Collected Stories

Withdrawal

1.

The front room of Eddie Rayner’s shop is like many other shops in High Street. It’s busy on Saturdays and quiet for the rest of the week. The shops around him sell the same things he sells: stripped pine furniture, bentwood chairs, old advertising signs, blue and white china, and odds and ends like butter churns and stained-glass windows. The prices are high and the work isn’t too hard. On weekdays the second-hand dealers stand in the street, chatting about prices and the pieces they’ve picked up at the auctions.

Eddie is no longer welcome to these little conferences. It’s because of the back room. There are many stories about Eddie’s back room. They are all guesses, because Eddie has never invited any of the other dealers to inspect it. However, a recent exhibition in the front room has given rise to a new spate of stories more shocking than anything before. Sixteen photographs of the bodies of murder victims lying on lino, on carpet, on cobblestone, surrounded by such everyday things as children’s toys, policemen’s shoes, and old cigarette packets. There is an ordinariness about the photographs which makes them all the more shocking. This new revelation of Eddie’s has brought his neighbours back into his shop. They haven’t liked what they’ve seen.

Even before this recent event he has been something of a scandal amongst them. They gossip about his women, they guess about his men friends, they shake their heads about the state of his Porsche which is now so battered and rusted that it is almost unrecognizable. And they wonder about the clients, some of them very well known and very wealthy, who come to visit Eddie’s back room and emerge carrying unidentified articles hidden in beer cartons or wrapped in newspaper.

Second-hand dealers are naturally jealous and bitchy about each other but Eddie Rayner somehow acted as a common bond to those in High Street. They said he paid too much at the auctions, that his prices were too high or too low, that his taste was dated, that he had no taste, that he knew nothing about business, that he received stolen goods, that he was a homosexual, that he was involved in witchcraft. All symbols by which they tried, somehow, to make the contents of the back room more concrete.

When Eddie hung the exhibition of murder victims they held a meeting and decided to send a deputation to ask him to remove the photographs at once. Eddie received the deputation with his cool, stoned, beautiful smile and left the photographs exactly where they were.

Incensed, they wrote him a very formal letter wherein they repeated their request in more forceful language. Eddie had the letter framed and hung it in the window.

It was, as Eddie said every day, a very interesting summer.

It was a terrible summer. Fires ringed the city itself, burning fiercely around the outer suburbs. At night the horizon glowed bright red as if the city were being fried on some incredible hot plate. The north wind pushed the fire into suburban streets where the sounds of its flames were picked up by excited men from radio stations and the same north wind brought ashes and still-burning leaves to float down High Street past Eddie’s shop, down Caroline Street, past his flat.

It was Eddie’s summer. Not the summer of white beaches and bronzed bodies, but the summer of burnt houses and blackened bodies, a summer you could believe was the beginning of the end of the world. At night Eddie sat on the balcony with Daphne smoking grass, watching the red glow in the sky and feeling an intensity of emotion that he had rarely experienced when confronted with nature.

2.

Eddie is waiting in Casualty at the Alfred Hospital. He is waiting for an intern called Dean Da Silva. He moves awkwardly from one foot to the other, tall and thin and lonely as a lighthouse.

He is unsure of whether he should have come. It is possibly dangerous, it is certainly indiscreet. Now, with the inquisitive rabbit eyes of the admissions clerk asking him silent questions, he feels that it has certainly been a bad move.

He sits, once more, on the vinyl bench, next to the weeping woman who continues to drop fat tears onto an old copy of Time. He can see the rabbit-eyed clerk saying something to a nurse about him. The nurse has a big arse and a small nose. She wrinkles her nose and Eddie sends her his most sinister sexual look. He is a master of this particular look and the nurse averts her eyes and whispers some cowardly message to the clerk, who waits a few seconds before looking up again.

Eddie Rayner has a face like Captain Hook in the Walt Disney version of Peter Pan & Wendy. His lower lip protrudes slightly, not enough to make him look stupid, but just enough to make him look vaguely debauched. He decorates this remarkable face with the marks of his caste: wire-flamed spectacles, thin drooping moustache that runs in parallel lines down his long chin, and shoulder-length hair of an undecided colour.

