Collected Stories

by Peter Carey

  Carla, most beautiful of women, crying in my ear, “Tell me I’m beautiful.”

  Locked doors with broken hinges. Bank vaults blown asunder. Blasphemous papers floating on warm winds, lying in the summer streets, flapping like wounded seagulls.

  11.

  In the morning the light caught her. She looked more beautiful than the Bonnards in Hale’s Critique of Bourgeois Art, the orange sheet lying where she had kicked it, the fine hairs along her arm soft and golden in the early light.

  Bonnard painted his wife for more than twenty years. Whilst her arse and tits sagged he painted her better and better. It made my eyes wet with sentimental tears to think of the old Mme Bonnard posing for the ageing M. Bonnard, standing in the bathroom or sitting on the toilet seat of their tiny flat.

  I was affected by visions of constancy. In the busy lanes behind the central market I watched an old couple helping each other along the broken-down pavement. He, short and stocky with a country man’s arms, now infirm and reduced to a walking stick. She, of similar height, overweight, carrying her shopping in an old-fashioned bag.

  She walked beside him protectively, spying out broken cobblestones, steps, and the feet of beggars.

  “You walk next to the wall,” I heard her say, “I’ll walk on the outside so no one kicks your stick again.”

  They swapped positions and set off once more, the old man jutting his chin, the old lady moving slowly on swollen legs, strangers to the mysteries of the Genetic Lottery and the glittering possibilities of a Chance.

  When the sun, in time, caught Carla’s beautiful face, she opened her eyes and smiled at me.

  I felt so damned I wished to slap her face.

  It was unbelievable that this should be taken from us. And even as I held her and kissed her sleep-soft lips, I was beginning, at last, to evolve a plan that would really keep her.

  As I stroked her body, running one feathery finger down her shoulder, along her back, between her legs, across her thighs, I was designing the most intricate door, a door I could fit on the afternoon before her Chance-day, a door to keep her prisoner for a day at least. A door I could blame the landlord for, a door painted orange, a colour I could blame the painters for, a door to make her miss her appointment, a door that would snap shut with a normal click but would finally only yield to the strongest axe.

  The idea, so clearly expressed, has all the tell-tale signs of total madness. Do not imagine I don’t see that, or even that I didn’t know it then. Emperors have built such monuments on grander scales and entered history with the grand expressions of their selfishness and arrogance.

  So allow me to say this about my door: I am, even now, startled at the far-flung originality of the design and the obsessive craftsmanship I finally applied to its construction. Further, to this day I can think of no simpler method by which I might have kept her.

  12.

  I approached the door with infinite cunning. I took time off from work, telling Carla I had been temporarily suspended for insolence, something she found easy enough to believe.

  On the first day I built a new doorframe, thicker and heavier than the existing one, and fixed it to the wall struts with fifty long brass screws. When I had finished I painted it with orange primer and rehung the old door.

  “What’s all this?” she asked.

  “Those bloody painters are crazy,” I said.

  “But that’s a new frame. Did the painters do that?”

  “There was a carpenter too,” I said. “I wish you’d tell the landlord to stop it.”

  “I bought some beer,” she said, “let’s get drunk.”

  Neither of us wanted to talk about the door, but while we drank I watched it with satisfaction. The orange was a beautiful colour. It cheered me up no end.

  13.

  The dwarf crept up on me and found me working on the plans for the door, sneaking up on his obscene little feet.

  “Ah-huh.”

  I tried to hide it, this most complicated idea which was to lock you in, which on that very afternoon I would begin making in a makeshift workshop I had set up under the house. This gorgeous door of iron-hard old timber with its four concealed locks, their keyholes and knobs buried deep in the door itself.

  “Ah,” said the dwarf, who had been a handsome fellow, resting his ugly little hand affectionately on my elbow. “Ah, this is some door.”

  “It’s for a friend,” I said, silently cursing my carelessness. I should have worked under the house.

  “More like an enemy,” he observed. “With a door like that you could lock someone up in fine style, eh?”

  I didn’t answer. The dwarf was no fool but neither was he as crazy as I was. My secret was protected by my madness.

  “Did it occur to you,” the dwarf said, “that there might be a problem getting someone to walk through a doorway guarded by a door like this? A good trap should be enticing, or at least neutral, if you get my meaning.

  “It is not for a jail,” I said, “or a trap, either.”

  “You really should see someone,” he said, sitting sadly on the low table.

  “What do you mean, ‘someone’?”

  “Someone,” he said, “who you could see. To talk to about your problems. A counsellor, a shrink, someone …” He looked at me and smiled, lighting a stinking Fasta cigarette. “It’s a beautiful door, just the same.”

  “Go and fuck yourself,” I said, folding the plans. My fishing rod was in the corner.

  “After the revolution,” the dwarf said calmly, “there will be no locks. Children will grow up not understanding what a lock is. To see a lock it will be necessary to go to a museum.”

  “Would you mind passing me my fishing rod. It’s behind you.”

