Illywhacker

He was sweating inside his heavy suit, but he wished to appear a man. He also wanted to say, I'm just a boy. I won't harm you. All I want is a feed and a place to sleep.

The woman on the veranda was as still as a goanna that knows itself watched and even the feathery touch of her broom as it shifted on the floor reminded him of a goanna's forked tongue as it smells the air.

"Boss home?" he asked her. He knew the black eye made him look unusual. He would have liked to explain the black eye to her. He was sure she was a nice woman and kind to her children. He could not explain the black eye. He was ashamed of it.

"What you after?" she asked.

"Oh," he blushed and made an arc in the sand with his boot, "bit of business."

"What sort of business would that be?"

A mouse ran across the veranda and she flicked it halfheartedly with her broom. The mouse ran up the handle of a rusting shovel, along the horizontal corrugations of the wall (Charles saw it, soft as a shadow across the silver) through the window and into the house. She removed the prop from the corrugated-iron shutter so that it dropped closed with a clang.

"Mice bad?" he asked.

"Bad everywhere," She said defensively.

"I come from Jeparit today," Charles said. "They were bad up there. By Jove they were. Eat your buttons."

"Eat your buttons everywhere." Charles did not hear her, nor did he notice the three safety pins on the front of her floral dress. "Eat your toenails in the night," she said.

Charles was fiddling with his hearing aid, a heavy metal box that pulled his suit coat out of shape. It came on with a roar. He grimaced.

"Sorry," he said, putting his head on one side as if he might, from this angle, penetrate the shadow. "I'm a bit hard of hearing."

"Ah," she said, suddenly sorry for him. "You didn't miss nothing. Just talking about the blankety mice."

"Got a cat?"

"Got two," she said, defensive again, "but it does no good."

Charles could smell, already, although he was not yet invited on to the veranda, the sour dank smell of mice. "I got something better than a cat, missus."

"Better talk to my husband if you're selling, but he won't buy nothing. If you've got mousetraps or that sort of thing you're better off to save your legs. He's up at the forge," she said, becoming angry, again, about the glass of water she would have to offer him.

Charles trudged around the back, past the hot silver walls, around the corner of the kitchen house. He had hoped that the man was not at home. He would rather, any day, deal with a woman for there was always a soft spot to be found in the hardest of them.

He was careful not to tread on the dead, sandy vegetable patch. He threaded his way through a rusting garden of ploughshares, tines and scarifiers and made his way, without hope, towards the dark mouth of the bright-walled shed. His hearing aid crackled and he missed the sounds of a man smithing and the cries of white cockatoos, three of them, as they passed overhead on their way to a stand of trees above a dry water-hole; their cries, coinciding with the slow powerful movement of their wings, were like big creaking doors in need of oil. Charles saw the birds but they only depressed him. He had swapped his nets for petrol.

The forge was set up at one end of the large earth-floored shed and he saw the red glowing piece of metal in the gloom before he saw the farmer himself. As he walked towards the shower of sparks he did not take in the unusual nature of the shed – the shelves packed with odd-shaped pieces of metal, the neat handwritten labels. He walked past a drill press and a lathe without wondering why a farmer would have such equipment. What he did notice was the tractor – an old T Model cleverly converted so that the heavy chain transmitted power to large metal wheels.

"Petrol," thought Snake Boy Badgery.

The farmer was one of those quick-eyed finely built men whom farming has made strong and wiry but who, in the end, are not suited to their work because they like the company of people too much. He was pleased to see the stranger standing in his shed. He did not immediately break off what he was doing – shaping a metal wheel cleat to replace the broken one on his tractor – but he finished it only roughly and when he had dunked it, sizzling, into a drum of year-old water, took off his apron and shook hands.

Charles was relieved to see the man's face, and not just because it grinned at him, but because it was, anyway, a friendly face, cocked, crooked, with pale eyebrows at extreme angles and deep wrinkles in the corner of pale blue eyes. This was Les Chaffey, a man with a dictionary on his shelf, a map of the world on his wall, a habit of poking at things with a fork or a screwdriver when they interested him.