Peter Carey - Collected Stories

But to come back to my new friend, who rolled a cigarette with hands which might have been the hands of an apprentice bricklayer, hands which were connected to breasts which were connected to other parts doubtless female in gender, who had such grace and beauty in her form and manner and yet had had her hair shorn in such a manner as to deny her beauty.

She was tall, my height. Across the table I noted that her hands were as large as mine. They matched. The excitement was exquisite. I anticipated nothing, vibrating in the crystal of the moment.

We talked, finally, as everyone must, about the Lottery, for the Lottery was life in those days and all of us, most of us, were saving for another Chance.

“I’m taking a Chance next week,” she said.

“Good luck,” I said. It was automatic. That’s how life had got.

“You look like you haven’t.”

“Thank you,” I said. It was a compliment, like saying that my shirt suited me. “But I’ve had four.”

“You move nicely,” she smiled. “I was watching you in the kitchen. You’re not awkward at all.”

“You move nicely too,” I grinned. “I was watching you too. You’re crazy to take a Chance, what do you want?”

“A people’s body.” She said it fast, briskly, and stared at me challengingly.

“A what?”

“A people’s body.” She picked up a knife, examined it and put it down.

It dawned on me. “Oh, you’re a Hup.”

Thinking back, I’m surprised I knew anything about Hups. They were one of a hundred or more revolutionary crackpots. I didn’t give a damn about politics and I thought every little group was more insane than the next.

And here, goddamn it, I was having dinner with a Hup, a rich crazy who thought the way to fight the revolution was to have a body as grotesque and ill-formed as my friends at the Parks and Gardens.

“My parents took the Chance last week.”

“How did it go?”

“I didn’t see them. They’ve gone to …” she hesitated “… to another place where they’re needed.” She had become quiet now, and serious, explaining that her parents had upper-class bodies like hers, that their ideas were not at home with their physiognomy (a word I had to ask her to explain), that they would form the revolutionary vanguard to lead the misshapen Lumpen Proletariat (another term I’d never heard before) to overthrow the Fastas and their puppets.

I had a desperate desire to change the subject, to plug my ears, to shut my eyes. I wouldn’t have been any different if I’d discovered she was a mystic or a follower of Hiwi Kaj.

“Anyway,” I said, “you’ve got a beautiful body.”

“Why did you say that?”

I could have said that I’d spent enough of my life with her beloved Lumpen Proletariat to hold them in no great esteem, that the very reason I was enjoying her company so much was because she was so unlike them. But I didn’t want to pursue it. I shrugged, grinned stupidly, and filled her glass with beer.

Her eyes flashed at my shrug. I don’t know why people say “flashed”, but I swear there was red in her eyes. She looked hurt, stung, and ready to attack.

She withdrew from me, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms. “What do you think is beautiful?”

Before I could answer she was leaning back into the table, but this time her voice was louder.

“What is more beautiful, a parrot or a crow?”

“A parrot, if you mean a rosella. But I don’t know much about parrots.”

“What’s wrong with a crow?”

“A crow is black and awkward-looking. It’s heavy. Its cry is unattractive.”

“What makes its cry unattractive?”

I was sick of the game, and exhausted with such sudden mental exercise.

“It sounds forlorn,” I offered.

“Do you think that it is the crow’s intention, to sound forlorn? Perhaps you are merely ignorant and don’t know how to listen to a crow.”

“Certainly, I’m ignorant.” It was true, of course, but the observation stung a little. I was very aware of my ignorance in those days. I felt it keenly.

“If you could kill a parrot or a crow which would you kill?”

“Why would I want to kill either of them?”

“But if you had to, for whatever reason.”

“The crow, I suppose. Or possibly the parrot. Whichever was the smallest.”

Her eyes were alight and fierce. She rolled a cigarette without looking at it. Her face suddenly looked extraordinarily beautiful, her eyes glistening with emotion, the colour high in her cheeks, a peculiar half-smile on her wide mouth.

“Which breasts are best?”

I laughed. “I don’t know.”

“Which legs?”

“I don’t know. I like long legs.”

“Like the film stars.”

Like yours, I thought. “Yes.”

“Is that really your idea of beautiful?”

She was angry with me now, had decided to call me enemy. I did not feel enemy and didn’t want to be. My mind felt fat and flabby, unused, numb. I forgot my irritation with her ideas. I set all that aside. In the world of ideas I had no principles. An idea was of no worth to me, not worth fighting for. I would fight for a beer, a meal, a woman, but never an idea.

“I like grevilleas,” I said greasily.

She looked blank. I thought as much! “Which are they?” I had her at a loss.

“They’re small bushes. They grow in clay, in the harshest situations. Around rocks, on dry hillsides. If you come fishing with me, I’ll show you. The leaves are more like spikes. They look dull and harsh. No one would think to look at them twice. But in November,” I smiled, “they have flowers like glorious red spiders. I think they’re beautiful.”

“But in October?”

“In October I know what they’ll be like in November.”

She smiled. She must have wanted to like me. I was disgusted with my argument. It had been cloying and saccharine even to me. I hadn’t been quite sure what to say, but it seems I hit the nail on the head.

“Does it hurt?” she asked suddenly.

“What?”

“The Chance. Is it painful, or is it like they say?”

“It makes you vomit a lot, and feel ill, but it doesn’t hurt. It’s more a difficult time for your head.”

She drained her beer and began to grin at me. “I was just thinking,” she said.

“Thinking what?”

“I was thinking that if you have anything more to do with me it’ll be a hard time for your head too.”

I looked at her grinning face, disbelievingly.

I found out later that she hadn’t been joking.

3.

To cut a long and predictable story short, we got on well together, if you’ll allow for the odd lie on my part and what must have been more than a considerable suppression of common sense on hers.

I left my outcast acquaintances behind to fight and steal, and occasionally murder each other in the boarding house. I returned there only to pick up my fishing rod. I took it round to her place at Pier Street, swaggering like a sailor on leave. I was in a flamboyant, extravagant mood and left behind my other ratty possessions. They didn’t fit my new situation.

Thus, to the joys of living with an eccentric and beautiful woman I added the even more novel experience of a home. Either one of these changes would have brought me some measure of contentment, but the combination of the two of them was almost too good to be true.

I was in no way prepared for them. I had been too long a grabber, a survivor.

So when I say that I became obsessed with hanging on to these things, using every shred of guile I had learned in my old life, do not judge me harshly. The world was not the way it is now. It was a bitter jungle of a place, worse, because even in the jungle there is cooperation, altruism, community.