by Peter Carey
“It sounds forlorn,” I offered.
“Do you think that it is the crow’s intention, to sound forlorn? Perhaps you are merely ignorant and don’t know how to listen to a crow.”
“Certainly, I’m ignorant.” It was true, of course, but the observation stung a little. I was very aware of my ignorance in those days. I felt it keenly.
“If you could kill a parrot or a crow which would you kill?”
“Why would I want to kill either of them?”
“But if you had to, for whatever reason.”
“The crow, I suppose. Or possibly the parrot. Whichever was the smallest.”
Her eyes were alight and fierce. She rolled a cigarette without looking at it. Her face suddenly looked extraordinarily beautiful, her eyes glistening with emotion, the colour high in her cheeks, a peculiar half-smile on her wide mouth.
“Which breasts are best?”
I laughed. “I don’t know.”
“Which legs?”
“I don’t know. I like long legs.”
“Like the film stars.”
Like yours, I thought. “Yes.”
“Is that really your idea of beautiful?”
She was angry with me now, had decided to call me enemy. I did not feel enemy and didn’t want to be. My mind felt fat and flabby, unused, numb. I forgot my irritation with her ideas. I set all that aside. In the world of ideas I had no principles. An idea was of no worth to me, not worth fighting for. I would fight for a beer, a meal, a woman, but never an idea.
“I like grevilleas,” I said greasily.
She looked blank. I thought as much! “Which are they?” I had her at a loss.
“They’re small bushes. They grow in clay, in the harshest situations. Around rocks, on dry hillsides. If you come fishing with me, I’ll show you. The leaves are more like spikes. They look dull and harsh. No one would think to look at them twice. But in November,” I smiled, “they have flowers like glorious red spiders. I think they’re beautiful.”
“But in October?”
“In October I know what they’ll be like in November.”
She smiled. She must have wanted to like me. I was disgusted with my argument. It had been cloying and saccharine even to me. I hadn’t been quite sure what to say, but it seems I hit the nail on the head.
“Does it hurt?” she asked suddenly.
“What?”
“The Chance. Is it painful, or is it like they say?”
“It makes you vomit a lot, and feel ill, but it doesn’t hurt. It’s more a difficult time for your head.”
She drained her beer and began to grin at me. “I was just thinking,” she said.
“Thinking what?”
“I was thinking that if you have anything more to do with me it’ll be a hard time for your head too.”
I looked at her grinning face, disbelievingly.
I found out later that she hadn’t been joking.
3.
To cut a long and predictable story short, we got on well together, if you’ll allow for the odd lie on my part and what must have been more than a considerable suppression of common sense on hers.
I left my outcast acquaintances behind to fight and steal, and occasionally murder each other in the boarding house. I returned there only to pick up my fishing rod. I took it round to her place at Pier Street, swaggering like a sailor on leave. I was in a flamboyant, extravagant mood and left behind my other ratty possessions. They didn’t fit my new situation.
Thus, to the joys of living with an eccentric and beautiful woman I added the even more novel experience of a home. Either one of these changes would have brought me some measure of contentment, but the combination of the two of them was almost too good to be true.
I was in no way prepared for them. I had been too long a grabber, a survivor.
So when I say that I became obsessed with hanging on to these things, using every shred of guile I had learned in my old life, do not judge me harshly. The world was not the way it is now. It was a bitter jungle of a place, worse, because even in the jungle there is cooperation, altruism, community.
Regarding the events that followed I feel neither pride nor shame. Regret, certainly, but regret is a useless emotion. I was ignorant, short-sighted, bigoted, but in my situation it is inconceivable that I could have been anything else.
But now let me describe for you Carla’s home as I came to know it, not as I saw it at first, for then I only felt the warmth of old timbers and delighted in the dozens of small signs of domesticity everywhere about me: a toothbrush in a glass, dirty clothes overflowing from a blue cane laundry basket, a made bed, dishes draining in a sink, books, papers, letters from friends, all the trappings of a life I had long abandoned, many Chances ago.
The house had once been a warehouse, long before the time of the Americans. It was clad with unpainted boards that had turned a gentle silver, ageing with a grace that one rarely saw in those days.
