Theft: A Love Story

by Peter Carey

  What is it, Butch?

  Can’t you see? The bastards have turned off the power.

  My first thought was that this was a punishment from the STATE ELECTRICITY COMMISSION because we left the lights on all night long but after the power had been off for three weeks, and we had been carrying water from the river and digging holes to do our business in, we learned that the citizens of Bellingen had ordered disconnection as if we were hostage-takers who must be driven from our hole. On top of this came an EVICTION ORDER and a DEMOLITION NOTICE because Jean-Paul’s house was built too close to the river. Of course the council had approved the building years before so it must have walked closer to the bank than previously. In any case, it was all a PACK OF LIES and after we were finally driven out, the house must have walked back to its approved position on the site.

  As for Jean-Paul himself, as Butcher said, he should be condemned by the Ryde Council on account of his arse being built too close to the public footpath and on our long flight back to Sydney, a full eight-hour drive, he was filled with sarcastic comments of this sort about the BOURGEOIS ART COLLECTOR but I enjoyed the drive. He took us up to Dorrigo, God bless him, and then into the high country of Armidale where the summers are dry and the paddocks were gold and the windows of the ute rolled down and the seat belts flapping—slap, slap, slap—against the door frames. The old ute had no air-conditioning just a DUCT opened by a foot-long lever which caused the release of long-trapped dust. Lord what perfumes—honey and gum blossoms and rubber hoses. We were Boones, big men, packed in tight, arse by arse, our heads bumping the ceiling on the potholes. My brother was a tense and fearsome driver but he refused to travel at less than ninety miles an hour, below which speed the bent propeller shaft set up a terrible vibration. He drove like his father did before him, with his elbows wide, his chest pushed forward, his angry eyes glaring straight ahead. So we sped like demons hour after hour through the gold and blue as if we were SIR ARTHUR BLOODY STREETON or FREDERICK McCUBBIN both painters Butcher loved even while he sneered at them.

  I farted and cried, Fire’s on! If you know the Streeton painting you get the joke.

  Entering the outskirts of Sydney, we were skint, the last of the fertiliser money being spent on petrol. At Epping Road we abandoned the Pacific Highway, that long familiar winding road once used by black fellows, and then tooled down to Lane Cove and East Ryde. We were both watching the petrol gauge and very quiet and thoughtful as we re-entered the old familiar country of DIVORCE and PATRONAGE both of these being situated in the exact same street. God help us. Before the Gladesville Bridge we turned onto Victoria Road and then right into Monash Road and as we entered Orchard Court we were already in contravention of a court order that neither of us were permitted to be within five miles of THE MARITAL HOME. My balls were shriveled. What would happen to us now? My brother made that old familiar right-hand turn, past the marital madness, and straight onto Jean-Paul’s lawn. Then Butcher Bones opened the glove box and removed a hammer, bless me, what had he become?

  11

  Being as familiar with that cul-de-sac as with my own pajamas, I ploughed into Jean-Paul’s perfect lawn with 100 percent understanding i.e. I knew I could rely on the neighbours to call my patron before I turned the engine off.

  I’d already had a whole life in Orchard Court where I had been not only a celebrity, but a famous lovesick fool. It was here I brought my bride. I built a bloody tower where she could meditate—believe it!—and an amazing tree house of the type a boy might dream about but never see in waking life—three platforms, two ladders, all lodged inside the branches of a lovely old jacaranda whose gorgeous purple petals, fallen two months before, were now rotting like heartache across the slate-grey roof. I had been a different man in those days, so naïve that lawyers and police could later decide my own paintings were marital assets i.e. not my property. The canvases were there now, a whole life’s work, which the court had “deemed”—as the saying is—that the plaintiff could do with as she wished.

  There had been no room in the ute for anything but paint and canvas and it was not by accident that the great alizarin crimson masterpiece was sitting on the top of the load. I removed the tonneau cover and attacked its crate with the claw hammer, and as the stainless-steel screws screeched like murder victims, I could already hear the telephone screaming in Jean-Paul’s pool house.

