by Peter Carey
The Saab’s alarm started. Sarkis took Mrs Catchprice’s bird-wing arm, and Mrs Catchprice, who must have seen what was happening, just kept on talking. She was telling him stories about the disadvantaged people she had employed at Catchprice Motors.
‘But I am boring you,’ she said.
He was frightened, not bored. He guided the old woman under the dark umbrella of mould-sweet street trees, between the gauntlet of twelve-year-old knees – stolen commando boots, lighter-fluid breath. Even in the midst of it, he could not hurry her. He felt the bones through the wrapping of her plastic coat. Old women needed extra calcium. He had his own mother on 800 mg a day, and she was young. Without calcium they became hunch-backed and fragile. And although Mrs Catchprice was not hunch-backed, she had that dried, neglected feeling in his hand, like shoes no one has bothered to oil. She was someone’s grandmother, or mother – they should treasure her. She should eat with them, sleep in their house. They should listen to her papery breathing in the night and it should give them a sense of completeness they would never have without her. If not for her, they would not exist.
Sarkis could press 140 kg. He could split a shirt by flexing his deltoids, but the twelve-year-olds were like dogs in a pack. Their breath stank like service stations and their nails scratched. They were feral animals. He was scared of them, even now, twenty metres past the Saab. There was a dull thudding noise. They were running over the roof of the Saab and jumping on its hood and if the owners were smart they would stay in their house and wait for the cops to come. A breeze brought a flower scent he could not name. A rock bounced off a low paling fence and rolled along the footpath past his feet. The car alarm stopped for a moment and everything was suddenly very quiet.
He steered her off the street, and on to a rough clay path across the burnt-out Kmart lot. This was maybe dumb. How could he tell? He hoped that the buskers from Victoria had not come back to live in the concrete pipes. He could see the pipes glistening nastily in the centre of the site. He could smell them from here: piss like a subway tunnel. She stumbled and gripped his arm. It was then she asked: ‘Do you have a suit?’
Maybe she said other things and he missed it. He was worrying about her bones, the buskers.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Well, you’d better come to the garage at eight-thirty tomorrow morning and we’ll see how we go.’ Sarkis was thinking how could he tell her to shut up, not to talk so loud. The piss-smelling pipes might hide Nasties, people without a human heart. They might beat you because they thought you had money, or a job, or a handsome face you did not deserve.
She held out her hand. He shook it. Just a little thing – a Chinese dish – bones and rice paper.
‘It’s a deal?’ she asked.
What?
‘Yes,’ he said.
They passed the concrete pipes and no one tried to hurt them, although Sarkis muddied his slip-ons and his socks. Did we shake hands about what I thought we shook hands about?
They came out on to Loftus Street. Sarkis saw the Esso sign illuminated in the sky above Catchprice Motors. Am I employed?
‘Do you walk at night very often?’ he said, but his mind was trying to figure out a way to check on what had happened to him.
‘Always,’ said Mrs Catchprice.
‘Actually,’ said Sarkis, ‘it’s very dangerous.’ They had come to a bench which the Franklin Council had bolted to a concrete block beneath the collapsing veranda of an old store. Mrs Catchprice sat down on the seat and began looking for a cigarette in her handbag.
‘Really very dangerous,’ Sarkis said. He sat beside her, with his arms resting on his knees. He peered across the road, through the trees, at Catchprice Motors.
‘You don’t want your new employer bumped off, eh?’ said Mrs Catchprice, and flashed her big white teeth at him.
He could have kissed her wrinkled-up old face.
‘If these louts give me trouble,’ she said, ‘I’ll blow them up.’ She opened her handbag wide and held up what Sarkis thought at first was a piece of salami. He took it from her. It was about fifteen centimetres long and very sticky.
‘Gelignite. You know what that is? Smell your fingers.’
Sarkis sniffed. It was musty and aromatic, like amyl nitrate.
‘Nitroglycerine,’ she said.
The street lights were an orange-yellow and made everything look like a colour negative. You had to think about the most ordinary things to work out what they really were and even when they had been pigeon-holed and labelled, read and understood, they kept some of their spooky double-self. So when Mrs Catchprice said, ‘I’m a lot more dangerous than they are,’ she had orange lips and a yellow face and copper hair, and she was very scary looking.
