Peter Carey - Collected Stories

On a Wednesday afternoon she wrote eleven letters to Evelyn, the back-up vocalist with the rock’n’roll band. She posted the eleven letters to five friends and six poste restantes, hoping that one of them would reach her. In the letters she promised safety, a refuge in this provincial city. She recognized the stupidity of the letters, the possibility of one of them reaching Carlos’s friends. She said nothing of Claude in the letters. There was no way she could explain Claude to Evelyn, or anyone else.

And she thought about the half a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines safely stored in an underground passage in a small northern town. And she thought about them timidly, for now she had time to consider the matter, she admitted she had none of the business skills needed to dispose of them.

More seriously, she doubted that she had the courage to double-cross Carlos on anything so important.

All I am, she thought, is a fucking groupie.

She took ten milligrams of Valium and stood in the rain, pretending she was a cow.

4.

She waited for him each evening with an anxiety she denied even to herself. She resisted temptations to cook him meals, yet thought she should be doing something. She wondered who was exploiting who. She didn’t understand the rules of the relationship. She didn’t understand why he let her stay, but she only thought about that when he wasn’t there. And then she felt she had nothing to offer him, if to do something as simple as cook a meal might be interpreted as an attempt to lay a claim on him. So together they opened tins of tuna and beans. They rarely ate out. He seemed to have no social life, although he discussed friends and recent dinner parties. She wondered if he was socially ashamed of her.

She didn’t understand that she was a storybook for him, an encyclopedia of adventure, a Persian carpet of his imagination that he stared at with wonder, never hoping to understand all the mysteries of it.

He interrogated her gently, never sure of whether she was exaggerating or lying. He lay gentle traps for her, smiled to catch her out on inconsistencies, enjoying the slow unravelling of her story.

He was fascinated by the rock’n’roll band (samurais, magicians, keepers of Rosicrucian secrets), by Carlos, and by all the drugs he knew by name but not from experience.

Lying in bed he might ask her about Carlos, feeling the wonder of a child asking a parent about worlds he didn’t understand.

“He was really amazing,” she said. “Carlos was the most amazing person. He had a terrible temper. He wasn’t really bright. He killed a man, Claude, while I waited in the car.”

“Did you love him?”

“He was really amazing.”

And then there was the morning Carlos was taken away by two other gangsters.

“Were they mafiosi?”

“I think he double-crossed them.”

“But were they mafiosi?”

“He was in his dressing gown. It was the only time I saw him scared. He was scared shitless. They took him away.”

“What did they do to him?”

She shrugged. “He didn’t come back for two weeks.”

“What did you do?”

“I went and hid. I knew a lot of things he knew. Do you want a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines?”

“You said half a million before.”

“What the fuck does that matter. It’s a lot of money, baby.” And her face which had been clouded with frowns burst into a smile of pure sensual excitement as she waved straight-fingered hands and clicked her tongue.

“Where?”

“Come with me and I’ll tell you.”

“Where?”

“Carlos can’t go near it, even if he gets out of jail.”

He smiled at her, wondering. “Why not?”

“You don’t understand Carlos. He wouldn’t tell anyone. He’ll wait.”

He kissed her then, very gently. “I think you’re bullshitting.”

“You think I’m bullshitting because you’ve never known anyone like Carlos.”

“You keep changing your story.”

“Don’t be boring, honey. You’re a boring old man.” And then she would kiss him, as gently as he had kissed her, looking into his eyes to ask him puzzled questions she couldn’t begin to form. “Do you want me to go away?”

“No, not unless you want to go away.”

His skin was younger than his eyes. He lay there languidly, without apparent need.

“I found a photograph of your wife. She looks very beautiful,” she said, asking another question.

“What else did you find?”

“A mouldy sandwich under the bed.”

“Anything else?”

“Let’s go to a club.”

“There aren’t any clubs.”

“Well, let’s go to a bar.”

“I hate bars.”

“You’re a boring old man, Claude.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

And she began then to kiss him, first his neck, then his chest, and then his limp cock until it was stiff and hard inside her mouth. She moved her mouth and tongue slowly, sweetly, and listened with pleasure while he groaned softly.

Outside the frogs croaked beside the river.

They held hands tightly, fucking slowly, feeling curiously happy in their puzzlement with each other.

5.

And then, in the last week of winter, the letters began and each night, it seemed, she had some word of the odyssey of the rock’n’roll band who were now wanted for questioning due to information that Carlos had passed on to the police.

“He’s trying to do a deal,” she said.

“How?” he asked.

“He’s a cunning little bastard,” she said.

Claude read the letters with wonder and fear, wonder at the adventure he was watching, and (to his own surprise) fear that the band would arrive at his house and take Julie from his dull world to their exciting one.

As he detailed the plumbing of the six-storey office block and watched the melancholy streets of the town with their predictable goings and comings, he thought only of the rock’n’roll band and the million dollars’ (half a million dollars’?) worth of amphetamines.

Ho-Chin, the legendary drummer, was coming down from the north and sneaking through borders for an unstated rendezvous with Eric, the lead guitarist. Evelyn, having laid low in Hong Kong, had slipped out to a cattle boat and was heading this way laden with cocaine and a plan to slip in through Daru in New Guinea and Thursday Island.

And each of them, it seemed to Claude, drawing his dreadful plumbing and considering the placement of mirrors for successful typists to lipstick in front of, was a king amongst kings and their coming together would be more thrilling and threatening than the meeting of rivers from the mountains.

And then there were setbacks, delays.

Paul had been arrested in Bangkok for busking. (Claude sent money.) Evelyn was having an affair with a Muslim in Surabaya and walked amongst pilgrims for Mecca with her infidel’s secrets, blue Muslim cocks on pale mornings, white sheets and slowly turning fans above the vagueness of mosquito nets. She who had once worked the London tube with her twelve-string guitar (click-click-cocaine-click), with her beautiful Eurasian face and blue-black straight hair, as thin and nervous as a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines.

Eric wrote letters about music, drugs and police that Claude didn’t understand.

He came to hate the letters. He also became obsessed by them. And as he concentrated on the method of attaching fire-escape banisters to walls, his mind wandered through impossible concerts in the municipal auditorium. Eric, in fur boots, eyes closed, singing electrical magic with his guitar until audiences were transformed into rivers and white water dispersed down streets where it flooded the houses and left them full of fish.

And as he worked on the relationship between the lift doors and the placement of the call buttons, he saw the second concert where the people would come and be transformed into large white birds who would circle in slow loops before going to live beside rocky seas, catching fish and making eggs which they would guard against predators.