Collected Stories

by Peter Carey

  Julie, Carlos’s twenty-two-year-old lover, escaped at the same time, slipped across the border and then flew as far south as her savings would permit. She arrived almost destitute.

  Unlike the band, she had no skills to sustain her. Her only talent was her life, her addiction to fear and danger.

  The town she arrived in suggested no avenues of opportunity for the one piece of business her financial security might have depended on.

  She knew where there was half a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines.

  Apart from Carlos, who was in prison, she was the only person in the world who knew.

  The town contained nothing she understood. The streets were wide and straight and without surprise. It boasted thirty-three buildings higher than five storeys, a single strip club, three expensive restaurants serving bad food, one discotheque full of thirteen-year-olds, and an ugly shrine to fallen soldiers which stood on a slight hill at the intersection of the two main boulevards.

  The only opportunities the town presented were paid employment. Her only qualification was a typing course she had begun when she had planned to run away from Carlos the year before.

  She took a room in a boarding house and began walking the wide, wet streets in search of a job.

  It was the worst part of winter.

  In an architect’s office she found Claude hunching over a singlebar radiator while he interviewed her with curious shyness. He was forty-one years old and not particularly successful. He didn’t give her a job, instead he asked her out for dinner.

  2.

  This is what Claude found out about her.

  She had hair the colour of a field of corn. She had a strutting walk she conducted with pointed fingers. She had been born with a cancer and still had the scar. She had lived with a gangster. She was full of fears and nightmares and had left her clothes in another city, running down back stairs to stolen cars with cocaine in her handbag and one shoe missing.

  She smiled crookedly. She had a lisp. Her voice was as soft as velvet. She had the start of a double chin. She had the face of someone who had come out of a sad movie at three o’clock in the afternoon. She could change from a Renaissance Bacchus to a gargoyle in less than a second. She had an extraordinarily beautiful smile.

  She believed that heroin was the best cure for the common cold. When she frowned it was like a pond shivering. She had a nightmare she couldn’t talk about. She had a sob that wet his sleep. She had a chin that went wobbly when she was having an orgasm. She knew Mick Jagger. She could define a band’s music by the drugs they used. She was in love with South America and had never been there. She was possibly wanted by the police in connection with the manslaughter Carlos was charged with, a crime involving the sale of a speedball that had gone wrong.

  Her handbag contained a huge bottle of Mandrax and a small one of Valium.

  She knew where there was half a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines.

  She drank with enthusiasm and kept a bottle of wine by the bed.

  It was their second night together.

  3.

  She came to him as a visitor from Mars, a dazzling carpet of arcane information which he read with doubt and wonder in the perpetual Sunday evenings of his life.

  She moved into his house on the slow muddy river and left her clothes scattered on the floor beside his.

  She lost two jobs in three days and said: “I could always become a whore.” As usual she was asking difficult questions by making confident assertions.

  In the cold nights they lit fires and interrogated each other about their lives, smoked grass, fucked and complained, each in their own way, of the life in the town.

  They were two particles, vibrating uncertainly in puzzled attraction.

  She could not understand the eccentricities of his bourgeois life, his two marriages, the gossip of a town that ostracized him, his dissatisfaction with his life but his depressed acceptance of it.

  She had begun by believing she was fucking for her dinner and had been surprised to find him warm, gentle, full of whimsies as beautiful as a fairy-tale. She recognized in him a romanticism similar to her own. While he slept she watched the warm lines beside his eyes, the softness of his mouth, the tousled lion’s mane of dark hair, and all the marks of hope and disappointment that forty years had etched into his olive face. She watched him tenderly, without understanding.

  After the third job, it was accepted that she would stay in the house while he went to his office where he worked on the detailing of the town’s thirty-fifth tall office block, overflow work from a larger, more successful practice than his own.

  The days were difficult for her. The quietness was depressing, the future uncertain. She read the foreign newspaper for information about Carlos, fearing a successful appeal by his lawyers. She dwelt continually on the night Carlos had given Jean the speedball, uncertain as to whether he had meant to kill him or if it had been a mistake. The panic in Jean’s eyes haunted her and made her heart palpitate and her scalp itchy. She knocked herself out with Valium and wine. She woke yellow-tongued and dry-mouthed and wandered around the huge adobe house that Claude had built for himself after his first marriage. It resembled nothing she had ever known, either her parents’ Tudor mansion or the shifting motel rooms of her gangster adventures. The walls needed painting and the air smelt damp. A fine clay dust settled on tables and chairs and spread across the slate floor like talcum powder so that each evening her footsteps stood as a diary of her restless day.

  She had battle fatigue but couldn’t slow down. The days with Carlos had been full of fast movements, dangers she only half understood. She had been swept along in a swift current of meetings conducted in Spanish and Italian, electric cocaine concerts with the rock’n’roll band, border crossings with damp hands holding one of Carlos’s five passports, a heavy pistol in a motel drawer, and the continual wonder of living a B-grade movie when your father was a director of a multinational corporation famous for its detergents and insecticides.

