Stealing Picasso (7 page)

Neither Marcel nor Turton spoke of it then. But now, hungry, rent due, the minions of Eastern Gas calling daily, Marcel remembers those five bills. Now he knows what that money means. He goes back to Handgun and sits at the bar. Suddenly it's the only money in the world.

He begins selling his hero to men in bars. To men who stroll down Fitzroy Street. Men who skip sideways out of the streetlight and drop, bent-backed and furtive, eyes darting, cruising to assuage an appetite they so despise that they attack it with the ferocity of rape and, when it's done, toss money onto the dirt as if the other party in this transaction bears all the weight of its indignity. Marcel closes his eyes and races his eyeballs around beneath his eyelids, humming a tune.

It pays well, but it is an unforgivable treachery, an impossible insult to Michael, and it sends Marcel spiralling into fits of depression every time he commits it. One night in Catani Gardens he sells himself to a Greek restaurateur who gives off airs of cologne and cuisine and whose lips have a latticework
of spittle joining them as he snarls snatches of
Thriller
lyrics in his climax. Listening to those verses it is easier for Marcel to believe Michael innocent of the crimes of which he is accused than to believe himself innocent of them.

Afterwards, he goes home and drinks a bottle of Stolichnaya and eats a handful of Panadol. He wakes the next day to the sound of the evening peak hour, pain flaring like aurora in his head. He showers three times before the smell of that restaurateur is off him. Cries in the shower each time, then prays to a poster of Michael for forgiveness.

In the end Turton insists on finishing Marcel's portrait, though there is no client for it now. He has him sit for hours, imploring him to remain perfectly still and to hold the broad, enigmatic smile they have chosen, even when Marcel complains his back is killing him and his cheek muscles are screaming with the effort. He promises Marcel a time will come when it's wanted. It will hang in a children's ward, he says. Or the foyer of Sony. Your portrait, in the palatial foyer of Sony Corporation headquarters.

Turton hugs him as he leaves the studio and whispers, ‘Acquittal.' He nods wisely at him as if it's a done deal. Sometimes on the way home after these torturous sessions Marcel is surprised to find a dance step creeping back into his walk. And though the portrait is not one of his better efforts, Turton looks at it for a long time after Marcel is gone, smiling.

On the suburban fringe, a place of woodyards and used-car lots and scrap-metal recyclers, in a vast metal shed chirping under the hammer of a wind that carries the fecal stench of dairy farms, Marcel Leech is watching Turton Pym paint a fanged
skunk onto the Harley Davidson of a Stinking Pariah named Larry Skunk Monk. Turton is the artist of choice of the Stinking Pariahs MC and has leased this shed in outer Pakenham in order to go about his business quietly, undiscovered by the art world.

Marcel often accompanies Turton into the wilds to this shed and his airbrush operation. Feeling comfortable in the cathedral darkness and the company of his friend, he dresses again as Michael Jackson and talks gently in his falsetto while he watches Turton work. He sits in an armchair Turton has reclaimed from a dumpster, his schoolgirl voice barely audible over the chug of the compressor.

‘The day I left school, I was fourteen, expelled. Father O'Brien gave me a ride down to the local Safeways. Said he'd talk to a man he knew. I waited in the car, watching the front of Safeways, people in and out like flies, all of them dull-faced – shopping, you know. Toothpaste, cantaloupes, Tim-damn-Tams. I started to feel real sick. Father O'Brien came outside with the man and introduced me and we shook hands and the man said because of Father O'Brien I had a job and if I worked hard and was reliable then la-de-da one day I'd be … I don't even know what. I was crying, whole place swimming in front of me, the Safeways man too. Next day when I started I couldn't even recognise which one he was to report to.'

Marcel sips his coffee. Turton is kneeling before the Harley blowing softly to dry the angry skunk he is painting.

‘They had me hauling trolleys of groceries from out back in the storage area into the store itself. “Pick up any cabbage leaf you drop.” “Customers have right of way.” That first day I started dreaming that Michael was going to come into my Safeways wearing his black Fedora, a bodyguard either side of him, three abreast down the aisle, and hold out his hand to me, and say, “Come with me, Marcel.” It was a vision. I kept
it up for about a year. Him walking in there, all the shoppers with their mouths open. In the last months I really had to screw up my face and concentrate to get it to play. Till one day there I was, rice and pasta aisle, my face screwed up, trying to get Michael to appear, and this old biddy tapped me on the arm with a bag of linguini and asked me if I was all right. Told me to sit on the floor so I didn't fall. That was the last time I ever had a vision of Michael coming for me.'

Marcel, looking at Turton kneeling there, says, ‘You must think I'm pretty weird.'

Turton puckers his lips in judgement. ‘No. Everyone hates Safeways.'

Two motorbikes pull up outside and their engines rev high before dying. Wal Wolverine Symonds and Larry Skunk Monk enjoy their footsteps echoing as they walk through the dark of the warehouse. Listening to the approaching steps, Marcel wraps his arms about himself.

‘It's only the Stinking Pariahs,' Turton tells him. Marcel's eyes widen and his throat clicks.

‘I'm painting this skunk for one of them.' Turton tries to calm him.

