Peter Carey - Collected Stories

Today she would teach him to leave her alone. Today she had money.

“What’s the matter with you, stupid?”

“Nothing,” she said. She was going to have to say something else soon. Say it now, she thought, say it now.

“What is it?” The voice was already becoming blotched with anger. She was not prepared for a Chinese Burner. She was the one who would give Chinese Burners today.

It was time to say.

“Mr Jacobs, would you really eat dog’s poo for two hundred dollars?” She said it as she always said it, with innocent curiosity.

“I told you I would.”

“I bet you wouldn’t.” There. She had started. She had never doubted him before.

“Listen, doll, I said I would, I meant I would. What’s the matter with you? What the fuck are you smiling about?”

She had it behind her back, wrapped in a little piece of clear thin plastic film. Now she held it out.

“There it is,” she smiled.

He looked at her in disbelief. He took the cigar out of his mouth and put it on the ashtray. He wasn’t looking properly and the cigar rolled off the ashtray and lay on the desk, quietly blistering the varnish.

“What’s that?”

“Dog’s poo.”

“Pull the other leg, honey.” But his eyes were riveted on the strange little parcel.

She walked over to his desk and unwrapped it gently. It wasn’t a very big piece, about three inches long and three-quarters of an inch in diameter.

“You dirty little bitch.” He was staring at her with astonishment.

“Will you eat it?” She was surprised how controlled her voice was, how quiet and firm and reasonable.

“Two hundred dollars,” he said, but the voice trailed off at the end and lacked conviction. He was staring at the turd which lay on the desk in front of him. The neglected cigar was making a strange smell but he didn’t seem to notice.

She took the bank book and withdrawal form and placed it beside the turd. She saw then just how little he wanted to eat it.

“It’s all right,” she goaded him softly, “I knew you wouldn’t.”

“Sign the form,” Jacobs said thickly.

“I’ll sign it when you’ve eaten it.”

“Sign it now.”

“No. Afterwards.”

There was silence then. She picked up the cigar and put it in the ashtray. Jacobs stared at the turd and poked at it with a pencil.

“I didn’t think you would,” she said.

He didn’t say anything for a moment and when he looked up his eyes looked strange and dead. “Get me a glass of water.”

She got him the glass of water and placed it beside the turd.

Now when she realized that he was going to do what she hoped, she no longer wanted him to. She saw the flaws in her revenge. She saw that it would solve nothing. It would make it worse. She felt that she had a tiger pinned to the ground and her triumph was fractured by the knowledge that sooner or later she would have to let it go.

“Don’t,” she pleaded, “please don’t, Mr Jacobs.”

“Piss off.” His little eyes glinted behind his spectacles and he passed his tongue nervously over his lower lip. He bit his neatly trimmed moustache. He daintily pulled back the sleeves of his grey dustcoat. He looked like a high-jumper about to make his run.

“No,” she said, “please. I didn’t mean it. It was a joke.”

His eyes were alight with triumph. “I’ll do it, damn you. I’ll take your fucking money.” But still he didn’t touch it. She stared in horror.

It was not what she wanted. It was not what she thought. There would be no pleasure here.

He took the turd like an old lady picking up a lamington, and bit it.

She retched first.

When Jacobs retched nothing came up. He drank the water and smeared the glass. Then he bit again, and swallowed. She could not stand it. It was not what she wanted. She only wanted peace. She only wanted to be somewhere else, to walk soft sandy paths, to build a little house in a warm tropical place. She had wasted her money. She had thrown it away.

Mr Jacob’s face was contorted in a horrible grimace. He stood and knocked over his chair and then rushed from the room. She could hear him vomitting.

When he came back he was wiping his face with the back of his hand.

“Now,” he said, “sign the form.”

She signed it, full of dread. His voice had been like a surgical instrument.

“Now,” he said, “give me a kiss.”

She ran then, darting around him and fleeing into the doorway that led to her great shelved refuge. He was behind her. There was no hiding. She came to a ladder. It was not her ladder. It led to no refuge, merely to piles of cement bags. She was high up the ladder when he reached the bottom. She didn’t look down. She could hear his breathing.

She tried to be somewhere else. She had to be somewhere else. When she dropped the cement bag down the ladder she was already walking down the sandy path to the mango tree. Somewhere far away, she heard a grunt. As she dropped the second bag she knew that the grunt had come from a tangled mess of the bright painful snakes.

“No snakes here,” she said.

She descended the ladder beside the path and found the snakes snapping around her ankles.

“Go away,” she said, “or I will have to kill you. No snakes here.”

But the snakes would not go away and writhed and twisted about each other making their nasty sounds.

It took her a while to mix the cement with sand and carry enough water, but soon she had it mixed and she buried the groaning snakes in concrete where they would do no harm.

When she looked at the concrete, trowelled neatly and squared off, she realized that it was as good a place as any to build.

She walked off down the path towards the mango tree. There she found some pieces of wood with “Williamson” written on them.

She started sawing then, and by the time dusk came she had built the beginning of her new home.

That night she slept on a high platform above the path, but two nights later she was asleep within her new house.

The moon shone through the sawtoothed sky and she dreamed that she was trapped in a white arid landscape, strapped in a harness and running helplessly up and down on a wire, but that was only a dream.

1.

Lilly Danko had a funny face, but the actual point where one said “this is a funny face” rather than “this is a pretty face” was difficult to establish. Certainly there were little creases around the eyes and small smile lines beside the mouth, yet they had not always been there and she had always had a funny face. It was a long face with a long chin and perhaps it was the slight protuberance of her lower lip that was the key to it, yet it was not pronounced and could be easily overlooked and to make a fuss about it would be to ignore the sparkle in her pale-blue eyes. Yet all of this is missing the point about faces which are not static things, a blue this, a long that, a collection of little items like clues in a crossword puzzle. For Lillian Danko had a rubber face which squinted its eyes, pursed its lips, wrinkled its nose and expressed, with rare freedom, the humours of its owner.

At the age of eight she had written in a school composition that she wished, when fully grown, to take the profession of clown. And although she had long since forgotten this incident and the cold winter’s afternoon on which she had written it, she would not now, at the age of thirty, sitting in a boiling old Chevrolet at the Kennecott Interstellar Space Terminal, have found anything to disown.

Here she was, knitting baby clothes in a beaten-up car, while Mort, dressed up in a suit like a travelling salesman, walked the unseen corridors inside the terminal in search of a job as a miner on one of the company’s planets, asteroids or moons. She was not likely to share any jokes on the subject with Mort, who was stretched as tight as a guitar string about to break. And she wished, as she had found herself wishing more and more lately, that her father had been alive to share the idiocies of the world with.