrywoman with a pink slip. She had meaty shoulders and fleshy upper arms. Her stomach bulged against the satin of the slip. She leaned forward, pressing her face towards the glass of a small round shaving mirror which was tied – with blue electrical flex – to the wall.

"Yes," thought Leah Goldstein, "she is a great courtesan. She is not the most beautiful woman in the world. She is not overendowed with intelligence. Yet her ambitions are quite extraordinary – nothing less than to be adored and worshipped. She is a great artist. Her husband can think of nothing else but having her love him. If she was beautiful everyone would understand. She could lie around in baths of ass's milk and her behaviour would be perfectly normal. They would applaud her and write poetry about her. They would think it quite permissible for her to be her husband's pet."

But it was not permissible for her, Leah Goldstein, to live her life so uselessly. It was not permissible to be in this undignified position, to be kept by a keeper of pets. She loved Charles, but it was not permissible for her to stay here. And here was this idiot, this fool, making a home for himself, jumping from one prison to another.

It was unbearable.

She sat and tried to write. She prided herself on her professionalism, that she could write her thousand words of pap whether she was well or ill. But all she felt was an enormous anger welling up in her, that she had wasted ten years of her life on a misunderstanding.

She stood up. She had not been intending to say anything. But when she emerged Herbert Badgery turned and smiled. His blue eyes looked false, like a doll's eyes.

"You fool," she said. "You moron. You want to be a pet."

"This is my old age."

"How disgusting then. What an old age. You want to lie on your back and have your stomach rubbed."

"Shut up."

"Pet," she said.

"Why not? I've earned it."

"What about life?" she cried. She was bawling now. Her face contorted. Tears coming down, splashing her sandalled feet. "What about life? I thought you were full of it. I used to tell people you had more life in your little finger" – she held it up, indicating a pink tip with a sharp slice of her other hand's index finger – "than most people, more moral people, better people, had in their whole bodies. Now look at you."

There was nothing to say.

She kicked at a brick. I suppose it hurt her, for her foot was covered with nothing more than a small blue slipper.

"Five years we were together, Mr Badgery, and I have drawn on that time ever since. It has sustained me. Not just you – don't look so smug – the life. The life was a life. When I visit my father his house is depressing, full of death and dying, and I read the letters. You could build a country from the towns and streets that I described, even a good country, a happy one. I was alive."

"So you want to be a dancer again."

"Don't be a smart alec," she said, but she was not shouting any more and there was sadness in her voice. She rubbed the foot with which she had kicked the brick.

"Well, what do you want?"

Her shoulders slumped, not much, perhaps no more than a quarter of an inch, but it was a definite movement and Mr Lo must have observed it too because he stopped staring at us and went back to his game of imaginary baseball and my daughter-in-law -standing powder-puff in hand at her doorway – winked at me.

And even I, with sweat in my eyes, could see that Goldstein did not know. She had what she always had, I thought – a yearning, and that was fine, but I would not be blamed for it. It was the same misunderstanding that had plagued me all my life. All I ever wanted was a fire and slippers. But the women never saw, or if they did, they looked the other way.