Theft: A Love Story

  You know who I am? the Butcher asked but it was clear the young fellow had not been reading five-year-old issues of ART & AUSTRALIA. Well never mind, he said, you’ll bloody know me in a moment. Hugh, he ordered, get the drill.

  Yes sir, no sir, but just the same I wished my father Blue Bones could see me as I sought the LETHAL drill and screwdriver attachment, displaying the nous to return with a thirty-foot extension cord to reach the 240V outlets. Quick as a wink, I had it all set up. Nobody told me do not touch the switches.

  The young fellow was not so pleased to see the drill and soon we were the object of a HISSY FIT but nothing could stop the Butcher where his ART was concerned and soon the drill was screaming and he had the screws out of his crate and we were rolling out his canvas a dreadful blasphemy the WORK OF A MADMAN in my opinion.

  I expected the Nancy Boy to have CONNIPTIONS but instead he folded his arms across his chest and cocked his handsome head and a little smile made its presence known at the corner of his mouth.

  Oh Michael BOONE, he said. Of course.

  That’s right, said the Butcher, but he didn’t puff himself. Instead his big chin shivered and his eyes went smaller than before. He was out of style. Even I saw that. I helped him roll up his canvas and he could not wait to make an exit. The Nancy Boy must have felt sorry for him as he stopped and picked up all the screws we had abandoned in our rush.

  Transparencies are really so much better, he said as he dropped the screws into my palm.

  You would think the Butcher would be destroyed but he bought 12 bottles of wine @ $40 per and in the morning he had got his puff back. What he needed was an ARMANI suit and that night when I came home with my chair he was looking like a bouncer at a strip club. I did not ask him how much money we had remaining but he immediately decided we would go to an OPENING together and he advised me to eat and drink what was on the trays because our funds were running low and we would not be having dinner from then on. It turned out that there was nothing on offer but Kraft cheese and pickled gherkins and I knew I was going to be badly BOUND UP if this continued. Afterwards he must have had an urgent need to NETWORK because he took me back to Bathurst Street and locked me in FOR SAFETY, bless me. I walked up and down the stairs a great deal and for a long time I sat on my chair just inside the door to the street. On one occasion someone attempted to enter and I successfully pretended to be an angry TIE DOG.

  Early next morning Butcher was back and we once more loaded up the ute and when he had shaved his head again we set off like ELECTROLUX MEN to present our wares. The Armani suit now smelled like an East Melbourne brewery and I was in no way surprised that my brother required the HAIR OF THE DOG before he faced the galleries. It was a dreadful business for him, day after day without relent, and there was no SMOKE-OH, no free time to wander off down George Street and set up my chair in the shade beneath the Cahill Expressway. Some of the proprietors were nice to Butcher and once we got taken to a Chinese restaurant but many of the younger generation could not give a FLYING FUCK about Michael Boone and by the third day he was DRUNK AS A SKUNK from brekkie onwards and that was how he came to crash the ute into a Jaguar parked in the lane beside Watters Gallery. As always he could admit no fault and when he had reversed twice and crashed twice more, he sped off down the dead-end lane, bouncing against all sorts of bins and cars leaving behind an entire bumper bar which might easily have been used in evidence against him.

  That was a Wednesday night. There were no openings and he bought a flagon of McWILLIAMS CLARET @ $8.95 and then took me to the Hare Krishna Temple in Darlinghurst where even my brother looked a giant of AUSTRALIAN RULES. There was not a steak or chop or even a decent butcher’s sausage. Eating their horrible foreign food I thought I would go mad myself to see what we had come to. I resolved to take my chair and set off to the Marsh again, and I might have done it if I could have found the road. Sometimes I am sorry I didn’t do it. It would have been a better life by far if I was not afraid.

  13

  The moment you think you’ve got the bugger happy, he is in the shit—there’s been a brawl, an accident, frottage, larceny, arson, a misunderstanding about removing goldfish from a bowl. Every new town or street or city is a problem which was why, in Bathurst Street, I was very pleased to discover, in the middle of Arthur Murray’s former dance floor, a lopsided, dingy, bronze, battered, twenty-dollar steel chair, no longer much to sit on, but useful for more than hiding dope or changing lightbulbs.

