Theft: A Love Story

22

All my life I was Slow Bones unless someone OUTSIDE THE FAMILY was present to explain my jokes. Oh, my brother said at last when THE PENNY DROPPED and he understood my painting, you clever bugger.

I could not return the compliment.

By next morning the repair was concluded, but there was no DAY OF REST and we had another ruction i. e. Jean-Paul had gone to New Zealand for a conference and this had obviously been planned solely in order to inconvenience my brother who wished to retrieve his painting for Japan. It was well known Butcher was too afraid to leave Australia or go to any place he was not known. So who could explain why he was in such a rush now unless he had an ANXIOUS PERSONALITY surely that could not be true.

Marlene had never met our benefactor so all she knew of him was from my brother e. g. Jean-Paul was not French but Belgian, not Jean-Paul Milan but Henk Piccaver, and it gave the Butcher a lot of pleasure to tell us that MR. PICKOVER was in New Zealand or WANK WALLOON had elevator shoes. Yet our benefactor had saved us many times and when Butcher was gaoled for stealing his own paintings from his wife it was Jean- Paul who was THE GOOD SAMARITAN although he was very frightened of me thinking I was a VIOLENT TYPE. When my brother was TAKEN DOWN to the cells it was Jean-Paul who gave me a room in his Edgecliff Nursing Home. AND ON THE MORROW WHEN HE DEPARTED HE SAID TAKE CARE OF HIM, AND WHATSOEVER HE SPENDEST MORE, WHEN I COME AGAIN, I WILL REPAY THEE. This was not a text my brother would have ever pinned upon his wall.

At the nursing home I made a friend of Jackson the night man a very interesting fellow a PIGEON FANCIER who brought in his patent racing clocks to show me. Better to be Slow Bones than be a bird.

Did Butcher reveal to Marlene Jean-Paul's kindness? Of course not. He said that his patron's Carrier watch cost forty-thousand dollars. This justified him attacking the DEVELOPMENT SITE with saws and hammers and staple guns and he did not pause to think that he was damaging a dance floor of a quality our parents would have never felt beneath their feet. Only in death were they more peaceful than when joined in the FOX TROT. It would make you cry to see how gently my father held his swollen liver-coloured hand against my mother's little back.

With the rain finished the weather once more turned hot and muggy and being unable to wait a single day without thinking of himself the Butcher began to MAKE ART. Better he be active I suppose but everything turned torrid and he was soon in an uproar not only with the COMMON HOUSE-FLIES who came to smell his underpants but also the smuts which floated through the window. Oh Hugh would you mind if I closed the window? That's a joke. He slammed the windows closed and when I once opened them at night he nailed them shut forever.

Here, have a chicken sandwich. Oh thank you very much.

PHTHAAA!

Soon he had two huge paintings ON THE BOIL one upstairs and one downstairs leaving barely room for me to sleep. When you see him work you do appreciate the better side of him the TALENT the German Bachelor was the first to understand. Of course the foreigner was later cast aside, abandoned in West Footscray teaching ADVERTISING GRAPHICS at the Tech.

In Sydney, Butcher used his remaining funds to buy new paint and he must have got a bargain price. These tubes were so old he had to unscrew the caps with pliers. I held my nose. Sure enough the bacteria had been feasting on the extenders in the paint, bless me, we had this trouble once before. The reds were now all related to the CESSPIT family, the blues smelled like rotting peaches. Soon the Development Site was very WHIFFY, hot and rotten, the chemistry of BODY ODOUR was brought in to assist.

So I had to walk—nowhere to go—not yet—but while polishing my chair I recalled that nice white flat belonging to Marlene Leibovitz. The smell of FORCED ENTRY would soon be gone and I did not imagine anyone would try that trick again, not if the Brothers Bones were standing guard. Of course I was not yet invited.

Just the same.

Just the same I had seen a great deal of LOVEY-DOVEY and Marlene had been very DIPLOMATIC about the bad smells of Bathurst Street, not once but three times, so I reckoned I would teach myself how to get to Elizabeth Bay.