  To come from that, to this.

  Days of wine and Valium and yellow rivulets running under willow trees to the wide muddy river at the bottom of Claude’s neglected garden which reminded her of some melancholy story she had been read as a child.

  She had reached the safety she had ached for and now she was prey to the boredom that safety brought with it.

  “Let’s go and dance somewhere,” she said, but there was nowhere to dance but the discotheque for thirteen-year-olds and the expensive restaurants for dirty old men.

  On a Wednesday afternoon she wrote eleven letters to Evelyn, the back-up vocalist with the rock’n’roll band. She posted the eleven letters to five friends and six poste restantes, hoping that one of them would reach her. In the letters she promised safety, a refuge in this provincial city. She recognized the stupidity of the letters, the possibility of one of them reaching Carlos’s friends. She said nothing of Claude in the letters. There was no way she could explain Claude to Evelyn, or anyone else.

  And she thought about the half a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines safely stored in an underground passage in a small northern town. And she thought about them timidly, for now she had time to consider the matter, she admitted she had none of the business skills needed to dispose of them.

  More seriously, she doubted that she had the courage to double-cross Carlos on anything so important.

  All I am, she thought, is a fucking groupie.

  She took ten milligrams of Valium and stood in the rain, pretending she was a cow.

  4.

  She waited for him each evening with an anxiety she denied even to herself. She resisted temptations to cook him meals, yet thought she should be doing something. She wondered who was exploiting who. She didn’t understand the rules of the relationship. She didn’t understand why he let her stay, but she only thought about that when he wasn’t there. And then she felt she had nothing to offer him, if to do something as simple as cook a meal might be interpre
ted as an attempt to lay a claim on him. So together they opened tins of tuna and beans. They rarely ate out. He seemed to have no social life, although he discussed friends and recent dinner parties. She wondered if he was socially ashamed of her.

  She didn’t understand that she was a storybook for him, an encyclopedia of adventure, a Persian carpet of his imagination that he stared at with wonder, never hoping to understand all the mysteries of it.

  He interrogated her gently, never sure of whether she was exaggerating or lying. He lay gentle traps for her, smiled to catch her out on inconsistencies, enjoying the slow unravelling of her story.

  He was fascinated by the rock’n’roll band (samurais, magicians, keepers of Rosicrucian secrets), by Carlos, and by all the drugs he knew by name but not from experience.

  Lying in bed he might ask her about Carlos, feeling the wonder of a child asking a parent about worlds he didn’t understand.

  “He was really amazing,” she said. “Carlos was the most amazing person. He had a terrible temper. He wasn’t really bright. He killed a man, Claude, while I waited in the car.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “He was really amazing.”

  And then there was the morning Carlos was taken away by two other gangsters.

  “Were they mafiosi?”

  “I think he double-crossed them.”

  “But were they mafiosi?”

  “He was in his dressing gown. It was the only time I saw him scared. He was scared shitless. They took him away.”

  “What did they do to him?”

  She shrugged. “He didn’t come back for two weeks.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went and hid. I knew a lot of things he knew. Do you want a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines?”

  “You said half a million before.”

  “What the fuck does that matter. It’s a lot of money, baby.” And her face which had been clouded with frowns burst into a smile of pure sensual excitement as she waved straight-fingered hands and clicked her tongue.

  “Where?”

  “Come with me and I’ll tell you.”

  “Where?”

  “Carlos can’t go near it, even if he gets out of jail.”

  He smiled at her, wondering. “Why not?”

  “You don’t understand Carlos. He wouldn’t tell anyone. He’ll wait.”

  He kissed her then, very gently. “I think you’re bullshitting.”

  “You think I’m bullshitting because you’ve never known anyone like Carlos.”

  “You keep changing your story.”

  “Don’t be boring, honey. You’re a boring old man.” And then she would kiss him, as gently as he had kissed her, looking into his eyes to ask him puzzled questions she couldn’t begin to form. “Do you want me to go away?”

  “No, not unless you want to go away.”

  His skin was younger than his eyes. He lay there languidly, without apparent need.

  “I found a photograph of your wife. She looks very beautiful,” she said, asking another question.

  “What else did you find?”

  “A mouldy sandwich under the bed.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Let’s go to a club.”

  “There aren’t any clubs.”

  “Well, let’s go to a bar.”

  “I hate bars.”

  “You’re a boring old man, Claude.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

  And she began then to kiss him, first his neck, then his chest, and then his limp cock until it was stiff and hard inside her mouth. She moved her mouth and tongue slowly, sweetly, and listened with pleasure while he groaned softly.

  Outside the frogs croaked beside the river.

  They held hands tightly, fucking slowly, feeling curiously happy in their puzzlement with each other.

  5.

  And then, in the last week of winter, the letters began and each night, it seemed, she had some word of the odyssey of the rock’n’roll band who were now wanted for questioning due to information that Carlos had passed on to the police.

  “He’s trying to do a deal,” she said.

  “How?” he asked.

