Theft (6 page)

Oh dearie me. Gracious, what a disaster. What might I do?

They did not know that I was born out of style, and was still out of style when I came down on the train from Bacchus Marsh. My trousers were too short, my socks were white and I will commit similar sins of style when I am in my coffin, my ligaments all gone, bone by bone, my flesh mixed down with dirt.

Anyway, the problem was not style. It was my falling prices at the auctions and the value of Jean-Paul's collection. The market is a nervous easily panicked beast. And so it should be. After all, how can you know how much to pay when you have no bloody idea of what it's worth? If you pay five million dollars for a Jeff Koons what do you say when you get it home? What do you think?

But what could I do about this, even if I wanted to do something? Nothing more than what I had done already, e. g. suck up to Kev and get some materials on

tick. Should I have telephoned Jean-Paul first? Asked his opinion? It is absolutely irrelevant what galleries and critics and people who buy paintings think. Of course I knew who Greenberg was. As far as I can see he was a technician, a radio repairman. He only said one thing worth knowing: the problem with art is the people who buy it.

For a period on the banks of the Never Never I made paintings unlike any I had ever seen or painted before. Day after day, night after night, I terrified myself, hardly knowing what I thought.

And through all of this there was Hugh, and shopping and cooking, and shitting and chopping the thistles, no woman, no drops of lavender sprinkled on her nameless breasts at night.

For every man shall bear his own burden, as our mum would say, and so through all of this was Hugh, and his deep little elephant eyes, every night and morning, through the end of the steamy mouldy summer, until the grass in the front paddock began to fleck with brown like a Harris tweed, and Hugh would still set off into Bellingen with his billy in his hand.

People were kind to him, never said they weren't. City wisdom says these little Australian towns are intolerant, but that was not the case in my experience and I fully expected that a place the size of Bellingen would have its Bachelor Gentleman and its Manly Lady Doctor with steel-tipped boots and serge trousers tough enough to sand your walls. There was room for Slow Bones too, room for everyone in a jostling edgy kind of way.

While I mixed paint, Hugh sat in the Bridge Hotel and made his single beer last from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon. I had this all arranged. His chicken-and-lettuce sandwich was delivered to him in his corner, same place each day, beside the radio.

I had no idea I was living in a perfect time. All I saw were irritations: calls from Jean-Paul, my lawyer, and then this long, long silence from Dozy which really did begin to eat my gut. I wanted to see the Leibovitz. It was my right, but I would not call him.

There would always be some crisis.

I thought these upsets were so bloody terrible. Hugh gone missing, Hugh fighting, Hugh distressed, so you can imagine it is a late-summer morning and I am painting and all I can hear are the cockatoos ripping the shit out of the trees above my head, and the cries of magpies, kookaburras, the bull at Mrs. Dyson's, and amongst all this many smaller birds, orioles, honeyeaters, grass wrens, butcher-birds, the sweet rush of the wind in the casuarinas by the river-

-I can hear a great roaring cry, not a bull calf, but like a bull calf on its way to being a steer, and although I continue painting I know this is my brother coming home--big sloping shoulders, meaty arms, lumbering along the narrow bitumen with his shirt-tails out and the empty billy in his hand and his whiskery face crumpled like a paper bag and that odd Roman nose flowing with snot, and this is why, even when I lived in Paradise, I had no fucking idea of where I was.

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Bald shiny shaven Butcher Bones said look at my works etc. but nowhere did he confess Hugh Bones was his helper. He signed each painting MICHAEL BOONE it would have been more truthful if it was CROSSED BONES. Every artist is a pirate as he himself has often said. But forgive me I thought every artist was a bloody king these days I must be wrong as usual.

Crossed Bones obtained his roll of canvas by the use of lies and I carried it on my back and lay it kindly in the ute while he fussed about me the NERVOUS NELLY. At home I was his navvy lumping canvas up the stairs to the studio and rolling it out across the floor. No witnesses to this. All private, him and me.

He goes--Look at that Hugh! How about that Hugh! We will make a bloody big picture here Hugh! It is a beauty! Will you cut it for me, mate? Just here, just here, you are a bloody genius Hugh!

But there is only one Genius in his VERSION OF EVENTS.

