Theft: A Love Story

by Peter Carey

  The waitress asked him would he like a drink. He said he was already at 30,000 feet. I had a beer.

  Olivier smelled of perfume and talcum powder like a BABY’S BOTTOM. The waitresses had been ALL OVER HIM since our arrival and when his lovely white jacket passed between them I saw a slight silver shimmer, a creature flown out of the night to cling to the wall above a woman’s bed.

  He whispered to me that he did not care his wife had turned out to be a PSYCHOPATHIC LIAR but he wished she would not pity him. Why could she not be like a normal woman and dump him in the street?

  He said Marlene either loved my brother or his work, who could ever tell which one? She was a romantic fool and had no idea of the bad character of artists.

  I said I understood completely.

  He said he understood completely from the day that he was born.

  I said it was the same for me. Exactly. When he said his father was a selfish pig I reached to shake his hand.

  The waitresses brought dinner on a tray and Olivier thought he might have just a CHOTA PEG which was only whisky in the end. I had a beer.

  TWO FOUR SIX EIGHT BOG IN DON’T WAIT.

  Olivier nibbled at his RABBIT FOOD but then got bored with it and arranged his bottles like checkers on the tray.

  He asked did I want him to tell me his pills.

  That was O.K. with me.

  He praised TEMAZEPAM he said the ATIVAN was also good and would I like a GENERIC VALIUM. There was much more than this. These are the ones I knew the names of at the time but he must have had ADDERALL as well.

  He took a CODIS tablet and one or two assorted capsules and then a sip of Tasmanian Pinot Noir saying the wine would POTENTIATE the pills by golly.

  You must not think me a sot, old Hughie. See I am in agony. I love her but she is a terrible, terrible woman.

  I did not know what to reply as Marlene was my friend and she and my brother had been ROOTING LIKE RABBITS with my full knowledge. I was an ACCESSORY AFTER THE FACT for all I know. Many is the night I had to put my head beneath the pillow to block the noise.

  Ask me how many women have I been to bed with, Olivier said.

  He was like a film star with his red lips and curly black hair the skin of his eyelids was soft as a penis freshly bathed. I said ten.

  That made him laugh. He patted my elbow and rumpled up my hair and said there was not one of them like his wife. Just the same it had been a RED FLAG to discover she had burnt down the school. He had learned this in the most dreadful way, being told at dinner by a client of his advertising firm who knew only that Olivier’s wife came from Benalla.

  How old is she? asks the client.

  Why twenty-three, says Olivier.

  Then she must have been there when that Marlene Cook burnt down the High School. What’s your wife’s name?

  Geena Davis, said Olivier.

  Like the movie star.

  Same, exactly.

  I will not easily forget the day I was declared too slow to return to Bacchus Marsh State School number 28. I would have burnt them to the blessed ground if only I had had some damn good pills to stop me being afraid of punishment. God bless me, save me, I have been made good by cowardice nothing more.

  Olivier said I might as well have another beer. I had the weight to soak it up, he said so. He asked me did I know Marlene was a thief. I said she was my friend.

  At this he moaned, saying she was his friend too, God help him. Soon he was saying the most frightful things and it took a while to understand he had switched the subject to his mother a very nasty woman. He was happy she was dead. He got a rash when he remembered her.

  He was called away by the waitress and I thought he must be in trouble for his violent language but then he returned with airline socks which I must put on. Everyone must obey this rule. He MINISTERED UNTO ME, kneeling to remove my sandshoes and whiffy socks which he tied inside a plastic bag. He said it might be better if I LIMIT MY FLATULENCE to the rear of the plane where it was needed, and then we laughed a lot.

  You should have been rich, old chum, he said. You could employ me to change your socks every day.

  The waitress brought us each a brandy and put my socks and shoes in the locker overhead.

  Olivier said he could have been rich easy enough but his mother was a thieving whore who stole everything from him and it made him sick to think of what she’d done. He would like to be rich and that would be perfect, to look after his horse, to ride like hell, he looked at me and smiled and I knew exactly what he meant—the blood and heart, everything pumping, happy, fearful, the human clock in the river of the day.

  She has ruined me, he said. I thought he meant his mother.