They step into the light, denim and leather and big outlaw hair and dark shades. Seeing Marcel, Larry Skunk says, ‘Shit. Michael Jackson … beat up.' Marcel smiles and says, ‘Hello,' in Michael's falsetto.

‘Hell happened to you, Michael Jackson?' Wal asks.

‘Nothing.'

‘No, tell,' Larry Skunk says.

Marcel's eyes are swollen black from being beaten senseless by four friends of a client who had paid $500 for a night with him. Having satisfied his own libido inside ten minutes, the client figured that, as he'd handed over five big ones for the
night, Marcel was still his property and he could do anything he wanted with him until morning, including making a tidy profit by subletting him for $2000 to four like-minded acquaintances he called in on his phone.

Marcel, when he was told of the arrangement, for legitimate health and business reasons, refused to sublet himself. When the quartet of wannabe sub-lessees of Michael Jackson's surrogate arse had Marcel's stance explained to them by the original lessee, they were, at first, only stamp-foot angry and edgily horny. But all four, having given up other Saturday night recreations for this taste of cloned star buttocks, soon went into a huddle and talked up a moral outrage between themselves. ‘Shit. This guy's interfered with kids.' Then they beat Marcel unconscious.

When Marcel finishes telling this story to Larry Skunk, the man raises his eyes to the heavens and looks at Wal Wolverine Symonds and shakes his head, and Wal Wolverine Symonds shakes his head back, acknowledging what a crazy, disappointing world we are forced to live in.

‘Legitimate businessperson like yourself. I'm Larry Skunk Monk, presidential guard of the Stinking Pariahs.' He holds out his hand. ‘You need protection. What's your name?'

‘Marcel.'

‘Arse Sell? You're kidding. Arse Sell?'

‘Marcel. With an M. Marcel.'

‘Right. Marcel. Only, I knew a guy called Bernie who was an arsonist.'

Larry Skunk comes from Mount Beauty, a hydro town in the mountains. Left school early and started work for the hydro
company alongside the other men in his family. But one day he was late for work and when his foreman called him a lazy little shit in the smoko hut in front of a gang of linesmen, Larry was astonished to see that foreman turn into a grizzly bear before his very eyes. Especially astonished since that foreman had been, up until then, his beloved Uncle Bruce. No matter – a living, breathing, drooling grizzly bear needs to be brought under control, and Larry Skunk brought him under control by whipping him with a length of steel rope. Then he scarpered as the prostrate grizzly began to show signs of turning back into Uncle Bruce, trounced and bloodied.

That event was Larry Skunk's first realisation that he had a psychosis that blurred the lines between bears and beloved uncles. He came down to Melbourne, where a man could comfortably live with such an affliction, and fell in with the Stinking Pariahs by beating up a Bandido. After Larry Skunk had performed the Twelve Labours of Hercules: stealing the Golden Harley of the Hell's Angel's master at arms, homiciding Alphonse of the ten-thou heroin debt, poisoning a kennel of Drug Squad rottweilers, conflagrating the Sydney Road Souvlaki Palace, etc., the Stinking Pariahs inducted him into their exalted ranks with a coat-of-arms tattoo, a bottle of Jim Beam and the two-hour rental of a seen-better-days street-corner slut. Welcome to the gang, Larry Skunk.

A decade of dope, LSD and speed has not helped Larry Skunk overcome his propensity for psychotic delusions. Fantastical comic-book hallucinations pop up before him like cardboard cut-outs in a shooting gallery. He is about as crazy a man as can operate within the confines of an outlaw motorcycle gang without being thrown out for being crazy. Beasts and goddesses appear before him. Tutankhamen in a white-goods store, Wonder Woman in a pub – it all adds colour to his day.
The fact that he sometimes makes threats or whispers sweet nothings to thin air doesn't bother his colleagues. If you're having a council of war with the Gypsy Jokers in the Rosstown Arms and are at a fragile moment in territorial negotiations, when your president has just said to theirs, ‘If you want Bays-water, you give up Coburg,' and into the dangerous silence that follows, one of your stone-hard presidential guard says in awe, ‘Throw that magic lasso, girl,' to a super heroine nobody else can see, it gives your gang a valuable whiff of lunacy. Larry Skunk brings that to the Stinking Pariahs.

He likes fighting and fights often. After the years of drugs he is as happily deluded as any holy warrior. Knows he is on the side of the angels, and doesn't need any righteous justification for a fight, because he can hallucinate his own righteous justification in a trice. It might start as an argument over a parking infringement. But anybody who angers Larry Skunk quickly transforms, before his very eyes, into a slavering Hun, a Red Indian warrior, a paedophile, a terrorist, a triceratops … Any one of a cast of monsters is retrievable from his frontal lobe at a moment's notice.

These happy metamorphoses mean Larry Skunk never has to feel guilty about chopping down a lollipop man or trouncing a milk-bar owner. He has always defeated a fiend of the most contemptible kind. And when that fiend lies, beaten and groaning, on the ground, Larry Skunk walks away before the delusion clears and before him, once again, is a parking officer or a clumsy motorist. Larry Skunk is happy in his violence. He saves himself and his friends from the clutches of fiends several times each week, and walks proudly through his days.