His body, however, is his real face. Legs so long and thin and tightly skinned in slinky velvet that he takes on something of the nature of a spider. It is an effect he is not unaware of. Now he stands and moves, once more, from leg to leg, dancing to some silent sensual music while he waits uncertainly for Dean Da Silva, who he has never met before. Dean Da Silva has a severed hand to sell him, or, more correctly, has hinted to a mutual friend that a severed hand might become available.

Dean Da Silva is somewhere in the unmapped area that lies behind the wall behind the counter where the admissions clerk is trying to locate a teddy-bear biscuit. Eddie hears him ask the nurse if she has seen a teddy-bear biscuit.

“Mr Rayner.”

Eddie jumps. He sees a plump, smooth, neatly suited, white-coated, shiny-shoed Dr Dean Da Silva standing in front of him. Dr Dean Da Silva has a smooth, bland, olive-skinned face. He asks Eddie, “What’s the trouble?”

“I’m Eddie Rayner.”

“That I know.”

“Yeah, well I believe my name has been mentioned …”

Eddie always finds these first contacts awkward. He looks at the clerk, who is peering at him over the top of a half-eaten teddy bear. He leads the way to a corner and Da Silva follows, frowning impatiently. Eddie hesitates. Then, with a shrug, he limply sheds his clothing: “It’s about the hand … a hand … you’re selling.”

“I see.” Da Silva’s face registers nothing. In it Eddie reads greed, fear, caution, superciliousness. He takes all his own anxieties and plants them in the empty bed of Da Silva’s face.

“That’s true, I take it, that you are?”

“More or less.”

Eddie smiles. He tries to plant a smile on Da Silva’s face. He encourages it with the serenity of his own smile but Da Silva only nods and waits. So he asks, “It’s OK for you to talk here, about this?”

“It is a little premature. What do you want it for, this… item?”

“I have a … you know … client.”

“A client?” Da Silva picks up the word and examines it critically with stainless-steel tweezers.

“Yes, a client.”

Dean Da Silva is doing his first year as an intern. Already he has found that fine balancing point between reserve and disdain. “It is not a very ethical request.”

“It is not a very ethical offer.” Eddie understands this language. The talk of ethics is really all about money. The less ethical it is the more expensive it will be.

“The offer has not been made. In any case,” Da Silva looks at his watch, a complicated piece of machinery which is probably a graduation present, “in any case, I believe I can contact you through our mutual friend.”

“The thing is a delivery date.”

“I’ll contact you when it becomes available. If,” he consults his graduation present again, “if it does become available.”

Eddie leaves the hospital wishing he hadn’t come. He has fallen victim, once more, to his own fierce impatience. Da Silva would have come to him sooner or later. There was no one else he could have gone to. Then Eddie could have controlled the deal and bought, if not cheaply, at a reasonable price. Now it was all going to be a hassle.

He guns the Porsche down Punt Road towards Caroline Street and then, on second thought, does a U-turn and heads back towards High Street so he can drive past the shop. As he comes up High Street he can see them: Jim Kenny and Alex Christopolous and someone he doesn’t know. They’re peering into his shop reading the letter that they themselves have signed. As he cruises past the shop he toots the horn, hoping they’ll jump. Instead they peer mildly in his direction and he watches them in the rear-vision mirror as they retreat slowly to Jim Kenny’s shop across the road.

He drops back into second and does a screaming wheelie that brings him to the front of Kenny’s shop, then another wheelie that brings him to his own front door. Now he has no idea what he should do next.

He could go back to the flat and see if Daphne is there. But if she isn’t there it’ll be worse. Better imagine she is there and go and check out the stocks in the back room.

