Peter Carey - Illywhacker

Of course I loved her for more than breasts and tongue. I had never stood so naked and felt so whole. She spoke like a ventriloquist speaks, hardly moving her splendid lips. It was a constant wonder that words emerged at all and that, when they did, they were so velvet soft, the tips of fingers encircling my ears. It was she who was the magician, and I the apprentice.

"We will invent ourselves," she said.

Geelong did not exist for us. We were oblivious to discomfort in our inconvenient nest. We lay, sat, squatted together in the valley of the roof while Molly lay, half crazy, on her bed below and Jack was entertained by his backers in gardens of Western District sheep.

"Will you teach me to fly?"

"My word, yes."

"Could we fly to Europe?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever made love to a man?"

"Good grief, no."

"I have made love to a woman," she said.

I was shocked, jealous, lustful and my voice was hoarse, half strangled with it all. "What woman?"

"You must teach her to fly too."

It is no wonder I did not take to Annette. I was jealous of her before I met her.

The hair around my penis was already damp and matted but when Phoebe extended her white hand the organ seemed to reach out towards the hand.

"Just like a flower", she wrote complacently in her notebook, "towards the sun."

Molly had not seen Phoebe climb on to the roof or me follow her. Yet she had a strong sense that something was wrong. This sense overpowered her and gave her what she called "her symptoms": a feeling of vertigo, like the panic she felt on high bridges, ledges, winding mountain roads. And once this feeling had appeared, like an old crow from a childhood nightmare, it stayed there and brought its own fear with it and she bitterly regretted the day she had so rashly thrown away the electric belt.

The electric belt had been purchased in 1890 from the Electro-Medical and Surgical Institute, a three-storey building in Sturt Street, Ballarat. Molly had been fourteen. She sat in the office of Dr Grigson with her two young brothers and her aunt, Mrs Ester. Mrs Ester's real name was Mrs Ester McGuinness but she was known as Mrs Ester to everyone in Ballarat and she was the licensee of the Crystal Palace Hotel.

Mrs Ester was in her late thirties. She had a slim figure, thrown slightly out of kilter by the unusual length of her body in relationship to her legs. She had a high head, a longish chin and quite extraordinary cherubic lips of which (together with her small, arched feet) she was secretly proud. Her eyes had a tendency to bulge and Dr Grigson, on first sighting her, had privately diagnosed a tendency towards an overactive thyroid gland.

Mrs Ester did not much like children but she had a strong sense of responsibility and these three children beside her were her brother's and it was her duty to safeguard them properly. The minute she knew of Molly's mother's madness she knew what had to be done and she used her newly installed telephone to call Grigson for an appointment, although she could, almost as easily, have walked across the street.

There were plenty of people in Ballarat who made fun of Grigson, men Mrs Ester thought should have known better. But Grigson occasionally took a small brandy in her establishment and she had felt honoured to listen to his talk of Pasteur and Lister and the Power of Electricity, the latter being a proven method for dealing not only with such things as constipation but also general debilitation and hereditary madness.

She was impressed by Dr Grigson's offices. They were a hymn to modernism and enlightenment. Models of the human body displayed the electric invigorators. Smartly dressed secretaries used telephones, Remington typewriters, and what she later discovered to be Graphaphone dictating machines. Mrs Ester, having seen the doctor (small, neat, precise, with a slightly Prussian appearance) driving his Daimler Benz down Lydiard Street, had expected modernism, but she had not been prepared for the scale of it.

Molly McGrath was Molly Rourke and she was fourteen. She sat wedged in between Mrs Ester and her brother Walter and saw none of what was around her. One of the secretaries offered her a sweet in a coloured wrapper. Molly shook her head and triggered off an echo of shaken heads in the two small boys. She had long copper hair that fell across her shoulders. Her young body reflected her diet of bread and potatoes. Her dimpled knees were properly hidden beneath her threadbare dress.

Walter had pooed his pants again. She had her nostrils full of the smell as she gazed down at the patterned carpet (roses and delphiniums entwined) and was unusually quiet: she thought everyone was looking at her because she was mad.

It was not like Molly to be so quiet. Her mother had called her "my song bird", not because she sang, but because she laughed. She was cheerful, inquisitive, energetic. She did not have to be told to get up in the mornings. She dressed her brothers, lit the fires, and often as not cooked breakfast. She did not complain, as Walter did, about her chilblains or pick at her warts. She could multiply 765 by 823 in her head, or any other number you liked to give her. No one had ever thought she was mad.

It had not even occurred to her that her mother was mad. Mrs Rourke was pale and wiry with dark sunken eyes and if she spent a lot of time being angry she also laughed, and Molly loved those rare sweet moments between storms when her mother was suddenly pink and warm and the troubles of the world were a long way away and then she would sing the soft Irish songs she had learned from her own mother who had carried them to Australia on a perilous voyage and arrived to find half Victoria afire and their ship had its sails set alight by the flying ashes from the bushfires.

It was Molly who had discovered her mother, early in the morning while her father was still at the bakery. She had hanged herself in the wash-house. There was one black shoe on her foot, not properly laced, and the other dropped on the broken stool she had climbed on. The smell of her opened bowels and the bulging, black eyes fused, in that dreadful moment, into one single thing, not a shape, not a colour, not a picture, but a feeling that burned itself into her. It was, at once, as hard as steel and as ghostly as a smell and it was this feeling that enveloped her still in Geelong nearly thirty years later while Phoebe and I were possums on the roof.

When Molly discovered her mother she did not scream. She dressed her brothers and took them next door to Mrs Henderson. She then walked two miles to the bakery where her father worked. She was made to wait for half an hour before she was permitted to see her father and then she watched while the big flour-dusted man roared and wept and rolled in the icy street while the cold winds blew through her thin dress. She listened to the loud cracks as he hit his head and thought that he must die too. She did not cry.

Mrs Ester was called in. She took the necessary steps. A funeral was organized and there was a wake at the Crystal Palace Hotel, in the private rooms, where Mrs Ester surprised everybody by singing "The Shan Van Vogt" and everybody became very Irish and very stirred and chose to remember that the dead woman's father had had his leg broken by policemen at the Eureka Stockade. They embraced Molly and made her eat slices of bread and butter.

After the wake Mrs Ester took the business of madness in hand. She had a small talk with Molly in the Ladies' Parlour of the Crystal Palace Hotel.

"I'm telling you cause you're the eldest – it wasn't just your mother."

Molly played with her dress which had been dyed black for mourning. The dye was not holding. It left black marks on her fingers. She knew that this conversation was not easy for Mrs Ester who had closed the hatch to the bar and shut the door to the passage. It was dark in the parlour and it smelt of floor polish and Brasso and stale stout and smoke.