Peter Carey - Illywhacker

When her arm cracked she knew it broken. She leapt to her feet. The light was shining into her mother's window the wrong way, and she could not see Molly, only the reflection of her own nakedness. She was winded.

She heard Mrs Kentwell's umbrella tattoo. They locked eyes a second: the naked girl and the black soldier with the umbrella rifle. She moaned as she ran across the veranda in full sight of two Dodges which were racing fast along Western Avenue. One blew its horn.

Damn them, damn them, damn them all.

Yet before she had closed her bedroom door behind her, a change had come over my beloved who was no longer wishing for death but already making plans for her survival.

It is no struggle to imagine the desperate alibis that came to her -half-formed jelly-like things with no proper legs or faces, desperate creatures that fell to powder when inspected, invisible cloaks with holes in them. They swarmed through the sea of pain as she awaited her mother's inevitable arrival. The arm was useless. She dressed none the less. She bit into her lip to stop the hurt. She had mud on her bottom. She managed to get herself inside a dress, and in all this desperation she was careful to choose a yellow dress that was very similar to the one she had abandoned on the roof.

Inept stories came to her, e. g. she had gone on to the roof to fix a tile; she had taken off her dress to avoid ruining it in the rain; worn no underwear for similar reason.

No, damn it.

When the knock on the door came she was still not ready.

"Come in," she said brightly.

She prepared her face for her mother, opened the door with her good arm, and found not Molly, but me, my face livid with fear, my hands trembling.

"Go away," she hissed, "for God's sake."

I was so pleased to see her in one piece, alive, felt such relief that I was faint and wanted to sit down. I opened my mouth and croaked relief.

"Your buttons are undone. Go away." She pushed at me. She "was more than my equal. She was definitely my superior, for she had, at last, a plan, flimsy, fragile, but one she would make work by the sheer force of her green-eyed will. "I am not in the house," she whispered. "Take them to sit in the parlour at lunchtime andwatch the esplanade."

"Are you all right?"

"Yes, yes, but did you hear me? Then please, I beg you, do what I say."

She closed the door and locked it. I did up my buttons as Jack skidded the Hispano Suiza to a halt and left a new set of skid marks on the bright green lawn.

The morning's drizzle had turned into heavy rain and the wagon driver with his high load of turnips huddled inside the black oilskin while his fox terrier ran along beneath.

The rain bit into her, sweeping across a bay so hateful that anyone could see the town was right to turn its back on it.

"So much the better," she thought, "so much the better for me to run in this, and slip." But when she came around the corner of Martha Street where she had waited for her wet-glassed wrist-watch to bring its hands to one o'clock, the pain was so intense that she almost fainted. She was soaked through and shivering. She stopped and huddled against one of the esplanade's few trees.

At the other end of the avenue a small grey figure with an umbrella battled into the wind.

It was one minute past one. She prayed her audience were assembled in the parlour, that some talk about aeroplanes would not distract them from her fall.

Jonathon Oakes, the Kentwells' brother, beat into the wind with his illicit letters bulging fat inside the pocket of his waistcoat. He did not lift his umbrella. He was nearly home. He would run the bath and read his letters in delicious privacy.

Phoebe seized this chance that fate had thrown up. She waited for the umbrella to come a little closer to her parents' house before she began to run.

Every step jolted her. She ran with a pitiful "oh, oh, oh" which she said to herself for comfort, a soft cotton-wool bandage of sound around the pain.

For a second he believed he had speared the girl with his umbrella.

Molly McGrath remained in the parlour while the men carried in her wounded daughter. People afterwards remarked to themselves on the curious stillness of the mother who would normally have darted about the room in hysterical activity, billing, cooing, ooohing, and making far too much noise and flutter for most people's taste.

She remained seated by the electric fire with the flex wound round her ankle (a tangle so odd that no one dared point it out to her) and smiled a fixed smile at Mr Oakes who had a small brandy to settle himself down.

She smiled the same smile at the doctor who arrived at short notice with his luncheon gravy still wet on his tie.

She smiled the same fixed smile at the pale, brave-chinned daughter who, lying in state on rugs and pillows in the parlour, shuddered a little before such icy radiance, imagining that her mother had seen through her deception.

She need not have worried. It was the sort of smile you save for the Devil, an attempt at sarcasm in the face of provocative coincidence.

It was not even Easter and winter had come to Ryrie Street. The owners of T Models put up their side curtains. The vendors in Anderson's Fruit and Produce Markets held cauliflowers in large red hands and the bottle-oh with the cleft tongue rode his wagon wrapped tight in an old grey blanket and had his bottle-oh cries blown westwards before the icy gusts of wind. The big houses on the coast at Ocean Grove and Barwon Heads had been closed down. The jazz bands had returned, to Melbourne and the summer's flappers were safely subdued (on weekdays at least) inside the heavy uniforms of The Hermitage, Morongo, Merton Hall and MLC.

I dressed in my suit and walked along Ryrie Street like a gentleman, picking out the puddles with the point of my Shaftesbury Patented Umbrella. A connoisseur of walks might have detected that although my walk was indeed the walk of a gentleman, it also exhibited subtle but obvious signs of depression. What had changed in the walk was not easy to detect, may have been nothing more than a slight scrape of the sole on every third stride, a refusal to pick up the feet properly, a tendency to stumble on uneven paving.

I was in love, and although I had used the term a hundred times before (would have said that I was in love with Mrs O'Hagen had you asked) had, in short, misunderstood, misused, and abused the term, confused it with lust or friendship or the simple pleasures of a warm breast, or a wild whooping fuck on a river bank, I had not known what I was talking about.

For two weeks I had groaned in my sleep and tossed and turned. I was denied the roof.1 was denied the merest civility as my plaster-armed beloved affected normality.

Did she blame me for her fall? Did she hate me for jeopardizing her life? I did not know, could get no answer, merely watch her as she took up occupations she had previously rejected. She had taken to socializing with the sons of squatters once again. She had gone, with high hemlines, to "At Homes" and balls, and left me jealous, half mad, to cluck with her parents who were concerned she might be mixing with a fast crowd. I shared their concern. I made it worse. I rubbed at it until it was red and blistered. I wished them to order her to cease, not just the squatters but also the history lessons. I knew what those history lessons were about. But Jack was indulgent, and Molly distracted, and I could get no commitment from them to do anything.

I tried to corner Phoebe in hall or music room, but I could get no reassurance. She hissed caution and passion all at once and did nothing to calm my fears. I attempted dangerous embraces in the bathroom and was savagely repelled. I tried to catch her eyes between spoons of porridge but she refused the very possibility and smiled dutifully at her father and asked serious questions about capital, loans, the structure of companies and the future of an aircraft factory in Geelong.