Peter Carey: Illywhacker

Jack had introduced the electricity himself. He hadn't messed around. He ran the wires like streamers across the ceiling, tacked them on to wooden architraves, hung them from a picture rail and looped them around the curtain rods. The neighbours in Western Avenue might not have cared for this frank approach, but I liked it. It made me comfortable. It was a house where you could put your feet up and drink French champagne or Ballarat bitter according to your mood.

The other remarkable thing about the house was chairs. There were so many of them waiting to be sat on that you could see, immediately, that the McGraths were hospitable people and they'd never pass up a chance to buy an extra chair if it took their fancy. Their taste was catholic, although that is a term they would not have used themselves. Was there Chippendale? Perhaps. And Louis-Quatorze? Probably, but the Herbert Badgery who looked on that array did not even know such names. They were all chairs to him, some old, some new, some tatty, some gilt, some comfortable, some overstuffed, some bursting with horsehair which would prickle the back of your legs and make you itch. I got the feeling that my hosts expected, at any moment, a hundred people with weary legs to walk in off the street.

I could hear the women making supper. Jack showed me to a room. He opened up the big French doors on to the veranda and the room filled with the smell of flowers, salt from the bay, the humming generators of cicada engines. The cupboard was full of clothes that Molly had collected to sell for the Wyuna Nursing Home appeal.

"Help yourself," said Jack. "There's some first-rate stuff in here, I warrant you."

I got myself a new wardrobe that night, selecting carefully, thinking of the winter ahead.

"Snaffle every staver," I told myself as I admired myself in my new suit. I thought I was a real smart bastard.

They tell me now that there was no wireless in Geelong in 1919, but I tell you there was. It had a big round dial depicting not only the stations but the world itself. We sat around it on our chairs. Phoebe drank a cordial and clinked her ice inside the glass. Molly had tea. Jack and I drank Scotch. Alcohol was always dangerous for me when I was excited: I sipped. Not Jack. He confessed he had been a teetotaller to the age of forty and he appreciated his drink the way he appreciated knots. He wiped his mouth with the back of his broad hairy hand and marvelled at its effect on his constitution.

"By Jove," he said, "that was good."

There was wireless, all right, and they read the news on it. Jack, like my father before me and my son after me, was a bit on the deaf side and he leaned attentively towards the set. The rest of us stared at the amber glow behind the map of the world: there was news that night of the Australia-England air race. Ulm, so the plummy-voiced announcer said, had crashed in Crete.

My God, it was the year to be an aviator. We could do no wrong. When the press wrote up a pilot he wasn't just a pilot; he was an "eagle soaring above our skies" and no matter how often some ex-RFC type crashed while publicizing War Bonds, the public never seemed to get tired of it. The Australia-England air race fed them on tales of heroism and danger.

As it happened, I had known Charles Ulm. Possibly I had known Charles Ulm. To tell you the truth I can't remember whether I really did know him or if I claimed it so often I came to believe it myself. Photographs of Ulm never looked like the man I described but people always blamed the photographer for that, not me. In any case, when the news was over I told them all about Ulm, what he was like as a man, what he looked like and so on. In short, I delivered value.

I gorged myself on cold roast lamb and beans and beetroot. I hadn't had a feed in two days.

Phoebe watched the man who kept a snake for a pet, who shared, it seemed, a bedroom with the creature. She thought he devoured the table with a most peculiar passion, a passion as cool and blue as his eyes, as controlled and modulated as her own careful speech. She watched her mother as she fluttered – a hummingbird – in the cage of the aviator's oil-stained hand.

"That is so, Mr Badgery?" said Molly who had gone all plummy-voiced. "Is it not?"

Molly was so shell-shocked by social life in Geelong that she had lost all confidence in her normal manner. She now crooked her finger in a monstrous way when drinking tea. People thought her affected.

Phoebe would one day grow into the most formidable snob yet she did not judge or reject her mother for her anxious affectations – her mother was vulgar, but she loved her. Phoebe put the whole responsibility upon Geelong. It is in matters to do with Geelong that she was a snob and she would, given half a chance, have made invidious comparisons with Paris. She did not get a quarter of a chance. The talk was all aviation. They quoted the farmer from Myah-Myah who built an aeroplane in 1910 based solely on a newspaper photograph of the Wright Brothers' plane. They talked of Smithy and Ulm and were momentarily silent for the first Kingsford Smith, Ross. And Phoebe missed the point: the talk was really a celebration of towns as plain (and plainer than) Geelong. They were eyries, the birthplaces of the great. Australians, it seemed that night in Western Avenue, were born to rule the skies.

We drank a toast: "To our eagles." The owner of the antiquated Morris Farman on whose side was strapped a bicycle for seeking help, did not even have the grace to blush.

Phoebe, however, invented me according to her needs. She imagined she saw Jewish blood, or Semitic blood anyway. She thought of Arabs in ships with odd-shaped sails, traders from Sumer, Phoenicians selling their rare purple dyes swept here in the eddies of time to a dull bay and an electrically-illuminated supper in Geelong.

But she saw also, in an ebb in the conversation, that I suddenly looked so sad, so lost, that my mouth lost its shape. In my eyes she saw the shape of brilliant dreams, and also (like a private drawer stupidly left open) the stubbornness, the wilfulness in my lips, a cruelty, a fear of my own weakness. Her perceptions were a dangerous mixture of deadly accuracy and pure romance.

I did not speak to Phoebe during that meal during which she silently, picking at lamb gristle, nibbling at lip-staining beetroot, made a number of decisions that were to affect her for the rest of her life. The first of these was that she would learn to fly and the second was that I should teach her.

That night she would glide into sleep on the double wings of a Morris Farman. I stayed up talking to Jack for another four hours but when I lay, at last, on the cool sheets of my bed, I spat carefully on my forefinger and rubbed, ever so lightly, the head of my penis which was filled to bursting with dreams of creamy skin.

I had some funny dreams about Jack McGrath in later life, but there is no benefit to be obtained from discussing them here, even if I do compare that first night to the first night with a new lover. There was passion, sympathy, excitement. We were tireless. We were sopleased. We talked of aeroplanes and motor cars, bullock teams and the bush. We recited Lawson and Banjo Pater son. We were still beneath the naked light globes in the ballroom when the milk cart went clopping down Western Avenue. We heard the clink of the ladle in the bucket, the sweet sound of pouring milk, the seagulls restless on the Quay a mile away.

Jack must have been dressed in the suit he had worn in honour of A. D. Collins, but I choose to remember him differently, with stubble on his folded face, the patch of dark hair on his ruddy cheek, his collarless shirt unironed, his old vest, his patched trousers, his unlaced boots placed beneath his chair (where they would be lost on the morrow), his toes curling and uncurling inside his carefully darned navy blue socks.