by Peter Carey
I did not want to touch it, no more than put my hand on a flat iron, hiss of skin, smell of flesh. I spent a good hour cleaning up the studio, scraped the lino, laid down paper and a length of unprimed cotton duck. If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die I removed the mixers from the drills and set to clean them. There was no actual need to do this, but I slowly peeled all the accumulated paint that had made its own little planet on the X-shaped armature of blades. “YOU MAY NOT LIVE TILL EVENING” and all the painted past was layered like licorice allsorts, sedimentary rocks, green, black, gorgeous yellow, sparkling mica, fool’s gold they call it in the Marsh. I did not wish to start. I scoured the blades with wire wool until they were burnished and then I screwed up my eyes and plunged the whirling shaft into the heart of Mars black, carbon black, graphite, 240 volts, 100 r.p.m., phthalo green with alizarin crimson and I had started. I was in. I shook the drips off that last mix, what a very cold light-sucking black was lying there, a lovely evil thing captive in a can. At its lovely nasty little heart was alizarin crimson. I could already calculate how I would edge those shapes as yet unborn—that alizarin crimson would make a border almost as black as black, but also, on the aft of “PROMISE” like the burning edge of a leaf in a firestorm. Then I invaded ultramarine blue with a force of sweet burnt umber, thus giving birth to a new black as warm as a winter blanket for a twenty-thousand-dollar horse, and then I stained my cotton duck with a very fucking diluted dioxane purple, so watered-down it was a pearly grey a secret skin you can still see behind the smudges of, say, Morn, and on that site, and in other places too where my mother’s dreadful fear was bent and twisted, you can today observe the pentimento, the erasures, the smudges, the changes of mind as I pushed, sometimes like Sisyphus, at the resistant letters which now must be made to serve me—not the Roman chisel or the language of the poets—until “DO NOT DARE TO PROMISE” was as ugly and noble as the milk-factory fire of 1953, ten men dead amongst the twisted tin and smoke. On the last day, very early on a dew-bright morning, I made a series of washes, 9/10 gel, and these I lay, lighter than a river mist across the blacktop. As for the work itself, you can see it, finally, years later, in a serious museum, and I will not treat you like some dickhead day trader in an aeroplane who wants to know “Should I know your name?”
But let me say only that I rubbed at it and buffed and scraped and sanded until it was an argument both within itself and against itself. Jesus it would put the fear of God in you, to see the skeins of secret black, it could choke you, and fuck you, and put your naked toes onto the fire.
This work continued three days. And it was done. Ominously, there were no visitors. And by that time Hugh had disposed of his dog and his little eyes were deep and hidden and he was very quiet around the property, mostly hacking at the thistles. I stayed away from Bellingen, judging it wiser to avoid the crime scene completely and drive the extra thirty minutes to Coffs Harbour. There were already difficulties—limited supplies, no phthalo green, a change of palette I would rather not have made. On the fourth day after the metacarpal came the first assailant, an idiot from the Bellingen Council with long white socks, a building inspector with a clipboard in his hand. He went around the property with a surveyor’s chain, measuring the distance from the riverbank to the septic tank. That’s how a small town gets rid of you. They declare your house in contravention of the regulations. Why would I give a shit? It wasn’t mine.
Money very short. I cooked baked vegetables until even I was sick of them, and Hugh—God bless him—did not once complain. But all this time no-one actually told us why we were now hated. We were fighting the wrong war, for the wrong reasons, and it was not until eleven days after the broken finger that the police came rattling across the cattle grid, not the locals but two plainclothes fellows with a driver from Coffs Harbour. Seeing the car, Hugh fled arrest, charging headfirst across the floodplain and I did not find him until dark when, having heard the police car finally depart, he emerged, wild-eyed and muddy, from a wombat hole.
9
The Art Police are cops, that’s all, and they will come and call on you as unexpectedly as Jehovah’s Witnesses and for reasons just as stupid. However, on that soupy day in Bellingen I was ignorant of the breed and I mistakenly assumed my visitors were typical.
There was an older man of fifty or so, tall and heavily built like an old-style walloper but with an odd almost lackadaisical gait and a big square head always turning this way and that as if he were trying to spot the Eiffel bloody Tower. He wore a ratty Fair Isle sweater and smoked a stinky pipe from which he continually blew globs of tar and spit onto my pasture. This Detective Ewbank exuded the sloppy good-naturedness of a packing clerk two weeks from retirement whilst, at the same time, having some weird aerial connection with his brainy-looking partner.
