Collected Stories (19 page)

On that day Eddie, with great subtlety and spiderlike certainty, humiliated the minister simply by asking him very specific questions about the photographs he wished to see. He was very, very polite, but his persona had changed, and he talked to the minister with the voice of the world outside. Normally he would have let him leaf through the files, but this was not to be a normal occasion. It was to be something of a duel. It was to be one of those strange occasions when neither the attacker nor the victim could really believe what was happening and thus smiled at each other throughout, each attempting to persuade the other of the supreme ordinariness of the occasion.

But the minister, like a man whose throat has been slashed by a very sharp razor, didn’t discover the damage till he had left the premises, and then only because it was reflected so painfully in the eyes of his mistress.

Daphne was not a beautiful girl, although she had a striking body with very long legs and big tits which she displayed to their most incredible advantage. Her face, however, had a flabbiness, a laxness about it that was not attractive. She had a large, loose mouth and a birdlike nose which lay beneath layers of make-up she applied so skilfully. There was, however, something about her, a combination of recklessness, sensuality, and strength. She had a novelist’s fascination for people, and an intuitive understanding of them. Her life was devoted to the study of people. She gossiped about them, fought
with them, and fucked them and had, in a very few years, collected an incredible array of lovers including a professional gangster, an English footballer, a visiting Shakespearian actor, and a well-known second-hand car dealer.

And during this summer she moved in with Eddie and Eddie was frightened, flattered, and almost in love with her. He felt like a man who’s bought a racing car he’s too frightened to drive fast. A sense of inadequacy overwhelmed him every time he thought about Daphne because Daphne had certain very set ideas about who Eddie was and Eddie wasn’t entirely sure that he could live up to them.

Daphne put great store by her honesty. They had played on that first incredible night, a long, exciting game of emotional strip-tease where they dared each other to be honest about their feelings. It had ended with Eddie declaring his total infatuation with Daphne and Daphne hinting that the feeling might be mutual. Somewhere along the line Eddie felt that he had lost the game, but he continued to play it and was disconcerted to discover that his most honest admissions were not received well. Honest admissions of previous dishonesty did not go down well with Daphne, whose reservations about him began when she sensed weaknesses and secrets she had not suspected. She regarded him curiously, unsure of his authenticity.

Eddie was wondering whether he might now go and see if Daphne was home when he heard the front door of the shop open. He came out to find the smack freaks tilting back dangerously on his bentwood chairs.

Jo-Jo, before the beauties of heroin had led him along more private paths, had once been a friend. But Pete had never been. Pete had mad eyes and a psychotic, derisive smile that struck a chill in Eddie’s heart. He had once seen Pete at work with a broken beer bottle. In the end nothing had happened. Pete had laughed in his victim’s pale face and smashed the bottle at his feet. But it had been a nasty scene and Eddie didn’t like to remember it. Pete had since done time for possession. He looked like someone who had done time, his hair still cut short by Pentridge barbers.

Eddie began to talk about the fires. Pete and Jo-Jo knew nothing about the fires and weren’t interested in them. Jo-Jo told him how they had been driven from their haven in Williamstown by other natural forces. They couldn’t stand it any more — the dead woman sitting in the room with the pen in her hand, forever about to write
something which they would never know about. Jo-Jo hated the blank paper almost as much as he hated the corpse of their landlady, an old woman of seventy or more who refused to decompose in spite of the heat, or because of it. Eddie thought he could see the fear showing through the unshaven whiskers of Jo-Jo’s baby face, but it was probably only malnutrition.

While the landlady sat at the table refusing to decompose, the house she had died in proved to be made of weaker stuff. Huge hunks of plaster, two inches thick and exceptionally dangerous, had begun to fall with frightening regularity. One such fall had ripped down a heavy bookshelf in the living room, another had knocked the bathroom cabinet from its wall and filled the bath with rubble. The dunny was blocked and they couldn’t shit in it.

Pete and Jo-Jo had lived in a small flat adjoining the main house. What had once been a quiet suburban refuge had now come to disturb them so much that they preferred to enter the inner city where they were both known to the cops.

