Peter Carey - Illywhacker

Bert told me he had a Prospect out at Morrisons, a woman with silver rings on her fingers, a cert to buy an A Model. He had offended this woman in some way. She would not speak to him. Would I, he asked, take on the job? There was fifty quid in it.

Bert needed the sale as much as I did. Before I had time to think about it his wife was ushering my children out of the northerly wind and into the shelter of the earth-floored shed where Bert did his welding and where she answered the phone and did the books. I would have taken my children with me, but she stole them away, fearful I suppose of any further hindrance to the sale being made – you could see the McCullochs were having hard times too.

Next thing I knew I was sitting behind the wheel of a brand new A Model and Bert was offering me – he held it delicately between thumb and forefinger as if it were a freshly welded intake manifold – a map, hand-drawn on gasket cork, to the property of Miss Adamson of Morrisons.

Bert had a nice face, round and regular with a fringe of snow-white hair, a tanned pate, and a pair of rimless spectacles that gave him, blue singlet or no, a distinguished air. His lower teeth, however, were stained and worn away by the hot torrents of his tea drinking and when he winked and grinned at me, the face took on a cock-eyed malicious quality, a trick of the teeth, but unsettling to a fellow so desperate for a quid and so fearful of failure at the same time.

"This'll test you, Sonny Jim."

"Why would that be?"

"She's a spinst-ah," he leered. "And a crack lick-ah."

Bert had a healthy interest in sexual matters. It had been he who informed me, years before, about what ladies who are affectionate towards each other do in private, and I suppose I must conclude he was correct about Miss Adamson's sexual predilections. But the interesting thing about it is that the place where the lady was supposed to put her tongue, this delicate and private matter, so occupied the minds of all Woodend that it assumed the nature of a cloak that the hot wind of gossip wrapped around the woman so tightly, so effectively that – even while they all sniggered and pointed – it obscured from view that which otherwise would have been glaringly obvious, to wit – Miss Adamson was not the full bag of marbles.

Sex was their obsession, but Miss Adamson's, as I soon found out, was chooks.

I did not realize straight away. I was struck, of course, by her physical appearance which was at once eccentric and aristocratic. I remember, most of all, her hands. These were not in the least aristocratic, but were large and broad and thick-fingered, as tough as farmers'. Her fingers not only showed broad, chipped, broken cuticles but three big ornate silver rings whose classical allusions were lost in convoluted forms and black silver oxide. Her face was strong, heavily jawed, big-nosed, but very handsome. Her hair was a lustrous grey and it was cut simply in a fringe. She wore a faded grey men's work shirt and big serge trousers of a weight unsuitable to the day. She was, I suppose, about fifty.

I liked her immediately.

Of course I liked her. I had seen Bert's wife's eyes, close to panic in the way they looked at me and when she gathered my children about her I realized, suddenly, how pinched and threadbare they were. Of course I liked Miss Adamson. I was going to sell her a car. I would have loved her if I had needed to. My stomach was swollen up with air and all that hot blown summer landscape had taken on a slightly unreal focus so that the edges of the wattle leaves looked sharp enough to slice your fingers off.

She was very civil to me. She was not the type to offer scones -she confronted me at the gate in front of her shiny little cottage -but neither was she the type to send me off without a demo. She reckoned (she ordered) that we might take a spin up to the back boundary where, she knew, the fence was sure to have been broken in a recent flood. She asked me, most politely, if the A Model could ford her river and I, having inspected the crossing, assured her, even more politely, that it could. I had the feeling in the back of my neck that I have always had when a sale will be made – that creamy tingling feeling, sharp and smooth at once, calm and excited, abrasive and soothing. I did not mind the musty smell about her person or the sour mud she introduced into the vehicle. I could not keep my eyes from the tangled wealth of story suggested by those silver rings and broad strong hands.

The river was only a foot high, the rocks small. We sailed across and didn't even get our feet wet.

The trouble was that we spent too much time on her boundary which, by the by, was the most disgraceful fence I have ever seen and it was, like dirty underwear, a contradiction to her front fences, her little green-painted cottage, closed sheds, neat haystacks – here, swept out of sight behind an unusual stand of wattles and box-thorns was a fence (which may, long ago, have been tight and strained with six bright tight strands of wire you could play a tune on) which was now as sad as a half-unravelled sweater on a scarecrow – cobbled together out of bits and pieces with not a single whole piece of wire, I swear it, more than a yard long, and most of them so rusty they broke when you twisted them, and some of them no more than poor thin binding wire, and others pieces of barbed stuff so archaic you found yourself wondering about its history. The posts were no better, most of them rotted off at ground level and the general situation was so bad that it was very easy to spend an hour there, poking around looking for bits of wire to fix it with. My feelings, so far, indicated that the sale was mine. I was already eating cafe breakfasts, hotel dinners, mixed grills, steamed puddings, ordering a beer for myself and green jelly for the children.

When the fence was fixed as well as possible, we got back into the car. Miss Adamson took in her broad belt a notch and made complimentary remarks. Not a word about Chooks or Tinkers. She even praised the paintwork, insisting that there was great depth and beauty in the black. If there were no upsets the fifty quid was mine.

We returned to the crossing, passing slowly through the high rusty stands of dock weeds and the fleshy beds of dense paspalum. We hit no hidden rock or stump.

What, an hour before, had been a pleasant little creek was now a swollen raging torrent down which broken trees rode pell-mell and beneath the rush of waters could be heard the low rumble of boulders grinding on each other like a gravel-crusher. Anyone who knows the district knows how this can happen – you have a blue-skied day but there are storms and thunder upon the mountain. I did not know this at the time, but Miss Adamson, having lived there for twenty years, must have known. In spite of which, she turned on me.

"You tinker," she said.

I had brought the car to the crossing. I was, already, disorientated. I could not understand why the creek was the way it was. It seemed impossible and I was as confused as a fellow suddenly, without warning, rolled out of a boat trying to understand his new environment.

"Madam?" I said, but I was staring at that monstrous river whose waters were puce and bruised from so much violence.

"You pesky little tinker," she said. "A tinker's trick," she roared. "But I", her eyes were hard, hostile, her mouth suddenly thin and severe, "shall not buy."

I knew she was a crack lick-ah, but it did not occur to me that she was crazy, not even when she blamed me for a flood. It is obvious enough now, now I alert you to the condition, but had you sat there with your head awash with astonishment and worry as to how you would get home to your children, knowing one had a sore throat and temperature and that the other would make himself ill with bawling, not knowing how it was – how, anyway -that a perfectly sedate creek could convert itself like this without benefit of a single cloud, and had you sat here beside me and shared my confusion, then the accusation of being a tinker, if you bothered to take it in, would be merely one more cannon shot in the chaos of battle and you would not think it madder or less reasonable than the river itself.