Illywhacker

Leah was engaged in conversation with Charles. I poked the fire irritably. "I was doing a show once in Wollongong", she was saying, "with one of Jack Leach's pythons, a dance show. I was a support act to Da

"I would have," Charles said.

"I know you would have," Leah smiled. "That's what I'm saying."

"What happened?" Sonia asked and I imagined she moved a fraction away from me.

"I bit its tail," the dancer said, "and it let go enough for me to get it off."

"I've often considered show business," I said.

"Oh yes," said Leah, but she was more interested in Charles.

"Yes," I said. God damn it. I did not even want the woman to stay. I would rather she left. I did not like her tone. I did not even care for her looks and I certainly had no thoughts of anything as dangerous as a fuck. I am Herbert Badgery, I thought, a man who nearly had an aircraft factory, a pioneer aviator anyway, a salesman of more than usual skill, and here I am being patronized by a girl who is self-important because she can touch a snake. I, who have travelled the country with a ca

"Yes," I said, "the entertaining arts have always attracted me."

"It's a hard life," Leah said, "and full of trickery and deception, people like Mervyn Sullivan who will steal your act and leave your picture up when you no longer work for them."

"Magic was my field," I said. For the admiration of a woman I did not know, I spent this little piece of gold which was not intended as currency at all. It was all I had in my empty pockets.

"Disappearing acts," I said, the master of self-delusion, imagining I could simply say it and not have to go through with a performance.

"Very common," she said, "but hardly enough to run a whole show on. You'd be surprised at the number of people I meet who think that they could make a living because they can throw a few balls into the air. One trick is not enough. One dance is not enough. I do the Emu Dance, the Fan Dance, the Snake Dance, the Dance of the Seven Veils. It is the snake that gets them in, but it is not enough by itself. Anyone who has read Cole's Fu

I stood before them. I can still see their eyes in the firelight, the Dodge, in the distance, half hidden by mist, the frying pan sitting amongst the cracked river rocks of the fireplace, the sheen on the snake's black back as it pressed itself against the warmth of a child's and a woman's body.

I made the dragon.

I put my foot on my knee. I held my arm in the air. I teetered on my toes. I summoned up the terrible flag of the English, the pipes and drums of the band, their blue shirts and white moleskins, the brains of Goon's father like the brains of the pig. The river banks flowed with the Chinese, a yellow river of fear over boulders as smooth and unyielding as dragons' eggs. The cart ran down Han and the bone splintered his leg: it thrust outwards like a dagger, drove through his smooth hairless thigh and he looked at it with astonishment: this enemy he had harboured i

I wanted to call out but I could not. The dragon came and it was bigger than the dragon I knew before, for a child does not know enough to make a powerful dragon. A child makes a childish dragon from children's fears, a cub with soft paws and breath that smells of warm milk.

Thirty-four years of locked-up terror came spurting at me and I knew I would drown in it. I tried to talk, but the dragon had me and dragged me away into the spaces between the mist of Crab Apple Creek while my audience, I must suppose, i

7

I am forced to tell you more about the history of this woman who finally trapped me into appearing beside her on a dusty stage in Bendigo, and if I begin by showing you her fu

Edith Goldstein knew it was the house. The silence had not been natural to Sid who had arrived in Melbourne as a poor refugee from Tsarist Russia. He stepped off the ship with a swagger in his walk, a glide to his step not out of keeping with a man who will shortly make his first hundred pounds in a dancing school in Exhibition Street. When he and Eddie Wysbraum shared both a room and a suit, he was not known to be a silent man. He had opinions which he voiced about manufacturing (he was for it) and religion (against).

Neither was the silence natural to Edith, a fine-boned redhead from Scotland who had made sandwiches in the railway rest rooms during the day and, having added dancing to her list of ambitions, had met Sid and fallen in love, not silently, but in a happy noisy godless confluence of Scots and Yiddish.

It was the house, I swear it, pushed them into its mould, made them meet its requirements. It stretched their necks by forcing them to peer over its high windowsills and Edith Goldstein who was five foot eight when she married Sid was five foot nine and a half by the time Leah got on the train with Sid and Wysbraum to go up to Sydney University.