by Peter Carey
Down on Sussex Street there was a louche basement café which I had crossed off my list due to Hugh’s tendency to claustrophobic panic. Here my bruised brother was soon happily spreading his baggy arse on a fake-leopard-skin stool. “Pan-oh,” he announced, drumming his chewed fingers on the counter. “Two pan-oh chocolate.”
While Hugh distributed his breakfast on his shirt I bought three big bowls of coffee. Marlene was all business.
“Give me this fellow’s number.”
“Whose?”
“This man who has your painting.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to get it back for you, baby.”
So American.
“Blumey,” Hugh whispered as she used the proprietor’s phone. “Keep her. Bless me.” And the bugger kissed me on the cheek.
Marlene returned, her upper lip taut with mischief.
“Lunch,” she said. “Go-Go Sushi in Kellett Street.”
Finally she sipped her coffee, coating the aforementioned lip with sugary foam. But then I saw the secret triumph in her narrowed eyes, and I suffered a jolt of panic e.g., Who the fuck are you, Wonder Woman? Where is your fucked-up husband?
“Oh Butcher Bones!” She drew her fingertip across my upper lip.
“Don’t you have a job?”
“I need to pick up some old Mitsukoshi catalogues from my flat,” she said. “You’ll like them, if you want to come. Then, if we’ve got time, we’ll go round to the police and we’ll talk to that tricky little shit. We’re going to get both your paintings back today.”
“We are?”
“Oh yes.”
Her flat turned out to be in one of those prewar buildings near the bottom of Elizabeth Bay Road: no lift, just battered concrete stairs at the top of which you might be rewarded, finally, with a view of the bay below. If you are a Sydney painter you will already be familiar with this real estate—Gotham Towers, Vaseline Heights—German cockroaches, encrusted kitchens, deco ceramics, ambitious art, but this was a very different visit to my usual and as Hugh charged upwards, bashing his chair against the chipped green railing, I was finally anticipating the cuckolded husband who had been, until this moment, the baby in his bare-breasted mother’s arms. The front door was thick grey metal, showing signs of a recent violent burglary. Inside, there was no sign of the man, or anything that might suggest the son of Jacques Leibovitz, nothing that I might identify as his, except a subscription copy of Car Rally and a naked half-eaten peach abandoned to the ants beside the kitchen sink. This latter item Marlene Leibovitz dispensed with and I soon heard it crashing like a drunken possum, careening off the cabbage-tree palm, descending through the rubber trees below.
“That was a peach,” said Hugh.
“A peach,” she said, and raised an eyebrow as if to say—I had not the foggiest. Hugh lurched towards the kitchen window and his chair would likely bash something so we had a little tussle, so vigorous on his part that I guessed he might be jealous, and by the time I had set him up safely in the middle of the room our hostess had retrieved a pile of glossy catalogues from a twisted filing cabinet which seemed to have been attacked by someone with a crowbar.
“O.K., we can go.”
“This is very nice here,” Hugh pronounced, his injured hands locked onto his mighty knees. “Very clean.”
Clean, and strange—almost no indication of what you might call art. There was a single Clarice Cliff vase which had been broken and rather brutally restored and, apart from that, only a line of small grey river rocks lined up along the top of a bookshelf.
“Almost all our stuff is still in storage.”
Our?
“We came in a big rush. Olivier was sent out to save a client from local poachers.”
And where was he now? I could not ask.
My brother turned excitedly. “Who lives here?”
“What?”
“Who lives here?”
“Mad people,” she said. “Quick. We’ve got to go.”
20
In the Marsh life was very slow as I recall although no BOWL OF CHERRIES, bitter wind from the Pentland Hills then cold rain all winter, also my neck four times bruised with hailstones not to mention the frost on the windscreen of the Vauxhall Cresta like crushed diamonds in the freezing light. This last was Butcher’s observation and he was never forgiven his POETIC EXPRESSION which was immediately deemed to have come from the German Bachelor. Crushed fucking diamonds, said our father, as was his custom, I mean his custom to be sarcastic when the pub had closed at six o’clock. For Blue Bones’ birthday that year Butcher invented a defroster with rubber cups sucking to the inside of the windscreen. God help us it ran the Vauxhall battery flat and then the HONEYMOON WAS OVER as they say. Crushed fucking diamonds, my father said. Fuck me dead crushed diamonds.
