"Who's that?" asked Leah Goldstein.

"That's Mr Lo." Emma gave Hissao the car and found herself a wooden truck to crash into it with. "There," she told the pretty rouge-cheeked boy, "now you're dead."

"Not dead," Hissao said. He started running around the gallery but stopped when he saw the adults were more interested in whispering than chasing.

"Why is he there?" Leah Goldstein hissed and Hissao came back to listen. He snuggled in against his mother, picking at the soft cotton of her dress, rubbing it against his cheek and smudging it, although no one realized.

"He wants to stay," Emma said. "He wants a job, so I gave him one."

"Gave him what?"

"I gave him a job," said Emma and, although she did not smile, there was something happening with her face, as subtle as her perfume.

"Emma!"

Emma pouted but she was not unhappy. She was almost never unhappy. Soon Leah would be going away, as soon as Charles's daddy came to get her, and she would miss her, miss the custard and rich soups, the games of canasta, the long companionable silences, but she would not be unhappy.

"Dear Leah," she said. She was about to fetch some perfume to dab on her friend's wrists when she heard her husband's great big feet – she saw them in her mind's eye, those punched brown brogues, size eleven, on the worn stair treads – they were coming this way. She could hear Charles and cranky Van Kraligan shouting at each other about the budgie factory. Van Kraligan's voice came up over the gallery – he was working below – but Charles was already up the stairs to the fourth level.

"Balt," Van Kraligan said. "I am not a bloody Balt. Balt is from Baltic. I am not Baltic. Fix it," he yelled, "fix it your bloody self, mate."

Charles strode through the door. He had shed his wartime camouflage and emerged with tailor's stitching on his gaberdine lapels. His suits were pressed each day by the American Pressers in Angel Place. He came through the stairs like a wealthy man, turned right rather than left, and thus missed the melancholy but hopeful Mr Lo standing at attention inside the cage Charles had commissioned from Spikey Dawson.

Charles walked – twenty-eight years old and still lifting his feet too high – round to the west side, as far as the door to the kitchen, and then he leaned over the railing so he could shout at Van Kraligan on the gallery below. Don't worry what he said – it was all to do with his ignorance about geography – but rather that Mr Lo heard the tone of voice and did not need to look for a gold watch to know that this hairy giant was definitely the boss.

He therefore readied himself, exposing his cuffs the correct amount and placing a white handkerchief in his breast pocket. When Charles had finished with Van Kraligan, Mr Lo gave a cough, very small, and very polite, which Charles did not hear – he noticed, instead, Emma and Leah staring in the direction of the cage.

When Mr Lo saw that he had the boss's attention, he proceeded to show him what he could do 38 He did not mind if she was mad – he would look after her, just as he had looked after Leah when she arrived, with one thin summer dress crammed in her handbag; just as he gave money to his mother and provided for his children. He got great pleasure from providing. It was a miracle that he could do it. He, Charles Badgery (who did not know what order the letters of the alphabet went in, who was ugly, awkward, shy, deaf, bandy), could provide.

When he threatened to call in doctors, which he often did, it was not because of her madness or lack of it. It was because of the thought that she mocked him. It was the look in her eye, secretive, malevolent, wrapped in thin clear plastic.

And it was this look that he saw, or feared he saw, on the day she put the Asiatic in the cage.

Charles leaned across the rail and watched Mr Lo thoughtfully, as though he were nothing more than a newly arrived cockatoo whose responses he was attempting to judge, to see if he would adapt to his cage readily or would end up noisy and a nuisance to his fellows.

Mr Lo bowed to Charles, bowed as he had not bowed except to Grandfather. Then he spoke a high-flown poem, badly remembered, which his accomplished sister had often recited before visitors. (The poem was in Mandarin. Charles Badgery did not notice the mistakes.) Finally he turned five somersaults and would have done a sixth except that he was out of practice and feared a disgrace.

"Please," said Mr Lo, suppressing his greedy lungs.

Charles was considering the thing that he never considered, the thing that he could not even admit that he thought about, but which had lacerated him since that day in 1943 when he emerged from the damp little church in George Street and discovered – it was his outraged mother who brought it to his attention – that his son was not named Michael, as he had thought, but Hissao. Now, six years later, he compared, point by point, his son with the man in the cage. He saw, quickly, that the visitor bore no resemblance to his son. His eyes were round, not almond-shaped at all, and they were sunken into shadows.

Seeing the proprietor's thoughtful face, Mr Lo realized that his tenure was in question. He began to sing a small sad song he had learned from his grandmother. Charles, hearing the sadness in the song, was at once moved and disgusted. He walked around the gallery rail but he would not look at the human being performing like a monkey in a cage.

He had ordered that the door of this particular cage be made big, like a normal door to a normal room, so when he decided to enter, he entered easily enough. Still, he found it difficult to battle the nimble Mr Lo who clambered up to the barred roof and hung on.

"Please," said Charles, "I cannot have you here."

While this all took place on the north side, Leah, on the south side, extracted Mr Lo's real story from Emma and – while Charles stayed inside the cage and Mr Lo hung on to the ceiling with aching arms -Leah came to the bars to explain the situation to the proprietor. Mr Lo, she said, wished to remain in Australia. The Australian government, having regard for the colour of Mr Lo's skin and the shape of his eyes, did not wish him to stay. They had given him the same iniquitous dictation test that they had given Egon Kirsch, although they had done it in Dutch not Gaelic, and they did not wish him to stay. They were wrong. Mr Lo was right.

This opinion had a confusing effect on Charles. First he had an excessive respect for the law which he must – there is no other explanation – have picked up from the Rawleigh's man who, having failed to abort him, had nursed him instead.

Second, he had immense respect for Leah Goldstein's firm opinions.

Everyone, he knew, was watching him. Leah was saying that Mr Lo shoud be harboured. His wife was edging around the rail towards him. There was a man from the Customs Department – a government officer – waiting in his office downstairs, "making inquiries" about certain activities and although he had nothing to hide he was fearful about it and was now made doubly fearful by this illegal activity being conducted above the government official's head. He did not want trouble. He began to sweat. He could feel his deodorized armpits were sweating.

"Perhaps", said Mr Lo, who felt himself unable to hang on much longer, "you think I want money. No money," Mr Lo said, even though he was frightened at what he had got himself involved with. He was beyond thinking. If only he could have a night's sleep without worrying about arrest.

"No," Charles said.

Mr Lo dropped wearily to the floor and examined the painful impressions the bars had made on his hands. He had soft hands. He was proud of them, but now his hands would become rough and callused, his long nail torn, and it was just as the fortuneteller had said – "Bad fortune, much hardship, great wealth follows."