by Peter Carey
I invented a steamer based on a Birko kettle and made a cunning nozzle to direct it. I bought a cheap syringe and, having filled it with GAC 100, lifted the cracked impasto exactly, precisely, as if I were controlling a bloody molecular jack. On the first day we did not quit until the light from the west caught the edge of St. Andrew’s and filled the upstairs room like single malt, Laphroaig, Lagavulin, God bless the distilleries of IslayI did not drink until after eight o’clock.
The next hung-over morning I woke to confront the great dead whale still beached upstairs and in the geometric center, this vast trauma still confronted me. The rectangle of collaged canvas was not 30 x 20½ but it was too late to argue. This single vital patch of gooseturd “GOD” had been pulled back from one corner to reveal the same answer they had gotten from X-ray and infrared i.e. there was sweet fuck-all to see, some underpainting, but certainly not the missing Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois. God knows how long they spent on the X-rays, but this final assault must have taken the cops all of five seconds, more than enough time to stretch and tear the underlying canvas and leave five lines of weft behind. I will not bore you with the surgical operation needed to remove those threads. For a conservator or a surgeon it might have been a lot of fun. For me, forget it. There was no reward in this, no risk, no discovery, nothing except the growing conviction that I was destroying what I had made, sucking out the holy deadly light I had created as a high-wire artist, guided by God, flying blind, my head between the legs of angels.
I was about to have a great show. I could not have a show.I was about to have a love affair. I could not think about it. I was in a rush. I could not rush. At this teetering moment I was everything that makes an artist a hateful loathsome beast. That is, I stole, I grabbed, I sucked love like phthalo green sucks light. I accepted the most monumental kindness from Marlene who appeared off and on, like a series of surprising gifts, through every day, like a six-winged seraph, her colour high, her eyes narrowed in blessing, offering, for instance, a great lump of wax and an iron with which she intended I should affix the injured collage when it was flat and straight again. Everything about this gift was touching but the most weirdly painful thing was the iron, a Sunbeam steam iron, pale blue plastic, at least ten years old, an instrument that made me think of Saturday afternoon races on the radio, our mother ironing in the musty sleep-out. Life in the half-light of the pit, so far from art.
I’ve known dealers and gallery owners and authenticators half my bloody life, and not one of them would have thought to give me the wax and the iron. For a refugee from the Benalla High School she was very well informed. And sometimes, in that first mad week, with my own bedroom given over to the Speaker, while Hugh snored on the floor, Marlene and I simply shared the Japanese catalogues. She talked. I stroked the pale illuminated hairs on her tanned arms, terrified by happiness.
About her husband, I did actually enquire, but she held her private life so fucking tightly, like a tourist clutching a handbag on the A train, and I learned no more about Olivier Leibovitz’s present life than you might deduce from sheet lightning above a ridge line. I would put myself to sleep inhaling her.
On most mornings she was light and easy, but twice a single blood vessel rose in that supple subtle forehead and on both of these occasions she departed abruptly, leaving me with nothing but her dirty teacup in the sink. Off to see the husband. It could have driven me insane, and yet I will never forget the tenderness of that week we worked together on the Speaker, a whole country that must be healed, swabbed, patted, cleaned, like blowing air behind a lover’s ear.
The rhythms of the restoration were affected by rainy weather which meant the air became suddenly colder and damper and the paint dried more slowly, but by the time the Nor’Easterly returned the Speaker was once more a very serious fucking entity By the fourth evening I had removed the daggy bits of thread and sanded the broken interstices between mother canvas and collage. On the following morning the collage section was stapled to its own distant corner and in this way, with a touch of steam here, and a brutal tug there, we got it flattened and its warp and weft realigned. By the seventh day, I had the iron, the wax, the flat unrumpled “GOD” released from its torture on the hardwood floor. Gently gently catchee monkey.
“Mate,” I said to Hugh, “I was planning to take Marlene for dinner.” I gave him two chicken sandwiches, and a big bottle of Coke. Receiving these suck-up tributes, he appraised me, his old red eyes as cunning as a crocodile’s.
I raised an eyebrow.
