Peter Carey - Collected Stories

“Now,” she said briskly, holding out her hands for the bird, “I’ll put it in the car so we won’t be breaking the rules.”

“No.” He was like a two-year-old with a teddy bear.

“You’ll exhaust it,” Lilly said, “and we need it for tomorrow. It’s our business. That’s what I mean about it not being a pet.”

“Your business?” the manager asked, and in truth every person in the room was trying to think how this beautiful bird might be anyone’s “business”.

“It’s a Pleasure Bird,” Lilly said, lighting a cigarette although she had given them up three months ago. It gave her time to think. “We charge a dollar a minute for people to stroke it.”

“You people in show business?”

“Sure am.” Lilly exhaled luxuriously and sat down on the bed.

“Dollar a minute, eh. Good work if you can get it.” He was being nice now and she allowed herself the luxury of not despising him for it.

“You think that’s too expensive?” She held out her arms for the bird. “We’ve charged more and no one’s ever complained.”

The manager stepped back from the extended arms, cooing over the bird like a mother keeping its baby from harm.

Lilly started talking. Ideas came to her so fast that she hardly knew how the sentence would end when she started it. “You can have it for half an hour.” She watched the manager glow. “In return for the price for this room and the food.”

“Done.”

“And wine, of course.”

“Done.”

“For an extra five dollars in cash you can take it to the office so we won’t disturb you. We’ll get it when time’s up.”

“Done.”

“What’s the time, Mort?”

Mort picked up his wristwatch from the top of the mute television.

“Nine twenty-three.”

“OK, it is now nine twenty-three.” She opened the door and ushered the manager out into the night. “I’ll pick it up from you at exactly nine fifty-three.”

When she shut the door she was grinning so broadly her face hurt. She hugged Mort and said, “I’m a genius. Tell me I’m a genius.”

“You’re a genius,” he said, “but you were crazy to let him take it away.”

“Why, for Chrissakes?”

“He mightn’t give it back.”

“Oh fuck, Mort. Stop it.”

“I’m sorry, it was just a thought.”

“Be positive.”

“I am positive.”

“Well, pour me a glass of wine and tell me I’m beautiful.”

The manager had taken the corkscrew and they had to shove the cork in with a pencil.

As it turned out they made an extra twenty dollars’ cash that night. It was ten-thirteen before they persuaded the manager to relinquish the bird. They stood in his office holding the wristwatch while the man bought minute after minute of extra time from his petty cash. The phone rang and wasn’t answered.

As they left his office, the bird ruffled its feathers and shat on the concrete.

3.

Mort didn’t want to look at the empty wine bottle or the plan he had agreed to so easily the night before. When Lillian got up he curled himself into a ball and pretended he was still asleep. Lilly knew he wasn’t asleep and knew why he was pretending.

“Come on, Mort, don’t be chicken shit.”

Mort moaned.

“Come on, Mort honey, or we won’t get a stall.” She rattled a coffee cup near his ear. “Do you want to get rich or do you want to stay poor? Here’s your coffee, baby. It’s getting cold.”

When Mort finally emerged, tousle-headed and soft as a child’s toy, he was in no way prepared for what he saw. Lilly was wearing white overalls and clown’s make-up. There were stars round her eyes and padding in her bum.

“Oh Christ, Lilly, please.”

“Please what? Drink your coffee.”

“Oh shit, please don’t. We don’t have to do that.”

“You heard what I told the man. We’re in show business.”

“Take it off, please. I don’t mind the business with the bird, but we don’t have to do all this.”

“Drink your coffee and I’ll take Charley-boy out for a shit.”

When he drove to the markets it was in strained silence. The clown held the bird. The straight man was at the wheel. When the car finally lost its muffler neither of them said anything.

4.

The markets had sprung up to meet the needs of the new poor and were supplied and operated by an increasingly sophisticated collection of small-time crooks. The police, by mutual agreement, rarely entered their enclosures and business was thus conducted with some decorum, whether it was the purchase of stolen clothing or illicit drugs (the notorious Lizard Dust was sold here and it was only the poor who tolerated the violent illnesses that preceded its more pleasant effects). Here you could buy spare parts for rubber thongs, fruit, vegetables, motor cars of questionable origin, poisonous hot dogs and bilious-coloured drinks.

The market they drove to was a vast concrete-paved car park which, at nine o’clock in the morning, was already unpleasantly hot. A blustery wind carried clouds of dust through the stalls, rattled the canvas roofs, and lodged a fine speck of dust in Mort’s eye. So it was Lilly who joined the queue for temporary stalls while Mort adjourned, more in embarrassment than pain, to minister to his eye in the men’s toilets.

The stall number was 128. It was nothing more than a wooden trestle table with a number painted on the top. Canvas awnings were a luxury they could not yet afford.

Mort stood behind the stall in his suit and tie, red-eyed and sulky. The bird stood stoically on the table. Lilly, resplendent in overalls and clown’s face, waddled to and fro in front, a balloon of swollen belly and padded bum.

“It won’t work.”

“Of course it’ll work,” she said. But her stomach was a mass of nerves and the baby, probably nervous of the life she had in store for it, kicked irritably inside her. “Don’t look like that,” she hissed. “I can’t do it when you’re looking at me like that.”

“Do what?”

And she started to do it. She felt a fool. She did badly what she had dreamed would be easy. Her voice sounded high and when she tried to lower it, it came out worse. What she said was hardly impressive and rarely funny. But she began to lumber amongst the crowds clapping her hands and making a fuss.

“See the Pleasure Bird at stall 128,” she yelled. “First three customers get a minute of pleasure for free. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. One dollar, one minute. They say it’s better than sex. One dollar, one minute and the first three customers get it free.”

A crowd of ragged children followed her. She did a cake walk. She danced a waltz with a black man in a pink suit. She fell over a guy-rope and made it look intentional. She attracted a small crowd by the simple device of placing a matchbox on the ground and making a big show of jumping over it, bowing and smiling when the jump was done. The matchbox jump was the most successful stunt of all and she gave the laughing crowd the news about stall 128 and the Pleasure Bird.

By the time she’d got lost in an alley of used car parts and been threatened by a woman who was trying to sell bruised apples she was exhausted. She had blisters on her feet from Mort’s sandshoes which were four sizes too big and a cut on her hand from the fall over the guy-rope. She limped back to the stall to find an enormous crowd huddled around an old woman who was dreamily stroking the bird. Mort stood beside her with his watch in his hand. The crowd was strangely silent and the woman crooning to the bird seemed vulnerable and rather sad.

“Ten minutes,” said Mort.

The woman reluctantly handed the bird back and, from a pocket of her voluminous black dress, produced a half-unravelled blue sock from which she counted out, in notes and coins, ten dollars.