Peter Carey: Illywhacker

Phoebe pulled a face at the dusty window.

"She is waiting for life to come and court her, and it will, in exactly the way she thinks it will. She doesn't need to work, or think."

Phoebe flattened her nose against the glass. "A nose like a pig," she thought, "in a street full of pigs."

"You have to work," Annette said softly. "And think. If you go on like this, you're going to be very unhappy."

Phoebe felt it. She felt the unhappiness push into her, thread itself through her like piano wire, push out through her stomach and bind her wrists. "You're horrid," she said, betrayed. The face behind the rain-flecked dusty window crumpled and her shoulders collapsed.

Annette drew the curtain slowly, discreetly, so as to attract no attention from the curious Mr Wilson who was laying out tomato seedlings not twenty feet away, and then (only then) held the crying girl and buried her face in the blissful softness of her neck.

"Why are you so horrid, Dicksy?"

"Because", Annette hissed, surprised at her own passion, "you are waiting for something to happen to you. You must do something."

"I will do something," Phoebe said quietly, running a finger thoughtfully across her lover's lips. "It will just be something unusual. It will not be something I can plan for. It won't be what you expect or what I expect either."

"What will it be?" Annette whispered, but by then she was no longer interested in the answer and she rubbed her nose into the softness of my darling's eye.

"It will be something," Phoebe said. "I guarantee you."

Later, when she was in Sydney being notorious, Phoebe went around telling people that she had "foreknowledge" of the event. She had known she would see my aeroplane suspended in the sky above Vogelnest's paddocks at Balliang East. She convinced many people, and I won't say it can't be true. In any case, it is a pretty story, so I will leave it hovering there, like an aeroplane, alone in the sky, gliding towards her with a dead engine.

Phoebe sat on the big kitchen table and kicked her legs and listened to the commotion, the little cries of pleasure, as her mother and Bridget set about packing the hamper. Phoebe frowned and bit her nails. She watched her mother like a parent who knows a child will shortly stumble. In that odd household it was the parents who were the children: Jack and Molly fussing over each other, touching each other, walking around the roses hand in hand, turtle-doving and cooing at fifty years of age while their only child watched them, nervous lest they hurt themselves.

They did not understand Geelong society. They were friendly and neighbourly. They offered hatfuls of hens' eggs across the fence.

Phoebe understood Geelong all too well. She shuddered when she heard that her mother had invited the A. D. Collinses to a picnic at Balliang East. Molly and Mrs Collins were on the committee for the Wyuna Nursing Home, and although they were both on the committee because their husbands were rich, in Molly's case this was the only reason. Molly did not know the other reasons even existed. She thought she could ask Mrs Collins to a picnic.

It was perfectly clear that the A. D. Collinses would not come and then there would be food not eaten and her mother would become brighter and brighter, chattier and chattier, and the moment would come when a particular laugh – Phoebe would recognize it instantly – would shudder and twitch and then fall apart in tears.

Phoebe jumped down off the table and embraced her mother. Molly was white-skinned and ginger-haired, sweet and soft as roly-poly pudding.

"Isn't it lovely?" Molly said. And Bridget stood back so that they might admire the hamper.

"Yes," said Phoebe. "It's lovely."

It was probably just as well the Collinses would not come. The McGraths always picnicked at the most dreadful places. They picnicked without shame; they picnicked thick-skinned and jolly at places Phoebe would not have stopped to spit at.

Phoebe no longer pleaded and no longer sulked. She understood the parameters of the picnics all too well. E. g. they could not go to the beach because of the sand. They must keep away from areas frequented by mosquitoes, trees with limbs that might fall, forests through which bush fires might suddenly sweep, places known to be frequented by bull ants or similar in soil or vegetation to places where bull ants had been observed. Last, and most important of all, there must be plenty of running water, water of impeccable credentials (a river, with the constant risk of dead heifers just a mile upstream, was quite unacceptable).

A good brass tap was, to Molly McGrath, the thing around which a good picnic could confidently be built.

They all knew, or thought they knew, that there was something wrong with Molly's brain. Neither father nor daughter mentioned it, but why else did they pamper her so, bring her bowls of bread and warm milk, and fuss over her like an invalid when she was – anyone could see -strong as an ox. Molly worked at her picnics like she tended her roses or worked on her veggie garden, breathlessly. Phoebe could feel terrors in the air when the cries of delight were loudest. Her mother was a creature building a fragile stick nest on a beach that will shortly be deluged by tide. She made happy optimistic cries but a practised observer would see she did not quite believe them.

However, the first time I saw the ritual of picnic preparation, I saw no terrors. I saw Molly's fine green eyes alight with anticipation, heard her laugh, saw her throw her small plump hands into the air with girlish delight, watched the same ringed hands accompany the hamper, like an escort of anxious doves, to the trunk of the Hispano Suiza.

And what newcomer, seeing the hamper, the car, the excitement of the hostess's eyes, would understand why Phoebe's lips were so pale and eyes so dull?

Jack McGrath was a man who was happiest without a collar. He preferred his trousers a size too large and his boots loosely laced. You might confuse the roll of his walk with that of a sailor's, but you have not made the study of walks I have – this was not a sailor's walk, it was the walk of a man who has covered twenty thousand dusty miles beside his bullock teams. He had drunk champagne from metal pannikins and called it "Gentleman's Grog". He had slept beneath his wagon and on top of it. He had hidden his gold in a hollowed-out yoke and drunk from dams that held more mud than water. He had, before he became a rich man, eaten a picturesque array of animals, reptiles, and birds. But he was not, not in any way, upset by his wife's restrictions in regard to picnics. "It was as if", Phoebe said later, "he wasproud of the whole nonsense mother went on with, as if it suggested some height of gentility and femininity few women might hope to attain. I don't think he ever saw how bleak the picnic spots were. All he could see was an advertisement for the sensitivity of his wife's beautiful skin. He was very proud of her."

Good dear Jack would never understand why anyone would slight his wife. He could not see that there was any difference between a picnic and having a drink with old A. D. (which he did often enough) in Finch's Railway Hotel. He would never learn the difference between having a drink with a man and sharing a feed with his family. You never met a man who seemed to make so few social distinctions. He would have anyone to his house who would come – bishops and rabbit-ohs, limping ex-servicemen and flash characters from the racetrack. They brought him presents or took him down, told lies or their true life stories and he stamped his foot and filled their glasses and took them for joy-rides in the Hispano Suiza. He was one of the worst drivers I ever met. He had no feel for machinery at all. (In all the years I sold cars to cockies I only met three men who were worse, and one of them killed himself on that narrow bridge at Parwan North.)