  Am I her pet dog, he continued, so I knew that was Marlene. You see, that is exactly what I am, he said. She will fill my bowl and brush my coat. I would rather be put down.

  I can ruin her, he said a moment later. That’s the irony old chap. I can destroy her. But what would be the bloody point, old man? If I ruined her she would not rub my ears.

  I woke up in the sky above America with my mouth full of dust, scents of fancy gargle, shaving cream, female soap.

  That’s Los Angeles, he said.

  This was my first sighting and I did not know what it could mean, but later I would see the swarms of tiny lights clustered through the night, the cities and highways of America, the beauty of white ants, termites devouring, mating signals glowing in their pulsing tails. Which prophet ever foretold such infestation?

  Olivier tapped my knee and said, I am in a state old chap. He offered a pill packet and a sip of his water. He said that if he ate peanuts he would die, if he had oysters his throat would close, but if he did not have Marlene he might as well cut his own throat with a Stanley knife.

  I returned his pills. He took one too.

  He said, I’ve just decided I am not going to sign that thing for her.

  I asked what thing.

  He said, It is completely bogus, so I won’t. It’s time I had some principles.

  I asked what it was.

  He said, She would never think I have the nerve. But you watch her old chum. You watch her when I refuse.

  I asked would he destroy her.

  That made him laugh a long time, stopping and starting and snorting until I feared he had gone mad.

  Finally I asked him what was so bloody funny but we were, as they say, PREPARING FOR LANDING and when the aircraft banged itself to earth, my question had not been addressed.

  39

  The taxis in New York are a total nightmare. I don’t know how anybody tolerates them, and I am not complaining about the eviscerated seats, the shitty shock absorbers, the suicidal left-hand turns, but rather the common faith of all those Malaysian Sikhs, Bengali Hindus, Harlem Muslims, Lebanese Christians, Coney Island Russians, Brooklyn Jews, Buddhists, Zarathustrians—who knows what?—all of them with the rock-solid conviction that if you honk your bloody horn the sea will part before you. You can say it is not my business to comment. I am a hick, born in a butcher’s shop in Bacchus Marsh, but fuck them, really. Shut the fuck up.

  Yes, it is insane to consider educating them one by fucking one, Miss Manners, but when I find a moron leaning on his horn outside my window …

  So I had to go to the supermarket at a time of night when you would expect the trip to be a swift one, when all the nice Jewish grandmothers should be home in bed or making their special gefilte fish for Rosh Hashanah or whatever it is they do—but perhaps the crowds of grannies in Grand Union were Christians or Tartars, but by God those old women were a subcategory of their own and they would smash you with their shopping carts if you could not match their speed. I was jet-lagged, a foreigner, and I was slow. God help me.

  An American supermarket is one thing, Jesus—but a New York supermarket is a complete dog’s breakfast—you would have to be born in Aisle 5 to understand its logic. As you have doubtless guessed already, I had come to buy a dozen eggs. At first I could not find them, then th
ere they were, right next to the feta, so many bloody categories of eggs, sizes of eggs, colours of eggs, my fellow shoppers could not wait for me to make a choice. I was blocking their aisle, so they locked wheels with me, crowded in from Aisles 2 and 3, swarmed like gridlocked morons at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel.

  I bought brown eggs because they seemed more basic—I really was a hick—but five blocks later, above Mercer Street and Broome, when I stood in the rusty shadow of the fire escape, I discovered the expensive little fucks had shells like concrete. Did I tell you I had been a fatal fast bowler at Bacchus Marsh High School? I still had a good eye and my father’s arm but no matter how I swung or spun them, the eggs bounced off the windscreens of the honking cabs.

  Marlene, bless her, tried neither to prevent nor encourage me and when I stepped back in through the open window she looked up from the ratty sofa where she was stretched out reading the New York Times. “Come here my genius.”

  She was so, so gorgeous, the reading light catching her left cheek, a wash of gold dust, rising from a slate blue field.

