Theft (13 page)
So you will now perhaps understand that, when the gorgeous Marlene Leibovitz said she would get me a show in Tokyo, my first thought was not of her moral character--not a quality you can ever look for in a dealer--but of Hugh. There is always Hugh, and what to do with him.
18
I would not mind a quid for every time the Butcher judged it time for me to piss off to my bed but in the case of Marlene Leibovitz no words were needed, their BUSINESS DISCUSSION being so urgent that I said cheerio before I got embarrassed for them both. God save them. When I stood to go she kissed me on the cheek and said something in a foreign language it must have been good night. I had no reason to get myself excited in spite of how I felt.
Having left them to their NEGOTIATIONS I sat on the stairs between the first and second floors but then Butcher came bursting out like a BAND-DOG who has broke his chain. What did I think I was doing? I could have punched. him in the nose but our father had correctly taught us the folly of fighting on a staircase and so I descended until I heard him close the upstairs door and slide his bolt, wad, load, what did I care?
From the time I was cast out of state school number twentyeight THROUGH NO FAULT OF MY OWN I occupied a grey steel chair purchased from AR-BEE Supply Company, and on Sunday evenings in the summer I would sit and watch the line of traffic that descended on us from Ballarat and the Pentland Hills, vehicles made of steel but for all the world like flesh and blood, dogs on heat, each one sniffing the tail of the one in front, an unbroken chain of men and women, boyfriends, girlfriends, the females with their heads on the shoulders of the males, sometimes a slender arm stretched out along the top of the backseat. One after the other they travelled in their mating myriads, their red behind-lights stringing a glowing necklace through the gloaming and depresh. Afterwards I went to the sleep-out which was what we called the part of the verandah Blue Bones walled in with asbestos sheets now generally against the law. Nothing much there after my brother ran away--steel bunks, old brown sticky tape the only evidence of the missing HOLY PICTURES by Mark Rothko the one who passed away.
On Bathurst Street I carried my JERRY-BUILT chair to the bottom of the stairs all the time feeling the great BLAME of the Butcher settling on my neck and that got my engine churning, pumping, and all the muscles in my forearms began to ELECTRIFY and then I must take a little stroll. I do not like the dark but had no choice. I pushed through the boys and girls, the drunk men shouting suck my dick. Cast-out angels, imps and demons of the bottle dark. Did I make them? Was it my fault they were there?
On another subject--I know not what the Butcher did to his missus but who could blame her for tiring of him in the end?
She was not like anyone you might meet if you were a Bones.
She was always kind to me, or was until I gave her reason not to be. Also she delivered up a magnificous little boy a MUCHIMPROVED MODEL of anything the Butcher could have done of his own accord. And I was promoted to be the MAJORDOMO, the factotum, the dogsbody, the nurse, the doorman, the butler, the waiter, the chief bottle washer, and my SIBLING often got it in his head that this was an insult to me to be a servant but he had no idea of who I was, bless me, I was now busy, from dawn to night, continually occupied in useful labour until suddenly GODDAMN ME.
That's enough. In any case.
Was never so busy as when I was Uncle Hugh.
That's enough, although I wish they had cut my throat and buried me that's it. Not being a brave man I was alive and so I fled from the fornicators on Bathurst Street and I pushed down through the WINE-DARK crowds towards the Quay and soon the footpaths were lonelier and I liked it much better though keeping an eye skinned, as instructed, for THE HOMOS. If I had half a brain I would have
returned to the safety of our Development Site but I can be a COMPLETE BLOODY MORON and headed into the criminal shadow of the Cahill Expressway and then the tomato sauce and stink-water of Circular Quay where the deckhand was about to withdraw the gangplank from the Woolwich Ferry. I arrived on board so urgently the plank sprung up in the air, crashed down like a clown-stick on the wharf. The deckhand was thin and ugly with a tattoo on his nose but he shook his head like he was SOMEONE OF IMPORTANCE. Thank Jesus the Butcher was not here to take offence.
I could not go home. All that was lost to me six hundred miles away. Even before we were round the corner of Dawes Point I could smell the bilgy oily air blowing from the container ships moored behind Goat Island, and the seagulls were like a whiteant hatch swarming around the pylons of the bridge, also the angry traffic locked in noisy upset above my head. Thus--the ferry--calm and clear, and the northeast wind lifted the shirt clear off my skin as if I was a human clothesline, no other burden on my soul. For a moment I was happy and then, suddenly, that's enough.