  He obliged, making a small bow as he handed it over. “You should consider joining us,” he said, “then you would not have this problem you have with Carla. There are bigger problems you could address your anger to. Your situation now is that you are wasting energy being angry at the wrong things.”

  “Go and fuck yourself,” I smiled.

  He shook his head. “Ah, so this is the level of debate we have come to. Go and fuck yourself, go and fuck yourself.” He repeated my insult again and again, turning it over curiously in his mind.

  I left him with it and went down to talk to the bream on the pier. When I saw him leave I went down below the house and spent the rest of the day cutting the timber for the door. Later I made dovetail joints in the old method before reinforcing them with steel plates for good measure.

  14.

  The door lay beneath us, a monument to my duplicity and fear.

  In a room above, clad by books, stroked slowly by Haydn, I presented this angry argument to her while she watched my face with wide wet eyes. “Don’t imagine that you will forget all this. Don’t imagine it will all go away. For whatever comfort you find with your friends, whatever conscience you pacify, whatever guilt you assuage, you will always look back on this with regret and know that it was unnecessary to destroy it. You will curse the schoolgirl morality that sent you to a Chance Centre and in your dreams you will find your way back to me and lie by my side and come fishing with me on the pier and everyone you meet you will compare and find lacking in some minor aspect.”

  I knew exactly how to frighten her. But the fear could not change her mind.

  To my argument she replied angrily: “You understand nothing.”

  To which I replied: “You don’t yet understand what you will understand in the end.”

  After she had finished crying we fucked slowly and I thought of Mme Bonnard sitting on the edge of the bath, all aglow like a jewel.

  15.

  She denied me a last night. She cheated me of it. She lied about the date of her Chance and left a day before she had said. I awoke to find only a note, carefully printed in a handwriting that seemed too young for the words it formed. Shivering, naked, I read it.

  Dear Lumpy,

  You would have gone crazy. I kn
ow you. We couldn’t part like that. I’ve seen the hate in your eyes but what I will remember is love in them after a beautiful fuck.

  I’ve got to be with Mum and Dad. When I see beggars in the street I think it’s them. Can’t you imagine how that feels? They have turned me into a Hup well and proper.

  You don’t always give me credit for my ideas. You call me illogical, idealist, fool. I think you think they all mean the same thing. They don’t. I have no illusions (and I don’t just mean the business about being sick that you mentioned). Now when I walk down the street people smile at me easily. If I want help it comes easily. It is possible for me to do things like borrow money from strangers. I feel loved and protected. This is the privilege of my body which I must renounce. There is no choice. But it would be a mistake for you to imagine that I haven’t thought properly about what I am doing. I am terrified and cannot change my mind.

  There is no one I have known who I have ever loved a thousandth as much as you. You would make a perfect Hup. You do not judge, you are objective, compassionate. For a while I thought we could convert you, but c’est la vie. You are a tender lover and I am crying now, thinking how I will miss you. I am not brave enough to risk seeing you in whatever body the comrades can extract from the Fastas. I know your feelings on these things. It would be too much to risk. I couldn’t bear the rejection.

  I love you, I understand you,

  Carla

  I crumpled it up. I smoothed it out. I kept saying “Fuck”, repeating the word meaninglessly, stupidly, with anger one moment, pain the next. I dressed and ran out to the street. The bus was just pulling away. I ran through the early morning streets to the Chance Centre, hoping she hadn’t gone to another district to confuse me. The cold autumn air rasped my lungs, and my heart pounded wildly. I grinned to myself thinking it would be funny for me to die of a heart attack. Now I can’t think why it seemed funny.

  16.

  Even though it was early the Chance Centre was busy. The main concourse was crowded with people waiting for relatives, staring at the video display terminals for news of their friends’ emergence. The smell of trauma was in the air, reminiscent of stale orange peel and piss. Poor people in carpet slippers with their trousers too short sat hopefully in front of murals depicting Leonardo’s classic proportions. Fasta technicians in grubby white coats wheeled patients in and out of the concourse in a sequence as aimless and purposeless as the shuffling of a deck of cards. I could find Carla’s name on none of the terminals.

  I waited the morning. Nothing happened. The cards were shuffled. The coffee machine broke down. In the afternoon I went out and bought a six-pack of beer and a bottle of Milocaine capsules.

  17.

  In the dark, in the night, something woke me. My tongue furry, my eyes like gravel, my head still dulled from the dope and drink, half-conscious I half saw the woman sitting in the chair by the bed.

  A fat woman, weeping.

  I watched her like television. A blue glow from the neon lights in the street showed the coarse, folded surface of her face, her poor lank greying hair, deep creases in her arms and fingers like the folds in babies’ skin, and the great drapery of chin and neck was reminiscent of drought-resistant cattle from India.

  It was not a fair time, not a fair test. I am better than that. It was the wrong time. Undrugged, ungrogged, I would have done better. It is unreasonable that such a test should come in such a way. But in the deep grey selfish folds of my mean little brain I decided that I had not woken up, that I would not wake up. I groaned, feigning sleep and turned over.

  Carla stayed by my bed till morning, weeping softly while I lay with my eyes closed, sometimes sleeping, sometimes listening.