He opens the door to the back room. There is nothing really to check out. He knows the extent of his wealth but enjoys, once more, looking at it with the assumed eyes of a stranger, saying to himself: you have never been here before, you wander down a street and browse in a shop, by mistake you open this door and find yourself in this room, this room that the world has always denied you. And there: the gold filling from Belsen. The phial of blood said to have once pulsed through Marilyn Monroe’s veins. The large file of genuine obscene letters and suicide notes obtained through his contact in the police department. Likewise the police photographs, recording details of crimes large and small, dead bodies and empty ashtrays set together in silver bromide. Many, many other items. A stained shirt with a foul smell which was certainly worn by Guevara in Bolivia, sold by a traitor to a policeman to a tourist to a woman collecting examples of folk weaving, and finally to Eddie. Less seriously there are a variety of trusses in glass cases with metal plaques attributing their ownership to important historical figures. These last are amusing fakes and are not expensive.

It is cool and dark here in the back room with its black walls and careful spotlights. Sharing the imaginary stranger’s delight Eddie wishes, once more, that the back room was not a back room. The exhibition of murder victims in the front room is a flirtation with his fantasy of declaring the back room open for general viewing. It is a calculated experiment.

The pine furniture and bentwood chairs bore him to death. But the things in this back room thrill him beyond measure, some strange mixture of fear and disgust and something else sends his nerve ends tingling. He is not an analytical man and has never wondered deeply about his love for these items. When challenged he has defended himself as a liberator, a man who has opened a door and let fresh air into a room musty with guilt. It is not a brilliant defence.

It was here, in this room where he is most sure of himself, that he first met Daphne. At that time she was the mistress of a cabinet minister who had a public reputation for Protestant austerity. The cabinet minister was an old customer of Eddie’s, a collector of strange photographs. Doubtless he could have obtained the same photographs through the police department but it would have been a risky business and he valued Eddie’s reputation for discretion. His particular interest was sadistic rape and these photographs, for some reason even Eddie wasn’t sure of, were the most difficult to obtain.

And it was here that Daphne saw Eddie, standing in his kingdom like the devil himself, talking in measured professional tones to the minister who, in his excitement and embarrassment, was stammering like a schoolboy.

On that day Eddie, with great subtlety and spiderlike certainty, humiliated the minister simply by asking him very specific questions about the photographs he wished to see. He was very, very polite, but his persona had changed, and he talked to the minister with the voice of the world outside. Normally he would have let him leaf through the files, but this was not to be a normal occasion. It was to be something of a duel. It was to be one of those strange occasions when neither the attacker nor the victim could really believe what was happening and thus smiled at each other throughout, each attempting to persuade the other of the supreme ordinariness of the occasion.

But the minister, like a man whose throat has been slashed by a very sharp razor, didn’t discover the damage till he had left the premises, and then only because it was reflected so painfully in the eyes of his mistress.

Daphne was not a beautiful girl, although she had a striking body with very long legs and big tits which she displayed to their most incredible advantage. Her face, however, had a flabbiness, a laxness about it that was not attractive. She had a large, loose mouth and a birdlike nose which lay beneath layers of make-up she applied so skilfully. There was, however, something about her, a combination of recklessness, sensuality, and strength. She had a novelist’s fascination for people, and an intuitive understanding of them. Her life was devoted to the study of people. She gossiped about them, fought with them, and fucked them and had, in a very few years, collected an incredible array of lovers including a professional gangster, an English footballer, a visiting Shakespearian actor, and a well-known second-hand car dealer.

And during this summer she moved in with Eddie and Eddie was frightened, flattered, and almost in love with her. He felt like a man who’s bought a racing car he’s too frightened to drive fast. A sense of inadequacy overwhelmed him every time he thought about Daphne because Daphne had certain very set ideas about who Eddie was and Eddie wasn’t entirely sure that he could live up to them.

Daphne put great store by her honesty. They had played on that first incredible night, a long, exciting game of emotional strip-tease where they dared each other to be honest about their feelings. It had ended with Eddie declaring his total infatuation with Daphne and Daphne hinting that the feeling might be mutual. Somewhere along the line Eddie felt that he had lost the game, but he continued to play it and was disconcerted to discover that his most honest admissions were not received well. Honest admissions of previous dishonesty did not go down well with Daphne, whose reservations about him began when she sensed weaknesses and secrets she had not suspected. She regarded him curiously, unsure of his authenticity.

