Things went from bad to worse and when the little girl got whooping cough and died it was all over. Uncle Jake was so wild with grief that Alice had to be got out of the house, he might have killed her. She went to her mother's and never came back, and was, in my childhood, a big, blond woman, even-tempered and fattish, who drank too much.
As for Uncle Jake, he recovered his spirits at last, but he never went back to the bakery or to any settled life. He had had his taste of that. Nobody blamed Alice for what had happened to him. He had simply, people said, reverted to his original wildness, which the apprenticeship to flour and icing-sugar, and his diversion for a time into suburban marriage, had done nothing to change.
All this had happened long before I was born. By the time of my earliest childhood Uncle Jake was already a gambler. It was the period of his flash suits, his brushes with the law, and the little orange car.
This beautiful machine, quite the grandest present I ever received, was his gift for my fourth birthday. “There,” he exulted when we all trooped out to the verandah to look, "it's for the kid.” It sat on the front lawn in its cellophane wrappers like a miniature Trojan Horse.
My father was embarrassed: partly at being so ostentatiously out- done (my parents’ present had been a cricket bat and ball), but also because he was fond of my uncle, knew how generous he could be, and was certain that my mother would disapprove.
She did. She regarded the machine, all gleaming and flame-coloured, as an instrument of the devil. Whenever I rode in it, furiously working the pedals and making a hrummm hrumm hrummm sound as I hurtled round the yard, she would look pained and beg me after a time to spare her head. The little orange car brought out a recklessness in me, a passion for noise and speed, that appalled her. I had always been such a quiet little boy. Was this it? Was this the beginning of it? Just working my legs so fast to get the wheels going introduced me to realms of sweaty excitement I couldn't have imagined till now — to scope, to risk! I had discovered at last the power that was coiled in my own small body, the depth of my lungs, the extraordinary joys of speed and dirt and accidents — of actually spilling and grazing a knee. Uncle Jake was beside himself. He had thought of me till then as a bit of a sissy, but look at this! "He's a real little tiger,” he said admiringly. “Just look at him go!”
Uncle Jake was too attractive. My mother tried to keep him away but it wasn't possible. He was family. He was always there.
I remember catching my parents once in a rare but heated quarrel. There was a family wedding or funeral to attend and the question had arisen of who might look after me.
“No,” my mother whispered, "he's irresponsible. I won't have the child traipsing around billiard-saloons or sitting in gutters outside hotels. Or riding in a cab with that Hector Grierley He's an abortionist! Everyone knows it.”
“He could spend the day at Ruby's.”
I heard my mother gasp.
“Have you gone off your head?”
Ruby was one of Uncle Jake's girlfriends, a big china-doll of a woman who lived with her daughters at Stones Corner.
What my mother did not know was that I had been to Ruby's already. Uncle Jake and I had dropped in there for an hour or so after an outing, and I had been impressed by his insistence that I swear, scout's honour, not to let on. The act of swearing and the establishment of complicity between us had made me see the quite ordinary house, which was on high stumps with a single hallway from front to back, in a special light.
Ruby wore pink fur slippers and was sitting when we arrived on the front doorstep, painting soft, mustard-yellow wax on her legs, which she then drew off like sticking plaster, in strips. She had a walnut-veneer cocktail cabinet, and even at three in the afternoon it came brilliantly alight when you opened the doors. I was allowed, along with the two skinny daughters, to sip beer with lemonade in it; and later, while Uncle Jake and Ruby had a little lie down, I went off with the two girls, and a setter with a tail that swept the air like a scarlet feather, to see their under-the-house.
“Watch out for the dead marines, love,” Ruby had called after us in her jolly voice, and one of the daughters, giggling at my puzzlement, indicated the stack of Fourex bottles on the back landing. “She means them, you dill!”
Among the objects that had taken my eye at Ruby's was a bowl of roses, perfect buds and open blooms in red, yellow, and pink, that looked supernaturally real but were not. I had never seen anything so teasingly beautiful, and when I left, one of the scarlet buds went with me. In crossing the hallway on my way to the toilet I had stopped, unhooked the most brilliant of them from its wire basket, and taking advantage of my time behind the bathroom door, had slipped it easily into my pants.
“Ruby's,” my mother said “is out of the question. I'm surprised at you even suggesting it.”
So with Ruby's hotly in mind, and exaggerated in retrospect as a carnival place of forbidden colour, I spent the day with a neighbour, Mrs. Chard, who took me on a tram-ride to the Dutton Park terminus, questioned me closely about Jesus, and informed me that she was descended from Irish kings, "though you mightn’ think it." (I didn't, but at nearly seven was too polite to say so.) She had a place above her lip where she shaved — you could see the shadow picked out in sweat drops — and seemed quite unaware of how the afternoon in her company was transfigured by the pink glow of my imagination, and how her louvred weatherboard became for a moment, as we approached it, the site of lurid possibilities — not perhaps a cocktail cabinet, but some equally exotic object that would be continuous with the world of Ruby's where it had been decided I should not spend the day.
But there was nothing. Only the smell of bacon fat in the kitchen, that clogged the back of my throat the way it clogged the drains, and an upright with candleholders.
Mrs. Chard played something classical in which she crossed her plump, freckled wrists; “Mother McCrea.” After which she showed me photographs, all of children who were dead. Then, acting on some compulsion of her own, or responding perhaps to a mood that I myself had created, she disappeared into a room across the hallway and came back holding her hands behind her back and looking very coy and knowing.
I was fascinated. She hadn't seemed at all like a woman who could tempt.
Suddenly, with a little cry and a not-quite-pleasant giggle, she produced from behind her back a pair of glossy dancing-shoes such as little girls in those days wore to tap-dancing classes, and waggled them seductively before me. They were Kelly green, and were too small for her hands, which she was using to make them dance soundlessly on the air. Uncertain how to react, I smiled, and Mrs. Chard fell to her knees.
She set the Kelly green shoes on the linoleum, where they sat empty and flat; then shuffling forward, she lifted me up, set me on the piano stool, and while I watched in a trancelike state of pure astonishment, she removed my good brown shoes, took up the Kelly greens, and forced my left foot — was she mad? — into the right one and my right into the even tighter left. Then she rose up, breathy with emotion, and set me down. I stood for what seemed ages among the bone china and maidenhair in an agony of humiliation, but unable, despite every encouragement, to make the shoes take flight and release their magic syncopations.