  “Bloody chair,” Hugh said. “Bless me.” And took possession with his big square arse.

  My brother had been raised on a chair, had spent his life after third grade on a chair, rocking back and forward in front of the shop. So when he stood and folded up his treasure, I didn’t have to ask him where he planned to go. He was so fucking happy, I had to smile.

  Outside was a decent width of footpath, and although close to the crowds of George Street, it was quiet enough for what Hugh craved, the chance to politely watch the world go by. Soon I set him up, potato chips on one side, Coca-Cola on the other, and as I headed back inside he turned to me, wrinkling his nose up towards squinting eyes, a sign that he was either very happy or about to fart. Beauty, I thought, that’s done. But of course it wasn’t done at all and half an hour later, coming down to check on him, I found him missing.

  I wish I could say this shit gets easier with practice. It does not help that he’s ham-armed, slope-shouldered, wildly strong—each time I think he’s dead, drowned, run over, picked up by sickohs in a van with sliding doors. And there is not a thing that I can do but wait, so all that afternoon while I was unsuccessfully trying to organise a line of credit, I ran up and down the stairs like some hairy reincarnation of our mother waiting for Blue Bones to turn up from the football in Geelong. Each time she thought him dead, declared us orphans, and each time he came in piss-faced drunk, and we boys helped him down the hall, all sixteen stone of him. “Come on Butcher, come on young’un, be a good fellow and go down to the Chinaman’s for me.” At the Chinaman’s they could not see my mother’s face, so it was easy for them to love my dad.

  In similar fashion I now waited for my brother and when I heard him hammering on the door I became the living fury in my mother’s eyes.

  “You stupid cunt, where have you been?”

  Well, he and his chair had been Waltzing Matilda. This sounds good but it was crap—he liked to wander, but he could not be trusted with a key and he would have gone ape shit if I was not there when he finally returned. That’s how I began to take him and his damn chair around the galleries, but never mind, there were problems worse than Hugh. For instance, it was soon made very clear to me that I would never get a show without my two most persuasive pieces; one of these had been stolen by the cops, the other by Jean-Paul. Easy. You would think, Just borrow them. But Jean-Paul would not cooperate because—oh dearie me—he could no longer trust me.

  “I will have it photographed,” he said, “if that would help.”

  “I’ll need a ten by eight.”

  “Relax, my friend.”

  You prick, I thought, don’t tell me to relax, you fucking thief.

  “You shall have your ten by eight.”

  When he says “shall” and “shan’t” he is pretending that he and his old man never came from Antwerp on a ten-pound migrant ticket, that they never built shearing sheds and ate cockatoos for their dinner. So where did all this “shall” and “shan’t” shit come from? Suddenly he sounded like old Lady Wilson hiring her shearers—Did you shar har last yar? No? Then you shan’t shar har this yar.

  I asked Jean-Paul: “When shall I have my ten by eight?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said, his eyes narrowing.

  I waited a day and called his office and of course no-one had heard of any ten by eight and as for Jean-Paul he was now in Adelaide addressing a conference on Surgically Removing the Assets of the Elderly and Infirm.

  Three times I had visited the police, four times I called the number on De
tective Amberstreet’s card but he was a Sydney cop and so he never phoned me back. So, fuck that—I threw Hugh’s chair in the back of the ute and we headed over to that nasty bunker the police have built in Darlinghurst. It was now late March but still very hot, so I already had the chips and Coca-Cola and I had planned setting up the chair in the shade across the road by the Oxford Gym.

  But Hugh was frightened of police and when he saw the bunker he would not leave the vehicle: he locked the door and clamped his hands across his fleshy wattley ears.

  “You silly cunt,” I said, “you’ll cook yourself.”

  In reply he farted. What a little flower he was.

  I entered police headquarters intending only to track down Amberstreet but I quickly understood that if I continued walking no bugger would prevent me and that is how, less than ten minutes later, I emerged from the lift on the third floor and saw the word “ART” nailed to the wall. Of all of the thousands of people who have seen that horrible building, which one of them could have imagined this particular crucifixion? Beside was a double doorway opening into a large windowless space at the rear of which was an iron cage of the type you might make for monkeys in a zoo. Here were stored crates, canvases, about thirty-two bronze casts of those Rodins which are always the subject of lawsuits and seem to breed like rabbits in the spring. The door of this cage was now ajar but my inevitable next step was interrupted.

