It was the mice that had brought Charles so far from Sydney, riding a motorbike he had never intended to buy. He had read about the plague in the Sydney papers, but he had not been prepared for the extent of it, the fearless armies of squeaking creatures, the stink you could never escape, the red sores they spread on the children's arms and faces.

No one had money to buy snakes and he had no talent to persuade them to change their minds. So he found himself broke and lonely in unfriendly towns, swapping the services of his pythons for a meal and a little petrol, knowing that tomorrow the snakes would be as sated as gluttons on Boxing Day and that if he wished to eat at all he would have to perform the Snake Trick. And it was the Snake Trick that had resulted in the black eye – his amateurish deception had been exposed in Dan Murphy's Commercial Hotel in Jeparit.

The Chaffeys' home was hot as an oven and smelt of mice and sweat but Charles was thankful to be invited inside and be formally introduced to Mrs Chaffey.

Mrs Chaffey was small and faded; however her worn pale eyes were still capable of transmitting signals of sharp alarm and warm affection on behalf of the husband called "Dad". She showed both of these emotions in the dark kitchen house as she listened to her husband explain the snake boy's business. She allowed herself to be persuaded to touch one; it was not the pythons that alarmed her, but rather the quantity of enthusiasm they might generate. Mrs Chaffey recognized enthusiasm as something vital in her husband's life, but she also knew it must be measured most precisely, like one of those potions (so beloved of quacks) that are vital in a small dose, and lethal in a larger one. When she had finished assessing the snakes she gave them back to their owner. Then she offered him a glass of water and cut extra potatoes for the Irish stew.

3

It is difficult to give the flavour of my son's life at this stage, and although he would later romance about it, claim that he had been a scholar of boarding houses and a citizen of the highway, that he had friends from Moe to Minyip, his grown-up eyes would still show the truth to anyone who cared to look at them: he had passed along those roads a total nonentity, had felt himself a no one, worse than a no one: shy, ugly, nervous of grown men, anxious when confronting boys his own age, a blushing fool with cafe waitresses, an easy target for teasing children.

Yet he also harboured an idea of himself that contradicted all of this: that he was someone special, someone who would one day do great things not just for himself, but for his country. And these contradictions, the triangular tensions between his shyness, arrogance, and hunger for affection, made him a difficult person to get to know, made him belligerent when nervous, a stammerer when confident, weepy when approved of, brash when he would be better off being quiet.

He was hampered further by his deafness which sometimes made him imagine slights where none had been intended.

These things were quite enough to make him a poor salesman, but he suffered a further handicap – he was so eager to tell the truth that he could never simplify. I have seen in him my own dizzy desire to throw all one's being at a friend's feet, to show the tangle, the contradictions, the good and the bad, and say- there I am. I did it myself one evening with Jack McGrath. I have done it on other occasions, but with Charles the truth was an obsession. I don't know where it came from, but it made him a poor salesman. And this is not, as you may have imagined Professor, because a salesman is required to lie. It is because the truth, told thus, is of no interest to the average punter.

And even with someone like Les Chaffey, it seldom brings a benefit.

Chaffey was interested in every word my son had to say. He sat him in his big gloomy dining room before the sun was down and put a big plate of stew in front of him. There was gristle on the meat and fat floating in the gravy, but Charles was so hungry that both his head and his belly ached. He picked up his yellow bone-handled knife and his verdigrised fork without waiting to hear if the Chaffeys said grace or not. Then Mrs Chaffey gave him a napkin so he put his knife and fork down and spread the linen on his lap.

It was then Les Chaffey asked him where the pythons came from.

Now if Charles had been able to forget an isolated pocket in Papua and a reported sighting in the Gulf, he could have answered this question in four words and got a potato into his mouth before the next question arrived. But he was not capable of such deceit and there was, anyway, such interest in the faces of both host and hostess, that he wished to present them with everything, not only about the snakes, but in the way that he himself, in the daily course of his life, had collected the information. So he not only mentioned the isolated pocket in Papua and the sighting in the Gulf which, he had to confess it, he had not read about himself but had been told by a man who he had met in a cafe in Ararat, a schoolteacher, a Mr Gibson, originally from Moe, who was not a teacher of natural science but of English but who read science as a hobby.

I am abbreviating. For every road Charles took he came to a fork that had to be noted if not explored. He covered many points, including the origin of his suit and the explanation of the oil stain on the cuff, before he revealed that Mr Gibson had told him that the sighting in the Gulf was not the python in question – there had certainly been no scale count – but another python or rather a snake commonly called a python, but in fact not a python at all.

His host and hostess were mopping up their gravy with big lumps of snowy baker-shop bread and Charles was still trying to get the first lump of spud into his mouth but he had not, even though he had abandoned Mr Gibson, been able to complete his answer.

He sat talking, his elbows resting on the checked oilskin table, while his pythons ate their fill, lazily doubling their bodyweight; they oozed their way through holes in the hessian wall-lining and lay plump and lumpy amidst the dry black seaweed insulation Les Chaffey had brought all the way from Geelong. Charles watched a skin form on the top of his stew. He spoke faster and faster. He was grateful for his host's kind attention and, at the same time, although he knew it was wrong of him to feel it, he was angry and resentful that they would not let him eat.

And yet he might have eaten in the end for his answer, although it seemed, as it uncoiled itself, to be never-ending, eventually began to taper and, finally, showed the divided subcaudal scales of the very tip of the tail itself. He should have had time for a quick mouthful before his host's next query, and would have, had he not noticed the aforementioned person leaning forward and staring unashamedly at his black eye. He was, as I have already said, ashamed of the story behind his injury but if he were asked a direct question about it he would have no choice but to tell the truth in all its humiliating detail.

The sun had now gone and kerosene lamps had appeared in the course of Charles's answer. They cast a deep blue shadow and it was the quest for this soft hiding place that made him push his chair back and turn his head in such an awkward way. Once he had his eye tucked safely out of sight, there was nothing the Chaffeys could do to persuade him to eat. He patted his stomach and declared himself satisfied. He could have cried with disappointment.

"Did you", Les Chaffey said, helping himself to his guest's uneaten food, "have a barney?"

Charles stared at his host, transfixed.

"A blue?"

He had a headache, and his neck hurt too.

"A stoush?" Les Chaffey suggested, leaning across his laden plate with knife and fork poised, his eyebrows skew-whiff in anticipation.