Collected Stories (20 page)

What he had in mind was a tableau. The tableau would consist of the whole house. In one room of this house there’d be a real old lady sitting at a table about to write a letter. That would be the centre of the work. The other rooms would be needed too, if only to establish the authenticity of the central room.

It was ambitious. It was dangerous. It involved skill and organization and a lot of luck. If one thing fucked up it wouldn’t work. If she had relatives who wanted to live in the house he wouldn’t be able to buy it. If the neighbours had found the body before he got there the whole thing would be ruined. If she’d started to decay, the embalmer (another problem) mightn’t be able to do a good job. He’d have to sneak her out of the house and crate her and store her for however long might be necessary.

But, with all these little difficulties taken care of, Eddie would have the most incredible auction sale of all time. Selected invitations to twelve of his richest customers. They would bid against each other to take possession of this most outrageous of all Eddie’s little curios.

But now as he drove out to Williamstown with the bucket of shit beside him on the seat he began to get a little nervous. His nervousness was nothing to do with the embalmer or the cops or difficulties with relatives. No, what was beginning, only now, to make him just a little bit nervous was the thought of the dead body.

He’d never seen a dead body.

He wished Daphne was with him. Daphne would have been freaked by it all. Her fear would have made him strong and confident. The thought of the body wouldn’t have worried him then. But now, by himself …

He tucked the Porsche behind a petrol tanker, deciding not to pass it. There was no hurry. Eddie cruised into Williamstown at 25 m.p.h.

The house was perfect, right down to the cypress pines that lined the rickety wooden fence at the front. From this exquisite beginning it never faltered. The drive was made from bricks which had sunken so that the surface resembled the surface of the sea in a slight swell. Beside the drive were lines of dead irises and beyond the iris beds were seas of tall brown grass amongst which Eddie could see neglected garden tools and the handle of an old-fashioned lawn mower.

It was perfect. It was also a little terrifying. He wished, once more, that Daphne had been there. It would have been easy. He wouldn’t have stayed sitting in his car as he was now. He could see the house through the wire gate. There was a dead woman sitting inside that house. Blistering weatherboard. Brown holland blinds drawn. Walls marked with the water from a leaking spout. It was nothing like the house in
Psycho.
It was also exactly like the house in
Psycho.

If it hadn’t been for the bucket of shit which was now slowly boiling in the sun it is possible that Eddie would never have left the car. But finally the foul smell became worse than his fear and he lifted the plastic garbage can from the car and carried it obediently up the drive.

It was then, halfway up the drive, that he heard the noise. An incredible screaming, high-pitched and terrible. Its effect on Eddie was shattering. His tall, thin frame jerked. He dropped the bin. And stood absolutely still.

There was a horrible prickling feeling down the back of his neck. He would have turned, right then, and run. But he was too frightened to run. He stood on that brick drive riveted to the spot while the squealing continued.

And then, very slowly, it dawned on him.

It was the fucking pig.

Hot and embarrassed he picked up the bin and continued up the drive. At the back of the house he found the pig writhing in the dust of its yard like a possessed thing. Not a smooth-shaven pig like he’d seen in the butcher shops, but a black hairy hog with a long evil snout and wild red eyes. He stood at the rails of the pig’s yard and watched it writhe like a man watching his own nightmares.

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.

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.

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.

“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. Here, 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.”