  “You are a moron.” She held her arms open and I held her, smelled her jasmine skin, her shampooed hair. Did I say I loved her? Of course I did. I slid my hand down her pole-climber’s back, touching every vertebra in that nubbly line of life. She was my thief, my lover, my mystery, a lovely series of revelations which I prayed would never end. It was our third night in New York City We had money now. The day had been a big success, and not just because of the case of Bourgueil and the bottle of Lagavulin, although that did smooth the edges, but Dozy Boylan’s signal-fly painting was now stored in an art world fortress in Long Island City. Its only entrance, Marlene told me, was through a tunnel which was flooded every night. The vaults were filled with Mondrians, de Koonings, and her precious Leibovitz which her wacko husband would come and sign off ASAP.

  “Forget the taxis,” she said. “It’s New York. What do you expect? You’ll get used to it.”

  She was right, of course. I was from the Marsh where Highway 31 ran right past my bedroom, trucks roaring and grinding all night as you waited for them to lose it on Stamford Hill, plough down into Main Street, sheering all the verandahs off the shops. I would grow accustomed to the fucking taxis, but what I could not get used to was that Marlene was not screaming at me. By now the Alimony Whore would have called the cops but here I had a quick hit of Lagavulin—God bless the workingmen of Islay—and as I left to buy some better eggs, she called me an idiot and put her tongue inside my ear.

  At this hour in Sydney only the bars would still be open but the entrance of Grand Union was crowded with limping black men who had come to feed empty cans and bottles to an automated machine. Also, new grandmothers had arrived—later I discovered that there was an endless supply of mafia mothers in the neighbourhood and I mention this now because John Gotti’s mother was later mugged by some unlucky fuck. What did I know? It was my good fortune that I was polite to all these lethal individuals, and when I tested an egg or two inside the refrigerated cabinet, no-one had the time to see my crime.

  There are 8,534 taxi medallions in New York, which must mean close to twenty thousand drivers and of course I could not give etiquette classes to them all, but you must believe me when I tell you that my eggs finally made a difference. You think this is ridiculous, but ask yourself: What are all those Sikhs saying to each other on their radios?

  I was much happier with my second dozen eggs, large thin white shells which splattered beautifully. We turned off the lights and my beautiful little thief came out on the fire escape to admire my aim.

  “You’re being unfair,” she said. “The wrong people are being punished. Forget the taxis. Go for the minivans with New Jersey plates.”

  I was drunk when we came back inside, a little spongy in the legs, and when the next serious eruption of horns arrived, just before midnight, I was ready to say my point was made. But I was standing at the icebox, so it was nothing to pick up an egg, turn off the lights, heave open the window, and burst my yellow bomb across the offending windscreen, a minivan as it turned out, with Jersey plates.

  “Come back in. Turn on the light.”

  In front of the minivan, whose wipers were now smearing yolk and white across the glass, was a yellow cab from which two travelers were slowly emerging.

  Pleased as I was that the minivan was now silent, I was slow to realise that the men emerging from the taxi below were both known to me.

  40

  In the past many unhappy voices. In the past the smell of stove blacking, Johnson’s floor polish, cloudy ammonia, then my father’s bloody aprons soaking in the bleach. DEAD BODIES so-called in amber glass—Foster’s Lager, Vic Bitter, Ballarat Bertie, Castlemaine XXXX, all those arguments best left in the slop tray but I never did like to hear them. There, I’ve said it. In the past, there was the main street. There was the butcher’s shop. Behind the shop the paddock was filled with boxthorn, then on the hill the vicarage. Happier listening to the bells for evensong. There, I’ve said it. Happier listening to the kookaburras, watch them tracing out their territory at dusk. Better to know S.F.A. about the kookaburras, God save us from the beak, the congregation of the worms and mice.

  Which is to say, NO DISCORD GENTLEMEN PLEASE. Likewise in the modern day I did not like to hear how my brother spoke to Olivier on Mercer Street, New York, the address written on my wrist. DON’T GET ME WRONG—I was very happy for a moment, on arrival, but then Marlene asked Olivier to sign the BOGUS DOCUMENT and within five minutes I had departed for the street. Soon there was a fellow approaching. Who was he? I did not know. He was dragging a loud cardboard box across the foreign cobbles. What did he intend? He was a BLACK MAN with a grey beard and a pair of Mickey Mouse ears or perhaps some other brand of mouse for the ears were small and pink UNNATURAL. Frankly, I liked the cut of him.

