Collected Stories

by Peter Carey

  Turk Kershaw had no interest in the subject. He felt vaguely contemptuous of McGregor and wished the meeting to be over soon.

  Davis, short and meticulous, seemed the one who was most as he had been. His good looks had not become overripe as had Sangster’s. Neither had success made him as disdainful of Turk as it had McGregor. Whilst Sangster and McGregor continued their conversation with earnest exclusiveness, Davis talked quietly and modestly to Turk about his hospital work. And it was Davis, pointedly ignoring the other conversation, who asked Turk about his dog, a different dog who had been less important to him.

  The question almost brought Turk undone.

  He had another swallow of Scotch before he answered.

  “It died,” he said.

  Davis nodded, sensing the pain, but not understanding it. “How long ago?”

  “Ten years,” Turk said. “You would have been at university by then.” He remembered a story that Davis had written in first form. It came to him then. The ten-year-old boy standing beside his desk reading aloud a work that verged on the erotic. He had read it to a tittering class without embarrassment. Turk had said nothing about the story. He had given it an average mark, yet it had touched him, it had been a strange eruption from a sea of mediocrity. Why had he given it an average mark? Had he been embarrassed too? Why had he wished to discourage him?

  McGregor was talking about some ideas he had to stop the problem of dole cheats. Sangster was obviously bored with the conversation. He was staring intently at a Malaysian air hostess who was drinking alone at the next table.

  “Did you get another one?” Davis asked.

  “Another what… I’m sorry.” Turk had been watching the air hostess smile at Sangster and had been pleased to note McGregor’s annoyance when he saw the same thing.

  “Another dog.”

  The word cut into him. He thought, I must not think of the metal dish. And then immediately he thought of it, and the chipped water bowl and the small grave, and the shed hair on the bedclothes, and the weight of the dog when it came to lie on his bed after the fire had gone cold at night.

  He swallowed and sucked in his breath. “It died too, I’m afraid.” He looked at Davis. He wondered if Davis understood anything. He had a sensitive face. It was a face his patients would have trusted. Davis listened to Turk, and his dark-brown eyes never left his face. “This morning … I… had to bury him.” Turk tried to smile, but he was too distressed and didn’t trust himself to say more. He could handle it. He would handle it. He had drunk too much, but he would handle it because there was no way not to handle it. Turk Kershaw did not weep.

  He blew his nose and caught Sangster looking at him warily. The air hostess had left. McGregor was talking to the waitress.

  Then Davis did something which he had not expected. He put his hand on Turk’s shoulder and said, “I’m sorry.”

  It was because of the concern, the kindness, the surgeon’s understanding of the total emptiness that he now felt that his defences crumbled. It was because of this that he now cried, very quietly, holding his snot-wet handkerchief to his eyes.

  It did not last long. But when he had put his handkerchief back in his pocket the table had new drinks on it, there was a clean ashtray, and everyone seemed uncomfortable.

  The awkwardness of the situation summoned up reserves in Turk that he had thought long gone. With red eyes and a blocked nose he fought his way out of his sentimentality, his loneliness, his empty house, and began to ease the conversation back to normality by helping them talk about what they wanted to talk about: the school, its characters, the people they had all once known.

  He was impatient and in a hurry to settle things, and it was this haste which made his first choice such a bad one. For he turned to McGregor and said, “Tell me, Mac, do you ever see Masterton?”

  It was only when he saw McGregor redden till his face was the bright crimson he had shown so readily at the age of twelve that he realized what he had said and how unacceptable the memory must be to McGregor. Masterton had been several years younger than McGregor, a blond boy with fine exquisite features, long lashes, and a prettiness of a type that is more commonly admired in females. McGregor had loved him hotly, chastely, with puzzled intensity. Their friendship had been one of those small, delightful scandals but one which had lasted longer than most. Turk had known all this but had never thought anything of it, had enjoyed it all, had watched the young lovers with the protective happiness of a parent. In his haste it had not occurred to him that McGregor might wish to forget it.

