Peter Carey - Collected Stories

Her face was red, the skin taut with rage.

“Isn’t it?”

I’d thought this damn Hup thing had gone away, but here it was. The stupidity of it. It drove me insane. Her books became weapons in my hands. I threw them at her, hard, in a frenzy.

“Idiot. Dolt. You don’t believe what you say. You’re too young to know anything. You don’t know what these damn people are like,” I poked at the posters, “you’re too young to know anything. You’re a fool. You’re playing with life.” I hurled another book. “Playing with it.”

She was young and nimble with a boxer’s reflexes. She dodged the books easily enough and retaliated viciously, slamming a thick sociology text into the side of my head.

Staggering back to the window I was confronted with the vision of an old man’s face, looking in.

I pulled up the window and transferred my abuse in that direction.

“Who in the fuck are you?”

A very nervous old man stood on a long ladder, teetering nervously above the street.

“I’m a painter.”

“Well, piss off.”

He looked down into the street below as I grabbed the top rung of the ladder and gave it a little bit of a shake.

“Who is it?” Carla called.

“It’s a painter.”

“What’s he doing?”

I looked outside. “He’s painting the bloody place orange.”

The painter, seeing me occupied with other matters, started to retreat down the ladder.

“Hey.” I shook the ladder to make him stop.

“It’s only a primer,” he pleaded.

“It doesn’t need any primer,” I yelled. “Those bloody boards will last a hundred years.”

“You’re yelling at the wrong person, fellah.” The painter was at the bottom of the ladder now, and all the bolder because of it.

“If you touch that ladder again I’ll have the civil police here.” He backed into the street and shook his finger at me. “They’ll do you, my friend, so just watch it.”

I slammed the window shut and locked it for good measure. “You’ve got to talk to the landlord,” I said, “before they ruin the place.”

“Got to?”

“Please.”

Her face became quiet and secretive. She started picking up books and pamphlets and stacking them against the wall with exaggerated care.

“Please, Carla.”

“You tell them,” she shrugged. “I won’t be here.” She fetched the heavy sociology text from beneath the window and frowned over the bookshelves, looking for a place to put it.

“What in the hell does that mean?”

“It means I’m a Hup. I told you that before. I told you the first time I met you. I’m taking a Chance and you won’t like what comes out. I told you before,” she repeated, “you’ve known all along.”

“Be buggered you’re taking a Chance.”

She shrugged. She refused to look at me. She started picking up books and carrying them to the kitchen, her movements uncharacteristically brisk.

“People only take a Chance when they’re pissed off. Are you?”

She stood by the stove, the books cradled in her arms, tears streaming down her face.

Even as I held her, even as I stroked her hair, I began to plot to keep her in the body she was born in. It became my obsession.

4.

I came home the next night to find the outside of the house bright orange and the inside filled with a collection of people as romantically ugly as any I had ever seen. They betrayed their upper-class origins by dressing their crooked forms in such romantic styles that they were in danger of creating a new foppishness. Faults and infirmities were displayed with a pride that would have been alien to any but a Hup.

A dwarf reclined in a Danish-style armchair, an attentuated hand waving a cigarette. His overalls, obviously tailored, were very soft, an expensive material splattered with “original” paint. If he hadn’t been smoking so languorously he might have passed for real.

Next to him, propped against the wall, was the one I later knew as Daniel. The grotesque pockmarks on his face proudly accentuated by the subtle use of make-up and, I swear to God, colour co-ordinated with a flamboyant pink scarf.

Then, a tall thin woman with the most pronounced curvature of the spine and a gaunt face dominated by a most extraordinary hooked nose. Her form was clad in the tightest garments and from it emanated the not unsubtle aroma of power and privilege.

If I had seen them anywhere else I would have found them laughable, not worthy of serious attention. Masters amusing themselves by dressing as servants. Returned tourists clad in beggars’ rags. Educated fops doing a bad charade of my tough, grisly companions in the boarding house.

But I was not anywhere else. This was our home and they had turned it into some spider’s-web or nightmare where dog turds smell like French wine and roses stink of the charnel-house.

And there squatting in their midst, my most beautiful Carla, her eyes shining with enthusiasm and admiration whilst the hook-nosed lady waved her bony fingers.

I stayed by the door and Carla, smiling too eagerly, came to greet me and introduce me to her friends. I watched her dark eyes flick nervously from one face to the next, fearful of everybody’s reaction to me, and mine to them.

I stood awkwardly behind the dwarf as he passed around his snapshots, photographs taken of him before his Chance.

“Not bad, eh?” he said, showing me a shot of a handsome man on the beach at Cannes. “I was a handsome fellow, eh?”

It was a joke, but I was confused about its meaning. I nodded, embarrassed. The photograph was creased with lines like the palm of an old man’s hand.

I looked at the woman’s curved back and the gaunt face, trying to find beauty there, imagining holding her in my arms.

She caught my eyes and smiled. “Well, young man, what will you do while we have our little meeting?”

God knows what expression crossed my face, but it would have been a mere ripple on the surface of the feelings that boiled within me.

Carla was at my side in an instant, whispering in my ear that it was an important meeting and wouldn’t take long. The hook-nosed woman, she said, had an unfortunate manner, was always upsetting everyone, but had, just the same, a heart of gold.

I took my time in leaving, fussing around the room looking for my beautiful light fishing rod with its perfectly preserved old Mitchell reel. I enjoyed the silence while I fossicked around behind books, under chairs, finally discovering it where I knew it was all the time.

In the kitchen, I slapped some bait together, mixing mince meat, flour and garlic, taking my time with this too, forcing them to indulge in awkward small talk about the price of printing and the guru in the electric cape, one of the city’s recent contributions to a more picturesque life.

Outside the painters were washing their brushes, having covered half of the bright orange with a pale blue.

The sun was sinking below the broken columns of the Hinden Bridge as I cast into the harbour. I used no sinker, just a teardrop of mince meat, flour and garlic, an enticing meal for a bream.

The water shimmered, pearlescent. The bream attacked, sending sharp signals up the delicate light line. They fought like the fury and showed themselves in flashes of frantic silver. Luderick also swam below my feet, feeding on long ribbons of green weed. A small pink cloud drifted absent-mindedly through a series of metamorphoses. An old work boat passed, sitting low in the water like a dumpy brown duck, full of respectability and regular intent.

Yet I was anaesthetized and felt none of what I saw.

For above my head in a garish building slashed with orange and blue I imagined the Hups concluding plans to take Carla away from me.