Peter Carey - Illywhacker

Goon Tse Ying was as hard to grasp as a raging sea with waves driving one way and tides pulling the other. He could be loud, play the fool like old Mr Chan at his ugly daughter's pre-wedding feast, going from table to table with his brandy bottle and loudly, raucously even, assuming the role that was expected of him, so that an Englishman, not understanding, would wish to know the name of the old man who was disgracing himself in so un-Chinese a manner. Likewise, if Goon's gravelling laugh and thumping brandy glass on Wong's scrubbed table made him appear impatient or foolish, or even mad, there was also a very cautious and serious part to his character that did not reveal itself while he was playing the rich benefactor. He had many responsibilities which he honoured ungrudgingly. These responsibilities meant that he could not always keep the promises he made to me.

His enthusiasm would have me learn all languages, understand the subtleties of astrology, sex one-day-old chicks and use an abacus. He made me many promises about things which he seemed to forget about entirely. As for the business of disappearing, it could not, he told me, be begun on the next day at all. I had not inquired. But when he brought up the subject it was as a reprimand.

"Not today, little Englishman, and not tomorrow. If you rush at a thing like this you will get nowhere. There are preparations to undertake. Nick Wong must have someone to replace the little work you do for him. There is equipment I need. I must find someone else to translate for Mr Chin whose English is worse than it was a week ago. I also have a marriage to arrange for myself. There are three things," he said, no longer an Englishman, "which are unfilial. And to have no posterity is the greatest of them. What does unfilial mean?"

I did not know.

"Learn," he said, his mouth full of noodles. "What hope is there for you if you know less than a Chinaman? Next week", he said, ladling soup into his bowl, "I will teach you to disappear."

But it was not next week, it was two days later, and Goon Tse Ying shook me awake in my bed at three in the morning. "Come," he hissed, "be quiet. Do not wake old Hing."

He took me to the kitchen where he already had the big wood oven crackling. He fed me a bowl of pork porridge with an egg in it. I broke the yolk and stirred it into the porridge, and, looking up, found him staring at me intently. The flames from the open door of the firebox made his face appear slightly sinister. It accentuated all the foreign features his perfect English and his tailored suits cloaked so densely. "You are learning already," he said, still staring at me. "For now you feel warm and content. You enjoy your porridge. But by tonight you will know terror. You will know the cold of the terror and the warm of the porridge. Now shine your boots and we will go."

He had a good horse and a smart sulky waiting outside. Drugged by the warm porridge in my stomach and the horse sweat and leather in my nostrils, rugged in a thick blanket, I went to sleep. When I awoke I found the dawn already gone and the sulky bouncing along a narrow gravel road through one of those flat featureless landscapes where it is the lot of sheep and their gaolers to spend their lives. Here and there were failed dams and along the fence lines, new plantations of cypress pines which might one day break the wind which now flattened the dun-coloured grasses. It was crow country.

We came to a small depression in the road where a slow creek dribbled its way over rusty rocks. A few eucalypts, spared the new settler's axe, clung to the top of the eroded banks.

Goon reined in the sweating mare and surveyed this scene with satisfaction. "This is a good place to learn," he announced. "There are rocks, a river, ugly trees. It is a terrible place." He rubbed his hands together. "Go and play while I get ready."

I put aside my rug and reluctantly abandoned the comforting smells of the expensive sulky which had evoked memories of days when I had a father beside me and a cannon behind me.

"Play by the creek," Goon instructed.

I was not ready for the lesson. I tugged up my socks to cover my knees and shivered. I walked slowly down to the creek. I was cold. My chilblains itched. I did not like the sound of the crows. I lifted up the rocks and looked for beetles or mud-eyes to torment.

Goon Tse Ying had many voices, but I did not recognize the curdled cry that shortly reached my ears.

Goon Tse Ying, dressed in his formal three-piece suit, his watch chain flashing in the winter sun, came bounding towards me waving an axe handle.

"Roll up," he screamed, "roll up."

The terrible Chinaman leapt from crumbling bank to gnarled root, from root to scoured clay. His face was hideous. The axe handle belted me across the shoulders and sent me sprawling.

I lay across the rocks blubbering, as broken as the beetles I had sought to injure.

"Now, you see," said Goon, standing over me. "It is not so easy. Get up. I did not hit you so hard."

I got up, bawling loudly. "I want my daddy."

"You have no daddy, little Englishman. You have only me. Now pay attention and I will show you how to stand so that you will disappear."

It was a terrible day. I learned to stand in the way he showed me, quite the opposite to what you'd expect for, rather than make me less conspicuous, it seemed to make me more so. I teetered on one leg, with one foot raised and resting on my knee. I stretched one hand in the air as if waving for attention. It did not work. He hit me time and time again. I wept. I begged. I tried to run away, but he caught me effortlessly.

"I will run you down," he bellowed as he chased. "You will go beneath my wheel."

But that night, as I nursed my wounds, he was kind to me. He stroked my head and told me stories about China to which he must return before his death. "To have amassed great wealth," he said, "and not return home is comparable to walking in magnificent clothes at night." He rubbed a cold camphor ointment on my bruises. He wrapped me in a blanket and made a soup heavy with duck. He fed me milk and brandy and put me to bed in the tent.

But on the next morning his great face had transformed. The skin was tight and waxy and the bones beneath it seemed as hard and cold as marble. The camp fire was cold and he showed no inclination to light it. He had rubbed grease in his hair.

"I have no time to play games," he told me, kicking at the dead ashes as if to deny the warmth of the night before. "I am buying a business in Grafton from a man I do not trust. You are slow and stupid. You are too English. You do not believe harm will come to you. Well, I give you my word that if you do not disappear this morning, first time, I will kill you. I do not have time to play games. I am thirty-seven years old and soon I must get married."

If you had seen him you would not have doubted him. He did not look at me. He took out his gold watch and spat on it. He rubbed its glass with a white handkerchief. Then he held it to his small flat ear and listened to it. It was obvious my death had no interest to him.

"Go and play by the creek," he said.

I did not beseech him. I did not cry. I walked down to the creek.

He did not come immediately. He squatted on his haunches and sang "Waltzing Matilda" in a wavering falsetto. I loathe the song to this day.

I did not look at him. When he had finished the song I heard him clear his throat and spit.

"No Chinese," he yelled.

I stood as I was taught. I held my shaking arm high. I teetered on my foot. Urine ran down my leg. I heard the swish of the axe handle. I began to quiver. My whole body began to hum like a tuning fork. My bones vibrated. I was a steel bridge marched on by an army. I was a glass held before a famous soprano.