Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

Geena Davis, said Olivier.

Like the movie star.

Same, exactly.

I will not easily forget the day I was declared too slow to return to Bacchus Marsh State School number twenty-eight. I would have burned them to the blessed ground if only I had had some damn good pills to stop me being afraid of punishment. God bless me, save me, I have been made good by cowardice nothing more.

Olivier said I might as well have another beer. I had the weight to soak it up, he said so. He asked me did I know Marlene was a thief. I said she was my friend.

At this he moaned, saying she was his friend too, God help him.

Soon he was saying the most frightful things and it took a while to understand he had switched the subject to his mother a very nasty woman. He was happy she was dead. He got a rash when he remembered her.

He was called away by the waitress and I thought he must be in trouble for his violent language but then he returned with airline socks which I must put on. Everyone must obey this rule. He MINISTERED UNTO ME, kneeling to remove my sandshoes and whiffy socks which he tied inside a plastic bag. He said it might be better if I LIMIT MY FLATULENCE to the rear of the plane where it was needed, and then we laughed a lot.

You should have been rich, old chum, he said. You could employ me to change your socks every day.

The waitress brought us each a brandy and put my socks and shoes in the locker overhead.

Olivier said he could have been rich easy enough but his mother was a thieving whore who stole everything from him and it made him sick to think of what she'd done. He would like to be rich and that would be perfect, to look after his horse, to ride like hell, he looked at me and smiled and I knew exactly what he meant—the blood and heart, everything pumping, happy, fearful, the human clock in the river of the day.

She has ruined me, he said. I thought he meant his mother.

Am I her pet dog, he continued, so I knew that was Marlene.

You see, that is exactly what I am, he said. She will fill my bowl and brush my coat. I would rather be put down.

I can ruin her, he said a moment later. That's the irony, old chap. I can destroy her. But what would be the bloody point, old man? If I ruined her she would not rub my ears.

I woke up in the sky above America with my mouth full of dust, scents of fancy gargle, shaving cream, female soap.

That's Los Angeles, he said.

This was my first sighting and I did not know what it could mean, but later I would see the swarms of tiny lights clustered through the night, the cities and highways of America, the beauty of white ants, termites devouring, mating signals glowing in their pulsing tails. Which prophet ever foretold such infestation?

Olivier tapped my knee and said, I am in a state old chap. He offered a pill packet and a sip of his water. He said that if he ate peanuts he would die, if he had oysters his throat would close, but if he did not have Marlene he might as well cut his own throat with a Stanley knife.

I returned his pills. He took one too.

He said, I've just decided I am not going to sign that thing for her.

I asked what thing.

He said, It is completely bogus, so I won't. It's time I had some principles.

I asked what it was.

He said, She would never think I have the nerve. But you watch her old chum. You watch her when I refuse.

I asked would he destroy her.

That made him laugh a long time, stopping and starting and snorting until I feared he had gone mad.

Finally I asked him what was so bloody funny but we were, as they say, PREPARING FOR LANDING and when the aircraft banged itself to earth my question had not been addressed.

The taxis in New York are a total nightmare. I don't know how anybody tolerates them, and I am not complaining about the eviscerated seats, the shitty shock absorbers, the suicidal lefthand turns, but rather the common faith of all those Malaysian Sikhs, Bengali Hindus, Harlem Muslims, Lebanese Christians, Coney Island Russians, Brooklyn Jews, Buddhists, Zarathustrians—who knows what?—all of them with the rocksolid conviction that if you honk your bloody horn the sea will part before you. You can say it is not my business to comment. I am a hick, born in a butcher's shop in Bacchus Marsh, but fuck them, really. Shut the fuck up.

Yes, it is insane to consider educating them one by fucking one, Miss Manners, but when I find a moron leaning on his horn outside my window...

So I had to go to the supermarket at a time of night when you would expect the trip to be a swift one, when all the nice Jewish grandmothers should be home in bed or making their special gefilte fish for Rosh Hashanah or whatever it is they do—but perhaps the crowds of grannies in Grand Union were Christians or Tartars, but by God those old women were a subcategory of their own and they would smash you with their shopping carts if you could not match their speed. I was jet-lagged, a foreigner, and I was slow. God help me.

An American supermarket is one thing, Jesus—but a New York supermarket is a complete dog's breakfast—you would have to be born in aisle five to understand its logic. As you have doubtless guessed already, I had come to buy a dozen eggs. At first I could not find them, then there they were, right next to the feta, so many bloody categories of eggs, sizes of eggs, colours of eggs, my fellow shoppers could not wait for me to make a choice. I was blocking their aisle, so they locked wheels with me, crowded in from aisles two and three, swarmed like gridlocked morons at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel.

I bought brown eggs because they seemed more basic—I really was a hick—but five blocks later, above Mercer Street and Broome, when I stood in the rusty shadow of the fire escape, I discovered the expensive little fucks had shells like concrete. Did I tell you I had been a fatal fast bowler at Bacchus Marsh High School? I still had a good eye and my father's arm but no matter how I swung or spun them, the eggs bounced off the windscreens of the honking cabs.

Marlene, bless her, tried neither to prevent nor encourage me and when I stepped back in through the open window she looked up from the ratty sofa where she was stretched out reading The New York Times. "Come here my genius."

She was so, so gorgeous, the reading light catching her left cheek, a wash of gold dust, rising from a slate blue field.

"You are a moron." She held her arms open and I held her, smelled her jasmine skin, her shampooed hair. Did I say I loved her? Of course I did. I slid my hand down her pole-climber's back, touching every vertebra in that nubbly line of life. She was my thief, my lover, my mystery, a lovely series of revelations which I prayed would never end. It was our third night in New York City. We had money now. The day had been a big success, and not just because of the case of Bourgueil and the bottle of Lagavulin, although that did smooth the edges, but Do2y Boylan's Signal-fly painting was now stored in an art world fortress in Long Island City. Its only entrance, Marlene told me, was through a tunnel which was flooded every night. The vaults were filled with Mondrians, de Koonings, and her precious Leibovitz which her wacko husband would come and sign off ASAP.

"Forget the taxis," she said. "It's New York. What do you expect? You'll get used to it."

She was right, of course. I was from the Marsh where Highway 31 ran right past my bedroom, trucks roaring and grinding all night as you waited for them to lose it on Stamford Hill, plough down into Main Street, sheering all the verandahs off the shops.

I would grow accustomed to the fucking taxis, but what I could not get used to was that Marlene was not screaming at me. By now the Alimony Whore would have called the cops but here I had a quick hit of Lagavulin—God bless the workingmen of Islay—and as I left to buy some better eggs, she called me an idiot and put her tongue inside my ear.