Eddie was wondering whether he might now go and see if Daphne was home when he heard the front door of the shop open. He came out to find the smack freaks tilting back dangerously on his bentwood chairs.

Jo-Jo, before the beauties of heroin had led him along more private paths, had once been a friend. But Pete had never been. Pete had mad eyes and a psychotic, derisive smile that struck a chill in Eddie’s heart. He had once seen Pete at work with a broken beer bottle. In the end nothing had happened. Pete had laughed in his victim’s pale face and smashed the bottle at his feet. But it had been a nasty scene and Eddie didn’t like to remember it. Pete had since done time for possession. He looked like someone who had done time, his hair still cut short by Pentridge barbers.

Eddie began to talk about the fires. Pete and Jo-Jo knew nothing about the fires and weren’t interested in them. Jo-Jo told him how they had been driven from their haven in Williamstown by other natural forces. They couldn’t stand it any more — the dead woman sitting in the room with the pen in her hand, forever about to write something which they would never know about. Jo-Jo hated the blank paper almost as much as he hated the corpse of their landlady, an old woman of seventy or more who refused to decompose in spite of the heat, or because of it. Eddie thought he could see the fear showing through the unshaven whiskers of Jo-Jo’s baby face, but it was probably only malnutrition.

While the landlady sat at the table refusing to decompose, the house she had died in proved to be made of weaker stuff. Huge hunks of plaster, two inches thick and exceptionally dangerous, had begun to fall with frightening regularity. One such fall had ripped down a heavy bookshelf in the living room, another had knocked the bathroom cabinet from its wall and filled the bath with rubble. The dunny was blocked and they couldn’t shit in it.

Pete and Jo-Jo had lived in a small flat adjoining the main house. What had once been a quiet suburban refuge had now come to disturb them so much that they preferred to enter the inner city where they were both known to the cops.

When he heard about the body something inside Eddie went very tight and began to reverberate very fast. A thought so outrageous that it terrified him to consider it. An impossible thought, but the more he was frightened of it the more he knew he had to do it. Not for the money, although the money would be incredible. But … because …

But for now he was relieved that Jo-Jo had brought a subject for conversation along with him. Jo-Jo’s silences were somehow like threats. Now while he talked to them about the old lady he managed not to feel so fucking straight. Smack freaks always made him nervous. They were so private, so exclusive, living in their own dangerous world which he would never have the courage or foolishness to enter.

Even now he felt their curious ambivalence towards him, their envy of his success, and also their contempt for it. Pete didn’t say much. He went off to the windowless dunny where he shot up and splattered blood over the door. He came back rubbing his arm and smiling secretively to Jo-Jo.

Eddie said, “She hasn’t rotted or anything?” He’d never seen a dead body. He wondered about it.

No, she hadn’t even … started … to decompose. She was like (grimace) perfect. Nothing was happening. That’s what was freaking them.

Eddie wanted to be sure they hadn’t told anyone.

Pete curled his lips. Who in the fuck’re we going to tell? The cops?

Jo-Jo nodded. They were waiting for some … stuff … and they were going to take the truck up to Queensland maybe tomorrow. They were waiting for a … delivery. They were going to Queensland to stay with … relatives.

The “relatives” were somehow a big joke. Eddie grinned with them and then felt stupid when he saw how they looked at him. They’d caught him out. They rubbed his nose in his own fraud. They knew he didn’t know the joke about relatives. Fucking smack freaks, always talking in code.

He told them he wanted to see the old lady and Jo-Jo told him the address although Pete told him not to. Pete was mumbling. Eddie wished they’d get out of his shop but when they asked if they could stay at his place for a night he couldn’t bring himself to say no.

3.

They moved in that night and began to fuck up his record collection as soon as they arrived. Eddie followed after them, putting records back in their plastic sleeves and placing ashtrays in strategic positions while Daphne, bright-eyed, talked to them about Queensland. Eddie didn’t know she’d been to Queensland. But she had. She’d lived there for nearly a year.

