Theft (3 page)

"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.

3

Phthaaa! We are Bones, God help us, raised in sawdust, dry each morning. I am called Hugh and he is called Butcher but the pair of us are meat men, not river men, not beggars hiding in damp shacks with floods and mud and mould, with a hook hanging from the front verandah to skin the eels. We were born and bred in Bacchus Marsh, thirty-three miles west of Melbourne, down Anthony's Cutting. If you are expecting a bog or marsh, there is none, it is just a way of speaking, making no more sense than if the town was named Mount Bacchus. The Marsh was a big old teasing town, four thousand people in those days before the PRODUCT MANAGERS came to live. We had a tease for everyone. On New Year's Eve the BODGIES and the WIDGIES would throw eggs at the barber's windows and write in whitewash on the road. My dad woke up one New Year's Day to discover someone had changed the sign above the shop from BOONE to BO NES. We were Bones thereafter. BO NES BUTCHERS.

All in that town were FULL OF HIGH SPIRITS like Sam Sawnoff in the book The Magic Pudding.

Like Barnacle Bill and Sam Sawnoff we always fought and wrestled. Bless us. I wrestled with my dad and my granddad as did Brother Butcher Bones, a big man if not the biggest. He could not stand to lose to me. God save us what a bag of tricks he had to use Full Nelson. Half Nelson. Chinese Burn. I did not grudge him, never. Wrestling was the best thing any day. Many the time in the sawdust we did the old charge and grab the knackers, blood is thicker than water as they say. This was long ago but we were all large men, none but Granddad larger than myself. When he was seventy-two he had a disagreement with thirty-five-year-old Nails Carpenter dropping him on his bum in the public bar of the Royal Hotel. Carpenter played RUCK for Bacchus Marsh but would never return to that WATERING HOLE not even when Granddad was safely dead and buried up at Bacchus Marsh cemetery, butcher's grass around the hole, so clean you could have displayed loin chops along the edge. Not even then would Nails return to the Royal although his old mates would barrack him from the doorway, come in, come in, we will shout you a shandy. Nails dropped dead in 1956 while pedalling up the Stanford Hill.

Carpenter should have known to drink his shandy and start again. When they teased me I TOOK IT IN GOOD PART even if I might have murdered them. Like that. I was a GENTLE GIANT. Our father was Blue Bones on account of he had red hair when young so they called him Blue meaning red. That is a general rule to go by if you come from OVERSEAS. In Australia everything is the opposite of what it seems to mean. E. G. I was SLOW BONES because I moved so rapid, it was my way of moving they referred to. I was Slow Bones some days, Slow Poke others, this last was SMUTTY.

Those blokes were ROUGH DIAMONDS from the milk factory or the Darley Brickworks AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS always referring to the bull putting its pizzle in the cow like it was the strangest thing in life.

Look at that Poke, he is poking her. But I could take a JOKE and get a POKE fast slow anyway you like you might be surprised.

The Bones were butchers. We had our own slaughter yards at the former DRAYBONE INN. In the gold-rush days this was where they would change the coach horses for COBB & CO but now it was where we brought the beasts to end their days. Never did a Bones take life lightly. If it was a fish or an ant, then possibly. But a beast's heart tips the scales at five pounds and no matter how many you slaughter you cannot do it without a thought. There was a sort of prayer YOU POOR OLD BUGGER or other stuff more serious I'm sure, and then they cut its throat and caught the blood in the tin bucket to save for sausage. It is a big responsibility to cut up a beast but when it is done it is done and afterwards you go to the Royal and then you come home THE WORSE FOR WEAR I do admit. After that you rest. It is in the Bible re Sunday: you must not work, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. Poor Mum.

I was not to be a butcher, bee-boh bless me. My brother was three inches shorter still he took my true and rightful name. It's a doggie dog world.

