Peter Carey - Collected Stories

Regarding the events that followed I feel neither pride nor shame. Regret, certainly, but regret is a useless emotion. I was ignorant, short-sighted, bigoted, but in my situation it is inconceivable that I could have been anything else.

But now let me describe for you Carla’s home as I came to know it, not as I saw it at first, for then I only felt the warmth of old timbers and delighted in the dozens of small signs of domesticity everywhere about me: a toothbrush in a glass, dirty clothes overflowing from a blue cane laundry basket, a made bed, dishes draining in a sink, books, papers, letters from friends, all the trappings of a life I had long abandoned, many Chances ago.

The house had once been a warehouse, long before the time of the Americans. It was clad with unpainted boards that had turned a gentle silver, ageing with a grace that one rarely saw in those days.

One ascended the stairs from the Pier Street wharf itself. A wooden door. A large key. Inside: a floor of grooved boards, dark with age.

The walls showed their bones: timber joists and beams, roughly nailed in the old style, but solid as a rock.

High in the ceiling was a sleeping platform, below it a simple kitchen filled with minor miracles: a hot-water tap, a stove, a refrigerator, saucepans, spices, even a recipe book or two.

The rest of the area was a sitting room, the pride of place being given to three beautiful antique armchairs in the Danish style, their carved arms showing that patina which only age can give.

Add a rusty-coloured old rug, pile books high from the floor, pin Hup posters here and there, and you have it.

Or almost have it, because should you open the old high sliding door (pushing hard, because its rollers are stiff and rusty from the salty air) the room is full of the sea, the once-great harbour, its waters rarely perturbed by craft, its shoreline dotted with rusting hulks of forgotten ships, great tankers from the oil age, tugs, and ferries which, even a year before, had maintained their services in the face of neglect and disinterest on all sides.

Two other doors led off the main room: one to a rickety toilet which hung out precariously over the water, the other to a bedroom, its walls stacked with files, books, loose papers, its great bed draped in mosquito netting, for there was no wiring for the customary sonic mosquito repellents and the mosquitoes carried Fasta Fever with the same dedicated enthusiasm that others of their family had once carried malaria.

The place revealed its secrets fast enough, but Carla, of course, did not divulge hers quite so readily. Frankly, it suited me. I was happy to see what I was shown and never worried about what was hidden away.

I mentioned nothing of Hups or revolution and she, for her part, seemed to have forgotten the matter. My assumption (arrogantly made) was that she would put off her Chance indefinitely. People rarely plunged into the rigours of the Lottery when they were happy with their life. I was delighted with mine, and I assumed she was with hers.

I had never known anyone like her. She sang beautifully and played the cello with what seemed to me to be real accomplishment. She came to the Park and Gardens and beat us all at poker. To see her walk across to our bed, moving with the easy gait of an Islander, filled me with astonishment and wonder.

I couldn’t believe my luck.

She had been born rich but chose to live poor, an idea that was beyond my experience or comprehension. She had read more books in the last year than I had in my life. And when my efforts to hide my ignorance finally gave way in tatters she took to my education with the same enthusiasm she brought to our bed.

Her methods were erratic, to say the last. For each new book she gave me revealed a hundred gaps in my knowledge that would have to be plugged with other books.

I was deluged with the whole artillery of Hup literature: long and difficult works like Gibson’s Class and Genetics, Schumacher’s Comparative Physiognomy, Hale’s Wolf Children.

I didn’t care what they were about. If they had been treatises on the history of Rome or the Fasta economic system I would have read them with as much enthusiasm and probably learned just as little.

Sitting on the wharf I sang her “Rosie Allan’s Outlaw Friend”, the story of an ill-lettered cattle thief and his love for a young school mistress. My body was like an old guitar, fine and mellow with beautiful resonance.

The first star appeared.

“The first star,” I said.

“It’s a planet,” she said.

“What’s the difference?” I asked.

She produced a school book on the known solar system at breakfast the next morning.

“How in the hell do you know so little?” she said, eating the omelette I’d cooked her.

I stared at the extraordinary rings of Saturn, knowing I’d known some of these things long ago. They brought to mind classrooms on summer days, dust, the smell of oranges, lecture theatres full of formally dressed students with eager faces.

“I guess I just forgot,” I said. “Maybe half my memory is walking around in other bodies. And how in the fuck is it that you don’t know how to make a decent omelette?”

“I guess,” she grinned, “that I just forgot.”

She wandered off towards the kitchen with her empty plate but got distracted by an old newspaper she found on the way. She put the plate on the floor and went on to the kitchen where she read the paper, leaning back against the sink.

“You have rich habits,” I accused her.

She looked up, arching her eyebrows questioningly.

“You put things down for other people to pick up.”

She flushed and spent five minutes picking up things and putting them in unexpected places.

She never mastered the business of tidying up and finally I was the one who became housekeeper.

When the landlord arrived one morning to collect the rent she introduced me as “my house-proud lover”. I gave the bastard my street-fighter’s sneer and he swallowed the smirk he was starting to grow on his weak little face.

I was the one who opened the doors to the harbour. I swept the floor, I tidied the books and washed the plates. I threw out the old newspapers and took down the posters for Hup meetings and demonstrations which had long since passed.

She came in from work after my first big clean-up and started pulling books out and throwing them on the floor.

“What in the fuck are you doing?”

“Where did you put them?”

“Put what?”

She pulled down a pile of old pamphlets and threw them on the floor as she looked between each one.

“What?”

“My posters, you bastard. How dare you.”

I was nonplussed. My view of posters was purely practical. It had never occurred to me that they might have any function other than to adverise what they appeared to advertise. When the event was past the poster had no function.

Confused and angry at her behaviour, I retrieved the posters from the bin in the kitchen.

“You creased them.”

“I’m sorry.”

She started putting them up again.

“Why did you take them down? It’s your house now, is it? Would you like to paint the walls, eh? Do you want to change the furniture too? Is there anything else that isn’t to your liking?”

“Carla,” I said, “I’m very sorry. I took them down because they were out of date.”

“Out of date,” she snorted. “You mean you think they’re ugly.”

I looked at the poster she was holding, a glorification of crooked forms and ugly faces.

“Well, if you want to put it like that, yes, I think they’re fucking ugly.”

She glowered at me, self-righteous and prim. “You can only say that because you’re so conditioned that you can only admire looks like mine. How pathetic. That’s why you like me, isn’t it?”