  He asked, Suspender been by here?

  I replied I just got here.

  He asked me where I been.

  Australia.

  Mad Max, he said, and continued on his way down the center of the street, laughing like a drain. SO WHAT’S THE JOKE YOU DICKHEAD? as my brother would have said. I returned to the safety of the loft but Butcher was busy threatening Olivier with violence, I will break your this, will tear out your that. Home sweet home and OLD LANG SIGN. In his red-faced rage he described plastic buckets filled with Olivier’s blood but his voice was shaking like a loose bit of tin on a chook house roof. I knew he was afraid.

  Olivier had remained very still, bending his body into the sofa like GUMBY. When I saw him smile at my brother I knew there would be bloodshed. I once more made my EXIT via the dreadful factory stairs pushing through a forest of SICK-MAKING wet burnt carpet rolls. My arm muscles were firing sparks, and I had a shuddering inside my head. Thank God to get into the air outside but then I understood I must be in the NEW YORK SLUMS, bless me. The door shut beside me and there was nothing more to do but wait and hope I would not be a VICTIM.

  I was frightened by Suspender that’s the truth. Later, once or twice, I used the name. Who are you? I’m Suspender.

  A man rode past on a bicycle, bless me, I had not expected bicycles at all. No harm was done.

  Then Olivier appeared.

  He said, I have brought your suitcase, but it’s up to you.

  What?

  I can’t stay here, old mate, he said.

  I asked him where was he going.

  Off to my club, but you will probably prefer to be with your KISS AND KIN.

  Can I come with you? I asked.

  He looked me up and down. He did not want me. I could see.

  Assuredly, he said at last. He smiled. He put his arm around me, but once we were in the taxi he drew back into his corner and exploded I HATE THE FUCKING BITCH!

  Bless me, save us. The misery of Sundays.

  I HATE HER.

  Hide the knives, lock the doors.

  I HOPE SHE DIES.

  Then he paid the driver and we were outsid
e a mansion.

  This was the Bicker Club whatever that meant. He said would I wait outside a moment as he would HAVE A WORD with Mr. Heavens. I was causing trouble. What else could I do?

  I had AMPLE OPPORTUNITY to read THE BICKER CLUB’S DRESS CODE FOR NONMEMBERS.

  INAPPROPRIATE ATTIRE IS LISTED BELOW:

  LEGGINGS, STIRRUP PANTS, CAPRI PANTS

  SHORTS OR CUTOFFS

  SWEATSHIRTS, SWEATPANTS, OR JOGGING SUITS

  HALTER DRESSES OR SUNDRESSES

  DENIM OF ANY TYPE OR IN ANY COLOR, INCLUDING DRESSES, SHIRTS, SKIRTS, VESTS AND/OR SLACKS

  SPANDEX OR LYCRA GARMENTS

  T-SHIRTS, TANK TOPS OR CROP TOPS

  Did I have CAPRI pants? What was a LYCRA garment? Olivier returned, not with Heavens but with Jeavons, a strange and ugly thing in a PENGUIN SUIT, as sniffy as the CARDIN JUDGE who gaoled my brother. Jeavons had a bald head and huge ears and when he spoke he raised an eyebrow as if sending me private messages. All Greek to me.

  Jeavons provided me with a long fur coat but I was a HOT ENGINE as my mother always said. OUR DEAR V8 she called me. I said I was not cold.

  Said Olivier, the bear suit is not exactly voluntary old chum.

  Then I understood the rude bugger Jeavons wished me to cover my own clothes. True enough—once my Marshy body was hidden from the MEMBERS’ view I was permitted entrance to the Bicker Club. You never saw such a place, too High Church for Mum, stained-glass ceilings, wood carved like a bloody ROOD SCREEN so it was IN EVERY WAY SUPERIOR to the place where we had left poor old Butcher and Marlene where the only chair had been a case of wine. I kept my coat buttoned tight around me because by now I was certain I must have a LYCRA GARMENT and when Jeavons said, You’ve had a long journey sir, I answered yes.