I wasn’t allowed to go near the pub. I didn’t know why. I was five and I knew a lot about pubs. Father had told me stories of outback pubs where men wearing white moleskin trousers and riding boots would come out of the bar singing, and jump on horses that bucked all over the place. I often thought of these men. They yelled out ‘Wild Cattle’ while their horses were bucking and they could all fight like threshing machines. I wanted to be like them when I grew up.
Jimmy Virtue didn’t ride bucking horses. But that didn’t matter with him. I liked him because he could climb trees better than any other man. I knew this because Mr Smith told me. Mr Smith lived in a wheelchair and he was all twisted. His hands curved round until the fingers were hooked like soft claws, and he would never be able to straighten them again in all his life. I couldn’t see his legs because he had a possum-skin rug over them but he could tell stories just as good as my father.
He would throw back his head and laugh at his stories, but his teeth needed cleaning. He wrote articles about birds for the papers. He used to teach me about birds, but he was no good on horses.
He used to go for drives in a phaeton. They wheeled his chair up the back, and he would sit in it all the day. Jimmy Virtue pushed his chair into the phaeton and then he would drive him where he wanted to go.
They used to look for parrots’ and owls’ nests in hollow limbs so high up it made you giddy to look down. But Jimmy Virtue could climb up to them. He climbed up on a rope and put his hand down the hollow limbs and pulled out eggs to show to Mr Smith, then he would put them back again.
Mr Smith told me Jimmy never broke an egg, and when he pulled out baby parrots he held them the right way, and he would never crush them by holding them tight. He was a good man, and Mr Smith liked him, and so did I.
I was standing near our fence one day, and Jimmy Virtue came walking towards me. He nearly fell over several times. His legs didn’t work properly. They carried him from one side of the path to the other. He stopped near me and hung over the fence. He vomited. His face was twisted. He looked as if he was going to cry. He suddenly flung back his head and cried out, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no! . . .’
I fled inside to my mother and hid my face in her black apron. I lifted my face to her and sobbed, ‘Jimmy Virtue can’t walk straight and he’s hanging on our fence calling out No, no, no, no.’
Mother looked out the window while she held me against her.
‘Poor Jimmy Virtue’s sick’, she said.
‘Why don’t you bring him inside and put him to bed?’ I pleaded.
‘He’ll get better soon. Don’t think about it.’
You told me not to think about it, mother.
Why then does Jimmy Virtue come to my room now that I am old? Why does he stagger in the dark, a symbol of all sickness, echoing my own thoughts with his terrible No, no, no, no. There is no black apron to shield me now.