Peter Carey: Illywhacker

Did they sense in Hissao the cold fury, the lovelessness of the perfect warrior? Did they realize, that even while he laughed and insisted they take another Scotch, he was not thinking about them but the revenge he planned against his family?

Ah, he was his grandfather's grandson and unkindness was his strongest card. Mr Tacheuchi, a lecherous drunk, was able to put him in touch with the right people at Mitsubishi.

There is no duller man on earth than a Mitsubishi Sarariman. Once you understand how conservative they are, you can easily imagine what distress, what physical pain, not to mention panic, they would feel to do business with a curly-headed, Bacchus-lipped, baggy-suited Australian with scuffed shoes.

Hissao therefore transformed himself. He became dullness personified. He had his hair neatly barbered. He bought the correct English suits and a wristwatch that would declare his rank more clearly than the business cards he had no time to print. In the corridors of Mitsubishi he was all but invisible. It was his destiny. He felt it. He took pleasure from his new politeness, the excessive courtesies, the slow progress, circular, but sometimes spiral, towards consensus.

He still knew himself to be an architect but there, in the endless meetings in Tokyo, the lunches in carefully graded restaurants, the ever-ascending levels of expense and status, he knew that he was born for this, that he was a great salesman, the best the family had yet produced.

He returned on a JAL flight to Sydney with a commitment of one million dollars (US), all of which was to be invested in the best pet shop in the world.

There was a recession on. He was written up in the papers.

He ripped the guts out of the old building as if he were a goanna feeding on a turkey. He attacked it viciously, took its entrails first, and left it clean inside, a great empty cavern of slippery ribs.

I lost my window, of course. I was shunted and shifted from ground floor to basement. I did not care. They fed me and wiped my bum. What more can a man want when his grandson is all afire with a scheme? He was my flesh and blood, my creature, my monster. I loved him, loved his barrelled chest, his red-rimmed eyes, the strong broad hands that unrolled the plans amidst the mortar and sawdust. He was opening out the pet shop, living out the destiny I had mapped for him when I took him to the South Pylon of the Bridge. He did not remember, of course, and that is as it should be and I could drink his hate as happily as his love because here, in the city of illusions, he was building a masterpiece.

No one, not even Emma, dared stand in his way. Such was the force of his vision that they all gave way before it and even Goldstein, increasingly gaunt and dark-eyed, Goldstein who would not speak to him, teetered on the brink of admiration for she saw he was pursuing an idea without compromise, that he really did have greatness within his grasp, but that was before she saw what he was up to.

The architects of Sydney all came, sooner or later, for a sticky-beak. They knew that Hissao Badgery, that gourmand, dilettante, deviant, was not capable of such work. They decided he was a front, a shadow for a Japanese architect, and they argued only about which Master it was.

The cretins. There was nothing Japanese in it except the money. He built like a jazz musician. He restated and reworked the melody of the old emporium. The creaking galleries were gone now, but you saw them still, in your imagination. He built like a liar, like a spider -steel ladders and walkways, catwalks, cages in mid-air, in racks on walls, tumbling like waterfalls, in a gallery spanning empty spaces like a stainless Bridge of Sighs.

When Goldstein, at last, saw what he was up to, she tried to stab him in the chest with a knife but she was now an old lady in paisley with weak wrists and arthritic hands and he easily knocked the blade away and then, for good measure, spat right in her face, a great glob of clouded spittle which landed on her ruined cheek and predicted, in its course, the bed along which her hopeless tears would shortly run.

What drove him to this rage was not the knife, but the lack of imagination she displayed, that she could not see what he was doing, what passions ruled him, what love his hate was based in.

I have no great pains, no searing agonies to make me scream and weep, but I have nausea, giddiness, the discomforts of incontinence, the itch of psoriasis, and I lie here, with my skin scaling, peeling like a withered prawn.

Naturally they come to see me, not just the men with callipers and bottles, but the ordinary visitors. They journey up the aluminium walkways, they brave their vertigo, they grasp the rail, they tremble to see what a human being can become.

I wish I were well enough to enjoy it properly. I used to enjoy it. I remember the first day he had the boys from Bondi Surf Lifesaving Club bring me up here. They carried me with two poles and a canvas sling.

It seems like for fucking ever ago. It happened in the week Goldstein went to gaol for throwing firecrackers at police horses. They brought me up here. I showed them my write-ups on the wall, framed, behind glass. The morons laughed at me, right in my face, and said I was a museum piece, that I should be stuffed, etc., and then they went downstairs to take up their own positions in the great exhibit, clowning on the sand on the ground floor. They were smug, those lads, about their pay and conditions, but they've been fired now – they got too old. They're probably on the dole, or in the park, getting pissed on metho, remembering the great days when they had work in the Best Pet Shop in the World.

You would think it too hot up here, under the skylight, but Hissao has worked everything out well. The roof disappears completely. He has it opening and closing like an eyelid, and the rosellas, when they are released, fly up towards the open sky. I can see them if I lie on my right side, but it makes me feel dizzy and ill and I try to turn away if I can. Some days I can turn by myself, but on others I need assistance. The rosellas reach the point just opposite me where the sonic curtain operates. When they hit it they falter, lose height, and then, because they now feel as ill as I do, they go back to their perches below. When they feel better they try again. When they die, Hissao gets a new lot.

Of course it is the Best Pet Shop in the World. Who could possibly compete with it? It is not just our owners, the Mitsubishi Company, who say so. Everyone comes. Name a country and I will have met someone who travelled from it just to see us.

And you can say it is simply hate that has made Hissao put so many of his fellow countrymen and women on display. Yet he has not only fed them and paid them well, he has chosen them, the types, with great affection. There is a spirit in this place. It is this that excites the visitors. The shearers, for instance, exhibit that dry, laconic anti-authoritarian wit that is the very basis of the Australian sense of humour. They are proud people, these lifesavers, inventors, manufacturers, bushmen, aboriginals. They do not act like caged people. The very success of the exhibit is in their ability to move and talk naturally within the confines of space. They go about their business, their sand paintings, their circumcision ceremonies, their strikes, settlements, discussions about national anthems, arguments about "Waltzing Matilda" and "Advance Australian Fair". In Phoebe's area the artists and writers all gather for their discussions. Who has not been thrilled to listen to them? Of course there are disagreements, fights, but no one objects. The only bitterness comes from outside these walls, from the jeering crowd of slogan writers on the street who cannot, anyway, afford the entrance money.