Peter Carey - Illywhacker

I lived for my family, and for Phoebe in particular, who waited in her room for my gentle knock.

Melbourne was a city of dreams and my darling was drunk on them. She made, with her own hands, a bright yellow flying suit and made love to me in it, allowing me entry through the opening she had so skilfully designed. The Morris Farman quivered on its guy ropes beneath the moon, before the wind at Maribyrnong.

In the next room Molly rang for room service and regaled old Klaus with tales of Point's Point while he allowed himself a glass or two of the creme de menthe that the widow, magnificent in crepe de Chine, was pleased to offer him.

Annette said she would attend no wedding in a church and it was for her sake that the wedding was held in the register office in William Street, a dusty dismal place which we pretended not to notice. Annette did not- arrive, so there was no bridesmaid. Dr Grigson, invited to give away the bride, had missed his train and arrived, puffing and blowing out his sallow cheeks, at the wedding breakfast with a patented electric device for toasting bread which he, confused about whose wedding it was, presented to Molly with a pretty speech.

We had a small private room on the first floor of the Oriental. The windows looked out, through the leaves of a plane tree, on to the dappled footpaths of Collins Street along which the Saturday trams full of football crowds rattled, ringing bells.

When Dr Grigson, formally attired in tails, pronounced the gathering splendid, he was, as was his habit, choosing his words carefully – he did not overstate the case.

Molly wore an emerald green tunic and a dress of gold tusser. She crowned her splendour with a wide-brimmed hat from which ostrich feathers cascaded in spectacular abundance.

Phoebe appeared for the breakfast in a navy and red faille dress with a matching poncho that was short and tailored and did nothing to hide the hugging dress which, as I remarked appreciatively, used no more fabric than was absolutely necessary. She wore a fur hat, a little like a fez, which had the disadvantage of hiding her copper hair but which capped her head tightly and presented her handsome face so pleasingly.

"I could fancy", Grigson said, "that I was sitting, this very moment, in Paris."

I was so happy I could not find it in my heart to ask the old gentleman what was wrong with sitting in Melbourne.

We toasted everyone. We toasted Jack, solemn in black suit and bulging collar, whose photograph Molly had arranged to hang beside the King's. We toasted Annette. We toasted Geelong.

Molly added a little creme de menthe to her champagne.

"To a new life", she declared, "for all of us."

Only Dr Grigson, suddenly reminded of the realities of Ballarat, saw reason to doubt it.

It can be argued, of course, that I should have consulted my fiance about the house she was to share with me, to ask her advice, opinion, needs, to see the bedroom pointed in a direction that was pleasing and the layout of the kitchen was a practical one. Shopping at the Port Melbourne tip, she should, you say, have been by my side, and may well have selected a different piece of carpet, a different Coolgardie safe, a better chair, and so on.

I dare say you're right, but the house was my present to her and as it represented no more than the core of the mansion I intended to finally construct, could be altered, pulled apart, demolished and rebuilt, I saw no harm in it. Saw no harm in it! I saw great benefit. It was my gift, my surprise, my work, my love, my tribute to her.

She loved it. As we bounced along the pot-holed track through yellow summer grass she exclaimed with joy. There was confetti spangled on her fur hat. The blustering northerly wind blew dust into her eyes.

She jumped from the car before I stopped. She ran through the house in echoing high heels. She kissed and hugged me. She called me husband.

I never guessed how differently she saw the place. That while her delight summoned up future towers and libraries in my mind, winding paths, flower borders, shrubbery, ancient elms, ponds and statues, children running with hoops and spinning-tops, my confetti-spangled wife saw nothing more than a camp.

It was this she thought so wonderful, and when she wrote her letters to Annette she would talk about it like a gypsy, a place to sing and dance and make love in, but nothing permanent. Phoebe loved it because it wasn't bourgeois. She loved it because it seemed to reject rose bushes and afternoon tea. She enjoyed (my perverse beloved) the rank foul smell that came drifting from the abattoirs, that gave an odd dimension to sunsets and storms in the sky above, and an unexpected perfume to the long-legged ibises.

Our wedding day was a dangerous day for flying. The howling northerly stole great fistfuls of red dust from the over-settled Mallee country, and carried it three hundred miles to throw it spitefully into our faces. But Phoebe, if she felt the spite, ignored it. She wished to consummate our partnership by flying. When she shed her splendid clothes it was not to lie between the stolen sheets, but to dress again in her flying suit and strap on her goggles.

I could not deny her, yet as I swung the prop, I was taken suddenly by the fear that was soon to become the dominant emotion of my life, that an accident would take my treasure from me. I saw her, as I grasped the prop and she, inside her cockpit, flicked the little bakelite switch to the "on" position; I saw her broken, bleeding. She held her thumb up, such a fragile thing, the bone a mere three-eighths of an inch, the skin as snug and fragile as the dope-tight fabric on an aircraft wing. The engine sputtered, then took, and I ran through the swirl of dust, carrying my butcher-shop nightmares, pulling my goggles over my eyes.

We were blown into the air before we had speed, kangaroo-hopped twice, swayed and tilted dangerously before we got the height to clear the dull red brick of the abattoirs. We bounced in the turbulent sky above the Maribyrnong, our noses full of the stink of rendering sheep boiling into tallow just below.

That twenty-minute flight was as frightening as any I ever made, and although I let my bride take the dual controls momentarily, I was forever overriding her, and I took a course out and along Port Phillip Bay, following the hot white beaches in case it was necessary to put down.

When I judged (incorrectly) that she had had enough, I brought the craft back to the river to land it. The ground ran east-west and made no allowance for the blustering northerly. I made no less than five attempts and aborted them as the gusts threatened to smash us sideways to the ground. When, on the sixth attempt, I landed it gracelessly, I whispered a small prayer to the god I did not believe existed and made a number of extravagant promises as payment for our safe delivery.

The exhilaration Phoebe showered on me was sufficient to make me forget the promises, one of which was related to obtaining a divorce from Marjorie Thatcher Badgery, a matter I had neglected to attend to so far and one that I would continue to neglect until it was brought to my attention in a manner I was to find uncomfortable.

We will come, in more detail, later, to the aphrodisiac effect of flying on Phoebe Badgery. Let me merely say that when we returned to the house Phoebe gave not a damn that the floor was adrift with Mallee dust and when she made love to her new husband she accompanied herself with a torrent of words, a hot obscenity that shocked me even while it brought a seemingly endless flow of semen pumping from my balls. It was an auspicious beginning for Charles Badgery who was conceived on that afternoon from the joining of his dry-mouthed father and ecstatic mother in a house whose dry Coolgardie safe contained nothing more than a loaf of stale bread and a tin billy of melted butter.