Peter Carey - Illywhacker

She wrote to Izzie once a week, but she said nothing to him of skin. I was the one who bore the brunt of her obsession.

Sonia was at Sunday School in her pretty dress and Charles had been taken up to Mapleton in the schoolteacher's jinker to remove an alleged taipan from the Post Office toilet. Leah and I -temporarily rich – had retired to bed in our room at Donaldson's Commercial Hotel, Nambour. It was the wet season: mosquitoes hung in clouds outside our net; the air was sweet with the smell of the sugar mill just up the road.

A romantic afternoon had been planned. Bundaberg rum was purchased. And then Izzie and his skin came greasingly into the room, sliding into the bed, and I found my lover looking at me with that calculating grey gaze of hers as if, had she been able to focus her stare finely enough, she would have cut away the bone on my shaven head and laid bare the smelly secrets of my dogfish soul.

"In what respect", she said, at last, "am I like your wife?" She propped herself up on her elbow and displayed her small flaw, the nipple of her left breast which had the habit of popping inwards and which she, when washing, and I when kissing, popped out again, in readiness for the day when she would feed a child. Sometimes we discussed this possibility, this furryedged future, but not today. The nipple remained inverted.

"I will tell you in what respect," she said, "it is skin. Give me the rum."

"Empty."

"Show me."

I dropped my hands into the skirts of mosquito net and dragged the empty bottle into bed. I held it up against the light. The bottle was empty but she drank from it anyway.

"Young women's skin," she said. "She was twenty-three when you left her."

"She left me."

"So you claim, but who could believe you? You told the newspaper in Grafton you were an ex-serviceman. You believe whatever falls out of your mouth because you don't really believe anything, just Product. You don't care about people, you only care about skin."

"Leah, Leah, I love you."

"Skin," she said. "Skin, you told me – the feel of skin."

"Let me…"

"And when it stretches and sags you'll throw me out, trade me in for a new one."

"Let me tell you a story."

"Don't touch me."

"A story."

"A lie."

"A true story. How I got my electric belt."

"How you got your Product to worship."

"It's about skin. Do you want to hear it or not?"

"Yes," she said, suspecting a trap.

The story was, more or less, as follows. Most of it is lies, but I could think of no other way to tell Leah Goldstein that I loved her and not her skin.

Molly was practical. She had always been practical, even if she had spent half her life pretending she was not. "You are a commercial asset," Mrs Ester had told her, and Mrs Ester, may she rest in peace, had been right.

She enjoyed driving home in the T Model taxi, enjoyed it far more than the Hispano Suiza, which was a fine car doubtless, but did not have "Boomerang Taxi" written on its door, or a commercial licence plate, or a "Not for Hire" sign displayed on the roof. She was not plying for business, but rather celebrating her occupation and enjoying the smell of lavender that emanated from the small muslin bag hidden beneath the back seat.

As she turned from Flemington Road up to Ballarat Road towards Haymarket she reflected that she was tired. Waiting while a wagon turned into the timber yard on the corner she checked her face in the rear-vision mirror and was pleased to note that the tiredness did not show. She was a handsome woman, a little plump, but handsome none the less. She patted her cloche hat and wondered if she appeared hard. She had dismissed Inky O'Dyer that afternoon, but her face did not suggest she was capable of it and Inky O'Dyer, small, swaggering, chewing a match, had been slow to understand. But she would not have the public being cheated, and Inky had cheated. She felt sorry for him. She felt more sorry for his wife, and had posted her a cheque for twenty pounds. For those who suffered she brimmed with compassion. Towards those who erred she was less than generous and when she thought of the insolent Inky, his cap pushed back on his head, his hands in his deep pockets, her mouth diminished in size a fraction, an event she did not witness in her mirror, for by then the wagon had finally entered the timber yard and she was almost at the corner at the Haymarket yards.

As she came down the track beside the yards (the same track I had met Horace on that afternoon) she saw the steer before she saw Charles. It was a large black animal with a white blaze on its forehead and one ear missing. The beast had been cut proud. It pawed the earth and dribbled, blocking the road, glaring malevolently at the taxi. She thought of Jack, who had become the subject of puzzling and angry dreams. She found herself, asleep, slapping her dead husband's face. She was not the sort of person to inquire as to why she might be so.

The steer annoyed her. She stopped the car and tooted the horn and, when it did not move, got out of the car and approached it with the crank handle. The beast hesitated, retreated, and then, kicking up its heels, dodged round the car and up towards the main road.

It was only then, suddenly frightened by the risk she had taken, that she saw Charles standing in the middle of the track, shoeless, mud-faced and blubbering.

She knew then what had happened. She had heard the whisperings in the house on the Maribyrnong and known something evil was afoot. Her daughter was a stranger to her and the colluding poet (who would not lift the seat when he urinated) could not meet her eyes. She had watched Annette Davidson silently, with a stock-taker's eyes, and measured, in that wide red mouth, the extent of her deviousness.

She swept up Charles from the roadway and while she chattered to him and called him dearie and little man, she was preparing herself. She drove fast on to the property, noted the aircraft gone, and, carrying her bulky bawling grandson in her arms, entered the house.

It was like a place where a murder had been committed. The very breadcrumbs on the oil-cloth table gave witness to it. Flies rose from an unwashed frying pan. Sonia was crying in her cot. Her nappy needed changing. She found me, in tatters, underneath the bed, my head bleeding – a broken window nearby attested to the cause. Nearby she found an axe, its blade chipped and ugly from its battle with the poems.

"Lord save us," she said. "May God strike them," she muttered. "May lightning hit them. Molly's here," she said. "Molly's here."

She did things in an order that had its own logic. First she attended to Charles. She washed a saucepan and heated up some milk. When she had done this she poured it into a large mug and added a very generous portion of her crime de menthe. She sat him on her knee and spoke to him soothingly. She took off his shoes and socks and played this little pig went to market and when the creme de menthe seemed slow in acting, made him another one. She was, perhaps, too generous, for Charles went to sleep before he had finished his second mug. She put him into bed fully clothed and then changed Sonia.

I heard all this but it did not touch me. I was in my own fever world, composed of whirling aeroplanes, spars, rotary engines, guy ropes, and buildings with splintered towers. Herbert Badgery, who does not cry, whimpered like a child.

As she cleaned out the bedroom she spoke to me, as she removed the bits and pieces Phoebe had left behind (three dresses, a silk scarf, two petticoats, scribbled poems crumpled on the floor, a chamber-pot-unemptied – a vase, lipsticks, the dress she had been married in) she talked to me.

"You were a doormat, poor man. Don't mind, don't worry. God will have mercy on you. Molly is here. Dearie me, look at it." She hurled things from the room as she spoke, bustling around. She tore sheets from the bed, removed prints from the wall. "You'll see," she said. "You'll see. Good riddance. Bad rubbish. Little Miss Uppity, little Miss Spoiled."