Peter Carey - Collected Stories

And it was here that Daphne saw Eddie, standing in his kingdom like the devil himself, talking in measured professional tones to the minister who, in his excitement and embarrassment, was stammering like a schoolboy.

On that day Eddie, with great subtlety and spiderlike certainty, humiliated the minister simply by asking him very specific questions about the photographs he wished to see. He was very, very polite, but his persona had changed, and he talked to the minister with the voice of the world outside. Normally he would have let him leaf through the files, but this was not to be a normal occasion. It was to be something of a duel. It was to be one of those strange occasions when neither the attacker nor the victim could really believe what was happening and thus smiled at each other throughout, each attempting to persuade the other of the supreme ordinariness of the occasion.

But the minister, like a man whose throat has been slashed by a very sharp razor, didn’t discover the damage till he had left the premises, and then only because it was reflected so painfully in the eyes of his mistress.

Daphne was not a beautiful girl, although she had a striking body with very long legs and big tits which she displayed to their most incredible advantage. Her face, however, had a flabbiness, a laxness about it that was not attractive. She had a large, loose mouth and a birdlike nose which lay beneath layers of make-up she applied so skilfully. There was, however, something about her, a combination of recklessness, sensuality, and strength. She had a novelist’s fascination for people, and an intuitive understanding of them. Her life was devoted to the study of people. She gossiped about them, fought with them, and fucked them and had, in a very few years, collected an incredible array of lovers including a professional gangster, an English footballer, a visiting Shakespearian actor, and a well-known second-hand car dealer.

And during this summer she moved in with Eddie and Eddie was frightened, flattered, and almost in love with her. He felt like a man who’s bought a racing car he’s too frightened to drive fast. A sense of inadequacy overwhelmed him every time he thought about Daphne because Daphne had certain very set ideas about who Eddie was and Eddie wasn’t entirely sure that he could live up to them.

Daphne put great store by her honesty. They had played on that first incredible night, a long, exciting game of emotional strip-tease where they dared each other to be honest about their feelings. It had ended with Eddie declaring his total infatuation with Daphne and Daphne hinting that the feeling might be mutual. Somewhere along the line Eddie felt that he had lost the game, but he continued to play it and was disconcerted to discover that his most honest admissions were not received well. Honest admissions of previous dishonesty did not go down well with Daphne, whose reservations about him began when she sensed weaknesses and secrets she had not suspected. She regarded him curiously, unsure of his authenticity.

Eddie was wondering whether he might now go and see if Daphne was home when he heard the front door of the shop open. He came out to find the smack freaks tilting back dangerously on his bentwood chairs.

Jo-Jo, before the beauties of heroin had led him along more private paths, had once been a friend. But Pete had never been. Pete had mad eyes and a psychotic, derisive smile that struck a chill in Eddie’s heart. He had once seen Pete at work with a broken beer bottle. In the end nothing had happened. Pete had laughed in his victim’s pale face and smashed the bottle at his feet. But it had been a nasty scene and Eddie didn’t like to remember it. Pete had since done time for possession. He looked like someone who had done time, his hair still cut short by Pentridge barbers.

Eddie began to talk about the fires. Pete and Jo-Jo knew nothing about the fires and weren’t interested in them. Jo-Jo told him how they had been driven from their haven in Williamstown by other natural forces. They couldn’t stand it any more — the dead woman sitting in the room with the pen in her hand, forever about to write something which they would never know about. Jo-Jo hated the blank paper almost as much as he hated the corpse of their landlady, an old woman of seventy or more who refused to decompose in spite of the heat, or because of it. Eddie thought he could see the fear showing through the unshaven whiskers of Jo-Jo’s baby face, but it was probably only malnutrition.

While the landlady sat at the table refusing to decompose, the house she had died in proved to be made of weaker stuff. Huge hunks of plaster, two inches thick and exceptionally dangerous, had begun to fall with frightening regularity. One such fall had ripped down a heavy bookshelf in the living room, another had knocked the bathroom cabinet from its wall and filled the bath with rubble. The dunny was blocked and they couldn’t shit in it.

Pete and Jo-Jo had lived in a small flat adjoining the main house. What had once been a quiet suburban refuge had now come to disturb them so much that they preferred to enter the inner city where they were both known to the cops.

When he heard about the body something inside Eddie went very tight and began to reverberate very fast. A thought so outrageous that it terrified him to consider it. An impossible thought, but the more he was frightened of it the more he knew he had to do it. Not for the money, although the money would be incredible. But … because …

But for now he was relieved that Jo-Jo had brought a subject for conversation along with him. Jo-Jo’s silences were somehow like threats. Now while he talked to them about the old lady he managed not to feel so fucking straight. Smack freaks always made him nervous. They were so private, so exclusive, living in their own dangerous world which he would never have the courage or foolishness to enter.

Even now he felt their curious ambivalence towards him, their envy of his success, and also their contempt for it. Pete didn’t say much. He went off to the windowless dunny where he shot up and splattered blood over the door. He came back rubbing his arm and smiling secretively to Jo-Jo.

Eddie said, “She hasn’t rotted or anything?” He’d never seen a dead body. He wondered about it.

No, she hadn’t even … started … to decompose. She was like (grimace) perfect. Nothing was happening. That’s what was freaking them.

Eddie wanted to be sure they hadn’t told anyone.

Pete curled his lips. Who in the fuck’re we going to tell? The cops?

Jo-Jo nodded. They were waiting for some … stuff … and they were going to take the truck up to Queensland maybe tomorrow. They were waiting for a … delivery. They were going to Queensland to stay with … relatives.

The “relatives” were somehow a big joke. Eddie grinned with them and then felt stupid when he saw how they looked at him. They’d caught him out. They rubbed his nose in his own fraud. They knew he didn’t know the joke about relatives. Fucking smack freaks, always talking in code.

He told them he wanted to see the old lady and Jo-Jo told him the address although Pete told him not to. Pete was mumbling. Eddie wished they’d get out of his shop but when they asked if they could stay at his place for a night he couldn’t bring himself to say no.

3.

They moved in that night and began to fuck up his record collection as soon as they arrived. Eddie followed after them, putting records back in their plastic sleeves and placing ashtrays in strategic positions while Daphne, bright-eyed, talked to them about Queensland. Eddie didn’t know she’d been to Queensland. But she had. She’d lived there for nearly a year.

“You know Cairns?” she asked Pete.

“Yeah.”