"You go to heaven", she whispered, "and see Jesus."

"Bullswack."

"You can't do it."

"I can. I can. If you help me, please, Sonny."

"No."

"Pur-leeese." Charles put his big arm around his sister; it was a wooden hug carved from Mallee root, the big head grotesquely askew, pleading gracelessly. "You take the stick," he said, putting it across her pleated lap and folding her little hands around it. "And you run at me, and say Ching Chong Chinaman."

"I won't."

"And hit me," Charles said, "hard."

"No," she said, and moved away from the stick which dropped to the ground.

"What do you pray?" asked ingratiating Charles.

Sonia said nothing.

"I need garters," Charles said firmly, and with that settled strode on ahead of his sister, leaving her to hurry through the last light towards the little hessian humpy I had made for Leah Goldstein who was now busy sewing spangles on to my best suit coat and arguing with me about the write-up I had got for her in the paper.

"It's all lies, Mr Badgery," she said, threading one more spangle on to her relentless needle. "I have never been to Gay Paree, as you call it. I will not dance with a death adder, not in any circumstances. And it says nothing about you and your act which you were so desperate to impress me with."

I watched the spangles unhappily and saw that I had not, as I believed I had, delivered value to her. It was a first-class write-up in anybody's language.

I tried to explain the nature of publicity to her. She listened to me patiently enough. I explained how I had been written up in papers everywhere and that a good editor expected a little exaggeration – the colours strengthened, so to speak. And it was my understanding of this that had allowed me to get a page-one write-up for her when she had been unable to get any. No one at the paper had ever heard of Mervyn Sullivan but everyone in Bendigo would now know about Leah Leonda, as I had called her.

"Well," she said, holding up the suit coat critically to the kerosene light. "I don't want to have a barney with you, Mr Badgery. You've been very kind. But if I can't do a show honestly I don't want to do a show at all. It's a good show. It's not like some old-fashioned aeroplane that you're ashamed of, no offence. I don't need to tell lies. We did ten shows in Myrniong. We got everybody in town, and some of them twice. And now we've got your act, Mr Badgery, which is really breathtaking. I think you underestimate the effect of your own act."

The aim of the write-up had been to make my so-called act unnecessary, but she was too flinty-faced to tell the truth to. I opened my mouth. I was prepared to begin a truthful sentence and not worry where I ended up, but my son barged through the doorway, demanding garters.

I told him there would be no garters but Leah, sitting on the bed I had made for her (hessian stretched across two wattle poles) had already produced some black elastic from her small cane sewing box.

Charles did not dare look at me. His lower lip went all plump, like a cherub, and he went and sat beside Leah while Sonia came and squatted beside me, hugging my calf and questioning my shoelaces.

30

Charles oiled the snakes as he was instructed and took them, one at a time, so they might attend to matters of toilet. The snake is a neat creature, and most fastidious about where it drops its shit. My son took them to a grassy patch and waited while they extruded their firm dark pellets. From time to time he adjusted his socks and examined the curious red patterns the garters made on his legs.

Sonia washed our dishes in the creek and managed not to break anything. She rubbed the greasy plates with river sand while Leah cleaned her single gramophone record with petrol and soft cloth. She did various exercises and displayed the emu feathers to the sunshine.

And I put on my spangled suit coat and was much admired.

The magpies chortled merrily, their feathers clean, and I was like one of those ageing farmers, Gus Housey comes to mind, who get behind the wheel of a motor car for the first time and know, before they do a thing, that they will crash. They hold the wheel rigidly. They stare ahead defiantly. They release the clutch with the jerk of someone who must get a nasty business done with. They give off the smell of men who are victims of their own excessive pride and now must pay the price. Their eyes seek out fences or trees and you cannot triumph over them in any wrestle for the wheel.

"There is population in this town," Leah told me, "and there is money, and we are not leaving until we have shown them what we can do."

Anticipating disaster, I persuaded my partner to let me negotiate a suitable venue for our premiere.

31

I have heard people describe Bendigo as a country town. They mention it in the same breath as Shepparton or Ararat. These people have never been to Bendigo and don't know what they're talking about. The Town Hall is the equal of anything in Florence; the Law Courts would not look frumpish in Versailles. And if there are farmers in the streets, dark cafes with three courses for two and sixpence and, in Hayes Street, a Co-op dedicated to Norfield Wire Strainers and Cattle Drench, it does not alter the fact that Bendigo is a town of the Gold Age. If cattle are driven through the streets on the way to the ammoniacal sale-yards it does not make the streets less grand, does not diminish their width by as much as half a chain, and even the bellowing cattle must see, if not understand, the great white fountain near the Kerang turn-off that promised (and promises still, for all I know) a return to days when men would once again build solicitors' offices like wedding cakes and put towers on hotels and art schools alike. One could ignore, as I had chosen to, as the townspeople tried to, the men with cardboard tied to the bottom of their shoes who shuffled through the town with billycans clanking and sugar bags tied across their bent shoulders.

There was no shortage of good venues for a variety act. For instance, there was a great big place near the Town Hall (gone now) that had a great circular upstairs gallery, electrically operated curtains, and a bank of lights which the caretaker, a newsagent and cricket fanatic named Perry Thomassen, was at great pains to show me, but not before he had demonstrated the correct wrist action for a googly and told me that he had been on the wireless, in a sporting quiz, in Melbourne. He was a lanky stooped fellow and too clumsy to be trusted with a cricket bat, let alone the fifty-foot ladder he mounted to demonstrate the spots, dimmer and floods. He got his pigeon toes tangled in the rungs and dropped pennies from his pockets while he recited the names of the men who made Australia the greatest sporting nation in the world. So keen was he to establish his case that he added Dame Nellie Melba and Mo McCaughey to his list, the point being (I think) that both of them had performed in this very hall. He was promising to show me Mo's braces (left behind in a dressing room in amusing circumstances) when I slipped quietly out into the street. I had no intention of making an idiot of myself in such a central location. Instead I booked the little wooden Mechanics' Institute in a laneway behind the back entrance to the Catholic Seminary. I got the place for two bob but had to sign a piece of paper saying I would not hold a political meeting.

I had to tell lies, of course, to explain this miserable location to Leah, but she was naive about halls at this stage of her career, never having had to hire one herself.

So there I was, at seven o'clock of a rainy night, shivering before the fly-spotted mirror while spiders kept on at their business on the bare tin roof above my head.