Theft (2 page)

We had not been in exile very long, six weeks or so, and I remember the day because it was our first flood, also the day when Hugh had arrived home from our neighbours with a Queensland heeler puppy inside his coat. It was difficult enough to look after Hugh without this added complication, not that he was always troublesome. Sometimes he was so bloody smart, so coherent, at other times a wailing gibbering fool. Sometimes he adored me, loudly, passionately, like a whiskery bad-breathed child. But the next day or next minute I would be the Leader of the Opposition and he would lay in wait amongst the wild lantana, pounce, wrestle me violently into the mud, or the river, or across the engorged wet-season zucchini. I did not need a sweet puppy. I had Hugh the Poet and Hugh the Murderer, Hugh the Idiot Savant, and he was heavier and stronger, and once he had me down I could only control him by bending his little finger as if I meant to snap it. We neither of us required a dog.

I severed the roots of perhaps a hundred thistles, split a little ironbark, fired up the stove which heated the water for the Japanese soaking tub and, having discovered that Hugh was asleep and the puppy missing, I retreated out onto the Skink, watching the colours of the river, listening to the boulders rolling over each other beneath the Never Never's bruised and swollen skin. Most particularly, I observed my neighbour's duck ride up and down the yellow flood whilst I felt the platform quiver like a yacht mast tensing under thirty knots of wind.

Somewhere the puppy was barking. It must have been overstimulated by the duck, perhaps imagined it was itself a duck--that seems quite likely now I think of it. The rain had never once relented and my shorts and T-shirt were soaked and I suddenly understood that if I removed them I would feel a good deal more comfortable. So there I was, uncharacteristically deaf to the puppy, squatting naked as a hippy above the surging flood, a butcher, a butcher's son, surprised to find myself three hundred miles from Sydney and so unexpectedly happy in the rain, and if I looked like a broad and hairy wombat, well so be it.

It was not that I was in a state of bliss, but I was, for a moment anyway, free from my habitual agitation, the melancholy memory of my son, the anger that I had to paint with fucking Dulux. I was very nearly, almost, for sixty seconds, at peace, but then two things happened at once and I have often thought that the first of them was a kind of omen that I might well have paid attention to. It only took a moment: it was the puppy, speeding past borne on the yellow tide.

Later, in New York, I would see a man jump in front of the Broadway Local. There he was. Then he wasn't. It was impossible to believe what I had seen. In the case of the dog, I don't know what I felt, nothing as simple as pity. Incredulity, of course. Relief--no dog to care for. Anger--that I would have to deal with Hugh's ill-proportioned grief.

With what plan in mind I do not know, I began struggling with my wet clothes, and thus, accidentally, had a clear view, beneath the studio, of my front gate where, some twenty yards beyond the cattle grid, I saw the second thing: a black car, its headlights blazing, sunk up to its axles in the mud.

There was no justifiable reason for me to be angry about potential buyers except that the timing was bad and, fuck it, I did not like them sticking their nose in my business or presuming to judge my painting or my housekeeping. But I, the previously famous artist, was now the caretaker so, having forced myself back into my cold and unpleasantly resistant clothes, I slopped slowly through the mud to the shed where I fired up the tractor. It was a Fiat and although its noisy differential had rapidly damaged my hearing, I retained a ridiculous affection for the yellow beast. Perched high upon its back, as ridiculous in my own way as Don Quixote, I headed out towards my stranded visitor.

On a better day I might have seen the Dorrigo escarpment towering three thousand feet above the car, mist rising out of the ancient unlogged bush, newborn clouds riding high in powerful thermals which any glider pilot would feel in the pit of his stomach, but now the mountains were hidden, and I could see no more than my fence line and the invading headlights. The windows of the Ford were fogged so even at the distance often yards I could make out no more of the interior than the outlines of the Avis tag on the rear-view mirror. This was confirmation enough that the person was a buyer and I prepared myself to be polite in the

face of arrogance. I do, however, have a tendency to bristle and when no-one emerged from the car to greet me, I began to wonder what Sydney fuck thought he could block my distinguished driveway and then wait for me to serve him. I dismounted and thumped my fist on the roof.

