Peter Carey - The Fat Man in History aka Exotic Pleasures

I stood above her, shaking, my heart beating wildly, the head of my cock protruding foolishly from my unzipped trousers, looking as pale and silly as a toadstool.

She struggled to her feet, rearranging her elegant rags and cursing. “You are an ignorant fool. You are a stupid, ignorant, reactionary fool. You have breathed the Fastas’ lies for so long that your rotten body is soaked with them. You stink of lies… do you… know who I am?”

I stared at her, panting.

“I am Jane Larange.”

For a second I couldn’t remember who Jane Larange was, then it came to me: “The actress?” The once beautiful and famous.

I shook my head. “You silly bugger: What in God’s name have you done to yourself?”

She went to her handbag, looking for a cigarette. “We will kill the Fastas,” she said, smiling at me, “and we will kill their puppets and their leeches.”

She stalked to the kitchen and lifted the mince meat from the sink. “Your mince is thawed.”

The mince was pale and wet. It took more flour than usual to get it to the right consistency. She watched me, leaning against the sink, smoking her perfumed cigarette.

“Look at you, puddling around with stinking meat like a child playing with shit. You would rather play with shit than act like a responsible adult. When the adults come you will slink off and kill fish.” She gave a grunt. “Poor Carla.”

“Poor Carla.” She made me laugh. “You try and fuck me and then you say ‘poor Carla’!”

“You are not only ugly,” she said, “you are also stupid. I did that for Carla. Do you imagine I like your stupid body or your silly mind? It was to make her feel better. It was arranged. It was her idea, my friend, not mine. Possibly a silly idea, but she is desperate and unhappy and what else is there to do? But,” she smiled thinly, “I will report a great success, a great rapture. I’m sure you won’t be silly enough to contradict me. The lie will make her happy for a little while at least.”

I had known it. I had suspected it. Or if I hadn’t known it, was trying a similar grotesque test myself. Oh, the lunacy of the times!

“Now take your nasty bait and go and kill fish. The others will be here soon and I don’t want them to see your miserable face.”

I picked up the rod and a plastic bucket.

She called to me from the kitchen. “And put your worm back in your pants. It is singularly unattractive bait.”

I said nothing and walked out the door with my cock sticking out of my fly. I found the dwarf standing on the landing. It gave him a laugh, at least.

I told her the truth about my encounter with the famous Jane Larange. I was a fool. I had made a worm to gnaw at her with fear and doubt. It burrowed into the space behind her eyes and secreted a filmy curtain of uncertainty and pain.

She became subject to moods which I found impossible to predict.

“Let me take your photograph,” she said.

“Alright.”

“Stand over there. No come down to the pier.”

We went down to the pier.

“Alright.”

“Now, take one of me.”

“Where’s the button?”

“On the top.”

I found the button and took her photograph.

“Do you love me? Now?”

“Yes damn you, of course I do.”

She stared at me hard, tears in her eyes, then she wrenched the camera from my hand and hurled it into the water.

I watched it sink, thinking how beautifully clear the water was that day.

Carla ran up the steps to the house. I wasn’t stupid enough to ask her what the matter was.

She had woken in one more mood, her eyes pale and staring and there was nothing I could do to reach her. There were only five days to go and these moods were thieving our precious time, arriving with greater frequency and lasting for longer periods.

I made the breakfast, frying bread in the bacon fat in a childish attempt to cheer her up. I detested these malignant withdrawals. They made her as blind and selfish as a baby.

She sat at the table, staring out the window at the water. I washed the dishes. Then I swept the floor. I was angry. I polished the floor and still she didn’t move. I made the bed and cleaned down the walls in the bedroom. I took out all the books and put them in alphabetical order according to author.

By lunchtime I was beside myself with rage.

She sat at the table.

I played a number of videotapes I knew she liked. She sat before the viewer like a blind deaf-mute. I took out a recipe book and began to prepare beef bourguignon with murder in my heart.

Then, some time about half-past two in the afternoon, she turned and said “Hello.”

The cloud had passed. She stood and stretched and came and held me from behind as I cooked the beef.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you,” I said.

She kissed me on the ear.

“What’s the matter?” My rage had evaporated, but I still had to ask the stupid question.

“You know,” she turned away from me and went to open the doors over the harbour. “Let’s not talk about it.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe we should.”

“Why?” she said. “I’m going to do it so there’s nothing to be said.”

I sat across from her at the table. “You’re not going to go away,” I said quietly, “and you are not going to take a Chance.”

She looked up sharply, staring directly into my eyes, and I think then she finally knew that I was serious. We sat staring at each other, entering an unreal country as frightening as any I have ever travelled in.

Later she said quietly, “You have gone mad.”

There was a time, before this one, when I never wept. But now as I nodded tears came, coursing down my cheeks. We held each other miserably, whispering things that mad people say to one another.

Orgasm curved above us and through us, carrying us into dark places where we spoke in tongues.

Carla, most beautiful of women, crying in my ear. “Tell me I’m beautiful.”

Locked doors with broken hinges. Bank vaults blown asunder. Blasphemous papers floating on warm winds, lying in the summer streets, flapping like wounded seagulls.

In the morning the light caught her. She looked more beautiful than the Bonnards in Hale’s Critique of Bourgeois Art , the orange sheet lying where she had kicked it, the fine hairs along her arm soft and golden in the early light.

Bonnard painted his wife for more than twenty years. Whilst her arse and tits sagged he painted her better and better. It made my eyes wet with sentimental tears to think of the old Mme. Bonnard posing for the ageing M. Bonnard, standing in the bathroom or sitting on the toilet seat of their tiny flat.

I was affected by visions of constancy. In the busy lanes behind the central market I watched an old couple helping each other along the broken-down pavement. He, short and stocky with a countryman’s arms, now infirm and reduced to a walking stick. She, of similar height, overweight, carrying her shopping in an old-fashioned bag.

She walked beside him protectively, spying out broken cobblestones, steps, and the feet of beggars.

“You walk next to the wall,” I heard her say, “I’ll walk on the outside so no one kicks your stick again.”

They swapped positions and set off once more, the old man jutting his chin, the old lady moving slowly on swollen legs, strangers to the mysteries of the Genetic Lottery and the glittering possibilities of a Chance.

When the sun, in time, caught Carla’s beautiful face, she opened her eyes and smiled at me.

I felt so damned I wished to slap her face.

It was unbelievable that this should be taken from us. And even as I held her and kissed her sleep-soft lips, I was beginning, at last, to evolve a plan that would really keep her.