Peter Carey - Collected Stories

“Wherever you want to go,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “I wouldn’t mind going to …” She stopped. “I’m being selfish. Where do you want to go?”

“Wherever you want to go.”

“Well,” she said, “I’ve always wanted to go to Florence.”

“All right,” he said.

He looked up at the sky. It was a good night for flying.

1.

When Carlos was arrested the rock’n’roll band fled immediately. In the confusion of the moment they left many valuable things behind them that would later be confiscated by due legal process, by Carlos’s lawyers: cars, paintings, houses — most, in fact, of the vast material wealth they had accumulated.

The connection between Carlos and the band was not well known, although later, of course, it was public knowledge that he had not only managed their business affairs to his own advantage, but thoughtfully supplied them with heroin and cocaine, thus assuring himself of a huge potential income in blackmail if the need should ever arise.

Julie, Carlos’s twenty-two-year-old lover, escaped at the same time, slipped across the border and then flew as far south as her savings would permit. She arrived almost destitute.

Unlike the band, she had no skills to sustain her. Her only talent was her life, her addiction to fear and danger.

The town she arrived in suggested no avenues of opportunity for the one piece of business her financial security might have depended on.

She knew where there was half a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines.

Apart from Carlos, who was in prison, she was the only person in the world who knew.

The town contained nothing she understood. The streets were wide and straight and without surprise. It boasted thirty-three buildings higher than five storeys, a single strip club, three expensive restaurants serving bad food, one discotheque full of thirteen-year-olds, and an ugly shrine to fallen soldiers which stood on a slight hill at the intersection of the two main boulevards.

The only opportunities the town presented were paid employment. Her only qualification was a typing course she had begun when she had planned to run away from Carlos the year before.

She took a room in a boarding house and began walking the wide, wet streets in search of a job.

It was the worst part of winter.

In an architect’s office she found Claude hunching over a singlebar radiator while he interviewed her with curious shyness. He was forty-one years old and not particularly successful. He didn’t give her a job, instead he asked her out for dinner.

2.

This is what Claude found out about her.

She had hair the colour of a field of corn. She had a strutting walk she conducted with pointed fingers. She had been born with a cancer and still had the scar. She had lived with a gangster. She was full of fears and nightmares and had left her clothes in another city, running down back stairs to stolen cars with cocaine in her handbag and one shoe missing.

She smiled crookedly. She had a lisp. Her voice was as soft as velvet. She had the start of a double chin. She had the face of someone who had come out of a sad movie at three o’clock in the afternoon. She could change from a Renaissance Bacchus to a gargoyle in less than a second. She had an extraordinarily beautiful smile.

She believed that heroin was the best cure for the common cold. When she frowned it was like a pond shivering. She had a nightmare she couldn’t talk about. She had a sob that wet his sleep. She had a chin that went wobbly when she was having an orgasm. She knew Mick Jagger. She could define a band’s music by the drugs they used. She was in love with South America and had never been there. She was possibly wanted by the police in connection with the manslaughter Carlos was charged with, a crime involving the sale of a speedball that had gone wrong.

Her handbag contained a huge bottle of Mandrax and a small one of Valium.

She knew where there was half a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines.

She drank with enthusiasm and kept a bottle of wine by the bed.

It was their second night together.

3.

She came to him as a visitor from Mars, a dazzling carpet of arcane information which he read with doubt and wonder in the perpetual Sunday evenings of his life.

She moved into his house on the slow muddy river and left her clothes scattered on the floor beside his.

She lost two jobs in three days and said: “I could always become a whore.” As usual she was asking difficult questions by making confident assertions.

In the cold nights they lit fires and interrogated each other about their lives, smoked grass, fucked and complained, each in their own way, of the life in the town.

They were two particles, vibrating uncertainly in puzzled attraction.

She could not understand the eccentricities of his bourgeois life, his two marriages, the gossip of a town that ostracized him, his dissatisfaction with his life but his depressed acceptance of it.

She had begun by believing she was fucking for her dinner and had been surprised to find him warm, gentle, full of whimsies as beautiful as a fairy-tale. She recognized in him a romanticism similar to her own. While he slept she watched the warm lines beside his eyes, the softness of his mouth, the tousled lion’s mane of dark hair, and all the marks of hope and disappointment that forty years had etched into his olive face. She watched him tenderly, without understanding.

After the third job, it was accepted that she would stay in the house while he went to his office where he worked on the detailing of the town’s thirty-fifth tall office block, overflow work from a larger, more successful practice than his own.

The days were difficult for her. The quietness was depressing, the future uncertain. She read the foreign newspaper for information about Carlos, fearing a successful appeal by his lawyers. She dwelt continually on the night Carlos had given Jean the speedball, uncertain as to whether he had meant to kill him or if it had been a mistake. The panic in Jean’s eyes haunted her and made her heart palpitate and her scalp itchy. She knocked herself out with Valium and wine. She woke yellow-tongued and dry-mouthed and wandered around the huge adobe house that Claude had built for himself after his first marriage. It resembled nothing she had ever known, either her parents’ Tudor mansion or the shifting motel rooms of her gangster adventures. The walls needed painting and the air smelt damp. A fine clay dust settled on tables and chairs and spread across the slate floor like talcum powder so that each evening her footsteps stood as a diary of her restless day.

She had battle fatigue but couldn’t slow down. The days with Carlos had been full of fast movements, dangers she only half understood. She had been swept along in a swift current of meetings conducted in Spanish and Italian, electric cocaine concerts with the rock’n’roll band, border crossings with damp hands holding one of Carlos’s five passports, a heavy pistol in a motel drawer, and the continual wonder of living a B-grade movie when your father was a director of a multinational corporation famous for its detergents and insecticides.

To come from that, to this.

Days of wine and Valium and yellow rivulets running under willow trees to the wide muddy river at the bottom of Claude’s neglected garden which reminded her of some melancholy story she had been read as a child.

She had reached the safety she had ached for and now she was prey to the boredom that safety brought with it.

“Let’s go and dance somewhere,” she said, but there was nowhere to dance but the discotheque for thirteen-year-olds and the expensive restaurants for dirty old men.