Life not always perfect I admit, but relaxing in its way, decent spaces between one thing and another as between the ants in a procession across the footpath. Between Darley and Coimadai there would be, at intervals, a decaying possum or a myxomatosis rabbit on the road. Blowflies are the hourglass of the bush. Fuck me dead the hourglass of the bush. Our father’s whispery voice never silent after all these years.
So that is the point: breathing space between things, no matter how bad the thing itself might be.
But Sydney, bless me, it was like CHINESE JUMPING JACKS on Guy Fawkes Day bang-bang-bang-bang without relent and all these explosions caused electrification in my longer muscles and I would truthfully prefer those Sunday afternoons in Bacchus Marsh with Mum crying in her room WHEN EVENING COMES DO NOT DARE TO PROMISE YOURSELF THE DAWN. Time very slow in those days, nothing to do but steal the ice from the cool room and feel it melting secretly inside my pocket. In the dusk of Sunday watch the ants crawl across the footpath down into the drain, who knows what they thought of sunshine, shadow, the headlights on the road to Ballarat?
But in Sydney, Lord save us, no sooner had I bashed the louts than I interrupted Butcher ON THE JOB with Marlene Leibovitz and after THE SANDMAN came it was another day and we were flooding the blood with CAFFEINE and I was the gerbil on the wheel.
Nothing was said but I had no doubt that Marlene’s apartment had been broken into and you could smell the FORCEFUL ENTRY but Butcher like a MORON rushed around admiring stones and broken vases though it was clear to anyone of AVERAGE INTELLIGENCE that some criminals had done damage with a crowbar jemmy sledgehammer that’s not all. Even the front door looked like a MURDER VICTIM. I was very worried about how we would protect our new friend with the lovely eyes, a smile so often hidden in their corners.
In order to help Marlene get the CATTLE-DOGS, as we like to call them in the Marsh, I wrenched open the filing cabinet. This had also been assaulted, the tumbler removed, the whole thing like a TRAFFIC ACCIDENT, a mailbox backed into by a garbage truck.
Very neat, I said. This was COMMON COURTESY. That is how I was raised e.g. when my father threw the leg of lamb so hard it broke the plaster sheet and lodged there, thigh first, leg bone pointing right at me, we did not mention it. Eat your dinner.
Just the same, my childhood normally very quiet and calm, nothing alarming to report. I could sit in front of our father’s artistic whitewashed sign LOCALLY KILLED MEAT and look at the Christmas trees tied to the verandah posts of the Courthouse Hotel. These were called PINUS RADIATA, no more friendly term being available in those years. These Pinus Radiata wilted in the heat like prisoners executed, not pleasant, but not hectic either, not much to think about but the pulse in the neck and the click in the back of my head although more at night than in the morning.
Butcher showed no curiosity about the Japanese cattle-dogs until he had us all crammed in the sandy ute. The motor was running and my ears tickling due to the distinctive high-pitched whistling of the Holden water pump. We were on our way to the NEXT THING, help me, a mighty DIFFERENCE OF OPINION with the police which Marlene and Butcher seemed pleased about, explain that if you can. The turning indicator was flicking tickin
g at an awful rate like the heart of a sparrow or a fish—how can they bear it? But then he asks the lovely woman please can he see the catalogues and as a result there is suddenly a great NOXIOUS SPILL of foreign ink, an odour like MUSTARD GAS, and if not that then other alien substances in no way like the smell of art the foreign printers claimed to represent.
Marlene asked me, What do you think, Hugh?
I said it was very nice and to be fair it may not have been these chemicals that hurt my head. In the apartment I had detected the odour of my father’s .22 after detonation—CORDITE—the rabbit still writhing on the ground before I stretched his neck. As I said, there was generally the perfume of an INTRUSION but if this was legal or not I could not say. I knew the cattle-dogs were the THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE to an exhibition in Japan and when I saw how Butcher stroked the pages he was like a dog himself, licking his dick in the middle of the road in dire danger of being run down by a truck.
Before you could say JACK ROBINSON we were in the RECEPTION AREA at Police Headquarters and Butcher must have thought he was playing in the Grand Final at MADINGLEY PARK because he darted over to the wing imagining he could drive up towards the goal but he was out of bounds and we were instead required to fill out our names at the front desk. I didn’t like to pay attention in these circumstances. The smell of floor disinfectant very strong.
