Collected Stories

by Peter Carey

  I was overwhelmed by a feeling of great loss. I yearned for lost time, lost childhoods, seasons, for Chrissake, the time when peaches are ripe, the time when the river drops after the snow has all melted and it’s just low enough to wade and the water freezes your balls and you can walk for miles with little pale crayfish scuttling backwards away from your black-booted feet. Also you can use a dragonfly larva as live bait, casting it out gently and letting it drift downstream to where big old brown trout, their lower jaws grown long and hooked upwards, lie waiting.

  The days get hot and clear then and the land is like a tinderbox. Old men lighting cigarettes are careful to put the burnt matches back into the matchbox, a habit one sometimes sees carried on into the city by younger people who don’t know why they’re doing it, messengers carrying notes written in a foreign language.

  But all this was once common knowledge, in the days when things were always the same and newness was something as delightful and strange as the little boiled sweets we would be given on Sunday morning.

  Those were the days before the Americans came, and before the Fastalogians who succeeded them, descending in their spaceships from God knows what unimaginable worlds. And at first we thought them preferable to the Americans. But what the Americans did to us with their yearly car models and two-weekly cigarette lighters was nothing compared to the Fastalogians, who introduced concepts so dazzling that we fell prey to them wholesale like South Sea Islanders exposed to the common cold.

  The Fastalogians were the universe’s bush-mechanics, charlatans, gypsies: raggle-taggle collections of equipment always going wrong. Their Lottery Rooms were always a mess of wires, the floors always littered with dead printed circuits like cigarette ends.

  It was difficult to have complete faith in them, yet they could be persuasive enough. Their attitude was eager, frenetic almost, as they attempted to please in the most childish way imaginable. (In confrontation they became much less pleasant, turning curiously evasive while their voices assumed a high-pitched, nasal, wheedling characteristic.)

  In appearance they were so much less threatening than the Americans. Their clothes were worn badly, ill-fitting, often with childish mistakes, like buttoning the third button through the fourth buttonhole. They seemed to us to be lonely and puzzled and even while they controlled us we managed to feel a smiling superiority to them. Their music was not the music of an inhuman oppressor. It had surprising fervour, like Hungarian rhapsodies. One was reminded of Bartók, and wondered about the feelings of beings so many light years from home.

  Their business was the Genetic Lottery or The Chance, whatever you cared to call it. It was, of course, a trick, but we had nothing to question them with. We had only accusations, suspicions, fears that things were not as they were described. If they told us that we could buy a second or third Chance in the Lottery most of us took it, even if we didn’t know how it worked, or if it worked the way they said it did.

  We were used to not understanding. It had become a habit with the Americans, who had left us with a technology we could neither control nor understand. So our failure to grasp the technicalities or even the principles of the Genetic Lottery in no way prevented us from embracing it enthusiastically. After all, we had never grasped the technicalities of the television sets the Americans sold us. Our curiosity about how things worked had atrophied to such an extent that few of us bothered with understanding such things as how the tides worked and why some trees lost their leaves in autumn. It was enough that someone somewhere understood these things. Thus we had no interest in the table of elements that make up all matter, nor in the names of the atomic subparticles our very bodies were built from. Such was the way we were prepared, like South Sea Islanders, like yearning gnostics waiting to be pointed in the direction of the first tin shed called “God”.

  So now for two thousand intergalactic dollars (IG$2,000) we could go in the Lottery and come out with a different age, a different body, a different voice and still carry our memories (allowing for a little leakage) more or less intact.

  It proved the last straw. The total embrace of a cancerous philosophy of change. The populace became like mercury in each other’s minds and arms. Institutions that had proved the very basis of our society (the family, the neighbourhood, marriage) cracked and split apart in the face of a new shrill current of desperate selfishness. The city itself stood like an external endorsement to this internal collapse and recalled the most exotic places (Calcutta, for instance) where the rich had once journeyed to experience the thrilling stink of poverty, the smell of danger, and the just-contained threat of violence born of envy.

