Peter Carey - Collected Stories

“The bastards.” He shouts the word. He doesn’t know who he shouts it at. Perhaps at Odysseus. He doesn’t know who it is.

The wooden horse now seems to him to be a terrible jail, a torture chamber from which he must escape before this next death can take place. He has no possessions. There is nothing to delay him. He will disappear for ever into the depths of this land. He would rather spend his life amongst strangers than be subjected to one more death.

He turns from the pages of verse with his jaw set hard and finds himself face to face with a frail old blind man with a pampered face. He has never seen him before. He dislikes him instantly.

“Excuse me,” says the blind man, “I’m blind. I can’t see.”

Echion remains still and doesn’t make a sound. He watches the blind man like a cat watching a snake.

“Put my hand on your shoulder.”

The old man looks so frail that Echion takes the hand and lays it on his shoulder. The hand is small and soft and his shoulder is hard and heavy. With his heart beating hard Echion begins to walk towards the trapdoor.

“Perhaps,” says the blind man, “it might be better to stay.”

“I’m going.”

“You are going … to Troy,” the blind man smiles. His hand is like a vice on Echion’s shoulder. Echion feels as if the marrow has been sucked from his bones. He is like a blown-out candle. He stands helplessly and looks at the rose petal mouth of this man. Finally he manages to speak. He says, “I read what Odysseus wrote.”

“My name is Homer,” says the blind man, “and you read what I told Odysseus to write and you read it because I permitted you to. This will be the last time for you. The other times were mistakes. But this business in Troy is what I needed you for, I need you to fall from the horse,” the poet says, “for the irony.”

Homer leads Echion to a place by the door where he ties his hands with leather thongs and binds them to a post. Echion doesn’t protest. He feels like an ox in a slaughter yard. The blind man ties on a gag to stop him bellowing.

6.

When the night came his companions returned to the horse to sleep. They had been told some story about Echion and no one, not even Diomedes, looked his way. It was as if he were invisible, already dead and buried in the pages of Homer’s verse.

When they had all drunk their wine Odysseus explained the nature of the battle to be fought the next day. He said nothing of how the wooden horse was to be moved to Troy. He mentioned “allies” and once talked of a “powerful friend”. The men’s minds, accustomed to living on the waves of Homer’s fevers, accepted all this without question and retired to bed early to be ready for tomorrow’s battle.

Echion lay in the dark and waited for Diomedes, but when he didn’t come to release him he began to work quietly on his leather bindings, gnawing on them with his broken teeth until his gums bled and his mouth was full of the sticky juices of his veins.

Around him the horse groaned and creaked like a ship weathering a heavy sea. Outside he fancied he could hear voices and hammering and the crash of masonry. His jaws ached and his arms twitched and it wasn’t until early morning that his bindings were finally undone.

He crept stiffly to the door and lowered the great trapdoor. The rope ladder flopped down in the dark. His arms were stiff and his hands so cramped that he could barely clench them. His head was strange from lack of sleep and as he lowered himself onto the first rung he was overcome with giddiness.

His foot slipped on the second rung, and he fell.

In the grey hours before dawn a giant wooden horse could be seen enclosed by the walls of Troy. The first Greeks who descended the rope ladder found Echion already there. He was lying on the dusty ground with his neck broken.

7.

Echion hadn’t died immediately. He had written some words in the fine clay dust with a bleeding finger. The words were as follows:

“KILL THE PIG TYRANT HOMER WHO OPPRESSES US ALL.”

But the words were erased by the blind feet of his companions as the whole incident concerning Echion was later erased by Homer, who no longer found the incident interesting enough to tell.

1.

The front room of Eddie Rayner’s shop is like many other shops in High Street. It’s busy on Saturdays and quiet for the rest of the week. The shops around him sell the same things he sells: stripped pine furniture, bentwood chairs, old advertising signs, blue and white china, and odds and ends like butter churns and stained-glass windows. The prices are high and the work isn’t too hard. On weekdays the second-hand dealers stand in the street, chatting about prices and the pieces they’ve picked up at the auctions.

Eddie is no longer welcome to these little conferences. It’s because of the back room. There are many stories about Eddie’s back room. They are all guesses, because Eddie has never invited any of the other dealers to inspect it. However, a recent exhibition in the front room has given rise to a new spate of stories more shocking than anything before. Sixteen photographs of the bodies of murder victims lying on lino, on carpet, on cobblestone, surrounded by such everyday things as children’s toys, policemen’s shoes, and old cigarette packets. There is an ordinariness about the photographs which makes them all the more shocking. This new revelation of Eddie’s has brought his neighbours back into his shop. They haven’t liked what they’ve seen.

Even before this recent event he has been something of a scandal amongst them. They gossip about his women, they guess about his men friends, they shake their heads about the state of his Porsche which is now so battered and rusted that it is almost unrecognizable. And they wonder about the clients, some of them very well known and very wealthy, who come to visit Eddie’s back room and emerge carrying unidentified articles hidden in beer cartons or wrapped in newspaper.

Second-hand dealers are naturally jealous and bitchy about each other but Eddie Rayner somehow acted as a common bond to those in High Street. They said he paid too much at the auctions, that his prices were too high or too low, that his taste was dated, that he had no taste, that he knew nothing about business, that he received stolen goods, that he was a homosexual, that he was involved in witchcraft. All symbols by which they tried, somehow, to make the contents of the back room more concrete.

When Eddie hung the exhibition of murder victims they held a meeting and decided to send a deputation to ask him to remove the photographs at once. Eddie received the deputation with his cool, stoned, beautiful smile and left the photographs exactly where they were.

Incensed, they wrote him a very formal letter wherein they repeated their request in more forceful language. Eddie had the letter framed and hung it in the window.

It was, as Eddie said every day, a very interesting summer.

It was a terrible summer. Fires ringed the city itself, burning fiercely around the outer suburbs. At night the horizon glowed bright red as if the city were being fried on some incredible hot plate. The north wind pushed the fire into suburban streets where the sounds of its flames were picked up by excited men from radio stations and the same north wind brought ashes and still-burning leaves to float down High Street past Eddie’s shop, down Caroline Street, past his flat.

It was Eddie’s summer. Not the summer of white beaches and bronzed bodies, but the summer of burnt houses and blackened bodies, a summer you could believe was the beginning of the end of the world. At night Eddie sat on the balcony with Daphne smoking grass, watching the red glow in the sky and feeling an intensity of emotion that he had rarely experienced when confronted with nature.