  Nor had it occurred to him that talk of Masterton and McGregor might make Sangster and Davis more than a little uncomfortable. For they too had had their affairs of the heart and simpler more obvious releases of adolescent lust.

  So they found themselves, all three, confronted with things they had no wish to remember. They did not wish to know that they had sucked the cocks of boys who had grown up to be married men or that they had loved other boys in the peculiarly intense way that the marketing director had loved Masterton.

  Davis’s foot accidently touched Sangster’s leg and he withdrew it quickly as if stung.

  Sangster, the newspaper proprietor, had no wish to remember that he had coated his cock with Vaseline hair tonic and slipped it gently into Davis, the surgeon’s, arse. Nor did Davis wish to remember the hot painful wonder of it, the shameful perplexing door of a world he had not known existed.

  None of the young men who sat at this table with Turk Kershaw wanted to recall the euphemistic way they had come to proposition one another by saying “Let’s inspect the plumbing”, which was delightfully ambiguous for them and meant, on the simplest level, crawling beneath the locker rooms, the dark damp space beneath the floor where they made love from curiosity and Sunday boredom and hot adolescent need.

  It had been another world, another time, with other rules.

  Now in the Golden Nugget they experienced the fear of dreams where you walk naked into crowded churches.

  They looked at Turk Kershaw and saw that he was, in spite of his obvious discomfort, smiling. There was a twinkle in his red eyes. And they knew that a hundred pieces of gossip and scandal were contained in that great domed head. He was ridiculous in his dirty old sportscoat. His sleeves were too short. His shirt was not properly ironed. He moved his hands in ways which were not conventionally masculine. If he had not been Turk Kershaw they would never have spoken to him. But there he was, sitting across the table, a glimmer of a smile betraying the dirty secrets he still carried with him. They looked at Turk Kershaw and could not forgive him for being their past.

  5.

  It was McGregor who was most angry with Turk. He had been made to look a fool and he could not forgive that. He had become the master of both the cudgel and the stiletto, using both of them with equal skill. He had learned the art of the lethal memo and knew how to maximize its effects: who to send copies to and how to list their names in orders both ingratiating and insulting. He had become an expert in detecting weaknesses and never hesitated to hit the weak spots when the moment was right. He had had his predecessor fired and he would be managing director within two years. He no longer remembered that it was Turk himself who had first shown him the benefits of intelligent analysis of your enemies’ weaknesses. It was Turk who had coached McGregor’s bullish bowling, and had made him look at each batsman as a separate problem. “Pick the weakness,” Turk had said, “everybody has a weak point. When you’ve found it, pound away at it.”

  So now McGregor waited while the others played “remember when”. And when he was ready he took advantage of a natural pause in the conversation. He smiled at Turk and said, “Remember how you used to get the kids doing exercises in the morning, in front of your bedroom window?”

  He drew blood. He watched with satisfaction as the colour came into Turk’s face. He reacted to the colour like a shark tasting blood in the water. He attacked politely, never once abandoning his perfect manners.

  �
��Why did you get them to do it in front of your bedroom window? Frankly,” he smiled, “I find that curious.”

  Turk watched him warily. He saw, out of the corner of his eye, Sangster grinning broadly. “I saw no reason to get out of bed simply because you lot couldn’t behave yourselves. The punishment was for you, not me.”

  He looked at Davis. Davis looked away. He looked to Sangster. Was Sangster for him or against him? McGregor folded his arms and smiled complacently.

  “Come on, Turk,” said Sangster, “you’ve got to admit, it’s a bit strange when you look at it. Lying in bed watching twelve-year-old boys doing their exercises. In their underwear.”

  Even as they spoke they began to wonder if it wasn’t true. Was it possible that Turk Kershaw was an old queen? They watched for other clues now, although the thought itself shocked them. For now they remembered how Turk had wrestled with them at night when he had come round to put the lights out, how they had attempted, four or five at a time, to overpower him. They thought of themselves as boys wrestling with an old queen. They felt foolish and disgusted with themselves and it was finally Davis (you too, Davis, thought Turk) who said: “You used to like wrestling.”