  Here also were the signs of fragmentation, of religious confusion, of sects decadent and strict. Wild-haired holy-men in loincloths, palm-readers, seers, revolutionaries without followings (the Hups, the Namers, the L.A.K.). Gurus in helicopters flew through the air, whilst bandits roamed the countryside in search of travellers who were no longer intent on adventure and the beauty of nature, but were forced to travel by necessity and who moved in nervous groups, well armed and thankful to be alive when they returned.

  It was an edgy and distrustful group of people that made up our society, motivated by nothing but their self-preservation and their blind belief in their next Chance. To the Fastalogians they were nothing but cattle. Their sole function was to provide a highly favourable intergalactic balance of payments.

  It was through these streets that I strode, muttering, continually on the verge of either anger or tears. I was cut adrift, unconnected. My face in the mirror that morning was not the face that my mind had started living with. It was a battered, red, broken-nosed face, marked by great quizzical eyebrows, intense black eyes, and tangled wiry hair. I had been through the lottery and lost. I had got myself the body of an ageing street-fighter. It was a body built to contain furies. It suited me. The arrogant Gurus and the ugly Hups stepped aside when I stormed down their streets on my daily course between the boarding house where I lived and the Department of Parks and Gardens where I was employed as a gardener. I didn’t work much. I played cards with the others. The botanical gardens were slowly being choked by “Burning Glory”, a prickly crimson flowering bush the Fastalogians had imported either by accident or design. It was our job to remove it. Instead, we used it as cover for our cheating card games. Behind its red blazing hedges we lied and fought and, on occasion, fornicated. We were not a pretty sight.

  It was from here that I walked back to the boarding house with my beer under my arm, and it was on a Tuesday afternoon that I saw her, just beyond the gardens and a block down from the Chance Centre in Grove Street. She was sitting on the footpath with a body beside her, an old man, his hair white and wispy, his face brown and wrinkled like a walnut. He was dressed very formally in a three-piece grey suit and had an old-fashioned watch chain across the waistcoat. I assumed that the corpse was her grandfather. Since the puppet government had dropped its funeral assistance plan this was how poor people raised money for funerals. It was a common sight to see dead bodies in rented suits being displayed on the footpaths. So it was not the old man who attracted my attention but the young woman who sat beside him.

  “Money,” she said, “money for an old man to lie in peace.”

  I stopped willingly. She had her dark hair cut quite short and rather badly. Her eyebrows were full, but perfectly arched, her features were saved from being too regular by a mouth that was wider than average. She wore a khaki shirt, a navy blue jacket, filthy trousers and a small gold earring in her right ear.

  “I’ve only got beer,” I said. “I’ve spent all my money on beer.”

  She grinned a broad and beautiful grin which illuminated her face and made me echo it.

  “I’d settle for a beer.” And I was surprised to hear shyness.

  I sat down on the footpath and we opened the six-pack. Am I being sentimental when I say I shared my beer without calculation? That I sought nothing? It seems unlikely for I had some grasping habits as you’ll see s
oon enough. But I remember nothing of the sort, only that I liked the way she opened the beer bottle. Her hands were large, a bit messed up. She hooked a broken-nailed finger into the ring-pull and had it off without even looking at what she was doing.

  She took a big swallow, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and said: “Shit, I needed that.”

  I muttered something about her grandfather, trying to make polite conversation. I was out of the habit.

  She shrugged and put the cold bottle on her cheek. “I got him from the morgue.”

  I didn’t understand.

  “I bought him for 3 IGs.” She grinned, tapping her head with her middle finger. “Best investment I’ve ever made.”

  It was this, more than anything, that got me. I admired cunning in those days, smart moves, cards off the bottom of the deck, anything that tricked the bastards — and “the bastards” were everyone who wasn’t me.

