Peter Carey - Illywhacker

O'Dowd now stood and began to stroll towards us and Clout, reckoning the hour had come, began to distribute his batons, the ends of which he had lewdly sharpened "for playin' quoits".

O'Dowd came walking carefully, showing great regard for the welfare of his boots at which he stared with great attention. When, at last, he showed his face, I saw what he'd been hiding-a smirk I could not understand.

"All right, Mr Badgery," he said to me. "You've won."

The men cheered. Someone clapped O'Dowd on the back.

"There's a train coming now," O'Dowd shouted. "Youse can all get on it."

"That's the Ballarat train," the communist said, pushing through. "These men want to go to Shepparton. It's going the wrong way."

O'Dowd could not help himself. He split himself with a grin. "Tough," he said. He could already feel the uncertainty amongst the men as they hovered, lifted a bag or put one down, whispered to a mate or cursed or spat. Their acceptance or rejection of the train was showing in their dusty irritated eyes.

"It's this train or no train," O'Dowd said. He was a clever bastard. He knew they didn't want to go to Ballarat, but he gave them a small victory which was enough to make them go soft and lose their fight. He smiled at me just like I had smiled at him. He wasmaking them do the exact opposite of what they wanted.

"There's no work in Ballarat," I said.

The smile swallowed itself in the cold slit of his mouth. "There's work", he said, "everywhere, for them that want it."

The train engine was in sight now at the bottom of the hill. The men started to check their swags, to arrange a billy, tighten a strap, hoist a bundle, kick a fire apart. They came around and shook my hand. They lifted Sonia and kissed her cheek and hugged her till she grunted. They ruffled Charles's head and we were all, in spite of our defeat, warm – we had won the most important battle, so we thought.

The train drew beside us and we stood in full sight of the driver and the fireman.

There were sheep wagons, not clean, but empty. The men waited for the protection of closed boxcars, rolling back their doors in good leisurely style. It was then, as they boarded the train, I saw Leah. She was running towards me carrying the snake bag in one hand, pulling bawling Charles towards me with the other.

"Come on," she screamed. "Get on the train."

I laughed.

"Get on," she said. "For God's sake, I beg you."

O'Dowd, I found, right behind my shoulder. "Better get on the train, Mr Badgery," he said.

"Hurry," Leah said. She did not wait but helped my son aboard, and then my daughter. She was climbing on, and I was stumbling along the track, tripping on abandoned sleepers, O'Dowd at my side. By the road I saw O'Dowd's bully boys setting to work on the Dodge. They had, at that stage, only slashed the tyres. The brush hook they used was razor sharp. They drew it round the walls "like a hot knife", O'Dowd said, "through lard."

He started laughing. He could not stop. He was hysterical. Tears rolled down his face and he could not speak for a good minute, by which time he was standing still, we were pulling away, and Charles was bawling about his lost rosellas. The train wheels obliterated his last crow of triumph.

And that was how I lost my only asset, for lose it I did, good and proper. When I finally got back there two weeks later I saw the sort of mess the "bhoys" had made of it. They were not so stupid as to steal it. They simply destroyed it. They had been at the body with an axe. They had used no spanners or wrenches on the engine, just the sledge-hammer.

Everything stank of dead rosellas.

There is no doubt about it -I have a salesman's sense of history. I do not mean about the course of it, or the import of it, but rather its scale of time, its pulse, its intervals, its peaks, troughs, crests, waves. I was not born in some Marxist planet out near Saturn where the days last a year and the inevitabilities of history take a century to show. I am from Venus, from Mars, and my days are short and busy and the intervals on my whirling clock are dictated by the time it takes to make a deal, andthat is the basic unit of my time. And even if I have boasted about how I was a patient man when I sold Fords to cockies, shuffled cards, told a yarn, taught a spinster aunt to drive, I was not talking about anything more than a day or two of my life, andthen off down the road with the order in my pocket.

I was not some Izzie with a twenty-year clock in his daggy pockets.

It is true that I was the one who took on the infamous John Oliver O'Dowd and organized the bagman against him, but when the battle was lost, I could not, as Leah begged me to (with tears in her big eyes), return to the struggle. For Christ's sake, I had lost mycar. But in the boxcar that day, Leah was beyond such trivial things as cars or making money. She did not have a stomach, did not need food, drink or even air. All she could think was that we should take on the enemy again.

She was the saint with shining eyes. I was the shark, the lounge lizard. I took the family to the saloon bar at Craig's Hotel and performed the snake trick for money.

Leah submitted, glowering – she drew a line between cheating and entertainment that I never saw as clearly.

The trick was one we had performed many times before when we were desperate. Everybody had a part: it was up to reluctant Leah to release the snake into the bar. It was up to me to find it and identify it as venomous. Then Sonia, drinking her lemon squash, would declare she knew a boy who would catch it. She fetched Charles. Charles then caught the snake for a fee (and, inevitably, much admiration).

The trick did have its dangers. In Rockhampton a drunk policeman splattered our best black snake with the publican's pistol. In Gympie a bank clerk got one with a billiard cue.

We had many assets to replace in Ballarat and we could not content ourselves with one pub, but moved from Battery Hill all the way through the east and up into the smarter pubs around Lydiard Street. We moved fast, keeping ahead of any grapevine, as voracious as an army of ants. The cheeks of the Badgerys were flushed but Leah betrayed her emotions with a nasty rash along her slender neck.

My pocket contained a damp bird's nest of crumpled currency from which drifted the unmistakable odours of Ballarat Bitter. I clicked my cane, tap, tap, a light filigree of sound woven around the military beat of Charles's great clod-hopping boots which he stamped heel first, into the ringing pavements of Sturt Street. Behind him came Sonia, her white socks betraying the lack of garters and behind her was Leah whose bulging black handbag contained a dangerously compressed snake whose welfare was much on her mind. Leah wore what she had escaped in, a light floral dress with an unflattering stain she had collected on a boxcar floor, and a wide-brimmed straw hat whose generous shade did not manage to hide the fury dancing in her big grey eyes and, it must be said, the dancer was limping. I am tempted to suggest that the blisters she habitually collected were caused, not by shoes, but by the same thing that caused the rash to rise from beneath the neat collar of her summer dress.

While Charles dropped back to lean against the wall, the rest of us entered Craig's Hotel in style, through the revolving glass doors, a quick inquiry at the desk and then through to the saloon bar with me no more than three inches behind Leah so that I might hide the stain that marked her backside.

It was that quiet sleepy time in the afternoon when the people who inhabit saloon bars do so quietly, where the work of the barmaid is betrayed by small quiet sounds, and no wolf-pack laughter or hen-party screech offends the ear of the sensitive visitor who may peruse the photographs of famous racehorses at his leisure while the other drinkers whisper quietly to each other, or read their copies of theCourier Mail, turning the pages quietly in respect of the hour of day.