I crawled off the stage and left the show to Leah Goldstein. My daughter came down off her chair and held my hand, but I did not want the shy sympathy of children, not that my son offered any. He would not even look at me. He put his precious jam tin on the kitchen sink and sat on the stairs where he could adore Leah without obstruction.
The Emu Dance was a great success. When the emu chick hatched they applauded the cleverness (Charles also, noisily). When she did the Veil Dance even the woman whistled her (Charles stamped). The tap was a triumph and when she returned for the great finale, the Snake Dance, the hall was as quiet and vibrant as a shiver.
My bleeding hands curled into fists and I could have punched the dancer on her little parrot's nose. I was far too jealous to watch her, and thus missed the moment when it started to go wrong. Perhaps, as I have seen her do, she held a clutch of assorted snakes in her hands and let them drop on to her head. It was called the Shower of Snakes. In any case, she attempted too much for the credulity of the big-voiced woman who asserted, loudly, that the serpents had obviously been defanged, their poison sacs removed and that fraud was being openly committed on stage. This was not, in itself, what stopped the show and Leah did not, as she often did later, make a simple speech about the technical difficulties of either defanging or removing poison sacs. She could explain the operation required with scientific precision and point out the adverse affect on the health and happiness of the snake. What did stop the show was A-plus-B's footnote to the charge of fraud and this was made sotto voce, beneath his hand, under his beard. I did not hear the complete sentence, but heard him say "three by two" which is, in case you did not know it, rhyming slang.
The arm of the gramophone dredged a painful channel across "The Blue Danube" and left a repeating click which was to accompany Leah's dancing for many months to come.
Leah, shivering in a harem suit, decked in gauze and goose-pimples, stood with hands on her hips, her head thrust forwards, trembling. She ordered the lights turned on and singled out the man with the large black beard who seemed not the least perturbed by becoming the focus of attention. He folded his hands complacently in his lap and chewed his large moustache.
"I heard you," said Leah Goldstein, "and I heard your name."
"What if you did?" said the big-voiced woman now revealed to be quite tiny, weathered and shrunken like an old iris bulb. She had a fox-stole round her shoulders and a large fur hat jammed over her head. "What diff does it make what he said? The point is, Jew or no Jew, their sacs are gone." She nudged her bearded companion with her sharp elbow. "Jew or no Jew," she said to A-plus-B, "what's the diff?"
There were dragons breeding in that halclass="underline" they cloaked their activities in the smell of stale orange peel and leaking gas, and Leah, getting a whiff of it, felt her guts knot hard.
"There is no 'diff, Kathleen," said the ironic pedagogue, "until she starts to make money under false pretences. Then", he smiled at the shivering dancer, "it means everything. Here we have, in Bendigo, a perfect illustration of the world financial crisis. You, madam", he told Leah Goldstein, "are a cartoon."
"Your name is A-plus-B," said Leah.
"Correct weight," said the woman. "What's his birthday?"
"Shut up, Kath," said an equally weathered man in grey overalls who was sitting at the back of the hall. "You've had a fair innings."
"They call you A-plus-B because you believe in Douglas Credit. It's a fraud," said Leah Goldstein, launching into a five-minute attack on the whole system of Douglas Credit, the history of which she briefly provided, with special emphasis on its derivation from Social Credit from which system it had excluded all radical and humanitarian aspects. Further, she implied, Douglas Credit was a breeding ground for fascists, Jew-haters, and worse, the central algebraic proof of its feasibility (in which A-plus-B plays a central role) was a trick, a fraud more serious than anything to do with snakes and poison sacs. "You can't even add up," she said, in conclusion.
"Spoken like a Jew," said A-plus-B. "Always adding up", he said, "and subtracting."
"Substracting," hollered fur-hatted Kathleen. "Very good."
"Shut up, Kath," said the man in grey overalls. "You're pissed."
"Subtraction," said A-plus-B, "as in cheating."
"Address yourself to the question," shrieked Leah.
"Shut up, Kath," said the man up the back, and fell off his chair.
"I'm a Jew all right," said Leah. She summoned Charles to her side (the first time he ever walked the boards). She whispered in his bright red ear. He returned with the jam tin of money. Leah took the tin and emptied all eleven shillings into the canvas snake bag. Then she took the two remaining black snakes, who had remained gently entwined around their mistress's warm body during the entire argument, and lowered them with their fellows. "I'm a Jew all right. I don't take money from fascists." She was having trouble speaking and I, who minutes before had wanted to punch her on her lovely nose, felt nothing but admiration for her courage. She, who could be so lithe and sensuous, stood in her harem suit, skinny, trembling, small-breasted, no longer in control of the shape of her normally austere lower lip.
Barry Edwards, previously flustered by a philosophically literate snake-dancer, could now smile confidently. He was blessed with a bully's subtle sensitivity – he was taking his cues from her voice. He was not thinking about the snakes which were now being carried towards him by Charles Badgery who felt then, that night, the shiver of power of a snake-handler. He would feel it all his life, but never so intensely, so exquisitely, as now, as his warty hand goes into the bag, glides sweetly past the sleeping python, in amongst the black-snake coils, smelling like a friend. The grubby little hand finds a shilling and holds it up to A-plus-B.
His garters itch, a pleasant feeling, providing the sweet anticipation of a gentle scratch.
Barry Edwards's hands reach out, greedy for the shilling, are nearly there, the nicotine-stained pincers, when Charles (you little bastard!) drops the shilling back into the sack.
How sweet my little son looked on that night. How angelic was his smile as he looked at his teacher's thoughtful face.
No one else would put their hand into the sack. Charles was enjoying himself, could have prolonged his little pantomime for minutes, hours; but Leah screamed at him to give the man his shilling; which he did. People scraped their chairs across the floor and gathered coats. They swarmed, moved erratically towards the door and back to where Barry Edwards remained stubbornly in his chair.
So Charles began to lay his pretty snakes at Barry Edwards's feet. He held the little black snake and showed its oil-glistening red belly and its smooth little head. He let it crawl around his neck and then he placed it on the floor like a child playing with a moulded-lead toy car. He pointed it carefully towards Edwards's odd scuffed shoes and watched as the aforesaid shoes moved themselves, one after the other, towards the door.
Imagine the Mechanics' Institute as a box of yellow wood with cold sickly light globes like a necklace around its picture rail. Arranged at random, pointing this way and that: some wooden chairs. In their midst: a jut-jawed child in short pants, playing with a red-bellied black snake, cooing to it on the floor.
33
We were magicians that night. We made futures and summoned up pasts. We sent up flares loaded with words that spewed like broken glass across the sky, and I knew the dancer so little I imagined this normal.
It was, my God, like Halley's Comet – for Leah to loosen her tongue and talk for the pleasure of it (lolly-paper talk) fifteen different factors must all coincide and I will list just eight of them.
1 A dancer's walk.
2 Danger overcome.
3 McWilliams Autumn Brown Sherry or equivalent.