by Peter Temple
Allen & Unwin brings you short stories from some of Australia’s most respected contemporary writers, published only in ebook format. For less than the price of a cup of coffee, try one over lunch, or on your way home!
Titles in the A&U Shorts program:
Georgia Blain, Mirrored
Tom Keneally, Blackberries
Alex Miller, Manuka
Peter Temple, Ithaca in My Mind
Christos Tsiolkas, Sticks, Stones
Charlotte Wood, Nanoparticles
Peter Temple, a former journalist, is an award-winning crime fiction writer. He is the first Australian to win a Golden Dagger, for The Broken Shore in 2007, and the only crime fiction author to have won the Miles Franklin, for Truth in 2010.
First published in the Books Alive collection 10 Short Stories You Must Read This Year,
(The Australia Council, 2009)
This edition published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2012
Copyright © Peter Temple 2009
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Ithaca in My Mind
Peter Temple
From the terrace, the eye was led down the thin lap pool edged with Castlemaine bluestone pavers and flanked by box hedges to the stone bench in front of the ivy-clad brick wall.
Vincent Duncan was sitting in a cane chair, naked beneath a blue towelling dressing-gown, a telephone in his left hand. With his right hand, he was toying with grey hairs on his chest.
‘Sorry, say that again,’ he said.
‘Carter wants to pass.’
‘Pass what?’
Duncan pulled a hair. It hurt in a pleasant way. He studied the tiny pale root that had lived in his flesh. What did hairs feed on?
‘He doesn’t want it,’ said Marjorie.
She had the voice of an upper-class English twelve-year-old. That was in part understandable because she had once been an upper-class English twelve-year-old. She lived in London with a man called Rufus, who had certainly once been an undersized twelve-year-old. Now he had a moustache like Neville Chamberlain and wrote oversized accounts of British military disasters involving acts of heroic selflessness, mainly by the officers.
Marjorie and Rufus lived in a flat in what had once been a power station. Architects were engaged to make the place even more cold and brutal. Duncan had spent a night there. It was like living in a missile silo designed by the Bauhaus.
‘I don’t think it’s quite Carter,’ said Marjorie. ‘Well, it’s probably not so much him as the new lot wanting to prune the mid-list.’
‘The mid-list’s got what to do with me, Marjorie?’ he said.
‘Of course it’s silly judgement on their part,’ she said, ‘but there it is. I’m afraid you are mid-list, darling, and we probably have to live with it.’
‘Marjorie,’ he said, ‘Carter’s a stupid prick. I never liked him. Let’s go elsewhere.’
‘Vincent,’ said Marjorie, ‘I’ve shown the book around.’
‘Talked to Random?’
‘I’ve spoken to Random, yes. Vincent, things are not what they were. Tastes change, you know that. We may have to batten down. In the long term, your . . .’
‘Well, how much?’
‘It’s not actually about the money.’
‘It never is. Random. They’re offering what?’
‘Random passed on it too.’
Duncan felt the cobweb tingle of pain across his scalp. It was cold. He pulled at the dressing gown to close it and saw the veins on his feet. Since when had they been big, so grotesque, that revolting colour?
‘Well, stuff Random too,’ he said. ‘Stuff Bertelsmann, stuff the Germans. Let’s go to Revanche. He wants me, that pretty boy.’
Majorie made a throaty sound. ‘To simply say it, Vincent, I’ve walked both sides of the steet. I’ve been offered five thousand pounds by Flashman and it is the only offer and I’m not sure how long it’s open.’
‘Ludicrous,’ Duncan said. ‘Insulting.’
‘You mustn’t take it personally. That is really important.’
‘Marjorie,’ he said, ‘I take it very personally. I cannot tell you how important this book is to me. I am in a position where if . . .’
He took a deep breath. ‘Marjorie, if this book doesn’t attract the best advance of my career, I may never write another novel.’
Marjorie was talking to someone. ‘Sorry, Vincent, the other line. Yes, your career. Well, it’s been pretty good, hasn’t it, darling. I mean, Ithaca, what’s that added up to over the years?’
‘Gus consumed the proceeds of Ithaca,’ he said. ‘The tax office and then Augustine.’
‘You’ve insisted on marrying them, Vincent. And without pre-nups. That really is unprotected sex.’
Duncan wanted to ask the podgy parasite what she knew of pre-nups and unprotected sex. Any sex. The historian almost certainly had his saggy bottom caned elsewhere.
But he needed Marjorie as never before. He needed her even more than he needed to find Hugh Merill-Porter, formerly of Toorak, the accountant who insisted he put everything, including the house, into the share market.
‘Gear,’ said Hugh. ‘Gear and grow very rich, Vincent. That’s all I have to say. You will thank me.’
When he found Merill-Porter, believed to be in a Philippine bolthole, he would say, ‘Pain, Hugh. Pain. That’s all I have to say.’
