Peter Carey - Illywhacker

No, I blamed the Irishman at Essendon, to whom Molly -worrying about persistent pains in her insides – at last made her full confession. The pain, it turned out, was only wind, for which charcoal tablets proved quite effective. But by then the Irishman had done his work and it had been decided that Molly must not keep me from my wife.

I was plump from puddings and my hands were soft. She bought me a brand-new Dodge. She took me to Stobbit's in Little Bourke Street and had a suit made for me. She dressed me, weeping, in her own electric belt. She knitted a sweater for Charles and a pair of socks and a balaclava for Sonia. But in the end there was nothing more she could do but make a thermos of strong black tea – it took only fifteen minutes -and present me with two tins of cake with pussy cats painted on them.

She stood in front of the old church hall that I had stolen from the Methodists. She plucked at the tall sedge grass that had invaded the grounds. She wore an unfashionably long cream dress which billowed out in the cold morning wind. She had used too much lipstick on her smile and her skin was dusty with powder, like the wings of a moth damaged from its adventures. She wore a cloth flower, a cream rose, in her gold-dyed hair. She held out a long-gloved arm and waved.

The gearbox in the Dodge was new and stiff. It moved reluctantly into first.

Charles kicked his new boots against the floor.

Molly, her soul now guaranteed safe and sound, retreated clumsily towards the solitude of the house.

I turned and drove straight back. But two days later we made our farewells for good. I headed up the Sydney Road, accompanied by St Christopher towards whose talisman I never felt anything but sentimental affection.

My attitude towards religion was not that of a serious man, and I did not think it odd that Sonia would have herself confirmed five times, not, that is, until the Church of England man in Ballarat brought it to my attention. This was in 1934 when Badgery amp; Goldstein lost the Dodge and my daughter decided on another confirmation.

I had no objection. She already had the dress.

I forget the minister's name, but I vividly remember the boiled lollies he offered me. The rooms of his manse were stacked high with cardboard boxes, large glass jars filled with Eucalyptus Diamonds, Black Babies, Humbugs, Tarzan Jubes, and Traffic Lights. He did not explain himself but I have seen the type before: clergymen with an itch for commerce who must satisfy their natural cravings in odd ways. This fellow was obsessed with buying things in bulk. He had me taste the marmalade he favoured, an orange Seville in a four-gallon drum, enough to last him a lifetime. He was a pleasant enough man with a great pile of fair wavy hair atop a high forehead. He had a hooded brow, bright blue eyes, and a small innocent mouth carried with him from his childhood.

He postponed the discussion of heresy (there was nought else on his mind) to show me the demijohns of water he had imported seventy miles from Melbourne. In the bathroom he demonstrated the comparative softness of Melbourne and Ballarat water by lathering his thin hairy arms and wrists -smeary Ballarat on the left, creamy Melbourne on the right.

We then sat in the front parlour and watched my pretty daughter play too roughly with his son. She did somersaults on the rough green lawn outside the leadlight windows and did not worry that she showed her panties.

Was I aware, he wished to know, of my daughter's frequent confirmations?

You cannot suck a man's humbug and be uncivil to him. I admitted to having seen her in her confirmation dress in another town, in other towns, with the Catholics in Sale, the Methodists in Yass. I had the photographs in my wallet – the pretty girl with the prayer book looking at the camera, sometimes alone, or, at Sale, in front of that redbrick barn of a thing, lined up with all those Irish eyebrows, pale skin, dark hair, squinting at the sun.

Did I believe? The reverend man inquired of me, proffering a second humbug which I declined.

In God?

His mouth wrapped around his humbug. His forehead creased. The big head nodded.

I confessed that I did not.

I did not, however, confuse the issue by admitting the pleasure I got from my daughter's confirmations – to see her there with her mother's green eyes alight with a passion not entirely selfish, that Bible clutched in her gloved hand. I envied her faith like I envied her careless tangle-armed sleep.

The clergyman did not come to the point right away. I realize now that he must have been busy with his humbug, wearing it down to a manageable size so that he might speak unimpeded, but at the time I was confused by his frown of concentration, his inexplicable pauses and frequent swallowing. Finally he got his sweetmeat into a suitable state and he was able to explain the nature of my daughter's heresy which he was now convinced she had inherited from that popish lot in Sale. He showed me the holy picture he had taken from her: the Assumption of the Virgin.

It was a beauty.

The Virgin rose above a great cloud of smoke while down below the adoring crowd raised their heads to what they could not see.

Sonia had assured the clergyman that she herself intended to do likewise and that her father Herbert Badgery (who art in heaven) could do it any time he liked.

"Oh dear."

"Oh dear," agreed the minister and bit his humbug so hard that it shattered in his mouth.

I looked at my daughter. I could not imagine what constellations whirled within her brain, how many angels she fitted on the heads of her pins, let alone how many she wedged under the edge of her broken fingernails.

I promised to attend to the matter as soon as possible but explained that we were newly arrived in Ballarat and busily establishing ourselves.

So if I may leave my daughter to tumble innocently upon the fresh-cut lawn, I must get down to explaining how it was we were in the Golden City at all.

By November 1934 I was a different man. I could read without moving my lips. I was an old python with his opaque skin now shed, his blindness gone, once again splendid and supple, seeing the world in all its terrifying colours. I had been drip-fed on Rosa's letters and Leah's monologues. I read the newspapers with the sensitivity of one liar regarding the work of another. An unemployed boilermaker from Williamstown, picked up on the road, was not just a witty fellow with a runny nose and a knowledge of horses, he was a symbol of the injustices that threaded all the way from the railway police who had most recently bashed him to Adolf Hitler and Mussolini.

People were still starving in Australia although the newspapers now denied it. When the Australian car industry at last capitulated and General Motors began manufacturing the press trumpeted the triumph.

I had become an armchair expert, busting for a fight.

I built my huts wherever we stayed, and left them for others to shelter in. This pitiful charity was hardly satisfying to a man like me. And yet I could think of nothing better. I slandered the communists for mindlessness and the Labour Party for racism. And at the same time I envied Izzie whose letters rubbed at me, irritated me, judged me, were sand between the skins of Badgery amp; Goldstein.

And it was in this mood that I took on the railway police.

I would not have minded the railway police if they were weak or unprincipled men trying to survive. Christ knows I have been both, am both, will always be both. But the railway police did not have the grace to lower their eyes in the face of decency, acquitted themselves like bully boys, enjoying the thwack of their three-foot batons. They evicted human beings from carriages carpeted with sheep shit and thought themselves righteous for doing it.