Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

There was a wooden bench before this painting and my brother now sat down. He was very still. And then finally he gave a laugh right through his shiny nose. He looked from one of us to the other as he could choose who would be worthy of what he might say next. Not one of us. He spoke to no-one in particular: Best thing Leibovitz ever did.

And then he walked towards the bar, a great fat lumpy man one short arm in his pocket, the other hand rubbing at his speckled freckled sun-baked head.

I want to be liked, to be remembered fondly, and I would be an idiot to stand before you naked, but what else have I ever done?

MoMA, the Museum Ludwig, the Tate—I can't list all the museums to which Mauri has donated my works, nor imagine the skuzzy deals these gifts were tied to. Enough to know I soon rose like a phoenix from the ashes of my Butcher life.

My saviour? A murderer. Actually, it's worse than that, because even though I had once walked away from her, I was still a Bones, and all the blacks and whites, so clear that morning in New York, were destined to be wet on wet, slow-drying, ambiguous, a shifting tide between beauty and horror. It swelled beneath my skin, filled my mouth.

In those polluted summer suburbs when Hugh and I were chained behind our filthy Victa mowers, I was still-in spite of all the death and deception—a prisoner of this tangled past. While I trimmed the floral fucking borders in Bankstown, I was reliving those days before the fall, when my baby and I looked at light together, drank Lagavulin on the rocks, walked hand in hand in the Museum of Modern Art, all those nights she pressed her lovely head in against my neck and I breathed the jasmine air around her brow.

A better person may have run in horror, but I loved her and I will not stop. There, I've said it plain. She is gone, not gone, out there somewhere, sending messages to me via Sotheby's and the Art Institute of Chicago. Is she taunting me or missing me?

How will I ever know? How do you know how much to pay if you don't know what it's worth?

The End