Peter Carey - Illywhacker

The turmoil of this meeting will be best understood if you imagine Rosa, now, as the caravan rocks in the wind, begin to speak sternly, harshly even, and all the time stroking Leah's smooth pink-nailed hand, and both women's eyes full of tears.

Rosa and Lenny begged Leah, jointly and separately, to reconsider. They spoke badly of Mervyn Sullivan and painted unattractive pictures of life on the road. But all this flowed off her smooth and untroubled skin which was, like all young skin, thin as paper and thick as cowhide.

Leah, excited beyond belief at this daring swerve in her life, refused to admit that she had done anything earth-shattering. She was insouciant, arguing against the skipping rhythms of her heart.

"Why", she asked Rosa, "is a doctor superior to a dancer?"

Rosa flinched, feeling her own words turned into knives and used against her.

"When the bills come," Lenny said, "then you will see the difference."

"Leah, if this is for us…" Rosa began.

"No, Rosa, it is not for you." And indeed she felt that was true, and although she felt a little frightened of what she had done, she also felt an enormous relief. She was too stupid to be a doctor. She could not have borne another year of feeling so inadequate. Everything around her conspired to make her feel stupid, even Izzie whom she admired so much.

"When I was a young girl," Rosa said, "I used to dream that one day my mother would get sick and old and I would look after her. I would tell her, Mamma, I will look after you. She would smile at me. She liked me to say it to her. She repeated it to grown-ups to show what a nice girl I was. Later, when I was older, I did look after her, and I was happy to look after her. But I've thought about it lately, Leah, and I don't think it was a very nice sort of happiness. It was like a revenge: 'Now I have you. Now you will wash your hands when I say. Now you will eat your meal. It will be this meal – which I have cooked without consulting you – because I am very busy and you are a lot of trouble.'"

"So," said Lenny. "So what is your story?" He butted out his cigarette and then placed it, not in the ashtray, but on the top of the table, lined up with all the other butts each one of which had been put out at precisely the same moment.

"The story is that all young people dream they will control their parents. They wait, like crows, while they get weaker."

"But you are not my parents, Rosa."

"Then I will not have this on my conscience. We did not ask you to." She looked up and caught Lenny's eyes. He nodded his head slowly. See! he was saying. See!

"Yes?" Rosa said belligerently. "What is it?"

But Lenny would say nothing. He ran his tongue over his chipped teeth and studied her with his calculating man's eyes.

"And it affects nothing," Rosa said to Leah. "Don't you understand? It is so naive. It is too naive to bear. The world stays just the same as it was before."

"I wasn't trying to alter the world. Rosa, Rosa, don't cry. The Kaletskys are the ones who alter the world. We Goldsteins are more humble."

"Humble. Listen to her, Lenny. I could smack your face. What will your father think of us?"

"Too late to think now," said Lenny.

"I sent him a list", said Leah, whose father still knew nothing of the Kaletskys, "with two columns. In one column I put all the pros and in another I put all the cons."

"You left some out."

"How do you know, Rosa, you haven't seen the list?"

"You have left out all the things you are too young to know, because you have never been a dancer. All you have listened to is my silly stories. I'm sorry I ever told you."

"Rosa, Rosa, don't cry."

"I'm not crying. It is such a waste of life, for nothing. You will lie in bed in some dump, some rat-hole in Benalla and the fleas will feed off you and you will stop yourself going to sleep because when you are asleep you will scratch yourself, and if you scratch your belly or your legs – you tell her, Lenny – then the customers see it. So you go to sleep anyway, you are so tired. You drove a hundred miles. You had a flat tyre. You did a show. You are so tired. You are so tired you stop listening to the drunks in the street calling out your name. You are too tired to be frightened when they break their beer bottles in the gutter and call out filthy things about the body you showed to them. So you go to sleep and you wake up at four in the morning because it is market day and the cattle are bellowing outside and you have scratched yourself all over and you will have to do the show with make-up all over your body and who will pay for the make-up? Lenny, you tell her."

"You do," Lenny said.

"So you wake up and you look at your face and it is getting a line, just here." She put a fingernail, light and sharp as a surgeon's scalpel, against the edge of Leah's mouth. "And you think how much nicer it would be to be a doctor and what a fool you were to ever listen to a bored old woman telling her sentimental stories."

"Oh, Rosa, you won't listen to me. I don't want to be a doctor. I want to be a dancer."

"A dancer, yes. The Tivoli. Her Majesty's. Even Romano's. But not Mervyn Sullivan on the road. He is such a wolf and poor little Izzie in Sydney half mad with jealousy. I thought you would marry him."

"Oh, Rosa."

"Marry him," Rosa said, hugging her fiercely. "Marry him. Stay here with us, Leah."

Lenny stretched out his hand across the table. He knocked the ashtray and broke the careful line of calculated butts. He took Leah's hand and held it hard.

"Stay, Leah."

Leah wept. She felt such a rush, such a huge upsurge of both happiness and misery that she was overwhelmed by something close to ecstasy. At that moment, in that rocking caravan, she would feel, she imagined, all the pain and happiness in the world, and she wept, nearly drowning. It was the last time she was so young.

The ructions in her own family were predictable but abated after the first flurry of telegrams (too upset too unwell to WRITE LIFE IS A BARREN FIELD LOVE FATHER).

Leah wrote a long and detailed letter in which she introduced the Kaletskys, one by one, and explained her motives for both of her seemingly precipitous actions. With this careful testament to his daughter's seriousness in his hands, Sid Goldstein ceased his melodramatic telegrams and wrote a long letter.

Leah treasured this letter for years, and not merely because the flowery copperplate hand seemed more considered than usual, but for the whole list of good advice it contained, i. e., Read if you can. Keep your mind alert. To describe the towns you visit will be a good exercise and train you in much more than English composition. It will encourage a critical frame of mind – to describe an object is to ask why the object is shaped the way it is. Likewise a horse, a building or a nose. All this will be good for you, whatever you do. I will not insult you by offering money, but if trouble strikes please be assured that your parents are always here and here to help you. I send my kindest regards and best wishes to your husband and hope some time we shall have the pleasure of meeting this young man.

The whole of this letter, by the by, was a masterful piece of deception. Sid Goldstein was depressed, miserable and unhappy but considered, wisely, that venting spleen on his daughter would merely drive her from him. One gets a whiff of the real state of his emotions in the irritable PS: "I cannot see", he wrote in broader, fatter strokes, "how you can possibly have betrayed Wysbraum. Are you thinking of the rooming house he rushed you into?"

The eccentrically spelt letters are all, I suppose, gone now -stranded in drawers with perished rubber bands and verdigrised door keys as companions, or have – worse – become the accumulated capital of fastidious great-nieces who marvel at the time you could send a letter for tuppence and regret – having consulted a stamp dealer on the subject – that their great-aunt did not treat the perforations of her stamps with more respect. She was not like Rosa who tore corners off and stood the King on his head, but she did not treat the perforations with the care her crabbed handwriting led one to expect.