That's enough.
I folded up my chair and walked to the lower deck the big diesel engines never ceased beneath my feet, sending me back to places known to Bill Bones and me, into our OLD HAUNTS.
Best not thought of.
Having rashly jumped aboard I had no more choice than dishwater down the giddy drain. The first ferry stop was the Darling Street Wharf at Balmain East and here the WELLKNOWN CRIMINAL had always had his waterfront mansion with canvas blinds. Before the COURT ORDER I often came here with Butcher's little boy and lifted him up to spy across the wall although we never saw a living soul certainly not the criminal himself. From here we might walk to the market up on Darling Street or return to the wharf and catch a SILVER BREAM or board a later ferry to LONG NOSE POINT and there visit STOREY AND KEERS the shipyard and if there were no COMPANY DIRECTORS in the office our mate would permit us aboard the FOREIGN SHIPS or onto the low brown WORK BOATS and we were once smuggled out to Cockatoo Island, Billy Bones and I, where we could have been gaoled for TRESPASS. Here we illegally visited the island power station which was like the inside of a valve radio, purple light, sparks, and also a TOP SECRET tunnel, cut by men from one side of the island to another. Billy had the Bones constitution he never tired. If I was a servant I was happy. Every day was something new. We might take the ferry to Greenwich and go swimming in the baths--BELLY WHACKERS and JELLYFISH and the bloody wonders of the good old DOG PADDLE. It does no good to remember. Better not. Stupid for me to have gone to Circular Quay.
By the time the ferry was coming into the Darling Street Wharf I did not trust the UNFRIENDLY DECKHAND to permit my escape. I jumped before he got a rope across the bollard, did not even glance at the CRIMINAL HOUSE but instead rushed up the Darling Street hill with my chair under my arm. Doubtless I looked like some kind of lunatic speeding up the hill into Balmain, my goodness, my blood must have been vermilious. The streets were empty of all but DRINKERS spilling from the pubs like innards from a mortal wound. There was not a street that did not hold a memory Bill Bones and I built the biggest Lego house ever constructed just there, in the park by the emergency ward where I took him when he burned his little hand through no fault of his own.
Outside the Willy Wallace they were drinking their SCHOONERS on the footpath and I did say sorry when I bumped, but then I departed rapidly with the chair held tight a SHIELD AGAINST THINE ENEMIES. I knew exactly where I was, bee-pop, shee- bop--the smell of gas and cat's piss and oil from Mort Bay all around--when the drinkers confronted me I was close to the site of the 1972 payroll robbery. I had taken young Billy there more than once A HISTORIC SITE where the bagman danced around the bullets RAT-TAT-TAT.
My brother says I draw trouble on myself but how could I attack myself from behind? Being set upon, I was compelled to smite my assailants with my shield. CAN'T STAND THE THINGS THEY DO TO ME. WON'T WAIT FOR JESUS TO PROVE TO ME. The
thugs ran limping and howling down the street like curs wombats possums vanquished pudding thieves. As far as I heard later they never lodged complaint
or charge and there would have been no trouble but for the actions of that very same unfriendly deckhand--this is not proven but how else were there police waiting for me at the Quay. These officers wished to learn how I got so much blood on my shirt and chair.
All's well that ends well by midnight I was home in bed. It was Marlene Leibovitz who cleaned my chair with Windex. In Butcher's version I was his cross to bear, God bless me, I must be an IDIOT SAVANT, a bloody big disaster.
19
I owned not so much as a Band-Aid but there was no shortage of Corio whisky to disinfect my brother's bleeding chin and on this whiskery site the toilet tissue caught, leaving behind little flowers like sheep's wool on barbed wire. Watching Marlene gently collect and flick away these blossoms, I could not have cared if she had stolen a painting or robbed the State Bank of Victoria. Of course we had made "love" already, but what was happening here was serious--Hugh was finally no obstacle to happiness, the opposite, and he drew from her everything that was and still is admirable, that is, her passionate sympathy for everyone strange or abandoned or living outside the pale.
That this unexpected tender heart might also benefit the wounded Olivier Leibovitz did not yet occur to me. The truth? I did not think of him at all. I was like a teenage boy, without harness or restraint, never considering where my ignorant heart might carry me, not understanding that this surge of blood might affect what I painted and where I lived or even where I died. Likewise I did not spare a moment to wonder about the consequences of drifting into the poisonous orbit of Le Comite Leibovitz. I was in love.