  In the full light of morning she was gone and had, with bitter reproach, left behind merely one thing: a pair of her large grey knickers, wet with the juices of her unacceptable desire. I placed them in the rubbish bin and went out to buy some more beer.

  18.

  I was sitting by the number five pier finishing off the last of the beer. I didn’t feel bad. I’d felt a damn sight worse. The sun was out and the light dancing on the water produced a light dizzy feeling in my beer-sodden head. Two bream lay in the bucket, enough for my dinner, and I was sitting there pondering the question of Carla’s flat: whether I should get out or whether I was meant to get out or whether I could afford to stay on. They were not difficult questions but I was managing to turn them into major events. Any moment I’d be off to snort a couple more caps of Milocaine and lie down in the sun.

  I was not handling this well.

  “Two fish, eh?”

  I looked up. It was the fucking dwarf. There was nothing to say to him.

  He sat down beside me, his grotesque little legs hanging over the side of the pier. His silence suggested a sympathy I did not wish to accept from him.

  “What do you want, ugly?”

  “It’s nice to hear that you’ve finally relaxed, mm? Good to see that you’re not pretending any more.” He smiled. He seemed not in the least malicious. “I have brought the gift.”

  “A silly custom. I’m surprised you follow it.” It was customary for people who took the Chance to give their friends pieces of clothing from their old bodies, clothing that they expected wouldn’t fit the new. It had established itself as a pressure-cooked folk custom, like brides throwing corsages and children putting first teeth under their pillows.

  The dwarf held out a small brown-paper parcel.

  I unwrapped the parcel while he watched. It contained a pair of small white lady’s knickers. They felt as cold and vibrant as echoes across vast canyons: quavering questions, cries, and thin misunderstandings.

  I shook the dwarf by his tiny hand.

  The fish jumped forlornly in the bucket.

  19.

  So long ago. So much past. Furies, rages, beer and sleeping pills. They say that the dwarf was horribly tortured during the revolution, that his hands were literally sawn from his arms by the Fastas. The hunchback lady now adorns the 50 IG postage stamps, in celebration of her now famous role at the crucial battle of Haytown.

  And Carla, I don’t know. They say there was a fat lady who was one of the fiercest fighters, who attacked and killed without mercy, who slaughtered with a rage that was exceptional even in such a bloody time.

  But I, I’m a crazy old man, alone with his books and his beer and his dog. I have been a clerk and a pedlar and a seller of cars. I have been ignorant, and a scholar of note. Pockmarked and ugly I have wandered the streets and slept in the parks. I have been bankrupt and handsome and a splendid conman. I have been a river of poisonous silver mercury, without form or substance, yet I carry with me this one pain, this one yearning, that I love you, my lady, with all my heart. And on evenings when the water is calm and the birds dive amongst the whitebait, my eyes swell with tears as I think of you sitting on a chair beside me, weeping in a darkened room.

  Fragrance of Roses

  I have looked for the village in an atlas and cannot find it. It is a poor town, made from the same grey granite as the mountain it clings to. The cobbled streets are of the same grey stone, often wet with rain, occasionally covered with a heavy blanket of snow.

  There are twenty-five houses in the village and the old man lived at the very last one on the high side, above the school. The house was as bleak and unremarkable as any other house in the village. But behind it was the most intricately wrought glasshouse, as delicate and weblike as the glasshouse in Kew Gardens in London.

  In this house the old man grew roses. It is probable that the glasshouse was warmer than his own mean bedroom and his bleak kitchen. If the ashes in his stove were often white and cold, the furnace for the glasshouse never died through the winter. And in the very worst months he would move his mattress into the glasshouse and spend his nights there.

  He spoke Spanish very badly and often irritated the storekeeper with his requests. The people in the village had never had a foreigner in their midst before and
after twenty-five years he was seen as more of a pest than a novelty.

  His mail was often needlessly delayed by the post office clerk, an idle and malicious game which gave less pleasure than teasing the old peasant woman who waited for letters from her son. The clerk tormented the old man quietly and determinedly, placing his parcels in full view on the shelf and insisting they were not for him.

  The old man accepted this quietly, and called at the post office persistently, day after day, waiting patiently at the counter, rubbing his small dry hands together and breathing into them to make them warm. He never complained. He never explained that the books were about the production of hybrid roses, and it would have made no difference if he had.

  When his books were finally made available he walked painfully back to his house, a small grey figure who looked fragile and pitiable in this village where everything seemed so cold and massive and unsympathetic.

  Earlier he had donated a large clock for the small village school. The gift had been received with embarrassment. A year later the clock stopped. The opinion in the village was that the clock had been of inferior quality.

  So its hands were still showing eighteen minutes past seven when two more foreigners arrived in the village fifteen years afterwards.

  They asked questions at the post office and the clerk gladly told them everything he knew about the old man with the glasshouse. He even gave them two parcels he had been keeping for over a month.

  That night the old man left the village with the other two foreigners, who were members of the Israeli security service.

  Later the town was to learn that the small, quiet foreigner had been none other than the former commandant of Auschwitz.