  Turk reddened again. He watched their smiling faces and detested them. He thought of their wives, whom he had seen in the social pages of Vogue, which he bought for just this reason. He saw the wives, one as beautiful as the next and almost identical in their style, each reduced to a charming doll in the small black and white photographs. While the men came to show the marks of character and experience on their faces, the women paid fortunes so that their experience and pain didn’t show, so they looked, each one, like people who had discovered nothing. And when, finally, their lives burst out through the treatments and the creams and showed on their faces they would feel it was the beginning of the end. He felt pity for the wives with their swimming-pool parties and charity balls and anger at their husbands, who displayed their deeds and emotions so proudly on their faces yet refused to allow their wives the same privilege.

  “No,” he said slowly with a quietness they all remembered with not some little fear. “No, it was you who enjoyed the wrestling.” He watched them, one by one, saw their anger and apprehension, hesitated, and finally decided it wiser not to say the words that were already formed in his mind: your little dicks were stiff with excitement.

  They paused then, aware of a new strength in him. They watched him carefully and found no weakness. The wound had closed.

  Sangster had none of McGregor’s political sense. It had never been necessary for him to have any. So now he continued where the other held back. “Tell us,” he said, toying with his drink, “where you buried your dog.”

  Turk looked at him with narrowed eyes. He felt Davis shift uneasily in his chair. “I buried the dog,” he said, “beneath the fig tree in the backyard of my house.” His head was perfectly clear now and he would not weep. He was vulnerable to pity or love but not to a crude bullying attack like that.

  There was silence at the table then. At other tables the habitués of the Golden Nugget conducted their business, boasted, made assignations and confessions and went to the telephone to tell lies with complicated plots.

  The attack on Turk had lost its momentum and the three students were temporarily marooned in the midst of battle, nervous, embarrassed by what they had done.

  But McGregor wouldn’t give up. While Turk was looking for his matches McGregor looked across at Sangster and made a limp-wristed caricature of a homosexual.

  Turk saw it.

  McGregor smiled back insultingly.

  Turk stood, slowly, feeling the weight of the whisky for the first time.

  McGregor waited.

  “McGregor,” Turk smiled, “surely, if you’re honest, you’ll admit that you miss Masterton. He did have such a firm little arse.”

  He walked from the bar before McGregor could recover, full of rage yet not for a second denying the pleasure he felt in saying the unsay able.

  In the bar three successful men in their early thirties stayed to plan their revenge.

  It was not a revenge at all, the way they discussed it.

  It was a prank.

  6.

  Sangster’s Mercedes arrived at the house before Turk’s bus could hope to. Davis, unsure and worried, lost courage at the last moment and sat in the car. He was beginning to feel sick and had no appetite for what was planned. He remembered a childhood afternoon when he had fired air-rifle pellets into a large, slow-moving lizard, only realizing the atrocity he was committing after he had fired twenty slugs into the slow body and saw the blood spots and the open eyes of the terribly silent being which stubbornly refused to die.

  He waited in the dark street, fearful of both Turk’s arrival and his friends’ activity. He considered leaving but he lacked the courage, just as he had lacked the courage to speak against the prank.

  In the gloom he saw Sangster and McGregor carrying something. Their laughter was sharp and clear.

  They were on the porch now. He heard the giggling, and then the hammering as they nailed the muddy body of Turk’s fox terrier to his front door.

  They made him come then, to admire the work.

  The surgeon in the dark suit walked up the steps of the house where he joined a marketing director and a newspaper proprietor in looking at the body of a dead dog nailed to a door.

  At that moment they were not to know that they had made an enduring nightmare for themselves, that the staring eyes of the dead dog would peer into the dirty corners of their puzzled dreams for many years to come.

