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wires like streamers across the ceiling, tacked them on to wooden architraves, hung them from a picture rail and looped them around the curtain rods. The neighbours in Western Avenue might not have cared for this frank approach, but I liked it. It made me comfortable. It was a house where you could put your feet up and drink French champagne or Ballarat bitter according to your mood.
    The other remarkable thing about the house was chairs. There were so many of them waiting to be sat on that you could see, immediately, that the McGraths were hospitable people and they’d never pass up a chance to buy an extra chair if it took their fancy. Their taste was catholic, although that is a term they would not have used themselves. Was there Chippendale? Perhaps. And Louis-Quatorze? Probably, but the Herbert Badgery who looked on that array did not even know such names. They were all chairs to him, some old, some new, some tatty, some gilt, some comfortable, some overstuffed, some bursting with horsehair which would prickle the back of your legs and make you itch. I got the feeling that my hosts expected, at any moment, a hundred people with weary legs to walk in off the street.
    I could hear the women making supper. Jack showed me to a room. He opened up the big French doors on to the veranda and the room filled with the smell of flowers, salt from the bay, the humming generators of cicada engines. The cupboard was full of clothes that Molly had collected to sell for the Wyuna Nursing Home appeal.
    “Help yourself,” said Jack. “There’s some first-rate stuff in here, I warrant you.”
    I got myself a new wardrobe that night, selecting carefully, thinking of the winter ahead.
    “Snaffle every staver,” I told myself as I admired myself in my new suit. I thought I was a real smart bastard.

10
    They tell me now that there was no wireless in Geelong in 1919, but I tell you there was. It had a big round dial depicting not only the stations but the world itself. We sat around it on our chairs. Phoebe drank a cordial and clinked her ice inside the glass. Molly had tea. Jack and I drank Scotch. Alcohol was always dangerous for me when I was excited: I sipped. Not Jack. He confessed he had been a teetotaller to the age of forty and he appreciated his drink the way he appreciated knots. He wiped his mouth with the back of his broad hairy hand and marvelled at its effect on his constitution.
    “By Jove,” he said, “that was good.”
    There was wireless, all right, and they read the news on it. Jack, like my father before me and my son after me, was a bit on the deafside and he leaned attentively towards the set. The rest of us stared at the amber glow behind the map of the world: there was news that night of the Australia–England air race. Ulm, so the plummy-voiced announcer said, had crashed in Crete.
    My God, it was the year to be an aviator. We could do no wrong. When the press wrote up a pilot he wasn’t just a pilot; he was an “eagle soaring above our skies” and no matter how often some ex-RFC type crashed while publicizing War Bonds, the public never seemed to get tired of it. The Australia–England air race fed them on tales of heroism and danger.
    As it happened, I had known Charles Ulm. Possibly I had known Charles Ulm. To tell you the truth I can’t remember whether I really did know him or if I claimed it so often I came to believe it myself. Photographs of Ulm never looked like the man I described but people always blamed the photographer for that, not me. In any case, when the news was over I told them all about Ulm, what he was like as a man, what he looked like and so on. In short, I delivered value.
    I gorged myself on cold roast lamb and beans and beetroot. I hadn’t had a feed in two days.

11
    Phoebe watched the man who kept a snake for a pet, who shared, it seemed, a bedroom with the creature. She thought he devoured the table with a most peculiar passion, a passion as cool and blue as his eyes, as