Theft: A Love Story

13

The moment you think you've got the bugger happy, he is in the shit—there's been a brawl, an accident, frottage, larceny, arson, a misunderstanding about removing goldfish from a bowl.

Every new town or street or city is a problem which was why, in Bathurst Street, I was very pleased to discover, in the middle of Arthur Murray's former dance floor, a lopsided, dingy, bronze, battered, twenty-dollar steel chair, no longer much to sit on, but useful for more than hiding dope or changing lightbulbs.

"Bloody chair," Hugh said. "Bless me." And took possession with his big square arse.

My brother had been raised on a chair, had spent his life after third grade on a chair, rocking back and forward in front of the shop. So when he stood and folded up his treasure, I didn't have to ask him where he planned to go. He was so fucking happy, I had to smile.

Outside was a decent width of footpath, and although close to the crowds of George Street, it was quiet enough for what Hugh craved, the chance to politely watch the world go by. Soon I set him up, potato chips on one side, Coca-Cola on the other, and as I headed back inside he turned to me, wrinkling his nose up towards squinting eyes, a sign that he was either very happy or about to fart. Beauty, I thought, that's done. But of course it wasn't done at all and half an hour later, coming down to check on him, I found him missing.

I wish I could say this shit gets easier with practice. It does not help that he's ham-armed, slope-shouldered, wildly strong— each time I think he's dead, drowned, run over, picked up by sick-ohs in a van with sliding doors. And there is not a thing that I can do but wait, so all that afternoon while I was unsuccessfully trying to organise a line of credit, I ran up and down the stairs like some hairy reincarnation of our mother waiting for Blue Bones to turn up from the football in Geelong.

Each time she thought him dead, declared us orphans, and each time he came in piss-faced drunk, and we boys helped him down the hall, all sixteen stone of him.

"Come on Butcher, come on young'un, be a good fellow and go down to the Chinaman's for me." At the Chinaman's they could not see my mother's face, so it was easy for them to love my dad.

In similar fashion I now waited for my brother and when I heard him hammering on the door I became the living fury in my mother's eyes.

"You stupid cunt, where have you been?"

Well, he and his chair had been Waltzing Matilda. This sounds good but it was crap—he liked to wander, but he could not be trusted with a key and he would have gone ape shit if I was not there when he finally returned. That's how I began to take him and his damn chair around the galleries, but never mind, there were problems worse than Hugh. For instance, it was soon made very clear to me that I would never get a show without my two most persuasive pieces; one of these had been stolen by the cops, the other by Jean-Paul. Easy. You would think, Just borrow them. But Jean-Paul would not cooperate because—oh dearie me—he could no longer trust me.

"I will have it photographed," he said, "if that would help."

"I'll need a ten by eight."

"Relax, my friend."

You prick, I thought, don't tell me to relax, you fucking thief.

"You shall have your ten by eight."

When he says "shall" and "shan't" he is pretending that he and his old man never came from Antwerp on a ten-pound migrant ticket, that they never built shearing sheds and ate cockatoos for their dinner. So where did all this "shall" and "shan't" shit come from? Suddenly he sounded like old Lady Wilson hiring her shearers—Did you shar har last yar? No? Then you shan't shar har this yar.

I asked Jean-Paul: "When shall I have my ten by eight?"

"Tomorrow," he said, his eyes narrowing.

I waited a day and called his office and of course no-one had heard of any ten by eight and as for Jean-Paul he was now in Adelaide addressing a conference on Surgically Removing the Assets of the Elderly and Infirm.

Three times I had visited the police, four times I called the number on Detective Amberstreet's card but he was a Sydney cop and so he never phoned me back. So, fuck that—I threw Hugh's chair in the back of the ute and we headed over to that nasty bunker the police have built in Darling- ' hurst. It was now late March but still very hot, so I already had the chips and Coca-Cola and I had planned setting up the chair in the shade across the road by the Oxford Gym.

But Hugh was frightened of police and when he saw the bunker he would not leave the vehicle: he locked the door and clamped his hands across his fleshy wattley ears.

"You silly cunt," I said, "you'll cook yourself."

In reply he farted. What a little flower he was.