He made a small rocking movement as he considered my request. He said nothing but I observed that telltale muscle, his slippery obtruding lower lip, and then I knew that if I stayed out late there would be big bloody trouble.
I told him we would be around the corner at “the Chinaman’s” a reference to the only restaurant in the Marsh.
Hugh studied his watch very carefully but did not look at me again. Pathetic, both of us. But ten minutes later all my silent rage was gone and I was sitting beside a gorgeous woman at Bukit Tinggi, not Chinese at all, as if it matters.
She was tired, her eyes hollowed.
“Don’t ask,” she said. “Feed me.”
And that is exactly what I did, and we sat side by side like children, and I fed her beef rendang and fiery curried fish and wiped her lips with the tip of my thumb. She talked about the many weirdnesses of Japan. It was all we discussed, but the subject had never seemed the point.
“We’ll stay in Asakusa,” she said. “It’s kind of sleazy but there’s a very funky inn.”
“I’m broke,” I said. “I couldn’t afford the bus to Wollon-gong.”
“They’ll pay,” she laughed. “You’re such an idiot.”
“And you too?”
“An idiot? No, I’m part of the package, baby.” She cupped her hand around my jaw and stroked my ear. “I’m the facilitator.”
“What’s a facilitator?”
“Japanese. It means buys the drinks.”
I could not tell her but this could only be a fantasy for me. I had never left Australia and I never could. I could not abandon Hugh again. I could not even stay long at the Bukit Tinggi and by nine o’clock I was escorting poor Marlene back up the dismal stairs in Bathurst Street. There is always Hugh.
Opening the door I surprised him, a fucking paintbrush in his hand.
As I rushed at him, he took a step backwards—the moron—itching his big bum, a great goofy grin on his unshaven face.
“What have you done?”
The answer was: the dipshit had painted on my work. I could have killed the prick. I howled at him.
“Shush,” said Marlene but I was deaf with fury at everything I had lost, would lose, my son, my life, my art. He retreated, afraid but not afraid, nodding and waving his arm as if I were a cloud of smoke.
It is my job to see better than you can, or John bloody Berger, or Robert fucking Hughes, but confronting my brother’s red assassin’s eyes, I saw only that he was a moron and I was therefore slow to notice he had painted only on that portion of the canvas which would, tomorrow, be covered forever. On that virgin rectangle where the Leibovitz had been suspected of hiding, he had written a mad artless note, like something on a dunny wall.
THE VANDAL AMERSTRIT DID THIS DAMIGE
FEBRUARY 7 1981. NEXT TIME YOUR EERS
WILL BE RIPPED OFF AND EATEN.
PROMISED BY HUGH BONES MARCH 25 1981.
Marlene later said I snarled like an animal. Certainly my sixteen-stone brother cowered, but he was also, at the same time, grinning, a small sharp-toothed de Kooning thing, and he was rocking, just a little, from the waist.
“Lead,” he said.
“You cunt!”
“Lead.”
“Lead paint?”
His grin made no sense at all.
“Why did you do that, you idiot?”
He tapped his head and grinned. “Up here for dancing.”
“Shush,” Marlene whispered, stroking my arm
.
“Show,” said Hugh.
I snatched the brush out of his hand and threw it out the open window.
“Stop it,” Marlene said. “It can be read by X-ray.”
She was a quick study, the first to understand that Hugh had written a secret letter in lead paint, words which would only be seen if the painting was X-rayed.
I remember still those eyes, wide with astonishment. She would not forget this, ever. She would never make the mistake of underestimating my brother as a witness to a work of art.
At last I got it too, and then I embraced the huge smelly ridiculous thing, holding his bristly neck while he squeezed the breath from me and cackled in my ear.
Who could explain the dark puzzle of Slow Bones’ folded brain?
22
All my life I was Slow Bones unless someone OUTSIDE THE FAMILY was present to explain my jokes. Oh, my brother said at last when THE PENNY DROPPED and he understood my painting, you clever bugger.
I could not return the compliment.
