Peter Carey - Collected Stories

“Cairns is a groove.”

“Holloway Beach.”

“Oh Christ yeah, Holloway Beach.” Pete exchanged some look with Jo-Jo that could have meant anything.

Eddie nearly asked, what’s Holloway Beach, but he stopped himself. He’d never seen Pete hold a human conversation with anyone. He would rather that it wasn’t happening here.

“You ever go to Martin’s caravan?”

“Oh yes,” Daphne smiled, a very large warm smile.

“He got busted.”

“Yeah I know.” Daphne smiled like she knew a lot about Martin and his caravan. It was a quite explicit smile which made her look a little soft and sentimental round the eyes.

Pete nodded, “You knew Martin.” He laughed.

Eddie sat on the floor and grinned good-naturedly. He remembered Daphne telling him once how she’d lived in a caravan.

“Martin was a good guy,” said Jo-Jo. “When he got busted his mum flew up from Lismore and bailed him out. You ever meet his mum?”

“Yeah,” Daphne giggled. “He took me down to Lismore once to see his mum.”

“The Golden Wattle Café …” grinned Pete.

“Yeah, The Golden Wattle Café, and she looked me up and down and everything. It wasn’t very cool. I had to sleep in a room out the back. That’s when I pissed off from Martin. His mum came in one morning and said, Daphne what do you think of Martin? I don’t know what she wanted me to say. But I said, well Mrs Clements he’s certainly a good fuck.”

“What’d she do?”

“ She didn’t do anything. She just pretended she hadn’t heard. I got a bus.”

Eddie waited for them to start talking about drugs. Sooner or later it’d come up. He hadn’t told her they were smack freaks. Now, sometime, the hypodermic would come out and no one needed to go and hide in the dunny to do the job. And then. And then, Daphne would want to try it. Anything once, she’d say, anything once. And leave Eddie standing like a shag on a rock.

They made him feel so fucking straight. He would have loved to have kicked them out but that would have made him feel even more straight. And when they began to shit in his red plastic rubbish bin he didn’t complain.

4.

Eddie went down to the shop the next morning to make a few private phone calls and found Detective Sergeant Mulligan from the vice squad waiting for him. Eddie knew Detective Sergeant Mulligan from the days when he’d managed the Brown Paper Book Shop in the Metropole Arcade. When he saw Mulligan he knew what had happened: his High Street friends had lodged an official complaint.

Eddie parked the Porsche behind Mulligan’s unmarked Holden and waved to the dapper man in the suit and suede waistcoat who stood waiting patiently outside the shop. Mulligan looked more like a used-car salesman than a cop. He had a seedy handsome face and favoured big cufflinks and interesting tie-pins.

He was going to be busted. He didn’t mind. Finally it’d be good for business.

“You’re a dirty bastard,” said Mulligan. “This is Constable Fisher.”

Fisher looked like a farmer. He gazed solemnly at Eddie like a child looking at a dangerous snake in the zoo.

Eddie opened the shop for them and they wandered around getting a better look at the photographs. “You know who this is?” Mulligan tapped a man lying on what seemed to be a kitchen floor.

“No.”

“Name’s Hogan. His wife’s in Fairlea now, the silly bitch. You mind telling me where you got these?”

“From the North Melbourne tip.”

“ You found them at the North Melbourne tip. Just wandering through were you?”

“A friend.”

“You’re a bit sick in the head, Eddie.”

“Do you think?” Eddie smiled. He found it ironic that he was being busted for possessing the art of the police force.

Constable Fisher watched one, then the other, like a man watching a game of tennis.

“Corrupt and deprave.”

“I’m what?”

“These,” Mulligan indicated the photographs, “are likely to corrupt and deprave.” He grinned. “So I’ll have to give you a receipt.”

Eddie thumped his forehead with his fist. “They’ve got their clothes on.”

“How many photographs?”

Fisher counted them twice. “Sixteen.”

“Listen,” said Eddie, “there’s no pricks, no genitals, they’ve got their clothes on.”

“Sixteen … photo … graphs,” wrote Mulligan, “size?”

Fisher guessed: “Ten by eight?”

“They’ve got their clothes on. They’re just dead people with their clothes on.”

But the truth of the matter is that Mulligan had a better idea of what Eddie was up to than Eddie did himself. He recognized him for what he was: a pornographer of death. He gave Eddie the receipt and went off with the photographs under his arm.

5.

Eddie spent the rest of the day trying to find a lawyer, an embalmer, and a man who made crates.

He phoned the lawyer and made an appointment. Then he contacted the crate maker and gave him the dimensions of the crate he wanted made. He allowed the dimensions on the generous side because Jo-Jo and Pete couldn’t seem to agree on whether their landlady had been large or small.

The embalmer was a little more difficult. He arranged one meeting at the Clare Castle Hotel in Carlton. It was not a satisfactory meeting. Eddie said he had to have a piss and crept out the back door and didn’t go back.

He’d have to solve that problem later. He contacted friends at St Vincent’s hospital but nobody knew anybody.

This job was going to have its difficulties.

Preoccupied with processes and techniques, he didn’t have much time to think about the old lady herself but her presence dominated his day and made him not unpleasantly tense. His nerve ends tingled and he clenched and unclenched his long fingers in an ecstasy of anticipation.

He planned to take Daphne with him. He had a very clear idea of the power politics of their personal relationship and he knew that the visit to the house would swing the balance once more his way, bring it back to where it had been on the first afternoon when he had humiliated the cabinet minister.

But when the morning finally came Pete and Jo-Jo presented him with the red plastic rubbish bin they’d been shitting in.

“What’s this?”

Pete stared at him incredulously. “It’s for the pig.”

“The cops?”

“Not the cops, the fucking pig. We got a pig out at Williamstown. You give it to the pig to eat.”

Eddie nodded slowly. They were doing to him what he had done to the cabinet minister. He put the plastic bin of shit in the passenger seat of the Porsche and was forced to leave Daphne behind with the freaks.

6.

When Eddie left the city he was still busy planning the complicated details of what would surely be his masterpiece. The embalmer had fucked things up a bit. Still, that could be fixed. Somehow it’d all work. And then, Jesus Christ, what an auction he’d have.

What he had in mind was a tableau. The tableau would consist of the whole house. In one room of this house there’d be a real old lady sitting at a table about to write a letter. That would be the centre of the work. The other rooms would be needed too, if only to establish the authenticity of the central room.

It was ambitious. It was dangerous. It involved skill and organization and a lot of luck. If one thing fucked up it wouldn’t work. If she had relatives who wanted to live in the house he wouldn’t be able to buy it. If the neighbours had found the body before he got there the whole thing would be ruined. If she’d started to decay, the embalmer (another problem) mightn’t be able to do a good job. He’d have to sneak her out of the house and crate her and store her for however long might be necessary.