I entered police headquarters intending only to track down Amberstreet but I quickly understood that if I continued walking no bugger would prevent me and that is how, less than ten minutes later, I emerged from the lift on the third floor and saw the word "ART" nailed to the wall. Of all of the thousands of people who have seen that horrible building, which one of them could have imagined this particular crucifixion? Beside was a double doorway opening into a large windowless space at the rear of which was an iron cage of the type you might make for monkeys in a zoo. Here were stored crates, canvases, about thirty-two bronze casts of those Rodins which are always the subject of lawsuits and seem to breed like rabbits in the spring.

The door of this cage was now ajar but my inevitable next step was interrupted.

"Who are you?" It was a tiny uniformed woman with the most magnificent long straight nose.

I asked for Amberstreet.

"Detective Amberstreet is not here," she said. She had an awful lot of braid and silver and piercing bright blue eyes.

"Then how about Detective Ewbank."

"He passed away."

My God, the last time I saw the moron he had my painting.

"Oh no," I cried. "No!"

Her eyes moistened and she lay her hand upon my sleeve. "He was up in Coffs Harbour," she said.

"What happened?"

"He had a heart attack, I believe."

But what about my canvas? It could still be in Coffs Harbour District Hospital. If the crate had dropped, it may have split and now it could be—worse than the hospital—in some coastal charters office at Coffs Harbour airport, all crunched up and folded, like a take-out menu in the back of an office drawer.

"Detective Amberstreet has gone to the funeral," she said, her nostrils flaring with sympathy. "Out at La Perouse.", If not for the intimacy of the nostrils, I might have asked her for the denomination of the deceased. This would certainly have helped because that cemetery, at La Perouse is bloody endless, and when Hugh and I had driven through the Presbyterians and edged along the Jews we got ourselves jammed in by a factory wall which made the northern border, and our only way down was along a narrow road through a nest of Chinese mausoleums.

Below us lay the Catholics and, down at the very bottom, where the cemetery is bordered by the Chinese market gardens along the creek, I spotted the remnants of a single funeral party. We had Buckley's chance but I edged the ute out of the grass and parked. Hugh took out his chair. I set off down towards the burial.

I was about halfway down the hill, sticking mainly to the narrow bitumen, when I heard a great holler behind me, and looking back I saw Hugh pointing excitedly at—I didn't know at which religious territory—but in the general direction of the airport and Botany Bay container terminal.

Had he spotted Barry Amberstreet?

I hesitated, naturally. But then Hugh and his chair were off down the hill, jumping graves, falling, rolling, up again, through the Presbyterians and Methodists, charging towards the shadow of the Bunnerong power station. There was a solitary figure in a suit down almost to the bottom edge. He looked thin enough to be our man. I was wearing my leather slips-ons which were useless for this business, but Hugh was wearing sandshoes and he ran with great certainty, his head pushed forward, his left arm pumping as if he were prisoner at the Oxford Gym.

Behind me, the cars were leaving the Catholic funeral and what did I think I was doing anyway? Why could I not wait to see Amberstreet tomorrow? Because I could not fucking bear to have my painting missing. Because it was my last hope. Because if this work was in Coffs Harbour I would be on the next plane.

Because I was a child, a driven, anxious fretful fool, and now I was running parallel with my huge demented brother, linked and mirrored like a double bloody helix, and by now, having lost my poofter shoes, I was on the very lower levels of the cemetery, down with the Anabaptists and Jehovah's Witnesses, and I might as well have been a dog running for a stick, for I could no longer see the fellow in the suit, nothing but the final chain-link fence which I now watched Hugh climb, wrenching the chair brutally when its leg got snagged. It was the beach that got me, made my eyes sting, my throat hurt, the sort of beach, the comparison with other beaches—the memory of Hugh holding my tiny boy in the pearly foam of Whale Beach surf. Now he stomped out onto that polluted sand at La Per-fucking-rouse and there he removed his Kmart shirt and, with his flesh all a creamy rosy ruin, sat to watch the rusty containers on the distant wharf.

Behind, as in an amphitheatre, the dead pressed against us in their serried ranks and I jammed my finger through the wire and wept.