‘You know how to let it off?’
‘Oh yes,’ Mrs Catchprice said. ‘I know how to “let it off” just fine.’ Her teeth were huge and gold in her orange mouth. She was standing in Loftus Street, but she was walking through the grass, trees and wild roses while the Catchprice boys were standing with their hands on their hips and their great dusty legs were sticking out of their little blue shorts. She walked from stump to stump in her straw hat and summer dress with her crimping pliers and her gelly in an old Gladstone bag. She used a torch battery to do the detonators. She beefed up the gelly with some ‘Nitron’ fertilizer which sure did lift the stumps out of the soil and made Cacka wince and squinch up his face and push his great dusty hands across his battered ears.
Broken earth was like any fresh killed thing – a rabbit, a fish – alive with colour. When you fractured it, the smell poured out, like from a peeled orange, and the hedgerows were made from long pale blue trunks and giant yellow flowers with the bees still feeding off them.
Mrs Catchprice held up the handbag by her forefinger and let it swing there. ‘You know how old this gelignite is?’ she asked Sarkis. ‘You can see it’s old by how it sweats. When it’s like this you can let it off just by throwing it.’
Sarkis’s previous employer had pierced nipples with metal rings in them. He showed Sarkis the photo. He had a metal stud which went through the end of his penis. Sarkis did not ask what the metal rings were for. He smiled and nodded. Likewise with this gelignite – smile. Later he would tell her that the twelve-year-olds were too stupid and doped-up to even understand what a stick of gelignite was. Now he would get her home. He would make her a cup of tea. After work one day he would even cut her frail, old, over-treated hair. It had lost its elasticity but you could still do something with hair like that. He could give her oil with hot towels. She would enjoy that. It was more personal than a steaming machine.
‘So,’ she said, taking back her stick of gelignite and putting it in her handbag where Sarkis could see a great number of crumpled twenty-dollar bills. ‘You were out of work, and now you have a chance again.’
‘Thank you,’ Sarkis said.
‘This is lovely,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘This is what I always liked best about having a business. I liked giving young people a chance.’
‘I won’t disappoint you,’ Sarkis said. ‘You won’t be sorry.’
‘This is lovely,’ Mrs Catchprice said. ‘This is such a nice town, even now.’
‘I’m Armenian,’ said Sarkis. ‘We are famous for being salesmen.’
‘Armenian?’ said Mrs Catchprice brightly. ‘How fascinating. Have you lived in Franklin long?’
‘Six months.’
It was this answer that seemed to make Mrs Catchprice step out on to the road, straight in front of an on-coming car. Sarkis grabbed for her but she was gone. She was bright pink and silver in the car’s headlights and it was only when it stopped that Sarkis realized it was a taxi and she had hailed it. She did not seem capable. She seemed too old and frail to be capable of making sudden movements and yet that was what particularly distinguished her – she leaped, jolted, slammed, and – right now, she jumped into the taxi and banged the door hard behind her.
‘Come on,’ she called as she wound
down the window. ‘Don’t dawdle.’
When Sarkis entered the back seat of the cab, Mrs Catchprice was telling the driver: ‘You cannot call yourself a taxi-driver and not know about the Wool Wash. You wait,’ she said to Sarkis. ‘You’ll like this.’
Sarkis recognized the driver – whatever he had done with his mother had not taken very long. The driver sat there with his meter on, staring into the rear vision mirror. He did nothing to acknowledge that he knew who Sarkis was. Mrs Catchprice continued to talk about the Wool Wash. Sarkis could not listen. He looked at the back of the man’s little shoulders and pink shell ears. He looked at the fleck of dandruff sticking to the stringy hair below his bald spot.
‘If you don’t know where the Wool Wash is,’ Mrs Catchprice said loudly, tapping the driver on the shoulder, ‘it might be polite to turn off your meter while you find out.’
The taxi-driver flinched from the touch and spoke into the mirror. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘In my taxi, control your mouth.’
