Theft: A Love Story

19

I owned not so much as a Band-Aid but there was no shortage of Corio whisky to disinfect my brother's bleeding chin and on this whiskery site the toilet tissue caught, leaving behind little flowers like sheep's wool on barbed wire. Watching Marlene gently collect and flick away these blossoms, I could not have cared if she had stolen a painting or robbed the State Bank of Victoria. Of course we had made "love" already, but what was happening here was serious—Hugh was finally no obstacle to happiness, the opposite, and he drew from her everything that was and still is admirable, that is, her passionate sympathy for everyone strange or abandoned or living outside the pale.

That this unexpected tender heart might also benefit the wounded Olivier Leibovitz did not yet occur to me. The truth? I did not think of him at all. I was like a teenage boy, without harness or restraint, never considering where my ignorant heart might carry me, not understanding that this surge of blood might affect what I painted and where I lived or even where I died. Likewise I did not spare a moment to wonder about the consequences of drifting into the poisonous orbit of Le Comite Leibovitz. I was in love.

Jean-Paul would soon decide that my affair with Marlene was "really about" my show in Tokyo. My so-called "mates"—so bloody psychologically acute they would make you want to die— all thought the same, but if they had even glimpsed this lovely Rembrandt woman reaching out to swab Falstaff's dark abrasions, they would have understood everything she did thereafter, or some of it at least.

Soon all three of us were sleeping on the same floor and I held Marlene against my chest while Hugh, three feet away from us, snored like a half-blocked drain. She fitted against my shoulder all through the night, still, calm, trusting, showing— even in her sleep—a sweet affection which would never jibe with her public reputation. The wind blew until the early hours, rattling the sashes and causing the clouds to scud across the lovely shivering moon. Next morning the air was still and I saw first water blue, then ultramarine—her clear wide open eyes, the sky of dirty Sydney, all its poisons blown away.

We had no shower available but my lover drenched herself with cold tap water, and then was perfect. She was twenty-eight years old. I had been that age once, the toast of Sydney, long ago.

Down on Sussex Street there was a louche basement cafe which I had crossed off my list due to Hugh's tendency to claustrophobic panic. Here my bruised brother was soon happily spreading his baggy arse on a fake leopard-skin stool. "Pan-oh," he announced, drumming his chewed fingers on the counter.

"Two pan-oh chocolate."

While Hugh distributed his breakfast on his shirt I bought three big bowls of coffee. Marlene was all business.

"Give me this fellow's number."

"Whose?"

"This man who has your painting."

"Why?"

"I'm going to get it back for you, baby."

So American. v

"Blumey," Hugh whispered as she used the proprietor's phone.

"Keep her. Bless me." And the bugger kissed me on the cheek.

Marlene returned, her upper lip taut with mischief.

"Lunch," she said. "Go-Go Sushi in Kellett Street."

Finally she sipped her coffee, coating the aforementioned lip with sugary foam. But then I saw the secret triumph in her narrowed eyes, and I suffered a jolt of panic, e. g., Who the fuck are you, Wonder Woman? Where is your fucked-up husband?

"Oh Butcher Bones!" She drew her fingertip across my upper lip.

"Don't you have a job?"

"I need to pick up some old Mitsukoshi catalogues from my flat," she said. "You'll like them, if you want to come. Then, if we've got time, we'll go round to the police and we'll talk to that tricky little shit. We're going to get both your paintings back today."

"We are?"

"Oh yes."

Her flat turned out to be in one of those prewar buildings near the bottom of Elizabeth Bay Road: no lift, just battered concrete stairs at the top of which you might be rewarded, finally, with a view of the bay below. If you are a Sydney painter you will already be familiar with this real estate—Gotham Towers, Vaseline Heights—German cockroaches, encrusted kitchens, deco ceramics, ambitious art, but this was a very different visit to my usual and as Hugh charged upwards, bashing his chair against the chipped green railing, I was finally anticipating the cuckolded husband who had been, until this moment, the baby in his bare-breasted mother's arms. The front door was thick grey metal, showing signs of a recent violent burglary. Inside, there was no sign of the man, or anything that might suggest the son of Jacques Leibovitz, nothing that I might identify as his, except a subscription copy of Car Rally and a naked half-eaten peach abandoned to the ants beside the kitchen sink. This latter item Marlene Leibovitz dispensed with and I soon heard it crashing like a drunken possum, careening off the cabbage-tree palm, descending through the rubber trees below.

"That was a peach," said Hugh.

"A peach," she said, and raised an eyebrow as if to say—I had not the foggiest. Hugh lurched towards the kitchen window and his chair would likely bash something so we had a little tussle, so vigorous on his part that I guessed he might be jealous, and by the time I had set him up safely in the middle of the room our hostess had retrieved a pile of glossy catalogues from a twisted filing cabinet which seemed to have been attacked by someone with a crowbar.

"OK, we can go."

"This is very nice here," Hugh pronounced, his injured hands locked onto his mighty knees. "Very clean."

Clean, and strange—almost no indication of what you might call art. There was a single Clarice Cliff vase which had been broken and rather brutally restored and, apart from that, only a line of small grey river rocks lined up along the top of a bookshelf.

"Almost all our stuff is still in storage."

Our?

"We came in a big rush. Olivier was sent out to save a client from local poachers."

And where was he now? I could not ask.

My brother turned excitedly. "Who lives here?"

"What?"

"Who lives here?"

"Mad people," she said. "Quick. We've got to go."