by Peter Carey
And then he realized. He thought of something he had read about:
WITHDRAWAL
The word flashed in the sky of his mind in red neon letters. And he understood the rubbish bin.
He took the bin of shit and tossed it into the pig yard. The pig gobbled the lot in two seconds, still whimpering.
Later, when he was inside the house, the pig became quiet. So, he thought, the pig is a junkie too, addicted from eating the shit of junkies.
8.
The episode with the pig had somehow cauterized his fear. Now he entered the house from the back verandah, tiptoeing selfconsciously across the creaking boards, the eyes of a thousand imaginary neighbours and vice-squad men boring into his black velvet back. He opened the door slowly, like a man defusing a dangerous bomb. His professional mind observed small details with fascination: the worn linoleum floor, the strange old lady’s hat on the hat stand, the plastic raincoat on the floor, the large white cat huddled in a ball in a far corner, the stained glass on the front door, far away. The first room, a bedroom, obviously unused. Several dead ferns in pots on the floor, a gardener’s glove, an airmail letter from Malaysia. He touched nothing, silently celebrating the perfect neglect, the authentic symbols of death. He approached, once more, that perfect no man’s land where fear is thrilling and almost pleasant.
To the left, another door. And he knew, as his hands touched the large black door knob, that this was the room. He held his breath, preparing himself for a smell he had read about. He waited for the air, heavy with the perfume of death, to overwhelm him.
But there was no smell, except perhaps a sweet woody smell like the inside of a walnut.
She sat, sedately, at the table, wearing a moth-eaten fur coat over a pair of men’s pyjamas that were a size too big. A slight old lady with thin grey hair pulled back into a bun on a very round head. Rimless glasses on a small pert nose. Tiny white hands, one resting on a table, one holding a fountain pen which rested on a blank piece of white writing paper. The table she sat at was large. On the other side of the table lay the remains of some plaster ceiling which had crushed a vase of flowers. Eddie noted the pieces of art noveau vase with satisfaction. Somehow they were almost better than the old lady herself, a more frightening natural symbol of the old lady who he now ignored, feeling a little embarrassed in her presence.
The blinds were drawn and the lights were on. This also was perfect: low-wattage lights, yellow and weak.
In search of other equally perfect symbols he wandered from room to room. He found photograph albums, old postcards, more letters than he could have hoped for, a wardrobe full of clothes, some of them expensive period pieces in their own right, a grand piano with a broken leg, paintings of irises and, in the kitchen, best of all, a ham sandwich slowly growing a green beard of mould.
And then, as he re-entered the living room where the old lady sat so quietly at the table, quite suddenly, without warning, it all went very flat. Well, perhaps not flat, but let us say that Eddie lost that tingling, that feeling of too much blood in the veins, that sensation that the curious fingers might themselves burst open under pressure, that curious irritating feeling at the back of the neck, all the delicious sensations that had always accompanied one of his finds.
Accustomed to standing on the edge of giddy chasms of disgust and terror, he was surprised to find himself standing on a wide, flat plain.
It was all so … ordinary.
He had dealt, all his professional life, with pieces of death, the cunts and pricks and tits of death, bottled, embalmed, and photographed close up. But here he had crossed that vague, disputed territory that separates the pornographic from the erotic. Accustomed to peering through keyholes, he was surprised to discover that he had walked through a door and it was all quite different from what his tingling hysterical nerves had told him it would be. He felt no suspicion of fear, no disgust, no exhilaration. Merely a kind of curious calm like a good stone.
The house was not, in spite of the body, in spite of the symbols, a house of death. The pornographer of death had been confronted with, of all things, a life.
9.
Like a child who, after weeks of ringing doorbells and running away, is caught and made welcome in the house whose doorbells he has been so excitedly ringing, Eddie shyly availed himself of the feast that was now offered him.
He travelled humbly through the rooms and passageways of the old lady’s life. He read letters from her mother which had been written fifty years ago. He leapt ten years forward to discover a love affair and back twelve years to read a school report, then forward to a concert where the old lady had sung with some distinction, then forward again, far forward, to the letter of an American who wrote to ask about a new hybrid iris which had been named after her and was difficult or impossible to obtain in Connecticut; there was a letter from a niece who worried that she might be lonely, the dignified letter of a rejected lover, then, quite recently, strange letters from a man who had once been a lodger who might well have been a con man but who inquired, just the same, about the health of a dog called Monty and who promised to return soon from Bundaberg, where he was engaged in the cane harvest.
He wandered through the pages of photograph albums and was able to put faces to many of the people who wrote the letters. He saw in the unchanging eyes of the old lady a peculiar mixture of vulnerability and bravado, the look was still there, gazing at him from across the table. He met her father, her mother, her brother the architect, her other brother who had been killed in a motor accident on his twenty-first birthday, the man who had written the first love letters but not the man who had written the more recent ones.
He read the letters sitting across the table from the old lady, who seemed as if she might, at any moment, begin to reply to any one of this vast horde of correspondents.
