Peter Carey: Illywhacker

"You hold that snake", she said, hardly moving her lovely lips, "as if you are frightened it will bite you. I don't think", she smiled, "that it is a pet at all."

In those days I would have done anything to get written up in the papers and anything for the admiration of a woman. If it hadn't have been for those two factors I would probably, by 1919, have been the Summit agent in Ballarat. I would have had a lot more than four and tuppence ha'penny in my pocket.

"Not a pet?" I raised my eyebrows.

"Is it?"

Look at the fool! I shudder to think of the risk I'm taking. The king brown snake is cranky and cantankerous. It can kill with a single strike. That dull Mr-Smith-type name is an alibi for a snake almost as deadly as a taipan. But Herbert Badgery will do anything to insist his lie is true -I let the snake run down my arm, across my trousers, to the ground.

And there it should have ended, with the five bob slinking off through the grass. The pet declared free. A good deed done, etc. But Phoebe came forward and picked the damn thing up herself. She held the writhing, deadly twisting rope out to me. My throat was so dry I could not speak. I took it with a shudder and got it into the hessian bag and tied the top with binding twine. I had to shove my hands into my leather jacket when I'd finished. They were trembling.

It was then that Ernest Vogelnest chose to make his entry, scuttling crab-style round the end of the good lower wing. He didn't beat around. He launched into his conversation before I saw him.

"How fast does it fly?" he said.

He made me jump, speaking up like that.

"Sorry," he said. He was a funny-looking little coot. He had thin wiry arms, a red face with a walrus moustache that was far too big for it. He wore his moleskins with foreign-looking leggings. He smiled and ducked his head.

"A very nice aeroplane, sir," said Ernest Vogelnest, nodding his head to the young lady. "Very nice…"

"I apologize", I began… "No, no, no. It is very interesting." He patted the air in front of my chest with the palms of his hands. There was so little of him. What there was was held together by dirt and sinew.

"Where will you go now?" He patted the nose cowling like a man admiring a neighbour's horse.

"Nowhere," I smiled. "It's no good. Broken. Kaput."

As it turned out we had quite different ideas about the aeroplane. From the corner of his eye Ernest Vogelnest saw his wife come out of the shed with a shovel. She carried the shovel to the fence and waited. A shovel was not such a wonderful weapon. He should, perhaps, have told her to bring the fork, but it was too late now.

"Kaput," I said.

"Oh no," Ernest Vogelnest said firmly. "Where to next?"

"We stay here," I said.

But Ernest did not want anything as strange as an aeroplane in his front paddock. It would bring crowds of people who would stare at him. He rubbed his papery hands together and saw them, in their teaming thousands, writing things on the road. They would think the plane was his. They would decide he was a spy. God knows what they would do to him.

I misunderstood him. I offered to pay.

"No, no," he rolled his eyes in despair. "No, no money."

"I will pay three shillings."

"I will pay more," Ernest Vogelnest said desperately, smiling and ducking his head. "Much more."

"He doesn't understand," Phoebe said.

Vogelnest ignored her. "I will pay you, sir, one pound, if you push your aero across the road," he smiled slyly, "into O'Hagen's."

We shook on it. I had made a total of one pound and five shillings since arriving in Balliang East. My gross assets were now one pound nine shillings and tuppence ha'penny.

Success always went to my head. I got too excited. I went from despair to optimism in a flash. And my day was only starting, because a dangerous meeting was about to take place.

I. e.: Jack.

There was nothing to protect us from each other. We were elements like phosphorus and air which should always be kept apart. But he was already standing up from his picnic and picking pine needles from his trouser cuffs, but even if Molly had somehow known, had seen the result of that fifty-yard walk across the road, what could she have done?

Jack McGrath was a man with an obsession, about transportation. He could discuss the wheel as a wonder, and he could talk about it for hours in relationship to the bullock team, the horse and jinker, the dray, the cart, the T Model, the Stanley Steamer. He could talk about it in relationship to Australia and its distances. He never got sick of it.

He had money in the bank. He owned a Hispano Suiza, a fleet of taxis, a racehorse, but none of those things made him happy. What he liked to do was talk. And when the house was empty of guests he'd put on his hat and walk three miles down to Corio Quay where he could still find, in 1919, bullock wagons unloading wool. He could yarn with the bullockies for hours. They talked record hauls. They boasted. Jack told them how he'd got the boiler into Point's Point in 1910. He advised them to move into trucks. He spoke enthusiastically about the future of the automobile but he looked with envy on their teams: Redman, Tiger, Lofty, Yallarman, he knew the beasts almost as well as he knew the men. He shouted them "Gentleman's grog" and, in his cups, made plans to go back on the track. When Lauchie Barr's team brought thirty-two tons of bagged wheat in from Colac and broke the Australian record, Jack brought him to dinner and presented him with a handsome cup with a silver cricketer standing on its lid.

He was exactly the sort of man I had wished to land on: enthusiastic, willing, and impressed with the idea of an aeroplane. But when I saw him stride across the road in his expensive suit I didn't realize what was coming. I saw a rich man. I was never good with rich men. They made my hackles rise.

This false impression didn't last a minute. Jack whipped off his jacket and ripped off his tie. He lost his collar studs in the grass. He collected his cufflinks and rolled up his sleeves while his wife, a pretty ginger cat in fluffy white, watched from the safety of the road.

To get the craft into O'Hagen's it was necessary to remove a few fence posts. Jack picked up a crowbar and set to it like a fellow who is starved of work. He raised the crowbar and sank it into the red earth. "That's the go," he said. "That's the go." He did not mean to overpower Ernest Vogelnest or snatch tools from his hand. He was being polite, useful, and although he was bursting with curiosity about the plane, he did not say a word that could be considered nosey. He gave himself wholly to the task at hand, to remove those four posts, replace them, get the plane through O'Hagen's broken fence, and hide it behind the hall.

The posts were out in a moment. Jack stacked them neatly and then I explained to them where they could push or lift and where they couldn't. You have to be careful with a plane like a Farman -you lift under a strut, never between. When I was sure they understood the requirements, I ordered a start, but although the farmer was quick to get his back under a strut, Jack McGrath would not have a bar of it.

It was all very well, he said, to rush into digging out a fence or putting one back in, but only a fool rushed into pushing anything, whether it was a dray or an auto or an aeroplane, without first looking over the ground and assessing the problems. He knew this from all his years with bullock teams. The secret of his success had not just been, as everyone thought, that he knew his beasts, each individual, like you might know a man or woman, each one with their strengths, their weaknesses, their little quirks. His success had been sealed on all the nights he had gone to sleep thinking out a problem. The way he got that boiler into Point's Point is the most famous example, but he would approach a difficult log in the same way. His success had been in thinking it out, and often when he met someone on the track, bogged to the axles under ten tons of wool, or in trouble on a pinch, he would see that they were only in strife because they had not stopped long enough to think. So at Balliang East he walked with me over to O'Hagen's, and unearthed a nasty hollow and a tangle of barbed wire which had been hidden in the dry summer grass.