  I used Hugh’s earlobe to persuade him from the ute and he took several swings at me before the penny dropped—restraining order or no, it was in his interests to roll out this canvas across our patron’s lawn.

  Jean-Paul was a heartless little fuck but he had the worst case of art lust you ever knew, and if his eye was not in the tiniest bit educated, it was easily aroused, and this made him buy a huge amount of shit and, on some occasions, bet against the auction records. I admit that I was fresh from vandalising his house of few possessions, causing ructions in the Promised Land, stealing fertiliser and allegedly cheating him in other ways, but all of that would be forgotten if, on looking down onto his lawn, he understood a fraction of what I’d done. Then he would transform himself from a lump of dog shit to a splendid silver thing.

  The evening clouds threw a galah-pink cast across the scene; it didn’t matter. This painting could suck up the damage caused by pink, by show-off lawns, by secret swimming pools and all that they entail. It was like a fucking stock car, indestructible. As I waited impatiently for my patron to appear I was so very deeply confident, swaying on my heels beside poor frightful Hugh whose nose was running, whose mouth was twisted in a shit-eating grin, a rictus of hope and terror, and together we anticipated the perfect little blow-dried, swept-back “do” which, if you wished to suck up badly enough, would suddenly remind you—God, I have been disgusting in my time—that Jean-Paul looked just like JFK.

  The plan of battle worked very well at first—car on lawn, phone in pool house, painting laid out right way round and, finally, my patron’s head appearing in the study window.

  Except the head was not my patron’s. God, I hardly recognised her. It was the plaintiff, his neighbour, the woman I had fucked back to front and sideways, held in the night, the most beautiful creature ever born. And there she was, the mother of my son, with her prim little mouth and her sharp enquiring nose and her expensive tan and I could not even see the really costly part of her, the shoes. She was visible for just a second, behind the glass. Hugh whimpered, climbed into the ute, and shut the door.

  The bomb was now ticking, never mind. I waited for Jean-Paul. He too appeared and I felt him suck on the bait and in less than two minutes I had a hit—the patron at his door—tiny bathing suit, smooth brown legs, knitted cotton sweater, dark glasses in his hand. Stepping down onto the lawn, he did not waste time acknowledging me but went directly at the painting, circling it, staring down, a bullshit parade of connoisseurship. But I had been around Jean-Paul too long, so I’ll tell you what he was really thinking while he flicked the wings of his Ray-Bans: What the fuck is this? and How little can I get it for?

  “I’ll give you a grand,” he said. “Cash. Now.”

  I knew I had him, sans doubt, sans souci, sans fucking question, so I began to roll up the canvas. Suck my dick, I thought. One fucking grand.

  “Come on mate,” he said. “You know what’s happening at the auctions.”

  He was a fool to bargain with a butcher. Worse, he called me “mate,” the first sign of his need and he was not helped by the arrival of a police car whose blue light was in a spastic fit as it came to the defense of Orchard Court.

  While Hugh was hiding on the floor of the ute, the policeman parked his car and then, I noticed, locked the door. Then my little boy my huge beefy eight-year-old boy burst out of Jean-Paul’s house. With a great dreadful cry like a crow or a donkey, he climbed me, the little snarly scabby fierce bony beautiful thing. He got his arms around my neck and I looked at him and he was bawling and Jean-Paul—in the middle of all this, the little creep—was offering me two thousand, an
d the copper was coming towards me with a determined look upon his face and then Hugh, oh bless him, was out of the car and running low to the ground, as dense and rapid as a wombat in the night. The copper was neither young nor violent in appearance and he let out a big shriek as Hugh struck him from the side and the pair of them went rolling over and over and down into the street.

  “I’ll give you five,” said Jean-Paul, “plus the lawyer.”

  My son smelled of chlorine and ketchup. He was a big burly fellow with a deep chest and he got all his heavy limbs wrapped around my head. I kissed his arm, and brushed the sweet soft downy hair across my face.

  “Don’t go, Daddy,” he said.

