Peter Carey - Illywhacker

So, no, I did not doubt her sanity. In fact the opposite is true: she looked at me as if I were some ant, some low form of life, and she looked at me so confidently that, in spite of the fact that her trousers were two sizes too big for her, I believed her. She was musty to smell but her eyes were eyes accustomed to deciding what way the world shall be run. At that moment I abandoned any hope of the sale.

That was my disappointment, a disappointment so great I could have cried. I wanted only to be with my family. I thought of my boy who would soon be bellowing in the foreign dark. I considered fording the river on foot, but even as the thought entered my head I saw a log, as big as a battering ram, surfing down the river as if powered by its own angry engine.

I thought the business finished. But it was, alas, merely starting, for the excitement of the river seemed to have served the function of priming the engine of Miss Adamson's madness and it began (roughly, with coughs, curses, and small explosions) to ignite, and then to turn, and soon the whole mechanism was huffing and chuffing, ready to run all through the night up and down, down and up, along one track whose point of departure and point of arrival were identical: chooks.

I did not notice at the beginning. I did not notice that she was speaking about her chooks in a peculiar way. She was worried about them. That was only natural. She said Maisie had no idea how to look after them. But she was not cross with Maisie, but with me, for luring her across the river.

She pulled a notebook from her pocket and showed me her breeding plan, all little tiny boxes and arrows at angles, but still I did not think her mad, merely unfriendly. She accused me of not understanding the diagrams. She was right. She did not do this in any hysterical way, but as proof, if you like, of my inferiority, that I was a man so stupid I could not understand a chook. My ignorance was a thing I was, I have admitted it before, most sensitive about. I collapsed easily before her attack.

She may have stopped talking, but I don't remember it.

At dusk a woman with a kerosene lamp came down to the crossing and waved it about. Miss Adamson got out of the car and screamed instructions at the raging river. It was quite obvious Maisie could not hear her, but Miss Adamson shouted at the light until, at last, it went away.

It was night before I really started to understand that I was trapped with a mad woman. By then she was stretched out on the back seat, her muddy boots on the upholstery, smoking.

"We have no right," she said, lighting a cigarette (I did not ask her where she was putting the ash and butts). "We have no right to make them so stupid. God did not make them stupid. Men did. All we do here is repair the damage."

"What damage?" I asked, but I was thinking of the damage she was doing to Bert's upholstery.

Then she sat up. The moon was just rising. I could see her very clearly. "Does nothing stay in your head, tinker?"

She then set off up and down her one track. Half the night she huffed and puffed while I drifted in and out of nightmares.

Her opinion, as I gathered it, was that the chook should be discontented. She found their content and their stupidity to be unnatural. She gave me chooks, chapter and verse, history, breeding, the Asian jungle fowl, the works. She had some jungle fowl which, she said – and I am sure she meant nothing vulgar -would put some spunk into her leghorns. They were on a verge of flight, she said, of freedom, anguish, life, love. She shook me awake to make sure I understood.

I had not eaten for three days. I told her this, but it did not affect her. She would not permit me to escape my hunger with sleep.

At dawn we saw a slight middle-aged woman in a black Edwardian dress. She was standing on the other side of the much reduced river. She was compressed by severe stays. She wore high-laced boots and a netted little black hat. She was carrying a bucket and hollering and pointing, but I could not make out what she was on about.

The object of her excitement was obscured by the tall avenue of blackwoods that lined the river, and then, in the grey imperfect light I witnessed what was, I suppose, in the history of noxious weeds and feral beasts, an important moment.

I thought at first they were sulphur-crested cockatoos.

But they were not. They were white leghorns, the most stupid of chooks, rising, white and heavy into the soupy summer air.

Miss Adamson was standing beside me. "There," she said to me, her eyes no longer cold and hard, but wet and shining and full of hurt like a wronged child. "There, tinker," she said. "You see."

There they were all right: ignorance, stupidity, malice, flying free and unfettered. They circled, their overdeveloped wings working at too fast a rate for birds so big. They set off south, the least hesitant one leading, down between the river blackwoods.

These were the progenitors of the wild chooks that caused so much trouble in the Wimmera wheatfields and of the leghorns who were soon to invade Leah Goldstein's story.

On her first day back in Sydney Leah went with Izzie to Bondi. The world shone with the light of picnics and Leah was delighted with everything she saw. The ordinariness of those little Bondi streets did not dismay her. She loved their mess, their crass. She liked the paspalum growing in the grass strips, the white clover with its rusty heart, the nettles poking out of chain-mail fences. A man in a cotton singlet was asleep in a kitchen chair on the footpath and around the corner came a nanny-goat, its chain rattling behind it, pursued by a woman in Sunday curlers and her husband's dressing gown.

"You mongrel," said the woman to the clever goat. "Lovely day," she said to Leah and did not even seem to see that Izzie, the source of Leah's happiness, was busy being a chook, not just any chook, but a chook belonging to Lenny and Rosa's new tenants.

Last night, on the platform at Central, he had tried to kiss her and she had found herself, involuntarily, shrinking from him. She had felt a flinch of disappointment exactly equal to the gap between her ivory-smooth idea of Izzie and Izzie himself, this little scarecrow with rag-doll sleeves, bad skin and hair (she wrinkled her nose) that badly needed washing.

But she had forgotten: Izzie was funny. And now, as he thrust out his bantam's chest and drew his hands into his flapping wings, she laughed in delight. God, what a chook he was. He clucked and chortled and scratched amongst the clover. He had feathers and a comb. He clicked along the paving stones on his pointed shoes.

"Teddy's chooks", he whispered, "do not stand on pavement cracks."

"Teddy's chooks", he leaped on to a low brick wall, "riding on the tram to Bondi."

The chook was so well behaved on the tram seat. It tucked its head in and snoozed absently. And this (it was now history) was how the tenants' chooks had travelled to Bondi after their eviction from Newtown, their right to free travel defended by three militant members of the Tramways Union, one of whom -the famous Arthur McKay – insisted on paying full fare for the rooster.

"I cannot wait", Leah said – and felt how pleased Izzie was when she took his arm – "to meet your famous chooks."

She could not have avoided them. The new tenants' chooks had taken possession like a conquering army. The front fence -never a pretty sight – was now ugly with chicken wire. The chooks scratched and pecked at the remains of the front lawn. Their droppings marked the concrete path around the side of the house and – in the ravaged back garden, between house and caravan – she walked into a scene of execution: a headless Rhode Island Red spurted its last spasms of bright red blood beneath the picnic sky and then fell, drunkenly, and lay twitching in the dust.