The younger man, Amberstreet, was not much more than twenty-five but he had already carved on his face a deep set of V-shaped creases which pointed like diagram arrows towards his pale grey eyes. Barry, his mate called him; his mouth was thin, and downturned, and perhaps because he was so stooped and spectacularly unmuscled, he made me imagine that the Art Police must be a very fucking unusual caste indeed, and in the same way that Jean-Paul’s beautiful wife might suggest hidden qualities in her very plain husband, Amberstreet’s weird birdlike looks gave a value to his mate’s pipe and Fair Isle sweater that could not have been more inflated, not even by Sotheby’s.
These cops caught me flat-footed, why wouldn’t they? They didn’t say they were from Sydney. I thought they had come from Bellingen, for Hugh. Instead they wished to inspect my work and I took them over to the shed to see it. Yes, I had obtained the paint and canvas by what you might call false pretences, so what would they do? Hang me? Yes, I had sold about a ton of fertiliser to Mrs. Dyson and Jean-Paul, I guessed, had got upset. The rich are like that, overcome by panic attacks at the thought they are possibly being used. God, what sort of animal would do that to them?
I walked Ewbank and Amberstreet to the shed as if they were Macquarie Street collectors on a studio visit, and I must say Ewbank was very bloody amiable at that stage, even if he did inform me that I had a record or, as he put it, was “known to the police.” Otherwise he was full of questions about the veggie garden and the Brahmin cattle Dozy had agisted on my roadside paddock. Amberstreet, meanwhile, was very quiet, but even this was in no way threatening. As Ewbank pointed out to me, his mate seemed mostly concerned about the danger of getting cow shit on his new Doc Martens.
The shed was a shed, the back third a loading ramp filled with Mrs. Dyson’s hay bales, the front two-thirds earth-floored. Here I parked the tractor, stored the chain saw, the brush cutter and what garden tools I had not left out in the weather. Here too I had rolled my nine canvases around long cardboard tubes. They leaned neatly against the wall, just like the rake, the shovel, the scythe and so on. Of course this was not ideal, but I obviously could not have them in the studio shouting in my ear.
“O.K. Michael,” said Detective Ewbank, “it’s time for show-and-tell.”
I made some joke—forget it now—about a warrant being required.
“It’s in the car,” said Amberstreet. “We’ll show you later.”
This gave me a jolt, but I got over it. What was the worst thing that could happen? I’d be charged with making art on Jean-Paul’s credit? Fuck him. The patience of the rich is easily strained. But I remained an obedient little citizen and I rolled out the first painting I, the Speaker, Ruled as King over Israel, laying it on a springy three-inch cushion of improved pasture.
So clock this: eight miles out of Bellingen, N.S.W., me in my shorts and bare feet and Amberstreet like some crane or heron with his short upper body and his long thin legs and cinched-in belt and the whole of his skeleton throwing all its force into his eyes as he looked down at my canvas. The work had a sort of nailed-down fuck-you quality with all the process showing. I had—I hope I told you—already begun to glue down rectangles of canvas onto the broader field. Even in t
he warm misty sunlight it looked very bloody good indeed.
The police said nothing throughout the first inspection, not even when we found the nest of baby mice living in the center of a roll. To tell the truth, I was almost happy. I could not go to gaol, and the work looked so good, in no way diminished by the smell of mice, or the waving light brown watermark that now ran, like the hamon on a Japanese sword, along the bottom edge.
Amberstreet wished to view I, the Speaker again. And I was an artist. Why wouldn’t I wish to show? I watched the strange little critic, arms folded, shoulders hunched. Ewbank, for his part, began to whistle “Danny Boy.”
“What would this be worth?” Amberstreet asked me. “On the market, at auction.”
I assumed he was trying to think how to recoup the cost of Raphaelson’s one-pound tubes, so I told him it was worth exactly nothing at this moment. I was out of fashion. Couldn’t sell a painting to save my bloody life.
“Yes, I understand that, Michael. Five years ago, you might have got $35,000 for this.”
“No.”
