Peter Carey - Illywhacker

"You must understand", she said after I had begged her to stay, "the difference between a criticism and an insult. Do you do well from your alluvial mining?"

Honesty, like temper, has a habit of coming on me without fair warning. Before I knew what I was doing I'd tossed her my specimen bottle and she'd caught it with a snap. A few gold specks glinted in the firelight.

She threw back her head and laughed and her laugh was as remarkable as her snort: a tangle like blackberries, sweet, prickly, untidy, uncivilized, and it is an indication of the difficulty I have with her, for her character will never stay still and be one thing, refuses to be held down on my dissecting board, pulls out a pinned-down leg and shakes it in the air.

Sonia loved the laugh. She nudged me conspiratorially, silently asking me to appreciate this marvel, this genie released from an austere and flint-grey vessel.

While the laugh raged around him, Charles's persistent wire at last hit the secret of his mother's lock and, from the battered three-strap suitcase, came the unfiltered odour of his flesh and blood.

The blue-bellied black snake that came first to his hand was only an average specimen, no more than three foot long and sleepy and stiff with the cold. Yet this is not to take credit away from my son who handled this, his first snake, with an instinctive sympathy.

Sonia gurgled, but whether from amazement or fear I could not tell.

"Shiva," the dancer said softly. "Don't let the others out."

"I shut it," Charles said, stroking a finger along the snake's spine.

"I had it locked."

Charles bestowed a magnificent smile upon his new friend and I cannot remember him smiling at all until that night. Perhaps it was the first time in his difficult life that he dared expect happiness, and when I recall him by the fire it is not, any longer, as a child, but as the big-jawed, heavy-necked, sloping-shouldered, wide-hipped, fifteen-stone business man whose rare smile could so charm those who saw it. It was a smile to treasure, a smile people would try to induce, the more wonderful for being so rare. I have felt a similar emotion when splitting open a dull piece of rock to discover a fist of opal hiding inside: that such splendour could exist captive in such ugly clay.

"There is a rule of the road," Leah told my son gently, "that you do not go messing with another fellow's swag."

"It's a suitcase," Sonia contradicted, leaping to her habitual defence of her brother.

The snake moved through my son's hand, ran along Leah's arm, and stopped. They both stroked it. The creature did not seem inclined to move any more.

"It is an unusual person," Leah said to me, "who will be at home with a venomous snake."

Let me tell you, I was no longer one of them. You can mistreat a horse and be forgiven it. You can kick a dog and it will come back and lick your hand. But a snake is another matter, and once you have wronged it, it will carry the memory of you with it, like a bolted convict with lash marks on its back, criss-crossed, burned in like a loaf of fancy bread. And there is no doubt that the greatest mistake I ever made in my life was to keep that Geelong snake a prisoner in a hessian bag, to starve it, to use it for tricks. Had I not been so foolish my whole life would have taken a different course: Jack would not have died, I would not have been permitted to marry Phoebe, and I would not have been troubled by the sight of my son besotted with a snake-dancer.

I was forty-five years old when I met Leah and a man, at forty-five, is meant to be mature. Certainly he should not be dependent on the good opinion and respect of total strangers who blunder into his camp.

"Most men", Leah said to me, "will run a mile from a snake," and I felt myself compared to my son and found lacking and I was led by my emotions rather than my common sense which told me to let my son have his moment of glory and not to worry that this blue-coated lecturer thought me a coward. My emotions, however, ruled. I could not stand it, this invasion of the one place on earth – my camp – where I might be confident of some respect.

Leah was engaged in conversation with Charles. I poked the fire irritably. "I was doing a show once in Wollongong", she was saying, "with one of Jack Leach's pythons, a dance show. I was a support act to Danny O'Hara's boxers and the snake got around my neck. It was choking me. I was going blue, and not one of those men would come near me. They wouldn't touch the snake."

"I would have," Charles said.

"I know you would have," Leah smiled. "That's what I'm saying."

"What happened?" Sonia asked and I imagined she moved a fraction away from me.

"I bit its tail," the dancer said, "and it let go enough for me to get it off."

"I've often considered show business," I said.

"Oh yes," said Leah, but she was more interested in Charles.

"Yes," I said. God damn it. I did not even want the woman to stay. I would rather she left. I did not like her tone. I did not even care for her looks and I certainly had no thoughts of anything as dangerous as a fuck. I am Herbert Badgery, I thought, a man who nearly had an aircraft factory, a pioneer aviator anyway, a salesman of more than usual skill, and here I am being patronized by a girl who is self-important because she can touch a snake. I, who have travelled the country with a cannon behind me, have built mansions, resumed land, skinned a crow with nothing but air from my lungs, and disappeared from human sight before witnesses.

"Yes," I said, "the entertaining arts have always attracted me."

"It's a hard life," Leah said, "and full of trickery and deception, people like Mervyn Sullivan who will steal your act and leave your picture up when you no longer work for them."

"Magic was my field," I said. For the admiration of a woman I did not know, I spent this little piece of gold which was not intended as currency at all. It was all I had in my empty pockets.

"Disappearing acts," I said, the master of self-delusion, imagining I could simply say it and not have to go through with a performance.

"Very common," she said, "but hardly enough to run a whole show on. You'd be surprised at the number of people I meet who think that they could make a living because they can throw a few balls into the air. One trick is not enough. One dance is not enough. I do the Emu Dance, the Fan Dance, the Snake Dance, the Dance of the Seven Veils. It is the snake that gets them in, but it is not enough by itself. Anyone who has read Cole's Funny Picture Book knows how to do a disappearing act. Nothing personal," she said quickly, seeing me rising from my log. "I am merely pointing out the difference between a professional and an amateur."

I stood before them. I can still see their eyes in the firelight, the Dodge, in the distance, half hidden by mist, the frying pan sitting amongst the cracked river rocks of the fireplace, the sheen on the snake's black back as it pressed itself against the warmth of a child's and a woman's body.

I made the dragon.

I put my foot on my knee. I held my arm in the air. I teetered on my toes. I summoned up the terrible flag of the English, the pipes and drums of the band, their blue shirts and white moleskins, the brains of Goon's father like the brains of the pig. The river banks flowed with the Chinese, a yellow river of fear over boulders as smooth and unyielding as dragons' eggs. The cart ran down Han and the bone splintered his leg: it thrust outwards like a dagger, drove through his smooth hairless thigh and he looked at it with astonishment: this enemy he had harboured innocently within him. My father galloped his team, his eyes bright, clear blue, dragging his cannon, cracking his whip.

I wanted to call out but I could not. The dragon came and it was bigger than the dragon I knew before, for a child does not know enough to make a powerful dragon. A child makes a childish dragon from children's fears, a cub with soft paws and breath that smells of warm milk.