Then his hired help would torture Hugh Merill-Porter. It would not bring back the one million-plus bucks lost by investing in house-of-cards property companies now insolvent. Nor would it restore ownership of the terrace. But watching it on video late at night would be satisfying.
At least he’d stopped marrying them after Gus.
‘Marjorie,’ Duncan said. ‘I need the sort of advance I got for The Taint of Speech. In that vicinity. Or I may never write again.’
Shrill laughter in the background.
Was he on Marjorie’s speakerphone?
She would die. He would travel to England and kill her.
‘Sorry about the noise,’ said Marjorie. ‘It’s Emily’s birthday.’
And Emily too would die. Enjoy, Ems. This is your last birthday.
‘The Taint sort of advance,’ he said. ‘Or I may never write again.’
A sigh.
‘Darling,’ said Marjorie, ‘Taint was on the back of Ithaca. You were hot, darling. But Taint tanked, there’s no other way to say it. And Rough Forked Beast didn’t find a readership either. And so we are at the point where, dare I say it, there may not b
e an enormous amount of pent-up expectation. Forked, really.’
She’d been drinking.
‘Have they actually read the actual book?’ said Duncan.
‘There is no way of knowing, my dear. Short of waterboarding them.’
‘But you’ve conveyed the, ah, essence? The man and the polar bear and the woman and the girl and the journey to the cave full of books? The . . .’
‘Yes, dear. We wrote a compelling blurb. Not an easy work to encapsulate, I have to say. Em did it brilliantly. Márquez, Coetzee, McCarthy, the tiger thing.’
‘Oh God no, Marjorie, not the bloody tiger?’
‘With respect, Vincent, the tiger was huge. We have tried to put A Seducing Fire . . .’
‘A Reducing Fire, Marjorie. Reducing.’
‘Yes. We’ve tried to put it in the company of hugeness. Associate it with hugeness.’
‘And?’
‘They didn’t make any specific comments. Just said pass.’
Shrieks in the background.
‘Darling,’ said Marjorie. ‘I’m being summoned, have to go, ring you back, not today, that’s chockablock. Pecker up.’
The sudden fire in his brain.
‘Marjorie,’ he said, ‘it occurs to me that I might need another agent. How does that sit with you, darling? You’ve lived a fat life off me and now you come along with this pathetic confession of inadequacy and just plain bloody stupid and hopeless . . .’
Duncan thought he could hear sluglike marine creatures crawling over the cable at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
‘Thank you for making this easier, Vincent,’ she said, voice of the headmistress of Malory Towers. ‘I’ve had enough of you. I am terminating our agency agreement, backdated to before you delivered this fourth-rate piece of sentimental rubbish. You will have the email within five minutes. Goodbye.’
The connection was ended. Duncan held a piece of moulded plastic in his hand.
Haig’s voice from behind him.
‘Bye, be back late,’ she said. ‘You really should go to the gym.’
He turned, saw only a gleam of bare shoulders, hair, she was gone.
Gone.
He sat. He heard her car coming out of the garage, heard it gunned down the street, around the corner.
It was an Alfa.
‘I have to have an Alfa, darling,’ she had said. ‘It makes me feel sexy.’
Who was the beneficiary of that? Not the mug who paid for it, paid the exorbitant repair and service bills. He calculated that every time it went in to the dealer, he paid the weekly wage of a mechanic and two slabs of beer.
Well, it wouldn’t be going in at his expense again. The letter from Stronzo Italia or whatever it was called said they’d handed him over to the lawyers.
A magpie landed beside the pool. Its first contemptuous act was to defecate. From on high, this arrogant bird had chosen his sliver of land to descend upon in order to shit on his hand-cut Castlemaine bluestone pavers.
Hand-cut. The twinky little landscape designer brought in by the skeletal architect had used the term.
Rock pavers cut by hand? Men sitting around with hammers, tapping away? Rubbish. They were cut with massive howling power saws. Kryptonite-tipped blades came down and sliced the ancient olivine basalt.
Duncan showered in the marble-floored glass box, talking to himself. ‘The swine,’ he said. ‘The ignorant swine. They can’t do this to me.’
He blow-dried his hair. He’d left it too late for plugs, that was a major regret. While you still had enough, you could hide them in the real hair. Leave it too late and you looked like a vain buzzard. He cinched his belt until it hurt and felt the small roll of fat with loathing. He made toast in the machine she had bought: five hundred and forty dollars. The bloody thing had twelve settings. Numbers one to six barely warmed the bread, seven and upwards charred it just as effectively as some twenty-five dollar piece of shit from Target.
He spread the blackened slices with cholesterol-lowering margarine and blood pressure-raising anchovy paste. Then he couldn’t eat.
He went to his desk and switched on the computer. He didn’t have to be at the university until eleven-thirty. What to do until then?
He had always written best at this time of day. It had come without effort.
What was the point of writing? He was a reject.
Rejected by the publishing world after fourteen novels. He had never been rejected. Published at twenty-three, never rejected.
