So the boy was acting in bad faith? Perhaps. But he was also an optimist. He knew that the signs in the sky of this city were made only from gas and glass. He knew gas and glass could be broken, the gas set free, the glass bent into other shapes and that even the city itself was something imagined by men and women, and if it could be imagined into one form, it could be imagined into another.
He arrived by taxi outside the emporium at eight thirty to find the footpath had already been swept and hosed. This was a warm morning and the water on the footpath was evaporating. It felt humid, luxurious, grubby, tropical. The window was full of little firetails and the background had been painted with the dun-khaki that is the firetail's dominant colour so that as the little birds flew to and fro their bodies disappeared and only their ember-red tails showed, like flying sparks. This was Van Kraligan's work, not his father's. Hissao checked his reflection in the window. He had worn a conservative suit to make his father feel confident and relaxed, but the bow tie was a secret code addressed only to himself and to those few who might read it – he had stolen it, of course, from Corbusier.
The door was unlocked for the staff. Hissao, however, did not enter immediately but crossed Pitt Street and stood amongst the crowds waiting for the Woolworth's sale. He looked across at Badgery's Pet Emporium, at the neon-signed parrots circling his grandfather's brightly lit window.
His grandfather, Hissao thought, was dying. So he was surprised to see him there, sitting bolt upright in his chair, like the captain on the bridge. He was dressed in a grey linen suit and a panama hat. The elastic of his tie was limp and showing at the edges of the knot, but his eyes were that splendid violet colour they would always show at the beginning of the day. Hissao, without knowing why, shivered.
"Oh, Master," he said, and giggled.
When he entered the emporium the cannabis played its gentle tricks on him and exaggerated the rust on the white-painted cages and the odour of mildew on the stairwell. He suddenly felt very sad.
He went into his father's office – it was tucked in neatly underneath the stairs – and stood staring at the framed photographs that had so impressed him as a boy. But Ava Gardner was already mouldy and Lee Marvin had been damaged by a leaking aquarium on the floor above and even his good wishes, sincerely meant too, had dissolved into a smudged watermark.
The sounds of the morning were all around him: the whining floor polisher, the creaking wheels of the old food pram, the groaning noises of the building itself which seemed to wheeze and fart like an old labrador, old, moth-eaten, too stubborn to die. He sat at his father's desk and began to tidy it for him (and you can look at this fastidiousness of his as one of the few obvious reactions against his upbringing). There were consignment notes from carriers, letters from collectors, trade magazines from all over the world, the vets' reports that his father had read out, so belligerently, to Leah Goldstein. These vets' reports, being roneoed copies and therefore on hydroscopic paper, were damp.
It was the first occasion in his life when he had felt the sadness of time. He was overcome with it there, in his father's office, with the damp paper between his fingers. He felt it in everything. He felt it in the rust and mildew, even in the box housing for the neon tubes above his head which he had once, in his innocence, thought so modern.
He knew why the building was so damp. Its damp courses were defective and it was built on top of the tank stream. He tried to cheer himself by imagining opening up the basement, going down to reveal the historic stream itself, having it run through transparent pipes, but he knew now what the tank stream must look like – a drain, a sewer, no different from other drains and sewers.
His father, coincidentally, had become concerned about rust, and Hissao found him with a pot of white paint trying, when it was already far too late, to hide the evidence fromTime magazine. He had already put white paint on his good suit before Hissao managed to persuade him to give the touching-up job to Van Kraligan who, for once, did not complain or argue. Hissao watched the stern-faced Dutchman as he took the can of paint and saw that his eyes were all aglitter with excitement. Everyone was waiting for the Yanks.
Hissao then wandered up the stairs to say hello to his mother and was astonished to find all the evidence of normal family life removed. This only exacerbated his sadness. Downstairs his past was rusting, but up here it had been obliterated. It felt cold and sterile. They had removed nets and ladders, the stacks of unread newspapers, the steel drums, the piles of bricks, the abandoned children's toys, balls of wool, lengths of dress material. They had put pot plants in Goldstein's apartment and set her desk outside and put Mr Lo at it so that he was pretending to be a clerk. They had polished the floors and painted his mother's cage. He could see that they had begun to brick up the arch above the RSJ, but had obviously panicked at the lack of time left, and painted over the unfinished job. The goanna had been removed, presumably not without protest from Emma, and placed in a large cage on the ground floor. It had been fed "pinkies" and was now as sleepy and inert as a sunbather.
Hissao shook hands with Mr Lo who was, as usual, so pleased to see him that he felt embarrassed. If he allowed himself to, he would become very cross with Mr Lo who was now free to stay in Australia but who would not leave the building he had lived in so long.
He found his mother in the kitchen sitting on a high stool with her handbag in front of her. He could see that she was bright and excited about the visit too. She had put on a big feathery hat and gloves and lipstick: He hugged and kissed her. He was pleased – he always was – to see her. She was overweight, she wore old-fashioned clothes, she had no interest in the world outside and only the most perfunctory grasp of his university studies, but she was his mother. They loved each other uncritically. She admired his bow tie and smoothed his hair and then patted the stool beside her for him to sit on.
It was then that Emma produced the old Vegemite jar.
Hissao looked at the bottle with the polite attention another son might bestow on his mother's favourite maidenhair fern, or on a pear tree, new ducklings, a cabbage bed or white-stalked celery growing up through cardboard tubes. The ritual with the bottle was so familiar that he did not even think about it. For the most part the contents of the bottle had been as formless and unpleasant as the sort of stuff you will pull out of a blocked grease trap, but occasionally there were leeches and once a fine creature, as thin as black cotton, which swam with the graceful movements of a snake.
But on this occasion his mother showed him a foetus, half goanna and half human. And I know I said, when I mentioned the subject before, that Hissao did not look, that the liquid was murky, that he could not be sure, but of course he looked. He was not only polite, he was naturally curious and if someone says that they have your brother in a bottle, of course you have a squint at it. It had fingers (they were perfectly formed) and a face in which you could make out features which had that mixture of soft-mouthed vulnerability and blandness that is the hallmark of the unborn. Where you might expect toes there were long claws, thin, elegant, shining black like ebony; there was also a tail which was long, striped, with very obvious glistening scales.
Hissao, quite suddenly, did not know where he was. His head span. He stood up, and was dizzy, so sat down again. His mother, momentarily, took on the appearance of a total stranger. He leaned across to the kitchen tap, turned it on, and collected water in his cupped hands but when he drank he could taste only the whale-fat flavour of his mother's lipstick. Just the same, he did not realize that he had seen a dragon, only that he was ill and frightened.