Theft: A Love Story

2

Hearing the screen door in the bathroom give a small urgent "thwack", I hid the shoes beneath the table and hurried around collecting muddy pumpkins, stacking them out on the front porch. Not that I didn't notice her enter, or see my Kmart shirt falling loosely from her slender shoulders, the collar's soft grey shadow across her bath-pink neck.

I handed her the cordless phone. "Telecom are back in service."

Brusque. It has been remarked of me before—the lack of charm when sober.

"Oh, super," she said.

She threw her towel across a wooden chair and walked briskly out onto the front porch. Above the insistent thrum on the roof I could hear the soft American burr which I understood as old money, East Coast, but all this was Aussie expertise i. e. from the movies and I had not the least idea of who she was, and if she had been Hilda the Poisoner from Spoon Forks, North Dakota, I would have had no clue.

I began to chop up a big pumpkin, a lovely thing, fire orange with a rust brown speckle, and a moist secret cache of bright slippery seeds which I scooped into the compost tray Out on the porch, I heard her: "Right. Yes. Exactly. Bye."

She returned, all antsy, rubbing at her hair.

"He says his creek is over the big rock." (She pronounced it "crick".) "He says you'll understand."

"It means you wait for the 'crick' to go down."

"I can't wait," she said. "I'm sorry."

It was exactly at that moment—well I'm fucking sorry Miss, but what do you want me to do about the flood?—that Hugh's adenoidal breathing pushed its way between us. Doughy, six foot four, filthy, dangerous-looking, he filled the doorway without explanation. He had his pants on, but his hair looked like cattle had been eating it and he was unshaven. Our guest was three feet in front of him but it was to me he spoke.

"Where's the bloody pup?"

I was at the far side of the stove, hands slippery with olive oil, laying the pumpkin and potato in a baking tray.

"This is Hugh," I said. "My brother."

Hugh looked her up and down, very Hugh-like, threatening if you did not know.

"What's your name?"

"I'm Marlene."

"Have you," he enquired, sticking out his fat lower lip, and folding his big arms across his chest, "read the book The Magic Pudding?"

Oh Christ, I thought, not this.

She rubbed her hair again. "As a matter of fact, Hugh, I have read The Magic Pudding. Twice."

"Are you American?"

"That's very hard to say."

"Hard to say." His self-inflicted haircut was high above his ears suggesting a fierce and rather monkish kind of character. "But you have read The Magic Pudding? "

Now she offered all of her attention. "Yes. Yes, I have."

Hugh gave me a fast look. I understood exactly—he would now be busy for a moment, but he had not forgotten this business with the dog.

"Who," he asked, turning his brown eyes to the foreigner, "do you like the best in The Magic Pudding?"

And she was charmed. "I like the four of them."

"Really?" He was dubious. "Four?"

"Including the pudding."

"You're counting the pudding!"

"But I like all the drawings." She finally returned the phone to the table and began to properly dry her hair. "The pudding thieves," she said, "are priceless."

"Is that a joke you're telling?" My brother hated the pudding thieves. He was continually, loudly, passionately regretful that it was not possible for him to punch the possum on the snout.

"It's not the characters I like"—she paused—"but the drawings— I think they're better than any painting Lindsay ever did."

"Oh yes," said Hugh, softening. "We saw Lindsay's bloody paintings. Bless me."

Whatever urgent business had been in her mind, she put it briefly to one side. "Do you want to know my favourite person in The Magic Pudding?"

"Yes."

"Sam Sawnoff."

"He's not a person."

"Yes, he's a penguin, but he's very good, I think."

And there she was—a type—one of those rare, often unlucky people who "get on with Hugh".

"Who do you like?" she asked, smiling.

"Barnacle Bill!" he cried exultantly. And next thing he was out of the doorway, shadowboxing, prancing round the table crying: "Mitts up, mitts up, you dirty pudding thieves!"

Jean-Paul's little house of few possessions was, as I said, a light and whippy structure, designed with no anticipation of hulking prancing men in muddy work boots. The cups and saucers rattled on their shelves. None of this seemed to put her out at all. Hugh put his arm around my chest.

Misunderstanding, she continued smiling.

"Where's my bloody dog?" my brother hissed.