  “Who are you?” It was a tiny uniformed woman with the most magnificent long straight nose.

  I asked for Amberstreet.

  “Detective Amberstreet is not here,” she said. She had an awful lot of braid and silver and piercing bright blue eyes.

  “Then how about Detective Ewbank.”

  “He passed away.”

  My God, the last time I saw the moron he had my painting.

  “Oh no,” I cried. “No!”

  Her eyes moistened and she lay her hand upon my sleeve. “He was up in Coffs Harbour,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  “He had a heart attack, I believe.”

  But what about my canvas? It could still be in Coffs Harbour District Hospital. If the crate had dropped, it may have split and now it could be—worse than the hospital—in some Coastal Charters office at Coffs Harbour airport, all crunched up and folded, like a take-out menu in the back of an office drawer.

  “Detective Amberstreet has gone to the funeral,” she said, her nostrils flaring with sympathy. “Out at La Perouse.”

  If not for the intimacy of the nostrils, I might have asked her for the denomination of the deceased. This would certainly have helped because that cemetery at La Perouse is bloody endless, and when Hugh and I had driven through the Presbyterians and edged along the Jews we got ourselves jammed in by a factory wall which made the northern border, and our only way down was along a narrow road through a nest of Chinese mausoleums. Below us lay the Catholics and, down at the very bottom, where the cemetery is bordered by the Chinese market gardens along the creek, I spotted the remnants of a single funeral party We had Buckley’s chance but I edged the ute out of the grass and parked. Hugh took out his chair. I set off down towards the burial.

  I was about halfway down the hill, sticking mainly to the narrow bitumen, when I heard a great holler behind me, and looking back I saw Hugh pointing excitedly at—I didn’t know at which religious territory—but in the general direction of the airport and Botany Bay Container Terminal.

  Had he spotted Barry Amberstreet?

  I hesitated, naturally. But then Hugh and his chair were off down the hill, jumping graves, falling, rolling, up again, through the Presbyterians and Methodists, charging towards the shadow of the Bunnerong power station. There was a solitary figure in a suit down almost to the bottom edge. He looked thin enough to be our man. I was wearing my leather slips-ons which were useless for this business, but Hugh was wearing sandshoes and he ran with great certainty, his head pushed forward, his left arm pumping as if he were prisoner at the Oxford Gym.

  Behind me, the cars were leaving the Catholic funeral and what did I think I was doing anyway? Why could I not wait to see Amberstreet tomorrow? Because I could not fucking bear to have my painting missing. Because it was my last hope. Because if this work was in Coffs Harbour I would be on the next plane. Because I was a child, a driven, anxious fretful fool, and now I was running parallel with my huge demented brother, linked and mirrored like a double bloody helix, and by now, having lost my poofter shoes, I was on the very lower levels of the cemetery, down with the Anabaptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I might as well have been a dog running for a stick, for I could no longer see the fellow in the suit, nothing but the final chain-link fence which I now watched Hugh climb, wrenching the chair brutally when its leg got snagged. It was the beach that got me, made my eyes sting, my throat hurt, the sort of beach, the comparison with other beaches—the memory of Hugh holding my tiny boy in the pearly foam of Whale Beach surf. Now he stomped out onto that polluted sand at La Per-fucking-rouse and there he removed his Kmart shirt and, with his flesh all a creamy rosy ruin, sat to watch the rusty containers on the distant wharf. Behind, as in an amphitheatre, the dead pressed against us in their serried ranks and I jammed my finger through the wire and wept.