Butcher Bones had the opportunity to keep up the family business in Bacchus Marsh but by the time Dad had his stroke Butch had met the GERMAN BACHELOR who gave him postcards to stick on the wall above his bunk. Those cards turned his head. The German Bachelor was permitted to be a teacher at Bacchus Marsh High School where he instructed the children of men who had lost their lives fighting Germans in the war. I don't know why he was not in gaol but my brother came home and said his teacher was a MODERN artist and had attended the so-called BOWER HOUSE. If Dad had known the effect of that Bower House on his oldest son he would have gone up to the school and dropped the German Bachelor like he dropped Mr. Cox after he strapped me for answering incorrectly.

Blue Bones took Coxy out of the room and across the street behind his van. Coxy's feet lifted six inches off the ground. That is all we saw, but knew much more.

It was my brother who inherited the nickname Butcher and that is a joke that anyone can see for it was he who refused the knife and scabbard. From the German Bachelor he got the habit of shaving his skull the DICKHEAD also the postcards of MARK ROTHKO and the idea that ART IS FOR BUTCHERS NOW. He learned from the German Bachelor that art had previously been restricted to palaces where it was viewed behind high gates by Kings and Queens, Dukes, Counts, Barons.

In any case he refused the apron when our poor mother begged him put it on. His father could not speak nor move but it was obvious he would like to clout Butcher across the earhole one last time. Auld Lang Syne. After Dad had his stroke there was no more SLAUGHTER.

It is hard work to slaughter a beast but when it is done it is done.

If you are MAKING ART the labour never ends, no peace, no Sabbath, just eternal churning and cursing and worrying and fretting and there is nothing else to think of but the idiots who buy it or the insects destroying TWO-DIMENSIONAL SPACE.

There is nothing sure or certain it would seem no matter how you shave your skull or boast about your position in AUSTRALIAN ART. One minute you are a NATIONAL TREASURE with a house in Ryde and then you are a has-been buying Dulux with your brother's DISABILITY PENSION.

You are a CONVICTED CRIMINAL a servant living on a Tick and Thistle farm.

The puppy was a cattle dog but there were no beasts for him to work with so he never learned his purpose on the earth. Bless him. I wrestled with him before he passed. Ascended, poor tyke.

He was a licky dog. He liked a toss, a good fall over in the grass.

By dint of playing he got ticks all lined up, dug into the edges of his floppy ears like cars parked outside a Kmart or a Sydney Leagues Club. The day I met him I removed each tick, one by one, God Bless him. My brother heard him barking at the Duck but he was making art and never spared a thought.

Your dog is DEAD Hugh. Butcher Bones gave not a FLYING FUCK about the puppy. He said your dog is dead and then he went off with the woman on the tractor and left me listening to a river the colour of a yellow cur, fucksuck flood, tugging, pulling stones out of the bank, beneath our feet, everything we stand on will be washed away.

4

The phone call I got that night from Dozy Boylan would make me laugh for days to come. "Mate," he said, and I knew that he was hiding in his bathroom because I could hear the echo.

"Mate, she's hitting on me."

He was full of shit, I told him so, although not without affection. "Shut up," he said. "I'm bringing her back to your place now."

I expressed loud amusement and that was rude and stupid and I have no excuse except--my overactive friend was a sixty-yearold farmer with soup in his moustache and trousers curling above his cinched-in belt. She was hitting on him? I snorted into the phone, and when he turned on me soon after I never doubted why.

In an astoundingly short time he came roaring across my cattle grid. I'd had a drink or two already and this was perhaps why it seemed so wildly funny, the audible panic of his off-road lugs rippling across the wooden bridge. By the time I had changed into a clean shirt, the old man had already performed a highspeed Y-turn and when I emerged on the front porch the taillights of his All Terrain Invention were disappearing into the night. I was still smiling as my visitor entered. Her hair was drenched again, flat on her head, dripping down her cheeks, collecting in the lovely well of her clavicle, but she was also smiling and--for a moment anyway--I thought she was about to laugh.