He stayed until dusk but he knew long before then that it would be wrong to make the tableau. It would be wrong because it would be wrong, and it would be wrong because it wasn’t shrill, or disgusting, or even vaguely spooky. He knew also that there was a lot of money to be made from selling the individual parts. The body, once removed from its environment, would be sufficiently scandalous to bring ten thousand dollars, possibly much more. Even in his new humbled state he recognized that this was a considerable amount of money. Likewise the letters, the postcards, the clothes would bring a lot. The letter telling her of her brother’s death could bring fifty dollars, nicely mounted in a clinical aluminium frame.
Still, he managed to evade the issue of what he would actually do with all this.
He left the house as he found it, succumbing only at the last moment to the letter announcing her brother’s death. This he folded lightly and put in his pocket.
Leaving by the back door he remembered the pig which was now sleeping contentedly in the corner of its yard. Some strange combination of his new-found feelings and some more practical, cautious, bet-hedging consideration made him decide to take the pig back with him to the smack freaks, who were, after all, responsible for its condition. Left alone it would suffer. Left alone it would also attract attention to the house and perhaps remove the old lady from his grasp at a time when he was unsure of what he might or might not do with her.
I will not record here the difficulties, some of them amusing, that confronted Eddie when he decided to truss the pig, nor those that beset him when he tried to get it into the car. Suffice it to say that he was badly bitten and that he finally succeeded in arriving back at Caroline Street with one pig which was already starting to worry about where its next fix was coming from.
10.
“You what?” said Jo-Jo.
“I brought the pig back. It’s downstairs in the car.”
The three of them looked up at him derisively. They sat together on the couch, Pete, Daphne, and Jo-Jo, and Eddie didn’t like to see them like that, all together, all aligned against him. There wasn’t much room on the couch. He could see how the thighs pressed into other thighs. Her
e, in his fucking flat, all pressed together and sitting in judgment on him, in his own flat.
“It was screaming.” His eyes sent desperate signals to Daphne, but Daphne wasn’t receiving.
“Did you give it the shit?”
“Yeah, of course I gave it the fucking shit, but I’m not going to make a shit run out there every day just to keep it quiet.”
Pete stared at him with dreadful anaesthetized eyes and Daphne smiled at him. It wasn’t much of a smile. It could have meant a number of unpleasant things. It occurred to him that she’d been shooting up, but he didn’t ask.
“If I let it keep screaming someone’s going to call the cops and I stand to lose several thousand bucks.”
That did it. Not so cool now, his smack freak friends. They wanted to know what was out there that they’d missed. Diamonds? They’d looked through the house for valuables but the only thing they found was a wrist watch on the corpse itself.
Eddie felt better. He rolled himself a joint and didn’t pass it round. He pulled out the letter and let them read it.
The freaks didn’t know where they were but he could see that Daphne knew the value of the letter. Still, even she hadn’t guessed. She wanted to know what else was out there. Gold fillings?
Eddie very nearly didn’t tell them. He had decided on the way back from the house that he wasn’t going to sell the old lady. He felt strong and together. He was going to call a doctor or the cops or whoever you call about an old lady, and that would be it. And if it hadn’t been for this problem with people sitting on his couch, it would have been it.
Now, however, he found himself saying, “That little old lady you left behind is worth ten grand, just the body alone.”
Pete shifted in his seat and looked at Eddie with his head on one side: “Who’d buy an old lady?”
“Lots of people would buy an old lady. Daphne knows at least four people who’d buy an old lady. I know maybe a dozen.”
Pete shook his head. “Shit, you’re weird, man, you’re really weird.”
Eddie smiled his stoned, cool, people-loving smile and went to sit on a tall stool. He felt better and worse all at once. In spite of his triumph a great sadness had begun to fall around him. He began to feel that the victory hadn’t been worth it. However, he continued: “I’m going to sell that little old lady. I’m going to buy the whole fucking house, man. THE DEAD LANDLADY IN HER HOUSE. Price on application.”
“Man, you’re on a weird trip.”
“Sure. Now if you guys help me upstairs with the pig, I’ll go out there tonight and bring her back.”
“You going to bring her here?”
“Sure. She can sit at the table there. Now you guys give me a hand with the pig and if it starts to yell you give it some stuff. I’ll pay for it, but you give it a fix if it needs it. I don’t want those pricks next door calling the cops because they hear a pig screaming.”
“OK, Eddie,” said the freaks.
11.
He drove the old lady back to Caroline Street with the hood down. She didn’t seem to mind. In fact, Eddie felt that the wind had put a smile on her face. Even now he was unsure of whether he would really sell her or not. With every mile he changed his mind and changed it back again.
In a confused state of mind he stopped off at High Street and the old lady waited patiently in the car while he went into the back room. The back room didn’t help. It all looked a little foolish to him, but maybe it was just because of the old lady waiting so meekly in the car outside.
12.
Exhausted by the events of the day, Eddie slept well that night. The freaks had given the pig a hit and it also slept soundly in the bath. The old lady sat at the table, the pen once more in her hand, gazing thoughtfully at Janis Joplin on the cover of Rolling Stone.
