Peter Carey - Illywhacker

I disappeared and the world disappeared from me. I did not escape from fear, but went to the place where fear lives. I existed like waves from a tuning fork in chloroformed air. I could not see Goon Tse Ying. I was nowhere.

I cannot tell how long I was like this, but finally the world came back to me and Goon Tse Ying was squatting a little way away from me grinning.

"Now," he said, "we will have a feast and I will teach you to eat chicken's innards."

I know for a fact that there are easier methods of disappearing than facing a Chinaman with an axe handle. It is no more difficult to learn than driving a car and does not require real danger for its accomplishment. The terror can be summoned up in the mind, and one does not need to adopt the peculiar stance of Goon Tse Ying: all that is needed is to tense the muscles in a certain way so that they begin to quiver. His odd method of standing helped produce this state but I was a resourceful young chap and soon found I could do it even while lying down in my bed.

Yet only twice did I disappear as a trick and the two incidents are separated by thirty years.

If you know what winter's mornings are like in Melbourne, if you have seen the blue fingers of the Chinese protruding from their grey mittens as they handle the cauliflowers and kale in the Eastern Market, if you have seen their breath suspended before kerosene lights, you might understand why an eleven-year-old might choose to disappear in order to lie in bed of a winter's morning.

I had not calculated the upset I would cause: the prodding hands, the chattering voice of old Hing, the running feet of his timid nephew, the shriek of old Mrs Wong whose heart was bad. I lay, invisible, in the heart of a storm.

When I finally regained my normal consciousness Goon Tse Ying was sitting on old Hing's bed reading the racing form.

"Mr Chin is with Mrs Wong," he said. "She is very sick. She is an old woman and has no use for demons. Look at my eyes and listen to me. I am going to Grafton soon and will not be here to teach you anymore. I have already taught you too much. If you make yourself feel the terror when there is no terror to feel, you are making a dragon. If you meet a real dragon, that is the way of things. But if you make dragons in your head you are not strong enough and you will have great misfortune. Do you understand me?"

"I am sorry, Mr Goon."

"You made a terror and now Mrs Wong has been taken by it and you are lucky that Mr Chin is here to care for her. The Wongs will not have you any more and I have spent the morning persuading my nephew to take you. I have had to pay him money and he is only taking you because his greed is greater than his fear, but it is only just greater", he held his thumb and forefinger apart, "that much, and if you make dragons in his house he will send you away and no one will talk to you or help you any more. Further, you will now work all day. When you have finished at the market you will go to the market garden and you will do whatever it is they ask you to do. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," I said.

"Well, shine your shoes," Goon Tse Ying said to me, "and when you walk into my nephew's house make yourself into a small man."

Mrs Wong, so I heard, recovered from the terror I had given her, but I never set foot in Wong's cafe again and when I had reason to pass by the worn wooden door stoop in Little Bourke Street I made myself small and walked quickly, with short steps and bowed head.

I made use of all the things I learned from Goon Tse Ying – how to appear bigger or smaller, how to skin a crow, butcher a pig, wear expensive shoes when my suit was inferior, how to change my accent, how to modulate my walk, but I always kept my word to him about making dragons until I was stupid enough to compete with my son for the affection of a woman.

There is nothing as good as bananas on the breath when it comes to making a horse feel it is akin to you. And it has always been my contention that it was for reasons very similar to this that Charles mistook Leah Goldstein for his mother.

When, on that chilblained afternoon in 1931, he grabbed her around the legs, he imagined his seven years of wandering were at an end, that the declared goal of our travels had been achieved, that we would return to the splendid home he could not remember and abandon the converted 1924 Dodge tourer in which we slept each night, curled up together amidst the heavy fug, the warm odours of humanity, which so comforted his battered father.

You would have met Leah, you might have embraced her and not noticed the smell of snake, buried your nose in the nape of her long graceful neck and smelt nothing but Velvet soap. But Charles – although he had never met a snake – recognized the odour of his flesh and blood and all his belligerence and suspicion melted away like the frost in a north-south valley when it finally gets the sun at noon.

We were camped on Crab Apple Creek, just outside of Bendigo, still six hundred miles from Phoebe Badgery. If I am inclined to refer to frost when referring to Charles's emotions, it is because it was a frosty place. When the frost melted it soaked into the mud. Even the magpies were muddy in that place. They scrounged around the camp, snapping irritably at the currawongs, and held out their filthy wings to the feeble sun, making themselves an easy target for Charles's shanghai.

On the day in question I was panning for gold while I tried to keep an eye on Charles who was reading a (probably stolen) comic on the running board of the Dodge while Sonia was floating sticks down the creek (a rain-muddied torrent that hid the pretty slate you can see in summer). I was getting a little colour, just a few specks, and my time would have been more profitably spent trapping rabbits. However I had a few bob in my pocket and we were on our way up to Darkville where one of Barret's clerks now had a still for making tea-tree oil. He had promised me a month's work cutting the tea tree and I had sent a wire saying we were on our way.

There was a depression on. Everyone knows that now. But I swear to you that I did not. I had lived seven years in an odd cocoon, criss-crossing Victoria, writing bad cheques when I could get hold of a book, running raffles in pubs, buying stolen petrol, ransacking local tips for useful building materials. I had long since stopped trying to impress motor-car dealers and agents. I had a salesman's vanity and could not bear rejection. I could not tolerate talking to men who would not even open my book of yellowed write-ups. Those Ford and Dodge agents in Ballarat, Ararat, Shepparton, Kaniva, Warragul and Colac finished off the work that Phoebe's poem had begun and I entered my own private depression and kept away from anything that might damage my pride any more.

I, Herbert Badgery, aviator, nationalist, now wore Molly's belt and chose not to see that the roads were full of ghosts, men with their coats too short, their frayed trousers too long, clanking their billycans like doleful bells.

I gave up having the newspapers read aloud to me on the day Goble and Mclntyre made their flight around Australia in a seaplane. I concentrated instead on the things I could hope to achieve: keeping my children clean and neat, turning the collars of my frayed shirts, polishing my boots and hoping that the brave new signs I painted on the door of the Dodge would convince people who saw me that I was a success and not a failure. The people I imagined were those who peer from a farmhouse window as a glistening custom-made utility goes by, a butcher in Benalla unlocking his shop at seven a. m., a cow-cocky driving his herd of jerseys from one side of the Warragul road to the other, a whiskered garage owner pumping four gallons up into the glass reservoir of a petrol bowser before taking my bad cheque. As for women, the only ones I spoke to were barmaids whose permission I sought before raffling sausages.