Peter Carey - Illywhacker

"You bastard," she said.

I wiped the foul-smelling spittle from my face, dabbed at the small splash on my waistcoat, rolled my napkin and placed it carefully in its ring. I blinked. I walked outside. Not even Molly said a word.

Phoebe followed me. "I want to talk to you," she said.

I stopped. Everyone in that little kitchen must have heard – my voice as dead as stone, Phoebe's quivering and only just controlled.

"I will have this child," she said. "All right?"

"All right."

"That will make you happy?"

I did not answer. How could I answer about "happy" when I saw the liquid hatred in her eyes.

"Then you have my word. You don't need to guard me. I will fly for the first six months, but not the last three. I will spend the last three months writing poetry and then I will give you the child."

And from that point, with my feet frozen in the frost-thick grass outside the kitchen window, I became a different man.

I did everything in my power to regain my wife's affections. The more I tried, the more pitiful she found me. She was one of those people who admire strength and despise weakness. The more I kotowed to her the more she scorned me. She ridiculed me openly.

And yet she did not remove the possibility of hope.

One September afternoon, two king parrots settled on the gables of the house while Horace sat in the sunshine peeling potatoes and I cut out fabric for a wing section Phoebe had ripped on a fence post down at Werribee. It was Phoebe, looking critically over my shoulder, who saw the parrots.

"Shush," she said, although nobody was talking.

The king parrot is a magnificent bird, and the clear blue of a Melbourne spring day sets them off perfectly. Their heads and chest are red, their wings and backs green, their long tails green. They stood on the roof and preened each other, and I, estranged from my wife, was overcome with loneliness.

They did not stay long. They landed, preened, looked around, and flew away.

I expressed my disappointment.

"Why would they stay?" said Phoebe, walking to the house. "There are no decent trees. There is nothing for them here. If you had chosen some land with decent trees there would be parrots all year round."

"Not all year," said Horace quietly. He was the only person permitted to contradict my wife. "They follow the blossoms."

"Different parrots," she said, "at different times."

"That is true," said Horace. "But in any case, we have splendid water birds which have their own charm."

"It is parrots that I love," said Phoebe. "It is parrots that I miss."

I held up the fabric to the light. Charles bellowed somewhere in the house. It was, I think, the day he ate Horace's tobacco, and it was also the day I resolved to buy Phoebe parrots.

I bought the king parrot from an old bushie in a pub in Exhibition Street. I placed it on the kitchen table on a Friday night.

The gift acted like honey on Phoebe's bitter tongue. Her eyes shone. "Oh," she said, "how beautiful. How splendid. Herbert, you must build it a cage."

"It has a cage," said Molly, "a very expensive one too."

"No, no. It deserves a big cage. A room."

Was I suspicious? Did I perhaps detect the faintest whiff of irony? Was there any there to smell? I still think this first enthusiasm of Phoebe's was genuine, and it was only later, when she saw me working on that cage, that she allowed her bitterness to warp her original spontaneous feeling, to convert it into something artful, ironic and sarcastic.

I did not understand poetry in those days. I imagined it involved rhymes, and if not rhymes at least words. But now I know a poem can take any form, can be a sleight of hand, a magician's trick, be built from string and paper, fish or animals, bricks and wire.

I never knew I was a hired hand in the construction of my wife's one true poem. I knew only, in the midst of its construction, that Horace would puzzle me with his sympathetic eyes which would not hold mine when I confronted him. I observed how he left the room when cages were discussed, how he picked up Charles and plopped him on his pudgy hip and took him outside to play.

Sonia, growing up inside my wife's womb, became accustomed to the noise of hammering and sawing – the king parrot was merely the first bird I housed beneath my spreading roof. My family soon included lorikeets and parakeets, western rosellas, gold-winged friar birds and a cat bird from Queensland.

The cat bird had a forlorn cry, like a whimpering child or the animal it is named for. The cockatoos screeched. The parrots hawked. The house pushed out and grew – rows of cages radiated like the spokes of a wheel.

Here: the photograph of the taxi drivers' picnic on September 23rd, 1923.I am trapped in the heart of Phoebe's poem, teetering at the apex of my empire. The photograph shows Molly, Annette, Phoebe, Horace, Charles, baby Sonia, me, and the taxi drivers and their wives and children. It does not show the house, only a little of the lattice I erected to shade the cages from the westerly sun.

The grass was fresh mown, already fermenting, and I was a sexton happily asleep in a fresh-dug grave, my hands muddy, the smile of a fool upon my face.

My house was full. All rooms were occupied. Annette's towel lay drying in the sun on her window ledge. Her bed was made. Sonia's nursery awaited her, but now she lay in her pram in the sunshine, kicking her long straight legs, curling her toes, and gurgling happily while all around her the taxi drivers and their wives and children admired her: just like her mother, but with her father's eyes.

Horace played the waiter. He carried wobbling jellies and drunken trifles, dispensed bread and butter and hundreds and thousands to the children.

The drivers were an independent lot, sharp, shrewd, cloth-capped and street-wise, but you could see they liked Molly who moved amongst them in a vast white dress, her copper hair cascading from beneath a straw hat, dispensing cordial. She was a lady. They called her "Ma'am". When the photographer arrived they lined up their taxis: "Boomerang", the signs said, "fast as an arrow, Australian to the marrow."

I stood between Phoebe and Annette. Annette, I can see, had put her arm through mine. She was nice to me that day, and I to her. I asked her to describe the streets of Paris, and she did, and I enjoyed hearing about it.

Phoebe seemed as happy as I ever knew her to be. When I see her in that photograph, see that proud chin, that soft smile, I can imagine, if I half close my eyes, the way she moved her lips when speaking, the throaty lazy voice. Her eyes, though, are shaded by her hat, and it is just as well they are shaded, those eyes that made the poem.

And it was through her poem I walked, I took the children on tours of my splendid cages. The birds were clean and healthy. They preened themselves in honour of spring. The parrots hung upside down on their perches. The friar birds drove their beaks into the sweet white flesh of Bacchus Marsh apples.

The trees, now three years old, stood as tall as young men, taller than Charles who tottered along in his ghost's gait, following Horace and holding on to his chubby legs.

That night, in the heart of my empire, my wife and I made love in the style that permitted no conception and that, in any case, was the one she now preferred. It no longer hurt her and left her free to increase the tempo of her own pleasure with her hand, but that night she wept when I entered her and her tears wet my nose where it pressed against her neck.

"Poor Herbert," she said.

I did not understand her.

"You'll be all right," she said. She choked. She shook.

"I am," I said. "I am, I am."