"No," she told the boys, but lacked confidence.

"With two galahs", the woman from the sandwich shop said, "in a cage, in a queue."

Only when the galahs were described in detail did Emma realize that the story was correct.

The front of her dress was stained with milk and damp with pee, but she did not pause to change, nor, when she issued her instructions, did she murmur. She put the baby firmly on her hip. "Look after the shop," she said to the woman from the sandwich shop. "I'll be back in half a mo."

"It's the lunch hour. My Sylvie's by herself."

"I'll tell her where you are," said Emma Badgery and pushed herself through a panic of children's legs into the confusion of George Street where the war was declaring itself, flapping on the wings of newspapers.

It was then that the goanna who had, perhaps, been prodded one time too many, decided to make its move. Under the illusion that it was a free agent it dragged its leathery belly along the cool tiles of the arcade, passed safely through a forest of thin legs and got itself as far as the fruit shop, right on George Street itself. The fruiterer, a young fox-faced man, took fright and slammed down the mesh grille with which he locked his shop at night.

The goanna was alarmed and climbed to safety. He got to the top of the grille and stayed there, thus preventing the fruiterer from opening his door again. The fruiterer could afford to wait a minute or two, but he was not prepared to see good business pass him by. He therefore began poking at the goanna with a broom handle. His wife managed to sell two bananas through the grille, but had her situation exploited by the customer who walked away without giving money in exchange.

The escaped prisoner was dashed to the floor with a broom stick and set upon by a passing fox-terrier.

The monitor reared up and stood on its back legs. Its throat inflated and it hissed like a dragon. The fox-terrier was small and fat. It had its teeth into the monitor's front leg and hung there, its back legs quite off the ground. No one passing seemed to notice. The monitor was six foot tall and it brought up its back legs and raked the fox-terrier's belly. The foxie yelped, dropped, walked a few yards, and collapsed, its green-grey intestines spilling out while it died, twitching, in the George Street gutter. It was Sylvie from the sandwich shop who put the rubbish bin down over the goanna. The greengrocer then helped her turn it and put the lid on. He swept its amputated leg out into George Street.

The Gould's Monitor was never quite the same again and all because, as Emma pointed out, Charles Badgery had gone off to enlist on behalf of the King of England.

26

Emma never did like those old toast-rack trams. She did not understand which was the green line and which the red. She was confused by the hieroglyphics they displayed on their front. She did not like the way they threatened to throw you out the door on bends. She had organized her life so that she avoided them completely.

But on this day she had no choice. She and the baby travelled by tram to Victoria Barracks. The army had set up a tent at the front gates and the men all queued to have their particulars taken down. She smelled the smell all right. She did not like it, but she would not be beaten by it. She pushed her way to where the odour was strongest, inside the tent itself, and demanded to see her husband. The men smiled at her. She saw the smiles, distant detached things like little red purses full of teeth. It was some time before she could be made to understand that if her husband was not in the queue and not in the tent then he had already been "done".

She turned to face the terrors of the trams again. She was dizzy. She went to a milk bar at the tram stop and asked for a glass of water. It was unthinkable that he would leave her. He had promised, in a church. She did not wait for the water. There was no time. She was dizzy like the other time, but worse. She was his possum, his mouse, his cherub, his delight. She rode down Oxford Street in a daze and when she found herself close enough to home – she recognized Hyde Park – she got out of the tram and began to walk. It was not her strong legs or countrywoman's walk that drew comments from passers-by. It was the unfocused look in her big round eyes. The pin (never properly clipped) dropped from the napkin in Liverpool Street, and the napkin itself flopped to the footpath on the corner of Pitt Street. There was something in her manner that prevented it being returned to her.

She pushed through the schoolchildren outside the shop and, finding her place behind the desk already taken by the lady with the growth, crawled quietly into the big cage that rightfully belonged to the goanna. The goanna, however, was in a rubbish bin behind the counter and so Emma was able to stay where she was, curled up, quite still, while conferences took place around her. The jeweller's nephew tried to speak to her but she did not seem to hear. It was decided best to leave it to her husband and so they put up the closed sign and shut the door.

Charles did not get home until six at night. He had been rejected from the tent because of his hearing and told, loudly, that there was no point in his name being written down. The rabbitoh persuaded him to go out to Bankstown where there was a fellow with his backyard full of golden-shouldered parrots. So when he arrived home he had the gang-gangs and a pair of golden-shouldered parrots as well. He did not realize anything was wrong.

He busied himself making the gang-gangs at home, whistling to himself all the while. He assumed Emma to be upstairs with the baby and took the pair of parrots up to show her. When he found the flat empty he came downstairs again and only when his son, asleep on his wife's breast, gurgled, did Charles see the situation.

He squatted before the cage.

"Emma," he said.

She murmured.

"Emma, what are you doing?"

Emma was not so dizzy any more. She drank some water from a bowl. He could not go and leave her without water. When it got cold in the night, she moved enough to let him push a blanket in around her.

27

Charles did not know what to do. He did not dare telephone a doctor in case they took her from him and locked her away in an asylum. He was still only eighteen and had no experience of such things. He was very close to panic and because he was so frightened himself he adopted a very firm approach that gave no indication of his true feelings.

He prepared a meal and set a place for her. He told her the meal was there, but he did not bring it down to her.

That night he slept on his own side of the bed with his hearing aid connected and turned up loud. In the morning he found Emma's side of the bed still empty, disturbed only by his dream-churned limbs. He had a headache. He rose wearily, tucked his hearing aid into his pyjama pocket, slipped his big feet into felt slippers (once the very symbol of his perfect happiness) and padded into the kitchen. He sat on a bin of millet and stared for a long time at the meal he had left out for her. The heavy mantel clock struck seven. He stood. He examined the meal closely and found two tiny scratch marks where a mouse had sampled the congealed white fat on the plate. Towards the centre of the table were two small droppings.

A cacophony of cockatoos vibrated the diaphragm of his ear. He could make out, in the midst of this din, the peculiar calls of the gang-gangs, cries they would normally have made in flight, but he was too depressed and frightened to take pleasure from anything so simple and everything that might have delighted him on a normal day now caused him pain, even – in the bathroom -the sight of Emma's worn-out toothbrush produced an agony that could not have been greater had she actually died.