Peter Carey - Collected Stories

Mr Jacobs was a small neat man who combed his hair flat with Californian Poppy hair oil. In his grey dustcoat he could look almost frail. In fewer clothes he revealed the alarming strength of his muscular forearms, disproportionate arms that belonged to a far bigger body than his. Sometimes she saw the arms in nightmares. Yet when he arrived in the morning wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase he looked to her like a respectable businessman. She was always shocked, in the mornings, to see how respectable he looked, and how his eyes, peering behind his rimless glasses, had a soft, almost mouse-like quality. He looked like a character from one of those cartoons which feature henpecked husbands. If you hadn’t known Mr Jacobs you could have imagined him saying “Yes dear, no dear”, but then you wouldn’t have known about the forearms, nor the afternoons, nor his angry bachelorhood. A wife, Mr Jacobs said, was a waste of money.

She had never known anyone like Mr Jacobs, but she had little experience of people. When she was a child they had lived in a poor mining area where her mother’s lovers had tried to gouge some unknown wealth from a bleak clay-white landscape. Around their tin shack were the high white clay piles of other men’s attempts. The ground was dotted with deep shafts and for her first four years she had only been able to play in a special leather harness which was strapped to a length of fencing wire. She had run up and down the wire like a dog on a chain, safe from the dangers of mine shafts. It must have been there, in that white hot place, that she had learned how to go somewhere else, to dream of green places and cool clear rain, to ignore what her eyes saw or her body felt.

People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else. Her mother had not liked it. Her mother’s lovers, in varying degrees, had been enraged or irritated by her withdrawals. She had learned not to hear their words or feel their blows. Now, at nineteen, her long thin legs still bore the ghost of their rages, the stripe of a heavy piece of wire, the spot of a cigarette. Yet they had not touched her.

Now it was morning in the Lost and Found and Mr Jacobs was talking about money again. He was sitting at his desk behind the great grimy counter and she was leaning against the wall, hugging herself with her thin arms, her head on one side, her waving fair hair falling over one eye as she watched Mr Jacobs with curiosity. She asked her ritual question with the untiring curiosity of a child who wants to be told the same frightening story once again.

“Mr Jacobs, would you really do anything for money, really?”

“You bet.” He lit a long thin cigar and put his feet on the desk. Each time he put the cigar to his mouth the terrible forearms emerged from his grey dustcoat. She thought of octopuses lurking beneath rocks in shallow pools.

“Would you walk naked in the street for a thousand dollars?”

“I’d do it for five hundred, doll.”

“You’d go to jail.”

“No, I’d be fined. I could pay the fine and still make a profit.”

“Would you drink, you know …” she faded off, suddenly embarrassed by what she had said.

“No, I don’t know.” He smirked. She hated his smirk. He knew what she meant because he had said he would do it before. He had said he would drink piss if there were money in it. She wanted to hear him say it again.

“You know, drink ‘it’.”

“Piss, would I drink piss for money?”

“Yes.” Her pale face burned. “That.”

“How much piss?”

“A teaspoonful.”

“Forty dollars.” It was strange the way he said that, the same tone of voice that he used when he was quoting a price for unredeemed property. It meant he was cheating. It meant, she thought, that he would probably do it for ten dollars.

“I’d do a pint for eighty.”

“What about the other?”

“What ‘other’?”

“You know.”

“Shit?”

She nodded.

“That’d be more expensive. I’d want a hundred and fifty for that.”

“What about dog’s stuff?”

“Two hundred.”

She shook her head, appalled at the thought of it.

“You don’t believe me?”

“I believe you.” She pulled a face. She couldn’t help it. The thought of it. The strange respectable little face, the neat clipped moustache smeared with stinking muck.

“Don’t pull faces at me, young lady.” She heard the tone in the voice and began to drift away. It was the nasty voice.

“I wasn’t,” she said, and then, seeing the rage growing on his face, corrected herself. “I was, but I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”

The confession pacified him. “Look, sweetheart, you don’t live in the real world. In two years’ time I’ll be free, just collecting rent.”

“Who’ll come here then?” Maybe, she thought, there will be someone nice. The thought cheered her. It had never occurred to her before.

“I’m fucked if I know. Somebody. You’ll be stuck here and I’ll be free just going around collecting rent.”

“Oh,” she said, “I won’t be here either.”

He laughed then. “You’ll be here, my little biddy, until you’re a shrunken-up old woman. How will you get out?”

She smiled then, so secretly that he started to get angry again.

“What are you smiling about?” He took his feet down off the desk.

“It’s nothing,” she said, but she was already edging her way along the wall, trying to escape. She couldn’t tell him.

“Tell me.” He was standing now and moving towards her. There was really no point in running. She would have to tell him something. Tell him anything.

“Tell me.” He was beside her now. His hand took her wrist. What would he do? She began to retreat. She started collecting coloured stones under water. She liked doing that. Swimming through the pale green water with the bucket, a beautiful turquoise bucket. The stones lay on the bright sandy bottom.

He was twisting her wrist. It was called “A Chinese Burner”. He had told her that before. He put two hands around her wrist and twisted different ways.

“I’ll get married,” she lied, picking up a glowing ruby-coloured stone, “and go away and have children.”

That satisfied him. He believed in confessions under pain. He believed in pain as he believed in money. He released her wrist and went back to sit behind his desk. Soon he would make a few false entries in the book, then he would go out to lunch, and then it would be afternoon.

During lunch she retreated into the depths of the Lost and Found. She crouched on the floor, reading in the dusty light: “Harvesting is not easy in a large mango tree, for the fruit must be picked carefully and placed gently into the picking boxes.”

There were no photographs of mangoes and she had never seen one.

She waited for the afternoon, placing glowing blue fruit into a pinewood box. She dropped pink tissues into the box and bedded the blue mangoes into it. She loved the feel of them, as soft and gentle as a baby’s cheek.

2.

It was afternoon and he stank of drink. He did not want it straight away. He made some phone calls and she waited, desperately flying through dusty corridors looking for beautiful things.

There was so much ugliness.

She saw shelves of dog turds lined up like buns in a bakery. She saw lengths of electrical flex hanging like whips. She looked for coloured stones but when she picked them up they were warm and squelchy in her hands and smelt of unmistakable filth. She searched on while he talked, looking for the forest, finding at last cool green paths below dripping trees. In the distance the bright blue mangoes shone like magic things and now she walked towards them, her bare feet caressed by a soft sandy path.