Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

What is it, Butch?

Can't you see? The bastards have turned off the power.

My first thought was that this was a punishment from the STATE ELECTRICITY COMMISSION because we left the lights on all night long but after the power had been off for three weeks, and we had been carrying water from the river and digging holes to do our business in, we learned that the citizens of Bellingen had ordered disconnection as if we were hostagetakers who must be driven from our hole. On top of this came an EVICTION ORDER and a DEMOLITION NOTICE because Jean-Paul's house was built too close to the river. Of course the council had approved the building years before so it must have walked closer to the bank than previously. In any case, it was all a PACK OF LIES and after we were finally driven out, the house must have walked back to its approved position on the site.

As for Jean-Paul himself, as Butcher said, he should be condemned by Ryde Council on account of his arse being built too close to the public footpath and on our long flight back to Sydney, a full eight-hour drive, he was filled with sarcastic comments of this sort about the BOURGEOIS ART COLLECTOR but I enjoyed the drive. He took us up to Dorrigo, God bless him, and then into the high country of Armidale where the summers are dry and the paddocks were gold and the windows of the ute rolled down and the seat belts flapping—slap, slap, slap—against the door frames. The old ute had no air-conditioning just a DUCT opened by a foot-long lever which caused the release of long-trapped dust. Lord what perfumes—honey and gum blossoms and rubber hoses. We were Boones, big men, packed in tight, arse by arse, our heads bumping the ceiling on the potholes. My brother was a tense and fearsome driver but he refused to travel at less than ninety miles an hour, below which speed the bent propeller shaft set up a terrible vibration. He drove like his father did before him, with his elbows wide, his chest pushed forward, his angry eyes glaring straight ahead. So we sped like demons hour after hour through the gold and blue as if we were SIR ARTHUR BLOODY STREETON or FREDERICK McCUBBIN both painters Butcher loved even while he sneered at them.

I farted and cried, Fire's on! If you know the Streeton painting you get the joke.

Entering the outskirts of Sydney, we were skint, the last of the fertiliser money being spent on petrol. At Epping Road we abandoned the Pacific Highway, that long familiar winding road once used by black fellows, and then tooled down to Lane Cove and East Ryde. We were both watching the petrol gauge and very quiet and thoughtful as we reentered the old familiar country of DIVORCE and PATRONAGE both of these being situated in the exact same street. God help us. Before the Gladesville Bridge we turned onto Victoria Road and then right into Monash Road and as we entered Orchard Court we were already in contravention of a court order that neither of us were permitted to be within five miles of THE MARITAL HOME. My balls were shrivelled.

What would happen to us now? My brother made that old familiar right-hand turn, past the marital madness, and straight onto Jean-Paul's lawn. Then Butcher Bones opened the glove box and removed a hammer, bless me, what had he become?

Being as familiar with that cul-de-sac as with my own pyjamas, I ploughed into Jean-Paul's perfect lawn with one hundred per cent understanding, i. e. I knew I could rely on the neighbours to call my patron before I turned the engine off.

I'd already had a whole life in Orchard Court where I had been not only a celebrity, but a famous lovesick fool. It was here I brought my bride. I built a bloody tower where she could meditate—believe it!—and an amazing tree house of the type a boy might dream about but never see in waking life—three platforms, two ladders, all lodged inside the branches of a lovely old jacaranda whose gorgeous purple petals, fallen two months before, were now rotting like heartache across the slate-grey roof. I had been a different man in those days, so naive that lawyers and police could later decide my own paintings were marital assets, i. e. not my property. The canvases were there now, a whole life's work, which the court had "deemed"—as the saying is—that the plaintiff could do with as she wished.

There had been no room in the ute for anything but paint and canvas and it was not by accident that the great alizarin crimson masterpiece was sitting on the top of the load. I removed the tonneau cover and attacked its crate with the claw hammer, and as the stainless-steel screws screeched like murder victims, I could already hear the telephone screaming in Jean-Paul's pool house.

I used Hugh's earlobe to persuade him from the ute and he took several swings at me before the penny dropped—restraining order or no, it was in his interests to roll out this canvas across our patron's lawn.

Jean-Paul was a heartless little fuck but he had the worst case of art lust you ever knew, and if his eye was not in the tiniest bit educated, it was easily aroused, and this made him buy a huge amount of shit and, on some occasions, bet against the auction records. I admit that I was fresh from vandalising his house of few possessions, causing ructions in the Promised Land, stealing fertiliser and allegedly cheating him in other ways, but all of that would be forgotten if, on looking down onto his lawn, he understood a fraction of what I'd done. Then he would transform himself from a lump of dog shit to a splendid silver thing.

The evening clouds threw a galah-pink cast across the scene; it didn't matter. This painting could suck up the damage caused by pink, by show-off lawns, by secret swimming pools and all that they entail. It was like a fucking stock car, indestructible. As I waited impatiently for my patron to appear I was so very deeply confident, swaying on my heels beside poor frightful Hugh whose nose was running, whose mouth was twisted in a shiteating grin, a rictus of hope and terror, and together we anticipated the perfect little blow-dried, swept-back "do" which, if you wished to suck up badly enough, would suddenly remind you—God, I have been disgusting in my time—that Jean-Paul looked just like JFK.

The plan of battle worked very well at first—car on lawn, phone in pool house, painting laid out right way round and, finally, my patron's head appearing in the study window.

Except the head was not my patron's. God, I hardly recognised her. It was the plaintiff, his neighbour, the woman I had fucked back to front and sideways, held in the night, the most beautiful creature ever born. And there she was, the mother of my son, with her prim little mouth and her sharp enquiring nose and her expensive tan and I could not even see the really costly part of her, the shoes. She was visible for just a second, behind the glass. Hugh whimpered, climbed into the ute, and shut the door.

The bomb was now ticking, never mind. I waited for Jean-Paul.

He too appeared and I felt him suck on the bait and in less than two minutes I had a hit—the patron at his door—tiny bathing suit, smooth brown legs, knitted cotton sweater, dark glasses in his hand. Stepping down onto the lawn, he did not waste time acknowledging me but went directly at the painting, circling it, staring down, a bullshit parade of connoisseurship. But I had been around Jean-Paul too long, so I'll tell you what he was really thinking while he flicked the wings of his Ray-Bans: What the fuck is this? and How little can I get it for?

"I'll give you a grand," he said. "Cash. Now."

I knew I had him, sans doubt, sans souci, sans fucking question, so I began to roll up the canvas. Suck my dick, I thought. One fucking grand.

"Come on mate," he said. "You know what's happening at the auctions."

He was a fool to bargain with a butcher. Worse, he called me "mate", the first sign of his need and he was not helped by the arrival of a police car whose blue light was in a spastic fit as it came to the defence of Orchard Court.