Peter Carey - Illywhacker

Molly always believed the child was Horace's. And Horace's behaviour simply confirmed it. The truth, however, was that Horace had found, at last, his true vocation which was neither poetry nor law nor Rawleigh's Balsam, but the care of house and baby which even Molly had to admit that he did with greater skill than any of the women could have managed. The house was clean and dusted, the meals were large and simple, the child both neat and happy. Horace cooed over it. He dusted its bottom with baby powder and cleaned its napkins and only when the small puckered lips sucked at his chest could he be judged lacking as both father and mother to it. He loved to watch it stretch and curl its feet, felt relief in its burps, and sheer wonder at its small unformed intelligence.

Molly saw that I, on the other hand, was very careful with the child. I treated it with reserve and caution. I was stiff and awkward. When I held him Charles writhed against me and screamed until Horace took him back again.

All this proved Molly's theories about the child's paternity. No such thought had entered my head. I had other reasons for treating Charles so carefully. I narrowed my eyes and watched him. I spied on him as he lay in his bassinet. And as Charles grew and came slowly into focus I saw exactly what had happened: Charles was Jack with bandy legs put on.

No wonder the jig, the hop, the dance.

I did not waste time thinking about the mechanics of this conception, whether Jack's ghost had mounted Phoebe in the night, driven home his pulsing lights deep into her womb and made her cry out, or whether he sent the snake slithering electrically into the bedroom with its belly full of coded liquids, there to insinuate itself between her legs whilst she slept beside her unsuspecting husband.

Phoebe displayed little of the maternal instinct towards her son and for this I silently thanked her. We did not discuss the Little Jack who toddled silently into places it was forbidden, but I always believed we both understood that something sinister had happened.

A lesser man might have been defeated by such a setback. Yet when I recall 1921 and '22 I recall only my feverish optimism. I built for the future, with the passion of a man who plans to start a dynasty. The house grew. It shot out long branches, covered walkways, new rooms. I built a room for Annette who had failed, as yet, to visit. I was oblivious to the world outside, and most of the world inside too.

E. g.: Dear Dicksy, you are, once again, proven right and there does not appear to be any likelihood of a more modern aeroplane. I am sure there is enough money. I am absolutely convinced. But the whole subject seems to enrage them and they will not even discuss it. He, who introduced himself into my life with all his dreams and ambitions, seems to have become an old man suddenly, weary of trying anything and content to sit in his slippers drinking tea. He is jealous of me. He led me on with all this talk of famous air races, and now he has abandoned them completely and he seems set for the life of a shopkeeper.

The poor little boy will, I suppose, suffer because of us, but at least H. has learned his lesson and seen that he is not capable of normal paternal feelings. We are, neither of us, normal people. Ido love my son, but much as I imagine fathers love their children, not in the hot entanglement of child and mother, all muddy with tears and pee. Thank God for Horace who is wonderful with him, and leaves me free to master this very antiquated aeroplane which, at least, is not forbidden me and in which I shall, any week, come to visit you. Dicksy, I cannot wait. I am a cat in heat. I lift my tail. I arch my back. I rub against your calves. And for all this, I blame the sky which is soempty. You are wrong (or, should I say, Freud is wrong – you are merely wrong to quote him). It may be correct in dreams (his, yours, not mine – I only dream of engines and magnetos with faults I cannot fix) but in real life the feelings are produced by emptiness. I know I would have the same urges in the desert, or in any place where I was me, alone, with, no one else to observe or censure me. I have felt the strongest desire in railway carriages when I am alone in a compartment by myself and I know I can do anything, anything at all, without anyone to interrupt. All of which is to say that they are welcome to get cross or unhappy because they have given up their dreams, but I will not.

Now you have those letters in your hand it is easy enough for you take Phoebe's side and look at me as a fool, or something worse. It is your privilege and if I did not wish you to have it, I would have kept the letters hidden. Yet I did not come into possession of them until 1930, when I had the indignity of buying them from a wizened man in the saloon bar of the Railway Hotel in Kyneton. He sat at the little round table, eating a musk stick, drinking stout, and dealing out his wares with yellowed finger. He offered me an envelope marked "personal effects" which contained postcards depicting Cossacks raping village women, then a comic strip of a baby with a ten-inch cock fucking a big-titted woman with a mole on her shoulder. Then my wife's letters to Annette. Jonathon Oakes, for that is who it was, did not recognize me and I did not ask him how his fortunes had fallen so low. I paid him five shillings for his stolen letters.

So this knowledge about my wife not only cost me pain, but also money. But it is yours. Take it. It goes together with the rest.

Yet I must tell you that Phoebe had not been able, or had no wish to, express herself so clearly to me. She did not deny me caresses. She did not fail to greet me with a kiss, to inquire about my work, to fetch my slippers – the slippers she appears to have hated were a gift to me from her. We played with Charles together. We pretended to love him together. My darling expected me, somehow, to be a mind-reader.

Doubtless I expected the same of her. I imagined my passion for building was shared by everyone. I did not doubt that it was understood: that my ruling love was for human warmth, for people gathered in rooms, talking, laughing, sharing stews and puddings and talk. Aeroplanes and cars seemed, in comparison, cold and soulless things, of no consequence in comparison to the family we were building. For the first time in my life I felt I had a place on earth.

But I did not explain myself. I felt it obvious. I thought my building was a language anyone could understand. Did they imagine I added rooms for no reason, that it was merely a hobby, a silly obsession? I built a room for a next child. I began tentatively. It rose as a question. I hung pink wallpaper. Phoebe admired it. I paced around her with a bucket of paste in my hand. It was a courtship dance. I have seen birds do the same in Mallee country. They build a mound. They show it. No words are spoken, but it is clearly understood.

So when Phoebe smiled and kissed me, her lips and eyes erased certain matters in the document I had so rashly signed. Still I did not contradict the cautious calendar my wife drew up. Neither did I ignore the details of the agreement in regard to ejaculatio, not, that is, until one Sunday afternoon when my wife, inflamed with passion after two hours of dangerous flying, clenched my buttocks tight and dug her nails in hard and then – and only then -I ripped forth a joyful sob of semen, a throb, a dob, a teeming swarming flood of life.

It was only then I realized that she could no more read my building than I could read her poetry.

The real bitterness did not start there, with Phoebe splashing water up her cunt, but on a July morning in 1923 while Charles slopped his spoon around a plate of soggy Weeties and Horace stood cooking bacon on the stove.

Phoebe left the room to vomit. When she returned she walked up to me and spat her morning sickness in my face.