Theft: A Love Story

51

WHO WOULD STEAL MY CHAIR?

Tasked and Marlene said I must have lost it on the stairs so I took a flashlight and peered in amongst all the dust and filth there was a dead mouse bless the poor dried heart who would steal my chair?

I must have done something that SLIPPED MY MIND. Once when I was a boy I went walking in my sleep only waking when my bare feet touched the wet path to the dunny. Another time I drew with a biro across the sheets. Bless me, I could not explain it. Perhaps I stole my chair myself. There was a secret in the room like bad meat, a nasty odour, so FAMILIAR, from my very sad and disappointing birth, the long afternoons, sun through the flywire, the buzz of flies outside HOWLING FOR BLOOD, Mum's breath like roses, like communion wine.

WHO WILL SAVE ME NOW?

Butcher painted in DEATHLY SILENCE the strange opposite of his normal practice which is to EAR BASH to the point of madness SKITING and BOASTING he would TALK THE BACK LEG OFF A DONKEY. Look at this Hugh, this will be a bloody beauty. This will knock their bloody socks off. This will be a bull ant in their pants. In previous times he had rolled the canvas out across the floor and then he would need me to perform my ACT OF GRACE but now he had a tricky little nest of sticks like a surveyor out on the Darley Road. He had become, forgive him, AN EASEL PAINTER so he could put me on the wrong side of the canvas as if I was the floor.

All my life I lived amongst the perfumes of secrets, blood, roses, altar wine, who can say what happened to us all in Main Street, Bacchus Marsh, not me. We might have all continued as butchers, drawing the red line, all death arriving kindly. How I might have loved those beasts, me better than any man before.

Never mind. They would not give me the knife and so I went to live with the so-called butcher and the darling boy, peaches in the grass, the sweet rotten aroma of his marriage, I knew it but could not name it as I circled round the boy, trying to keep him safe and then it was me that hurt him. Everything always wrong, badness at the centre, the sound of flies excited in the sun, the thin squeak and fat slap of the swinging door as one person entered and another left. This was the Marsh, voices in another room. I was not born slow, I know it.

In New York I sat on my CANAL STREET MATTRESS my mind was puzzling back and forth why my brother was now painting like a MEDIOCRITY. He did not say I did not ask.

This was the worst feeling that there is.

In the Marsh I poked into the big drawer beneath Mum's wardrobe, when alone I was a STICKY BEAK, forgive me.

They said I was born Slow Bones and broke my mother's heart.

But something was taken from me. Something happened, never found, just the smell of camphor in a drawer. We walked around it then, as we now walked around my missing chair, as if circling some strange and dirty thing for why else would he paint a MEDIOCRITY? It made my head ache. I could not hold it still, as slippery as an earthworm before the dreaded hook.

My brother had come to New York and no-one at a restaurant knew his name and he was angry they did not bow down to the great EX-MICHAEL BOONE and therefore he became small and shrivelled, dark as coal from the Madingley open cut. He bought ink sticks from Pearl Paints and off he went, rubbing and rubbing, as if he could erase himself, rub himself away to dust.

Whatever happened we can never know.

Walk around, walk around.

Marlene Cook from Benalla. Michael Boone from Bacchus Marsh. Kings and Queens on Mercer Street. He climbed up to the roof of the building and there lay his painting to the eye of night. Egg white, black grit, burned souls falling.

WHO WILL SAVE ME NOW?