  So I laughed. Aloud deep joyful laugh that made passers-by stare at me. I gave them the fingers-up and they looked away.

  She sat on her hands, rocking back and forth on them as she spoke. She had a pleasantly nasal, idiosyncratic voice, slangy and relaxed. “They really go for white hair and tanned faces.” She nodded towards a paint tin full of coins and notes. “It’s pathetic, isn’t it? I wouldn’t have gotten half this much for my real grandfather. He’s too dark. Also, they don’t like women much. Men do much better than women.”

  She had the slightly exaggerated toughness of the very young. I wondered if she’d taken a Chance. It didn’t look like it.

  We sat and drank the beer. It started to get dark. She lit a mosquito coil and we stayed there in the gloom till we drank the whole lot.

  When the last bottle was gone, the small talk that had sustained us went away and left us in an uneasy area of silence. Now suspicion hit me with its fire-hot pinpricks. I had been conned for my beer. I would go home and lie awake without its benefits. It would be a hot sleepless night and I would curse myself for my gullibility. I, who was shrewd and untrickable, had been tricked.

  But she stood and stretched and said, “Come on, now I’ve drunk your beer, I’ll buy you a meal.”

  We walked away and left the body for whoever wanted it. I never saw the old man again.

  The next day he was gone.

  2.

  I cannot explain what it was like to sit in a restaurant with a woman. I felt embarrassed, awkward, and so pleased that I couldn’t put one foot straight in front of the other.

  I fancy I was graciously old-fashioned.

  I pulled out her chair for her, I remember, and saw the look she shot me, both pleased and alarmed. It was a shocked, fast flick of the eyes. Possibly she sensed the powerful fantasies that lonely men create, steel columns of passion appended with leather straps and tiny mirrors.

  It was nearly a year since I’d talked to a woman, and that one stole my money and even managed to lift two blankets from my sleeping body. Twelve dull stupid drugged and drunken months had passed, dissolving from the dregs of one day into the sink of the next.

  The restaurant was one of those Fasta Cafeterias that had sprung up, noisy, messy, with harsh lighting and long rows of bright white tables that were never ever filled. The service was bad and in the end we went to the kitchen where we helped ourselves from the long trays of food, Fastalogian salads with their dried intoxicating mushrooms, and that strange milky pap they are so fond of. She piled her plate high with everything and I envied the calm that allowed her such an appetite. On any other night I would have done the same, guzzling and gorging myself on my free meal.

  Finally, tripping over each other, we returned to our table. She bought two more beers and I thanked her for that silently.

  Here I was. With a woman. Like real people.

  I smiled broadly at the thought. She caught me and was, I think, pleased to have something to hang on to. So we got hold of that smile and wrung it for all it was worth.

  Being desperate, impatient, I told her the truth about the smile. The directness was pleasing to her. I watched how she leant into my words without fear or reservation, displaying none of the shiftiness that danced through most social intercourse in those days. But I was as calculating and cunning as only the very lonely learn how to be. Estimating her interest, I selected the things which would be most pleasing for her. I steered the course of what I told, telling her things about me which fascinated her most. She was pleased by my confessions. I gave her many. She was strong and young and confident. She couldn’t see my deviousness and, no matter what I told her of loneliness, she couldn’t taste the stale self-hating afternoons or suspect the callousness they engendered.

  And I bathed in her beauty, delighting in the confidence it brought her, the certainty of small mannerisms, the chop of that beautiful rough-fingered hand when making a point. But also, this: the tentative question marks she hooked on to the ends of her most definite assertions. So I was impressed by her strength and charmed by her vulnerability all at once.

  One could not have asked for more.

  And this also I confessed to her, for it pleased her to be talked about and it gave me an intoxicating pleasure to be on such intimate terms.

  And I confessed why I had confessed.

