by Peter Carey
She shrugged. She refused to look at me. She started picking up books and carrying them to the kitchen, her movements uncharacteristically brisk.
“People only take a Chance when they’re pissed off. Are you?”
She stood by the stove, the books cradled in her arms, tears streaming down her face.
Even as I held her, even as I stroked her hair, I began to plot to keep her in the body she was born in. It became my obsession.
4.
I came home the next night to find the outside of the house bright orange and the inside filled with a collection of people as romantically ugly as any I had ever seen. They betrayed their upper-class origins by dressing their crooked forms in such romantic styles that they were in danger of creating a new foppishness. Faults and infirmities were displayed with a pride that would have been alien to any but a Hup.
A dwarf reclined in a Danish-style armchair, an attenuated hand waving a cigarette. His overalls, obviously tailored, were very soft, an expensive material splattered with “original” paint. If he hadn’t been smoking so languorously he might have passed for real.
Next to him, propped against the wall, was the one I later knew as Daniel. The grotesque pock-marks on his face proudly accentuated by the subtle use of make-up and, I swear to God, colour coordinated with a flamboyant pink scarf.
Then, a tall thin woman with the most pronounced curvature of the spine and a gaunt face dominated by a most extraordinary hooked nose. Her form was clad in the tightest garments and from it emanated the not unsubtle aroma of power and privilege.
If I had seen them anywhere else I would have found them laughable, not worthy of serious attention. Masters amusing themselves by dressing as servants. Returned tourists clad in beggars’ rags. Educated fops doing a bad charade of my tough, grisly companions in the boarding house.
But I was not anywhere else. This was our home and they had turned it into some spiderweb or nightmare where dog turds smell like French wine and roses stink of the charnel-house.
And there squatting in their midst, my most beautiful Carla, her eyes shining with enthusiasm and admiration whilst the hook-nosed lady waved her bony fingers.
I stayed by the door and Carla, smiling too eagerly, came to greet me and introduce me to her friends. I watched her dark eyes flick nervously from one face to the next, fearful of everybody’s reaction to me, and mine to them.
I stood awkwardly behind the dwarf as he passed around his snapshots, photographs taken of him before his Chance.
“Not bad, eh?” he said, showing me a shot of a handsome man on the beach at Cannes. “I was a handsome fellow, eh?”
It was a joke, but I was confused about its meaning. I nodded, embarrassed. The photograph was creased with lines like the palm of an old man’s hand.
I looked at the woman’s curved back and the gaunt face, trying to find beauty there, imagining holding her in my arms.
She caught my eyes and smiled. “Well young man, what will you do while we have our little meeting?”
God knows what expression crossed my face, but it would have been a mere ripple on the surface of the feelings that boiled within me.
Carla was at my side in an instant, whispering in my ear that it was an important meeting and wouldn’t take long. The hook-nosed woman, she said, had an unfortunate manner, was always upsetting everyone, but had, just the same, a heart of gold.
I took my time in leaving, fussing around the room looking for my beautiful light fishing rod with its perfectly preserved old Mitchell reel. I enjoyed the silence while I fossicked around behind books, under chairs, finally discovering it where I knew it was all the time.
In the kitchen, I slapped some bait together, mixing mince meat, flour and garlic, taking my time with this too, forcing them to indulge in awkward small talk about the price of printing and the guru in the electric cape, one of the city’s recent contributions to a more picturesque life.
Outside the painters were washing their brushes, having covered half of the bright orange with a pale blue.
The sun was sinking below the broken columns of the Hinden Bridge as I cast into the harbour. I used no sinker, just a teardrop of mince meat, flour and garlic, an enticing meal for a bream.
The water shimmered, pearlescent. The bream attacked, sending sharp signals up the delicate light line. They fought like the fury and showed themselves in flashes of frantic silver. Luderick also swam below my feet, feeding on long ribbons of green weed. A small pink cloud drifted absent-mindedly through a series of metamorphoses. An old work boat passed, sitting low in the water like a dumpy brown duck, full of respectability and regular intent.
Yet I was anaesthetized and felt none of what I saw.
For above my head in a garish building slashed with orange and blue I imagined the Hups concluding plans to take Carla away from me.
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:
&
nbsp; “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 on to glistening grass, freshly mown. He cut my hair shorter and shorter till my fingers tingled.
It has been said that the penis has no sense of right or wrong, that it acts with the brainless instinct of a venus fly-trap, but that is not true. It’s too easy a reason for the stiffening cock that rose, stretching blindly towards the bony fingers.
