Peter Carey - Illywhacker

I panned for gold whenever I had a spare moment but I no longer hoped for anything remarkable. It was miserable work in winter and on the day Sonia found the emu my bare feet were blue with cold and my bandy legs were as white as an Englishman's below my billowing woollen underpants.

She had crept upstream while I was busy panning. I looked up and found her missing. I bellowed her name above the roaring yellow water that tugged malevolently at my feet. I threw the unwashed gravel back and scrambled up the slippery clay bank just as she came running through the bush with her finger held (sshh) to her lips. My heart was beating so loudly I could hardly hear what she said. I crushed her to me but she wormed out of my arms impatiently.

"Papa, it's an emu." Her appearance, her manner, were a continual joy and a pain to me for she was like her mother in so many ways, in her murmuring throaty speech, in the extraordinary green of her eyes. Yet she was without the imbalances in either her character or her face: Phoebe's low forehead and long chin had rearranged themselves into a more harmonious relationship.

"With feathers, papa." She pulled the sleeves of her woollen cardigan over her hands and flapped them with impatience and excitement. "An emu."

I expected a goldfinch or a chook, but I pulled on my trousers and my boots while she danced impatiently around me, stretching her cardigan out of shape.

"Hurry. Hurry."

I followed her, my laces dangling, mimicking her exaggerated stealth.

Charles came bellowing behind, enraged that he was being abandoned. He did not understand me: I would never have left him behind in any circumstances. I explained this to him. I, after all, knew better than anyone the horrors of being alone at ten years of age. Had I not lived amongst the garbage in the Eastern Markets, living on old cabbage leaves, too frightened to taste the saucer of warm milk the Wongs left for me each night? Charles knew this story. I wished him to know I would never abandon him. I explained it endlessly, but he could not be comforted. He worried that I would forget to pick him up after school. If I was five minutes late I would find him blubbering or running in panic down the street. If I got up in the night he wanted to know what I was doing and on more than one occasion I have had a nocturnal shit interrupted by my son blundering through the dark in search of me. He was my policeman. He would stand beside me shivering while I wiped my arse and only then would he return to bed.

Sonia took her brother's warty hand to lead him to the emu. She never flinched from the feel of those warts, but ministered to them constantly, gathering milk thistles and carefully squeezing their juices on to the ugly lumps that were always marked with ink from one unhappy well or another.

Sonia's hand did not comfort Charles. Now he was with us he became surly. He dragged his boots along in the gravelly mud and scratched the leather I had worked so hard to shine for him.

"Where are we going?" (It was his continual cry, here, and on the road where he kicked against the confines of the Dodge.) "Where are wegoing?"

"There is an emu," Sonia said, "with feathers."

"There ain't emus."

"I think it's an emu." Sonia was always ready to defer to her brother but just the same she parted the blackberry briars stealthily.

There are no crab apples on Crab Apple Creek. There is a tangle of blackberries and a number of giant river blackwoods. We came under the blackwood canopy to a clear bit of land by the bridge on the Castlemaine Road and there, amongst the ash of swaggies' fires and the dried pats of cattle dung, was an emu.

It was the cleanest thing in that muddy place. Its feathers shone. Its long neck glistened. It also had the most remarkable pair of legs I was ever blessed to cast my eyes on. They were long and shapely and tightly clad in fishnet stockings.

Sonia squeezed my hand and rubbed herself against me with delight. Charles gawped and went bright red. The emu jerked its head towards us and then away. Sonia hugged herself with pleasure. The emu started to shake. It started slowly, a mild vibration that built and built until it was quivering all over. It stamped its feet, one, two, three. It waggled its backside. It bumped and ground. It went into the most astonishing sexual display I have ever witnessed in my life. There was no mistaking its intention and I was embarrassed in front of the children. It set up a display with its backside, getting lower and lower to the ground, then sprang like a dervish and scissored its legs. It hopped on its haunches. It squatted. It showed itself like I have seen red-arsed bool-bools do in spring.

"Egg," shrieked Sonia, tugging painfully on my wedding ring. "Egg, egg, egg."

"Shut up," said Charles.

The egg was black and shining, about eight inches across, an emu egg of course. The emu pecked it. And out of the egg came a little emu, bright blue, rocking back and forth on a metal spring.

"No, Charlie," Sonia cried.

But it was too late. Charles was running, his head down, his little arms outstretched, his warty hands open, towards the emu. He got a hold of a net-stockinged leg and would not letgo.

The emu now unravelled itself. The front of the chest detached itself and revealed itself to be a woman's head with a feathered hat. The emu's head and neck dropped so we could see they were not neck and head at all, but an arm with a glove made in the shape of an emu's head. Another naked arm emerged from somewhere and stroked my son's bristly head.

"Did you get it?" the emu asked.

I stood as gawp-mouthed as my son had.

"Did you get the photographs," the emu said, "or didn't you?"

"Mummy," Charles said.

"Are you a journalist," the emu said, "or aren't you?"

"No," I said, "my name is Herbert Badgery."

"Mummy," said Charles.

"I have waited here all morning," the emu said. "I have waited here for the dills to arrive. God damn them. What do you need to get written up in their silly rag?" She stamped her foot. "I gave them a map. I told them I would be here and I walked here, two miles. They wanted me to do it in town but they don't understand publicity. I need all this," she gestured at the blackwoods, blackberries, the cow dung, the dead winter grass, "for atmosphere. It's not so much trouble for them to come. They have motor cars. Look at my shoes. Look at them. How in the hell do I get a break? Mervyn Sullivan has stolen my act. The police won't make him take down my picture. What do they expect me to do: starve? Bendigo is a lousy town. I should have gone up to Ararat. Where is the boy's mother?"

She squatted down beside Charles and wiped his nose with a little square of newspaper she had tucked away in her feathers. "You should look after children," she said sternly. "They are the hope of the future. Just because you are unemployed it doesn't mean your children should have no hope."

"My shoes hurt," Charles said.

"I am employed," I said.

"Bully for you," she said. "Buy your boy boots then."

I am giving a bad impression of Leah, but she has only herself to blame, for she was not at her best beneath the Castlemaine Road that day, nor I guess would she have been at her best when she asked the police to force Mervyn Sullivan to remove her picture from his sideshow. She was not one of life's diplomats at the best of times, but she could never control herself in the presence of a policeman.

She had an austere face, and you would hardly call it pretty. It was a flinty sort of face, with a small mouth, grey eyes and a little parrot's beak of a nose which I later came to admire although at the time I was not well disposed towards parrots or anything that reminded me of them. She had short dark wavy hair, olive skin, a slight smudge on her upper lip, and a long graceful neck. Her ears stuck out. The emu dance, which she had learned direct from its inventor, certainly made the most of her best features.