Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

Remus Creek was a paradise with ferns of all varieties, palms, creepers with the skin of baby elephants, its water shallow but perfectly clear so that the small pebbles shone red and yellow in among the rippling gray. Poor Papa.

They arrived at a stand of flooded gums, tall thin eucalypts with shiny white-green bark and there in front of them were the foundations for the rotting buckled floor and when she followed Trevor up the wide wooden steps she thought of platforms in the jungle, Aztec, Mayan, sites of sacrifice.

The mumbo jumbos were waiting for her in a semicircle and Trevor went to sit at one end next to Rebecca leaving Dial alone, squinting into the sun.

Rebecca said, We have a rule, and in those four words Dial felt the bilious bitter taste of her dislike.

Dial did not answer but she saw that not even pretty Roger would catch her eye. The girl with the starving chest was playing with her toes.

Rebecca said, You know what I’m talking about, Dial. She looked sideways at Trevor as she spoke. Again Dial thought, She’s sleeping with him.

Yes, said Dial, you said you had a rule.

About cats.

Yes, you said that before.

Yes, and you said there was a lawyer who told you not to worry, but he was wrong, Dial. He admits he was wrong, said Rebecca. She held out a letter.

Dial nodded at the letter but went no closer to accepting it. She was thinking, I cannot take this shit. I will not. She was also thinking about the boy who had chosen to live up the hill with Trevor. His clothes would be removed as if he’d died, nothing left behind, not even a plastic toy to break her heart. She thought, I do have to take this. Then she thought, not for the first or last time either-This is where I’ve ended up.

So what do you want me to do? She tried to smile.

Get rid of the cat.

I take it none of you want him?

Ha-ha, said Rebecca.

No one else spoke, but Rebecca stood and walked off the platform with her great fat ass wobbling inside her cotton pants. In a moment a car door slammed and when Rebecca returned Dial could hear Buck. He arrived up on the platform, a prisoner in a metal cage.

Rebecca held out the cage and Dial took it.

Buck was meowing piteously.

I know you think this is cruel, Rebecca said, but considering he’s a murderer…

Dial was reading the metal manufacturer’s label on the heavy cage. FERAL-TRAPPA. She set it down and opened up the wire door and inside she saw Buck’s pink complaining mouth. He stood and sat. His front paw was caught, a sort of mousetrap for a cat.

Feral, she said.

It means wild, said Rebecca. The feral cat is declared as a class two species under the Land Protection Act.

You’ve crushed his fucking leg. He’s not feral. He’s my son’s cat.

He’s not your son, said Rebecca.

Dial looked to Trevor who looked away. She set down the cage and gently lifted the sprung arm of the trap and brought Buck into the light. He cried, and raked his claw down her arm.

You’ve crushed him. You know this won’t mend.

It is a her, said Rebecca.

Dial stood on the platform under the harsh violet sky. The time-warp idiots, she thought. Why don’t you fight for something real?

You can’t look after that cat, said Rebecca. You can’t even look after the kid.

Dial could look after Buck. That was all she knew to do. If you shot a cottontail you often found him wounded, struggling. You picked him up quickly, stilled your heart, stretched his neck. And it was done.

She stood before them. She did it swiftly. In a few seconds Buck was a warm pelt in her bleeding arms.

Go watch Walt Disney, she said to Rebecca.

She turned and walked down off the Aztec platform and passed between the flooded gums, along the shadowed creek with its stones and dams. She was crying then, not loudly. She found a shovel in the garden and carried Buck down into the rain forest and there, before the abandoned hut with the stone gargoyle, she dug down into the soil, chopping through the fresh white wounded roots, laying him in the crumbling black soil and covering him.

She had no prayers, comrade. Dear Papa, that was all.

When the boy was four years old, and before that probably as well, Grandma Selkirk would take him to the Guggenheim Museum and order him to run down the spiral ramp which-she said so-was what was intended by the architect, Frank Lord Right. That had been the boy’s misunderstanding. Grandma used the name herself whenever possible. How perfect, she said. Frank Lord Right was not building Calvary, she said, did not mean us to trudge upward to our crucifixion. Push UP on the elevator button, his grandma said, then run like the wind.

Three times he got in trouble with the guards apparently-he had no memory of this but he sure recalled Grandma’s argument with the tiny black guard after she cupped her hands on the Brancusi head. The guard said, Get back, then Grandma called for someone higher up and in the end she was the only person in New York allowed to touch the head.

It is art, she told the guard, who hated her for being bohemian, she said so.

Afterward she said, That guard could not have imagined that Brancusi was my friend. History would prove this not quite true, but never mind. She touched the boy’s own head the same as she touched the Brancusi, fitting her palm around it. She loved him. He felt it there, an almost exact notion of how precious he was to her. She was a smeller too, always sniffing the salt and death in seaweed, the waters of the lake, the crush of dried lavender. Her nose was small and straight. It was her best “instrument,” she said so. He would lie with her on the sofa in the big room at Kenoza Lake and she would go to sleep and the boy would sit with his hands on his knees and will her to continue breathing, the perfume of martini in the summer night, forever and ever, world without end.

The boy knew the names of smells, but it was his “visual intelligence” that was thought to be his “gift.” This was unmasked one winter Saturday when the Guggenheim had activities. The boy could not escape activities, and was forced to obey a leaflet containing a tiny section of a Jackson Pollock painting. Grandma said he had to match the little bit of picture with one of the three whole Pollocks on the museum walls.

When he found it pretty easy she looked at him so fiercely he knew he had done something good. You have the Selkirk eye, she said.

During the week she brought back her powdery friends from the English-Speaking Union, to see if they could do the same. They could not match her grandson. Four years old.

None of this had ever helped him in any way that he could understand.

When he saw the power lines and the cane fields and he made his way down the dry gully he had no idea that the Australian bush was crusted, creased, folded on itself, long gray ridges and bright streaky torn bits where the earth had tried to pull itself in half, or that he was like an ant making his way across a Jackson Pollock without a map. He did not know the story of the lost child or the drover’s wife and he came down the gully, jumping from broken rock to broken rock, and when he lost sight of the road ahead, he had lots of worries, mostly how he would get back to Kenoza Lake, but it did not enter his head that he might perish here.

He got a thorn in his hand and this broke off inside the flesh and he suffered a scratch on his cheek, but when he entered the lifeless pine forest at the bottom of the gully he walked without hesitation through the creepy quiet toward the dry white road.

Coming out into the sunlight, he understood that he could turn left to reach Yandina, but he turned right and so headed deeper into the bush, trudging along the lonely road which he remembered from the day after the storm. What had been slick and slimy had set hard and the ridge and rut of truck tires were now becoming clouds of dust, like dead souls rising in small whirls and skirmishes.