Peter Carey - Illywhacker

I drove back to the camp constructing towers with pretty windows.

I parked the Dodge and noticed Leah was boiling something up in a four-gallon drum. She did not look up to greet me and, imagining she was washing her female particulars, I did not intrude. Instead I busied myself with the guttering and the fencing wire. When Leah spoke she was right behind me. She made me jump.

"One," she said, "I was drunk. Two, it won't happen again. Three, I don't love you."

I covered my confusion by dropping the rest of the guttering on the ground.

"Did you hear me?" she asked.

"I heard you."

"Good," she said, and walked back to the fire where she was -I discovered later – punishing her overcoat by boiling it.

I fiddled with the fencing wire for a bit, making a few nails to start with. I like making things. It is always soothing, and the very simple things are the most soothing of all. The squatter's wire felt as soft as lead between my pliers. I made three-inch nails, each one exactly the same as the one before.

"What are you doing?"

"Making nails."

"This camp is filthy," she said (untrue). "Your truck is filthy. I don't know how you live like this. Come on, move. Move your nails. Help me with the mattress. How long is it since you aired it? How long is it since you washed your children's clothes? Orange peel!"

She emptied the back tray of the Dodge and started scrubbing. I took the guttering over to her hut. I fetched an empty petrol drum to stand on and began to measure for the gutter. In a minute she was behind me with her wet arms folded across her breasts. Her neck seemed longer, stretched, her shoulders more sloping, her eyes larger.

"Excuse me, what are you doing?"

"Fixing up."

"You sleep with me once and you think you own me."

"No." If you had seen her once you would know that she could not be owned. "Just making a place."

"This is not your place and never can be."

I recognized the tone. This was not lolly-paper talk. It was hacksaw stuff, the annoying tone with which she had entered camp.

"It is public land," I said. "It's a reserve, and if I take out a mining lease I'm entitled to build a hut here, providing I continue to demonstrate that I am actually working my lease."

"There you go, land-house, house-land, you can't help yourself, can you, Mr Badgery? You're true blue. Dinky-di. You think you can put up some shanty and that makes it your place, but you can't, and it never will be. Are you listening to me?"

I did not want to lose my temper. "Leah, what have I done to deserve this?"

"Forget what we did. The matter is obvious. The land is stolen. The whole country is stolen. The whole nation is based on a lie which is that it was not already occupied when the British came here. If it is anybody's place it is the blacks'. Does itlook like your place? Does it feel like your place? Can't you see, even the trees have nothing to do with you."

"This is my country", I said quietly, "even if it's not yours."

"Meaning, excuse me?" She put her hands on her hips.

I scratched a line on the guttering and threw it to the ground. "You're a Jew. You don't have a country."

"Of course we have a country. It was stolen from us."

"Tough. What do you want me to do?"

"I don't want you to do anything. I don't require a hut or nails."

"Leah," I held out my hand.

She brushed the hand away.

"Don't touch me," she said. "Touch me and I leave, right now." And she walked across to the kero drum, her legs perambulating beneath her rigid spine, and began to fish out her boiling coat.

I cannot stand being brushed aside. Most serious tempers begin with being brushed aside, kindness rejected, conciliation spurned. "And if I don't touch you, what then?"

"How would I know?" she said, dropping the coat back into the water. "Don't you have any ideas of your own? Don't you read anything? Don't you think about anything but skin?" She suddenly burst into tears, calling me a bully.

If you expect me to take her in my arms and quiet the tears, to stroke her hair and whisper into her ear, you have mistaken me for someone else. I lostmy temper. Not slowly, not neatly, but like an overwound clock flying into separate parts, with useful cogs and gears all converted into deadly shrapnel. I will not repeat the rough words I said. The gist of it, however, is essential: I had not invited Leah into my camp or my bed and she had no business attacking me for either.

I turned my back on her and went back to nailing the guttering on the hut, splintering timber, bending nails, full of homicidal strength. I was as mad with fight as a bar-room brawler rolling out into the street; when her apology came it was the last thing I expected.

She did not look like a woman apologizing. Her eyes were strong, and her manner thoughtful. One could not confuse apology with surrender.

It was quite an apology, and not a short one either, although the length was not dictated by a love of words; she had a lot to say. On certain difficult matters, of which skin was perhaps the most important, she did not make herself clear, or I did not pay attention properly. Other things I grasped a little better – of all her conflicts, she admitted, the greatest was between weakness and strength. She saw herself in an alliance of the weak against the strong but (paradoxically, she thought) was much attracted to male physical strength which also (in the form of police, bailiffs, armies and Mervyn Sullivan) most terrified her in life. Her adultery had, therefore, been a more complicated betrayal and she had been wrong, she admitted, to blame me for it.

I am prepared to wager that she never laid out the central nervous system of the dogfish as carefully as she exposed these nervous systems of her own; I was much affected and stepped down from my drum, with my own confession tumbling from me. I admitted I could not read and that the landscape had, indeed, always seemed alien to me, that it made me, in many lights, melancholy and homesick for something else, that I preferred a small window in a house, and so on.

I must describe this to you coldly. I step back from it a little. Excuse me, but our hands are trembling, mine and Leah's, all these naked things of ours nodding to each other, shining wet and sensitive to sunlight.

We consider each other, our eyes so sharply focused that the periphery of our vision is smeared with vaseline.

We retire to bed. If there are curtains, they are drawn.

It is not the skin of young women, their firm breasts, buttocks, undimpled backsides, unstretched stomachs, etc., it is their expectations of life that I have lusted after, have drunk like a vampire with a black mouth and pink tongue; I have stolen their passions, enthusiasms, mistakes, misunderstandings, and valued these more than their superior educations.

The steps of the Bendigo Post Office are not a private place on a Friday afternoon. When you hear Leah scream at me you will think -casual bystander – that my new lover is nothing but a screaming shrew, is less attractive than the big-faced yellow-tailed black cockatoo my son has chained, temporarily, to the external rear-vision mirror of the truck, a cockatoo whose tail feathers conveniently echo the colour of the telegram in Leah's hand, a pretty coincidence not noted by the idle clergyman who stops to stare or by the two taut housewives with string bags full of sausages who do not bother to hide their interest in the Jewess, her silver shoes, and the rude-faced boy who is pulling her towards the truck.

There: Leah waving the telegram. She is a splendid creature, her whole soul trembling with love, with fear, feeling itself to be caught between good, evil, weakness, strength, duty, indulgence, crude appetite and fine ascetism.