Collected Stories (18 page)

“My name is Homer,” says the blind man, “and you read what I told Odysseus to write and you read it because I permitted you to. This will be the last time for you. The other times were mistakes. But this business in Troy is what I needed you for, I need you to fall from the horse,” the poet says, “for the irony.”

Homer leads Echion to a place by the door where he ties his hands with leather thongs and binds them to a post. Echion doesn’t protest. He feels like an ox in a slaughter yard. The blind man ties on a gag to stop him bellowing.

When the night came his companions returned to the horse to sleep. They had been told some story about Echion and no one, not even
Diomedes, looked his way. It was as if he were invisible, already dead and buried in the pages of Homer’s verse.

When they had all drunk their wine Odysseus explained the nature of the battle to be fought the next day. He said nothing of how the wooden horse was to be moved to Troy. He mentioned “allies” and once talked of a “powerful friend”. The men’s minds, accustomed to living on the waves of Homer’s fevers, accepted all this without question and retired to bed early to be ready for tomorrow’s battle.

Echion lay in the dark and waited for Diomedes, but when he didn’t come to release him he began to work quietly on his leather bindings, gnawing on them with his broken teeth until his gums bled and his mouth was full of the sticky juices of his veins.

Around him the horse groaned and creaked like a ship weathering a heavy sea. Outside he fancied he could hear voices and hammering and the crash of masonry. His jaws ached and his arms twitched and it wasn’t until early morning that his bindings were finally undone.

He crept stiffly to the door and lowered the great trapdoor. The rope ladder flopped down in the dark. His arms were stiff and his hands so cramped that he could barely clench them. His head was strange from lack of sleep and as he lowered himself onto the first rung he was overcome with giddiness.

His foot slipped on the second rung, and he fell.

In the grey hours before dawn a giant wooden horse could be seen enclosed by the walls of Troy. The first Greeks who descended the rope ladder found Echion already there. He was lying on the dusty ground with his neck broken.

Echion hadn’t died immediately. He had written some words in the fine clay dust with a bleeding finger. The words were as follows:

“KILL THE PIG TYRANT HOMER WHO OPPRESSES US ALL.”

But the words were erased by the blind feet of his companions as the whole incident concerning Echion was later erased by Homer, who no longer found the incident interesting enough to tell.

The front room of Eddie Rayner’s shop is like many other shops in High Street. It’s busy on Saturdays and quiet for the rest of the week. The shops around him sell the same things he sells: stripped pine furniture, bentwood chairs, old advertising signs, blue and white china, and odds and ends like butter churns and stained-glass windows. The prices are high and the work isn’t too hard. On weekdays the second-hand dealers stand in the street, chatting about prices and the pieces they’ve picked up at the auctions.

Eddie is no longer welcome to these little conferences. It’s because of the back room. There are many stories about Eddie’s back room. They are all guesses, because Eddie has never invited any of the other dealers to inspect it. However, a recent exhibition in the front room has given rise to a new spate of stories more shocking than anything before. Sixteen photographs of the bodies of murder victims lying on lino, on carpet, on cobblestone, surrounded by such everyday things as children’s toys, policemen’s shoes, and old cigarette packets. There is an ordinariness about the photographs which makes them all the more shocking. This new revelation of Eddie’s has brought his neighbours back into his shop. They haven’t liked what they’ve seen.

Even before this recent event he has been something of a scandal amongst them. They gossip about his women, they guess about his men friends, they shake their heads about the state of his Porsche which is now so battered and rusted that it is almost unrecognizable. And they wonder about the clients, some of them very well known and very wealthy, who come to visit Eddie’s back room and emerge carrying unidentified articles hidden in beer cartons or wrapped in newspaper.

Second-hand dealers are naturally jealous and bitchy about each other but Eddie Rayner somehow acted as a common bond to those in High Street. They said he paid too much at the auctions, that his
prices were too high or too low, that his taste was dated, that he had no taste, that he knew nothing about business, that he received stolen goods, that he was a homosexual, that he was involved in witchcraft. All symbols by which they tried, somehow, to make the contents of the back room more concrete.

