Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

As for the work itself, you can see it, finally, years later, in a serious museum, and I will not treat you like some dickhead day trader in an aeroplane who wants to know "Should I know your name?"

But let me say only that I rubbed at it and buffed and scraped and sanded until it was an argument both within itself and against itself. Jesus it would put the fear of God in you, to see the skeins of secret black, it could choke you, and hick you, and put your naked toes onto the fire.

This work continued three days. And it was done. Ominously, there were no visitors. And by that time Hugh had disposed of his dog and his little eyes were deep and hidden and he was very quiet around the property, mostly hacking at the thistles. I stayed away from Bellingen, judging it wiser to avoid the crime scene completely and drive the extra thirty minutes to Coffs Harbour.

There were already difficulties—limited supplies, no phthalo green, a change of palette I would rather not have made. On the fourth day after the metacarpal came the first assailant, an idiot from Bellingen Council with long white socks, a building inspector with a clipboard in his hand. He went around the property with a surveyor's chain, measuring the distance from the river bank to the septic tank. That's how a small town gets rid of you. They declare your house in contravention of the regulations. Why would I give a shit? It wasn't mine.

Money very short. I cooked baked vegetables until even I was sick of them, and Hugh—God bless him—did not once complain. But all this time no-one actually told us why we were now hated. We were fighting the wrong war, for the wrong reasons, and it was not until eleven days after the broken finger that the police came rattling across the cattle grid, not the locals but two plainclothes fellows with a driver from Coffs Harbour.

Seeing the car, Hugh fled arrest, charging headfirst across the floodplain and I did not find him until dark when, having heard the police car finally depart, he emerged, wild-eyed and muddy, from a wombat hole.

The Art Police are cops, that's all, and they will come and call on you as unexpectedly as Jehovah's Witnesses and for reasons just as stupid. However, on that soupy day in Bellingen I was ignorant of the breed and I mistakenly assumed my visitors were typical.

There was an older man of fifty or so, tall and heavily built like an old-style walloper but with an odd almost lackadaisical gait and a big square head always turning this way and that as if he were trying to spot the Eiffel bloody Tower. He wore a ratty Fair Isle sweater and smoked a stinky pipe from which he continually blew globs of tar and spit onto my pasture. This Detective Ewbank exuded the sloppy good-naturedness of a packing clerk two weeks from retirement whilst, at the same time, having some weird aerial connection with his brainylooking partner.

The younger man, Amberstreet, was not much more than twenty-five but he had already carved on his face a deep set of V-shaped creases which pointed like diagram arrows towards his pale grey eyes. Barry, his mate called him; his mouth was thin, and downturned, and perhaps because he was so stooped and spectacularly unmuscled, he made me imagine that the Art Police must be a very fucking unusual caste indeed, and in the same way that Jean-Paul's beautiful wife might suggest hidden qualities in her very plain husband, Amberstreet's weird bird-like looks gave a value to his mate's pipe and Fair Isle sweater that could not have been more inflated, not even by Sotheby's.

These cops caught me flat-footed, why wouldn't they? They didn't say they were from Sydney. (I thought they had come from Bellingen, for Hugh. Instead they wished to inspect my work and I took them over to the shed to see it. Yes, I had obtained the paint and canvas by what you might call false pretences, so what would they do? Hang me? Yes, I had sold about a ton of fertiliser to Mrs. Dyson and Jean-Paul, I guessed, had got upset. The rich are like that, overcome by panic attacks at the thought they are possibly being used. God, what sort of animal would do that to them?

I walked Ewbank and Amberstreet to the shed as if they were Macquarie Street collectors on a studio visit, and I must say Ewbank was very bloody amiable at that stage, even if he did inform me that I had a record or, as he put it, was "known to the police". Otherwise he was full of questions about the veggie garden and the Brahmin cattle Dozy had agisted on my roadside paddock. Amberstreet, meanwhile, was very quiet, but even this was in no way threatening. As Ewbank pointed out to me, his mate seemed mostly concerned about the danger of getting cow shit on his new Doc Martens.

The shed was a shed, the back third a loading ramp filled with Mrs. Dyson's hay bales, the front two-thirds earth-floored. Here I parked the tractor, stored the chainsaw, the brush cutter and what garden tools I had not left out in the weather. Here too I had rolled my nine canvases around long cardboard tubes. They leaned neatly against the wall, just like the rake, the shovel, the scythe and so on. Of course this was not ideal, but I obviously could not have them in the studio shouting in my ear.

"OK, Michael," said Detective Ewbank, "it's time for show-andtell."

I made some joke—forget it now—about a warrant being required.

"It's in the car," said Amberstreet. "We'll show you later."

This gave me a jolt, but I got over it. What was the worst thing that could happen? I'd be charged with making art on Jean- Paul's credit? Fuck him. The patience of the rich is easily strained. But I remained an obedient little citizen and I rolled out the first painting, 7, the Speaker, Ruled As King Over Israel, laying it on a springy three-inch cushion of improved pasture.

So clock this: eight miles out of Bellingen, NSW, me in my shorts and bare feet and Amberstreet like some crane or heron with his short upper body and his long thin legs and cinched-in belt and the whole of his skeleton throwing all its force into his eyes as he looked down at my canvas. The work had a sort of nailed-down fuck-you quality with all the process showing. I had—I hope I told you—already begun to glue down rectangles of canvas onto the broader field. Even in the warm misty sunlight it looked very bloody good indeed.

The police said nothing throughout the first inspection, not even when we found the nest of baby mice living in the centre of a roll. To tell the truth, I was almost happy. I could not go to gaol, and the work looked so good, in no way diminished by the smell of mice, or the waving light brown watermark that now ran, like the hamon on a Japanese sword, along the bottom edge.

Amberstreet wished to view 7, the Speaker again. And I was an artist. Why wouldn't I wish to show? I watched the strange little critic, arms folded, shoulders hunched. Ewbank, for his part, began to whistle "Danny Boy".

"What would this be worth?" Amberstreet asked me. "On the market, at auction."

I assumed he was trying to think how to recoup the cost of Raphaelson's one-pound tubes, so I told him it was worth exactly nothing at this moment. I was out of fashion. Couldn't sell a painting to save my bloody life.

"Yes, I understand that, Michael. Five years ago, you might have got thirty-five thousand dollars for this."

"No."

"There's no point in lying, Michael. I know what you used to sell for. The thing is now, you're in free fall. Isn't that so?"

I shrugged.

"I'll give you five," he said suddenly.

"Oh, Jesus," said Ewbank, and walked over to inspect the concrete pigsties, whacking at them with a length of irrigation pipe. "Jesus," he cried, "Joseph and Mary."

"No tax," said Amberstreet and I saw his eyes all glistening. "All cash."

Ewbank, meanwhile, was pissing himself with laughter, shoving heaps of black shag into his fat pipe. His younger colleague's face, by contrast, was creased like tissue paper protecting the bright stones of his eyes.