“You know Cairns?” she asked Pete.

“Yeah.”

“Cairns is a groove.”

“Holloway Beach.”

“Oh Christ yeah, Holloway Beach.” Pete exchanged some look with Jo-Jo that could have meant anything.

Eddie nearly asked, what’s Holloway Beach, but he stopped himself. He’d never seen Pete hold a human conversation with anyone. He would rather that it wasn’t happening here.

“You ever go to Martin’s caravan?”

“Oh yes,” Daphne smiled, a very large warm smile.

“He got busted.”

“Yeah I know.” Daphne smiled like she knew a lot about Martin and his caravan. It was a quite explicit smile which made her look a little soft and sentimental round the eyes.

Pete nodded, “You knew Martin.” He laughed.

Eddie sat on the floor and grinned good-naturedly. He remembered Daphne telling him once how she’d lived in a caravan.

“Martin was a good guy,” said Jo-Jo. “When he got busted his mum flew up from Lismore and bailed him out. You ever meet his mum?”

“Yeah,” Daphne giggled. “He took me down to Lismore once to see his mum.”

“The Golden Wattle Café …” grinned Pete.

“Yeah, The Golden Wattle Café, and she looked me up and down and everything. It wasn’t very cool. I had to sleep in a room out the back. That’s when I pissed off from Martin. His mum came in one morning and said, Daphne what do you think of Martin? I don’t know what she wanted me to say. But I said, well Mrs Clements he’s certainly a good fuck.”

“What’d she do?”

“She didn’t do anything. She just pretended she hadn’t heard. I got a bus.”

Eddie waited for them to start talking about drugs. Sooner or later it’d come up. He hadn’t told her they were smack freaks. Now, sometime, the hypodermic would come out and no one needed to go and hide in the dunny to do the job. And then. And then, Daphne would want to try it. Anything once, she’d say, anything once. And leave Eddie standing like a shag on a rock.

They made him feel so fucking straight. He would have loved to have kicked them out but that would have made him feel even more straight. And when they began to shit in his red plastic rubbish bin he didn’t complain.

4.

Eddie went down to the shop the next morning to make a few private phone calls and found Detective Sergeant Mulligan from the vice squad waiting for him. Eddie knew Detective Sergeant Mulligan from the days when he’d managed the Brown Paper Book Shop in the Metropole Arcade. When he saw Mulligan he knew what had happened: his High Street friends had lodged an official complaint.

Eddie parked the Porsche behind Mulligan’s unmarked Holden and waved to the dapper man in the suit and suede waistcoat who stood waiting patiently outside the shop. Mulligan looked more like a used-car salesman than a cop. He had a seedy handsome face and favoured big cufflinks and interesting tie-pins.

He was going to be busted. He didn’t mind. Finally it’d be good for business.

“You’re a dirty bastard,” said Mulligan. “This is Constable Fisher.”

Fisher looked like a farmer. He gazed solemnly at Eddie like a child looking at a dangerous snake in the zoo.

Eddie opened the shop for them and they wandered around getting a better look at the photographs. “You know who this is?” Mulligan tapped a man lying on what seemed to be a kitchen floor.

“No.”

“Name’s Hogan. His wife’s in Fairlea now, the silly bitch. You mind telling me where you got these?”

“From the North Melbourne tip.”

“You found them at the North Melbourne tip. Just wandering through were you?”

“A friend.”

“You’re a bit sick in the head, Eddie.”

“Do you think?” Eddie smiled. He found it ironic that he was being busted for possessing the art of the police force.

Constable Fisher watched one, then the other, like a man watching a game of tennis.

“Corrupt and deprave.”

“I’m what?”

“These,” Mulligan indicated the photographs, “are likely to corrupt and deprave.” He grinned. “So I’ll have to give you a receipt.”

Eddie thumped his forehead with his fist. “They’ve got their clothes on.”

“How many photographs?”

Fisher counted them twice. “Sixteen.”

“Listen,” said Eddie, “there’s no pricks, no genitals, they’ve got their clothes on.”

“Sixteen … photo … graphs,” wrote Mulligan, “size?”

