Peter Carey - Illywhacker

At about the time Molly arrived, torn and panting, in her room, young Dave McCorkell was suspended twenty feet above the Sandy River retrieving Dr Grigson's Electric Invigor-ator.

He carried his treasure back to where his rabbits lay in a patch of new sunshine. He could not imagine what this treasure was for, but thinking about the cloudy, unnameable, unknowable possibilities made his penis become stiff. He scratched his bare legs and resolved to keep it a secret.

Yet a week after Molly Rourke's Protestant wedding to Jack McGrath everyone in Point's Point knew the whole story about Molly Rourke: that she had worn, for all her time amongst them, an electrically operated chastity belt.

But by then Molly and Jack were on their way to Geelong, Jack marvelling at the way he had managed to make the decision so quickly whilst Molly sat rigid in the train seat: her future madness hung before her, dangling by a rope in her mind's eye.

Molly stayed in bed while the voices assailed her.

She had always liked flowers. There had been no flowers in her youth, just a backyard with puddles of stale water unnoticed by sunshine. She tried to think of flowers now, to enjoy what little the view from her bedroom afforded in March. She loved the tender, brilliant complications of flowers, like the folds of ball dresses. She cared more for her flowers than the Hispano Suiza or the house or the society of important people who always left her feeling as if she had been unworthy of their company. But flowers had always made her feel better and she looked at them and drew from them that nectar that Annette Davidson might hope to draw from art.

She had planned her garden in Geelong so that there was always something to see from her bedroom window.

But today was not a good day. The canna lilies, rich red and pretty pink, occupied the midground of her view, and the creamy chrysanthemums the foreground. Yet there was no joy to be had here, and it was not because there was a fine drizzle of rain falling, or because the winds of early winter had begun to whip across Corio Bay making the water an unpleasant green-grey.

Petals loosened themselves and fell and whilst, on a happier day, this early destruction of a flower would have caused her anxiety, today there were other things preying on her mind.

There were voices in the house, and no one else in it.

She had fare welled her daughter to the library. She had seen Herbert Badgery walk away down the esplanade. It was Bridget's day off. She was all by herself and she had, twice, put on her dressing gown and walked through every room of the house and around the wide veranda. There was no one in the house but there were voices. It was not the wireless, which she had disconnected from the wall, nor His Master's Voice.

She retired to bed with voices in her ears. She was having tiny explosions in her head. She detected malice in the voices. Her bed was too far off the floor and made her giddy. She lay in the bed, pale and sweating, while her green eyes viewed the garden from a bed of puffy flesh.

It was then, as one particularly vicious gust of wind shook the branches of the leafless peach tree and bent the fleshy green stalks of the canna lilies until their faces were pressed into the ground, that the naked figure of her daughter sailed slowly through the air above her eyes. She did not seem to merely fall, but to move with dream-like slowness, transcribing an arc while the coppery triangle of her pubic hair, until now protected from her mother's gaze, was exposed quite clearly to its anxious audience.

The figure landed with a thud on the grass beyond the canna lilies.

It said: "Hoof."

Molly McGrath was beset with hot prickling skin and a thundering heart which she tried to still with the pressure of her hand. She saw her daughter stand, and saw her arm hang like a broken wing.

Molly McGrath whimpered and curled her fifty-year old body into a shaking ball beneath the sheets.

When Jack McGrath arrived home, triumphant from his negotiations in Colac, he had great difficulty in persuading his wife to leave her bed. The slightly fixed smile she brought to the table made him feel very uneasy indeed.

I find myself, with Phoebe in mid-air, wondering about Mrs Kentwell's nipples, and whether they were ever sucked by man or child, and by God one is tempted to imagine her little black-suited cricket of a brother with his soft child's lips sucking at them, snorting and moaning, and Mrs Kentwell's teeth in a glass on the dresser, but I can't stretch to it, and will content myself with more or less established facts.

Jonathon Oakes, Mrs Kentwell's brother, stole letters.

He was twice arrested, but never charged. He followed the postman like a nervous dog, always at a distance, hiding in the gateways, behind hedges, dipping into unknown letterboxes in hope of news. He also had two post office boxes of his own, to which certain private correspondences were addressed.

It is easy enough to understand why he got himself into this state, because Mrs Kentwell ruled the house in Western Avenue with an ivory-handled paper knife on which was engraved the image of an elephant-headed god from India.

On the day in question, Jonathon Oakes was doing his rounds and Mrs Kentwell was taking tea alone in the drawing room. She poured with a steady hand and placed the cup and saucer to her left. She then slit open each of the morning's letters with her paper knife. She removed the stamps and placed them in a neat pile and then removed the contents of each envelope. Those from her friends in England she placed on the top, those from Assam (there were two) were placed underneath. The two local letters were for her brother but she would, as usual, read them before he did (which would not be until she had dealt with matters in Assam and England). He was far too timid a fellow to protest at this high-handedness, but not such a dull one that he would not take his own compensation.

As Alice Kentwell concentrated on parish problems in a village in Kent, her brother was puffing up the hill from his morning's work, anxious to get home before he was soaked by rain. Phoebe, meanwhile, was flying from the roof.

Mrs Kentwell looked up just in time to witness Phoebe's fall. She stood, immediately, substituted paper knife for umbrella and strode out on to the veranda in the style of a woman about to lay low a marauding snake. She tapped the metal point of the umbrella up and down on the wooden floor. She hissed. The naked figure of Phoebe McGrath ran with its rag of a broken arm, while the umbrella played an angry tattoo.

Mrs Kentwell was not astonished. She was beyond astonishment. Western Avenue, she decided, must stand up and fight if it was to remain anything at all.

She stood on the veranda, a tall straight figure in severe black which had begun as mourning for a dead husband and now seemed to represent a different mourning altogether. Mrs Kentwell mourned the lost standards of English civilization which wilted and died in this society of Irish peasants and jumped-up cockneys.

She was still on the veranda, a black sentry with a black umbrella, when yours truly, Herbert Badgery, the ruffian aviator, walked across the roof of the McGrath house and climbed down a fig tree, arranged clothes, and strode out of sight around the north side of the house which had once been known as "Wirralee".

She tapped the umbrella once, a full stop to everything, and returned to her letters whose fine calligraphy danced before her eyes, unravelling before the pull of her anger.

When Phoebe fell from the slippery roof she knew, before she hit the ground, that her life was ruined. As the real world rushed up to meet her, she knew she was not brave enough to be what she would like to be. In mid-air, naked, she wished for death, her chest crushed, her heart pierced, her legs snapped like quail bones. Her feelings were not those of a radical, Bohemian, free-lover, but a seventeen-year-old girl in Geelong who faces social ruin.