  “I’ll take ten,” I told Jean-Paul. “In cash. And you fix up the cop. That or forget it.”

  Jean-Paul fled into the house. I looked into my son’s serious brown eyes and wiped the tears from his freckled Butcher cheeks. “It’s not my fault,” I said, “you know that.” Dear God why do our children have to carry all this weight?

  Then Jean-Paul re-emerged with the familiar envelope. Not the first time he had shared his secret—the piles of hundreds he kept taped beneath his kitchen drawers.

  “Count it,” he said.

  “Fuck you.”

  He was carrying a glass of whisky and I remember thinking that he was very naïve to imagine he could buy the coppers with a single drink, and so convinced was I of this unworldliness that although I witnessed what happened next, I did not understand it at the time. Jean-Paul ordered Hugh to his feet and then, as the policeman began to rise, threw the glass of scotch all over him.

  “You’re drunk,” he said, “how dare you!”

  There was other stuff occurring so what the policeman said, I do not know, but I remember seeing the poor bugger wash his face at the garden tap. Meanwhile, I was showing my son the correct way to treat an unstretched canvas. What else was I to do? Go hiking? We kneeled together on the lawn, in contravention of the court order, and rolled the best work of my life around a cardboard tube.

  That was how, when I was bleeding, wounded, Jean-Paul Milan got possession of If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die for ten thousand dollars. I should be grateful for the larceny?

  12

  Although you will never hear this from the Butcher, our patron was our saviour time and time again. Now he loaned us an entire four-story DEVELOPMENT POSSIBILITY in Bathurst Street, a site well situated, close to the George Street entertainment district and transportation. Of course my brother was a genius so there was no need to thank Jean-Paul. This was a PATTERN OF BEHAVIOUR previously observed. For instance, our mother had sold her twenty acres at Parwan so the Butcher could further his studies at Footscray Tech but in all his thousands of MEDIA PROFILES my brother never mentioned his family’s kindness. He portrayed his departure from the Marsh as an ASCENSION from a cess pit, holy fire blasting from his hairy arse.

  At Jean-Paul’s property in Bathurst Street he immediately set to the front door with drills and hammers, securing a padlock on the outside and a galvanised bolt inside, all this IRRATIONAL ACTIVITY being solely to prevent the legal owner gaining entry and presumably stealing the POST-COMMENCEMENT MASTERPIECES contained therein. Having previously served as an ARTHUR MURRAY DANCING SCHOOL the building was already well equipped with lights and mirrors FIFTEEN HUNDRED SQUARE FEET per floor and therefore a good place for making art. But now my brother did not wish to paint at all. I must be stupid to have expected that he would. Instead he decided to retrieve the work confiscated by Detective Amberstreet for in his CONFUSED MIND this huge canvas was now hanging on the wall in the headquarters of the New South Wales police. Imagine. All the VICE SQUAD with their big fat woodies come to have a Captain Cook.

  The first night he ground his teeth and kicked me in the balls by accident, Lord save us, he thrashed around, giving orders in a rage. Night and day my brother was in a fret about the place in history which had been given to him and then taken back again. What happiness had he gained by leaving home?

  First thing in the morning, nothing would deter him, but he must have a chat to the police and have them return his painting ASAP. Had it slipped his mind that he was a SUSPECT in a larceny a party to an ASSAULT and in contravention of a court order to go no closer than 5 miles to the MARITAL RESIDENCE? Had he forgotten he had been ILL WITH FEAR only last July when he was sent to Long Bay for his BREAK AND ENTER? He told me police can do what they like to you. He would have had to be blind not to notice swarms of coppers on the streets around the Arthur Murray Dancing School, deaf not to hear their sirens in the night as they pursued the so-called ASIAN GANGS. Due to the muggy March weather we had been forced to sleep with the windows open and thus could hear PERVERTS down in the alley and DRUG ADDICTS arguing and the footsteps of people fleeing from the Asian gangs. During the night I was pleased to have the protection of the locks. At the same time I never liked to be shut inside a house, so when he went off to the police I was UP AND OFF like a greyhound after an electric hare.

