Peter Carey - Illywhacker

"I see nothing so peculiar," I said, happy to pretend that I was offended.

"Nothing peculiar", Jack said, "in marrying without a bride? It's not a thing I'd be game to have a go at myself."

"Walking up the aisle", Molly said, "all by yourself."

"Here comes the bride," sang Jack, "fair, fat and wide."

"Here comes the groom," recited Molly, "all by himself in the room."

"There," she laughed, "I'm a poet and I don't know it." Phoebe sipped water and watched us all. I dared not catch her eye.

I can remember few days when Corio Bay looked really beautiful -even when the summer sun shone upon it, when one would expect to recall diamonds of light dancing on an azure field, the water appeared bleak and flat, like a paddock too long over-grazed. This, of course, is why the city fathers turned their back upon it and placed vast eyeless wool stores on its shores.

Of my evening walks with Jack McGrath, I remember no pretty colours in either sky or water but rather, on the evening now in question, only the coarse sand on its shores which were littered with the bodies of stranded jellyfish.

"You had me worried." Jack hitched up his baggy trousers and buttoned up all four buttons of his waistcoat and all three of his suit jacket. "My word you did."

"How's that, Jack?"

Soiled clouds hung over the bay and the wind came from the south where there was no land at all, just a white-tipped ocean that reached all the way to Antarctica.

"There are two things I've never gone for. Chaps that cheat at cards and grown-up men marrying young girls."

The wind blew through my jacket. My nipples were hard and uncomfortable. They scratched themselves against my cotton shirt. "I don't get your meaning," I said, but I got his damn meaning well enough.

"Molly thought you wanted to marry Phoebe," Jack laughed. "She thought you were going to ask for her hand."

I laughed too. It was a virtuoso performance, an isolated, technically perfect, joyless loop in the cold blue evening air. "And what", I said, when the laugh was done, "did she think of that?"

"It's a thing that always makes me feel ill. I can't abide it. Old men and young girls. It makes my flesh creep."

"Surely," I said miserably, "there must be occasions…"

But there was a stern and unrelenting streak in gentle Jack and his big blunt face looked taut and the laugh lines refused to fall into their natural furrows.

"No, no," he said. "No occasion. No occasion at all."

We walked on in silence.

It was the trouble with the world that it would never permit me to be what I was. Everyone loved me when I appeared in a cloak, and swirled and laughed and told them lies. They applauded. They wanted my friendship. But when I took off my cloak they did not like me. They clucked their tongues and turned away. My friend Jack was my friend in all things but was repulsed by what I really was. I admired and loved him, even though he could not abide the Chinese; but he could only like the bullshit version of me. He would have condemned me for what happened at O'Hagen'

's, for my lust, my greed, my temper, my impatience. He would not have seen the abandonment of the Ford with any sympathy.

Yet this did not put me off. Quite the opposite. All it did was make me want to tell him more, to grab him by the scruff of the neck and force him to look at me as I was, to make him accept me. I wanted to prop his eyelids open with matches and say, I am what I am for good reasons and a man with half a soul would understand and even sympathize.

I had vertigo. I wanted to fling myself off the edge of my confession and somehow, with the force of my passion, with the power and courage of my leap, command respect, understanding, sympathy.

Roughly equivalent, of course, to punching him in the face.

Before I could stop myself I told him that I had lied about the aircraft factory, that I had no experience in the business at all.

"You're a queer fellow, Badgery," he said, when I had finished. "Do I get you right when you say you have no interest in a factory?"

"Of course I have an interest?" I said. "I could think of nothing better."

We walked on into the gloom.

"You have an interest?" he said at last.

"Of course I do."

"And so do I."

He stopped, and stood stamping his big boots into the sand.

"So where is the problem?" he said.

"I wasn't going to Ballarat at all. I was broke when I met you."

"That's Ballarat's loss," he said.

He turned back towards the house.

"The point is not whether you're an engineer or whether you're broke. The point is that you've got a grand idea. And you've also got enthusiasm, which is the only quality that makes a business go. We can buy engineers, Badgery, but we can't buy enthusiasm. You say you're a liar, but I've seen nothing dishonest in you. You paid me back my thirty pounds. You don't go ogling my daughter. I'd be happy to have you for a partner."

I couldn't understand why, but he made me feel unclean. He gave me no comfort.

"I've got a few acquaintances," Jack said, "wealthy men down at Colac who are interested in this venture. To hell with Ballarat," he laughed as the street lights came on in a long electric line above our heads. "We'll do it. By Jove, see if they can stop us."

Hooper the grocer, cantering his team home along Western Avenue, saw two men standing with their hands in their pockets by the side of the road. He tipped his hat to Jack McGrath who stared right through him as if he and his wagon were glass things in a dream.

Jack was arranging his expedition to Colac and he could not leave the telephone alone. His deafness made him bellow. When he was engaged in telephoning the whole house stood still and waited for him to finish. It was a big house, but even in the music room you could not escape his optimism. He did not give a damn for the expense. He talked on and on.

In the midst of all this, the roof above Phoebe's bed had begun to leak. Jack was too excited to give much of his mind over to such a mundane thing.

"It's a tile come off," Jack said, still puffing from the exertion of his phone call and putting four spoons of sugar in his tea, "that's all."

Phoebe said nothing.

"Mr Johnstone used to do the tiles," Molly said. "But he's dead, at Gallipoli, and he borrowed your bicycle," she told her daughter, "so he could go up to Ryrie Street to enlist. Do you remember, Jack? Do you remember Bob Johnstone coming here to borrow Phoebe's bike? I said to him, you'll look funny, a big man like you on a girl's bicycle, but he didn't seem to worry."

"It's hard to get a man to do one tile," Jack said. "I'll get up in the weekend, when I come back from Colac."

"I'll do it," I said. "Let me."

"We couldn't," Molly said, "could we, Jack?"

"No," Jack said, "we couldn't." His mind, however, was on other things.

I smiled. They all (except Phoebe) smiled in return.

"I am not frightened of heights," I said (I looped the loop in the skies of their imagination). "Just tell me where the ladder is."

It was late March and the morning had a fresh edge to its sunlight. When I folded my napkin and placed it on the table it looked, with its eggshell white and blue shadows, like a detail from a painting by the impressionist Dussoir.

Phoebe lay on her bed. It was five minutes past nine on the monstrous black clock her father had given her for her fifteenth birthday. She could hear me on the roof above her bed. She stood. Her feet were bare. Her mother did not like her to have bare feet, but her mother had taken Bridget to the market in Moorabool Street and as Phoebe stepped out on to the veranda she looked forward to the cool feeling the wet dewy grass would give her unnaturally hot feet.