Was Carter mad? What about the others? Of course, they’d taken their cue from Hillary & Woolfe. When Marjorie came around, they knew H & W had dumped him. If he wasn’t good enough for H & W, why should they touch him?
What had Marjorie told them? He should have asked her. She wasn’t dumb enough to tell them Carter didn’t want the book. Why hadn’t she told him before she went hawking the thing around? He could have told her what to say: ‘Vincent’s unhappy with H & W. He now thinks it was a mistake to listen to Adam Carter’s promises. He’s been shockingly published for one of Australia’s modern masters.’
For a modern master. If the New York Review of Books called you a modern master, you were one, even if the reviewer also mentioned two vastly overrated pricks. And one of them was a one-book wonder and only that because his nauseating title, The Lost Philosophy of Sock Knitting, had for some reason appealed to thousands of cretins.
A reject. Writer of a book that wasn’t good enough to be published unless he accepted an advance of five thousand pounds from some obscure porn publisher. An insult. Haig’s bloody studio had cost ten times that.
Beloved of the French critics, winner of the Prix de Goncourt. Deserved favourite for the Booker passed over in favour of a vapid English navel picker. Three times cheated of the Miles Franklin by parochial, provincial idiots. How could it end like this?
The postman on his infuriating machine. Duncan went out. Four letters. The telephone bill. The power bill. A letter from the bank. They wanted the mortgage reduced by two hundred thousand dollars or he would be handed over to Collections.
Oh Lord. You couldn’t write in circumstances like these. Between them, Gus and Merill-Streep had destroyed a major talent.
This could be from Brown. He loved the attention he got there, the intelligent, attractive young people. Sharp, in awe. Not Brown. The Mountain Workshop hadn’t asked him back yet either.
Did the Americans know? Shouldn’t the invitations have arrived by now? Age was a terrible thing, everything telescoping, accelerating. March. The annual US trip was only four months away. Haig said she didn’t want to come this year.
Vincent, I hate being an appendage.
Well, she’d been pleased to be a bloody appendage in the early days. She’d hung onto him, touched him, kissed his cheek, his ear, put a hand in his pocket, she’d made sure the students knew who was the lover of the modern master, who was the chosen woman.
Duncan focused, found himself looking at the two-metre-high painting on the wall opposite, the painting from Haig’s joint exhibition after she finished art school. He’d had his eye on her since they were introduced at some lit festival thing. She’d been dressed like a French roadmender, a very appealing look. On opening night, he bought all five of her works. The next night, he took her to dinner and later to the suite in the Connell.
All that had remained was to ease Gus off the scene. They barely spoke, anyway. He couldn’t waste any more of his life on her.
He made her a very generous offer. In an email from New York. That seemed to be a sensible way to do it. It avoided the unprofitable emotions that could be generated in a personal encounter.
How could he have known that the dreamy, palely loitering poet would in an instant turn into a slit-eyed money-grubbing vixen? Her solicitor, frightening feminist Alvina Raicheva, kicked off with an ambit claim to half of everything he had. Fortunately, the man-hating lawbitch’s search for concealed assets failed to turn up his foreign earnings in the Banque Pétain.
&
nbsp; But Gus ended up with half of what they could find. He had to borrow six hundred thousand dollars to buy her alleged share of the house.
Two hundred thousand dollars or Collections?
Duncan stared at Haig’s painting. It was crap, a piece of imitation Kiefer, which made it second-generation crap. Some of the brownish blobs stuck to the canvas had hairs in them and bone fragments and what looked like pale bits of sinew too tough for stomach acid.
Haig thought she owed her career to talent. She didn’t know that he’d arranged for two dealers to bid against each other when he’d put two of her paintings into an auction at Looby’s. It cost a fortune but the sharp operators of the art world sat up. Suddenly she was collectable. Her career took off. And he got his money back with interest when the ghastly things were bought by art dupes for large sums at auction again a year later.
They hadn’t screwed in some months now, more like three. And the last time was pretty perfunctory stuff, she’d been in the shower inside four minutes. You got more time from a hotel hooker.
Now that he thought about it, sex and her use of the studio upstairs had tapered off at around the same time. She’d fallen out of love with the studio he’d had built, the bloody thing cantilevered out into space, the light controlled by electronic blinds. She now did her creating in a former asylum, a building full of talentless canvas defacers, mostly young, a few ancient poseurs wearing neckerchiefs.
He would have to ring Marjorie. She was his only hope. A quick apology would do it. Shock, heat of the moment, grovel to her. He pressed the numbers. She answered at the second ring.
‘Marjorie, my dear . . .’
‘Bugger off, Vincent. Don’t call me, I’ll call you.’
His computer pinged. Email.
From Marjorie.
It is with regret that I must inform you that I have decided to terminate our agency agreement as of . . .
He’d have to sell the house. Rent? Vincent Duncan renting a house? His precious furniture, his books in a rented house? That was not thinkable.
The phone rang.
Marjorie, the cow, she’d be full of regret now, he would be in charge. He let it ring, stroked his stubble.