Collected Stories (40 page)

But she stood and stretched and said, “Come on, now I’ve drunk your beer, I’ll buy you a meal.”

We walked away and left the body for whoever wanted it. I never saw the old man again.

The next day he was gone.

I cannot explain what it was like to sit in a restaurant with a woman. I felt embarrassed, awkward, and so pleased that I couldn’t put one foot straight in front of the other.

I fancy I was graciously old-fashioned.

I pulled out her chair for her, I remember, and saw the look she shot me, both pleased and alarmed. It was a shocked, fast flick of the eyes. Possibly she sensed the powerful fantasies that lonely men create, steel columns of passion appended with leather straps and tiny mirrors.

It was nearly a year since I’d talked to a woman, and that one stole my money and even managed to lift two blankets from my sleeping body. Twelve dull stupid drugged and drunken months had passed, dissolving from the dregs of one day into the sink of the next.

The restaurant was one of those Fasta Cafeterias that had sprung up, noisy, messy, with harsh lighting and long rows of bright white tables that were never ever filled. The service was bad and in the end we went to the kitchen where we helped ourselves from the long trays of food, Fastalogian salads with their dried intoxicating mushrooms, and that strange milky pap they are so fond of. She piled her plate high with everything and I envied the calm that allowed her such an appetite. On any other night I would have done the same, guzzling and gorging myself on my free meal.

Finally, tripping over each other, we returned to our table. She bought two more beers and I thanked her for that silently.

Here I was. With a woman. Like real people.

I smiled broadly at the thought. She caught me and was, I think, pleased to have something to hang on to. So we got hold of that smile and wrung it for all it was worth.

Being desperate, impatient, I told her the truth about the smile. The directness was pleasing to her. I watched how she leant into my words without fear or reservation, displaying none of the shiftiness that danced through most social intercourse in those days. But I was as calculating and cunning as only the very lonely learn how to be. Estimating her interest, I selected the things which would be most
pleasing for her. I steered the course of what I told, telling her things about me which fascinated her most. She was pleased by my confessions. I gave her many. She was strong and young and confident. She couldn’t see my deviousness and, no matter what I told her of loneliness, she couldn’t taste the stale self-hating afternoons or suspect the callousness they engendered.

And I bathed in her beauty, delighting in the confidence it brought her, the certainty of small mannerisms, the chop of that beautiful rough-fingered hand when making a point. But also, this: the tentative question marks she hooked on to the ends of her most definite assertions. So I was impressed by her strength and charmed by her vulnerability all at once.

One could not have asked for more.

And this also I confessed to her, for it pleased her to be talked about and it gave me an intoxicating pleasure to be on such intimate terms.

And I confessed why I had confessed.

My conversation was mirrors within mirrors, onion skin behind onion skin. I revealed motives behind motives. I was amazing. I felt myself to be both saint and pirate, as beautiful and gnarled as an ancient olive. I talked with intensity. I devoured her, not like some poor beggar (which I was) but like a prince, a stylish master of the most elegant dissertations.

She ate ravenously, but in no way neglected to listen. She talked impulsively with her mouth full. With mushrooms dropping from her mouth, she made a point. It made her beautiful, not ugly.

I have always enjoyed women who, whilst being conventionally feminine enough in their appearance, have exhibited certain behavioural traits more commonly associated with men. A bare-breasted woman working on a tractor is the fastest, crudest approximation I can provide. An image, incidentally, guaranteed to give me an aching erection, which it has, on many lonely nights.

But to come back to my new friend, who rolled a cigarette with hands which might have been the hands of an apprentice bricklayer, hands which were connected to breasts which were connected to other parts doubtless female in gender, who had such grace and beauty in her form and manner and yet had had her hair shorn in such a manner as to deny her beauty.

She was tall, my height. Across the table I noted that her hands
were as large as mine. They matched. The excitement was exquisite. I anticipated nothing, vibrating in the crystal of the moment.

We talked, finally, as everyone must, about the Lottery, for the Lottery was life in those days and all of us, most of us, were saving for another Chance.

“I’m taking a Chance next week,” she said.

“Good luck,” I said. It was automatic. That’s how life had got.

“You look like you haven’t.”

“Thank you,” I said. It was a compliment, like saying that my shirt suited me. “But I’ve had four.”

“You move nicely,” she smiled. “I was watching you in the kitchen. You’re not awkward at all.”

“You move nicely too,” I grinned. “I was watching you too. You’re crazy to take a Chance, what do you want?”

“A people’s body.” She said it fast, briskly, and stared at me challengingly.

“A what?”

“A people’s body.” She picked up a knife, examined it and put it down.

It dawned on me. “Oh, you’re a Hup.”

Thinking back, I’m surprised I knew anything about Hups. They were one of a hundred or more revolutionary crackpots. I didn’t give a damn about politics and I thought every little group was more insane than the next.

And here, goddamn it, I was having dinner with a Hup, a rich crazy who thought the way to fight the revolution was to have a body as grotesque and ill-formed as my friends at the Parks and Gardens.

“My parents took the Chance last week.”

“How did it go?”

“I didn’t see them. They’ve gone to …” she hesitated “…  to another place where they’re needed.” She had become quiet now, and serious, explaining that her parents had upper-class bodies like hers, that their ideas were not at home with their physiognomy (a word I had to ask her to explain), that they would form the revolutionary vanguard to lead the misshapen Lumpen Proletariat (another term I’d never heard before) to overthrow the Fastas and their puppets.

I had a desperate desire to change the subject, to plug my ears, to shut my eyes. I wouldn’t have been any different if I’d discovered she was a mystic or a follower of Hiwi Kaj.

“Anyway,” I said, “you’ve got a beautiful body.”

“Why did you say that?”

I could have said that I’d spent enough of my life with her beloved Lumpen Proletariat to hold them in no great esteem, that the very reason I was enjoying her company so much was because she was so unlike them. But I didn’t want to pursue it. I shrugged, grinned stupidly, and filled her glass with beer.

Her eyes flashed at my shrug. I don’t know why people say “flashed”, but I swear there was red in her eyes. She looked hurt, stung, and ready to attack.

She withdrew from me, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms. “What do you think is beautiful?”

Before I could answer she was leaning back into the table, but this time her voice was louder.

“What is more beautiful, a parrot or a crow?”

“A parrot, if you mean a rosella. But I don’t know much about parrots.”

“What’s wrong with a crow?”

“A crow is black and awkward-looking. It’s heavy. Its cry is unattractive.”

“What makes its cry unattractive?”

I was sick of the game, and exhausted with such sudden mental exercise.

“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.

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.