Peter Carey - Illywhacker

It was to this concentration on the task at hand that Mervyn Sullivan attributed his now doubtful success.

Leah waited for a reply. If there had been a chair to sit on she would have sat, but as there was none she stood uncertainly at the doorway and waited. She watched Mervyn Sullivan complete his meat pie and carefully wipe his fingers with newspaper cuttings.

Then he stood up and did up his suit coat.

"Mr Sullivan…" Leah began again.

"A long way from Romano's," Mervyn Sullivan said. "Lobster thermidor and French champagne, crepes Suzette and yes sir, no sir. A long way too, girlie, from when I saw you last. Don't you want to be a lawyer any more?"

"Doctor," Leah said. "You see, Izzie lost his job and…"

Mervyn Sullivan held up his hand. "Spare me, please. I listen to these stories all day. Please."

"You said you'd get me work."

"I'm packing in this game," Mervyn Sullivan said, indicating that Leah should sit in the chair next to the waste-paper basket. "I'm finished. I can't make a quid any more."

Leah looked at the shining handsome face and mistook the liquids for signs of emotion. In the middle of her own disappointment she found room to be sorry for him.

"How terrible," she said.

Mervyn Sullivan did not seem to notice her sympathy. "I have girls like you in here every day. Dancers are a dime a dozen, girlie, I promise you. There's nothing. If you don't believe me go and see All-Star, go and talk to Jim Sharman. Ask him about dancers. They all think they're star material. They come in here and then they want to argue with me. Anyway, I'm packing up, I'm going on the road again. Who would have thought it? Fifty years of age, and back on the road. Jesus wept."

"I'll do anything," Leah said. "I learn quickly."

"Dancers are too much trouble," Mervyn said. "Give me a good vocalist, a fat lady and a magician. Why do I want to break my heart with dancers?"

"I brought my costume."

"What difference does a costume make?"

"It's an emu costume," Leah said, and held up the feathers. "Don't you remember Rosa Kaletsky's Emu Dance?"

"So why would feathers make you co-operate? It's your age, girlie. You'll think you know everything. Give you a week and you'll think you're it. You'll be telling me how to run my business, you'll be arguing with me, having headaches, going sick, falling in love with the first decent-looking cocky who comes ogling you in the front seat."

He was standing now, staring at a photograph on the floor. He stooped and picked it up. "Prunier's," he said, handing it to Leah who saw Mervyn Sullivan with a beautiful woman on either side of him. "I was the King," he said. "I got Sheila Bradbury, that's her on the left, a hundred quid a week. She's an alcoholic now. If you want sense from her see her at breakfast while she's still shaking."

"I don't drink."

"But could I trust you?" Mervyn Sullivan said softly, his eyes watering and his upper lip swelling. "You're at the university. You think you've got brains. You think you can dance. You'd argue with me all day long. I'm getting too old to argue, girlie. Mervyn knows what's right. You're a good kid," he said, coming to look at the photograph over her shoulder. He was very close, but she was not frightened. But when she felt his hand on her neck, she knew, with a shock, what was required.

"Would you co-operate?" Mervyn Sullivan said. "That is the question."

They were five floors above the street. A fine rain was falling and obscuring the outlines of the world outside. Leah shivered.

"You see," he said, and took his hand away.

They stood there, staring intently at the photograph of Mervyn Sullivan and two women at Prunier's. There was a vase of flowers, roses, on the table. The black-trousered legs of a waiter hovered by Mervyn's left shoulder. The woman who was now an alcoholic had her hand on Mervyn's right shoulder. Lost in the black and grey world of the photograph, Leah made her decision.

"All right," she said.

"You won't argue," Mervyn Sullivan said, turning her by her shoulders to look at him. Her nose came level with his splendid tie. It was a big tie, and tied into a luxurious fat knot. "It's hard on the road," he said. "The towns are ratty. We sleep in caravans. There is no damn glamour, just hard work," he said smiling. He brushed her breast with the back of his large hand and she thought, again, that he would burst into tears. "The magician is a fairy," he said, taking her hand and placing it against the hard thing in his trousers. "And I can't pay you like a professional. Two quid a week would be tops."

"Three quid," Leah said, thinking of Rosa and Lenny.

"Three quid," Mervyn Sullivan agreed, unbuttoning her skirt. "Just for the legs."

As the alcoholic Sheila Bradbury could attest, Mervyn Sullivan was a bully and a bastard but he was a masterful lover and although not totally denying the watery emotion suggested by his face, performed with such lingering brutality that Leah, who five minutes before had been a virgin, found herself in Elizabeth Street, spread out across a desk and making tiny bird-sounds she did not at first recognize as coming from her at all. Mervyn Sullivan had been a tap-dancer. He was brilliant, alone in a spotlight, which itself suggested there might be an audience for the event; and Leah, in the darkness, vibrated like a tram on metal wheels and felt an electric pleasure as she raced over cold wet bitumen.

When it was over, he was matter-of-fact. "OK," he said, "now you can dance."

"You hired me already."

"Christ," he said, "You're arguing already."

"You said three pounds."

"Look, girlie, I don't even know you can dance. Now, please, just for Uncle Mervyn, put on your feathers. And let's hope you do a little better on your feet than on your back."

She danced, without music, with hate in her heart.

"All right," he said. "Meet me down in the arcade on Wednesday morning and bring a photograph so I can get a sign painted."

She was nineteen years old; her eyes were clear; she was so young that Rosa could not even bear to contemplate it. She placed her hand next to Leah's, silently, as if the evidence presented there on the oilcloth-covered table should be argument enough: the corruption of one, the innocence of the other.

Leah's brow contained not a line. It was so smooth that Rosa ran the tip of her finger across it, from the bridge of her nose up into the dense curly blue-black hair that never, in any light, revealed the scalp beneath.

Rosa opened her mouth to speak and then shut it. What was there to say? How could she un-say all those dances, wind back all those scratchy pieces of silly music?

In just this way had she lost Joseph, through the power of her stupid mouth. But you could lose someone to Lenin with a clear conscience. You could not abandon someone to Mervyn Sullivan so easily.

Lenny, crumpled, unshaven, unhappy Lenny, said nothing. She could not meet his eyes. She knew she would see blame there. She felt blame enough.

So they sat, in silence, while the westerly wind buffeted the little caravan and rain dripped slowly through the leaking hatch in the roof.

Rosa would have liked to say some of the things she felt about Leah's decision. For instance: it suggested an enormous arrogance, to undertake this change of career for the benefit of people who had not requested it, people far tougher than she was who had – anyway -survived a lifetime of difficulty without such monstrous charity, this bright-eyed, shining One Fine Thing.

Yet she could not say this with any confidence because Leah stubbornly refused to admit that Lenny and Rosa had anything to do with it. She said nothing, not even half a hint, about sending them money and no one could bring themselves to ask her this most embarrassing question or say that whatever money she made she would need herself, that even if she starved herself on their account, she could not, on a dancer's wages, be a breadwinner.