When he heard about the body something inside Eddie went very tight and began to reverberate very fast. A thought so outrageous that it terrified him to consider it. An impossible thought, but the more he was frightened of it the more he knew he had to do it. Not for the money, although the money would be incredible. But … because …

But for now he was relieved that Jo-Jo had brought a subject for conversation along with him. Jo-Jo’s silences were somehow like threats. Now while he talked to them about the old lady he managed not to feel so fucking straight. Smack freaks always made him nervous. They were so private, so exclusive, living in their own dangerous world which he would never have the courage or foolishness to enter.

Even now he felt their curious ambivalence towards him, their envy of his success, and also their contempt for it. Pete didn’t say much. He went off to the windowless dunny where he shot up and splattered blood over the door. He came back rubbing his arm and smiling secretively to Jo-Jo.

Eddie said, “She hasn’t rotted or anything?” He’d never seen a dead body. He wondered about it.

No, she hadn’t even … started … to decompose. She was like
(grimace) perfect. Nothing was happening. That’s what was freaking them.

Eddie wanted to be sure they hadn’t told anyone.

Pete curled his lips. Who in the fuck’re we going to tell? The cops?

Jo-Jo nodded. They were waiting for some … stuff … and they were going to take the truck up to Queensland maybe tomorrow. They were waiting for a … delivery. They were going to Queensland to stay with … relatives.

The “relatives” were somehow a big joke. Eddie grinned with them and then felt stupid when he saw how they looked at him. They’d caught him out. They rubbed his nose in his own fraud. They knew he didn’t know the joke about relatives. Fucking smack freaks, always talking in code.

He told them he wanted to see the old lady and Jo-Jo told him the address although Pete told him not to. Pete was mumbling. Eddie wished they’d get out of his shop but when they asked if they could stay at his place for a night he couldn’t bring himself to say no.

They moved in that night and began to fuck up his record collection as soon as they arrived. Eddie followed after them, putting records back in their plastic sleeves and placing ashtrays in strategic positions while Daphne, bright-eyed, talked to them about Queensland. Eddie didn’t know she’d been to Queensland. But she had. She’d lived there for nearly a year.

“You know Cairns?” she asked Pete.

“Yeah.”

“Cairns is a groove.”

“Holloway Beach.”

“Oh Christ yeah, Holloway Beach.” Pete exchanged some look with Jo-Jo that could have meant anything.

Eddie nearly asked, what’s Holloway Beach, but he stopped himself. He’d never seen Pete hold a human conversation with anyone. He would rather that it wasn’t happening here.

“You ever go to Martin’s caravan?”

“Oh yes,” Daphne smiled, a very large warm smile.

“He got busted.”

“Yeah I know.” Daphne smiled like she knew a lot about Martin
and his caravan. It was a quite explicit smile which made her look a little soft and sentimental round the eyes.

Pete nodded, “You knew Martin.” He laughed.

Eddie sat on the floor and grinned good-naturedly. He remembered Daphne telling him once how she’d lived in a caravan.

“Martin was a good guy,” said Jo-Jo. “When he got busted his mum flew up from Lismore and bailed him out. You ever meet his mum?”

“Yeah,” Daphne giggled. “He took me down to Lismore once to see his mum.”

“The Golden Wattle Café …” grinned Pete.

“Yeah, The Golden Wattle Café, and she looked me up and down and everything. It wasn’t very cool. I had to sleep in a room out the back. That’s when I pissed off from Martin. His mum came in one morning and said, Daphne what do you think of Martin? I don’t know what she wanted me to say. But I said, well Mrs Clements he’s certainly a good fuck.”

“What’d she do?”

“
She
didn’t do anything. She just pretended she hadn’t heard. I got a bus.”

Eddie waited for them to start talking about drugs. Sooner or later it’d come up. He hadn’t told her they were smack freaks. Now, sometime, the hypodermic would come out and no one needed to go and hide in the dunny to do the job. And then. And then, Daphne would want to try it. Anything once, she’d say, anything once. And leave Eddie standing like a shag on a rock.

They made him feel so fucking straight. He would have loved to have kicked them out but that would have made him feel even more straight. And when they began to shit in his red plastic rubbish bin he didn’t complain.