“I could show,” said the voice, “that it is something quite extraordinary… not worse… better… better… better by far, you have nothing to fear.”
I knew, I knew exactly in the depth of my clouded mind, what was happening. I didn’t resist it. I didn’t want to resist it. My purpose was as hers. My reasons probably identical.
Softly, sonorously she recited:
“Which trees are beautiful?
All trees that grow.
Which bird is fairest?”
A zipper undone, my balls held gently, a finger stroked the length of my cock. My eyes shut, questions and queries banished to dusty places.
“The bird that flies.
Which face is fairest?
The faces of the friends of the people of the earth.”
A hand, flat-palmed on my rough face, the muscles in my shoulders gently massaged, a finger circling the lips of my anal sphincter.
“Which forms are foul?
The forms of the owners.
The forms of the exploiters.
The forms of the friends of the Fastas.”
Legs across my lap, she straddled me. “I will give you a taste… just a taste… you won’t stop Carla… you can’t stop her.”
She moved too fast, her legs gripped mine too hard, the hand on my cock was tugging towards her cunt too hard.
My open eyes stared into her face. The face so foul, so misshapen, broken, the skin marked with ruptured capillaries, the green eyes wide, askance, alight with premature triumph.
Drunk on wine I have fucked monstrously ugly whores. Deranged on drugs, blind, insensible, I have grunted like a dog above those whom I would as soon have slaughtered.
But this, no. No, no, no. For whatever reason, no. Even as I stood, shaking and trembling, she clung to me, smiling, not understanding. “Carla will be beautiful. You will do things you never did.”
Her grip was strong. I fought through mosquito nets of mushroom haze, layer upon layer that ripped like dusty lace curtains, my arms flailing, my panic mounting. I had woken underwater, drowning.
I wrenched her hand from my shoulder and she shrieked with pain. I pulled her leg from my waist and she fell back on to the floor, grunting as the wind was knocked from her.
I stood above her, shaking, my heart beating wildly, the head of my cock protruding foolishly from my unzipped trousers, looking as pale and silly as a toadstool.
She struggled to her feet, rearranging her elegant rags and cursing. “You are an ignorant fool. You are a stupid, ignorant, reactionary fool. You have breathed the Fastas’ lies for so long that your rotten body is soaked with them. You stink of lies… do you… know who I am?”
I stared at her, panting.
“I am Jane Larange.”
For a second I couldn’t remember who Jane Larange was, then it came to me: “The actress?” The once beautiful and famous.
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br /> I shook my head. “You silly bugger: What in God’s name have you done to yourself?”
She went to her handbag, looking for a cigarette. “We will kill the Fastas,” she said, smiling at me, “and we will kill their puppets and their leeches.”
She stalked to the kitchen and lifted the mince meat from the sink. “Your mince is thawed.”
The mince was pale and wet. It took more flour than usual to get it to the right consistency. She watched me, leaning against the sink, smoking her perfumed cigarette.
“Look at you, puddling around with stinking meat like a child playing with shit. You would rather play with shit than act like a responsible adult. When the adults come you will slink off and kill fish.” She gave a grunt. “Poor Carla.”
“Poor Carla.” She made me laugh. “You try and fuck me and then you say ‘poor Carla’!”
“You are not only ugly,” she said, “you are also stupid. I did that for Carla. Do you imagine I like your stupid body or your silly mind? It was to make her feel better. It was arranged. It was her idea, my friend, not mine. Possibly a silly idea, but she is desperate and unhappy and what else is there to do? But,” she smiled thinly, “I will report a great success, a great rapture. I’m sure you won’t be silly enough to contradict me. The lie will make her happy for a little while at least.”
I had known it. I had suspected it. Or if I hadn’t known it, was trying a similar grotesque test myself. Oh, the lunacy of the times!
“Now take your nasty bait and go and kill fish. The others will be here soon and I don’t want them to see your miserable face.”
I picked up the rod and a plastic bucket.
She called to me from the kitchen. “And put your worm back in your pants. It is singularly unattractive bait.”
I said nothing and walked out the door with my cock sticking out of my fly. I found the dwarf standing on the landing. It gave him a laugh, at least.
8.
I told her the truth about my encounter with the famous Jane Larange. I was a fool. I had made a worm to gnaw at her with fear and doubt. It burrowed into the space behind her eyes and secreted a filmy curtain of uncertainty and pain.