“There’s no point in lying, Michael. I know what you used to sell for. The thing is now, you’re in free fall. Isn’t that so?”
I shrugged.
“I’ll give you five,” he said suddenly.
“Oh Jesus,” said Ewbank, and walked over to inspect the concrete pig sties, whacking at them with a length of irrigation pipe. “Jesus,” he cried, “Joseph and Mary.”
“No tax,” said Amberstreet and I saw his eyes all glistening. “All cash.”
Ewbank, meanwhile, was pissing himself with laughter, shoving heaps of black shag into his fat pipe. His younger colleague’s face, by contrast, was creased like tissue paper protecting the bright stones of his eyes.
I won’t say I wasn’t seriously tempted.
Ewbank had wandered back, puffing on his pipe. He had an extraordinary way of doing this, making his big black eyebrows shoot up every time he took a puff, the result being that he looked to be in a state of active astonishment.
“I couldn’t give it all at once. I’d pay you over a year.”
If it had been a lump sum, I might have said yes, but it was not enough to save me so I turned him down. Even now I don’t know if what happened next was connected to my refusal, but I don’t think so. It was more as if we’d had a little pleasant break and now we must return to work.
Amberstreet frowned and nodded. “I understand,” he said. He then turned to his partner: “You got the tape, Raymond?”
Ewbank withdrew from his pocket a dirty-looking handkerchief and then a very snazzy little tape measure of a type I had never seen before, as if he might be a surgeon with instruments designed in Tokyo for a task so specialised it had no English name. My balls tightened at the sight of it.
“Measure the addition,” Amberstreet said, an ugly word for the rectangle which bore the single word “GOD” with all its gooseturd grey and phthalo green smudged and shifted in the battle with the resistant “O.”
I watched Ewbank measure it, like you watch your own car crash happen.
“Thirty by twenty and one-half inches,” he announced.
Amberstreet gave me a cherubic little smirk.
“Oh, Michael!” he said to me, taking in his belt one more notch. I suddenly understood he was a scary little shit.
“What?”
“Thirty by twenty and a half,” he said. “Oh, Michael!”
“What?”
“Not familiar?”
“No.”
“The same dimensions as Mr. Boylan’s Leibovitz.”
I thought, What is this? Kabala? Numerology?
“Michael, I thought you were a clever man. We know the exact dimensions. They’re in the catalogue raisonné.”
“What would it matter if it was the same dimensions?”
“It would matter,” said Amberstreet, “because as you know Mr. Boylan’s home was burgled and a work by Jacques Leibovitz was stolen.”
“Bullshit. When?”
Hearing this Ewbank gave a mighty big suck in of his pipe so his eyebrows disappeared into his hair.
“Oh.” Amberstreet smiled incredulously. “You didn’t know!”
“Don’t be so bloody sarcastic. How could I know?”
“Like you know John Lennon’s dead,” said Ewbank.
“You could try any newspaper,” suggested Amberstreet. “You could turn on the radio.”
“John Lennon’s not dead you dick.”
“Don’t change the subject, Michael. We’re here to investigate a burglary.”
It was only then, as we stood staring down at my painting, that I realised something very serious was going on.
“Someone pinched his Leibovitz?”
“Three weeks ago, Michael. You are the only one who knew it was there.”
“He never showed it to me. Ask him,” I said, but I was seeing the hateful look on Dozy’s face as he passed me in the fog.
“But you knew he had it. You knew he was going away, down to Sydney for the night.”
“He’s always going down to Sydney. You really think I’m stupid enough to glue a two-million-dollar painting to my canvas and then cover it with paint? Is that your point? It’s very easy to see you’re not a bloody artist.”
“We’re not saying you’ve got it under there. We’re saying we need to remove the work for X-raying and I.R. spectography”
“You bugger. You just want to nick my fucking canvas.”
“Calm down, pal,” said Ewbank. “You’ll get a proper receipt. You can write the description yourself.”
“When would I get it back?”
The older man’s eyebrows shot up alarmingly.
“That would depend,” said Amberstreet.
“On what?”
“If we have to keep it for the trial.”