Up close like this, his breath was really awful.

"Later, Hugh."

"Shut up." There was the missing front tooth and all that tartar but since Dr. Hoffman was deported, there was no dentist brave enough to tackle Hugh.

"Later, please."

But he was hard against my back, with his whiskery jowls against my cheek. He was a strong man of thirty-four and when he moved his huge arm around my throat I could hardly breathe.

"Your puppy drowned."

I saw my visitor suck in her breath.

"It drowned, mate," I said.

He let go his grip but I watched him very closely. Our Hugh could be a devious chap and I didn't want to cop that famous roundhouse punch.

He stepped back, stricken, and that really was my prime concern, to get beyond his reach.

"Careful of the bath heater," I said, but he had already stumbled, sat on it, cried with pain, and rushed head down into his room.

Singed feathers, I thought, recalling the rooster in The Magic Pudding.

Moaning, Hugh slammed his door. He threw himself onto his bed and as the house shook and rattled the visitor's clear blue eyes widened. How could explain? All my brother's misery was painfully present and nothing could be said in private.

"Can I walk across the creek?" she asked.

Five minutes later we were out in the storm together.

The tractor headlights were weak and the ride very loud and rough, no more than twenty ks, but the wind was off the escarpment and the rain stung my face and doubtless hers as well. She had borrowed my oilskin coat and a pair of gum-boots but her hair would, by now, be wild and curling, her eyes slitted against the rain.

For the first mile and a half, that is, all the way to Dozy Boylan's cattle grid, I was very aware of that slender body, the small breasts against my back. I was half mad, you see that, a dangerous male in rut, in a fury with my brother, roaring around Loop Road, the slasher swaying and rattling, the differential whining in my ears.

As we arrived at the grid, my weak yellow lights fell upon the boiling water of Sweetwater Creek, more usually a narrow stream. Jean-Paul's big slasher—what I would call a mower— was attached to the power takeoff and three-point hydraulics. I raised it as high as it would go, a big square raft of metal about six foot by six foot. I should have removed it, but I was a painter and in matters agricultural my judgment was bad in almost every way imaginable. I had it firmly in my mind that the little creek was nothing serious, but entering the flood my boots were immediately filled with cold water and then it was too late, and the Fiat was rising and stumbling across the hidden rocks. Then the current caught the slasher and I felt a sick surge in my gut as we began to drift. I steered upstream, of course, but the tractor was slipping down, lumbering over the boulders, front wheels rearing in the air. I was no farmer, never had been. The mower was a deadly orange barge riding on the surface of the flood. I could feel my passenger's terror as she dug into my shoulders and saw clearly, angrily, what a complete fool I was. I had put my life at risk, for what? I did not even like her.

Bless us, as Hugh would say.

Luck or God being with us, we emerged on the far bank and I lowered the mower for the journey up Dozy's steep drive.

Marlene said nothing, but when we arrived at the front door, when Dozy came out to greet her, she shed my raincoat, urgently, desperately, as if she never wished it to touch her again. I had no doubt she was afraid, and in the tangled skin she handed me I imagined I could feel her anger with my recklessness.

"You better take that slasher off," said Dozy. "I'll babysit it for a day or two."

Dozy was a rich and successful manufacturer who had, with all the energy and will that marked his character, turned himself into a broad sixty-year-old man with a grey moustache and a strong farmer's belly. He was also a gifted amateur entomologist, but that was not the point right now, and as his guest took refuge inside his house he fetched a fierce flashlight and held it silently while I disconnected the mower from the hydraulics.

"Hugh alone?"

"I'll be back soon."

My friend said nothing judgmental, but he caused me to imagine Hugh howling across paddocks, barbed wire in the dark, rabbit holes, the river, his terror that I was dead and he was left alone.

"I would have got her in the Land Rover," Dozy said, "but she was in a great awful rush and I was listening to the BBC news."

He said nothing about her attractiveness, leading me to conclude that she was one of the nieces or grandchildren he had spread out across the world.

"I'm fine now." And I was, in a way. I would go home and feed Hugh, tune in his wireless, and make sure he took his bloody tablet. Then we would talk about his dog.

Once, not so long ago, I had been a happy married man tucking in his boy at night.