I am never good with maps just as well or I would have left Sydney many times and if my needs had not been SPECIAL I would have been on the road to Melbourne where the dog SHAT in the tucker box nine miles from Gundagai. This is not what the FAMOUS AUSTRALIAN SONG says it makes out that the dog SAT on the tucker box. What morons. You could not make a song about sitting. I would know. Butcher once drove me past the actual statue of the dog but it is based on what they call MISINFORMATION and the dog is therefore sitting on the box the work of a MEDIOCRITY OR LESS as my brother observed whilst speeding past.

If members of the GENERAL PUBLIC have a map then they can go directly to their destination. In my case it is different I must do a great deal of circling and going around the block to make sure I can get back home from where I have arrived, and I do this when I am halfway there or a quarter-way or just a block from home. So what may take the GENERAL PUBLIC twenty minutes walking according to a map might take Hugh as much as three hours but once learned it is never forgotten, burned into my brain, set fast, like red molten metal cooling in a deep-cut channel. My brain is then HARDWIRED as the saying is. To find Elizabeth Bay I must first proceed by trial and error. Very time-consuming, no point in denying the upsets, frights, alarms, the blood roaring in my ears, the electrics firing in my limbs as I go scuttling back the way I came from. Not so bad to look at as it feels. The MAN IN THE STREET would assume I was running for a train or dentist appointment. Some innocents I hit by accident but very few. Having got up the top of William Street I followed a pair of HARD CASES with no bum inside their trousers, red skin on their elbows. These were identical to the DRUG ADDICT in Bellingen so I knew they must be going to Kings Cross. I should have returned to Bathurst Street but the addicts were a blessing, walking very fast and I stayed with them past the Kings Cross Police Station and then I saw the sign Elizabeth Bay Road.

Onwards, as my dad would say, onwards Captain Pillock. I wrote down where I was and then proceeded. Say not the struggle naught availeth.

At the bottom of Elizabeth Bay Road, past the shop of the BAD-TEMPERED GREEK and the ALL-IMPORTANT bottle shop, there is a big grassy park with TREES FROM THE COUNTRIES OF OUR FORMER ENEMIES and the minute I got there I set up my chair and I was as good as home, with Marlene's flat three minutes away and I knew how to get back to Bathurst Street and my arms were soft as pretty putty.

It was a very pleasant place to sit having very little traffic except the taxis, and big Moreton Bay fig trees sometimes filled with dirty old FLYING FOXES the same as would travel west above the Bellinger River hour after hour all through the dusk and deepest night squadrons of them as if on their way to a war we could not know the rules of. No flying foxes this particular morning. I took off my shirt to feel the sun. Very calm, nothing alarming to note other than the rich person's automatic gate opening and closing without DUE CAUSE as they say. WE ARE ALL OBSERVED—my brother's mad belief—he could not live if he was not watched, his shiny head a request for admiration. I had my eyes shut but soon heard the familiar sound of the HOLDEN WATER PUMP which revealed itself to be a police car come to tell me I could not sit here. I was sure they did not have the right to move me but they perhaps misunderstood my underpants and I had never forgotten Butcher being TAKEN DOWN to the cells. I replaced my shirt and folded my chair and as I did so Marlene Leibovitz arrived in a yellow taxi.

Hugh, she cried, oh dear Hugh. The police were powerless before her. PHTHAAA. She took me up those flights of stairs and I decided I would not leave her flat now because it was very quiet and clean and when you opened the window you could hear the rigging on the yachts smacking against the masts and see the water from Rushcutters Bay dancing on the white ceiling, a swimming pool of air. Poor Mum could never imagine this when she dreamed of God Almighty never thought there might be so many yachts or time to sail them and this sound she never heard, I know it, breeze, light, slight slap of stainless steel in the eternal afternoon.

Would you like to live here, Hugh?

I said I would.

She said she would go and fetch Butcher too. I wished she loved only me, held my face in her dry light palms nine miles from Gundagai.

I asked her what about the mad people who had been living here before. She said there was only one but he was gone. She threw something out the window. I heard it crashing down through the trees but I had my chair and the breeze and a light moving like a twenty-amp net above my head. It was the first time I really liked Sydney since poor Billy's finger broke our life, forgive me.