Eddie went down to the shop the next morning to make a few private phone calls and found Detective Sergeant Mulligan from the vice squad waiting for him. Eddie knew Detective Sergeant Mulligan from the days when he’d managed the Brown Paper Book Shop in the Metropole Arcade. When he saw Mulligan he knew what had happened: his High Street friends had lodged an official complaint.

Eddie parked the Porsche behind Mulligan’s unmarked Holden
and waved to the dapper man in the suit and suede waistcoat who stood waiting patiently outside the shop. Mulligan looked more like a used-car salesman than a cop. He had a seedy handsome face and favoured big cufflinks and interesting tie-pins.

He was going to be busted. He didn’t mind. Finally it’d be good for business.

“You’re a dirty bastard,” said Mulligan. “This is Constable Fisher.”

Fisher looked like a farmer. He gazed solemnly at Eddie like a child looking at a dangerous snake in the zoo.

Eddie opened the shop for them and they wandered around getting a better look at the photographs. “You know who this is?” Mulligan tapped a man lying on what seemed to be a kitchen floor.

“No.”

“Name’s Hogan. His wife’s in Fairlea now, the silly bitch. You mind telling me where you got these?”

“From the North Melbourne tip.”

“
You
found them at the North Melbourne tip. Just wandering through were you?”

“A friend.”

“You’re a bit sick in the head, Eddie.”

“Do you think?” Eddie smiled. He found it ironic that he was being busted for possessing the art of the police force.

Constable Fisher watched one, then the other, like a man watching a game of tennis.

“Corrupt and deprave.”

“I’m what?”

“These,” Mulligan indicated the photographs, “are likely to corrupt and deprave.” He grinned. “So I’ll have to give you a receipt.”

Eddie thumped his forehead with his fist. “They’ve got their clothes on.”

“How many photographs?”

Fisher counted them twice. “Sixteen.”

“Listen,” said Eddie, “there’s no pricks, no genitals, they’ve got their clothes on.”

“Sixteen … photo … graphs,” wrote Mulligan, “size?”

Fisher guessed: “Ten by eight?”

“They’ve got their clothes on. They’re just dead people with their clothes on.”

But the truth of the matter is that Mulligan had a better idea of what Eddie was up to than Eddie did himself. He recognized him for what he was: a pornographer of death. He gave Eddie the receipt and went off with the photographs under his arm.

Eddie spent the rest of the day trying to find a lawyer, an embalmer, and a man who made crates.

He phoned the lawyer and made an appointment. Then he contacted the crate maker and gave him the dimensions of the crate he wanted made. He allowed the dimensions on the generous side because Jo-Jo and Pete couldn’t seem to agree on whether their landlady had been large or small.

The embalmer was a little more difficult. He arranged one meeting at the Clare Castle Hotel in Carlton. It was not a satisfactory meeting. Eddie said he had to have a piss and crept out the back door and didn’t go back.

He’d have to solve that problem later. He contacted friends at St Vincent’s hospital but nobody knew anybody.

This job was going to have its difficulties.

Preoccupied with processes and techniques, he didn’t have much time to think about the old lady herself but her presence dominated his day and made him not unpleasantly tense. His nerve ends tingled and he clenched and unclenched his long fingers in an ecstasy of anticipation.

He planned to take Daphne with him. He had a very clear idea of the power politics of their personal relationship and he knew that the visit to the house would swing the balance once more his way, bring it back to where it had been on the first afternoon when he had humiliated the cabinet minister.

But when the morning finally came Pete and Jo-Jo presented him with the red plastic rubbish bin they’d been shitting in.

“What’s this?”

Pete stared at him incredulously. “It’s for the pig.”

“The cops?”

“Not the cops, the fucking pig. We got a pig out at Williamstown. You give it to the pig to eat.”

Eddie nodded slowly. They were doing to him what he had done to
the cabinet minister. He put the plastic bin of shit in the passenger seat of the Porsche and was forced to leave Daphne behind with the freaks.

When Eddie left the city he was still busy planning the complicated details of what would surely be his masterpiece. The embalmer had fucked things up a bit. Still, that could be fixed. Somehow it’d all work. And then, Jesus Christ, what an auction he’d have.