Theft: A Love Story

12

Although you will never hear this from the Butcher, our patron was our saviour time and time again. Now he loaned us an entire four-storey DEVELOPMENT POSSIBILITY in Bathurst Street, a site well situated, close to the George Street entertainment district and transportation. Of course my brother was a genius so there was no need to thank Jean-Paul. This was a PATTERN OF BEHAVIOUR previously observed. For instance, our mother had sold her twenty acres at Parwan so the Butcher could further his studies at Footscray Tech but in all his thousands of MEDIA PROFILES my brother never mentioned his family's kindness. He portrayed his departure from the Marsh as an ASCENSION from a cesspit, holy fire blasting from his hairy arse.

At Jean-Paul's property in Bathurst Street he immediately set to the front door with drills and hammers, securing a padlock on the outside and a galvanised bolt inside, all this IRRATIONAL ACTIVITY being solely to prevent the legal owner gaining entry and presumably stealing the POST-COMMENCEMENT MASTERPIECES contained therein.

Having previously served as an ARTHUR MURRAY DANCE.

STUDIO the building was already well equipped with lights and mirrors FIFTEEN HUNDRED SQUARE FEET per floor and therefore a good place for making art. But now my brother did not wish to paint at all. I must be stupid to have expected that he would. Instead he decided to retrieve the work confiscated by Detective Amberstreet for in his CONFUSED MIND this huge canvas was now hanging on the wall in the headquarters of the New South Wales police. Imagine. All the VICE SQUAD with their big fat woodies come to have a Captain Cook.

The first night he ground his teeth and kicked me in the balls by accident, Lord save us, he thrashed around, giving orders in a rage. Night and day my brother was in a fret about the place in history which had been given to him and then taken back again.

What happiness had he gained by leaving home?

First thing in the morning, nothing would deter him, but he must have a chat to the police and have them return his painting ASAP. Had it slipped his mind that he was a SUSPECT in a larceny a party to an ASSAULT and in contravention of a court order to go no closer than five miles to the MARITAL RESIDENCE? Had he forgotten he had been ILL WITH FEAR only last July when he was sent to Long Bay for his BREAK AND ENTER? He told me police can do what they like to you. He would have had to be blind not to notice swarms of coppers on the streets around the Arthur Murray Dance Studio, deaf not to hear their sirens in the night as they pursued the so-called ASIAN GANGS. Due to the muggy March weather we had been forced to sleep with the windows open and thus could hear PERVERTS down in the alley and DRUG ADDICTS arguing and the footsteps of people fleeing from the Asian gangs. During the night I was pleased to have the protection of the locks. At the same time I never liked to be shut inside a house, so when he went off to the police I was UP AND OFF like a greyhound after an electric hare.

Always about, all my life, whether on the chair in front of our shop or in the pony cart taking orders. In Bellingen always on the road, the air in summer thick with floating thistle seeds and spiders travelling miles like balloonists on their webs, and in the city too, I would rather be outside during the hours when it was safe to be so, and I took a folding chair down to the footpath and witnessed all the human clocks passing me, pumping, sloshing—there is one, there another, and each one the centre of the world. You can go half mad looking at them, like gazing at the stars at night and thinking of infinity. What a strain it is. Our mother suffered it, always looking at eternity with her watery eyes, poor Mum, God bless her.

I was not sitting on my chair long before a young policeman told me I could not do that without a permit from the City of Sydney. As the SEAT OF GOVERNMENT was just behind St.

Andrew's Cathedral I went there and MADE ENQUIRIES, but no-one could understand me and so I walked around the streets and when I was tired I would open my ILLEGAL CHAIR but not for long.

There were police everywhere in Sydney. What threat this represented Butcher never could decide. One moment he was screaming about the expense of his parking tickets and the next he was tearing them up like confetti and declaring that if you did not pay them they would get lost in the system. Many is the time he overparked and double-parked, even outside police headquarters in Darlinghurst, a location he would return to time and time again. First off he left me in the ute while he went in to locate his painting. Returning, he would not say how the police had responded, but that night his DRINKING PROBLEM surfaced once again.

Shortly thereafter we had a visit from a certain Robert Colossi, a thin curly-haired POT-SMOKER who was contracted to take photographs of Butcher's paintings for the galleries. But my brother soon had reason to regret he had paid one thousand dollars cash for UNUSABLE transparencies and he threw them in the bin and immediately drove to an address in Redfern and I waited in the ute. When Butcher came running out I understood this must have been the residence of Robert Colossi because he was carrying a very heavy HASSELBLAD camera valued in excess of two thousand dollars this being JUST COMPENSATION for his loss. After this time, this asset was stored on top of the hot-water service and Butcher would not unlock the door no matter who rang the bell. To me he gave a knocking code SOS but he would not provide a key in case I was robbed by the photographer. Soon he gave a key to a total stranger, a woman who worked in the bookstore in the Queen Victoria Building. It is a fair guess she was short and had big bosoms but as she never used the key I have no right to say.

