Peter Carey - Illywhacker

At the back of the house there was an old fig tree, an easy-climbing tree whose branches now shaded the roof of the back veranda. When she was younger she had played in it. Now she could walk up the branch without so much as stopping. She ran lightly across the veranda roof and crawled, loose as a cat (arched back, purring) to the next ridge.

I was somewhere in the next valley, fiddling inexpertly with wire and pliers. In a moment I would look up and see, perched on the ridge above me, a beautiful young woman with hair the colour of copper, her bare legs dangling towards me, her face a shaded secret, dark against the pale blue morning sky.

I sucked in my breath. I stood there, staring.

I stopped breathing. I put down the pliers. They made a small noise (clink) against the tiles.

Did I speak? Later I tried to remember. Probably I said "come" in my mind, silently, and motioned with my hand. She came down the ridge, that steep face of red tiles, standing up, her lovelyfeet sure-footed. Only the blind eyes of the empty tower looked down on us.

I will go to my grave remembering the high flush in her face as she came to me, the cool of her arm (hot and cold) and, oh my God, such a kiss. I would have been content, would have ventured no further than the kiss (it was a meal, a feast in itself) but Phoebe had not come climbing trees and roofs merely to taste my mouth and stare at my glittering eyes, and when I felt those fingers like birds' wings fluttering at the buttons of my fly I closed my eyes and moaned. The pliers skipped across the tiles and clattered down into the box gutter in the valley.

Her eyes were a match for mine. They did not falter or flutter, but gazed straight back. She undressed me and I did not fight or attempt to assert the masculine prerogative. She undressed me to my farmer's body: tanned arms, tanned neck, and the blue-white skin traced by veins and, most curious of all, a hard but soft-skinned penis with its toadstool head and its great blue vein stretching along its length. She had talked with Annette about men's organs and how they would look, but nothing had prepared her for the softness, the baby skin stretched so tight.

When she touched me with her finger, I moaned ("So sweetly," she with her lips, just brushed me, silk on silk.

Somewhere, in another world, a door slammed.

I straightened her and removed her dress, a dress left over from a younger summer with daisies repeated on a blue field. I lay the dress against the slope of the roof and she lay there quickly before the dress slid down the slope. The tiles were rough on her back, hurt but did not hurt. She had a mole on her shoulder. She thought my penis was silky and strong. I knelt before her. She took it in her hand and introduced it, ever so gently, into her.

When she hurt, her mouth opened and her green eyes went wide. My left knee was on a roll of copper wire, my right on tiles. I trembled. My eyes never left her. She thought I was a Phoenician with a bow to my bottom lip. She sent the pain away, dismissed it, pulled me to her and felt like she had felt on the day she discovered surf, fear and pleasure, pulled this way, tumbled that without being able to control or understand it; but there was also a place in the water where you melted into it and she found the place and gave herself over to it until the swoon, the swoon she had felt in Annette's arms started to approach like a cloud of distant bees.

"Mr Badgery!" Down below us, unseen, Molly McGrath, in apron, her arms full of snapdragons.

"Yes," I called. "Yes."

"Would you like a cup of tea when you've finished?"

Phoebe giggled. I placed my hand across her mouth, but gently.

"Thank you, Mrs McGrath."

We smiled at each other and she nibbled the fingers of my censoring hand, but her mother's voice had changed me and I moved swiftly, thrust guiltily, made love to her like a thief with the eyes of the tower glaring down on me.

I reared back suddenly.

Phoebe watched the semen spurt in the sunlight. I held her hand. She looked at the cloudy sperm, red tiles. As she scrambled for her clothes, she did not have time to think about how she felt.

"You go first," she told me. "Go and have tea with her." The first words she'd spoken to me in eight weeks.

"What about the ladder?"

"I don't need a ladder."

Phoebe McGrath kissed Herbert Badgery. She kissed him on the nose. She kissed him on his Phoenician's mouth.

And then I was gone, scurrying off like a burglar, leaving behind my pliers and my wet cloud of semen. Phoebe tried to think what she felt but could not touch what it was. The semen on the roof looked like mucus from your nose, yet it was full of life. It was dying in the sun where no one could see it.

She put her finger in it and wrote "Phoebe loves Herbert" on a tile.

She held her finger to her nose. It smelt like flour and water.

I cannot say that Jack's feelings did not enter my head, but rather that I trussed and tethered them and threw them into some back room in my mind where I would not hear them struggling. Now, as I drag these old items out, I am surprised at the number I chose to forget (a wife and child in Dubbo come to mind) and how effectively I did it.

I felt strong and confident and wonderful to be alive. I poured tea for Molly in the front parlour and accepted one of Bridget's heavy lamingtons as my right. I devoured it with pleasure, and took a second one when it was offered. In the afternoon I would go to the Barwon Common and service the Morris Farman. I looked forward to it. I had brand new plugs to fit, a new oil seal, and twenty feet of piano wire for new rigging. I would clean the magneto again, time it, and have the Renault engine looking clean and splendid for the backers to whom I would demonstrate the wonders of flight.

I stretched and yawned. There was a soft noise above the ceiling, a pattering.

My hostess stared at the ceiling, a deep frown creasing her forehead, a lamington held between thumb and forefinger. I returned her anxious smile.

"A possum," I said.

"Surely not."

"Almost certainly," I said, and languidly constructed a tale about how, during my attempts to fix the tile I had been confronted with "a big brown fellow" who had "a brush-tail as thick as your arm".

"No," said Molly, putting down her lamington and holding her hands tightly together.

"And cocky as all get out," I said. "Sat there like Jacky and wouldn't budge."

"You don't say."

"In clear daylight." I saw the possum with complete clarity as it came to take its position, the position Phoebe had occupied in the dazzling moment when she appeared on the top of the ridge.

"And wouldn't go away?" Molly shivered.

"No harm," I said, but I was surprised to see goose-flesh on my hostess's arms.

"I live in terror," she said, leaning forward and shifting in her chair a little so that her dimpled knee almost touched me. There was hardly room for a piece of French toast to slide through the space between our knees. She meant nothing untoward. She was merely moving closer to seek the protection of a man, an instinctive move she was not even aware of having made.

"In terror?" I asked as she put her hand on my arm.

"In terror. Do you know," and she widened her eyes accordingly, "a very good friend of mine, a dear lady, very sweet, was in a house, her house, when a possum", she held her white throat with a hand where Jack's gifts glittered expensively, "came down the chimney and quite destroyed…" she waved her hand around the room, "everything."

"Surely not." I discreetly separated my penis from the spot where it had glued to my woollen underpants.

Molly blinked and drank her tea.

Phoebe appeared silently in the doorway.

"I was telling your mother, Miss McGrath," I said, "that I have seen possums on the roof."