They had come down the first time in the train, because Charles would not let his precious birds travel alone and then, a week later, they had gone back to Jeparit to get the AJS. They had gone together and had been ridiculed by her father for not thinking to put the motor cycle on the train in the first place. What fun he had got from his ridicule, what joy from his temper at the waste of money involved. Her daddy had stamped his polished boots, a quick tattoo, one two, one two, as he criticized them as "spendthrift fools".
And she would never forget coming down the long snake road through the bare cold Pentland Hills towards the Marsh, to be wrapped up so cosily while even the finest winter drizzle felt like a drill of needles against the skin of her young girl's face.
Charles was shouting on the stairs. They were both so lucky. Perhaps the children had suffered because of it, but neither of them had fallen into the businesslike habits of father and mother. She was lucky. It was a pig in a poke and who could have foreseen the poke in the pig? Who was to tell her, who could have predicted, that a man so strong-armed and bristle-faced would suddenly reveal himself to have lips like a baby's when the lights were out? All that kissing and sucking under the sheets.
He had fetched her, from the very first morning, breakfast in bed.
"Brekky," she murmured now, sitting alone in the chair. "Emma wants her brekky." Her Mum and Dad would never have believed that shy Emma would have the nerve to ask for such a thing and yet, precisely because she was not used to it, there was a pleasure in the request itself that was quite extraordinary. It made her nipples go hard, as if she had taken off all her clothes and was standing, brazen, in the middle of a paddock, or up to her knees in swamp water. There was no one to stop her. No one could laugh or pull her hair.
She was lucky and she never forgot how lucky she was and she put him ahead of the children, the two eldest in particular, and they did not like her any more and kissed her only on her cheek with two lips that felt as hard and cold as abalone, all muscle – she would rather they did not kiss her at all – or kept their lips inside hard clamlike shells where they belonged. It was wrong to not love them, to love the youngest more than the eldest, the husband more than even the youngest and sometimes she did care, and she cried that she had made them unhappy, but not often and not for long, because in the end it was what she wanted.
She was lucky to have the business, not only that, to own the walls and roof that contained the business. But she did not like to talk about the business itself, and although she understood – she understood perfectly, exactly – that he might wish to talk to her about it, she did not wish to hear the problems about the business. It was something she would rather not know. It was not a woman's place anyway. And even if it was, it wasn't her place. It was like being in a sidecar and sticking your head out to look at the wheels turning; it could make you fret when you saw how thin the spokes were or that three of them were rusted and five bent, and you should not know, either, about the patches on the tube, or the lack of tread on the tyre. When Charles wished to discuss business with Henry Underhill's daughter she would not permit it.
She sat in her chair and felt that delicious sense of anticipation her teasing always produced in her. It was woman's art. He would not go roaming the streets tom-catting like Mr Schick.
Tonight, or tomorrow night, or even the night after, he would come to her to apologize for the broken bowl. That's why she had left the broken pieces out on the dustpan, so he would not have a chance to forget them. That's why she had left it out. So he would see it when his temper had gone and he could come to her to say sorry. She would judge then what to do, to accept, and hold him in her arms, or to put it off a while longer, to spurn him, to push him to the next giddy level of pleasure.
"Brekky," she murmured, sitting in her chair, "Little Emma wants her brekky."
The journalist, meantime, was walking along George Street carrying a mental picture of her husband – a bubbling baggy-suited enthusiast. He had felt his spine tingle when he saw the man handle the bower-bird. He now found himself wishing, in a way that he imagined he had long ago abandoned, that he might do something decent and sensible with his life. He wished that his days were involved with straw, feathers, simple affections, and he resolved, walking into the Marble Bar, to make Charles the good guy in his story on the fauna-smuggling racket. By the time he had made this decision, Charles had changed into a maniac. He was grappling with an old scarred goanna and pushing it belligerently into a hessian bag. He would not say what it was that he intended although the staff were nervous, knowing this was Mrs Badgery's special pet. They wished no trouble from "her upstairs".
Hissao watched this ruckus without pleasure. He waited to excuse himself, to go back to the university and continue his real life. He was suddenly tired of the pet shop itself, its odd echoes, ghostly floorboards, smells and, most particularly, the caged creatures which should not be caged at all. Having defended his father so skilfully he now felt disgusted, not only with himself, but with the activities he had shielded from attack.
Yet it was Hissao who held the heavy bag of struggling goanna while his father went to get his car keys. They then walked together, father and son, out into Pitt Street where the car, a new-model Holden, was parked outside Woolworths. He waited for his father to unlock the boot. Then he dumped the heavy bag inside, stepped back on to the footpath and, as he did so, his eye was caught by the whizzing parrots. The light inside his grandfather's room was very strong, a vivid blue-white neon so that when the old man sat there, as he did now, as he had before, he seemed as strongly lit as the famous sign that moved around him.
The colour of the eyes could not, surely not, have been discernible from the street, but Hissao was sure it was. He felt, later, that the eyes had bullied him, had made him hold out his hands for the key when he had been meaning to shake hands, to say goodbye.
"I'll drive," Hissao said, and his father dropped the keys into the outstretched hand.
59
Do not think I have no feelings. A stroke may remove one side of your body but it does not cut one's passions in half. No, no, everything is doubled. Twice the pain. Twice the grief. And just because a thing must be done do not imagine that one necessarily relishes it.
No, it is no fun to watch your little boy drive out of your life and my heart, that day, was drilled with icy needles that have never melted. I feel them still, this moment, when I breathe. I cough hard, but all I get is some white dribble to run down the deep unshaven gullies on either side of my mouth which is, no more, I promise, the Phoenician's bow that so beguiled Miss Phoebe McGrath in 1919.