Detective Amberstreet no longer with us.
That was the news we were finally given and all Butcher’s previous politeness was revealed as so much bad milk floating in a cup of welcome tea, but just as he commenced his rant, Marlene took his receipt from him THANK THE LORD and showed it to the WELL-SPOKEN SERGEANT at the desk. She said we wished only to collect property that had been held in a case now settled.
The well-spoken sergeant offered to escort Marlene.
Thank you, she said, but I know my way.
In the lift her colour was rising and as she had a SCANDINAVIAN appearance this was very attractive although a puzzle, never mind.
Up on the third floor we saw “ART” written on the wall as Butcher had already described and inside there was a policewoman, also a sergeant with a huge SCHNOZZ like an anteater which she lifted expectantly towards us. Bless me, save me. HUGE NOSTRILS. Behind her was a great mess looking more like Eddie Tool’s lube bay or Jack Hogan’s overnight express service which our father once used to send meat to America although that was ONE DREAM GONE SOUR as the saying is. All manner of art in crates and boxes, and loose items protected by paper, bubble wrap, polystyrene beads never ending, indestructible until the dead rise up. Also quite similar to the spare parts department in Waltzer’s Garage. Stewart Waltzer had fan belts, coil springs, but also snakes in formaldehyde, magnetic letters, bookends manufactured on his workshop lathe. Butcher had no interest in Stewart Waltzer or Jack Hogan. The Marsh was dead to him and he surrendered up his receipt to the sergeant who poked her nose into the contents of the cage, turning over this or that item, peering sadly at the labels. I was already electric in the forearms but when I witnessed Butcher enter the cage WITHOUT PERMISSION I became light-headed as the saying is.
The brain is a funny thing, the way it works, always seeking the most polite explanation so when I saw the Butcher dragging out a black soft item my brain thought it was one of those foreign rugs which he is in the habit of carrying from one woman to the next. He looked like a big old dog tugging a smelly blanket but as he and Marlene began to spread this item on the concrete I heard his cries of distress and then I saw it was a work of art brutalised beyond belief. LORD SAVE US. This was my poor brother’s painting. It was our mother’s words, black as the pupils of her eyes, and here it had been treated like some off-cut underlay, forgive them, shoved in the dumpster by the carpet layers and the nose woman was saying YOUSE DON’T MAKE IT BETTER FOR YOURSELF BY SHOUTING AT ME.
She was like a clerk at the post office a LITTLE HITLER checking the receipt number against the tag stapled cruelly to the corner of the black canvas. My mother’s words rising from the night of Main Street. The Nose matched the tag against a REGISTER but she did not know who she was dealing with. She was not an anteater but an ant, a blowfly on the wall of the palace of a king, and when my brother smoothed out the canvas I had once cut for him so perfectly, he was as FURIOUS and TENDER as he had been when we laid out our mother and placed the pennies on her eyes POOR MUM dear Mum she could not have imagined the path her life would take. Blue Bones had been a HANDSOME MAN the FULL FORWARD of the Bacchus Marsh XVIII and how could she have seen ahead, no more than a pretty hummingbird or willy wagtail beside the Darley Road. My brother was now laying out his canvas on a carpet which was the exact same NICOTINE BROWN as in our motel outside of Armidale $28 a night COLOUR TV. The thirty-inch-by-twenty-inch GOD once glued flat onto the middle of the skin was now torn away in a great flap. My brother held up this blasphemy in loud complaint, his own face crumpled like an unmade bed. THE FUCKING RECEIPT SAYS CONFISCATED FOR PURPOSE OF X-RAY.
YOUSE NOT MAKING IT EASIER.
FUCK ME DEAD DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE DONE?
She said he would be fined six hundred dollars for obscenity if he didn’t watch himself. This threat made my brother create a shower of slippery twenty-dollar notes which was confusing to us all. Then, bless me, he gave us all a lecture. The Summary Offensive Act allows a man to say what he bloody likes if there is reasonable excuse. And he never saw such REASONABLE EXCUSE in his life than the behaviour of ignorant Croats—what was that? I did not know—ignorant Croats who had ripped his work of art apart. Was this the result of X-rays? He laughed nastily. He would have Amberstreet locked in gaol.
