Peter Carey - Collected Stories

He wandered through the pages of photograph albums and was able to put faces to many of the people who wrote the letters. He saw in the unchanging eyes of the old lady a peculiar mixture of vulnerability and bravado, the look was still there, gazing at him from across the table. He met her father, her mother, her brother the architect, her other brother who had been killed in a motor accident on his twenty-first birthday, the man who had written the first love letters but not the man who had written the more recent ones.

He read the letters sitting across the table from the old lady, who seemed as if she might, at any moment, begin to reply to any one of this vast horde of correspondents.

He stayed until dusk but he knew long before then that it would be wrong to make the tableau. It would be wrong because it would be wrong, and it would be wrong because it wasn’t shrill, or disgusting, or even vaguely spooky. He knew also that there was a lot of money to be made from selling the individual parts. The body, once removed from its environment, would be sufficiently scandalous to bring ten thousand dollars, possibly much more. Even in his new humbled state he recognized that this was a considerable amount of money. Likewise the letters, the postcards, the clothes would bring a lot. The letter telling her of her brother’s death could bring fifty dollars, nicely mounted in a clinical aluminium frame.

Still, he managed to evade the issue of what he would actually do with all this.

He left the house as he found it, succumbing only at the last moment to the letter announcing her brother’s death. This he folded lightly and put in his pocket.

Leaving by the back door he remembered the pig which was now sleeping contentedly in the corner of its yard. Some strange combination of his new-found feelings and some more practical, cautious, bet-hedging consideration made him decide to take the pig back with him to the smack freaks, who were, after all, responsible for its condition. Left alone it would suffer. Left alone it would also attract attention to the house and perhaps remove the old lady from his grasp at a time when he was unsure of what he might or might not do with her.

I will not record here the difficulties, some of them amusing, that confronted Eddie when he decided to truss the pig, nor those that beset him when he tried to get it into the car. Suffice it to say that he was badly bitten and that he finally succeeded in arriving back at Caroline Street with one pig which was already starting to worry about where its next fix was coming from.

10.

“You what?” said Jo-Jo.

“I brought the pig back. It’s downstairs in the car.”

The three of them looked up at him derisively. They sat together on the couch, Pete, Daphne, and Jo-Jo, and Eddie didn’t like to see them like that, all together, all aligned against him. There wasn’t much room on the couch. He could see how the thighs pressed into other thighs. Here, in his fucking flat, all pressed together and sitting in judgment on him, in his own flat.

“It was screaming.” His eyes sent desperate signals to Daphne, but Daphne wasn’t receiving.

“Did you give it the shit?”

“Yeah, of course I gave it the fucking shit, but I’m not going to make a shit run out there every day just to keep it quiet.”

Pete stared at him with dreadful anaesthetized eyes and Daphne smiled at him. It wasn’t much of a smile. It could have meant a number of unpleasant things. It occurred to him that she’d been shooting up, but he didn’t ask.

“If I let it keep screaming someone’s going to call the cops and I stand to lose several thousand bucks.”

That did it. Not so cool now, his smack freak friends. They wanted to know what was out there that they’d missed. Diamonds? They’d looked through the house for valuables but the only thing they found was a wrist watch on the corpse itself.

Eddie felt better. He rolled himself a joint and didn’t pass it round. He pulled out the letter and let them read it.

The freaks didn’t know where they were but he could see that Daphne knew the value of the letter. Still, even she hadn’t guessed. She wanted to know what else was out there. Gold fillings?

Eddie very nearly didn’t tell them. He had decided on the way back from the house that he wasn’t going to sell the old lady. He felt strong and together. He was going to call a doctor or the cops or whoever you call about an old lady, and that would be it. And if it hadn’t been for this problem with people sitting on his couch, it would have been it.

Now, however, he found himself saying, “That little old lady you left behind is worth ten grand, just the body alone.”

Pete shifted in his seat and looked at Eddie with his head on one side: “Who’d buy an old lady?”

“Lots of people would buy an old lady. Daphne knows at least four people who’d buy an old lady. I know maybe a dozen.”

Pete shook his head. “Shit, you’re weird, man, you’re really weird.”

Eddie smiled his stoned, cool, people-loving smile and went to sit on a tall stool. He felt better and worse all at once. In spite of his triumph a great sadness had begun to fall around him. He began to feel that the victory hadn’t been worth it. However, he continued: “I’m going to sell that little old lady. I’m going to buy the whole fucking house, man. THE DEAD LANDLADY IN HER HOUSE. Price on application.”

“Man, you’re on a weird trip.”

“Sure. Now if you guys help me upstairs with the pig, I’ll go out there tonight and bring her back.”

“You going to bring her here ?”

“Sure. She can sit at the table there. Now you guys give me a hand with the pig and if it starts to yell you give it some stuff. I’ll pay for it, but you give it a fix if it needs it. I don’t want those pricks next door calling the cops because they hear a pig screaming.”

“OK, Eddie,” said the freaks.

11.

He drove the old lady back to Caroline Street with the hood down. She didn’t seem to mind. In fact, Eddie felt that the wind had put a smile on her face. Even now he was unsure of whether he would really sell her or not. With every mile he changed his mind and changed it back again.

In a confused state of mind he stopped off at High Street and the old lady waited patiently in the car while he went into the back room. The back room didn’t help. It all looked a little foolish to him, but maybe it was just because of the old lady waiting so meekly in the car outside.

12.

Exhausted by the events of the day, Eddie slept well that night. The freaks had given the pig a hit and it also slept soundly in the bath. The old lady sat at the table, the pen once more in her hand, gazing thoughtfully at Janis Joplin on the cover of Rolling Stone.

When Eddie woke in the morning Daphne was already up. He went out to inspect the old lady and found she wasn’t there. No one else was there, either.

Instead, he found a note from Daphne which said that they’d taken the old lady to Sydney to sell and they were going on up to Queensland to stay with relatives. The note said there was some stuff in the bathroom cupboard, enough for a couple of hits, and she’d marked the pig with lipstick to show where to put the needle in. There were other instructions, all quite helpful and explicit.

She also left the name of a man who could sell Eddie more smack and said where to contact him and how much to pay. “In my opinion,” she wrote, “the best thing might be just to give it an O.D., love, Daphne.”

1.

My friend S. went to live in America ten years ago and I still have the letter he wrote me when he first arrived, wherein he describes the shadow factories that were springing up on the west coast and the effects they were having on that society. “You see people in dark glasses wandering around the supermarkets at 2 a.m. There are great boxes all along the aisles, some as expensive as fifty dollars but most of them only five. There’s always Muzak. It gives me the shits more than the shadows. The people don’t look at one another. They come to browse through the boxes of shadows although the packets give no indication of what’s inside. It really depresses me to think of people going out at two in the morning because they need to try their luck with a shadow. Last week I was in a supermarket near Topanga and I saw an old negro tear the end off a shadow box. He was arrested almost immediately.”