One ascended the stairs from the Pier Street wharf itself. A wooden door. A large key. Inside: a floor of grooved boards, dark with age.
The walls showed their bones: timber joists and beams, roughly nailed in the old style, but solid as a rock.
High in the ceiling was a sleeping platform, below it a simple kitchen filled with minor miracles: a hot-water tap, a stove, a refrigerator, saucepans, spices, even a recipe book or two.
The rest of the area was a sitting room, the pride of place being given to three beautiful antique armchairs in the Danish style, their carved arms showing that patina which only age can give.
Add a rusty-coloured old rug, pile books high from the floor, pin Hup posters here and there, and you have it.
Or almost have it, because should you open the old high sliding door (pushing hard, because its rollers are stiff and rusty from the salty air) the room is full of the sea, the once-great harbour, its waters rarely perturbed by craft, its shoreline dotted with rusting hulks of forgotten ships, great tankers from the oil age, tugs, and ferries which, even a year before, had maintained their services in the face of neglect and disinterest on all sides.
Two other doors led off the main room: one to a rickety toilet which hung out precariously over the water, the other to a bedroom, its walls stacked with files, books, loose papers, its great bed draped in mosquito netting, for there was no wiring for the customary sonic mosquito repellents and the mosquitoes carried Fasta Fever with the same dedicated enthusiasm that others of their family had once carried malaria.
The place revealed its secrets fast enough, but Carla, of course, did not divulge hers quite so readily. Frankly, it suited me. I was happy to see what I was shown and never worried about what was hidden away.
I mentioned nothing of Hups or revolution and she, for her part, seemed to have forgotten the matter. My assumption (arrogantly made) was that she would put off her Chance indefinitely. People rarely plunged into the rigours of the Lottery when they were happy with their life. I was delighted with mine, and I assumed she was with hers.
I had never known anyone like her. She sang beautifully and played the cello with what seemed to me to be real accomplishment. She came to the Park and Gardens and beat us all at poker. To see her walk across to our bed, moving with the easy gait of an Islander, filled me with astonishment and wonder.
I couldn’t believe my luck.
She had been born rich but chose to live poor, an idea that was beyond my experience or comprehension. She had read more books in the last year than I had in my life. And when my efforts to hide my ignorance finally gave way in tatters she took to my education with the same enthusiasm she brought to our bed.
Her methods were erratic, to say the last. For each new book she gave me revealed a hundred gaps in my knowledge that would have to be plugged with other books.
I was deluged with the whole artillery of Hup literature: long and difficult works like Gibson’s Class and Genetics, Schumacher’s Comparative Physiognomy, Hale’s Wolf Children.
&nbs
p; I didn’t care what they were about. If they had been treatises on the history of Rome or the Fasta economic system I would have read them with as much enthusiasm and probably learned just as little.
Sitting on the wharf I sang her “Rosie Allan’s Outlaw Friend”, the story of an ill-lettered cattle thief and his love for a young school mistress. My body was like an old guitar, fine and mellow with beautiful resonance.
The first star appeared.
“The first star,” I said.
“It’s a planet,” she said.
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
She produced a school book on the known solar system at breakfast the next morning.
“How in the hell do you know so little?” she said, eating the omelette I’d cooked her.
I stared at the extraordinary rings of Saturn, knowing I’d known some of these things long ago. They brought to mind classrooms on summer days, dust, the smell of oranges, lecture theatres full of formally dressed students with eager faces.
“I guess I just forgot,” I said. “Maybe half my memory is walking around in other bodies. And how in the fuck is it that you don’t know how to make a decent omelette?”
“I guess,” she grinned, “that I just forgot.”
She wandered off towards the kitchen with her empty plate but got distracted by an old newspaper she found on the way. She put the plate on the floor and went on to the kitchen where she read the paper, leaning back against the sink.
“You have rich habits,” I accused her.
She looked up, arching her eyebrows questioningly.
“You put things down for other people to pick up.”
She flushed and spent five minutes picking up things and putting them in unexpected places.
She never mastered the business of tidying up and finally I was the one who became housekeeper.