Nothing happened for almost a minute. Then the engine fired and the foggy window descended to unveil a woman in her early thirties with straw-coloured hair.

"Are you Mr. Boylan?" She had a strange accent.

"No," I said. She had almond eyes, lips almost too large for her slender face. She appeared unusual, but very attractive, so it is strange, you might think-- given my miserable existence and almost continual horniness--how powerfully and deeply she irritated me.

She looked out the window, surveying the front and back wheels which she had spun deep into my land.

"I'm not dressed for this," she said.

If she had apologised perhaps I would have reacted differently, but she actually rolled the windows up and shouted instructions at me from the other side.

Well, I had been famous once but now I was just a dogsbody, so what did I expect? I wrapped the free end of the Fiat's cable around the Ford's back axle, an exercise which covered me with mud and perhaps a little cow shit too. Then, returning to my tractor, I dropped it into low ratio and hit the gas. Of course she had left the car in gear so this manoeuvre created two long streaks across the grass and out onto the road.

I saw no reason to say goodbye. I retrieved the cable from the Ford and drove back to the shed without looking over my shoulder.

As I returned to my studio I saw she had not gone at all but was walking across the paddock, high heels in her hand, towards my house.

This was the hour at which I normally drew and as my visitor approached I sharpened up my pencils. The river was roaring like blood in my ears but I could feel her feet as she came up the hardwood stairs, a kind of fluttering across the floor joists.

I heard her call but when neither Hugh nor I responded she set off along the covered walkway suspended between house and studio, a whippy ticklish little structure some ten feet above the ground. She might have chosen to knock on the studio door, but there was also a very narrow walkway, a kind of gangplank which snaked around the outer wall of the studio and so she appeared in front of the open lube-bay door, standing outside the silk, the river at her back.

"Sorry, it's me again."

I affected great concentration on my pencils. "Can I use your phone?"

At that moment the electricity returned, flooding the studio with bright light. There stood a slender blonde woman behind a veil of stocking silk. She had mud up to her pretty calves.

"Strong work," she said. "You can't come in."

"Don't worry. I wouldn't track mud into a studio."

Only later did I think how few civilians would have put it quite like that. At the time I was concerned with simpler things: that she had not come to buy the property, that she was exceedingly attractive and in need of help. I led her back across the walkway to Jean-Paul's "house of few possessions" where the only real room was a central kitchen with a square table made from Tasmanian blackwood which I was required--his final instruction--to scrub each morning. The table had more character than when Jean-Paul last saw it--cadmium yellow, crimson rose, curry, wine, beef fat, clay--over a month of domestic life now partially obscured by a huge harvest of pumpkins and zucchinis amongst which I now finally located the telephone.

"No dial tone," I said. "I'm sure they're working on it."

Hugh began stirring in his room. I remembered that his dog had drowned. It had completely slipped my mind.

My visitor had remained on the other side of the flywire door.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "I can see you have more important things to worry about." She was drenched, her short yellow hair all matted, like a little chicken saved from drowning.

I opened the door.

"We are used to mud in this part of the house," I said. She hesitated, shivering. She looked like she should be put in a little cardboard box before the fire.

"Perhaps you'd like some dry clothes and a warm shower?"

She could not have known what a peculiarly intimate thing I was offering. You see, Jean-Paul's bathroom was on the back porch and here we hairy men were used to showering, almost alfresco, with nothing but flywire separating us from the roaring river, the bending trees. It was easily the best part of our exile. Once we were clean we would climb into that big Japanese wooden tub where the hot water cooked us as red as crayfish while, on a day like today at least, the rain beat across our faces.

On the public side, by the open stairs--really just a fire escape-- there were canvas blinds and these I now lowered. I gave her our one clean towel, a dry shirt, a sarong.

"If you use the tub," I said, "you can't use soap in it." "Domo arigato" she called. "I know how to behave."

Domo arigato? It would be six months before I would learn what that might mean. I was thinking I should have told Hugh about the damn puppy, but I did not need his outbursts now. I returned to my table full of pumpkins and sat, quiet as a mouse, on the noisy chair. She was looking for Dozy Boylan--who else?

