Peter Carey - Illywhacker

Mrs Ester was not at ease with children. "Do you see what I'm getting at?"

"No, Mrs Ester."

"What I am saying is that it wasn't just your mother. Do you see what I'm getting at?"

But Molly did not.

Mrs Ester sighed. She fiddled with the big ring of keys she always wore hanging from her waist. "Your Granny Keogh was the same."

Same as what? Molly looked miserably at the painting of the green-eyed cat that hung crookedly beneath the shelf of china ornaments that were intended to make the parlour cosy.

"Do you see my point? For heaven's sake, girl, she drowned herself in Lake Wendouree."

This news was horrible but made no sense. It got mixed up with the smell of whisky on her aunt's breath, the darkness of the room, the green eyes of the cat and the reverence with which Patchy the barman, having blundered into the room, retreated from it, his larrikin's head oddly bowed.

Mrs Ester was at her best dealing with the brewery or asking a drinker to leave without offence. She was, by habit, a blunt woman, and this beating around the bush did not suit her at all. She did not intend to be unkind. She was now merely intent on not prolonging the agony.

"I am not having you hanging yourself," she said, "here or elsewhere, now or later."

And having, at last, delivered herself of her burden, she sat with her hands folded on her lap and her head on one side.

"Oh," Molly said, "I promise you. I promise, Mrs Ester, I never would."

"It is not a thing you can promise, poor child," said Mrs Ester, suddenly hugging her fiercely, and crushing the child's nose into a brooch. "It will come up on you. One minute you will be singing and happy and the next… I will take you to Grigson," she said.

Molly had wailed. She had howled, sentenced in the Ladies' Parlour, and felt the black dye of her dress insinuate itself into the pores of her skin.

Dr Grigson, as it turned out, was strange, but not unpleasant. The nicest thing about him was his hands which were soft and dry like talcum powder. When he touched her face or held her hand it had a lovely ministering quality which the girl found comforting. Everything about Dr Grigson was very neat and very clean. Molly had never smelt such a clean smell, on a man or a woman. He had small, stiff movements and when he turned his head he turned his shoulders as well, as if his head and body were all of a piece and had no independence at all.

"I see no reason", he said, "why you should end the same way as your mother and grandmother. Modern Science", said the promoter of Lister and Pasteur, "can do much for your condition."

"She doesn't understand," said Mrs Ester, who was accompanying each of the children on their interviews.

"Do you understand?" Dr Grigson asked her.

She nodded her head.

"Tell me, my child."

She did not want to say it. She did not have to repeat, with words, the fallen chair, the shoe still on the foot, the smell.

"I will go mad," she said in a very small voice, "and get up on a chair, and jump off."

"You will do no such thing," said Dr Grigson, "if I can help it."

She was relieved when he took her hand back. He asked her many questions. Did she see things falling? Did she hear voices? Was she prone to laughter in an excessive degree? ("Yes," said Mrs Ester.) Did she touch herself between the legs? Did she wake with palpitations?

He was like a nice nun, not the sort that hit your knuckles with a ruler and talked of sin and hellfire, but the other sort. He had gentle Jesus eyes.

"Amazing," Dr Grigson said turning in his chair to look through the window at the big white statue in the middle of Sturt Street. "The child", he swung back to face Mrs Ester, "must have an electric invigorator. With it she will have a long and happy life."

Molly multiplied 899 by 32 in her head. A small, light, happy calculation. It meant nothing. She multiplied in relief. A flood of numerals marched across her mind and swept away her misery.7,676 by 296, she thought, marching down the stairs behind her brothers. The answer seemed almost as long as life itself.

The day that Molly strapped on the apparatus around her waist, hid the battery in the folds of her dress, and stood before the doctor smiling, was the happiest day she could remember of her childhood, better, by far, than her first communion or the birthday picnic out at Creswick. She walked the wintry streets of Ballarat as one invincible. She went into St Mary's on the hill and prayed for an hour to the Blessed Virgin. She did some multiplications for God as well, presenting him, finally, with 5,895,323.

Ballarat stretched low and wide, from Battery Hill to the edges of the west. It was made from wood. Weatherboards and wide verandas lined wide streets that baked into claypans in summer, churned into mud in winter. They had planted oaks and bluegums in Sturt Street. They stocked Lake Wendouree with fish. They began to talk of Ballarat with civic pride, but it was Mrs Ester who showed real confidence in the future. She built the Crystal Palace Hotel from brick.

It stood high and solid, three storeys facing a Sturt Street that looked faint-hearted and pessimistic in comparison, as if the gold that had made the city rich might suddenly go away.

Mrs Ester did not worry about gold. The quartz crushers were already more important. The foundries were there. H. V. McKay was manufacturing harvesters which were sold all round the country. She had no need of the custom of miners who drank themselves into oblivion down in the shanties of the east and frittered away their fortunes on chilblained prostitutes. It is true she had a public bar that spilled its dubious contents on to Sturt Street on summer evenings: and there were miners amongst the shearers, fettlers, foundry men, farm labourers, clerks and tricksters and passing thieves, but she had not built her business on anything so flimsy.

The Duke of Kent stayed at the Crystal Palace Hotel in 1873 -that was the sort of hotel it was.

Molly had visited the Crystal Palace Hotel before her mother's death made it her permanent residence. They had come once for Christmas dinner and once for a funeral, but they had come with tingling skin scrubbed hard by a mother who felt out of place amongst such finery. They had come with new shoelaces, their eyes downcast, told not to stare at the lady with the cherub's lips and bulging eyes.

But now she could enter the Crystal Palace Hotel through the grand front entrance. She did not quite skip up the steps. She certainly did not laugh or giggle. But she could, whilst walking briskly, carrying the morning's newspapers, smiling sweetly at the guests, feel that she was a part of the complicated mechanism of this important place.

Her father had taken a room in a boarding house close to the bakery. Sean had been sent up to Creswick to the Rourkes' and Walter went to Ballarat South with the Kellys who wrote complaints about his bed-wetting. He had also been sent home from school with his underpants wrapped up in newspaper after soiling his pants in arithmetic class. And Molly had begun work as a housemaid for Mrs Ester. She was paid no money, but she was fed, given shelter, and she had her electric invigorator.

She worked hard and lost her fat. She rose at five and lit the fires. She toiled along the carpeted passages upstairs and the highly polished wooden ones downstairs. She could clean a room and leave it so that one would imagine it never slept in. She could clean a mirror so a guest might feel that no face had ever been reflected in it before. She collected squeezed lemons from the kitchen every Tuesday and went from brass doorknob to brass doorknob, rubbing them hard until the lemons fell to pieces in her hands and the brass gave up its grime to the sour sticky juice. She liked the hotel. She liked the quiet clink and rustle of breakfast in the dining room, the rumble of kegs being rolled down to the cellar, the smell of brewery horses, the songs in the saloon bar late at night, and the sound of Mrs Ester's high-heeled shoes and rattling key as she passed in the corridor on her way to bed.