Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

Hello, Dial.

Rebecca and a small boy had made themselves at home among the cushions.

Hello, said Dial, her heart beating violently.

Doing a bit of renovation?

Yes.

Lining the inside at last?

Yes, said Dial, or words to that effect.

You know that timber’s going to shrink?

Yes I do.

You butt them up against each other you’ll have one-inch gaps.

Who the fuck did these people think they were, walking into your apartment, scratching their hairy legs and eating your papaya? Dial did not sit down. She could not. Her behavior would not help her. Well so be it, she thought. She had never lived anywhere there was no conflict.

Soon she noticed a bad smell which she blamed on the hair sticking out beneath Rebecca’s plump arms. The visitor’s breasts were big and sweaty, staining her gray T-shirt.

So, Rebecca, this is about the cat?

Rebecca nodded toward a flour sack which had been dropped by the door to the deck. You could say that, she said.

Dial thought, My God, the bitch has killed him.

Have a look, said the stinky woman, why don’t you?

Why should I?

It’s educational.

Dial approached the bag slowly, a sort of unreal buzzing in her head. Flies crawled around her wounded ankle.

The contents slithered onto the floor like what? Flowers. Grass tussocks. Some stinky mulch. Then she understood what she was looking at: small dead birds, some bright, some dull, some filled with ants and possibly-she saw the movement like a living stomach-maggots. The Godfather, she thought. The horse’s head in bed.

What the hell are you up to, Rebecca? I never did anything to you.

Oh, you’re wrong there, Dial.

Rebecca stood up and her staring blond boy-child stood right beside her, its colorless eyes filled with blank dull righteousness.

This is what you did to me, Rebecca said. You bring your cat into the valley. This is what you do. They’re sentient beings, she said, nudging a feathered corpse with her big toe.

They’re what ?

In Buddhism, began Rebecca.

I know what sentient means.

Rebecca narrowed her eyes. Then you should know that your cat is destroying our environment and you’ve got a choice. You can get rid of this cat or we will get rid of you.

Rebecca, you know I talked to Phil Warriner.

This is not America, Dial. We don’t decide ethical issues with lawyers.

And with that, she departed, walking heavily on her heels, with her boy already left three steps behind and wailing.

Beneath the vermined bodies the yellow planks lay in shadow, crisscrossed like yarrow sticks on the dusty floor.

When it got too hot to work the boy washed and climbed up in the big old barber’s chair. Enthroned beneath the baking roof, he looked out across the waves of silver bush where the trees, like aliens, swished their dangerous tails.

Trevor would then bring him bread and olives and papaya or watermelon or cantaloupe. One time there was a huge blue bag of mangoes. The mangoes were “visitors,” a class of thing that also included the boy and the dull old horse presently flicking the flies away from his bottom with his nervy tail, a sad beast who spent his mornings being led around the pug mill while Trevor shoveled dirt, and the boy, whose job it was to lead the horse, whispered into his jerky ears and fed him carrots with his palm, his fingers nowhere near his wide blunt teeth. The horse was on a secret assignment from a paddock not so far beyond the rally car. In the heat of the dusty afternoon the boy removed the horse’s shellback ticks and splat their blood sacs between his fingernails. Sometimes the horse tried to bite him in return.

The boy was full of saintly concern for the sad biting horse but had mostly forgotten about the cat he had required so urgently. When he was with Dial he remembered Buck of course, but right now he was way more interested in another long-dead cat that had got Trevor into trouble when he was an orphan, freshly stolen from his English parents, so he said, and brought to Australia by the priests at the Dr. Barnardo’s Homes.

The boy knew he was not old enough to hear the stories Trevor wished to tell him, but that is why he came. Why he was invited probably. The stories were rich and sticky, like blood and sugar, like something that would later make him ill. There had been many cats on the orphan farm. That was in South Australia. The boy did not know where that was, only that it was cold and loveless and the London boys would suffer ringworm, scabies, beatings, in order to “get a love,” i.e., to smooth and pet a cat.

The farting scabby boys were just like him. He was told this often although it was not really true. They had climbed into an attic searching for one particular cat. They knew it was there as they had heard it meowing in the night. In the crawl space they scraped their knees, and they banged their heads on rafters, voices breaking, Puss-puss-puss; but what was so secret in the dark was a public event in the dormitory below where Brother Kiernan waited, sitting on an iron bed, already tapping his cane against his boot. The boys would get punished soon enough.

What was the crime? Trevor spat his olive pits out against the trailer. Bang! Bang! Bang! What was the fucking crime?

This dormitory where Brother Kiernan waited with his cane was not so far, Trevor said, from where the boys would have to line up two years later to view him in his coffin. This scene the grown-up man could still see vividly: the bruised purple undersides of the roses along the quartz-white gravel path, the smell of the blood and bone fertilizer, the stink of death. Brother Kiernan’s face was wax, his hair all white. The boy Trevor felt the cruel pinch of the shoes he had been forced to wear for this occasion, shoes that had been confiscated when the orphans first landed on Australian soil.

They took every bloody thing, Trevor said.

Have some more bread, he said.

Any little thing we brought from home. Conkers-do you know what a conker is?-rubber bloody bands. They put our shoes and socks and sweaters into beer cartons and wrote our names on there. ERIC HOBBS they wrote and clipped me across the lug hole when I said the name was wrong. They did not give our shoes back until the occasion of Kiernan’s funeral and by then our feet were bigger and harder and we had got used to moving smartly across frost, hard-crushed gravel and all the spikes and pricks and bindy-eyes we never knew before. The shoes clamped us hard at Kiernan’s funeral but it felt so good to see the bastard dead. Do you know what I mean, he asked, his eyes too bright, too narrowed.

Do you know what I mean? he asked, stabbing the melon as if to do it harm.

The boy was afraid. He asked about the cat.

The orphans had climbed up into the ceiling and gotten caught and then they were given blue chits which meant they had to report to Kiernan’s office.

Trevor sliced more watermelon and handed the boy a fist of olives which he was way too tense to eat.

It was a very small room, Trevor said. We knew it well, firstly because we had helped build it. “Man’s work with a boy’s body” is what they called it. Just off the ship we were divided into gangs to clear brush, dig trenches, lay foundations, gather granite from the quarry, pour barrows full of concrete, burn ourselves with lime. Boys from ten to fourteen. We made the rooms we were beaten in, and worse.

And Brother Kiernan now made good use of our Christian labor, mate. As punishment for entering the attic, he had us strip and walk around him naked in a circle and he lashed at us with that bloody cane.

The boy was frightened. He moved to wash his plate.

Trevor stayed him with a hand against his arm. I’m telling you about the cat, he said. You’ll like the cat. It was because of the cat that he beat our legs and bottoms without mercy, a great huge Irishman with an arm as thick as our legs. We carried those bruises and welts and cuts for bloody weeks. They were nothing. It was the terror in our heads. Nothing could compare with that.