She said Amberstreet was overseas.
He said he did not give a flying fuck. He planned to X-ray him so severely the semen in his testicles would lose its wiggly little tails.
If I could have found my way out of the building I would have run away but instead I picked up the money he was wasting and then I assisted Marlene, carrying the canvas towards the lift while the sergeant was left with the receipt. My brother was not himself. Finally he came and wrenched the painting from us and threw it across his shoulder and this was obviously not the right mood to begin a BUSINESS LUNCH with Jean-Paul.
21
Even at four years of age my son was very serious about his duties in the studio and you could give him a pair of tweezers and set him to picking up dust and hairs and finally he would leave the paint as slick and unperturbed as melting ice. Children raised on Space Invaders and Battlezone will tire quickly of this stuff—no enemy to destroy no gold coins to collect—but my Bill was a Bones deep to his bloody marrow and he worked beside his dad and uncle, solemn, freckle-faced, with his lower lip stuck out, his tongue half up his nose, and there were many days in East Ryde when we had been all three silently engaged in the sweet monotony of such housekeeping, hours punctuated by not much more than the song of blackbirds in the garden or a loud friarbird with its wattles hanging like sexual embarrassments on its ugly urgent face. Of course my apprentice was also a boy with his own employment, climbing the jacaranda, falling, howling, hooked by a branch stuck through his britches, suspended twenty feet up in the air, but Bill loved Hugh, and me, and the three of us could labour side by side sustained by nothing more than white sugar rolled in a fresh lettuce leaf and never called to dinner until we called ourselves, our stomachs sounding like the timbers in a clinker boat finally riding at anchor for the night.
On the day we carried the injured canvas into Bathurst Street, Bill was there, and not there—the normal phantom pain of amputees. The flesh of my flesh had been chopped off by order of the bloody law and the entire city of Sydney, roads, rivers, railway lines shrunk around my missing son like iron filings making contour lines around a magnetic pole. But he was in residence, as a shadow, as a mirror, and most fucking particularly because Marlene Leibovitz made the same shape in the sonar of my feelings, something very like Bill, benevolent, generous, blessedly in need of love thank Jesus.
I entere
d Bathurst Street a wild ass of a man, carrying my own corpse across my own shoulder—I, the Speaker, now as diminished as a Bugatti abandoned in a West Street parking garage, covered with dust and feathers and pigeon shit, its battery flat, a dull sickening click, no light at all.
Marlene went off to call Jean-Paul, and Hugh helped me clear the second floor, although my recollections are doubtless filled with all the errors of eyewitness testimony, that fiction used to hang so many innocents. Who knows what really happened? Who cares? The Bones boys were Marines on the last day of a war, throwing helicopters overboard, dragging mattresses to the landing, sending them tumbling down the stairs. Of course I destroyed my private bedroom, but sex was not the point. We found a straw broom as stubby as a good Dulux brush, and I swept urgently, opening the windows to both street and lane, and all the while the tragedy lay folded and rumpled, dead as bloody doornails, on the landing.
Hugh has a reputation for being quiet and shy but the old bugger’s normal medicated state is as continuously noisy as a kettle—bee-bop and shee-bop—and as we—phtaaa—unfolded the canvas on the floor he set up a sort of vibrato. My brother had become a car, God help us, a Vauxhall Cresta at eighty miles an hour. These things get on your nerves, but we endure, continue, and I may have looked sour and he may have appeared retarded but we worked like a team of carpet layers tugging and stretching, battling the stiff unsupple canvas, each victory celebrated by a small explosion as we stapled the fuck to Arthur Murray’s resistant hardwood floor. Hugh was soon down to stinky socks and khaki shorts, all his rosy venous imperfection, a sweaty shining Rubens double-declutching on the S bends. I, the Speaker reached almost the length of the room but the width was not so easily accommodated and stapling on the long sides was like playing tennis on an indoor court—the damn baseline too close, but never mind.
“Bill,” he said.
This was not a useful thing to say to me although there is not the tiniest bloody doubt that—forget the idiot Court Guardian with three pens in his shirt pocket—Bill had the skill to use the staple gun. Instead of which we two dangerous men must work alone, two steps forward, one step back as the canvas—having been wet very bloody judiciously—surrendered a millimeter here and a millimeter there.