Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

Minutes after Kevin's call, the Bones boys were back in the Holden ute, creeping along the road, a submarine gliding through the milky sea of fog. My house-paint period was over.

No longer would I be reduced to adding sand or sawdust to build impasto or using scratchy short-haired brushes on a Dulux Hi Gloss that dried too fast.

"Bloody hot," said Hugh.

"Clammy, mate."

"Bloody scorcher, you wait."

Neither of us liked this wet season, but for Hugh, whose main activity was to every day walk into Bellingen and back, the heat was of never-ending concern and, being a fearsome mouthbreather, he needed vast quantities of water in order not to perish on the journey. Even now he was drinking from the billycan he carried with him everywhere. Later, when he set out to walk, he would dive down into the bush to this creek or that dam—he knew them all.

Back at the co-op I picked up my beautiful wooden box of onepound tubes—that was Raphaelson's, everything so perfectly presented—and I was happy as a boy on Christmas morning.

Every one of these new greens I ordered straight, but also mixed down with pumice and flakes of stainless steel, this recipe designed to give the green a secret mirrored light that would—I knew this before I opened anything—curl my fucking toes.

It's hard to make a civilian understand what this new palette and an uncut roll of canvas might mean to me but I planned to get into some very serious shit and in this I was not deluded. Later, of course, Jean-Paul claimed I had obtained my materials illegally. But did he have the heart to be a patron, or did he want me to continue to spend Hugh's pension on bloody house paints? What had he expected when he started?

Hugh arm-wrestled Kev and won four bucks for his victories, so he was happy too. I added a couple of bags of fertiliser to the bill. It was eighteen bucks a bag at the co-op and Mrs. Dyson, my next-door neighbour, was happy to take it off my hands for fifteen. Later Jean-Paul would decide that this was stealing too, but for God's sake, I was not a Sunday painter. I could reasonably expect to pay back any debts. It was a cash-flow issue only and if I had not been interfered with so unconscionably I would have been able to sell the canvases privately—the court never need have known.

The road back to Jean-Paul's place winds through the bush until it commences its descent into the long green valley at Gleniffer. At this point you can normally see the Dorrigo escarpment and, three thousand feet below in the valley, the Never Never, which was today lying beneath a blanket of fog so dense it was, from some three hundred feet of elevation, a streaky oyster grey. I was driving very very slowly indeed when I saw another pair of headlights coming towards us.

"Dozy," said Hugh, "bloody old Dozy."

He had an eye, Hugh, although it required no special talent to recognise our neighbour's headlights for he had, perhaps because of the unpredictable nature of his creek, converted a long-wheelbase Land Rover into a somewhat eccentric monster truck, the lights of which sat close together and high up off the road. Seeing their yellow ore-eyed glow, I slowed, pulling up just below the brow of the hill where, with my window down, I could hear Dozy's horrible old diesel grinding down into first gear. According to the custom in those parts he should have stopped to talk, but he passed by me, very close, and so very slowly that there could be no mistaking his look of implacable hostility.

I had only known Dozy Boylan six weeks but we had quickly become friends, often spending two or three nights a week drinking from his cellar, discussing not art, not literature, but the plants and insects which were his great passion. It was he, my neighbour, who had discovered both the rare Wombat Fly (tr.

Borboroidini) and the Stalk-eyed Signal Fly (Achia sp.) He was smart, so enthusiastic, so filled with life and information.

Nothing in my experience prepared me for his rich man's secretiveness and—even worse—this really rather hateful look which he now bestowed on me.

Well, I liked my neighbour and if I had offended him somehow, then I would apologise. I thought, I'll call him in an hour or two.

And then I began to think about those lovely heavy tubes from Raphaelson's and that flat, stapled section of the canvas which I had already prepared. As soon as we were back home I was into it, and Hugh had filled his billy with water and set off back along the road, drinking and spilling as he proceeded.

I should have phoned Dozy that night, and indeed I intended to, for I had still not seen the Leibovitz or talked to him about the general bloody wonder of its existence, but I was filing away the beautiful colour charts from Raphael-son's when I came across some papers he had given me when I first arrived. Dozy had a rich and interesting history and apart from running a very profitable Brahmin stud in Bellingen, he had, years before in Sydney, established a now-famous business in what was then called Scandinavian Design. Amongst the old catalogues he had provided, by way of introduction, was a glossy company report in which was contained, along with black-and-white reproductions of 1950s modern furniture, his portrait. It made me smile at first, for he had clearly modelled himself on the actor Clark Gable, although there was, behind that trim moustache and the movie-star good looks, something not quite right, a little crooked, a little heavy in the chin and although these were not in any usual sense defects, they became so simply through his failure to actually be Clark Gable, and what was left was something rather vain and silly. I would never have dwelled on this if it had not so brilliantly explained the half-wild anger I had seen in his eyes this morning on the road. The old man was vain. It had never occurred to me. But he had claimed Marlene had hit on him and I had mocked his bullshit. So fucking sorry to have caused offence.

So I did not call him. I would do it later. I would get over it. He would get over it, or so I thought. I was wrong, wrong about almost everything, and I would wander on blindly for the next few weeks before I finally discovered the real source of Dozy's upset, and in the meantime there developed one of those strange silences between friends that, like a torn shoulder muscle left unattended, grows hard and lumpy and finally locks into a compacted knot of injury that no amount of manipulation can undo.

He spoke to Hugh, I know, and sometimes gave him lifts in his Land Rover, but although I saw Dozy many times upon the road and although he quietly returned my slasher after dark one night, I never actually spoke to him again. I would see that Leibovitz within the year, but by then Dozy would be dead.

The undiluted greens I did not even bother with, but the others I was into like a snouty pig—huge luscious jars, greens so fucking dark, satanic black holes that could suck your heart out of your chest. Green would not be my only colour, but rather my theorem, my argument, my family tree, and soon I had all ten bloody power drills committed in one way or another, mixing my demon dark, with gesso, with safflower oil, kerosene, with cadmium yellow, with red madder; the names are pretty but beside the point—there is no name for either God or light, only mathematics, the angstrom scale, red madder = Aus $65,000.

Hugh was up and away, all over the place like a madwoman's shit, gallumping along the bitumen, swearing at the flies in made-up languages, but he, Dozy, Marlene, my little boy— everyone was dead to me. RIP, so very bloody sorry.

I painted.

Later, when he laid his pale bored eyes upon this canvas in the loft on Mercer Street, the dealer Howard Levi was nice enough to explain what I had done that steaming day in Bellingen: "You are like Kenneth Noland" and "Your words are not the point, your words are an armature, something you hang the colour from."