Peter Carey - Collected Stories

The attack on Turk had lost its momentum and the three students were temporarily marooned in the midst of battle, nervous, embarrassed by what they had done.

But McGregor wouldn’t give up. While Turk was looking for his matches McGregor looked across at Sangster and made a limp-wristed caricature of a homosexual.

Turk saw it.

McGregor smiled back insultingly.

Turk stood, slowly, feeling the weight of the whisky for the first time.

McGregor waited.

“McGregor,” Turk smiled, “surely, if you’re honest, you’ll admit that you miss Masterton. He did have such a firm little arse.”

He walked from the bar before McGregor could recover, full of rage yet not for a second denying the pleasure he felt in saying the unsay able.

In the bar three successful men in their early thirties stayed to plan their revenge.

It was not a revenge at all, the way they discussed it.

It was a prank.

6.

Sangster’s Mercedes arrived at the house before Turk’s bus could hope to. Davis, unsure and worried, lost courage at the last moment and sat in the car. He was beginning to feel sick and had no appetite for what was planned. He remembered a childhood afternoon when he had fired air-rifle pellets into a large, slow-moving lizard, only realizing the atrocity he was committing after he had fired twenty slugs into the slow body and saw the blood spots and the open eyes of the terribly silent being which stubbornly refused to die.

He waited in the dark street, fearful of both Turk’s arrival and his friends’ activity. He considered leaving but he lacked the courage, just as he had lacked the courage to speak against the prank.

In the gloom he saw Sangster and McGregor carrying something. Their laughter was sharp and clear.

They were on the porch now. He heard the giggling, and then the hammering as they nailed the muddy body of Turk’s fox terrier to his front door.

They made him come then, to admire the work.

The surgeon in the dark suit walked up the steps of the house where he joined a marketing director and a newspaper proprietor in looking at the body of a dead dog nailed to a door.

At that moment they were not to know that they had made an enduring nightmare for themselves, that the staring eyes of the dead dog would peer into the dirty corners of their puzzled dreams for many years to come.

For the people they continued to make love to in their dreams did not always have vaginas and the dog looked on, its tongue lewdly lolling out, observing it all.

1.

How I have waited for the train, dreamed about it, studied its every detail. It has been my ambition, my obsession, a hope too far-fetched for one of my standing. My poor, dimly lit room is lined with newspaper cuttings, postcards, calendars (both cheaply and expensively printed) celebrating its glories, the brutal power of its locomotive, the velvety luxury of its interiors.

On stifling summer nights I have lain on my bed and lingered over the pages of my beautiful scrapbooks, particularly the one titled “Tickets, Reservations, etc.”. Possibly it is the best collection of its type. I do not know. But I have been fortunate indeed to have superiors who have not only known of my interest but have been thoughtful enough to hand on what bits and pieces have come their way.

I imagine them at dinner parties: the clink of fine crystal, the witty conversation, the French wines and white-shouldered women.

“Ah,” one would say, “so you have been north on the train?”

“Yes,” said nonchalantly, as if the train were nothing, a bicycle, a bowl of soup.

“I wonder perhaps if I may have your tickets. I have a clerk who has an interest …”

Even now, imagining this conversation, I hold my breath. I wait on tenterhooks. Have the tickets been thrown away? Have they been kept? If so will my superior remember to ask about dining-room reservation cards, a menu, baggage tickets?

“Well, yes, I believe I have them still.”

Will he get them now? Or will he merely intend to fetch them but stay talking for a moment and then, finally, forget the matter entirely.

No. No. He stands. A tall man, very white-skinned, a rather cruel aristocratic nose. A kindly smile flickers around his thin lips. “Best to get it now,” he says, “lest one forget.”

It is a large house of course and he is away some time. He walks lightly up the great curving staircase where he passes maids in black dresses and white aprons. He greets them kindly, knowing each one by name. I follow him down wide corridors and into a study, book-lined, a large green lamp hanging over a cedar table on which sits a stamp collection in eight leather-bound volumes. One album lies open revealing blue stamps, almost identical, but with slight differences in printing.

He fossicks in the drawer of a mahogany desk. I cannot make out what he has. Ah, an envelope. Now, down the corridors. Oh, the agony of waiting. On the staircase he stops to talk with a servant, inquiring about the man’s father. The conversation drags on. It seems as if we will be here all night. But no, no, it is over. The servant proceeds upstairs, his master downstairs.

Finally at the dinner table the envelope is presented to my superior. He opens it. Thank God. I thought for a moment he was going to put it in his pocket without even looking.

And, oh, what treasures we have.

First, two small blue first-class tickets. The blue denotes a journey in excess of one thousand miles. Rare enough, but across the blue is a faint green stripe which denotes the Family Saloon. I imagine the saloon, recalling the colour gravure calendar which displays its glories. The oak door leading to the observation platform. The high arched roof with the clerestory windows. The two quilted chairs upholstered in rich rust-coloured velvet. There is also a couch with two loose cushions, one with tassels, one bearing an insignia the nature of which remains mysterious to me. There is a writing table with a lamp of graceful design. The windows of the carriage are large, affording a panorama of the most spectacular scenery by day, curtained by ingenious blinds at night.

In addition the envelope contains reservations for the dining car, a lavishly printed menu and two unusual luggage labels denoting the high rank of the traveller.

They will go into my scrapbook, of course, and be held there not by anything as coarse as glue, but by the small transparent hinges used by stamp collectors. The scrapbook will lie under my bed as always. On a hot night I will lean down and take it out, and slowly, having all the time in the world, I will peruse its contents.

If the fat bitch in the next room roars and moans in her stinking lust I will not become distressed. I will not even hear her. While her organ grips and slides over her latest lover’s aching penis, I will be far away. Nothing will touch me. I will not hammer on the wall in rage. Nor will I be so base as to press my ear closer to catch the obscenities she mutters or the details of the perversions she commands him to perform.

I will travel first through the old tickets, pale gold with ornate copperplate, then over the commemorative journeys with their ornamental insignia, their laurels, crests and specially commissioned engravings. The list, although not endless, is certainly long. There are five hundred and thirty-three separate tickets.

If the following day is a Sunday I will wake early and travel by blue bus to the Central Station. It is not permitted to visit the platform itself but one can look through the wire grille and watch the activity. The passengers, beautifully dressed, occasionally accompanied by servants, stroll to and fro on the platform. One may also catch a glimpse of a courtesan, white-skinned and dark-eyed, her position in life denoted by the small white umbrella she holds in one small gloved hand. Porters bustle. Waiters in red uniform, their faces as empty of expression as the glass window they stand behind, examine the status of those whom they will shortly serve. At one time a string quartet was established in a long white carriage and when the train at last departed it was possible to hear the sweet music of a cello above the muscular sound of the locomotive.