When the landlord arrived one morning to collect the rent she introduced me as “my house-proud lover”. I gave the bastard my street-fighter’s sneer and he swallowed the smirk he was starting to grow on his weak little face.
I was the one who opened the doors to the harbour. I swept the floor, I tidied the books and washed the plates. I threw out the old newspapers and took down the posters for Hup meetings and demonstrations which had long since passed.
She came in from work after my first big clean-up and started pulling books out and throwing them on the floor.
“What in the fuck are you doing?”
“Where did you put them?”
“Put what?”
She pulled down a pile of old pamphlets and threw them on the floor as she looked between each one.
“What?”
“My posters, you bastard. How dare you.”
I was nonplussed. My view of posters was purely practical. It had never occurred to me that they might have any function other than to adverise what they appeared to advertise. When the event was past the poster had no function.
Confused and angry at her behaviour, I retrieved the posters from the bin in the kitchen.
“You creased them.”
“I’m sorry.”
She started putting them up again.
“Why did you take them down? It’s your house now, is it? Would you like to paint the walls, eh? Do you want to change the furniture too? Is there anything else that isn’t to your liking?”
“Carla,” I said, “I’m very sorry. I took them down because they were out of date.”
“Out of date,” she snorted. “You mean you think they’re ugly.”
I looked at the poster she was holding, a glorification of crooked forms and ugly faces.
“Well, if you want to put it like that, yes, I think they’re fucking ugly.”
She glowered at me, self-righteous and prim. “You can only say that because you’re so conditioned that you can only admire looks like mine. How pathetic. That’s why you like me, isn’t it?”
Her face was red, the skin taut with rage.
“Isn’t it?”
I’d thought this damn Hup thing had gone away, but here it was. The stupidity of it. It drove me insane. Her books became weapons in my hands. I threw them at her, hard, in a frenzy.
“Idiot. Dolt. You don’t believe what you say. You’re too young to know anything. You don’t know what these damn people are like,” I poked at the posters, “you’re too young to know anything. You’re a fool. You’re playing with life.” I hurled another book. “Playing with it.”
She was young and nimble with a boxer’s reflexes. She dodged the books easily enough and retaliated viciously, slamming a thick sociology text into the side of my head.
Staggering back to the window I was confronted with the vision of an old man’s face, looking in.
I pulled up the window and transferred my abuse in that direction.
“Who in the fuck are you?”
A very nervous old man stood on a long ladder, teetering nervously above the street.
“I’m a painter.”
“Well, piss off.”
He looked down into the street below as I grabbed the top rung of the ladder and gave it a little bit of a shake.
“Who is it?” Carla called.
“It’s a painter.”
“What’s he doing?”
I looked outside. “He’s painting the bloody place orange.”
The painter, seeing me occupied with other matters, started to retreat down the ladder.
“Hey.” I shook the ladder to make him stop.
“It’s only a primer,” he pleaded.
“It doesn’t need any primer,” I yelled. “Those bloody boards will last a hundred years.”
“You’re yelling at the wrong person, fellah.” The painter was at the bottom of the ladder now, and all the bolder because of it.
“If you touch that ladder again I’ll have the civil police here.” He backed into the street and shook his finger at me. “They’ll do you, my friend, so just watch it.”
I slammed the window shut and locked it for good measure. “You’ve got to talk to the landlord,” I said, “before they ruin the place.”
“Got to?”
“Please.”
Her face became quiet and secretive. She started picking up books and pamphlets and stacking them against the wall with exaggerated care.
“Please, Carla.”
“You tell them,” she shrugged. “I won’t be here.” She fetched the heavy sociology text from beneath the window and frowned over the bookshelves, looking for a place to put it.
“What in the hell does that mean?”
“It means I’m a Hup. I told you that before. I told you the first time I met you. I’m taking a Chance and you won’t like what comes out. I told you before,” she repeated, “you’ve known all along.”
“Be buggered you’re taking a Chance.”
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 attentuated 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 agai
nst the wall, was the one I later knew as Daniel. The grotesque pockmarks on his face proudly accentuated by the subtle use of make-up and, I swear to God, colour co-ordinated 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 spider’s-web 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.