Fisher guessed: “Ten by eight?”

“They’ve got their clothes on. They’re just dead people with their clothes on.”

But the truth of the matter is that Mulligan had a better idea of what Eddie was up to than Eddie did himself. He recognized him for what he was: a pornographer of death. He gave Eddie the receipt and went off with the photographs under his arm.

5.

Eddie spent the rest of the day trying to find a lawyer, an embalmer, and a man who made crates.

He phoned the lawyer and made an appointment. Then he contacted the crate maker and gave him the dimensions of the crate he wanted made. He allowed the dimensions on the generous side because Jo-Jo and Pete couldn’t seem to agree on whether their landlady had been large or small.

The embalmer was a little more difficult. He arranged one meeting at the Clare Castle Hotel in Carlton. It was not a satisfactory meeting. Eddie said he had to have a piss and crept out the back door and didn’t go back.

He’d have to solve that problem later. He contacted friends at St Vincent’s hospital but nobody knew anybody.

This job was going to have its difficulties.

Preoccupied with processes and techniques, he didn’t have much time to think about the old lady herself but her presence dominated his day and made him not unpleasantly tense. His nerve ends tingled and he clenched and unclenched his long fingers in an ecstasy of anticipation.

He planned to take Daphne with him. He had a very clear idea of the power politics of their personal relationship and he knew that the visit to the house would swing the balance once more his way, bring it back to where it had been on the first afternoon when he had humiliated the cabinet minister.

But when the morning finally came Pete and Jo-Jo presented him with the red plastic rubbish bin they’d been shitting in.

“What’s this?”

Pete stared at him incredulously. “It’s for the pig.”

“The cops?”

“Not the cops, the fucking pig. We got a pig out at Williamstown. You give it to the pig to eat.”

Eddie nodded slowly. They were doing to him what he had done to the cabinet minister. He put the plastic bin of shit in the passenger seat of the Porsche and was forced to leave Daphne behind with the freaks.

6.

When Eddie left the city he was still busy planning the complicated details of what would surely be his masterpiece. The embalmer had fucked things up a bit. Still, that could be fixed. Somehow it’d all work. And then, Jesus Christ, what an auction he’d have.

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.

7.

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.

8.

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.

9.

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.

10.

“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.”

“Man, you’re on a weird trip.”

“Sure. Now if you guys help me upstairs with the pig, I’ll go out there tonight and bring her back.”

“You going to bring her here?”

“Sure. She can sit at the table there. Now you guys give me a hand with the pig and if it starts to yell you give it some stuff. I’ll pay for it, but you give it a fix if it needs it. I don’t want those pricks next door calling the cops because they hear a pig screaming.”

“OK, Eddie,” said the freaks.

11.

He drove the old lady back to Caroline Street with the hood down. She didn’t seem to mind. In fact, Eddie felt that the wind had put a smile on her face. Even now he was unsure of whether he would really sell her or not. With every mile he changed his mind and changed it back again.

In a confused state of mind he stopped off at High Street and the old lady waited patiently in the car while he went into the back room. The back room didn’t help. It all looked a little foolish to him, but maybe it was just because of the old lady waiting so meekly in the car outside.

12.

Exhausted by the events of the day, Eddie slept well that night. The freaks had given the pig a hit and it also slept soundly in the bath. The old lady sat at the table, the pen once more in her hand, gazing thoughtfully at Janis Joplin on the cover of Rolling Stone.

When Eddie woke in the morning Daphne was already up. He went out to inspect the old lady and found she wasn’t there. No one else was there, either.

Instead, he found a note from Daphne which said that they’d taken the old lady to Sydney to sell and they were going on up to Queensland to stay with relatives. The note said there was some stuff in the bathroom cupboard, enough for a couple of hits, and she’d marked the pig with lipstick to show where to put the needle in. There were other instructions, all quite helpful and explicit.

She also left the name of a man who could sell Eddie more smack and said where to contact him and how much to pay. “In my opinion,” she wrote, “the best thing might be just to give it an O.D., love, Daphne.”