  Always about, all my life, whether on the chair in front of our shop or in the pony cart taking orders. In Bellingen always on the road, the air in summer thick with floating thistle seeds and spiders traveling miles like balloonists on their webs, and in the city too, I would rather be outside during the hours when it was safe to be so, and I took a folding chair down to the footpath and witnessed all the human clocks passing me, pumping, sloshing—there is one, there another, and each one the center of the world. You can go half mad looking at them, like gazing at the stars at night and thinking of infinity. What a strain it is. Our mother suffered it, always looking at eternity with her watery eyes, poor Mum, God bless her.

  I was not sitting on my chair long before a young policeman told me I could not do that without a permit from the City of Sydney. As the SEAT OF GOVERNMENT was just behind St. Andrew’s Cathedral I went there and MADE ENQUIRIES, but no-one could understand me and so I walked around the streets and when I was tired I would open my ILLEGAL CHAIR but not for long.

  There were police everywhere in Sydney. What threat this represented Butcher never could decide. One moment he was screaming about the expense of his parking tickets and the next he was tearing them up like confetti and declaring that if you did not pay them they would get lost in the system. Many is the time he overparked and double-parked, even outside police headquarters in Darlinghurst, a location he would return to time and time again. First off he left me in the ute while he went in to locate his painting. Returning, he would not say how the Police had responded, but that night his DRINKING PROBLEM surfaced once again.

  Shortly thereafter we had a visit from a certain Robert Colossi, a thin curly-haired POT-SMOKER who was contracted to take photographs of Butcher’s paintings for the galleries. But my brother soon had reason to regret he had paid one thousand dollars cash for UNUSABLE transparencies and he threw them in the bin and immediately drove to an address in Redfern and I waited in the ute. When Butcher came running out I understood this must have been the residence of Robert Colossi because he was carrying a very heavy HASSELBLAD camera valued in excess of $2,000 this being JUST COMPENSATION for his loss. After this time, this asset was stored on top of the hot-water service and Butcher would not unlock the door no matter who rang the bell. To me he gave a knocking code S.O.S. but he would not provide a key in case I was robbed by the photographer. Soon he gave a key to a total stranger, a woman who worked in the bookstore in the Queen Victoria Building. It is a fair guess she was short and had big bosoms but as she never used the key I have no right to say.

  As Colossi’s transparencies had been a PILE OF SHIT my brother determined that the pair of us would visit the galleries and display the paintings IN THE FLESH. The following Monday morning he parked the ute on the No Standing place in Bathurst Street and so we had a BLUE with a parking cop which resulted in a threat of immediate arrest and a hundred-dollar fine but Butcher said this did not matter because the ticket would be lost in the system. As we loaded the ute my hea
rt was racing like a TWO-BOB WATCH but soon we were in Paddington outside the PINAKOTHEK and we parked in sight of the front door and carried the first crated painting inside, a big room ugly as WATSON MOTORS with shiny concrete floors and so-called works of art hung around the walls. These paintings were red and blue and green, so badly done the colours winked and jumped like fleas on a blanket thereby creating a feeling of ANXIETY beyond the range of VALIUM.

  The young NANCY BOY behind the desk mistook us for FEDEX or DHL and he could not wait to get us put in our proper place which he judged to be the loading dock.

  Where’s Jim? says Butcher Bones, and we laid our crate down on the floor.

  There’s no Jim, said the Nancy Boy. And you can’t bring that crate in here.

  But the Butcher was wearing our father’s wide thin grin. Jim Agnelli, he says.

  Mr. Agnelli passed away, said the fellow.

  If Butcher felt grief, he did not have the time to show it. Well, he said. I am Michael Boone.

  This name seemed not to have the effect he had desired. He added: And I came to show Jim what I’ve been up to.

  He did not say, Shame I missed him, but that was his tone.

  In that case, said the young fellow, I’d be happy to look at your transparencies. Perhaps you could leave them with me.