Peter Carey: Illywhacker

"Ah," he said, raising his eyebrows comically, poking gentle fun at the seriousness. He tilted back on the chair and then dropped forward. "Ah so," he said, making himself look as Japanese as anything in Kurosawa, "Ah, so… deska?"

Leah misunderstood the performance. She was suspicious of the smiling face and all this animation at a time when he should, given what he had witnessed, be filled with grief. He was spoiled and young and corrupt and she saw, in his white collar and smarmy tie, the salesman's desire to please.

"So I am directed to be a smuggler, eh?" Hissao smiled into his beer. It was easy to forget he was only eighteen years old. "That's the plan. The business is viable after all?" He was being funny, so he imagined.

Leah had never been good with irony. She lit a second cigarette and frowned.

"We'll all be rich," Hissao said gaily. "We could have sports cars and lovers." He was joking of course, but he dropped the word "lovers" into the stream of his talk as deliberately as a fisherman letting a mud-eye float past a watching trout. He wanted Goldstein to talk about lovers, her lovers, his mother's lovers. He wanted confessions, secrets, all the lovely laundry of the past.

It was, however, the wrong approach for Goldstein. She thought him frivolous and silly. She gave him a stern lecture on the American takeovers of Australian industry – a subject she had been researching for the Labour Party – and talked about the political ramifications of it, both in terms of ever-increasing dependence on American investment and the paybacks a client state must make, like fighting wars in Korea and other places.

It was all unnecessary. Hissao knew almost as much about the subject as she did. He was soon bored and boredom – because he was not a meek young man – soon gave way to irritation.

"I see," he said, now parodying the very quality Leah had misread in him. He filled his beer glass from the jug. "But it doesn't matter, so long as the Resch's is still cold."

She took the bait and that made him really cross. He clicked his tongue loudly. It was an unexpected enough (and sufficiently loud) noise to make Goldstein stop.

"Do you really think", Hissao said, his cheeks burning, "that I don't know all that stuff?"

Goldstein opened her mouth combatively and then shut it cautiously. She tilted her head appraisingly. At last she said: "I don't know you."

"No," he said. "You don't."

They were both embarrassed then. Leah poured more beer for both of them and Hissao began to talk again, deliberately trying, with words and enthusiasm, to bleed the poisonous temper out of his system.

"Leah," he said, "even if I had no principles at all, I wouldn't do what she wants."

"She's your mother."

"Yes, yes, she's my mother, but I wouldn't do it. Out of pure self-interest I wouldn't do it. Out of egotism, I wouldn't. Out of pride, arrogance, ambition."

He listed motivations that, because they were a little unsavoury, he judged she would believe more readily than fine ones.

"You see," he said, smiling, but not calmly. "I'm going to be a great architect."

He took one of Goldstein's cigarettes and lit it with not-quite-steady hands.

Then he was a young man, all afire with enthusiasm and ambition. And Goldstein, who knew herself to be living amongst the rusted wrecks of lives, felt very old and grey and cynical and she envied the smooth skin of his cheeks and the clarity of his eyes and she felt herself giving way to his will as he talked about greatness, his greatness, as if it were a thing so certain that he could touch it. He said it made the skin on his fingers go taut – he showed her where -and the quick beneath his nails tingle. And Leah was entranced and repelled by him at the same time. She felt – as she had done when she saw the bow tie -that he was decadent, that his smile was overripe, his skin too smooth, his teeth too white; but there was also something else about him that contradicted this, something untarnished and tough, as precise and unblunted as a surgical blade fresh from its paper wrapping. She had seen this, this tough thing, when he had clicked his tongue.

And yet, through prejudice no doubt, she began to distance herself from him. She leaned back in her chair and dropped her cigarette into the gravel. She listened carefully to what he said – as if the words were a typewritten transcript with no passion or any inflexion. It seemed to her that all he believed in was his ambition. She was wrong, of course, but she was also stubborn in her opinions, and clung to first impressions long past the time when a reasonable person would give them up. And now she remembered a time – she had thought a great deal about this time recently- when everyone she knew seemed occupied with the problems of belief and principle. They had gone about it inelegantly, stumblingly, stupidly often, but at least it had mattered to them and even Herbert Badgery, a blue-eyed illywhacker, had so wished himself to be a man of principle that he had imitated a Wobbly and fought the railway police.

But architecture, she thought, was no better than bird-smuggling. She was not insensitive to architecture. (Quite the opposite, as we have seen already.) The new buildings of Sydney cowed her and seemed, in their intentions, no better than the old ones she wished destroyed. They seemed merciless and uncaring, like machines of war. They rose in disciplined ranks and cast shadows in the streets while the night sky was all abloom with their alien flowers. And this, because it was the only architecture that seemed to matter, was the only architecture she could see. She therefore interrupted Hissao to demand that he confront the path he was choosing, that he admit the companies he worked for (she assumed companies and he did not contradict her assumption) would almost certainly have values that were against the interests not only of fish and birds, but also of marsupials and mammals, human beings included.

By then they were drunk, although neither of them realized it. Their combativeness was not without joy and when Leah dragged him out the side gate (she intended to show him the city skyline, but there were plane trees in the street which blocked the view) she took him by his hand and laughed when he resisted. When the skyline would not reveal itself, no matter how they jumped, they went into the bar and bought another jug of beer. Then they went back into the bright garden which was now, at lunchtime, redolent with burning meat and alive with the small blue flashes of burning chop fat as Mich Crozier's customers cooked themselves their famous five-bob barbecues.

Neither Hissao nor Leah ate. He was telling her that there was not yet an Australian architecture, only a colonial one with verandas tacked on. She said the only suitable architecture should be based on the tent. He agreed with her. She was surprised. She then talked resentfully – Hissao thought – of Mr Lo who was happy to stay where he was and be fed and did not need to worry about what it meant to be Chinese and that she, for her part, was sick to death of trying to decide what it meant to be Australian. She then began to contradict herself, to say there could never be an Australian architecture and he was a fool for trying because there was no such thing as Australia or if there was it was like an improperly fixed photograph that was already fading.

When Hissao objected she told him he was immoral and politically naive.

Hissao then told her that he had smoked a reefer and had sex with a sailor on the night his father died. He tried to talk about the jumble of emotions he felt about this death and which she too, presumably, felt; he looked for some good thing in the aftermath of the nightmare.

Goldstein was shocked and revolted, but also astonished, that in spite of all the things about the boy that offended her (the sailor most of all, but also the drug-taking, the lack of belief, the lonely egotism of ambition) that they could at least agree on this question of the Badgery Pet Emporium, that it was a business that could no longer be innocently pursued.