"I never told a man in twenty years," said Father Moran. "And perhaps I am using the wrong term in calling it a fairy. I never studied these things. It might have been an elf or something. But I'll tell you this, Badgery, whatever he was, he was. And I suppose you're thinking that it was something else, a sparrow, or a doll, and that I was just a little fellow and easily confused. But I know what I saw because I saw its face. It was so cross. You never saw such anger on a human's face. You never saw such a filthy scowl as the one it gave me. It was the sort of expression you would expect a bull ant to have, if it had a proper face to give expressions with. Do you follow me?"
He went on and on. I was not only alarmed by the emotion, I was also concerned for my heater. You do not accumulate these things easily, even in Rankin Downs. I had some Feltex on the floor, six bookshelves, a chair, a desk. I did not get this stuff by violence or bribery or dobbing-in my fellow prisoners. I got them by using frailty and decency. This is a very potent combination. It does things to screws who you would otherwise describe as heartless and before they can help themselves they are running to fetch you a square of carpet from their own house and smiling at you like a mother when you have it. I got this sort of treatment at some cost, for making yourself into a frail man is a dangerous thing and much of it is not reversible. I lost an inch in height during my ten years in Rankin Downs and I have had trouble with my sciatica ever since. My skin never recovered its tone. But excuse me, because the damn heater is crumbling beneath the priest and it is not cowardice that stops me telling him, but his story which is reaching a delicate stage and has become frail and flowery and as easily bruised as a baby's arm. Attendez-vous!
"I went and got my brother. I begged him to come and look. But he wouldn't come. He laughed at me, Badgery, and he would not come. You can imagine it, can't you? Me knowing this little gent is over there, no more than a cricket pitch away, and my brother refusing to come and look. That was like him. It was so like him. He enjoyed what it did to me."
"Perhaps your father…?"
"My father beat me," the priest said. "For lying."
It was getting late. I could hear the slow diesel thump of the Fergie tractor bringing the trailerful of boys back from work. The kitchen was pumping out its rancid steam and the mechanics were already showered and thumping their tennis ball (bom, bom, bom) against the wall of my hut and Father Moran was demanding something with his eyes. I felt what a dog must feel, a dog who wants to sleep and is interrupted by a master who wants something the dog can't understand. I did all a dog can do. I showed him my eyes. They were a fine colour. I also asked him how fairies might fit in with Catholicism. I thought this might be the trouble. But if it was he wasn't ready to admit it.
It was only the kerosene heater crumpling beneath his sixteen stone that finally brought him to his senses. He broke the mantle and burst the fuel tank and when he picked the whole thing up in his big hands, kero dripping on to his boots, he looked dazed like a man after a traffic accident.
"Oh, Badgery," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm a clumsy fool. I beg your pardon."
There was nothing I could say. My face said what I felt. You are a lucky man to own a kero heater.
"I'll replace it," he said desperately. "The sisters at the convent have some the same."
"Don't worry, Father." I stood with a grunt. I made my kidneys hurt and the pain showed like a shadow on my face. I grimaced and shuffled towards him. "I'll get another."
He looked at me: frail decent Badgery shuffling to pick up the wounded heater. My aim was to make his heart near burst, but this – as I found out later – was not the case at all. But if Moran did not think me frail and decent, he was quite alone in all the gaol.
You would not dream of the numbers of young men in gaol who dream only of being decent men. You won't observe them in such numbers in any other place. I was first amongst them. I was their leader, their example. There was no kindness I would not stoop to perform.
It was my frailty that gave me power. It ruined my body, but I was respected by young ruffians known to have put hot smoothing irons on young girls' faces. They came with offers to protect me.
Was it admirable? Did I claim that it was? Of course it was not admirable. I took it up, originally, to stop myself being bullied by my fellow prisoners. If I had been younger, stronger, richer, if I could have defended myself with a fist or a knife or a bribe, then I would have done so. But I had none of these things. I had only decency and frailty to rely on.
But there was another aspect to it. I was preparing myself to take my place at the Kaletskys' on Sunday afternoons. To this end I was acquiring an education. I wished to be a decent man in a grey suit. I wished to be quiet and polite. I did not want to be an ignorant fool full of noises and bombast, I wished to acquire ideas and opinions, to sit next to Rosa at the big table and talk about philosophy and politics. I wished to accept scones and tea, and walk amongst the orange groves with Leah's children, return through the French windows to play chess with her husband. I was preparing myself for a gracious old age, with friends.
"We shall be", Leah wrote, "your de facto family."
To this end I was busy learning to be an intellectual. I was in correspondence with the University of Sydney and you may judge, of course, that my motives were the wrong ones for the proper study of any subject, let alone History. It is true that I was often impatient, that I was in too much of a hurry to find some little snippet, some picturesque fact that would serve to impress the Kaletskys with my erudition. I persisted just the same. And all Rankin Downs was proud of me. Juvenile sadists who might otherwise have tried to rip my balls off came to stand in my cell just to watch me studying. The Anglican Bishop of Grafton, reading about me in a local paper, had books sent to me and I am much indebted to him for providing most of the dreary Australian history books that were available pre-war.
But it was to the Catholic side, to Father Moran in particular, that I owed my real thanks, for it was he who gave me, on his very first visit to my freshly painted yellow room, M. V. Anderson's famous work which opens with that luminous paragraph which I will quote without abbreviation: "Our forefathers were all great liars. They lied about the lands they selected and the cattle they owned. They lied about their backgrounds and the parentage of their wives. However it is their first lie that is the most impressive for being so monumental, i. e., that the continent, at the time of first settlement, was said to be occupied but not cultivated and by that simple device they were able to give the legal owners short shrift and, when they objected, to use the musket or poison flour, and to do so with a clear conscience. It is in the context of this great foundation stone that we must begin our study of Australian history."
Reading these words I always imagined the man who wrote them. M. V. Anderson was a thin stooped fellow with a big nose and a high-pitched voice, a tea drinker, a gossip with dandruff on his shoulders and nicotine on his long fingers. M. V. Anderson enjoyed himself. There was nothing to excite him as much as a lie. I imagine the glint in his eye and the pendulous lower lip as it begins to blow up and expand with blood as he tells his reader that Bourke and Wills were not involved in simple exploration but were spies for the colony of Victoria, sent to steal a piece of Western Queensland that had, by error, been omitted from the proper survey.
It was M. V. Anderson who showed me that a liar might be a patriot and although, at the time, I thought this a lesson learned too late, it was not so. So if I say some unkind things about Father Moran they must be weighed against the positive aspect, i.e., that it was he and no one else who drove two hours along rutted gravel roads to introduce M. V. Anderson into my life. The book, of course, had another name on its flyleaf. Stephen Wall, it said, 6B. When I pointed this out to Moran, and suggested that Master Wall must miss his book, he merely said that M. V. Anderson was unsuitable for boys.