Peter Carey - Illywhacker

He had written a poem to celebrate the event: "The poet, tongue-pierced, / Trussed, gagged, / By butcher's wife in Wil-liamstown."

I would never have viewed the funny-looking fellow as a competitor for my wife's affections, and in this I was both right and wrong. I doubt they ever shared much more than a peck on the cheek, and yet, I fear, there are poet's caresses that are more intimate for not being visible.

While I went to Billinsky's to buy my tin billy full of bortsch, I saw no more than one more steamed-up little cafe full of drunks in overcoats. I did not recognize the prostitutes and did not know it was a place for poets and artists to boast to each other and recite their works out loud.

I brought back soup from Billinsky's. I won't say it was not appreciated, but what Horace brought from there was treasured more. He spent his evenings drinking tea with jam in it and trying to overhear more prestigious conversations at other tables. He also knew Dawson's wine bar in Carlton where short-story writers and housebreakers rubbed drunken shoulders. He knew little rooms in Collins Street where painters lived in bare rooms divided by Japanese screens, rooming houses in East Melbourne whose moth-eaten felt letter racks held letters that might one day be published in books, whose polished brown linoleum floors led to tiny apartments where people waited until being called to fame in London or New York.

In short, he filled my darling's head with nonsense. He recited his poems and listened to her while Molly tilled the clay-heavy garden beds close by and kept a suspicious eye turned on the events inside the kitchen.

It was to Horace that Phoebe revealed her pregnancy, not me. It was with him that she discussed the complicated state of her emotions produced by the little gilled creature who stirred within her: blood, birth, life, death, fear, and the final decision that she could not, no matter what guilt it caused her, have this child.

The papers that year were full of abortionists being arrested and patients charged. She had already visited Dr Percy McKay who had since been arrested and put in Pentridge Gaol, but not before he had informed her that her body played tricks on her. She was not one month pregnant as she imagined, but nearly three. Dr McKay's last day of freedom was partly occupied with lecturing Phoebe Badgery on the dangers of a late abortion and her perfect situation (in terms of health and financial security) to have the child. He had put no weight on aviation or poetry. He had judged her doubly fortunate to have such hobbies.

From Phoebe's point of view the situation had now become quite desperate. She was anxious, angry, guilty; and frightened of what she read in the papers. Yet, at the same time, she could watch her own drama with an appreciative eye: here she was, twenty years old, married, in Melbourne, a poet in the kitchen, an aeroplane out the window, conspiring to procure a dangerous abortion without her husband's knowledge. All these things, the authentic and the false, the theatrical and the real, were all a part of her nature and I do not mean to belittle her by pointing them out.

"What", she asked Horace Dunlop, "are we to do?"

Phoebe could co-opt people like this – she included them in her life generously, without reserve, and included theirs in hers as readily.

"What are we to do?" she asked, and the poet was flattered and frightened as a clerk given a too rapid promotion. He had no idea what to do. He was an unprepared explorer about to embark in a leaking dug-out on a dangerous journey up a fetid river.

"I will make inquiries," he said, standing. "This evening."

"No, no, you mustn't go, not yet."

Molly coughed, loudly, outside the window.

"But I must, dear lady," Horace said, mournfully arranging his cravat, "must bid adieu."

Phoebe was at the shelf I was pleased to call the mantelpiece. She dug into a large biscuit canister.

"No," Horace said, holding up his hand. "I will not permit you to buy more."

"If I must buy a bottle to maintain your presence, then that is what I'll do," Phoebe smiled. "A bottle, sir, of your excellent product. If it would make my condition disappear I would pay you a thousand pounds."

"If I could make your condition disappear I would consider myself amply rewarded with nothing more", Horace said, "than to be permitted a kiss." And he blushed bright red.

"Mr Dunlop!" Phoebe said, but she was not displeased. "You are absolutely the most immoral man I have ever met."

"A poet", said Horace, "has his own order of morality."

"My husband would kill you just the same," Phoebe smiled. "Here is the florin for your balsam but perhaps you had better give me the bottle another time; I already have four of them."

The poet hesitated. He would rather have denied himself the florin, but he was too impoverished to allow himself the luxury. He took the money and dropped it into his jacket pocket where there was nothing for it to jingle against.

"There will be no doctor in Melbourne who will touch you," he said. He was probably right. The press was in a hysteria about abortion and did not hesitate to report what grisly details came its way. "But I will arrange something."

He would have done anything for this throaty-voiced woman who spoke without moving her lips, and yet the very thing he was to arrange made him clench his thighs together in sympathetic agony and his fearful imagination was peopled with bloody instruments and tearing life.

"It is monstrously unfair," he said, "the whole thing. I would not be a woman for a million pounds."

"Dear Horace," Phoebe said, "you are a good friend."

"Ay," the poet said sadly.

"You can help, can't you?"

"Yes, yes. I will. I will. I will do something. I will make inquiries." He pushed away the bread and lard with a quick shudder of revulsion. He stood up, brushing the crumbs from his vest and tucking in the tail of his shirt. "I will make inquiries and be back by dinnertime."

"My husband will be here."

"Then you will introduce me to him, dear lady," said Horace, allowing himself the liberty of kissing her hand. "I cannot spend my time sneaking in and out of your house like a criminal. Does he not care for poets?"

"Very much," she smiled. "So much that he has impregnated one."

"I will be careful," Horace said, smiling so primly that the small mouth became even smaller and Phoebe, considering the twitching nose, was reminded of a guinea pig called Muffin she had once had as a pet. "Will bemost careful, that he attempt no such thing with me."

And so saying, he bowed theatrically.

Molly saw the poet depart. She nodded to him as he ran towards his horse and cart. She dug her spade deep into the ground, frowned, and, as Horace began his dash towards the city, went into the house to interrogate her daughter about these visits from the Rawleigh's man.

Horace's carthorse was a dun-coloured, sway-backed, lop-eared gelding with furry fetlocks and soup-plate hooves. Nothing in its experience of Horace had prepared it for such a desperate journey. The gelding had been inclined to dawdle and the poet had not been keen to change its mind. It had wandered on a loose rein, eaten flowers when it cared to, and stumbled along the cobbled streets of North Melbourne, Flemington, Moonee Ponds and Essendon, with a low lolling head. The only thing that seemed to have the capacity to excite the animal was a motor cycle, to which category of machinery it had a strong aversion. Horace, on hearing the approach of a motor cycle, would dismount and stand by the horse's head, soothing it, reciting incantations until such time as the offensive machine had passed.

But on this Tuesday afternoon the poet ran to the jinker as fast as his short chubby legs could carry him. His small brown eyes bulged. His button nose shone. He did not take his seat with his usual fussing of cushions and rugs. He did not first introduce himself to the horse's attention and mutter soothing words to it, as if apologizing for the necessary subjugation of one being to another. He stood in the jinker and gave the horse a great thwack on the backside with the end of the reins.