Jean-Paul would soon decide that my affair with Marlene was "really about" my show in Tokyo. My so-called "mates"--so bloody psychologically acute they would make you want to die-- all thought the same, but if they had even glimpsed this lovely Rembrandt woman reaching out to swab Falstaff's dark abrasions, they would have understood everything she did thereafter, or some of it at least.
Soon all three of us were sleeping on the same floor and I held Marlene against my chest while Hugh, three feet away from us, snored like a half-blocked drain. She fitted against my shoulder all through the night, still, calm, trusting, showing-- even in her sleep--a sweet affection which would never jibe with her public reputation. The wind blew until the early hours, rattling the sashes and causing the clouds to scud across the lovely shivering moon. Next morning the air was still and I saw first water blue, then ultramarine--her clear wide open eyes, the sky of dirty Sydney, all its poisons blown away.
We had no shower available but my lover drenched herself with cold tap water, and then was perfect. She was twenty-eight years old. I had been that age once, the toast of Sydney, long ago.
Down on Sussex Street there was a louche basement cafe which I had crossed off my list due to Hugh's tendency to claustrophobic panic. Here my bruised brother was soon happily spreading his baggy arse on a fake leopard-skin stool. "Pan- oh," he announced, drumming his chewed fingers on the counter.
"Two pan-oh chocolate."
While Hugh distributed his breakfast on his shirt I bought three big bowls of coffee. Marlene was all business.
"Give me this fellow's number." "Whose?"
"This man who has your painting." "Why?"
"I'm going to get it back for you, baby."
So American. v
"Blumey," Hugh whispered as she used the proprietor's phone. "Keep her. Bless me." And the bugger kissed me on the cheek. Marlene returned, her upper lip taut with mischief. "Lunch," she said. "Go-Go Sushi in Kellett Street."
Finally she sipped her coffee, coating the aforementioned lip with sugary foam. But then I saw the secret triumph in her narrowed eyes, and I suffered a jolt of panic, e. g., Who the fuck are you, Wonder Woman? Where is your fucked-up husband?
"Oh Butcher Bones!" She drew her fingertip across my upper lip. "Don't you have a job?"
"I need to pick up some old Mitsukoshi catalogues from my flat," she said. "You'll like them, if you want to come. Then, if we've got time, we'll go round to the police and we'll talk to that tricky little shit. We're going to get both your paintings back today."
"We are?"
"Oh yes."
Her flat turned out to be in one of those prewar buildings near the bottom of Elizabeth Bay Road: no lift, just battered concrete stairs at the top of which you might be rewarded, finally, with a view of the bay below. If you are a Sydney painter you will already be familiar with this real estate--Gotham Towers, Vaseline Heights--German cockroaches, encrusted kitchens, deco ceramics, ambitious art, but this was a very different visit to my usual and as Hugh charged upwards, bashing his chair against the chipped green railing, I was finally anticipating the cuckolded husband who had been, until this moment, the baby in his bare-breasted mother's arms. The front door was thick grey metal, showing signs of a recent violent burglary. Inside, there was no sign of the man, or anything that might suggest the son of Jacques Leibovitz, nothing that I might identify as his, except a subscription copy of Car Rally and a naked half- eaten peach abandoned to the ants beside the kitchen sink. This latter item Marlene Leibovitz dispensed with and I soon heard it crashing like a drunken possum, careening off the cabbage-tree palm, descending through the rubber trees below.
"That was a peach," said Hugh.
"A peach," she said, and raised an eyebrow as if to say--I had not the foggiest. Hugh lurched towards the kitchen window and his chair would likely bash something so we had a little tussle, so vigorous on his part that I guessed he might be jealous, and by the time I had set him up safely in the middle of the room our hostess had retrieved a pile of glossy catalogues from a twisted filing cabinet which seemed to have been attacked by someone with a crowbar.
"OK, we can go."
"This is very nice here," Hugh pronounced, his injured hands locked onto his mighty knees. "Very clean."
Clean, and strange--almost no indication of what you might call art. There was a single Clarice Cliff vase which had been broken and rather brutally restored and, apart from that, only a line of small grey river rocks lined up along the top of a bookshelf.
