He did an odd thing. Let me tell it.
Charles was sitting on the bonnet of the truck. The cockatoo was tied with dunny chain to the outside rear-vision mirror from which perch it shrieked and wailed and attacked its own reflection. (If you are, from habit, seeing a white cockatoo in your mind, I must beg you to change it for the correct one, three foot long, funereal black, its yellow fan of feathers at present clasped shut beneath its tail.)
Izzie, his hands in his pockets, his suit jacket bulging with books, came to stand in front of Charles who had disliked him the moment he knew the man existed. And just as, years later, Charles would not be able to pass by an aggressive or frightened animal without attempting to befriend it, so, it seems to me, Izzie approached my suspicious hostile son.
Izzie held out his dainty hand towards the cockie which tilted its ferocious head to one side and examined the approaching meal. Izzie began to spill out an immense amount of information about cockatoos including such historical titbits as the fact that its close relation Calyptorhynchus magnificus (the red-tailed black cockatoo) was the first Australian parrot to be illustrated. This little sketch was executed not by Joseph Banks, but by his draughtsman, a chap called Parkers or Parkinson, in 1770. The information, however, was not merely historical (that would have lost Charles's attention very quickly) but covered breeding, questions of diet and inclination to travel. My son hoarded away everything he heard. The result, however, was that he felt obliged to give something in return. "It bites," he admitted.
"Yes," said Izzie. "Yes," he added, offering his fingers as if they were egg sandwiches. He was not a fool. He not only knew the bird was female (Charles had not), he knew that its beak must be powerful enough to crush a pine nut or hakea pod. So for what did he offer this sacrifice? For Charles's admiration? For silent Sonia's? Or for Leah, who remained with the white wings of the article for which Joseph Kaletsky was later tried? Did he reduce the value of his courage to that of a gimmick?
Leah watched him calmly. She passed her hand across her eyes a second and yawned. The eucalypts tossed above her head and the casuarinas shed needles with a sigh that meant nothing more than windy weather.
And the cockatoo, at last, took what was offered and Izzie gave an odd, high hoot. Charles slapped the bird across the head. The finger was released. Blood streamed.
We all, I think, looked at Leah. This is why I am sure we understood more than we knew. We looked, all together, towards her and she, hearing the hoot of agony, looked up, saw the blood flowing from the finger, and looked down again.
This is one of the few moments of childhood that Charles can accurately recall (for the rest it is imaginary slights, fictitious hardships) and on this day in Bendigo he too saw the blood flowing down the lacerated finger and I am indebted to him for the recollection of a dirty fingernail atop it all.
It was not to be a simple day for at this very moment, while Leah was returning to her magazine, while the finger was still aloft, before the cockatoo had stretched and spread itself, levitated above the bonnet of the Dodge with its sulphur tail feathers splayed out beneath it, a black Chevrolet, with a wireless aerial running along its roof like the outlined drawing of a knife blade, rolled over the rocks into the camp with its engine cut.
It was the town police from Bendigo.
As a car salesman you have many dealings with police, particularly in regard to registration of vehicles. Up until that day I always got on well with them. At Barret's we gave them a bottle of grog at Christmas, nothing dirty, but enough to get my plates through the system quickly. In short I did not, as Leah now did, begin to shake like a leaf, nor did my face, as Izzie's did, set into a scimitar sneer.
The police were not, however, here to inquire about motor-car registration plates (although they made a note of mine before departing). They were here to advise a communist agitator and his collaborators to move out of town. They did this with a mixture of weariness and primness that I was later to recognize as characteristic. They searched no one, and made no inquiries as to why their major interest had blood streaming down his finger. We were given sixty minutes to pack and it all happened so fast I did not even argue. When they called me "Baldy" I did not raise a fist.
Even when they departed I had no time for post mortems because now I found Izzie's wrath was focused on me. He was under the illusion that I had informed the local police. I had somehow, it seemed, done this during the night. I had walked five miles into Bendigo, like Curnow betraying the Kelly gang, to give the warning. What bullshit. I have seen drunks get themselves into this sort of passionate rage, a time for ultimatums, bottles with broken necks, drawn knives and shotguns grabbed from under car seats. But it was only nine in the morning and there was no alcohol to justify it.
The charming man I had enjoyed ten minutes before now became a hateful little sparrow to whom I would happily have fed poisoned wheat. He splashed blood on my clean shirt, and that upset me almost as much as the silly ultimatum he now proclaimed, demanding that Leah choose now, once and for all, between the pair of us.
Leah walked across from the petrol drum to which she had returned for the magazine.
"Come," she said, holding his arm. "I want to talk to you."
"Talk to me here," Izzie said.
"Izzie, please."
"Talk here," he said. "What can't be said?"
"All right," said Leah Goldstein, no longer fair, no longer rational. "All right."
It was then she told him, in front of everyone, she could not bear his skin.
I think of a suit of scar tissue, ripped and broken, beside which agony a lacerated finger is nothing but a young man's prank.
42
"What sustains you, Mr Badgery?" Leah asked me, rattling northwards in a hurriedly packed utility, hounded by small-town police who imagined us revolutionaries. They were waiting for us at Heathcote and Nagambie, Tatura, Kyabram and Shepparton itself. They found us entering town, or buying a pie or a few gallons of petrol. In Nagambie we got our camp set up before they were on to us, Brylcreemed Irishmen with cabbage soup on their breath. They were familiar with our names and our business which was, they informed us, the overthrow of lawful government. We packed our things and moved on, driven across the state like the legendary sparrows the Chinese eliminated by never letting land.
"What sustains you?" she asked, as I turned down one more unlabelled gravel road which promised an escape from the tyrannical coppers of the soft-fruit country.
I attempted an answer. The car crashed hard into deep potholes. I was thirsty. Dust went muddy in my throat.
"Nothing", she said, "sustains you, Mr Badgery. You are walking on hot macadam, quickly. All that sustains you is your filthy belt, excuse me, but it is true. You are sustained by a gadget. The gadget does not believe in anything. It does not have an idea. It is just a product. The workers who make it are serving a mindless thing."
"It prevents dizziness."
"Dizziness, you told me, fearfulness. The verdigris on the battery makes your leg green. Have you noticed?"
"What is 'sustain'?" Charles asked, leaning forward like a scabby sultan from the pile of bedding in the back. Leah had charcoaled a small moustache on to his face and it was Leah, now, who answered his question with such patience, at such length that I derived great benefit myself.
"What is wrong with us all", she said when she had satisfied my son's curiosity, "is that we are sustained by gadgets, or desires that are satisfied by gadgets, when someone like my husband," she swallowed, "whatever his faults," a long pause, "is sustained by something more substantial."
"And what sustains you, Mrs Kaletsky?"
"Movement," she said, displaying her white feet. "I admit it. I am really the one dancing on hot macadam, not you: town to town, dancing, writing letters. I cannot stay still anywhere. It is not a country where you can rest. It is a black man's country: sharp stones, rocks, sticks, bull ants, flies. We can only move around it like tourists. The blackfeller can rest but we must keep moving. That is why I can't return with my husband as he wishes," she announced, seeking rest in a simple theory, "because I am selfish, addicted to movement."