Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

About her husband, I did actually enquire, but she held her private life so nicking tightly, like a tourist clutching a handbag on the A train, and I learned no more about Olivier Leibovitz's present life than you might deduce from sheet lightning above a ridge line. I would put myself to sleep inhaling her.

On most mornings she was light and easy, but twice a single blood vessel rose in that supple subtle forehead and on both of these occasions she departed abruptly, leaving me with nothing but her dirty teacup in the sink. Off to see the husband. It could have driven me insane, and yet I will never forget the tenderness of that week we worked together on the Speaker, a whole country that must be healed, swabbed, patted, cleaned, like blowing air behind a lover's ear.

The rhythms of the restoration were affected by rainy weather which meant the air became suddenly colder and damper and the paint dried more slowly, but by the time the nor'-easterly returned the Speaker was once more a very serious fucking entity.

By the fourth evening I had removed the daggy bits of thread and sanded the broken interstices between mother canvas and collage. On the following morning the collage section was stapled to its own distant corner and in this way, with a touch of steam here, and a brutal tug there, we got it flattened and its warp and weft realigned. By the seventh day, I had the iron, the wax, the flat unrumpled "GOD" released from its torture on the hardwood floor. Gently gently catchee monkey.

"Mate," I said to Hugh, "I was planning to take Marlene for dinner." I gave him two chicken sandwiches, and a big bottle of Coke. Receiving these suck-up tributes, he appraised me, his old red eyes as cunning as a crocodile's.

I raised an eyebrow.

He made a small rocking movement as he considered my request. He said nothing but I observed that telltale muscle, his slippery obtruding lower lip, and then I knew that if I stayed out late there would be big bloody trouble.

I told him we would be around the corner at "the Chinaman's", a reference to the only restaurant in the Marsh.

Hugh studied his watch very carefully but did not look at me again. Pathetic, both of us. But ten minutes later all my silent rage was gone and I was sitting beside a gorgeous woman at Bukit Tinggi, not Chinese at all, as if it matters.

She was tired, her eyes hollowed.

"Don't ask," she said. "Feed me."

And that is exactly what I did, and we sat side by side like children, and I fed her beef rendang and fiery curried fish and wiped her lips with the tip of my thumb. She talked about the. many weirdnesses of Japan. It was all we discussed, but the subject had never seemed the point.

"We'll stay in Asakusa," she said. "It's kind of sleazy but there's a very funky inn."

"I'm broke," I said. "I couldn't afford the bus to Wollongong."

"They'll pay," she laughed. "You're such an idiot."

"And you too?"

"An idiot? No, I'm part of the package, baby." She cupped her hand around my jaw and stroked my ear. "I'm the facilitator."

"What's a facilitator?"

"Japanese. It means buys the drinks."

I could not tell her but this could only be a fantasy for me. I had never left Australia and I never could. I could not abandon Hugh again. I could not even stay long at the Bukit Tinggi and by nine o'clock I was escorting poor Marlene back up the dismal stairs in Bathurst Street. There is always Hugh.

Opening the door I surprised him, a fucking paintbrush in his hand.

As I rushed at him, he took a step backwards—the moron— itching his big bum, a great goofy grin on his unshaven face.

"What have you done?"

The answer was: the dipshit had painted on my work. I could have killed the prick. I howled at him.

"Shush," said Marlene but I was deaf with fury at everything I had lost, would lose, my son, my life, my art. He retreated, afraid but not afraid, nodding and waving his arm as if I were a cloud of smoke.

It is my job to see better than you can, or John bloody Berger, or Robert fucking Hughes, but confronting my brother's red assassin's eyes, I saw only that he was a moron and I was therefore slow to notice he had painted only on that portion of the canvas which would, tomorrow, be covered forever. On that virgin rectangle where the Leibovitz had been suspected of hiding, he had written a mad artless note, like something on a dunny wall.

THE VANDAL AMERSTRIT DID THIS DAMIGE

FEBRUARY 7 1981. NEXT TIME YOUR EERS

WILL BE RIPPED OFF AND EATEN.

PROMISED BY HUGH BONES MARCH 25 1981.

Marlene later said I snarled like an animal. Certainly my sixteenstone brother cowered, but he was also, at the same time, grinning, a small sharp-toothed de Kooning thing, and he was rocking, just a little, from the waist.

"Lead," he said.

"You cunt!"

"Lead."

"Lead paint?"

His grin made no sense at all.

"Why did you do that, you idiot?"

He tapped his head and grinned. "Up here for dancing."

"Shush," Marlene whispered, stroking my arm.

"Show," said Hugh.

I snatched the brush out of his hand and threw it out the open window.

"Stop it," Marlene said. "It can be read by X-ray."

She was a quick study, the first to understand that Hugh had written a secret letter in lead paint, words which would only be seen if the painting was X-rayed.

I remember still those eyes, wide with astonishment. She would not forget this, ever. She would never make the mistake of underestimating my brother as a witness to a work of art.

At last I got it too, and then I embraced the huge smelly ridiculous thing, holding his bristly neck while he squeezed the breath from me and cackled in my ear.

Who could explain the dark puzzle of Slow Bones' folded brain?

All my life I was Slow Bones unless someone OUTSIDE THE FAMILY was present to explain my jokes. Oh, my brother said at last when THE PENNY DROPPED and he understood my painting, you clever bugger.

I could not return the compliment.

By next morning the repair was concluded, but there was no DAY OF REST and we had another ruction i. e. Jean-Paul had gone to New Zealand for a conference and this had obviously been planned solely in order to inconvenience my brother who wished to retrieve his painting for Japan. It was well known Butcher was too afraid to leave Australia or go to any place he was not known. So who could explain why he was in such a rush now unless he had an ANXIOUS PERSONALITY surely that could not be true.

Marlene had never met our benefactor so all she knew of him was from my brother e. g. Jean-Paul was not French but Belgian, not Jean-Paul Milan but Henk Piccaver, and it gave the Butcher a lot of pleasure to tell us that MR. PICKOVER was in New Zealand or WANK WALLOON had elevator shoes. Yet our benefactor had saved us many times and when Butcher was gaoled for stealing his own paintings from his wife it was Jean- Paul who was THE GOOD SAMARITAN although he was very frightened of me thinking I was a VIOLENT TYPE. When my brother was TAKEN DOWN to the cells it was Jean-Paul who gave me a room in his Edgecliff Nursing Home. AND ON THE MORROW WHEN HE DEPARTED HE SAID TAKE CARE OF HIM, AND WHATSOEVER HE SPENDEST MORE, WHEN I COME AGAIN, I WILL REPAY THEE. This was not a text my brother would have ever pinned upon his wall.

At the nursing home I made a friend of Jackson the night man a very interesting fellow a PIGEON FANCIER who brought in his patent racing clocks to show me. Better to be Slow Bones than be a bird.

Did Butcher reveal to Marlene Jean-Paul's kindness? Of course not. He said that his patron's Carrier watch cost forty-thousand dollars. This justified him attacking the DEVELOPMENT SITE with saws and hammers and staple guns and he did not pause to think that he was damaging a dance floor of a quality our parents would have never felt beneath their feet. Only in death were they more peaceful than when joined in the FOX TROT. It would make you cry to see how gently my father held his swollen liver-coloured hand against my mother's little back.