I really did not know what was going on. A certain part of me thought the fucks were robbing me. Another part of me was thinking I was in very serious shit. I don’t know which was the better or the worse, and in the end, after I had spent three hours making a crate, a time they used to photograph my pry bar and my other tools, and after I had personally helped them load it in their wagon, they showed me the huge press file on the Leibovitz theft. I read the front-page headlines by the light of their headlights, still clueless about John Lennon, but relieved to understand that I, at least, was not being robbed.
10
Of course the pipsqueak Michael Boone was ignorant of anything that did not personally benefit him, and on the subject of the wombat he incorrectly used the expression MUDDLEHEADED which might be the title of a book but is wrong because the wombat is a clever fellow who can, God bless him, do a barrel-roll-with-twist inside his tunnel, scratch his ears, flatten himself like dough under a rolling pin and I knew this because I had SEEN IT WITH MY OWN EYES. Of course I never told my brother and he had no idea what plans I had made in preparation for the visit by police, although the moment I snapped Evan Guthrie’s metacarpal I expected BYAR-BYAR-BYAR blue light flashing THE WRATH OF THE LAW and then I would not be able to rely on Butcher Bones to save me. Many a time he had threatened to have me put under MANAGED CARE where they would remove the tartar from my teeth.
The coppers were SLOW AS A WET WEEK and thus provided good opportunity to widen one long branch of wombat tunnel. The first time I entered that maze was the day after I buried the puppy and I took my mattock and torch and the lid of a 4-gallon drum of molasses to act as a shield, but I never had trouble with the wombats, quickly learning to make a friendly grunting noise on approach. The smallest I named FELLOW, bless him. He would sometimes sniff my hair but not on the day the police finally visited when I lay inside the entrance with my boots at the mouth, my nose pointing down into the dark, no bad smells, just earth and roots and when I had to fart I was very sorry. After I had FORTY WINKS I emerged to discover the sky black and mixed with ultramarine and the camphor laurel in silhouette and a great yellow spill of light from the shed where I sa
w Butcher Bones busy with a saw and trestle, cutting pine planks. Bless me, I thought, they are making me a coffin.
The Butcher was a great one for blame, nothing better to get his eyes flicking left to right. It was his SPECIALITY DE MAISON, to always know exactly who was at fault. When the police at last departed and I revealed my presence, I was staggered that the finger was not pointed at me.
“That bitch, that fucking bitch!” he cried, and I was pleased indeed, not being a female. Soon I understood he was referring to Marlene, an admirer of The Magic Pudding. He had been so HOT FOR HER but now he explained to me she was BEHIND ALL THIS and suddenly she was pretty much a MASTER CRIMINAL. I knew from experience there was no better proof of innocence than to be blamed by Butcher Bones and this time, like every other, he would soon, with no apology, change his tune with a DO-SI-DO. In any case I was not the GUILTY PARTY and I was most relieved I would not be singing songs in my lonely cell but I was worried they would take an innocent woman in my place. What could I say? My brother’s neat little girl ears were filled with wax and he roared me up for getting my new shirt dirty and then he telephoned Dozy Boylan to boast that he had solved the CASE.
Dozy replied, If you ever call me again I’ll come and put a bullet in your arse.
After this the Butcher sat at the table and was quiet a long while. Then he began to stare up at the rafters and I was concerned he had gone mad so I asked him would he like a cup of tea. No reply, but I made it anyway. Four spoons of sugar, as he liked it. No thank-yous offered—who expected them?—but he cupped his sap-stained hands around the chipped old mug which our poor mother had once held IN THE MORNING CONSIDER THAT YOU MAY NOT LIVE TILL EVENING, poor old Mum, God bless her. The back of my neck had gone VOLCANIC and I asked him, What will we do now, Butcher? If he had raved and ranted and abused me I would have felt in SAFE HANDS but instead he gave me what is known as a WAN SMILE and it was clear all the puff had gone out of him and he left me alone then, crawling into his bed without undressing. What would I do? I was forbidden to touch the light switches or other electrical appliances so my bedroom was bright all night as if I was a battery hen and I dreamed it was summer in the Marsh, me and the pony somehow lost up on Lerderderg Street then captured by the Catholics—what a bloody nightmare. I woke next morning to hear a great howl and I rushed out in my pajamas to see what NEW MISADVENTURE had befallen Butcher Bones. I found him still dressed as the night before, and in his hand he had the drill, its shaft dripping with his evil bloody alizarin crimson.