‘It is my eyes you should worry about, not my mouth,’ said Mrs Catchprice, fiddling with her handbag. ‘I have a cataract on one eye,’ she said, producing a crumpled pack of Salems, ‘but I can still see your name is Pavlovic and you are plying for trade out of area.’
Pavlovic’s shoulders stiffened. Then he turned the meter off. ‘Wullwas?’ he asked.
‘W-o-o-l W-a-s-h.’
When the driver could not find the Wool Wash in his street directory, Mrs Catchprice took it from him.
‘Everyone knows the Wool Wash,’ she told her new employee. ‘It is the most lovely part of Franklin.’ But it was not listed in the driver’s street directory. Mrs Catchprice stared at the map page, looking at the bend in the river where she thought the Wool Wash was.
‘I never heard of it,’ said Pavlovic.
‘I never heard of it either,’ said Sarkis.
To the taxi-driver she said: ‘Just head south. I’ll direct you,’ but she was stricken with that horrible feeling that sometimes came to her on her night-time walks. It was as if all her past had been paved over and she could not reach it, as if she was a snake whose nest had been blocked while she was out and could only go backwards and forwards in front of the place where the hole had been, finding only cold hard concrete where she had expected life.
19
While Maria sat in the Blue Moon Brasserie, discussing Catchprice Motors, Benny Catchprice was playing Tape 7 of Actualizations and Affirmations. Tape 7 was not to be played unless or until you experienced ‘Blockage’.
‘You are not transformed,’ Tape 7 now said to Benny. ‘So whose fault do you think that is?’
Benny had come back from work feeling powerful and confident and he had undressed to do the mirror exercise and then suddenly – zap – he lost it. As he faced himself in the mirror he felt ‘the fear’. It was hard to stand straight. He put his hand across his navel. His balls went tight in his newly hairless scrotum and he sweated around his arsehole. Five minutes ago he felt fantastic to be so clean and smooth, like a fucking statue. It had been just a blast to look at himself in the mirror and see his power. Then suddenly the thing that made him feel great – how he looked – marble white skin, wide shoulders, slim waist – made him feel like shit.
He turned to Tape 7 and pressed the ‘Play’ button.
‘You paid us $495,’ Tape 7 said, ‘so if you’re cheating, who are you cheating? Can’t be us, we’ve got our money. If you’re cheating, you’re cheating yourself.’
‘Fuck you,’ Benny said and pushed at the cassette player with his foot. There was a grease mark on the foot, dust on his hands as well. That was the old Benny – he drew dirt on to himself like iron filings on to a magnet. Snot, sleep, grease, blackheads, he made neglect so much a part of him that no one, not even Mort Catchprice, wished to touch him and everything he made contact with became tarnished, mildewy, mouldy, ruined in some way. Something that had been shining clear silver in its polythene-wrapped box became ‘used’ the minute Benny touched it. Even his Christmas presents had been unpleasant to receive – rammed shut at the corners and torn and gummed up with glue and sticky tape so they felt like an oil-skinned table on which jam has been spilled and not properly cleaned.
‘You’re so used to cheating,’ the tape said.
‘Shut up.’
‘What story do you tell yourself? Nobody loves you? You’re too stupid? These are just stories you use to cheat yourself.’
‘What do you fucking know?’
‘That’s why you’re the way you are. You have no authenticity. You are unable to separate the bullshit you tell yourself from the truth. You’ve paid your $495 so now you can see – you either do the job properly or you see how you cheat yourself.’
The step he had omitted was no big deal. It was embarrassing, but he would do it if it was important – he had to fold his clothes carefully in separate parcels and then float them down the river. ‘This does not mean flush them down the toilet,’ the tape said. ‘And if you are asking, is it O.K. if I put them in the sea, it is not. It means a river, not the sea, not a lake, not a drain. If you have any doubts as to whether it is a river or not, you can assume you’re trying to cheat yourself out of your life and it is not a river.’
To wrap a shoe in black paper and tie it with gold ribbon seemed like an easy thing to do when you heard it on the tape. Benny swept nails and pins and cake crumbs from the bench with the flat of his hand and wiped the surface with a ‘Fiery Avenger’ T-shirt.