Everyone is amazed that such a creature as Michael Boone would emerge from Bacchus Marsh which they assume must be a cesspit, misnaming it Buckus Marsh or Bacchus Swamp and thereby demonstrating they don't know what they're talking about although the best lamb chops in the southern hemisphere were produced there. Cleaver, saw, wooden block. I wished them to be mine.

When he asked me to cut his Dutch canvas I was very bloody tired, having walked all the way to town and up by the Guthries' dam where I got a whole family of ticks attached to the underside of my balls. I was weary and itchy but he must MAKE ART. Bless me, I never grudged him no matter what he has said about me. For instance, at night I lie in bed and pull my pillow across my head trying not to hear him talk to the DOZY RICH MAN. Oh what a bloody big burden I appear to be, all whisper and distress God save me.

Can you cut it for me, Hugh?

Did I ever hear him tell the Rich Man that his brother can track a single thread down across the canvas, follow it like a single black ant through the summer grass, lying on my stomach THE HUMAN MICROSCOPE? No, never. Bless me, did I complain? Did I ever point out how strange it was to now be granted control of the LETHAL BLADE because never, not ever, would my so-called family give me a SCABBARD, never would they let me draw the blade across the holy living skin.

Hold the basin Jason, but never hold the knife. But now I am the one with the MURDER WEAPON and I can lie on the floor in his studio and follow a single weft thread of his Dutch canvas--not to him was this talent granted, nor my superior strength. It makes him very happy to watch me part one thread from its neighbour for nine feet and not one mistake the whole length of it. My perfect cut is a SECRET MARK OF GRACE that's what he told me don't worry that he doesn't believe in God and writes his HOLY WORDS without relent, long handle, stiff three-inch bristles. He pays ten dollars per brush and in a rage he writes God's words forever. WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM? as they say.

I was Slow Bones. I know its meaning no matter what I said before. They would not give me the knife or steel or scabbard. Instead I must ride the bloody cart and pony taking orders. Lovely Lamb Chops today Mrs. Puncheon. And would that be a pound of cat's meat once again? I never could accept I had been forbade the knife although I would have killed the beasts more kindly bless them their big eyes reflecting back my face at me. Thus does God in his mercy see our countenance.

For a long time I blamed my mother for not speaking up on my behalf. She was just a little thing, a cockney sparrow with great black sunken eyes, always on the lookout for the last day, final hour, our turn will come. She had a terror of knives, dear Mum, poor Mum, and who could blame her when you saw Blue Bones or Grandpa Bones walk in the back door? Big men always in a towering rage. Each night my mother took the knives and hid them in the Chubb safe. She had her left breast taken by amputation. God bless her. Therefore it follows. Hide the knives. But my ordained future was nightly locked away.

But when all was lost and gone, in later years, our shop and home turned into a video store, all hope abandoned, then was I appointed knife man to my brother's canvas. Explain this cruelty if you will. In this and other ways I became his MANSERVANT. For instance, in the studio there is a plastic ice-cream tub with tweezers laying in it, like something at the dentist's before he hurts your gums. These tweezers will not get mentioned when Michael Boone is holding forth with his opinions--Clement Greenberg is a radio mechanic, etc. You might be advised to ask him, Oh what is that bloody big bowl filled with tweezers? The answer is--So Hugh the idiot can kneel before me and remove from the wet paint all the little bits of flick and fleck the bodies of the dead the parts of matter the fluff and bumph and snot of life which interfere with the purity of TWO-DIMENSIONAL SPACE.

I have been informed that there is no-one else on earth who could part those threads for nine feet without an error. But then again I do not care, all is vanity, and many times I think I am nothing but a big swishing gurgling pumping clock, walking backwards and forwards along the road to Bellingen each day,

spring, summer, flies, moths, dragon-flies, all fluttering flittering tiny clocks, a mist of clocks, each moment closer to oblivion.

Impediments to art. Who will remove us with the tweezers?

I never wished to die up here in northern New South Wales with the leeches and ticks and bloody floods sucking at the bank, everything damp, mouldy. I was born beneath the WERRIBEE RAIN SHADOW so give me a grave in a dry place, hard yellow soil where you can see the marks of crowbar like witchetty grub tracks on the rock of ages. I never wished to die here but my true home has been turned into a video store, mother, father all lost to me, so I am poor Hugh, bloody Hugh, the human clock.

