Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

He calmed after a while, but then he started in on Hugh who he claimed was smashing up his "facility".

"He pulled the washstand off the wall."

"What do you want me to do? I'm in New York."

"Fuck you, you thief. I'll have him locked up for his own protection."

After the nice patron slammed the phone down in my ear we found a bar and I drank my first Budweiser. What a jar of cat's piss that turned out to be. "Don't worry," Marlene said, "it'll be all right tomorrow."

But it was Hugh I was thinking of. And although I held Marlene's hand, I was alone, rank with shame and weariness as I was led onto the bus to Newark Station where we caught New Jersey Transit to Perm Station and then changed to an art-encrusted loony bin to Prince Street. It was SoHo but not the SoHo where you bought your Comme des Garcons. I had no idea where I had surfaced, only that I had destroyed my brother's life and that the sirens were hysterical and cabs would not shut the fuck up and that, somewhere, near here, there was a place to stay. I wanted a gin and tonic with a great fat fistful of anaesthetic ice.

At dusk we finally arrived on Broome and Mercer, that is at an hour when the sheet-metal factories were dark, the power was off, the aging pioneers of Colour Field and High Camp Anaesthesia were presumably crawling into their fucking sleeping bags while the web of fire escapes was weaving a last lovely filigree of light across the factories' faces.

On the corner of Mercer Street, Marlene said, "I'm going to stand on your shoulders."

I obediently held out my hands, and Marlene Cook climbed up me like a full forward in the goal square in the Melbourne Cricket Ground. This was the first time I glimpsed the size of what might be still hidden from me. With her big handbag still across her shoulder my intimate companion leaped from my hands to my shoulders. Only one hundred and five pounds but she departed with such force that my knees bent like tired old poppy stems and by the time I steadied myself she was pulling herself up on the rusty ladder, then zigzagging through the filigree to the fifth floor. I heard a resistant window break free, a kind of pop, like a locked-up vertebra achieving independence.

Who was this fucking woman? There was a police car approaching, lumbering slowly along the broken street, headlights up, headlights down. And who the fuck was I? My money was all Japanese. My passport was with my bags in a locker in Penn Station. A silver key fell from the night and bounced across the cobbles. The police car braked and waited. I entered the spotlight, picked up the key, retreated. Then the car lumbered onwards, dragging its muffler like a broken anchor chain.

This was not Sydney. Let me list the ways.

"Come on up," my lover called. "Fifth floor."

On the other side of the door it was pitch bloody dark and I made my way slowly up the stairs, feeling my way past a landing filled with disgusting smoke-damaged carpet and another with cardboard boxes and then on the fourth floor I saw the flickering light of candles spilling from behind a battered open metal door. "How's this?"

It was a loft, almost empty, almost white. Marlene stood in the centre. Her big black handbag was on the floor behind her, beneath the big deep-silled window, amidst the mess of wooden splinters which announced her entry. Abandoned on the sill was a fucking Stanley Super Wonder Bar, a heavy-duty piece of steel with a ninety-degree-angle claw for pulling nails and, at the other extremity, a deadly point.

"Honey, is this yours?"

She took it from me without a word.

I observed how familiarly she hefted it. "Whose place is this we're in?"

She was studying me closely, frowning. "New South Wales Government Department of the Arts," she said. "They have it for artists-in-residence."

"Where is the artist?"

"You?" She approached, a supplicant, her shoulders bending to fit against my chest.

I snatched the pry bar from her. "Who lives here?"

I had hurt her hand, but she smiled, soft and bruised as peaches in the grass. "Baby, we'll have money from Tokyo tomorrow."

"Tomorrow I have to fly home."

"Michael," she said. And then she broke apart and she was weeping, Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, fractured, her beauty divided against itself by cracks and fissures, a pit, eyes like animals, God have mercy I threw the bar away and held her, so shockingly tiny against my chest, her little head within my hands. I wanted to wrap her tight inside a blanket.

"Don't go," she said.

"He's my brother."

She turned her big wet eyes up to me.

"I'll bring him here," she said suddenly. "No, no," she said, jumping away from my nasty laugh. "No, really." She joined her palms and did a weird sort of Buddhist thing. "I can do this,"

Marlene said. "He can come with Olivier."

Oh no, I thought, oh no. "Olivier is coming here?"

"Of course. What did you imagine?"

"You never said a thing."

"But he's the one with the droit moral. I can't sign."

"He's coming here? To New York?"

"How else could I do it? Really? What did you think?"

"I thought this was some little romantic tryst."

"It is," she said. "It is, it is."

For this I had betrayed my mother and my brother? So fucking Olivier could be witness to adultery?

"Don't you fuck with me, Marlene." I was Blue Bones' son and don't know what else I said. I certainly kicked the nasty wonder bar against the wall. "What's that?" I roared. "What the fuck is that?"

"I don't know."

"Bullshit you don't know."

"I think it's called a pry bar."

"You think?"

"Yes."

"And you really carry this in your purse?"

"I had it in my suitcase until Penn Station."

"Why?"

She shrugged. "If I was a man you'd never ask me that."

That was when I walked out. I found a place called. Fanelli's up on Prince Street where they were nice enough to let me pay a thousand yen for a glass of scotch.

One Sunday in the Marsh.

One Sunday in the Marsh there came a bishop walking out of the vestry like a crab he had been in Sydney that very morning but before that time he had been tortured by Chinese communists. He had his back split open by whips and his flesh had hardened rough and raw as a Morrisons road full of dried tyre tracks after heavy rain. Following the first Psalm he explained why no-one should vote for the Australian Labor Party and then he removed his vestments in full sight of the CONGREGANTS and my mother said Lord save us but when invited to respond my daddy wished to know what time did the bishop have his breakfast in Sydney.

What was the question?

How long did it take to fly from Sydney?

One hour, said the bishop.

My mother kicked my father but he was Blue Bones and he did not give a tinker's damn about the opinion of the men in the vestry and he certainly would not modify his behaviour on account of a size-four female shoe. Our father was a well-known MARSH IDENTITY. The flight from Sydney was a bloody miracle as far as he was concerned, so he wanted the bishop to answer him—was it rough or smooth?

The bishop told him smooth.

Lord knows what my father would say now if he rose from the grave to find me prisoner in the utility room of Jean-Paul's nursing home. No doubt give me the STROP to punish me for destroying PRIVATE PROPERTY. Fair enough. Only when justice had been done would he understand that Butcher had flown all the way to New York, had abandoned me again.

That would get my father straightaway. Ah, he would ask, how long would that take?

Thirteen hours.

Good heavens.

My daddy was a REAL CHARACTER, as the saying is.

Everyone remembers him. WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?

The police are little Hitlers according to Butcher Bones but when I was in arrears at the nursing home they did not charge me with a crime. As long as I remained inside the utility room everything was hunky-dory. They brought me interesting objects they had discovered in their travels including a bear used to advertise a doughnut shop.