  “He’s a cunning little bastard,” she said.

  Claude read the letters with wonder and fear, wonder at the adventure he was watching, and (to his own surprise) fear that the band would arrive at his house and take Julie from his dull world to their exciting one.

  As he detailed the plumbing of the six-storey office block and watched the melancholy streets of the town with their predictable goings and comings, he thought only of the rock’n’roll band and the million dollars’ (half a million dollars’?) worth of amphetamines.

  Ho-Chin, the legendary drummer, was coming down from the north and sneaking through borders for an unstated rendezvous with Eric, the lead guitarist. Evelyn, having laid low in Hong Kong, had slipped out to a cattle boat and was heading this way laden with cocaine and a plan to slip in through Daru in New Guinea and Thursday Island.

  And each of them, it seemed to Claude, drawing his dreadful plumbing and considering the placement of mirrors for successful typists to lipstick in front of, was a king amongst kings and their coming together would be more thrilling and threatening than the meeting of rivers from the mountains.

  And then there were setbacks, delays.

  Paul had been arrested in Bangkok for busking. (Claude sent money.) Evelyn was having an affair with a Muslim in Surabaya and walked amongst pilgrims for Mecca with her infidel’s secrets, blue Muslim cocks on pale mornings, white sheets and slowly turning fans above the vagueness of mosquito nets. She who had once worked the London tube with her twelve-string guitar (click-click-cocaine-click), with her beautiful Eurasian face and blue-black straight hair, as thin and nervous as a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines.

  Eric wrote letters about music, drugs and police that Claude didn’t understand.

  He came to hate the letters. He also became obsessed by them. And as he concentrated on the method of attaching fire-escape banisters to walls, his mind wandered through impossible concerts in the municipal auditorium. Eric, in fur boots, eyes closed, singing electrical magic with his guitar until audiences were transformed into rivers and white water dispersed down streets where it flooded the houses and left them full of fish.

  And as he worked on the relationship between the lift doors and the placement of the call buttons, he saw the second concert where the people would come and be transformed into large white birds who would circle in slow loops before going to live beside rocky seas, catching fish and making eggs which they would guard against predators.

  Stoned on hope and anxiety he saw a concert where the applause became locusts and the audience became fields of grass and were devoured by the locusts and left barren and desolate. Wind came through the municipal auditorium blowing gritty sand into the faces of the rock’n’roll band as they travelled out into the desert, cruel bandits looking for new audiences, coming at last to a city in the north surrounded by orange groves and date palms where they would be taken in and adopted by the people and taught crafts such as cabinet making and net weaving and some would learn how to pick an orange, at what time, by what method, for the people in that place had no music in their lives and didn’t understand the purpose of the band, seeing them simply as vagabonds to be befriended and taught a purpose in life.

  Such were Claude’s dreams of the rock’n’roll band, against whom he was already building defences.

  6.

  She made up her eyes with charcoal in the manner of Indian men, so they suggested secrets and sorcery.

  She pored over newspapers, reading between the lines of local news.

  The mayor, she suggested, was a Cocairo.

  How was she so sure?

  “Look at his cheekbones. Cocairos are like that. That’s how you tell them. The skin stretches tight over their cheekbones. They got a crazy look in their eyes.”

  A lo
cal murder was obviously centred around heroin.

  “How? Why?”

  “It’s very weird, you know, the guy wasn’t from here at all and the girl was. I think she lured him into the bush where the other guy killed the first guy. He probably double-crossed him. It was a heroin deal, I bet.”

  “How?”

  “It’s just very weird, that’s all.” And she couldn’t say any more, retreating simply into her own certainty, unable or unwilling to explain why it was a heroin killing or possibly not believing it anyway, but simply wanting to transmit the incredible life she had lived with Carlos.

  “This town is a fucking bore.”

  “You don’t have to stay here.”

  “I can’t afford to go anywhere else … unless …” she flashed wide sparkling Indian eyes and snapped her fingers, click, click, click, “unless you want to come and get some amphetamines with me, honey.”

  He thought of Bonnie and Clyde Barrow taking photographs of themselves in hotel rooms, posing as gangsters in a movie, cigarettes dangling from their mouths, guns pointed on camera.

  “You’re a French gangster movie,” he told her.

  “You don’t make any sense,” she said. “There’s half a million dollars’ worth of amphetamines. We can get them.”

  She was chubby. She cried in her sleep. Her palms sweated continually. He saw her cowering in a corner while Carlos beat her up.

  “Where are they?”

  “I’ll tell you when we’re on our way.”

  “I can’t leave anyway,” he said. “I’ve got a building to finish.”

  “You’re a boring old man, Claude, come and get drunk.”

  “We got drunk last night.”

  “We could try and score some coke.”

  “You said you didn’t want any more coke.”

  And there she was again, in her underwear, the grey hat tipped forward on her curly blonde head, the revolver dangling in her small damp hand. “Just a sniff, honey. Cocaine is a really amazing drug. It’s a really nice drug.”