‘You are going to wrap your old clothes to do honour to yourself. If you cannot do honour to your past, how are you going to do honour to your future? Each one of these parcels is you and I want you to dress it like you are dressing it for the funeral of a King or Queen.’
It sounded easy. It sounded inspiring, until you tried it and all of your old self kept soaking out of you, crumpling the paper, tangling the ribbon. When it was done, and wrapped, he saw the parcel had no ‘Integrity’. It was a lumpy shitty thing. This was why the transformation could not be complete.
Slowly he unwrapped the shoes on the table and then he tried to flatten the paper with his hands. The paper would not go flat. It was Benny-ised.
‘Shut up,’ he told the tape. ‘I’m going to fucking iron them.’
He dressed in his suit again. He took his time dressing properly, and when he remembered that he had not cleaned the smudge on his foot, he unlaced his shoes, took off his trousers, rubbed off the smudge with a wet washer, and dressed once more. Then he walked up the stairs.
He knew Granny Catchprice was out walking and he knew that Vish was up there in her apartment, skulking, waiting like some kind of missionary. He had been up there all day long, hiding. If you asked him why he was hiding he would deny it, but Benny knew he was hiding, from Mort, from Benny, from the cars themselves. He had been cooking curry and now he was standing in front of the bride doll cabinet doing stuff in front of the picture of his guru. There was a bowl of yellow food beside the picture and there was a sprig of jasmine in a Vegemite jar. Vish believed the picture could taste the food with its eyes.
Benny said: ‘Whatcher doing?’
Vish turned and saw him.
‘Hi,’ he said. He looked wide awake, alert, without that dumb, blissed-out look he normally got from chanting.
‘You should have come and seen me,’ said Benny, and patted the wings of his platinum hair flat on the side of his head. ‘History is being made round here.’ I look like her.
‘I’m pleased you came,’ Vish said. He was pleased too. He walked towards Benny as if he was going to hug him, but then he stopped, a foot in front of him, grinning. He made no acknowledgement that his brother had undergone a total transformation.
‘You should have come down.’ Benny said. ‘I was expecting you.’
‘I didn’t want to hassle you.’ Vish smiled. It was impossible to know what he was thinking.
‘You shoulda dropped in, you know.’ Benny said. He was standing in front of h
is brother in a $300 suit and his brother was saying nothing about it. He had never owned a suit before, neither of them had. ‘I’ve been thinking about you all day. About all that stuff we talked about …’
‘Now we can talk,’ Vish nodded to the dining-table and pulled out a chair.
‘I was just hanging out down in the cellar after work,’ Benny said. ‘You should have come down.’
Vish sat down and patted the chair beside him.
‘I’ve changed,’ Benny said. ‘For Chrissakes, look at me.’
Vish looked up and squinted his eyes at Benny. ‘Your appearance?’
‘Oh Vish,’ Benny said, grabbing his brother by his meaty upper arm. ‘Don’t be a pain in the arse. Come on, come and help me iron some stuff. Will you do that? Remember when you used to iron my school shirts? Come down to the cellar and help me iron my shirts.’
‘You want me to come to your cellar?’
Benny sighed.
‘It’s just that you never wanted me to be there before.’
‘There’s stuff I want you to see,’ Benny said, patting his brother softly on the cheek. ‘You’ll never understand if you don’t come.’
20
‘Welcome to the Bunker,’ Benny said.
It was worse than anything Vish could have imagined. The air was as thick as a laundry. The concrete floor was half an inch deep in water. It was criss-crossed with planks supported by broken housebricks. A brown-striped couch stood against one end, its legs on bricks. The bricks were wrapped in green plastic garbage bags. Electric flex was everywhere, wrapped in Glad Wrap and bits of plastic bag with torn ends like rag; it crossed the planks and ran through the water. Two electric radiators stood on a chipped green chest of drawers, facing not into the room but towards the walls where you could see the red glow of two bars reflected in what Vish, at first, thought was wet floral wallpaper. It was not wallpaper. It was handwriting, red, blue, green, black, webs of it, layer on layer. In the corner to the left of the door was a white fibreglass object, like a melted surfboard in the shape of a shallow ‘n’.
