Free Illywhacker by Peter Carey Page A

“that by the time we arrived we had the wheel ourselves, and gunpowder too.”
    “It was a Chinaman invented gunpowder,” I said.
    It was too much for Jack. He could not abide Chinamen, no matter what I told him. He sucked in his cheeks and blew them out. He kicked a jellyfish back into the water.
    “Twist and giggle,” he said, “turn and spin / Squirm and spit and grin / Just like a bally Chinaman / When someone pulls his string.”
    “There is no kinder soul on earth than the Chinaman,” I said.
    He narrowed his eyes a fraction and stared at me hard. By God he would have been a hard man in a fight, but he would never allow himself to get into one-he would always find a comfortable way to take in the most uncomfortable things.
    “The poor little chap,” he said. “Poor little fellow.” I was Romulus and Remus to Jack, a poor little chap suckled on the tits of wolves.

17
    Phoebe felt she had become invisible. She accompanied Jack and me to Belmont Common for flying lessons but no one spoke to her. She sat in the back seat and listened.
    It never entered my head that she might want to fly. She expressed no interest. She said nothing. Sometimes I saw her listening with a little smile on her face. She made me flustered. I lost my train of thought.
    She knew her father would never master the aeroplane, no matter how many lessons I gave him. He had even less feeling for it than he had for the Hispano Suiza. But she watched the circus silently, biding her time. Her father could never bring the stick down enough to land it. It was horrible to watch. The Farman floated in unsteadily, Jack in the front, Herbert in the back.
    She could see me leaning forward and thumping her father in the middle of the back with my fist. She could hear me shouting, “Push it down, down, down.” But nothing would persuade Jack to push the stick down towards the looming earth.
    She visited Annette but they both made each other irritated. They bickered and fought. Her mother, once so concerned about the quantity of balls Phoebe attended, the parties she was invited to, and the friends she had, no longer seemed to worry. She made up her Christmas parcels for the orphanages, put money in envelopes for the men at the Ainsley Home, and fussed about with Herbert’s socks.
    For Phoebe the days over Christmas passed in a strange daze. Sometimes she felt so tense that she wanted to scratch her face until it bled but sometimes the feeling turned a degree or two and then what had been pain became pleasure. And in between those two extremes she spent whole days in a distracted state, a sort of mental itch that did not let her pay attention to anything or anyone.
    She went to a few parties around Christmas (I watched her go, hopeless with lust and jealousy). She had her feet stood on by the sons of Western District graziers, two of whom proposed to her.
    She hid amongst the throngs of bathers on Eastern Beach and burnt her creamy skin, perhaps deliberately. No one reprimanded her. She shed her ruined skin with fascination and did not answer desperate letters from poor Annette who spent her Christmas in a rejected lover’s hell.
    Phoebe did not speak to the person whose image remained continually in her mind’s eye. She would not even ask him to pass the bread. She ignored him at bedtime and would not even say good night. She was reprimanded for her rudeness. She shed her skin in a bedroom curtained from the February heat, and waited.

18
    It is time to deal with the neighbours and I am like Goon Tse Ying, capable of becoming invisible, sliding under doors, lifting rugs from floors on windless nights. I get a dirty pleasure sifting through their private cupboards amongst the dust and fluff and paper-dry conversations. I push my invisible nose deep into the sheets of beds and breathe in the odours of their unheard farts.
    There were so many ways the McGraths had upset the upper crust in Western Avenue. The offences were as numberless as flies and