Peter Carey - Illywhacker

"The doctor…" he tried, but hat pins pierced his tongue.

"The doctor too," the mutton-chops said, reaching for his telephone.

But Horace was already in retreat and before Toddy knew where he was he was cantering back up to Carlton with his nosebag still on and the reins belabouring his backside while the rhythm of his hooves drummed into Horace's panic: to aid, abet, to aid, abet.

The actress, when she saw him stumble through Dawson's door, carefully placed the wine glasses on the far edge of the table, against the dark panelled wall.

"I'm done for," said the poet, dropping heavily and smellily beside her. "They're after me."

They heard his story and persuaded him to take some wine. He was a teetotaller but gulped it down. Like lard, he thought, giving solace to the injured tongue.

"You're in love, my friend," Bernstein said, lowering his voice to a level which he understood to be a whisper.

"No, no," Horace said hopelessly, "she is a wonderful person."

"Are you really a virgin?" asked the actress who was very young to speak in such a manner. She wore a green headband and smoked her cigarette from a tortoiseshell holder.

"I am, madam," said Horace. "Now, also, I am a criminal. They have my description. They even know the colour of my handkerchief," and he stared into the gloom of the wine bar as if its booths might be filled with policemen.

"You are in love," said Bernstein. "Why else would you do it?"

"She is a poet," said Horace.

"You are in love," said the actress, "and I think you're sweet."

"I am not in love," Horace cried shrilly, pulling handkerchief and poems tumbling from his pocket. "I am in trouble," he said, wiping his face and dropping the handkerchief carefully to the floor. He slumped back into the hard wooden bench and, while his companions conferred in a whisper, sipped Bernstein's port while he tried to kick his handkerchief into the next booth.

"Give me a pound," said the actress.

He placed his florin on the table.

No one asked him how he had intended paying for the medicine at Mallop's Pharmacy. Bernstein opened his wallet, took out a pound, and handed it to the actress who squeezed out past Horace. He was so depressed as to be insensible to both his friend's generosity and the passage of the silk-clad buttocks which pressed briefly against him.

"We must buy the newspapers," he said to Bernstein who poured his friend more wine and was polite enough not to laugh at his misery.

The actress was gone an hour and Bernstein would not let his friend depart until she returned. He went out to buy the Herald and let Horace pore through it looking for his name.

"Probably in the Sun tomorrow," he said, carefully folding the wine-stained broadsheet and ironing in knife-sharp creases with the flat of his hands.

The actress (a Miss Shelly Claudine who was shortly to appear in the front chorus at the Tivoli) returned at last, slightly grim of face, but with a newspaper-wrapped bottle in her handbag. This she thrust at Horace.

"Tell her," she whispered hoarsely, "that she must drink it in the morning when her husband has gone. It will hurt her, but she must not panic." And then she kissed Horace on his astonished wine-wet mouth.

Horace became emotional. He took the actress's hand and shook his head. Tears welled in his eyes but words would not come.

"Go," she said, "for God's sake."

"How can I thank you?"

"Write a poem for me," the actress said, and kissed him again, this time on the forehead (he had never been kissed so many times in a day).

"To hell with the law," Horace told Bernstein, "the law is a monkey on a stick."

"An ass," said Bernstein.

"A billy goat's bum," said Horace, the bottle tucked safely in his pocket, his handkerchief abandoned on the floor. He bowed formally to his benefactors and withdrew.

He threaded his cautious circuitous way to the Maribyrnong River, heading north as if he intended to visit Brunswick, then south as if the zoo had suddenly claimed his interest. He trotted out towards Haymarket along quiet streets and, when he considered himself safe, finally allowed Toddy to wander with his lolling head and stumbling hooves along the last two miles to Ballarat Road. They stopped for snapdragons and roses, delphiniums and geraniums. They stopped so Toddy could shit, or merely lift his tail and consider shitting. The horse, perhaps aware that the excitements of the day were not yet over, prudently threw a shoe four hundred yards from home.

The horse had its head at a pile of dung, purchased by Molly, intended for the garden. I saw it in my headlights and read the Rawleigh's sign on the panniers of the cart. My scalp prickled and my hands clenched. I knew that something was wrong. I am not inventing this, not confusing the before and after. I knew something was up before I heard my wife's voice, refracted, splintered, like the glass across a fallen water colour.

I ran towards the house. I found the kitchen empty. The bedroom was full of light and threw too many shadowed forms against the canvas walls. I ran up the two steps that had once led to the small stage of the hall and found the scene that follows: my wife lying on our bed, spewing green bile into a basin held by a stranger, my mother-in-law sitting on the end of the bed stroking her daughter's feet.

Phoebe wore a woollen nightgown. She twisted, stretched, jack-knifed, clasped her stomach and repeated the fractured moan that had chilled me at the front door. Her hair was wet and plastered on her forehead. My pocket bulged with commissioned photographs of "my house", "my home", "my family".

"What in the name of God is happening?"

Molly would not look at me. The man with the basin could not hold my eyes.

"Phoebe," I said.

"Poisoned," she said, and tried to laugh.

My first and strongest inclination in the face of these conspirators was to hit someone, to bend a nose, crack a tooth, bang a head against a floor.

"What poison?" I shouted and even Molly would not look up. She stared at her daughter's cold white feet. "What poison?" I asked the fat head. I gripped the iron bed with hands on which I had written the price of a limited slip differential.

Phoebe opened her mouth to answer, then changed her mind, moaned, and leant towards the stranger's basin into which she discharged a long stream of green liquid.

"I am your husband," I said, rocking the bed.

The man I later knew as Horace Dunlop opened his child's mouth and then closed it.

Phoebe pulled herself half up and leant on her elbow. "I am pregnant", she said, "and I have taken poison."

I pushed my way round to the head of the bed, my eyes half closed, my brows hooded. I would have unchaired the poet and trampled on him if he had not been wise enough to vacate his position swiftly.

I held the basin.

"No baby," Phoebe said wearily.

I shook my head.

"No baby," she said and tried to smile. "No nothing. No Phoebe either. Poor Herbert."

"Get a doctor," I said to the poet who was hovering at the doorway, "whoever you are."

"No doctor," Phoebe said, and took my hand.

"They'll charge her," the poet said. "She won't die. Don't call a doctor."

"Who is this man?" I demanded. "Why is he here? Did he give you this poison?"

"No, no," Phoebe said. "Only the Rawleigh's man."

"She won't die," Horace said, taking a tentative step back into the room. "She is losing the foetus."

"How dare you," I roared, standing up and spilling bile down my trouser leg. "How dare you call my child a foetus."

"It is the name…"

"It is not the name of my child you scoundrel and she will lose no child while I am here."

"It is the scientific name of the unborn child."

"And unborn it will stay, until its time. You mark my words Mr Man-or-Beast, she will lose no child. She will lose nothing."