18

Years later when she was being eccentric, had shed her corset and let her arse spread unhindered by anything but her perpetual dressing gown, Emma showed her youngest son a tiny foetus – it was no more than an inch long – which she claimed was his half-brother and which – she tried to make him look in the old Vegemite jar that contained it – was half goanna and half human.

Hissao was disgusted with his mother (who wouldn't be?) and not least because she allowed her upper denture plate to drop at the moment of this disclosure. He did not look, or looked only briefly at the "thing" floating in cloudy liquid.

He shuddered, he who accepted his mother's peculiarities more easily than any of us.

Hissao was well informed about the genitalia of goannas. He had known, from a very early age, that the male has not one penis, but two. These are pale spiny things no more than two centimetres long, and normally kept retracted in little sheaths under the rear legs. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Hissao stumbled on the mechanical reality of such a coupling, but he should have known better than to approach the problem in this way. There is no doubt that some unlikely things have happened within the wombs of the women of the family but there is no question that they have been able to affect the shape of their offspring as easily as children idly fooling with some Plasticine. Why, if not because of this, is Hissao himself not only named Hissao, but also snub-nosed and almond-eyed? Why? Because the Japanese were bombing Darwin and Emma was not a stupid woman.

The goanna foetus in the bottle was to cause us all a great upset and no one was to be more upset than Charles for whom it was to prove quite fatal.

When he stood beside Les Chaffey in the schoolyard in Jeparit he could not see what the silent girl would become and -untroubled by wild visions – he was able to admire her composure and her sturdy limbs. His hearing aid crackled and hissed. He looked at her sternly. She had pronounced hips, a barrel chest and a broad backside, but it was not simply her shape that he found agreeable; it was her stillness in the midst of all the hysteria that surrounded her. She had screamed, of course, from pain. But now the reptile (a Gould's Monitor) was still again, the girl's pleasant moon face was composed; only her brown eyes displayed any agitation. When she heard that Charles intended to remove the goanna, she smiled at him, lifting her top lip to reveal pretty pink gums and small neat teeth.

The goanna had its leathery chin resting just above her fringe. It tested the air nervously with its forked tongue. Its front claws gripped her broad shoulders, its baggy muscled body moulded itself to her cotton-clad back and its hind claws gripped the soft mound of her generous backside. Its tail, striped yellow like all its body, did not quite touch the ground.

Charles then transformed himself from an acned, red-faced, awkward youth into an expert. The schoolchildren who had whispered and giggled about his funny face and bandy legs saw the change and fell into a silence.

"Get a chaff bag," he told the bank manager, with such terseness that the man did as he was told. Charles turned off his hearing aid and walked out into the no man's land that separated the assembled pupils from the frozen girl.

Emma, seeing him stand before her, observed the hearing aid, a small brown bakelite knob protruding from his fleshy ear, and it made her trust him. He seemed older and more experienced. She felt his personality to be round and smooth and free from nasty spikes. She smiled, a smaller, shyer smile than last time, and this raised, from the ranks of the children in front of her, the same magical incantation that had greeted Leah Goldstein and Izzie Kaletsky when they embraced in a Bondi bus shelter.

"Hubba hubba," the children shouted.

The bag arrived. When this fact had, at last, been drawn to Charles's attention, he walked slowly towards the goanna. His neck was tingling. He felt a warm hum at the base of his skull. The goanna blew out its neck. Charles made a noise deep in his throat. The goanna hissed and then, before anyone had time to gasp, Charles had it off and into the bag, causing no more additional damage than a ripped patch of dress which revealed a blood-spotted petticoat underneath.

"Thank you," she said, and waited for Charles to fiddle with his hearing aid with one hand while he held the agitated chaff bag with the other.

"Charles Badgery," he said, blushing now that the expert performance was ended and he found himself, a shy boy, faced with a girl he liked the look of.

"Don't hurt it," she said.

She placed her hand on his wrist, a pressure so light Charles could barely feel it and, at the same time, could feel nothing else. "It wasn't the goanna's fault." Her voice was as light as her touch. "It was them," she nodded at the pupils who were still, for the moment, quiet. "The little beggars were cheeking it. Promise me you won't hurt it."

"You have my word," he said, quite scarlet, but now they were being crowded and, like aviators just landed, were taken away by the mob, Emma by her pupils, Charles by Les Chaffey and the bank manager.

19

Never in Les Chaffey's life had a plan worked out so neatly and it took him by surprise. He had developed plans more rational, more reasonable, prettier plans, more optimistic plans but these – carefully detailed to the last screw – had been stillborn while this careless doodle, this idea that Charles must fall in love with the schoolteacher, now came to pass exactly as he'd envisaged.

"Well, I'll be damned, I'll be euchred, I'll be a Dutchman." He grinned and rubbed his leprechaun mouth and gazed at his raw red friend who would only confess that Miss Underhill seemed "like a nice sort of girl".

The motor cycle, it was obvious, was an essential aid to courting and Les, having belted his truck up the drive in a cloud of dust, did not stop for tea or a chat with his wife, but pulled his overalls on over his good Fletcher Jones trousers and set to work immediately. It was not in his nature to work so quickly, but he could see that an hour lost would be a dangerous hour, so he put his head down and did not stop until the AJS was back together. It was because of this, or because of Charles impatiently circling him, getting in his light, kicking over his tools, that the quality of the job was less than it might otherwise have been and the machine would ever after be troubled by faults that originated in those two excited days.

As it turned out such haste was unnecessary and no motor cycle was required to woo Miss Emma Underhill who, tired of her landlady's son who was building an outhouse specially to please the young miss, walked the six miles across from Red Hill to inquire, she said, about the well-being of the goanna. The Underhill women were all great walkers and Emma did not come traipsing along the sandy road in high heels and white lawn dress. She put on her white short socks and her strong brown brogues. She wore a heavy tweed pleated skirt that did not show the dirt, and a black twin-set, a colour that suited her complexion. She did carry an umbrella, but she used it energetically, like a walking stick, and she put her shoulders back and held up her head and walked with a good stride, strong and determined, but not without grace or sensuality either. Whilst walking, Emma Underhill showed a part of her character she kept hidden the rest of the time and for an hour and a half she did not lower her eyes once.

She handled the complications of the Chaffeys' gate without hesitation and she walked, more sedately, up the long drive, aware that a woman was squatting on the front veranda watching her. She put up her umbrella and realized, for the first time, that she was being bold. She would be talked about.