Of course it thrills me: Badgery, as bold as brass, in Pitt Street. Badgery Pet Emporium. It is better than she described. This window is thirty feet long and is set out with a design of pretty flowers. I make out the map of Australia. There are some words, but I am more taken by the little rock-wallabies which hop to and fro across this pretty scene and one of them, in particular, eating an apple, holding it daintily between its two front paws.

The men go on with their argument about the car and I get out of their way. I cannot know that the wallaby will die of influenza in Beverly Hills and I am, of course, proud of my boy. I begin to remember things more fondly than I am used to – the day he brought the yellow-tailed cockatoo down from the tree at Bendigo School, how Izzie had his finger bitten, and how Charles sold the bird when we ran out of petrol in Albury.

I enter the shop. Do I suddenly look like a Narrabri cocky on his first day in Sydney? Well, why not. Look at those galleries, those beautiful birds behind shining white wire, the glistening snakes coiled beneath spotless glass, that huge skylight, just as Goldstein described it to me, and now, as I watch, two white-overalled men work with buckets and water, cleaning off the week's supply of pigeon shit against a background of delicate stratocumulus.

The galleries are crowded. Ascending the stairs it is necessary to be polite, to allow two nuns to come down, to wait for three clattering boys with high voices and heavy boots.

I lean, at last, over the rail of the first gallery and look down. The cashier sits at a high desk in the middle of the floor, but he is deep in a book. I watch for some time. The cashier continues to turn the pages indolently, and yet the shop is obviously prosperous. The shop attendants are everywhere. They wear red-peaked caps and dicky little yellow jackets. They squat beside a cage here, gesture like a fisherman there, close eyes to dredge up information from the cellars of their memories. These are not salesmen. They are enthusiasts.

I am too delighted to dwell on anything in particular. I wander from exhibit to exhibit. I find the famous regent bower-bird which is trained to dig sapphires. It takes its blue stones from a pile of sawdust and places them, one by one, on an apothecary's scales. In the next cage I put two bob in a slot and see two apricot-coloured budgies tap an illuminated button. They get some seed. I get a drink coaster printed with the legend "Best Pet Shop in the World".

I slip this into my pocket. I walk up the last flight of stairs to the door marked "Private". And there, for a moment, with the door not properly locked, I hesitate. For this is the part I most care to see, to meet the affectionate wife I have read so much about, to play with my grandchildren, to be offered scones and the comfy chair. I am a coward in the face of that door. I thrust my hands in my pocket to make them still, and I am still vacillating when two youths come tearing out the door, their faces bright with embarrassment, and go thumping down the stairs past me. On the floor below they suddenly burst into ugly laughter.

I funk it, and turn, not knowing the woman I have come to damage is not five feet from me, quietly knitting. I do not meet Mr Lo, puffing from his exertions, nor Emma Badgery, the real cause of the upset boys I have just witnessed, who is adjusting her dress and retiring to a corner, a well-fed spider retiring to the centre of its web.

36

Emma knew it was wrong. She knew she would go to hell for the things that she did. It was not right to love your husband more than your children, or to spend your afternoons in a cage or to tease him so much that he banged his head against the floor like a defeated wrestler in a Pitt Street newsreel. She was steeped in wrong, soaked in it – it was probably wrong, it felt wrong, to eat mangoes the way she did, to suck the wide flat fibrous stone and have juice running down your arms, to have it well up in sticky pools between your fingers, and who, in her father's house, would have even imagined a fruit like a mango? It would have made him angry, her dearest daddy; he would have hit her bare legs with a razor strop. What a giddy temper he would have had at the suggestion of such a fabulous and filthy fruit.

And it was wrong, she did not need to be reminded, to make those two boys go running giggling down the stairs. She had heard them come through the "Private" door. She had seen them long before they had seen her, the minute they put their spotty noses inside and sniffed the musty odours of her home. Their upper lips were smudged with adolescent hair. She had watched them lift the mist nets and heard them croaking to each other. She had been in her slip and bra and she did nothing to make herself more decent. Leah was nearby, but was busy working and did not notice. Mr Lo was asleep. Emma pretended the boys were not there and she had opened her compact and dusted a little more blusher on her cheek. She heard them see her – the sucked-in breath, the whispered conference – and from the corner of her eye, as she checked her smooth reflection in her mirror, she waited to see what they would do.

But they were only boys, and easily frightened. When she turned to look at them, they fled, hooting and hollering down the stairs.

Once she had looked up and seen a policeman. He had watched her, smiling at her quietly, from the other side of the bars. Then she had become all milky and languid and had drawn on her lipstick, pouting her lips proudly towards that little mirror she owned then, and had let the clean biting line of neat teeth show underneath that firm silk-hard flesh that glistened like the innards of a freshly cut heart, bright, almost iridescent, slippery, muscled, secret.

He was not the only one of her uninvited visitors who gave her that sweet calm smile of recognition, merely the first. He had sat and smiled at her, she knew, because he knew she was like him and he like her. This kindred feeling was so soothing that her whole soul became as cool and limpid as tank water.

But to listen to most of the people who saw her, those all-but-burglars, you would think that her presence in a cage had affected some vital thing in their innards. She could not, ever, predict what it was they were going to do when they saw her, but the reactions were nearly always violent or loud or crude or angry – and she knew it was sinful to sit safely inside her cage and enjoy it, but she did anyway.

She preened herself. She had become vain and was not even ashamed of it. Once she had been a young girl and worn short socks and sensible skirts, but now she arranged her powder and her lipsticks and her rouges, mascaras, eye-liners, her emollients, astringents, foundation creams, moisturizing creams, her egg creams, her enamels, her nail-polish removers, emery boards, nail files and other aids to femininity.

And although her cage was directly opposite you as you walked on to the fourth level – so that you had only to come to the rail in front of you and look across – there was such a tangle of objects, such a confusion of lines or rope, netting, electrical cable, string, so many shapes you could not immediately understand, so many fascinating perspectives of the emporium below and the sky above, that you did not immediately notice the woman in the cage, or the child that was so often with her. In fact you were more likely to notice the lattice structure – it was very pretty and was often lit from within – that was next door to her. This was a cube measuring about ten feet in every way and you would not immediately describe it as a cage at all. It was far too pretty. It was a place for ferns and creepers and there were, indeed, some terracotta pots whose dried dead vegetation suggested that it was intended to have plants growing over it. Charles had given this to Emma in 1944, for Christmas. She had thanked him of course, and given him warm kisses, but she had not been so simple as to be tricked into living in it. And this, as it turned out, was just as well, because when Leah Goldstein arrived to live, one tear-stained afternoon, there was immediately a suitable place to put her.