By next morning the repair was concluded, but there was no DAY OF REST and we had another ruction i.e. Jean-Paul had gone to New Zealand for a conference and this had obviously been planned solely in order to inconvenience my brother who wished to retrieve his painting for Japan. It was well known Butcher was too afraid to leave Australia or go to any place he was not known. So who could explain why he was in such a rush now unless he had an ANXIOUS PERSONALITY surely that could not be true.
Marlene had never met our benefactor so all she knew of him was from my brother e.g. Jean-Paul was not French but Belgian, not Jean-Paul Milan but Henk Piccaver, and it gave the Butcher a lot of pleasure to tell us that MR. PICKOVER was in New Zealand or WANK WALLOON had elevator shoes. Yet our benefactor had saved us many times and when Butcher was gaoled for stealing his own paintings from his wife it was Jean-Paul who was THE GOOD SAMARITAN although he was very frightened of me thinking I was a VIOLENT TYPE. When my brother was TAKEN DOWN to the cells it was Jean-Paul who gave me a room in his Edgecliff Nursing Home. AND ON THE MORROW WHEN HE DEPARTED HE SAID TAKE CARE OF HIM, AND WHATSOEVER HE SPENDEST MORE, WHEN I COME AGAIN, I WILL REPAY THEE. This was not a text my brother would have ever pinned upon his wall.
At the nursing home I made a friend of Jackson the night man a very interesting fellow a PIGEON FANCIER who brought in his patent racing clocks to show me. Better to be Slow Bones than be a bird.
Did Butcher reveal to Marlene Jean-Paul’s kindness? Of course not. He said that his patron’s Cartier watch cost $40,000. This justified him attacking the DEVELOPMENT SITE with saws and hammers and staple guns and he did not pause to think that he was damaging a dance floor of a quality our parents would have never felt beneath their feet. Only in death were they more peaceful than when joined in the FOX TROT. It would make you cry to see how gently my father held his swollen liver-coloured hand against my mother’s little back.
With the rain finished the weather once more turned hot and muggy and being unable to wait a single day without thinking of himself the Butcher began to MAKE ART. Better he be active I suppose but everything turned torrid and he was soon in an uproar not only with the COMMON HOUSE-FLIES who came to smell his underpants but also the smuts which floated through the window. Oh Hugh would you mind if I closed the window? That’s a joke. He slammed the windows closed and when I once opened them at night he nailed them shut forever. Here, have a chicken sandwich. Oh thank you very much. PHTHAAA!
Soon he had two huge paintings ON THE BOIL one upstairs and one downstairs leaving barely room for me to sleep. When you see him work you do appreciate the better side of him the TALENT the German Bachelor was the first to understand. Of course the foreigner was later cast aside, abandoned in West Footscray teaching ADVERTISING GRAPHICS at the Tech.
In Sydney, Butcher used his remaining funds to buy new paint and he must have got a bargain price. These tubes were so old he had to unscrew the caps with pliers. I held my nose. Sure enough the bacteria had been feasting on the extenders in the paint, bless me, we had this trouble once before. The reds were now all related to the CESS PIT family, the blues smelled like rotting peaches. Soon the Development Site was very WHIFFY, hot and rotten, the chemistry of BODY ODOUR was brought in to assist.
So I had to walk—nowhere to go—not yet—but while polishing my chair I recalled that nice white flat belonging to Marlene Leibovitz. The smell of FORCED ENTRY would soon be gone and I did not imagine anyone would try that trick again, not if the Brothers Bones were standing guard. Of course I was not yet invited.
Just the same.
Just the same I had seen a great deal of LOVEY-DOVEY and Marlene had been very DIPLOMATIC about the bad smells of Bathurst Street, not once but three times, so I reckoned I would teach myself how to get to Elizabeth Bay.
I am never good with maps just as well or I would have left Sydney many times and if my needs had not been SPECIAL I would have been on the road to Melbourne where the dog SHAT in the tucker box nine miles from Gundagai. This is not what the FAMOUS AUSTRALIAN SONG says it makes out that the dog SAT on the tucker box. What morons. You could not make a song about sitting. I would know. Butcher once drove me past the actual statue of the dog but it is based on what they call MISINFORMATION and the dog is therefore sitting on the box the work of a MEDIOCRITY OR LESS as my brother observed whilst speeding past.
