Peter Carey - Illywhacker

A man in a woollen round-necked singlet and serge trousers stood watching the bird with an air of puzzled curiosity. He had a big boozer's nose, tender with fragile capillaries, and – as he saw Izzie and tucked his lower lip beneath his upper – a manner that was at once self-effacing and sly. He pushed the dead bird with the head of his axe.

Izzie introduced Leah. Teddy called her "missus". He squatted and poked at the small fire he had lit beneath Lenny's copper cauldron. The bottom of the cauldron was streaked with black and it was full of dark steaming water.

"Hang on," Teddy said. "Got a prezzie for you." He rose and disappeared into the house and they could hear a woman's voice shouting at him in anger.

"Nice bloke," Izzie said.

"Where are Sid and Rosa?"

Izzie nodded his head towards the caravan and, seeing Leah's confusion, explained: "Teddy's got a wife and four kids."

"Oh," said Leah, looking at the dead chook and wondering how it was possible to be evicted in Jack Lang's state.

"Here ya are," Teddy said. He had returned with a chipped bowl full of hen's eggs. "Nice fresh cackleberries for your mum and dad."

As they walked the few steps to the caravan, Teddy dunked the headless chook into the cauldron and the rank smell of its steaming feathers filled Leah's nostrils.

One expected discord amongst the Kaletskys, but nothing had prepared Leah for the dull air of misery she found inside that caravan on whose floor the sand of lost holidays, sand that had once stuck between Izzie's toes or clung to Rosa's brown calves, still lingered, cold, hardedged, abrasive.

Rosa looked ill. Her face was sallow. Those lovely lines around her eyes and mouth had deepened and set into unhappy patterns, and although she embraced Leah and made a fuss of her, her eyes stayed as dull as the windows of that gloomy space. They crammed in together around a tiny table, oppressed by the weight of uncomfortably placed cupboards.

Leah had returned to Sydney vowing to work hard at her studies, to give up her picnics and her dancing, but she had not been in the caravan five minutes before she found herself resolving to get Rosa out on a picnic.

"So," she said, bright as a nurse, "you have tenants, Rosa."

"I hate them," Rosa hissed. "I want my house back."

Lenny sighed and screwed his eyes shut. "If you want them to go," he said, "all you have to do is tell them." He lit a cigarette, made a face, then put it out.

"Why should I tell them? He," Rosa pointed a finger at her son who stared, ostentatiously, at the metal ceiling, "he is the one who asked them here."

"You have a short memory, Rosa," Izzie said. "Who offered them the house?"

"How could they live in the caravan? It is hard enough for two people."

Lenny was trying to catch Leah's eye. He was making secret fun of his wife. Leah was embarrassed. She took Rosa's hand and stroked it but Rosa did not seem connected to her hand. "I am a prisoner in this nasty box," she said, but to no one in particular. "I cannot go into my garden, I have to ask them if I might please use the shower. The shower is filthy. The walls in the kitchen are covered with grease…"

"Whose grease?" said Lenny.

"It smells. I hate it."

"Rosa," Lenny said, "you are being selfish," but he put out his hand to her, to touch her shoulder. Rosa shrugged his hand off.

"Of course I am selfish," she yelled, suddenly very angry. "I have always been selfish."

"You gave them the house," Izzie said and Leah, who had begun to feel physically ill, found a strong shiver of dislike pass through her.

"What else could I do? You make it impossible for me to do anything else with your stupid charity. You are a wishy-washy. You know you are."

Izzie's face tightened and his pretty mouth became a slit. "Who owned stocks and shares? Some Marxist!"

"I did," Rosa shouted. Leah wanted to block her ears, to run away and hide from this nightmare. "I did."

"You are making Leah embarrassed," Lenny said, but Rosa was staring at her son and something nasty was happening between them.

"Joseph would never have done this to me," she said. "A real communist would do nothing so sentimental."

Izzie stood up, his face quite pallid. "Shut up," he screamed. He looked ugly with hate. "Shut your damn mouth."

Lenny began to rise. Leah put her hands across her ears. The caravan rocked and swayed as Izzie ran from it. They heard his feet on the path and the squeak of the gate.

"Go and find him, Leah," Rosa said wearily. "Go and find him. Tell him you love him."

When she had gone, husband and wife went back to the matter that they had been discussing for two days. They circled round and around it, talking, talking, but in the centre of their talk there was nothing, a hole – the scrap-metal business was bankrupt.

Amongst some fleshy plants with leaves like ear-lobes, she found him, high on the cliffs of Tamarama where the wet Cellophane wrappers of Hoadley's confectionery assumed the same wet snotty look as the used contraceptive – that repellent thing – she had found there while walking as a dancer, her head high, her arms swinging, as fluid as a seagull, on a day when Rosa had been happy with the world and that other fleshy plant, the one called pig-face, had lain across a corner of the cliffs like vivid pink shantung flung across a draper's counter.

He was curled inside a weather-worn piece of soft yellow stone a hundred feet above the sucking sea. If he had wrists like a girl, he suffered hurt like a man, privately, ashamed of tears or perhaps, Leah thought, seeing the black ball of pain in the arms of the rock, like an animal withdrawing from the herd. It seemed to her to be a deeply conservative attitude to pain – to withdraw from society as if one would be destroyed for one's weakness or incapacity.

All away to the south the sky was hung with thunder blue and down along the beach at Bondi the sand glowed an odd deep mustard yellow and she wished she had been up on the cliffs on the day of Rosa's birthday party to see the procession along the beach: the mauves, the yellows, blacks and pinks, the wonderful Silly Friends parading noisily and emptily along the sand.

She chose a course towards Izzie that would allow him to witness her approach and thus have time to compose herself. She walked with her head down, one hand on her hat, the other controlling her dress which rose recklessly to show the sky her dancer's legs.

When she arrived at the rock he was sitting up, looking sheepish. She sat down beside him and took his hand, not as a lover might, but as a concerned stranger taking a pulse, and indeed it crossed her mind to wonder if such skin could ever be truly familiar, if it might not always be slightly alien.

"Talking to my mother," Izzie said, not looking at her. "Talking to my mother is not a game you can win. You are in check from the first move."

"Do you know what I think?" Leah said at last.

"What do you think?"

"I think the chooks are making everyone unhappy." She smiled, but she was quite serious. When Izzie had made the chooks they had been snow-white creatures with wise black eyes but now they were malevolent and mad-eyed and their red combs were obscene.

Izzie shrugged his shoulders irritably.

"She has never been any different," he said. "It was always Joseph who could do no wrong. Whatever I did, it didn't matter-I was wrong. Oh, Goldstein, if only you could meet my slimy big brother. She loves him. She thinks he's the ant's pants. Have you seen how she wraps up his dull translations in tissue paper? Jesus Christ! He's such a fraud."

"Izzie, why didn't you tell me about Rosa?"

"I am telling you, Goldstein," he smiled, "now."

"She's unhappy. She looks sick and miserable. And your father has a funny look too – disappointed and bitter."