Peter Carey - Illywhacker

And what did puritanical Leah think of Nathan Schick? Leah Goldstein, who put Izzie Kaletsky on a pedestal and then worried about the ethics of skin, this same Leah Goldstein sat in her chair with her gin and water, and beamed at him. She loved Nathan Schick's vulgar suit and ringed hands. She liked the garrulous checks, like leftover material from a Silly Friends party. Even as he had walked across the saloon bar, stepping over the snake so carelessly, even as he opened his gold-filled mouth to expose her for fraud, she liked him.

Leah became light-headed more quickly than mere gin could explain.

She laughed, that great wild snort of a laugh that was her trademark, and gave not a damn that heads in that noisy bar turned to look at her. She was talkative, almost (for her) garrulous. She told a story about Rosa, one about a snake; she held my hand and patted me on the head. When we stumbled out into the gin-bright street she liked Nathan enough to kiss him, first on one cheek and then the other. She made his sunken eyes gleam like diamonds and she glowed herself, realizing the importance of her gift.

Nathan had a soft spot for us too. He was to tell us so, continually. He exploited us in his crummy show in Ballarat and had us work at starvation rates, but still he liked us. He was lonely, divorced three times with all his children either in hospital or gaol, but he was an optimist. He quickly became Dear Nathan, Bloody Nathan, Poor Nathan, Nathan-won't-shut-up, Nathan-won't-go-home.

I grew to love the bony-faced bastard and his schemes, and I thought that Leah did too. She worked hard, laughed more often, told her awkward jokes, but the letters from Ballarat show the true condition of her soul: they lack joy. It does not matter that she had a real job in a big city, three shows a day, write-ups in theCourier Mail, a new act with a Distinctive Australian Flavour. All this, it seems, was froth.

She wrote to Rosa: "The lesson I have learned is that what you say will happen, will happen. I declared myself a dancer when I had no right to. I had no skill, no experience, nothing. And yet, today, here I am writing to you from Ballarat and telling you about our show, and that I have spangles on my tits and a regular Yank to tell me when I am out of time. How pathetic I have been. I am like someone God has given three wishes to and all I have asked for is ice-cream. I have been wasting time trying to get deep satisfaction from something that cannot provide it. Ho-hum!"

In the light of this one could be cynical and say that the telegram telling her of Izzie's accident was a gift from God.

Leah felt the jerk of the train physically rip her out of Ballarat. She saw dry-eyed Herbert Badgery standing waving, hiding his emotions in the shadow of his Akubra hat, grey, formal, unsmiling. Beside him Nathan Schick showed his gold teeth in crooked-faced regret. Mr Schick was bare-headed of course, because he-had given his Panama hat to Leah burgundy ribbon he "just happened" to have in his pocket. Dear Mr Schick, she reflected. Dear Mr Schick was a good man although, paradoxically, quite dishonest. He had them working for less than a stagehand, had lied to them about his Tivoli show, but had come to the station, given away a fine hat and stood there now with his eyes gleaming with tears in his ascetic bony skull. Sonia held a handkerchief to her mouth. Was she pretending to cry? Leah did not care for Sonia who had been, she thought (and said), spoiled by her prettiness, and her father's loneliness for female company. She was a product of Skin, stroked too much, fondled, indulged and should have had her knuckles rapped and her backside paddled instead of being permitted to display all these parodies of female fine feeling of which her gooey-eyed religion was only one example. She had been permitted to say a prayer in the carriage. Dear God let Leah travel safely to Sydney and may Izzie be better soon. Amen.

Leah moved irritably in her seat and considered the other occupants of the carriage: old ladies of the type you no longer see: thick stockings, hanging drawers, stretched cardigans, ruddy faces, dead fur, powder, flatulence, all for ever in the process of arrangement and rearrangement while they looked for their tickets and called each other Mae or Gert. They smelt of dust and ignorance, like front rooms that need airing.

Leah's cheek was smeared with tea-tree oil, the remainder of Charles's goodbye kiss which she would, in fact, carry with her all her life for she would never be able to smell tea-tree oil without remembering that acned face shining bright beneath the aromatic sheen. He had made her promise she would come back and she had phrased her promise like a clever lawyer. She was ashamed of herself for the promise, and unsure as to the correctness of what she was doing. Regret hovered, waiting to be let in. And yet, as the train tore her free of Ballarat, she was mostly aware of having done something, at last, that was fine, something selfless, something that did not cater for what she imagined to be her mindless hedonism: the pleasures of movement, the tremors of skin, the sensualist's love of description. She did not relish Izzie, and for this reason she was pleased to go to help him but even while she savoured the pleasure of this fine decision she was pulling herself up sharp, criticizing herself for smugness and self-righteousness.

She was surprised to be on that train. Like a child who imagines herself locked in her room and then finds the door not locked at all, she stood uncertainly in the corridor, wondering if she would not, after all, be better to stay in her room with her dolls and her books.

She had not expected to be let go so easily. She had, of course, announced her intention firmly and then, to her surprise, found no one to question her. She had expected Herbert Badgery to fight her fiercely. Herbert Badgery, however, had not known this, nor had he guessed as she had, that once she had offered her services to Izzie it would not be easy to relinquish them. Later, when Herbert understood that his silence was based on a wrong assumption, he much regretted that he had not protested.

Not a simple regret either, it turned and turned, as endless as a corkscrew in his heart.

Leah did not overvalue Schick's easy emotion at the expense of Badgery's silence. She had lain in Herbert's arms often enough to have absorbed him, to have achieved that almost complete understanding of a character by osmosis. They had passed fluids between each other. She knew that this refusal to display emotion was not heartlessness but a dam wall of emotion on whose deep side she had also swum, silently, in a place not suggested by the flashy talk and loud opinions of Herbert the urger.

The train shuddered down through the hills of Ballarat and travelled through the greedily cleared land which produced in her a melancholy unrelated to her own experience in this landscape. (It is true that she had danced in all these towns between the barren hills, first with Mervyn Sullivan and then with Badgery amp; Goldstein, bleak halls in frost-clear nights, potato farmers clapping (a padding noise) on thick callused hands.) But she saw the landscape with Herbert's eyes. It was his, not hers. She could feel nothing for the place, and only sense the things he had told her: how he had flown there, crash-landed here, sold a car to a spud cockie there, at Bungaree. Even Ballarat had been like that. She had seen it as one might see a triple-exposed photograph: streets in which Grigson drove, Mrs Ester strode and through which the horse dragged Molly's mother's coffin. All of this she saw, but it was nothing to do with her.

Tonight she would see her father in Melbourne and she intended to ask him (took out pencil and paper to make the note) about his own feelings and why he had abandoned the rituals of their race which might have sustained them better in a foreign place. Why then had he denied himself (and her) this comfort?