Peter Carey: Illywhacker

He admired her hands (brown skin and such pink nails like seashells) which seemed to him perfectly proportioned, undeco-rated by nail polish or rings, but soft and supple. He watched them trace unselfconscious paths as they touched each other, her cheek, her forehead. He enjoyed their suppleness, the easy way the fingers could bend back from the pale pink of the palm which was crossed with the clear deep lines of an unhesitant life.

Hissao relaxed into the seat and, as the craft lifted off the tarmac at Mascot Airport, touched the parrot for luck and smiled with satisfaction at the perfection of life.

This business about Hissao and women is difficult. His continual love affairs may be interpreted as a continual need to prove himself as a man in spite of his height. It is a tempting hypothesis. Henry, having read about the Don Juan complex inReader's Digest, suggested to Hissao that his promiscuous behaviour was the result of low-quality orgasms, but Hissao smiled at his brother with such compassion that it was Henry who lost his temper and had to leave the room.

Hissao was one of those rare men who genuinely love women and who, dreaming in bars and coffee shops, amidst the steam of espresso machines, can imagine amorous delights in all the various forms the female body assumes. When he saw his fellow passenger (square-jawed, sloe-eyed) he was not reacting to her money (which he could only guess at) or her fame (which he was ignorant of) but rather his small Nipponese nose twitched to some subtle aroma, the smell of spices in doorways, musky broad-leaved grasses, the heady aroma of a foreign country with its strange alphabets which promise the obliteration of one's personal past and the limitless possibilities of the erotic future.

The 747 landed in Melbourne to take on more passengers, but none of them came to first class. When it took off again, an hour later, Hissao had still not spoken to his companion. They took off into the face of a large black storm. Hissao gave himself up to the power of the engines. He offered himself to them. He felt no fear, only pleasure, in the even greater power of the storm as it pushed the plane relentlessly, breathlessly, upwards before throwing it fiercely into the cold holes in its boiling middle. In Melbourne, as so often happens in summer, it dropped from 35 ºC to 18 ºC in ten minutes and sweating men in shirt sleeves in Flinders Street prepared to make it the subject of headlines – it was autumn after all.

They reared and lunged above the monotony of Melbourne's west, out across the melancholy wheat plains around Diggers' Rest where Hissao's grandfather had once sold T Model Fords to farmers who could not sign their own name. He passed over Bendigo where Badgery amp; Goldstein had first performed. They were still in the storm half an hour later above Jeparit where Sir Robert Menzies had been born and where Hissao's father met his mother in the mouse plague of 1937.

They passed the borders of the family history, but Australia stretched on for two thousand miles more and it would be another five hours before they left its coast. An International Vice-President of Uniroyal, returning from firing the Australian Managing Director, vomited his farewell drinks into a paper bag and somewhere else Hissao could hear a woman crying helplessly.

The woman beside him did not move anxiously in her seat or let out cries of fear or even sit like someone waiting for something unpleasant to pass. She was going home after her mother's funeral and her thoughts were full of death and her own mortality and a fine chill of loneliness pierced her.

She had many friends, was much loved by them, and certainly had no shortage of lovers, but both her parents were dead and she had the sensation, now, of being in the front line with none of the conventional weapons of family or children or even country to defend herself against the realities of death and nothingness. Yet she was a strong woman, and an optimist at that; she was not in the least frightened by life, so that when, above Jeparit, Hissao began to talk to her, she gave him the whole of her intelligent attention and warmed her chilled thoughts in conversation.

The most puzzling thing in the entire encounter occurred at a certain stage very late in the conversation, when she discovered she had been talking to a man. She had the feeling of a dream where things and people transmogrify, characters dissolve from one to the other like tricks in a film, monsters in a bottle. She had the sense, the very distinct sense, of her companion's female gender; she had been pleased to find it, had relaxed into it, had been even more delighted to find it coupled with an elegant wit and a sense of both joy and irony. The forces of life, she thought to herself, are flying high tonight.

Later she tried to remember if she had taken pills or perhaps drunk excessively, but there had been only one glass (of champagne) and certainly no pills and yet, in the soft whistling dark above the Arafura Sea she found herself deep in conversation with a man, as in a dream, and her nipples contracted and her vision tunnelled and the sense of what had happened and was happening was disturbed, disorientating, and intensely erotic at the same time. What she saw as through a smeared glass darkly was a Renaissance face, a Bacchus that belonged to red wine, grapes, apples with the bloom of Tuscany on them, a vision saved from decadence by a firmness, a cleanness of will that showed in the intense blue eyes.

As she leaned across the last six inches of reserve to kiss him she felt his maleness to be overlaid with a soft blue shadow, the memory of the woman she had begun to talk to.

They were in the back seat of first class. The movie was running. Hissao removed the seat divider. She held his face a moment. Hissao smiled, thinking of the lines of her life held firmly against him, the beginning of her heart line touching the beginning of his smile.

Naturally she misunderstood the smile.

"It's all right," she whispered, "I'm just trying to imagine who you are."

His intentions were not bad. It may be tempting to find in those rosy Tuscan apples the worm of self-absorption, to see in his Bacchus lips the centre of his moral universe. He has, after all, declared himself amoral. He likes to think of himself as a pirate, a brigand, a citizen of risk. But let me tell you, he has the morals of a schoolteacher. Forget the Bacchus lips. He is as careful as a clerk. Even when he removed the seat divider he was beginning to stand, to place the parrot safely amongst his folded coat.

His mistake was to expect caution on the part of his companion. After all, they were not alone. The stewards were sitting upstairs and could return at any moment. The other four first-class passengers were absorbed withThe Railway Children but that could prove to be indigestible at any moment.

But his companion, Rosa Carlobene, was not known for timidity and tonight, above the Arafura Sea, she was seeking the warm juices of life, defying the tapeworms of habit and order, luxuriating in the complexity of her sexual feelings, flying high on the side of the angels against death and despair.

Thus it was poor Rosa who, in one strong sinuous thrust, ground her pelvis into the head of the golden-shouldered parrot.

Hissao felt the skull squash and wetness spread. He leapt to his feet. He did not care for caution, discretion, customs spies, or Rosa Carlobene. He unzipped his fly, hoping against hope.

And Rosa, who had misunderstood the bump that was the parrot, now misunderstood the blood on Hissao's trembling hands.

"What is it?"

She clutched at his sleeve. He sat down again, but he was fiddling around his fly. "It's nothing," he said.

"Did I hurt you?"

"It's nothing, nothing, I promise. Don't worry." But the words did not match his tone which was cold and angry.