  My conversation was mirrors within mirrors, onion skin behind onion skin. I revealed motives behind motives. I was amazing. I felt myself to be both saint and pirate, as beautiful and gnarled as an ancient olive. I talked with intensity. I devoured her, not like some poor beggar (which I was) but like a prince, a stylish master of the most elegant dissertations.

  She ate ravenously, but in no way neglected to listen. She talked impulsively with her mouth full. With mushrooms dropping from her mouth, she made a point. It made her beautiful, not ugly.

  I have always enjoyed women who, whilst being conventionally feminine enough in their appearance, have exhibited certain behavioural traits more commonly associated with men. A bare-breasted woman working on a tractor is the fastest, crudest approximation I can provide. An image, incidentally, guaranteed to give me an aching erection, which it has, on many lonely nights.

  But to come back to my new friend, who rolled a cigarette with hands which might have been the hands of an apprentice bricklayer, hands which were connected to breasts which were connected to other parts doubtless female in gender, who had such grace and beauty in her form and manner and yet had had her hair shorn in such a manner as to deny her beauty.

  She was tall, my height. Across the table I noted that her hands were as large as mine. They matched. The excitement was exquisite. I anticipated nothing, vibrating in the crystal of the moment.

  We talked, finally, as everyone must, about the Lottery, for the Lottery was life in those days and all of us, most of us, were saving for another Chance.

  “I’m taking a Chance next week,” she said.

  “Good luck,” I said. It was automatic. That’s how life had got.

  “You look like you haven’t.”

  “Thank you,” I said. It was a compliment, like saying that my shirt suited me. “But I’ve had four.”

  “You move nicely,” she smiled. “I was watching you in the kitchen. You’re not awkward at all.”

  “You move nicely too,” I grinned. “I was watching you too. You’re crazy to take a Chance, what do you want?”

  “A people’s body.” She said it fast, briskly, and stared at me challengingly.

  “A what?”

  “A people’s body.” She picked up a knife, examined it and put it down.

  It dawned on me. “Oh, you’re a Hup.”

  Thinking back, I’m surprised I knew anything about Hups. They were one of a hundred or more revolutionary crackpots. I didn’t give a damn about politics and I thought every little group was more insane than the next.

  And here, goddamn it, I was having dinner with a Hup, a rich crazy who thought the way to fight the revolution was to have a body as grotesque and ill-formed as my friends at the Parks and Gard
ens.

  “My parents took the Chance last week.”

  “How did it go?”

  “I didn’t see them. They’ve gone to …” she hesitated “… to another place where they’re needed.” She had become quiet now, and serious, explaining that her parents had upper-class bodies like hers, that their ideas were not at home with their physiognomy (a word I had to ask her to explain), that they would form the revolutionary vanguard to lead the misshapen Lumpen Proletariat (another term I’d never heard before) to overthrow the Fastas and their puppets.

  I had a desperate desire to change the subject, to plug my ears, to shut my eyes. I wouldn’t have been any different if I’d discovered she was a mystic or a follower of Hiwi Kaj.

  “Anyway,” I said, “you’ve got a beautiful body.”

  “Why did you say that?”

  I could have said that I’d spent enough of my life with her beloved Lumpen Proletariat to hold them in no great esteem, that the very reason I was enjoying her company so much was because she was so unlike them. But I didn’t want to pursue it. I shrugged, grinned stupidly, and filled her glass with beer.

  Her eyes flashed at my shrug. I don’t know why people say “flashed”, but I swear there was red in her eyes. She looked hurt, stung, and ready to attack.

  She withdrew from me, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms. “What do you think is beautiful?”

  Before I could answer she was leaning back into the table, but this time her voice was louder.

  “What is more beautiful, a parrot or a crow?”

  “A parrot, if you mean a rosella. But I don’t know much about parrots.”

  “What’s wrong with a crow?”

  “A crow is black and awkward-looking. It’s heavy. Its cry is unattractive.”

  “What makes its cry unattractive?”

  I was sick of the game, and exhausted with such sudden mental exercise.