Peter Carey - Illywhacker

"How do I seem to you?" Charles asked.

"How do you mean?"

"How do I seem?"

It was an impossible question, and it was expressed in an unusual voice, light, with a reedy vibrato. Hissao put the car into gear when the lights went green.

"Have you seen my bottom?" Charles asked.

"What?"

"Have you", Charles sat sideways in his seat to look at his embarrassed son, "seen my bottom, my bum?"

Hissao smiled but it was not the charming smile of the urbane young man who had discussed the pet business with Time magazine. His eyes showed his embarrassment and his smile hurt his face. "Not for a while," he said.

"Was it wrinkled?"

"Oh, Dad! Please."

"Was it?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Yes," said Charles, with some bitterness, and then faced the front. They drove on in a silence that Hissao found almost unbearable. They crossed that bridge – I forget its name – the ugly steel box that lay, on that day, across joyless wind-whipped water the colour of a battleship.

"You shouldn't have told me to shut up."

"I'm sorry."

"I bought you your own car. I pay for your university fees, I give you money to live on. I don't ask for much from you. (Keep going up Victoria Road.) I never thought I'd ever hear you tell me to shut up."

Hissao had to change lanes to stay in Victoria Road. He tried to explain, at the same time, why it was necessary to stop his father's comments on Herr Bloom but Charles was not really listening. "Anyway," Hissao said, "he liked you."

"He thought I was a crook."

"No, really. He didn't."

"Thought I was a crook. Maybe I am a crook. Do you think I'm a crook?"

"No."

"Well, he thought I was a crook. All he saw was this big building. He thought I was a moneybags but do you know what I see when I look at that building, all those people employed, all those families fed, all those beautiful pets being shipped away all over the world? Do you know what I think?"

Hissao knew the answer. He had heard it before.

"I think it's a bloody miracle."

They kept driving along Victoria Road while Charles told the story of the business, right from the day when Emma's father had said she had a bum like a horse. He went through his first meeting with a bank manager, the guarantee by Lenny Kaletsky. He could remember every bird he had brought down from Jeparit, and the price of every animal, fish, bird and reptile he had ever sold. He would recall a year in his memory because it was the year that an important specimen had died or another incubated.

At Silverwater Road he had Hissao turn left and they proceeded down through that industrial wasteland across the polluted river and on towards the Parramatta Road.

"There never was a day", Charles said, "when I did not want to be the best at what I did. Do you believe me?"

"Yes, Dad, I do."

"When I was a little nipper no one paid attention to Australian birds and animals. It's all changed now. Me and Nathan, we did that."

"That's terrific," Hissao said and his father looked at him in a way that made him ashamed of the ineptitude of his response.

"I never meant anyone any harm," his father said.

It was a grey overcast day and a low blanket of cloud sat over the industrial puddle-dotted wastes of Silverwater.

"Nowadays you can travel all over the world and find Badgery's birds in all the big collections, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Tokyo."

Hissao, of course, knew all this. He had heard it many times before. His father never tired of repeating the names of cities he had never been to.

"Holland," said Charles, crossing his calf across his heavy thigh. "France, Tokyo."

"You said Tokyo."

"Yes," said Charles. "Turn right."

They drove out to Parramatta in heavy silence. When they arrived at Church Street Charles had him turn right again and it occurred to Hissao that his father was not thinking about where they were going.

"You're intelligent," Charles said as they passed the last of the Parramatta shops. "You can spell, you can write, you've got an education. Do you think there's a God?"

"No, I guess not."

"No," said Charles. "I suppose there isn't."

"Will I go back into Victoria Road?"

"Yes. We'll go to the tip at Ryde."

As they crossed the start of Silverwater Road, Charles said: "Would you say I was a success?"

"Yes."

"And your mother?" His voice was actually shaking. Hissao saw that his cheeks were wet. He did not know what to do. "Would you say she was a success too?"

He tried to hold his father's hand but it was clenched into a fist and did not respond to holding.

"Drive," Charles said. "Is she?"

"Yes, in her way."

Later Hissao was to regret his wooden awkwardness, his stiff inadequate answers to all these questions and yet they were not really questions at all, but echoes made by Charles's ricocheting thoughts.

Hissao found the tip and drove, at last, through the low scrub. They bounced over a bush track and arrived at a large bulldozed clearing the perimeters of which were piled with garbage. Magpies and crows rose and settled. Small black flies entered the car through the open windows and then clustered on the inside of the windscreen trying to get out again. The place stank.

Hissao was under the impression that his father was going to release his mother's pet. There would be trouble, he knew, but he did not judge or interfere. He knew that goannas were natural scavengers and imagined his father had chosen the tip because -in all the city – it was the best source of food for it.

Yet when Charles lifted the animal from the boot he also picked up a rifle. He dumped the bag on the ground and clipped a ten-round magazine of.22 bullets into the rifle. Then he untied the string of the bag and emptied the goanna on to the dusty clay ground.

The goanna was nearly twenty-four years old now and rarely moved if it was not necessary. It would lie with its head resting in its food tray and when Emma placed its food there it would eat without altering position. Now it seemed oblivious to any danger, although its tongue flicked in and out as it tasted the new air.

Hissao was frightened.

"You bitch," he heard his father say. "You fucking evil rotten bitch."

Two bullets struck the reptile in fast succession. The noise was empty and metallic. It looked as if he had missed, although the range was only twenty-four inches. Then Hissao saw the blood oozing from eye, and mouth. There were more light, sharp shots. Red marks appeared on the big head, no more serious than sores on the flaking scaly skin. The reptile did not rise up on its rear legs, inflate its throat, slash out with its claws. It tried to get under the car. Charles fired three more times, from the hip, with the tip of the muzzle three inches from the victim.

Hissao turned away. He looked over towards the city. He tried not to hear the things his father said about his mother. He could see the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the AWA tower and he did not see his father do it. He heard a grunt.

It takes only a second, this sort of thing. I have gone through the motions myself – it takes only a second to reverse the rifle and put it in your mouth. It had nothing to do with his financial affairs or his loss of control to his American partners. It was a mistake, most likely because the day was overcast, because the grey sky sucked all the joy from the land, because there were puddles at Silverwater, because the goanna did not die cleanly, because it suffered its wounds in silence, because it could not scream, because there was rust and enteritis and because he misunderstood what he had seen in a bottle.

He left us in charge of Emma, his sole heir, sole proprietor of the Best Pet Shop in the World.

Leah Goldstein had worn her suit expecting to be taken somewhere smart, but Doodles Casey had taken her for a counter lunch instead. At first she had been miffed and had drunk quickly and angrily. Then she had seen the funny side of it and drunk quickly and gaily. They had rough red wine and her lips now showed a cracked black mark around their perimeter.