Peter Carey - Collected Stories

The water became black with a dark-blue wave. The waving reflection of a yellow-lighted window floated at my feet and I heard the high-pitched wheedling laugh of a Fasta in the house above. It was the laugh of a Fasta doing business.

That night I caught ten bream. I killed only two. The others I returned to the melancholy window floating at my feet.

5.

The tissues lay beneath the bed. Dead white butterflies, wet with tears and sperm.

The mosquito net, like a giant parody of a wedding veil, hung over us, its fibres luminescent, shimmering with light from the open door.

Carla’s head rested on my shoulder, her hair wet from both our tears.

“You could put it off,” I whispered. “Another week.”

“I can’t. You know I can’t. If I don’t do it when it’s booked I’ll have to wait six months.”

“Then wait …”

“I can’t.”

“We’re good together.”

“I know.”

“It’ll get better.”

“I know.”

“It won’t last, if you do it.”

“It might, if we try.”

I damned the Hups in silence. I cursed them for their warped ideals. If only they could see how ridiculous they looked.

I stroked her brown arm, soothing her in advance of what I said. “It’s not right. Your friends haven’t become working class. They have a manner. They look disgusting.”

She withdrew from me, sitting up to light a cigarette with an angry flourish.

“Ah, you see,” she pointed the cigarette at me. “Disgusting. They look disgusting.”

“They look like rich fops amusing themselves. They’re not real. They look evil.”

She slipped out from under the net and began searching through the tangled clothes on the floor, separating hers from mine. “I can’t stand this,” she said, “I can’t stay here.”

“You think it’s so fucking great to look like the dwarf?” I screamed. “Would you fuck him? Would you wrap your legs around him? Would you?”

She stood outside the net, very still and very angry. “That’s my business.”

I was chilled. I hadn’t meant it. I hadn’t thought it possible. I was trying to make a point. I hadn’t believed.

“Did you?” I hated the shrill tone that crept into my voice. I was a child, jealous, hurt.

I jumped out of the bed and started looking for my own clothes. She had my trousers in her hand. I tore them from her.

“I wish you’d just shut up,” I hissed, although she had said nothing. “And don’t patronize me with your stupid smart talk.” I was shaking with rage.

She looked me straight in the eye before she punched me.

I laid one straight back.

“That’s why I love you, damn you.”

“Why?” she screamed, holding her hand over her face. “For God’s sake, why?”

“Because we’ll both have black eyes.”

She started laughing just as I began to cry.

6.

I started to write a diary and then stopped. The only page in it says this:

“Saturday. This morning I know that I am in love. I spend the day thinking about her. When I see her in the street she is like a painting that is even better than you remembered. Today we wrestled. She told me she could wrestle me. Who would believe it? What a miracle she is. Ten days to go. I’ve got to work out something.”

7.

Wednesday. Meeting day for the freaks.

On the way home I bought a small bag of mushrooms to calm me down a little bit. I walked to Pier Street the slow way, nibbling as I went.

I came through the door ready to face the whole menagerie but they weren’t there, only the hook-nosed lady, arranged in tight brown rags and draped across a chair, her bowed legs dangling, one shoe swinging from her toe.

She smiled at me, revealing an uneven line of stained and broken teeth.

“Ah, the famous Lumpy.”

“My name is Paul.”

She swung her shoe a little too much. It fell to the floor, revealing her mutant toes in all their glory.

“Forgive me. Lumpy is a pet name?” She wiggled her toes. “Something private?”

I ignored her and went to the kitchen to make bait in readiness for my exile on the pier. The damn mince was frozen solid. Carla had tidied it up and put it in the freezer. I dropped it in hot water to thaw it.

“Your mince is frozen.”

“Obviously.”

She patted the chair next to her with a bony hand.

“Come and sit. We can talk.”

“About what?” I disconnected the little Mitchell reel from the rod and started oiling it, first taking off the spool and rinsing the sand from it.

“About life.” She waved her hand airily, taking in the room as if it were the entire solar system. “About… love. What… ever.” Her speech had that curious unsure quality common in those who had taken too many Chances, the words spluttered and trickled from her mouth like water from a kinked and tangled garden hose. “You can’t go until your mince … mince has thawed.” She giggled. “You’re stuck with me.”

I smiled in spite of myself.

“I could always use weed and go after the luderick.”

“But the tide is high and the weed will be … impossible to get. Sit down.” She patted the chair again.

I brought the reel with me and sat next to her, slowly dismantling it and laying the parts on the low table. The mushrooms were beginning to work, coating a smooth creamy layer over the gritty irritations in my mind.

“You’re upset,” she said. I was surprised to hear concern in her voice. I suppressed a desire to look up and see if her features had changed. Her form upset me as much as the soft rotting faces of the beggars who had been stupid enough to make love with the Fastas. So I screwed the little ratchet back in and wiped it twice with oil.

“You shouldn’t be upset.”

I said nothing, feeling warm and absent-minded, experiencing that slight ringing in the ears you get from eating mushrooms on an empty stomach. I put the spool back on and tightened the tension knob. I was running out of things to do that might give me an excuse not to look at her.

She was close to me. Had she been that close to me when I sat down? In the corner of my eye I could see her gaunt bowed leg, an inch or two from mine. My thick muscled forearm seemed to belong to a different planet, to have been bred for different purposes, to serve sane and sensible ends, to hold children on my knee, to build houses, to fetch and carry the ordinary things of life.

“You shouldn’t be upset. You don’t have to lose Carla. She loves you. You may find that it is not so bad … making love … with a Hup.” She paused. “You’ve been eating mushrooms, haven’t you?”

The hand patted my knee. “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”

What did she mean? I meant to ask, but forgot I was feeling the hand. I thought of rainbow trout in the clear waters at Dobson’s Creek, their brains humming with creamy music while my magnified white hands rubbed their underbellies, tickling them gently before grabbing them, like stolen jewels, and lifting them triumphant in the sunlight. I smelt the heady smell of wild blackberries and the damp fecund odours of rotting wood and bracken.

“We don’t forget how to make love when we change.”

The late afternoon sun streamed through a high window. The room was golden. On Dobson’s Creek there is a shallow run from a deep pool, difficult to work because of overhanging willows; caddis flies hover above the water in the evening light.

The hand on my knee was soft and caressing. Once, many Chances ago, I had my hair cut by a strange old man. He combed so slowly, cut so delicately, my head and my neck were suffused with pleasure. It was in a classroom. Outside someone hit a tennis ball against a brick wall. There were cicadas, I remember, and a water sprinkler threw beads of light onto glistening grass, freshly mown. He cut my hair shorter and shorter till my fingers tingled.