Peter Carey: Theft: A Love Story

Carpenter should have known to drink his shandy and start again. When they teased me I TOOK IT IN GOOD PART even if I might have murdered them. Like that. I was a GENTLE GIANT. Our father was Blue Bones on account of he had red hair when young so they called him Blue meaning red. That is a general rule to go by if you come from OVERSEAS. In Australia everything is the opposite of what it seems to mean. E. G. I was SLOW BONES because I moved so rapid, it was my way of moving they referred to. I was Slow Bones some days, Slow Poke others, this last was SMUTTY.

Those blokes were ROUGH DIAMONDS from the milk factory or the Darley Brickworks AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS always referring to the bull putting its pizzle in the cow like it was the strangest thing in life.

Look at that Poke, he is poking her. But I could take a JOKE and get a POKE fast slow anyway you like you might be surprised.

The Bones were butchers. We had our own slaughter yards at the former DRAYBONE INN. In the gold-rush days this was where they would change the coach horses for COBB & CO but now it was where we brought the beasts to end their days. Never did a Bones take life lightly. If it was a fish or an ant, then possibly. But a beast's heart tips the scales at five pounds and no matter how many you slaughter you cannot do it without a thought. There was a sort of prayer YOU POOR OLD BUGGER or other stuff more serious I'm sure, and then they cut its throat and caught the blood in the tin bucket to save for sausage. It is a big responsibility to cut up a beast but when it is done it is done and afterwards you go to the Royal and then you come home THE WORSE FOR WEAR I do admit. After that you rest. It is in the Bible re Sunday: you must not work, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. Poor Mum.

I was not to be a butcher, bee-boh bless me. My brother was three inches shorter still he took my true and rightful name. It's a doggie dog world.

Butcher Bones had the opportunity to keep up the family business in Bacchus Marsh but by the time Dad had his stroke Butch had met the GERMAN BACHELOR who gave him postcards to stick on the wall above his bunk. Those cards turned his head. The German Bachelor was permitted to be a teacher at Bacchus Marsh High School where he instructed the children of men who had lost their lives fighting Germans in the war. I don't know why he was not in gaol but my brother came home and said his teacher was a MODERN artist and had attended the so-called BOWER HOUSE. If Dad had known the effect of that Bower House on his oldest son he would have gone up to the school and dropped the German Bachelor like he dropped Mr. Cox after he strapped me for answering incorrectly.

Blue Bones took Coxy out of the room and across the street behind his van. Coxy's feet lifted six inches off the ground. That is all we saw, but knew much more.

It was my brother who inherited the nickname Butcher and that is a joke that anyone can see for it was he who refused the knife and scabbard. From the German Bachelor he got the habit of shaving his skull the DICKHEAD also the postcards of MARK ROTHKO and the idea that ART IS FOR BUTCHERS NOW. He learned from the German Bachelor that art had previously been restricted to palaces where it was viewed behind high gates by Kings and Queens, Dukes, Counts, Barons.

In any case he refused the apron when our poor mother begged him put it on. His father could not speak nor move but it was obvious he would like to clout Butcher across the earhole one last time. Auld Lang Syne. After Dad had his stroke there was no more SLAUGHTER.

It is hard work to slaughter a beast but when it is done it is done.

If you are MAKING ART the labour never ends, no peace, no Sabbath, just eternal churning and cursing and worrying and fretting and there is nothing else to think of but the idiots who buy it or the insects destroying TWO-DIMENSIONAL SPACE.

There is nothing sure or certain it would seem no matter how you shave your skull or boast about your position in AUSTRALIAN ART. One minute you are a NATIONAL TREASURE with a house in Ryde and then you are a has-been buying Dulux with your brother's DISABILITY PENSION.

You are a CONVICTED CRIMINAL a servant living on a Tick and Thistle farm.

The puppy was a cattle dog but there were no beasts for him to work with so he never learned his purpose on the earth. Bless him. I wrestled with him before he passed. Ascended, poor tyke.

He was a licky dog. He liked a toss, a good fall over in the grass.

By dint of playing he got ticks all lined up, dug into the edges of his floppy ears like cars parked outside a Kmart or a Sydney Leagues Club. The day I met him I removed each tick, one by one, God Bless him. My brother heard him barking at the Duck but he was making art and never spared a thought.

Your dog is DEAD Hugh. Butcher Bones gave not a FLYING FUCK about the puppy. He said your dog is dead and then he went off with the woman on the tractor and left me listening to a river the colour of a yellow cur, fucksuck flood, tugging, pulling stones out of the bank, beneath our feet, everything we stand on will be washed away.

The phone call I got that night from Dozy Boylan would make me laugh for days to come. "Mate," he said, and I knew that he was hiding in his bathroom because I could hear the echo.

"Mate, she's hitting on me."

He was full of shit, I told him so, although not without affection.

"Shut up," he said. "I'm bringing her back to your place now."

I expressed loud amusement and that was rude and stupid and I have no excuse except—my overactive friend was a sixty-yearold farmer with soup in his moustache and trousers curling above his cinched-in belt. She was hitting on him? I snorted into the phone, and when he turned on me soon after I never doubted why.

In an astoundingly short time he came roaring across my cattle grid. I'd had a drink or two already and this was perhaps why it seemed so wildly funny, the audible panic of his off-road lugs rippling across the wooden bridge. By the time I had changed into a clean shirt, the old man had already performed a highspeed Y-turn and when I emerged on the front porch the taillights of his All Terrain Invention were disappearing into the night. I was still smiling as my visitor entered. Her hair was drenched again, flat on her head, dripping down her cheeks, collecting in the lovely well of her clavicle, but she was also smiling and—for a moment anyway—I thought she was about to laugh.

"How was the crossing?" I asked. "Were you scared?"

"Never by the crossing." She sat heavily in my chair and exhaled—a different person now, messier, less brisk. She produced from the folds of her borrowed poncho, a magnum of 1972 Virgin Hills which she held like a trophy in the air.

Later she told me that I had cocked my head, looking at the wine like a sulky dog, but that was a misunderstanding. This was a prize bottle from Dozy's cellar. There was nothing to explain it and the mystery was made deeper by her manner—she was suddenly so full of energy, kicking off her gumboots, opening up a drawer—did she wait to ask permission? She located a corkscrew, ripped out the cork, brushed down her skirt, sat cross-legged on the kitchen chair and, while she watched me pour the Virgin Hills, she just plain grinned at me.

"OK," I said. "What happened?"

"Nothing," she said, her eyes sparkling to the point of carbonation. "Where's your brother? Is he OK?"

"Asleep."

Whatever dark visions she then conjured—probably the drowning dog—she could not stay with long. "The good thing," she said, raising her glass, "is that Mr. Boylan knows his Leibovitz is real."

"Jacques Leibovitz?"

"That's the one."