Peter Carey - Collected Stories

Yet he seemed somehow restless and untouchable. His movements, normally so fluid, had become less certain.

They played the amphetamine game now only because he wanted to.

She talked to him about the amphetamines because she had come to love him. She considered, by brown rivers on hot days, saying I love you in the evening but never did. She came to fear that he wanted her to leave, that his restlessness was an indication of this.

“Do you want me to go away, honey?” she asked him.

“Do you want to go away?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you bored?”

“No,” she smiled, “I’m not bored.”

“You keep saying I’m a boring old man.”

“Ah,” she said, “I only say that to flatter you.”

“I have often thought,” he said, not unkindly, “that you perhaps say it to flatter yourself.”

“How do you mean?”

“That it makes you feel dangerous.”

She reacted by making pistols of her fingers and with wrinkled nose, swivelling hips, shooting him with imaginary Magnums. “Zap. Zap.”

“Do you want to rob banks?” he said.

“Only if I can do it with you,” she said. “Come and look at the trees. I think they might need watering.”

11.

She had begun to guess about the rock’n’roll band and its effect on him. She had tried to tell him that it affected nothing, would affect nothing. But because he hadn’t really declared his fears there was no way she could successfully allay them.

He thought she was a Bedouin princess who would return to her own people.

She was an orphan with damp hands and bad dreams that she had postponed with wine and Valium and electric fears.

Sometimes she felt she had been invented by Leonard Cohen, whom she hated.

She regretted her letters to Evelyn.

She regretted the answers. She took the letters as they arrived and hid them where he wouldn’t find them.

But he found them and misinterpreted her reasons for hiding them.

She began to fear losing him.

She had made him hate his job. She had made him ashamed of his life. She had never told him that she loved him, that her eyes filled with tears watching him sleep, without her knowing why.

And she knew that he was plotting something. His dark face was as secretive as shuttered windows on winter mornings. When she kissed him he returned her kisses distractedly. When he got stoned he looked miserable. And when he asked her about the amphetamines she knew it was because he thought she was a liar so she told him plainly, in detail, exactly where they were and she drew a plan that could not have been invented and explained that in the city in question there was an old quarter in which all the houses had disused interconnecting passages, a protection against seventeenth-century winters.

“Now do you believe me?” she said when she had finished.

“Yes, I believe you,” he said, without apparent conviction.

And although she should have guessed what was on his mind she didn’t, because he wasn’t interested in money, because drugs had no fascination for him, because he was unlike Carlos and had no need to prove himself in acts of machismo and because it was unthinkable that a gentle-faced amateur should attempt anything so patently foolish.

He said he was going to an architects’ convention in another city.

She knew he was lying and didn’t ask to come.

She knew he was going to fuck some lady who was more beautiful and more interesting than she was.

She bought him a mohair sweater in a very pale blue.

12.

He had become more than slightly mad. His actions were dictated by a logic so strict that it allowed no variation. He was a sleepwalker strolling on the ledges of sixty-storey buildings. He was a beachcomber removing seashells from a minefield. He flew into a northern city, took a taxi to an address he had copied down, asked the taxi to wait and emerged in five minutes with a large crate.

In his hotel room he packed the contents of the crate into sixty small cardboard boxes and posted them to himself, to his home, to his office and to seven different suburban post offices in the town where he lived.

Not one of them was intercepted by customs. It had never occurred to him that they might be.

13.

He had always wanted to take Polaroid photographs of her face to show her its incredible variety, most beautiful in laughter, most childlike when solemn, ugly in tears, as mischievous as a gargoyle, as decadent as Bacchus.

But when finally, two weeks after he returned, he presented her with a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines, he was in no way prepared for the undiluted horror that widened her eyes and dropped her jaw and made her literally gasp for breath.

For she knew, as she looked at the peculiarly beautiful capsules with their pink and yellow stripes, that her haven had been ripped apart and laid waste.

She stared at him, shaking her head, not even trying to wonder how he had succeeded in doing what he had done.

She shivered in anger and despair.

He had understood nothing.

He had thought it was a game.

He had finally believed her story but he had never believed how serious it was.

He was standing in front of her now, smiling proudly, like a dog with a hand grenade in its mouth, wagging its tail.

Carlos had an ugly mouth. Carlos had treated her like shit. Carlos was stupid and vindictive and in jail. But he was also a businessman who had just been relieved of the biggest deal he had ever conceived. Carlos would kill a hundred men to get those little pills. He would do it tomorrow, or the next day, or next year, but he would do it.

There was nothing she could say to him. There was no advice she could offer him for his own safety. She could think only of her own survival. She felt ill. She could not even kiss him goodbye.

14.

Clay dust falls from adobe walls and settles on slate floors, chairs, tables and filters through the cracks of a crate containing a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines which have never been discovered.

He tried one once, but it made him feel unpleasant.

In nights of Valium and wine he remembers times when he held her in his arms and pressed his body full of dreams.

She moves around the house on soft slow feet, her footsteps padding softly above me as I lie, on my unmade bed of unwashed sheets, listening. She knows, as she always knows, that I am listening to her and it is early morning. The fog has not risen. The traffic crawls outside. There is a red bus, I can see the top of it, outside the window. If I cared to look more closely I could see the faces of the people in the bus, and, with luck, my own reflection, or at least the reflection of my white hair, my one distinction. The mail has not yet arrived. There will be nothing for me, but I wait for it. Life is nothing without expectation. I am always first to pick up the letters when they drop through the door. The milk bottles, two days old, are in the kitchen unwashed and she knows this too, because she has not yet come.

Our relationship is beyond analysis. It was Bernard, although I prefer to name no names, who suggested that the relationship had a Boy Scout flavour about it. So much he knows. Bernard, who travels halfway across London to find the one priest who will forgive his incessant masturbation, cannot be regarded as an authority in this matter.

Outside the fog is thick, the way it is always meant to be in London, but seldom is, unless you live by the river, which I don’t. Today will not disappoint the American tourists.

And she walks above my head, probably arranging the little white dolls which she will not explain and which I never ask about, knowing she will not explain, and not for the moment wishing an explanation. She buys the dolls from the Portobello Road, the north end, on Friday morning, and at another market on Thursdays, she has not revealed where, but leaves early, at about 5 a.m. I know it is a market she goes to, but I don’t know which one. The dolls arrive in all conditions, crammed into a large cardboard suitcase which she takes out on her expeditions. Those which still have hair she plucks bald, and those with eyes lose them, and those with teeth have them removed and she paints them, slowly, white. She uses a flat plastic paint. I have seen the tins.