When Eddie hung the exhibition of murder victims they held a meeting and decided to send a deputation to ask him to remove the photographs at once. Eddie received the deputation with his cool, stoned, beautiful smile and left the photographs exactly where they were.

Incensed, they wrote him a very formal letter wherein they repeated their request in more forceful language. Eddie had the letter framed and hung it in the window.

It was, as Eddie said every day, a very interesting summer.

It was a terrible summer. Fires ringed the city itself, burning fiercely around the outer suburbs. At night the horizon glowed bright red as if the city were being fried on some incredible hot plate. The north wind pushed the fire into suburban streets where the sounds of its flames were picked up by excited men from radio stations and the same north wind brought ashes and still-burning leaves to float down High Street past Eddie’s shop, down Caroline Street, past his flat.

It was Eddie’s summer. Not the summer of white beaches and bronzed bodies, but the summer of burnt houses and blackened bodies, a summer you could believe was the beginning of the end of the world. At night Eddie sat on the balcony with Daphne smoking grass, watching the red glow in the sky and feeling an intensity of emotion that he had rarely experienced when confronted with nature.

Eddie is waiting in Casualty at the Alfred Hospital. He is waiting for an intern called Dean Da Silva. He moves awkwardly from one foot to the other, tall and thin and lonely as a lighthouse.

He is unsure of whether he should have come. It is possibly dangerous, it is certainly indiscreet. Now, with the inquisitive rabbit eyes of the admissions clerk asking him silent questions, he feels that it has certainly been a bad move.

He sits, once more, on the vinyl bench, next to the weeping
woman who continues to drop fat tears onto an old copy of
Time.
He can see the rabbit-eyed clerk saying something to a nurse about him. The nurse has a big arse and a small nose. She wrinkles her nose and Eddie sends her his most sinister sexual look. He is a master of this particular look and the nurse averts her eyes and whispers some cowardly message to the clerk, who waits a few seconds before looking up again.

Eddie Rayner has a face like Captain Hook in the Walt Disney version of
Peter Pan & Wendy.
His lower lip protrudes slightly, not enough to make him look stupid, but just enough to make him look vaguely debauched. He decorates this remarkable face with the marks of his caste: wire-flamed spectacles, thin drooping moustache that runs in parallel lines down his long chin, and shoulder-length hair of an undecided colour.

His body, however, is his real face. Legs so long and thin and tightly skinned in slinky velvet that he takes on something of the nature of a spider. It is an effect he is not unaware of. Now he stands and moves, once more, from leg to leg, dancing to some silent sensual music while he waits uncertainly for Dean Da Silva, who he has never met before. Dean Da Silva has a severed hand to sell him, or, more correctly, has hinted to a mutual friend that a severed hand might become available.

Dean Da Silva is somewhere in the unmapped area that lies behind the wall behind the counter where the admissions clerk is trying to locate a teddy-bear biscuit. Eddie hears him ask the nurse if she has seen a teddy-bear biscuit.

“Mr Rayner.”

Eddie jumps. He sees a plump, smooth, neatly suited, white-coated, shiny-shoed Dr Dean Da Silva standing in front of him. Dr Dean Da Silva has a smooth, bland, olive-skinned face. He asks Eddie, “What’s the trouble?”

“I’m Eddie Rayner.”

“That I know.”

“Yeah, well I believe my name has been mentioned …”

Eddie always finds these first contacts awkward. He looks at the clerk, who is peering at him over the top of a half-eaten teddy bear. He leads the way to a corner and Da Silva follows, frowning impatiently. Eddie hesitates. Then, with a shrug, he limply sheds his clothing: “It’s about the hand … a hand … you’re selling.”

“I see.” Da Silva’s face registers nothing. In it Eddie reads greed, fear, caution, superciliousness. He takes all his own anxieties and plants them in the empty bed of Da Silva’s face.

“That’s true, I take it, that you are?”

“More or less.”

Eddie smiles. He tries to plant a smile on Da Silva’s face. He encourages it with the serenity of his own smile but Da Silva only nods and waits. So he asks, “It’s OK for you to talk here, about this?”