Butcher Bones is not liked in Bellingen. It was the same in the Marsh. Who can like a man who shaves his head in order to prevent his father cutting his hair? No-one liked him any more than they liked the GERMAN BACHELOR and then he was off to the city only returning briefly when Blue Bones had his stroke and his own mother wept begging him to take up the steel and scabbard, he would not although he returned to Melbourne and secretly worked in the William Angliss meat factory. He said I only have one life which is a lie. Now he has the condition of AMNESIA clearly forgetting what injury he had done to home and family and here in Bellingen he is always saying Oh, I am a COUNTRY BOY or I am from the Marsh but they see him there with his dark fast flicking eyes, cheating and lying and putting things on account of Jean-Paul Milan and he is only saved because they steal from Jean-Paul too.

It was one day or another. He was puddling in his paint, I was approaching the township, the road rising up above the Bellinger River and the last flood had subsided leaving grass as flat as dead men and something like sad vomit not yet hosed away. By the pylons of the bridge there were still the old sticks piled up FLOTSAM JETSAM, a dreadful bower of bark, lantana, all sorts of vegetable and mineral, including a fence post with wire trailing like fish gut from its top hole. That was when I observed it, saw it from a distance, blue and grey, not much bigger than a breakfast sausage. At that moment a dirty big timber jinker came speeding into the corner, dropping gears, throwing bark, raising dust, tossing flies and thrips all breathing life, into the greatest of confusion. The world has ended, thought the fly. My heart was pumping, sloshing blood from one room to the next. Meat and music, two beats per second, I went ploughing down the hill, off the shoulder of the road down the embankment towards the river. What I had seen was my puppy's dry tail, his unlit byre, God save him. It was a shock, bless me, but there he was, his lip curled back, some evil thing had eaten at him. His bottom was half pulled out. God bless him, I pulled his feathery little body up with my whittled stick and I didn't know what then to do. I came up to the road, my new shirt torn by the fence. I was thinking I would get a wheat bag to put him in and take him home, it would be a muddy resting place, tucked up inside the ANCIENT FLOODPLAIN with the river rocks. I should have gone to the co-op they would have accommodated me, but the pub was closer and I went in there. I have my normal corner by the wireless. I didn't put him on the bar, everything hygienic.

Nothing was usual except Merle brought me my schooner and I set out to drink it, even at that moment wishing to be polite.

Normally I would make the drink last hours but now I set to finish it immediately. It was that wet-ashtray-stinking time of day, that is, before Kevin from the co-op farts and lights his pipe. At first I had no company excepting a heroin addict with no bum inside his trousers, but then the Guthries entered. There are two Guthries, the bigger one is Evan but his brother is normally of a very decent disposition. I learned the Guthries had been on a fencing contract for three weeks and having just discovered that their cheque had bounced they were not in the best of moods. Gary Guthrie had announced he would take his D24 out to the fence line and destroy the last three weeks of work. He was very bitter.

As there was no-one but the heroin addict in the pub, and him completely silent, I could not help but hear the conversation.

Likewise they observed my puppy. Evan did not speak to me but he told Merle I should be reported to the Health Inspector. I loudly asked Merle did she have a

handy box because anything that would hold a dozen bottles could also hold my dog. She said she had just burned all the cardboard. The heroin addict took his beer out to the footpath.

Evan then gave the opinion I was a moron for drinking with a dead dog. He was a big bugger, legs like the fence posts he spent his life burying in the earth. I did not answer him, relying on the brother, but the brother was downcast, his mind filled with vengeance such as ripping down three miles of fence and dozing it into the creek. In the hop-sour shadows of the public bar his plans were blooming like PATTERSON'S CURSE. Evan made a remark about the cause of the injury to the puppy's bottom, I turned the other cheek, but when he tried to violently confiscate the body, I was swift as an AZURE KINGFISHER flashing across the mustard yellow skin of the flood. I took his little finger, as crunchy as a dragonfly inside the beak.

Evan was what you call an OLD FAMILY in the district. His photo was on the wall, a ruckman in the Bellingen XV but now he was forced to descend to the level of the skirting board, howling, holding his FRACTURED METACARPAL against his chest. IN THE WINK OF AN EYE he was brought low.