Jacko Read Online Free Page B

Jacko’s doorstep when they came to New York with Musica Viva – separately, however, for they were long divorced.
    The first good thing I noticed about Jacko’s wife was that she did not regard television with any particular seriousness. But she seemed quietly to relish Jacko’s tricks just the same.
    â€”A cherrypicker, she had said earlier. That’s the go!
    And the word go , as uttered by Lucy’s lovely, symmetric lips, would resonate with Australian vowels ancient as The Man from Snowy River , evocative of The Drover’s Wife . The Australian vowel, which had waited basking like a lizard on the Australian littoral, to insinuate itself into the mouths of immigrant children.
    â€”That’s the go, Jacko, she was always saying in public.
    This did not seem too strenuous, reforming or disapproving to me. But to hear Jacko speak sometimes, you would have thought she spent all her time trying to reconstitute him.
    Jacko’s mother, Chloe, loved Mrs Jacko, Lucy (short for Luciana), and sometimes called her on the radio telephone from Burren Waters and asked her when was she going to leave that pisspot of a son of hers.
    Sometimes at dawn Lucy went out with Jacko and the camera crew, and stood around in the snow, or else in the harshness of a summer’s sunrise, as he performed his stunts. I had an image of her dancing away from the camera but not succeeding in escaping it one Christmas morning, when Jacko delivered snow to a hapless and perhaps over-decorated household in Queens. She seemed to know that a sylph had no place in Jacko’s act. Occasionally she made what seemed to me lightly mocking remarks about Dannie, upon whose ‘a’ she laid a particular weight of nasal mockery. She seemed easy, however, with the idea that the sort of sharp-edged, pretty young women who came ravening up out of communications courses in Syracuse and Brown and Ann Arbor would be enchanted by Jacko’s loud good cheer and by his widespread stardom in the matter of hard-talking entry.
    I admit that none of these perceptions of mine necessarily counted for much: in private she may have outlaid fearsome energies on amending Jacko. It was simply that her public demeanour in bars and in restaurants, or when you visited their own home as she cooked with Jacko, or as she emerged ill-rested from their bedroom to greet you for breakfast on a Sunday morning after one of Jacko’s all night Soho adventures, never showed the faintest trace of bitterness.
    There might, at such a time, be small blue triangles under her clear eyes. Too many cigarettes had put them there – she came of a generation of Australian schoolgirls who nearly all smoked, even though only a fragment of the boys did. Sometimes we’d discussed what that fact meant about Australia and boys and girls. I had for example been writing something for the New York Times Color Magazine on the question of whether Australia’s reputation as a South Africa for women was well founded. I tried to encompass anecdotal material from my own daughter’s history and from Lucy Emptor’s related experience. And I thought of other Australian women, of the great barefooted matriarch of Burren Waters, Chloe Emptor, dam of Jacko whose sire was Stammer Jack. It was an invidious situation, of course, writing such a piece: I was like a German trying to prove I liked Jews; an Israeli trying to prove that Palestinians were often treated with every courtesy.
    But that’s another story.
    Mrs Jacko – Lucy Emptor – was rarely seen to have had enough sleep or enough oxygen, but she was of an age where it didn’t make a dent in her splendour. This wife who – according to Jacko’s confiding word – harried him in secret, smiled girlishly in bars at midnight and said, A cherrypicker. That’s the go.
    In a way that made the heart turn over.
    I couldn’t see any of it as wifely tyranny, but was always assured by Jacko