If members of the GENERAL PUBLIC have a map then they can go directly to their destination. In my case it is different I must do a great deal of circling and going around the block to make sure I can get back home from where I have arrived, and I do this when I am halfway there or a quarter-way or just a block from home. So what may take the GENERAL PUBLIC twenty minutes walking according to a map might take Hugh as much as three hours but once learned it is never forgotten, burnt into my brain, set fast, like red molten metal cooling in a deep-cut channel. My brain is then HARDWIRED as the saying is. To find Elizabeth Bay I must first proceed by trial and error. Very time-consuming, no point in denying the upsets, frights, alarms, the blood roaring in my ears, the electrics firing in my limbs as I go scuttling back the way I came from. Not so bad to look at as it feels. The MAN IN THE STREET would assume I was running for a train or dentist appointment. Some innocents I hit by accident but very few. Having got up the top of William Street I followed a pair of HARD CASES with no bum inside their trousers, red skin on their elbows. These were identical to the DRUG ADDICT in Bellingen so I knew they must be going to Kings Cross. I should have returned to Bathurst Street but the addicts were a blessing, walking very fast and I stayed with them past the Kings Cross Police Station and then I saw the sign Elizabeth Bay Road.
Onwards, as my dad would say, onwards Captain Pillock. I wrote down where I was and then proceeded. Say not the struggle naught availeth.
At the bottom of Elizabeth Bay Road, past the shop of the BAD-TEMPERED GREEK and the ALL-IMPORTANT bottle shop, there is a big grassy park with TREES FROM THE COUNTRIES OF OUR FORMER ENEMIES and the minute I got there I set up my chair and I was as good as home, with Marlene’s flat three minutes away and I knew how to get back to Bathurst Street and my arms were soft as pretty putty.
It was a very pleasant place to sit having very little traffic except the taxis, and big Moreton Bay fig trees sometimes filled with dirty old FLYING FOXES the same as would travel west above the Bellinger River hour after hour all through the dusk and deepest night squadrons of them as if on their way to a war we could not know the rules of. No flying foxes this particular morning. I took off my shirt to feel the sun. Very calm, nothing alarming to note other than the rich person’s automatic gate opening and closing without DUE CAUSE as they say WE ARE ALL OBSERVED—my brothers mad belief—he could not live if he was not watched, his shiny head a request for admiration. I had my eyes shut but soon heard the familiar sound of the HOLDEN WATER PUMP which revealed itself to be a police car come to tell me I could not sit here. I was sure they did not have the right to move me but they perhaps misund
erstood my underpants and I had never forgotten Butcher being TAKEN DOWN to the cells. I replaced my shirt and folded my chair and as I did so Marlene Leibovitz arrived in a yellow taxi.
Hugh, she cried, oh dear Hugh. The police were powerless before her. PHTHAAA. She took me up those flights of stairs and I decided I would not leave her flat now because it was very quiet and clean and when you opened the window you could hear the rigging on the yachts smacking against the masts and see the water from Rushcutters Bay dancing on the white ceiling, a swimming pool of air. Poor Mum could never imagine this when she dreamed of God Almighty never thought there might be so many yachts or time to sail them and this sound she never heard, I know it, breeze, light, slight slap of stainless steel in the eternal afternoon.
Would you like to live here, Hugh?
I said I would.
She said she would go and fetch Butcher too. I wished she loved only me, held my face in her dry light palms nine miles from Gundagai.
I asked her what about the mad people who had been living here before. She said there was only one but he was gone. She threw something out the window. I heard it crashing down through the trees but I had my chair and the breeze and a light moving like a 20-amp net above my head. It was the first time I really liked Sydney since poor Billy’s finger broke our life, forgive me.
23
Olivier Leibovitz existed outside our frame, tugged and tacked around the edge of life and yet from that offside position he would always exert his influence, creasing his wife’s brow by remote control, twisting up my own when, to give a for-instance, I opened Marlene’s wardrobe—my wardrobe I was told—and discovered his suits and shirts—all different whites like fairy dust. I would have hurled them out but took the more cautious path.