Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

Across from Go-Go Sushi was a green brothel popular with UNSAVOURY CUSTOMERS I have watched them come and go but even when I was most particularly upset I was never such a reckless fool as to have my BRAIN IN MY DICK. I turned left in the direction Marlene had taken, past SPORT ITALIA where the COLOURFUL RACING IDENTITY was shot in the neck by a KNOWN ASSOCIATE OF CRIMINALS. Thank God I had no gun myself. A very short distance beyond this BLOOD-SPATTERED CRIME SCENE was Bayswater Road which would make you giddy with bridges and tunnels and cars descending and rising and crossing the abyss not a LIVING SOUL God save us all. What will happen to me? I searched for Marlene, back and forth between Bayswater Road and Elizabeth Bay Road, the narrow footpath causing both dents and bruises which would later bloom pink yellow green the colour of SWEETBREADS. I was making a map. Too late.

This was how I should have learned a bigger territory, like the children singing their times tables.

In the Vauxhall Cresta I was six years old fighting with my warty brother. I did not start the war but neither could I stop and suddenly Blue Bones pulled up the car by the salt pans at Balliang East.

Get out, he said.

It was just on dusk when I obeyed and my father reached back a long wiry arm and slammed the door shut. Then he drove away, the taste of the salt dust, crows cawing, the tail-light red as it proceeded into dark, sixteen miles towards the safety of the Marsh. It was well after the moon had risen before the OLD MAN returned to find his bawling boy. It learned me, as he told me more than once.

As chance would have it I heard Marlene's voice calling from beneath the grapevines of the crime scene and looking into the shady garden I saw she and Jean-Paul at a round green table with the dreadful catalogue laid out before them. They were IN CONFERENCE RE JAPAN. I easily got my chair untangled from the garden gate and I sat between her Jasmine and his Brut de Brut where I was informed that Jean-Paul had agreed If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die would be picked up by Woollahra Art Removals that very day.

I began GRINNING LIKE AN APE as the saying is.

Jean-Paul asked me how was Butcher.

My face was hurting very bad.

I heard Jean-Paul ask me would I like to get a job but he had no understanding of my situation. If I am GAINFULLY EMPLOYED the social services will stop my disability pension and when I finally lose my job I will never get the pension back for having LIED TO THE GOVERNMENT. If Butcher had been here he would have explained it properly but Jean-Paul did not believe me. I said I was no good at jobs and would not stand being shouted at as he might have reason to recall.

I mean, he said, off the books.

Whatever it was OFF THE BOOKS made my stomach sick. I pointed out that the social services were LITTLE HITLERS sometimes they came to inspect our garbage to see if I had a job and was buying Tasmanian pinot noir for instance.

No, he said, they don't do that.

I smiled at Marlene like a dog. She placed her hand on me, it had no more weight than a cabbage moth upon my shoulder. Off the books, she said, means Jean-Paul would not tell anyone you were working but he would give you money.

But Butcher had been in prison and it nearly killed him. I began to explain his continuing difficulty with Detective Amberstreet but Marlene prevented me, resting her hand light as a whisper on my lips.

Would you mind helping out Jackson at the Edgecliff Nursing Home?

I asked her, Do you know Jackson?

No, she said. Jean-Paul tells me you were mates when Butcher was in gaol. You raced his pigeons.

But no-one understood anything.

You were his friend, the night man.

I touched his pigeons, that's all.

Would you like to help him be the night man for a week or two?

For money? Off the books?

I asked her if she thought I should.

She said yes, so I said I supposed that would be OK.

Marlene then stood. She said she had to CATCH UP with Butcher at Go-Go Sushi and that she would see me in a minute and then she walked raising fine white dust from the gravel with her lovely sandalled feet.

I smiled at Jean-Paul but began to gag.

He pushed his chair away from the table and said, You would sit at the door all night and if anyone is sick you pick up the phone for the duty nurse.

I asked him, Was this so my brother did not have to take me to Japan?

He said, Yes that was so, he would not lie.

I asked when this would start but the truth is I could not even hear him anymore. God knows what damage I might cause if left alone.

The Plaintiff had a horse at one time, a very flighty Arab named Pandora and by the time Pandora had ripped her fetlock on barbed wire and then, three weeks later, thrown the Plaintiff, thus breaking six bones in her so-called art hand, I was pretty much retired from horses.

That is to say, I have not the least interest in the horse Olivier Leibovitz kept on West 89th Street and I never enquired as to exactly what sort of animal it was, only being sure—because Marlene told me—that it was absolutely not one of those Claremont Riding Academy horses from the same address, notorious bitter nags which had the habit of crushing their riders on the walls of the transverse on 102nd Street. The riding-school horses were as close as Marlene got to Manhattan equestrian life, and her own feeling for horses was not really the point. For she loved Olivier and she loved Olivier on a horse, how he looked and smelled, and most importantly, how happy it made him.

Contrary to what I thought when she walked across my paddock carrying her alimony-whore shoes, Marlene was extraordinarily kind to those she loved and it was completely typical of her to go out of her way to give me pleasure by arranging the ad in Studio International or to butter raisin toast for Hugh or read aloud from The Magic Pudding and, years earlier, when Olivier's divorce left him so broke that he had to sell his horse, it was a case of fuck the court and all of 60 Center Street.

He would get it back, the horse, she would make sure of it.

At first Olivier's stable expenses had been covered by his pathetic efforts on the Lazy Lucy, that is, licensing small slices of three Leibovitzes. These were not works chosen with any care, just scratched transparencies that had been, left to float around in the company of paper clips and pencils and bits of art-related correspondence. Most of the latter was in French, a language he spoke fluently but which he affected to be unable to read.

At the time when Marlene first surprised him he had imagined he was hiding his tiny licensing profits from his wife's lawyers, a fantasy of course—his possession of the Leibovitz droit moral was no secret and it was naturally deemed to be part of Marital Assets and he was forced to cough up every cent he made from his tacky souvenirs. His only luck, which was not clear until later, was that the lawyers, being philistines and ignoramuses, valued the droit moral in terms of the profit he had previously gained from it: i. e. sweet fuck all.

By the spring of 1975, which was when he lost the horse and stable, Marlene was his secretary and had therefore been granted the care of that rat's nest of paper he referred to only as "the French Material".

She asked him, "What shall I do with it?"

He looked into the grey metal cupboard with its bulging files,, its ribbon-bound sheaves, its single orphaned pages, yellowed, browned, creased. He shrugged, a Gallic gesture, so it seemed to Marlene Cook.

"Is it about the art?"

"Yes." He startled, smiling. "Absolutely! About the art."

He could have had no clue that she was already half drunk on her learning curve. She would have been far too shy to tell him that she had read Berenson and Vasari, Mars-den Hartley and Gertrude Stein, but at the time she asked, Is it about the art? she knew the importance of such correspondents as Vuillard and Van Dongen, and she had eaten enough hot dogs during lunch at Phillips and Sotheby's to wonder if this rat's-nest archive might not cover his horse and stable costs entirely. He had no idea how she loved him. She thought herself below him in every way, in grace, in beauty, in sophistication. He hadn't noticed that she was his angel, repairing him, dressing all his bleeding wounds.