  For the people they continued to make love to in their dreams did not always have vaginas and the dog looked on, its tongue lewdly lolling out, observing it all.

  The Journey of a Lifetime

  1.

  How I have waited for the train, dreamed about it, studied its every detail. It has been my ambition, my obsession, a hope too far-fetched for one of my standing. My poor, dimly lit room is lined with newspaper cuttings, postcards, calendars (both cheaply and expensively printed) celebrating its glories, the brutal power of its locomotive, the velvety luxury of its interiors.

  On stifling summer nights I have lain on my bed and lingered over the pages of my beautiful scrapbooks, particularly the one titled “Tickets, Reservations, etc.”. Possibly it is the best collection of its type. I do not know. But I have been fortunate indeed to have superiors who have not only known of my interest but have been thoughtful enough to hand on what bits and pieces have come their way.

  I imagine them at dinner parties: the clink of fine crystal, the witty conversation, the French wines and white-shouldered women.

  “Ah,” one would say, “so you have been north on the train?”

  “Yes,” said nonchalantly, as if the train were nothing, a bicycle, a bowl of soup.

  “I wonder perhaps if I may have your tickets. I have a clerk who has an interest …”

  Even now, imagining this conversation, I hold my breath. I wait on tenterhooks. Have the tickets been thrown away? Have they been kept? If so will my superior remember to ask about dining-room reservation cards, a menu, baggage tickets?

  “Well, yes, I believe I have them still.”

  Will he get them now? Or will he merely intend to fetch them but stay talking for a moment and then, finally, forget the matter entirely.

  No. No. He stands. A tall man, very white-skinned, a rather cruel aristocratic nose. A kindly smile flickers around his thin lips. “Best to get it now,” he says, “lest one forget.”

  It is a large house of course and he is away some time. He walks lightly up the great curving staircase where he passes maids in black dresses and white aprons. He greets them kindly, knowing each one by name. I follow him down wide corridors and into a study, book-lined, a large green lamp hanging over a cedar table on which sits a stamp collection in eight leather-bound volumes. One album lies open revealing blue stamps, almost identical, but with slight differences in printing.<
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  He fossicks in the drawer of a mahogany desk. I cannot make out what he has. Ah, an envelope. Now, down the corridors. Oh, the agony of waiting. On the staircase he stops to talk with a servant, inquiring about the man’s father. The conversation drags on. It seems as if we will be here all night. But no, no, it is over. The servant proceeds upstairs, his master downstairs.

  Finally at the dinner table the envelope is presented to my superior. He opens it. Thank God. I thought for a moment he was going to put it in his pocket without even looking.

  And, oh, what treasures we have.

  First, two small blue first-class tickets. The blue denotes a journey in excess of one thousand miles. Rare enough, but across the blue is a faint green stripe which denotes the Family Saloon. I imagine the saloon, recalling the colour gravure calendar which displays its glories. The oak door leading to the observation platform. The high arched roof with the clerestory windows. The two quilted chairs upholstered in rich rust-coloured velvet. There is also a couch with two loose cushions, one with tassels, one bearing an insignia the nature of which remains mysterious to me. There is a writing table with a lamp of graceful design. The windows of the carriage are large, affording a panorama of the most spectacular scenery by day, curtained by ingenious blinds at night.

  In addition the envelope contains reservations for the dining car, a lavishly printed menu and two unusual luggage labels denoting the high rank of the traveller.

  They will go into my scrapbook, of course, and be held there not by anything as coarse as glue, but by the small transparent hinges used by stamp collectors. The scrapbook will lie under my bed as always. On a hot night I will lean down and take it out, and slowly, having all the time in the world, I will peruse its contents.

  If the fat bitch in the next room roars and moans in her stinking lust I will not become distressed. I will not even hear her. While her organ grips and slides over her latest lover’s aching penis, I will be far away. Nothing will touch me. I will not hammer on the wall in rage. Nor will I be so base as to press my ear closer to catch the obscenities she mutters or the details of the perversions she commands him to perform.