“It is a little premature. What do you want it for, this… item?”

“I have a … you know … client.”

“A client?” Da Silva picks up the word and examines it critically with stainless-steel tweezers.

“Yes, a client.”

Dean Da Silva is doing his first year as an intern. Already he has found that fine balancing point between reserve and disdain. “It is not a very ethical request.”

“It is not a very ethical offer.” Eddie understands this language. The talk of ethics is really all about money. The less ethical it is the more expensive it will be.

“The offer has not been made. In any case,” Da Silva looks at his watch, a complicated piece of machinery which is probably a graduation present, “in any case, I believe I can contact you through our mutual friend.”

“The thing is a delivery date.”

“I’ll contact you when it becomes available. If,” he consults his graduation present again, “if it does become available.”

Eddie leaves the hospital wishing he hadn’t come. He has fallen victim, once more, to his own fierce impatience. Da Silva would have come to him sooner or later. There was no one else he could have gone to. Then Eddie could have controlled the deal and bought, if not cheaply, at a reasonable price. Now it was all going to be a hassle.

He guns the Porsche down Punt Road towards Caroline Street and then, on second thought, does a U-turn and heads back towards High Street so he can drive past the shop. As he comes up High Street he can see them: Jim Kenny and Alex Christopolous and someone he doesn’t know. They’re peering into his shop reading the letter that they themselves have signed. As he cruises past the shop he toots the horn, hoping they’ll jump. Instead they peer mildly in his
direction and he watches them in the rear-vision mirror as they retreat slowly to Jim Kenny’s shop across the road.

He drops back into second and does a screaming wheelie that brings him to the front of Kenny’s shop, then another wheelie that brings him to his own front door. Now he has no idea what he should do next.

He could go back to the flat and see if Daphne is there. But if she isn’t there it’ll be worse. Better imagine she is there and go and check out the stocks in the back room.

He opens the door to the back room. There is nothing really to check out. He knows the extent of his wealth but enjoys, once more, looking at it with the assumed eyes of a stranger, saying to himself: you have never been here before, you wander down a street and browse in a shop, by mistake you open this door and find yourself in this room, this room that the world has always denied you. And there: the gold filling from Belsen. The phial of blood said to have once pulsed through Marilyn Monroe’s veins. The large file of genuine obscene letters and suicide notes obtained through his contact in the police department. Likewise the police photographs, recording details of crimes large and small, dead bodies and empty ashtrays set together in silver bromide. Many, many other items. A stained shirt with a foul smell which was certainly worn by Guevara in Bolivia, sold by a traitor to a policeman to a tourist to a woman collecting examples of folk weaving, and finally to Eddie. Less seriously there are a variety of trusses in glass cases with metal plaques attributing their ownership to important historical figures. These last are amusing fakes and are not expensive.

It is cool and dark here in the back room with its black walls and careful spotlights. Sharing the imaginary stranger’s delight Eddie wishes, once more, that the back room was not a back room. The exhibition of murder victims in the front room is a flirtation with his fantasy of declaring the back room open for general viewing. It is a calculated experiment.

The pine furniture and bentwood chairs bore him to death. But the things in this back room thrill him beyond measure, some strange mixture of fear and disgust and something else sends his nerve ends tingling. He is not an analytical man and has never wondered deeply about his love for these items. When challenged he has defended
himself as a liberator, a man who has opened a door and let fresh air into a room musty with guilt. It is not a brilliant defence.

It was here, in this room where he is most sure of himself, that he first met Daphne. At that time she was the mistress of a cabinet minister who had a public reputation for Protestant austerity. The cabinet minister was an old customer of Eddie’s, a collector of strange photographs. Doubtless he could have obtained the same photographs through the police department but it would have been a risky business and he valued Eddie’s reputation for discretion. His particular interest was sadistic rape and these photographs, for some reason even Eddie wasn’t sure of, were the most difficult to obtain.

And it was here that Daphne saw Eddie, standing in his kingdom like the devil himself, talking in measured professional tones to the minister who, in his excitement and embarrassment, was stammering like a schoolboy.