Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

"Please, mate. No trouble."

He paused. "Who is he?"

"He's going to clean the painting."

"Oh."

He drew back, puzzled at first, but finally displaying a stupid knowing smirk, as if he, of all people, was privy to some hidden truth.

"What is it that you're thinking, mate?"

He tapped his head.

"You're thinking?"

"Roof," he said.

The fucking smirk was physically unbearable. "What roof, mate?"

He withdrew further, back towards the mattress, his mouth now impossibly small, his ears slowly suffusing with blood. As he settled back into his nest his dry hair, confused by static, rose slowly on his head. He was still like this, a dreadful grinning fright, when Marlene came back from her run.

She also was on edge, had been on edge in any case, and no matter how she ran or worked her weights, nothing would give her any peace.

Sitting at the table, she went straight back to the Times.

"You burned down the high school," my brother said.

Oh Hugh, I thought, Hugh, Hugh, Hugh.

Marlene's colour was already high, a lovely pink that revealed the tiniest palest freckles.

"What did you say to Marlene?"

Hugh hugged his big round knees and giggled. "She burned down Benalla High School," he said.

Marlene smiled. "Hugh, you are very strange."

"You too," my brother said, somehow seeming contented, as if some puzzle had been solved. "I heard you burned down Benalla High School."

Marlene was staring at him now, and for a moment her eyes narrowed and her mouth tightened, but then her face relaxed.

"Why Hugh," she smiled, "you are as full of tricks as a bag full of monkeys."

"You too."

"You too."

"You too," until the pair of them were laughing uproariously and I went to the dunny to get away.

At lunchtime, Milt called to say Jane had the painting which appeared, she said, to have been hung in someone's kitchen.

That night I cooked sausages for Hugh and after Marlene had taken her evening run, she and I went to dinner at Fanelli's where we drank two bottles of fantastic burgundy.

I didn't feel drunk, but I fell into bed and passed out like a light.

I woke to find Marlene crawling back into bed. I had a splitting headache. She was freezing cold. At first I thought her shivering but when I touched her face it was aflood with tears. As I held her, her body shook convulsively.

"Shush, baby. Shush, it's all right."

But she could not stop.

"I'm sorry," said Hugh, standing in the doorway.

"For fuck's sake, go back to fucking sleep. It's three o'clock."

"I shouldn't have said it."

"It's nothing to do with you, you idiot."

I heard him sigh and Marlene was almost choking, a dreadful noise like someone drowning. I could see her by the light from the street, all her smooth lovely planes crushed and broken inside a fist. It was the dumb divorce, I thought, the bloody droit moral. Why she had to have it, I really, really could not see.

"Can you still love me?"

Headache or no, I loved her, as I had never loved in all my life, loved her wit, her courage, her beauty. I loved the woman who stole Dozy's painting, who read The Magic Pudding, who faked the catalogue, but even more the girl escaping the vile little room in Benalla and I could smell the red lead paint her mother brushed on the fireplace every Sunday, taste the shitty ersatz coffee made from chicory, the canned beetroot staining the boiled egg white in the deadly iceberg salad.

"Shush. I love you."

"You don't know."

"Shush."

"You won't love me. You can't."

"I do."

"I did it," she cried suddenly.

"What did you do?"

I looked into her face and saw an alarming terror, a dreadful cringing in the face of my tender enquiry. She gave a little moan and hid her head in my chest and began to sob again. Through all of this, I detected Hugh. He was now standing right over us.

"Go to bed, now."

His bare feet brushed across the floor.

"I did it," she said.

"She burned down Benalla High School," said Hugh mournfully.

"I'm sorry."

I took her chin and tilted her face towards me, all the street light trapped in a tide around her pooling eyes.

"Did you, my baby?"

She nodded.

"Is that what you did?"

"I'm vile."

I took her to me, and held her, the whole cage of mystery that was her life.

I was wrong, quite possibly, I had sinned, very likely, had borne FALSE WITNESS, become a COMMON GOSSIP. Have you heard? They say Marlene Cook burned down the high school.

Who is THEY? Why, it was only Olivier. So it was just SCUTTLEBUTT and HEARSAY, bless me, I would never have repeated it if I had not SMELLED A RAT, as the saying is. I was DISCOMBOBULATED—that's a good one—and so I foolishly repeated what a DRUG ADDICT had ALLEGED and caused Marlene to weep, deep in the middle of the night, a human lost in outer space or inside a plastic bag, gulping for air, their GOOD NAME vacuumed from them, the HOOVER sucking oxygen, roaring like the mills of God.

What right did I have? No right, only wrong. Forgive me Lord Jesus, it was agony to hear her suffer and I could not wait for the dawn so I could go back to the Bicker Club and PUT IT TO Olivier that he had invented the story because he hated her.

When it was grey light I stood above them. I wished I was an angel, but there never would be feathers on my hairy back. She was sleeping, her head as always against my brother's chest. He opened one eye and peered at his watch.

Out? he asked.

Walk, I said.

It was a clear morning, just after seven, pigeons already cooing on the rusty fire escape, not knowing one day from the other I presume, or only wet from dry, hot from cold, their hearts the size of a lump of gum, insufficient blood to fill a cup. Nothing like my agony for them, I thought, but then again who can imagine the constant torment from the lice, the pain of diseases unknown to any but the sufferer, their own secret horrors, no worse, no better. Walking up Mercer Street, head down. All around me black plastic bags, erupting, spewing, restaurant fish for instance. What knowledge might a fish have?

Who would forewarn a red snapper of the afterlife, this purgatory on Mercer Street? These dreadful thoughts pursued me SMELLS IN HELL as I bolted up Broadway, was nearly killed. Then Union Square, Gramercy Park, but where was Jeavons now? It did not matter. I had my key. As I have confessed. As I have told the sequence of events. As the story has been recorded, reel to reel.

I PROCEEDED to the second floor and unlocked the door, bless me. I did not know what I had done.

Olivier in black pyjamas, his face hidden by the chair, the legs. of the chair closed like scissors around bruised white throat, a great blue birthmark, an underground lake spilling beneath his skin.

His eyes were open. He was still. What had SLIPPED MY MIND I could not tell. I touched him with my foot and he moved like a dead beast but no more.

I did not touch the body with my hands. I ran from the club with Jeavons calling to me STOP. I ran down Broadway howling DON'T WALK DON'T CARE. Save us from me, tell me what is done.

Slow Bones woke us. Like sheet metal falling, flailing, slamming on the bed. No time for socks or underwear, we travelled, all three together, to the Bicker Club, and there we found the socalled Jeavons in a state that was unpleasantly like a snit.

It was he who pointed out "the wife" to the police and as a result Marlene had the privilege of being taken to the crime scene—the cops getting very bloody physical with me when I thought I had a right to come along—and it was she who then became "the deponent" who swore "the remains" of the deceased had once been Olivier Leibovitz.