Peter Carey - Illywhacker

"What is it, little Leah? What is it?"

Leah wept and wept. "I am a fraud," she said. "I am a fake, a fake, a fake. I cannot be anything."

"You are the sky," Rosa said, trying to find medicine in words. She held the girl's head to her breast. "You are the sky." She meant that big sky, that vast clear cobalt sky without history, clean, full of light, free of sombre clouds.

But she did not explain herself and neither the sky nor her arms could give Leah Goldstein any comfort.

Now, in that kitchen, her husband came to sit next to her in the vacant chair. He put the back of his dirty hand against her cheek, gently. "She is very young," he said, softly, "and you will damage her."

"All right," she said, but she promised nothing.

"You have plenty of other things to amuse you," he said, looking around the kitchen, the open cupboards, the spilt flour, the stacks of yellowing newspapers.

"Yes," she said. She found some cheese and pickles then and saw him to his truck. She admired the load of roofing lead he had bought from the old Turramurra Seminary and promised him meat and pudding for his dinner while Leah Goldstein, who had heard almost every word, held the head of the gramophone ready. And Rosa, returning to the spare room, found her protegee swaying her hips lasciviously to the accompaniment of Lou Rondano's "Boompsy Daisy".

In October, Leah Goldstein had to give up her dancing. Her final exams were approaching. She was also working late into the night, Roneoing pamphlets, addressing envelopes and moving from dreary street to dreary street stuffing election material in letter boxes. She felt herself engaged in a fight between good and evil. It was no longer a theory to her. In the final hectic weeks Izzie had been badly beaten by the New Guard, dragged down from the platform outside Colgate Palmolive and kicked and pummelled as he lay on the ground. He had screamed like a child, a high piercing terrible sound, and although he was ashamed of this it made Leah admire him all the more. She developed a passionate hatred of large men, New Guardsmen, policemen, bailiffs with moustaches and returned soldier's badges. When Jack Lang was finally elected and she met him, at last, face to face, she was made uncomfortable by his size, the harshness of his voice, the width of his shoulders: the Socialist Saviour looked like a bailiff.

There were parties, of course, when Lang was finally elected, but the party she chose to remember was the one Rosa and Lenny threw for Rosa's birthday during the first week of her exams.

"My silly friends," Rosa had told her with an odd grimace that at once celebrated her theatrical colleagues and denied them totally.

Rosa's silly friends had red mouths and huge hats. They were walking scrapbooks. There were dancers of every type, bit actors, second-rate cabaret performers, and short men with wide lapels who could tell jokes for three hours without repeating themselves. They filled the house, surrounded the caravan, and spilled out into the street. They chucked Izzie under the chin as if he were still a little boy and told each other different stories at the same time. Leah was entranced by them and did not notice that Rosa was bored and dissatisfied with all this vapid talk which reminded her only of the days before her expulsion when her friends had been serious people.

Mervyn Sullivan arrived in a giant black Buick, bringing two beautiful actresses and a huge bottle of champagne with a silver ribbon around its neck, and Rosa, surprising herself by the dazzling quality of her own hypocrisy, pretended to be flattered that he had come.

In the later afternoon they all walked along Bondi Beach and strolled along the sand in colourful defiance of the rude realities of life. This was the day when Mervyn Sullivan, hearing that Leah had learned dancing from Rosa, grandly presented her with his card, a deckled masterpiece like a wedding invitation. "There is always work for talent," he said and made her put the card in her handbag.

Jennifer Valamay sang a rude song about a dicky bird and Leah, emboldened by a single glass of sweet sherry, kissed Izzie on the cheek behind the laundry. It was not an unqualified success, for the skin she had felt such compassion for when it was bruised by the fists of bullies also had an upsetting clamminess; the kiss made her shiver; she hid the shiver in a laugh.

When she returned to Malvern Road at Christmas that year, Leah Goldstein had no idea that she was, already, well on the way to being a snake-dancer. She felt, inside that monstrous house, on the way to nowhere. She was bored and lonely. She listened to the magnified sounds of clinking cutlery and, in this atmosphere as thin as her mother's consomme, she found herself yearning for the coarseness of the Kaletskys, for hunks of potato and chunks of sausage, for things not cut but torn, for breadcrumbs on the tablecloth, for shocking flatulence, accusation, discord. Even the way the male Kaletskys moved, their slightness, frailty, their sparrow-fast heads, their darting eyes, the movements of their ironic lips, all this purified in her mind until their skins became buffed and ivory smooth with so much taking out and putting away, and the Kaletskys metamorphosed into exquisite characters, like a family of little Balinese gods and exhibited a variety-show vulgarity that was, at the same time, so finely worked that the images must be wrapped -like Joseph Kaletsky's translation of Engels that Rosa had so proudly shown her – in fine layers of jeweller's tissue paper.

Her mother, it is true, saw something was amiss, but blamed Sydney for making her daughter noisy and opinionated. If she could have known that snakes would be involved she would have, of course, blamed the snake. But the snake is not a Cause but an Effect, not a Serpent but a simple snake, and if we are to be scrupulous in laying blame it is better that you know: it is the chooks that are responsible.

Soon you will find yourself with chooks all around you, shitting, pecking, puddling in their drinking water, but before we get to that insanitary situation, perhaps I should recount my own experience of chooks – and I do not mean the difficulties, with lice, mites, fowl pox, pullorum or bum-drop about which subjects Goon's otherwise taciturn cousin gave me enough information to last a lifetime. Nor do I plan to debate with you the comparative virtues of the Plymouth Rock, the Rhode Island Red, the Silkie, the White Leghorn or the Australorp, although I have always thought the White Leghorn a particularly degenerate example of the species. Nor, madam, will I sign your protest letter about the battery hens. I wish only to recount an incident that occurred in that summer of February 1931 while Leah Goldstein was hiding in her room in Malvern Road pretending to be a socialist.

I was, at that time, still dithering around Central Victoria and giving my son the deceitful impression that Sydney and his mother were 20,000 miles from Melbourne.

Now I know I told you I had given up on the motor trade, but in February 1931, just as I was coming down the steps of the Woodend Post Office, trying to keep my hat on my head and the hot wind-blown dust out of my eyes, I ran into Bert McCulloch, the local Ford dealer.

Now dealer is a tricky word: it suggests something sharp and clever, monied, propertied, something, in short, not at all like Bert who was a blacksmith by birth, a jack of all trades, a clever wheelwright, an ace welder, a plumber of rare ingenuity. He could carry a piece of hot metal between grease-black thumb and forefinger in such a way that -even though the metal had suffered half an hour beneath his welding torch – he was not burnt. His knack, he said, was partly in the protection offered by the grease but also by the feather-lightness of his touch.