As Colossi's transparencies had been a PILE OF SHIT my brother determined that the pair of us would visit the galleries and display the paintings IN THE FLESH. The following Monday morning he parked the ute on the No Standing place in Bathurst Street and so we had a BLUE with a parking cop which resulted in a threat of immediate arrest and a hundred-dollar fine but Butcher said this did not matter because the ticket would be lost in the system. As we loaded the ute my heart was racing like a TWO-BOB WATCH but soon we were in Paddington outside the PINAKOTHEK and we parked in sight of the front door and carried the first crated painting inside, a big room ugly as WATSON MOTORS with shiny concrete floors and so-called works of art hung around the walls. These paintings were red and blue and green, so badly done the colours winked and jumped like fleas on a blanket thereby creating a feeling of ANXIETY beyond the range of VALIUM.

The young NANCY BOY behind the desk mistook us for FEDEX or DHL and he could not wait to get us put in our proper place which he judged to be the loading dock.

Where's Jim? says Butcher Bones, and we laid our crate down on the floor.

There's no Jim, said the Nancy Boy. And you can't bring that crate in here.

But the Butcher was wearing our father's wide thin grin. Jim Agnelli, he says.

Mr. Agnelli passed away, said the fellow.

If Butcher felt grief, he did not have the time to show it. Well, he said. I am Michael Boone.

This name seemed not to have the effect he had desired. He added: And I came to show Jim what I've been up to.

He did not say, Shame I missed him, but that was his tone.

In that case, said the young fellow, I'd be happy to look at your transparencies. Perhaps you could leave them with me.

You know who I am? the Butcher asked but it was clear the young fellow had not been reading five-year-old issues of ART & AUSTRALIA. Well never mind, he said, you'll bloody know me in a moment. Hugh, he ordered, get the drill.

Yes sir, no sir, but just the same I wished my father Blue Bones could see me as I sought the LETHAL drill and screwdriver attachment, displaying the nous to return with a thirty-foot extension cord to reach the two-hundred-and-forty-volt outlets.

Quick as a wink, I had it all set up. Nobody told me do not touch the switches.

The young fellow was not so pleased to see the drill and soon we were the object of a HISSY FIT but nothing could stop the Butcher where his ART was concerned and soon the drill was screaming and he had the screws out of his crate and we were rolling out his canvas a dreadful blasphemy the WORK OF A MADMAN in my opinion.

I expected the Nancy Boy to have CONNIPTIONS but instead he folded his arms across his chest and cocked his handsome head and a little smile made its presence known at the corner of his mouth.

Oh Michael BOONE, he said. Of course.

That's right, said the Butcher, but he didn't puff himself. Instead his big chin shivered and his eyes went smaller than before. He was out of style. Even I saw that. I helped him roll up his canvas and he could not wait to make an exit. The Nancy Boy must have felt sorry for him as he stopped and picked up all the screws we had abandoned in our rush.

Transparencies are really so much better, he said as he dropped the screws into my palm.

You would think the Butcher would be destroyed but he bought 12 bottles of wine @ $40 per and in the morning he had got his puff back. What he needed was an ARMANI suit and that night when I came home with my chair he was looking like a bouncer at a strip club. I did not ask him how much money we had remaining but he immediately decided we would go to an OPENING together and he advised me to eat and drink what was on the trays because our funds were running low and we would not be having dinner from then on. It turned out that there was nothing on offer but Kraft cheese and pickled gherkins and I knew I was going to be badly BOUND UP if this continued. Afterwards he must have had an urgent need to NETWORK because he took me back to Bathurst Street and locked me in FOR SAFETY, bless me. I walked up and down the stairs a great deal and for a long time I sat on my chair just inside the door to the street. On one occasion someone attempted to enter and I successfully pretended to be an angry TIE DOG.

Early next morning Butcher was back and we once more loaded up the ute and when he had shaved his head again we set off like ELECTROLUX MEN to present our wares. The Armani suit now smelled like an East Melbourne brewery and I was in no way surprised that my brother required the HAIR OF THE DOG before he faced the galleries. It was a dreadful business for him, day after day without relent, and there was no SMOKE-OH, no free time to wander off down George Street and set up my chair in the shade beneath the Cahill Expressway. Some of the proprietors were nice to Butcher and once we got taken to a Chinese restaurant but many of the younger generation could not give a FLYING FUCK about Michael Boone and by the third day he was DRUNK AS A SKUNK from brekkie onwards and that was how he came to crash the ute into a Jaguar parked in the lane beside Watters Gallery. As always he could admit no fault and when he had reversed twice and crashed twice more, he sped off down the dead-end lane, bouncing against all sorts of bins and cars leaving behind an entire bumper bar which might easily have been used in evidence against him.

That was a Wednesday night. There were no openings and he bought a flagon of McWILLIAMS CLARET @ $8.95 and then took me to the Hare Krishna restaurant in Darlinghurst where even my brother looked a giant of AUSTRALIAN RULES.

There was not a steak or chop or even a decent butcher's sausage. Eating their horrible foreign food I thought I would go mad myself to see what we had come to. I resolved to take my chair and set off to the Marsh again, and I might have done it if I could have found the road. Sometimes I am sorry I didn't do it. It would have been a better life by far if I was not afraid.