There were no other Boylans, and I knew she would have no hope of driving her rent-a-car across his flooded creek. I began to think about what I could cook for dinner.

Having no desire to set off Hugh, I remained silently at the table while she bathed. I rose only once, to fetch a cloth and some moisturising cream and with this I began to clean her Manolo Blahniks. Who would have believed me? I must have paid for two dozen pairs in the last year of my marriage, but this was the first time I had actually touched a pair and I was shocked by the indecent softness of the leather. The wood shifted and crackled in the firebox of the Rayburn stove. If I have made myself sound calculating, let me tell you: I had not the least fucking idea what I was doing.

2

Hearing the screen door in the bathroom give a small urgent "thwack", I hid the shoes beneath the table and hurried around collecting muddy pumpkins, stacking them out on the front porch. Not that I didn't notice her enter, or see my Kmart shirt falling loosely from her slender shoulders, the collar's soft grey shadow across her bath-pink neck.

I handed her the cordless phone. "Telecom are back in service."

Brusque. It has been remarked of me before--the lack of charm when sober. "Oh, super," she said.

She threw her towel across a wooden chair and walked briskly out onto the front porch. Above the insistent thrum on the roof I could hear the soft American burr which I understood as old money, East Coast, but all this was Aussie expertise

i. e. from the movies and I had not the least idea of who she was, and if she had been Hilda the Poisoner from Spoon Forks, North Dakota, I would have had no clue.

I began to chop up a big pumpkin, a lovely thing, fire orange with a rust brown speckle, and a moist secret cache of bright slippery seeds which I scooped into the compost tray Out on the porch, I heard her: "Right. Yes. Exactly. Bye."

She returned, all antsy, rubbing at her hair.

"He says his creek is over the big rock." (She pronounced it "crick".) "He says you'll understand."

"It means you wait for the 'crick' to go down."

"I can't wait," she said. "I'm sorry."

It was exactly at that moment--well I'm fucking sorry Miss, but what do you want me to do about the flood?--that Hugh's adenoidal breathing pushed its way between us. Doughy, six foot four, filthy, dangerous-looking, he filled the doorway without explanation. He had his pants on, but his hair looked like cattle had been eating it and he was unshaven. Our guest was three feet in front of him but it was to me he spoke.

"Where's the bloody pup?"

I was at the far side of the stove, hands slippery with olive oil, laying the pumpkin and potato in a baking tray.

"This is Hugh," I said. "My brother."

Hugh looked her up and down, very Hugh-like, threatening if you did not know. "What's your name?"

"I'm Marlene."

"Have you," he enquired, sticking out his fat lower lip, and folding his big arms across his chest, "read the book The Magic Pudding?"

Oh Christ, I thought, not this.

She rubbed her hair again. "As a matter of fact, Hugh, I have read The Magic Pudding. Twice."

"Are you American?" "That's very hard to say."

"Hard to say." His self-inflicted haircut was high above his ears suggesting a fierce and rather monkish kind of character. "But you have read The Magic Pudding? "

Now she offered all of her attention. "Yes. Yes, I have."

Hugh gave me a fast look. I understood exactly--he would now be busy for a moment, but he had not forgotten this business with the dog.

"Who," he asked, turning his brown eyes to the foreigner, "do you like the best in The Magic Pudding?"

And she was charmed. "I like the four of them." "Really?" He was dubious. "Four?"

"Including the pudding." "You're counting the pudding!"

"But I like all the drawings." She finally returned the phone to the table and began to properly dry her hair. "The pudding thieves," she said, "are priceless."

"Is that a joke you're telling?" My brother hated the pudding thieves. He was continually, loudly, passionately regretful that it was not possible for him to punch the possum on the snout.

"It's not the characters I like"--she paused--"but the drawings-- I think they're better than any painting Lindsay ever did."

"Oh yes," said Hugh, softening. "We saw Lindsay's bloody paintings. Bless me." Whatever urgent business had been in her mind, she put it briefly to one side. "Do you want to know my favourite person in The Magic Pudding?"