Peter Carey - Collected Stories

But, with all these little difficulties taken care of, Eddie would have the most incredible auction sale of all time. Selected invitations to twelve of his richest customers. They would bid against each other to take possession of this most outrageous of all Eddie’s little curios.

But now as he drove out to Williamstown with the bucket of shit beside him on the seat he began to get a little nervous. His nervousness was nothing to do with the embalmer or the cops or difficulties with relatives. No, what was beginning, only now, to make him just a little bit nervous was the thought of the dead body.

He’d never seen a dead body.

He wished Daphne was with him. Daphne would have been freaked by it all. Her fear would have made him strong and confident. The thought of the body wouldn’t have worried him then. But now, by himself …

He tucked the Porsche behind a petrol tanker, deciding not to pass it. There was no hurry. Eddie cruised into Williamstown at 25 m.p.h.

7.

The house was perfect, right down to the cypress pines that lined the rickety wooden fence at the front. From this exquisite beginning it never faltered. The drive was made from bricks which had sunken so that the surface resembled the surface of the sea in a slight swell. Beside the drive were lines of dead irises and beyond the iris beds were seas of tall brown grass amongst which Eddie could see neglected garden tools and the handle of an old-fashioned lawn mower.

It was perfect. It was also a little terrifying. He wished, once more, that Daphne had been there. It would have been easy. He wouldn’t have stayed sitting in his car as he was now. He could see the house through the wire gate. There was a dead woman sitting inside that house. Blistering weatherboard. Brown holland blinds drawn. Walls marked with the water from a leaking spout. It was nothing like the house in Psycho. It was also exactly like the house in Psycho.

If it hadn’t been for the bucket of shit which was now slowly boiling in the sun it is possible that Eddie would never have left the car. But finally the foul smell became worse than his fear and he lifted the plastic garbage can from the car and carried it obediently up the drive.

It was then, halfway up the drive, that he heard the noise. An incredible screaming, high-pitched and terrible. Its effect on Eddie was shattering. His tall, thin frame jerked. He dropped the bin. And stood absolutely still.

There was a horrible prickling feeling down the back of his neck. He would have turned, right then, and run. But he was too frightened to run. He stood on that brick drive riveted to the spot while the squealing continued.

And then, very slowly, it dawned on him.

It was the fucking pig.

Hot and embarrassed he picked up the bin and continued up the drive. At the back of the house he found the pig writhing in the dust of its yard like a possessed thing. Not a smooth-shaven pig like he’d seen in the butcher shops, but a black hairy hog with a long evil snout and wild red eyes. He stood at the rails of the pig’s yard and watched it writhe like a man watching his own nightmares.

And then he realized. He thought of something he had read about:

WITHDRAWAL

The word flashed in the sky of his mind in red neon letters. And he understood the rubbish bin.

He took the bin of shit and tossed it into the pig yard. The pig gobbled the lot in two seconds, still whimpering.

Later, when he was inside the house, the pig became quiet. So, he thought, the pig is a junkie too, addicted from eating the shit of junkies.

8.

The episode with the pig had somehow cauterized his fear. Now he entered the house from the back verandah, tiptoeing selfconsciously across the creaking boards, the eyes of a thousand imaginary neighbours and vice-squad men boring into his black velvet back. He opened the door slowly, like a man defusing a dangerous bomb. His professional mind observed small details with fascination: the worn linoleum floor, the strange old lady’s hat on the hat stand, the plastic raincoat on the floor, the large white cat huddled in a ball in a far corner, the stained glass on the front door, far away. The first room, a bedroom, obviously unused. Several dead ferns in pots on the floor, a gardener’s glove, an airmail letter from Malaysia. He touched nothing, silently celebrating the perfect neglect, the authentic symbols of death. He approached, once more, that perfect no man’s land where fear is thrilling and almost pleasant.

To the left, another door. And he knew, as his hands touched the large black door knob, that this was the room. He held his breath, preparing himself for a smell he had read about. He waited for the air, heavy with the perfume of death, to overwhelm him.

But there was no smell, except perhaps a sweet woody smell like the inside of a walnut.

She sat, sedately, at the table, wearing a moth-eaten fur coat over a pair of men’s pyjamas that were a size too big. A slight old lady with thin grey hair pulled back into a bun on a very round head. Rimless glasses on a small pert nose. Tiny white hands, one resting on a table, one holding a fountain pen which rested on a blank piece of white writing paper. The table she sat at was large. On the other side of the table lay the remains of some plaster ceiling which had crushed a vase of flowers. Eddie noted the pieces of art noveau vase with satisfaction. Somehow they were almost better than the old lady herself, a more frightening natural symbol of the old lady who he now ignored, feeling a little embarrassed in her presence.

The blinds were drawn and the lights were on. This also was perfect: low-wattage lights, yellow and weak.

In search of other equally perfect symbols he wandered from room to room. He found photograph albums, old postcards, more letters than he could have hoped for, a wardrobe full of clothes, some of them expensive period pieces in their own right, a grand piano with a broken leg, paintings of irises and, in the kitchen, best of all, a ham sandwich slowly growing a green beard of mould.

And then, as he re-entered the living room where the old lady sat so quietly at the table, quite suddenly, without warning, it all went very flat. Well, perhaps not flat, but let us say that Eddie lost that tingling, that feeling of too much blood in the veins, that sensation that the curious fingers might themselves burst open under pressure, that curious irritating feeling at the back of the neck, all the delicious sensations that had always accompanied one of his finds.

Accustomed to standing on the edge of giddy chasms of disgust and terror, he was surprised to find himself standing on a wide, flat plain.

It was all so … ordinary.

He had dealt, all his professional life, with pieces of death, the cunts and pricks and tits of death, bottled, embalmed, and photographed close up. But here he had crossed that vague, disputed territory that separates the pornographic from the erotic. Accustomed to peering through keyholes, he was surprised to discover that he had walked through a door and it was all quite different from what his tingling hysterical nerves had told him it would be. He felt no suspicion of fear, no disgust, no exhilaration. Merely a kind of curious calm like a good stone.

The house was not, in spite of the body, in spite of the symbols, a house of death. The pornographer of death had been confronted with, of all things, a life.

9.

Like a child who, after weeks of ringing doorbells and running away, is caught and made welcome in the house whose doorbells he has been so excitedly ringing, Eddie shyly availed himself of the feast that was now offered him.

He travelled humbly through the rooms and passageways of the old lady’s life. He read letters from her mother which had been written fifty years ago. He leapt ten years forward to discover a love affair and back twelve years to read a school report, then forward to a concert where the old lady had sung with some distinction, then forward again, far forward, to the letter of an American who wrote to ask about a new hybrid iris which had been named after her and was difficult or impossible to obtain in Connecticut; there was a letter from a niece who worried that she might be lonely, the dignified letter of a rejected lover, then, quite recently, strange letters from a man who had once been a lodger who might well have been a con man but who inquired, just the same, about the health of a dog called Monty and who promised to return soon from Bundaberg, where he was engaged in the cane harvest.