When Eddie woke in the morning Daphne was already up. He went out to inspect the old lady and found she wasn’t there. No one else was there, either.
Instead, he found a note from Daphne which said that they’d taken the old lady to Sydney to sell and they were going on up to Queensland to stay with relatives. The note said there was some stuff in the bathroom cupboard, enough for a couple of hits, and she’d marked the pig with lipstick to show where to put the needle in. There were other instructions, all quite helpful and explicit.
She also left the name of a man who could sell Eddie more smack and said where to contact him and how much to pay. “In my opinion,” she wrote, “the best thing might be just to give it an O.D., love, Daphne.”
Report on the Shadow Industry
1.
My friend S. went to live in America ten years ago and I still have the letter he wrote me when he first arrived, wherein he describes the shadow factories that were springing up on the west coast and the effects they were having on that society. “You see people in dark glasses wandering around the supermarkets at 2 a.m. There are great boxes all along the aisles, some as expensive as fifty dollars but most of them only five. There’s always Muzak. It gives me the shits more than the shadows. The people don’t look at one another. They come to browse through the boxes of shadows although the packets give no indication of what’s inside. It really depresses me to think of people going out at two in the morning because they need to try their luck with a shadow. Last week I was in a supermarket near Topanga and I saw an old negro tear the end off a shadow box. He was arrested almost immediately.”
A strange letter ten years ago but it accurately describes scenes that have since become common in this country. Yesterday I drove in from the airport past shadow factory after shadow factory, large faceless buildings gleaming in the sun, their secrets guarded by ex-policemen with Alsatian dogs.
The shadow factories have huge chimneys that reach far into the sky, chimneys which billow forth smoke of different, brilliant colours. It is said by some of my more cynical friends that the smoke has nothing to do with any manufacturing process and is merely a trick, fake evidence that technological miracles are being performed within the factories. The popular belief is that the smoke sometimes contains the most powerful shadows of all, those that are too large and powerful to be packaged. It is a common sight to see old women standing for hours outside the factories, staring into the smoke.
There are a few who say the smoke is dangerous because of carcinogenic chemicals used in the manufacture of shadows. Others argue that the shadow is a natural product and by its very nature chemically pure. They point to the advantages of the smoke: the beautifully coloured patterns in the clouds which serve as a reminder of the happiness to be obtained from a fully realized shadow. There may be some merit in this last argument, for on cloudy days the skies above our city are a wondrous sight, full of blues and vermilions and brilliant greens which pick out strange patterns and shapes in the clouds.
Others say that the clouds now contain the dreadful beauty of the apocalypse.
2.
The shadows are packaged in large, lavish boxes which are printed with abstract designs in many colours. The Bureau of Statistics reveals that the average householder spends 25 per cent of his income on these expensive goods and that this percentage increases as the income decreases.
There are those who say that the shadows are bad for people, promising an impossible happiness that can never be realized and thus detracting from the very real beauties of nature and life. But there are others who argue that the shadows have always been with us in one form or another and that the packaged shadow is necessary for mental health in an advanced technological society. There is, however, research to indicate that the high suicide rate in advanced countries is connected with the popularity of shadows and that there is a direct statistical correlation between shadow sales and suicide rates. This has been explained by those who hold that the shadows are merely mirrors to the soul and that the man who stares into a shadow box sees only himself, and what beauty he finds there is his own beauty and what despair he experiences is born of the poverty of his spirit.
3.
I visited my mother at Christmas. She lives alone with her dogs in a poor part of town. Knowing her weakness for shadows I brought her several of the more expensive varieties which she retired to examine in the privacy of the shadow room.
She stayed in the room for such a long time that I became worried and knocked on the door. She came out almost immediately. When I saw her face I knew the shadows had not been good ones.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but she kissed me quickly and began to tell me about a neighbour who had won the lottery.
I myself know, only too well, the disappointments of shadow boxes for I also have a weakness in that direction. For me it is something of a guilty secret, something that would not be approved of by my clever friends.
I saw J. in the street. She teaches at the university.
“Ah-hah,” she said knowingly, tapping the bulky parcel I had hidden under my coat. I know she will make capital of this discovery, a little piece of gossip to use at the dinner parties she is so fond of. Yet I suspect that she too has a weakness for shadows. She confessed as much to me some years ago during that strange misunderstanding she still likes to call “Our Affair”. It was she who hinted at the feeling of emptiness, that awful despair that comes when one has failed to grasp the shadow.
4.
My own father left home because of something he had seen in a box of shadows. It wasn’t an expensive box, either, quite the opposite — a little surprise my mother had bought with the money left over from her housekeeping. He opened it after dinner one Friday night and he was gone before I came down to breakfast on the Saturday. He left a note which my mother only showed me very recently. My father was not good with words and had trouble communicating what he had seen: “Words Cannot Express It What I feel Because of The Things I Saw In The Box Of Shadows You Bought Me.”