  14

  Baldy was in a rage with the sand from La Perouse and, as always, it was personal i.e. mountains had been born and broken—bloody rock, bloody tides, fish were dead, shells hollow, corals snapped like bones—therefore the grains of sand now lying on the seat of the Holden ute must have traveled through eternity with the SOLE INTENTION of irritating his pimply arse. Our father Blue Bones was much the same and we brothers cowered before his fury when TRACKED-IN SAND was detected on the carpets of the VAUXHALL CRESTA and then there were such threats of whippings with razor strops, electric flex, greenhide belts, God save us, he had that mouth, cruel as a cut across his skin. As a boy I could never understand why nice clean sand would cause such terror in my dad’s bloodshot eyes, but I had never seen an hourglass and did not know that I would die. None shall be spared, and when my father’s hour was come then the eternal sand-filled wind blew inside his guts and ripped him raw, God forgive him for his sins. He could never know peace in life or even death, never understood what it might be to become a grain of sand, falling whispering with the grace of multitudes, through the fingers of the Lord.

  At Bathurst Street my brother claimed I had TRACKED IN SAND to the former Arthur Murray Studio and then he showed SIGNS OF INSTABILITY like our mother, poor Mum, always sweeping, always tidy in case called. IT IS I LORD. Oblivion ooh wop bop da. Butcher’s eyes were bright with blame so I plied the broom as he demanded and when he hurled the pot-smoker’s camera crashing to the lane below, I knew not to question him for I understood he had been unhinged by his rejections and he could not bear it anymore. Soon he finished his $8.95 McWilliams Cask and announced we were going out to eat. He was sufficiently cashed-up so might have shouted me a real mixed grill, kidneys, bacon, chops, steak, pork sausage, but he was saving his funds for IMMORTALITY and I knew he was about to put us both through the agony of an OPENING NIGHT and it was with a heavy heart, bless me, that I observed his little blame-filled eyes, watched him sponge his suit, smelled the wet-hop perfume, like a public bar, bless me, it made me think of Bellingen.

  Come on, young’un, said he, and bring your bloody chair.

  I wished to refuse but did not have the guts, blumey God knows what injury I may still cause to him. We drove to the Australian Galleries in Paddington with not a word between us. The cat had my brother’s tongue and would not release it, not even when I farted BETTER OUT THAN IN as our father liked to say, also—FARTING HORSE NEVER TIRES. He was in a grim bright state when we entered the VENUE, all toothpaste and hair oil with a single red capillary showing on his nose. He was the formerly famous Michael Boone and he located the FEATURED ARTIST, and drank three glasses of Tasmanian Pinot Noir while he praised him bare-faced. This painting a bloody ripper! That one a fucki
ng beauty! Only I could recognise the secret rage, the ROILING SEA between the Butcher’s fangs and fur. The recipient of his false witness was a PRETTY BOY with long curling blonde hair and he ignorantly bathed in Butcher’s scorn, and I could not bear it, bless me, I was afraid for them both, for myself as well, because if I lost my brother I was lost myself. On account of my previous MISUNDERSTANDING no-one would have me anymore. I attempted to divert my brother but he had gone dangerously sweaty in the pouches beneath his wine-dark eyes so I took my chair from the region of the pinot noir and I sat in the alcove where not even the waiters would look for me. I was so hungry but even more afraid, so I sat rocking on my chair, back and forth, the human clock, all the blood sloshing squirting circling and I took deep breaths causing it to OXYGENATE and turn a bright, bright crimson, and if you had cut my throat I would have hit the wall, bless me. What a mess I would have made. Such were my thoughts when a woman’s voice spoke. She said: No singing God-save-the-queen to men with colds in the head.

  This was a QUOTATION from the great book by the terrible painter Norman Lindsay.

  Don’t you know me?

  The speaker was pretty and very slender, what is called a GAMINE with tiny boobies and a silk dress you could have fitted in your pocket with your hanky.

  How is your brother?

  Bless me, it was Marlene Leibovitz although she looked very different from the time her rented car was bogged. She was now more of the ARTISTIC TYPE with her hair done in the SLEPT-IN STYLE but just the same she was very friendly and she squatted at my side and let me share her plate of snacks. I suppose I must have seemed HALF-WITTED to be so pleased when I knew Butcher had blamed her for stealing the painting and ruining our lives. I told her we had trouble with the police and had been forced to leave the district with nothing but the paintings and what materials would fit into the ute. She lay her hand upon my strong arm and she said her life had also been destroyed by those exact same events. Her husband could not take the strain of the responsibility and from the time of the theft they were ESTRANGED.