I did not share her opinions but I did not care because it was very nice to be with her. She made Butcher quiet, soothing that MAD RAGE which had been brought about by the work of the pretty-boy painter and the general problem of being OUT OF STYLE. She went for the plum pancakes and THREE FORKS and when I was completely STONKERED we all drove back to Bathurst Street, although not before the Butcher bought two bottles of D'ARENBERG DEAD ARM SHIRAZ @ $53 per, the unit price being an indication that he planned to make her like him more than me. Such is life. Who knows what he remembers about the night where his entire life began to change? All he ever mentions is that we left my chair behind in the restaurant and we had to go back and explain to the waiter it was legally our property. It is not my fault that there are so many aggressive drunks and criminals in Darlinghurst at that hour of night.

Finally we came up the stairs at Bathurst Street, not even pausing on the first floor but heading on up to the second. The lights of the dancing school were better than we might have hoped and Butcher had previously banked and aimed them at the longest wall and now, in spite of the injury suffered when retrieving my chair, he was able to assist me when tacking the canvases in place. One for the money, two for the show. He was a bloody bower bird displaying snail shells and dead spiders to the female, puffing up his feathers to make himself look larger, running back and forwards, bless me chook-chook-chook.

Until now Mrs. Leibovitz had been VULNERABLE, but now her eyes lost all sign of feeling and she revealed what is known as a professional character standing in the EXACT SAME way as Detective Amberstreet on a later date, supporting her left elbow with her right hand while the left cupped her chin and covered the evidence of her pretty mouth. Surely this was not the result my brother wanted?

She did not say a word, preferring to nod when she had seen enough, and at her bidding we two large men rolled up one canvas and tacked up the next one. Bless me, I was not sure what was happening. No-one touched the Dead Arm Shiraz, although it had been offered with the shells and spiders.

Then she said, I can get you a show in Tokyo.

Bless me.

This was not what I had expected. Had he? I cannot guess. If I had been him I would have set off hollering and running around the room, THE BUTCHER'S DANCE by Arthur Murray. But his Boone-eyes stayed dark and tiny like my father when considering the possibility a well-priced beast might be hiding a NOTIFIABLE DISEASE.

Where?

The male's mouth was just a slit, a contrast to the female's which was parted in surprise. The windows were open to the street and we could hear shouting, perhaps the WESTIES had come to beat up the SOFT FACES as they were called. The woman scratched her bare brown upper arm and asked him, Did he know Tokyo? He treated her as if she was trying to pick his pocket.

How can I get a show in Tokyo? His face was an egg or river stone, no place to crack it open.

At Mitsukoshi, she said, smiling and frowning to a very large degree, her forehead corrugated like low tide—sand worm in secret panic beneath the feet.

Mitsukoshi?

The department store.

A department store, says he, as if it might be disgusting to buy a pair of socks or that he had never lived fifteen years behind a bloody shop which had been his heritage and obligation.

Marlene could not have known we were in danger of a sermon based on ideas put up his batty by the German Bachelor. Just the same she CUT HIM OFF AT THE PASS, firstly uncorking the fifty-dollar shiraz and pouring it into a coffee cup, then explaining to my brother, as he walked up and down like a horse on a lunging rope, that all the most important shows in Japan were in department stores. I could not see why she would tolerate him but of course this is the LIBERTY given those of so-called genius that they are permitted to act like TOTAL MORONS. Marlene Leibovitz persisted, finally producing from her purse a notebook inside which she had stuffed papers big and small amongst them a card with silver on its edge. On this card were three important things. The first was the name of the Mitsukoshi department store and the second was the angry Duco-dripper Jackson Pollock but it was not until a CROWN PRINCESS was revealed that my brother finally WHOA UP.

Well fuck me dead, said Butcher.

It is a big bloody mystery to me that a man so dead set against QUEEN ELIZABETH OF ENGLAND could get himself so rigid about the crown princess of Japan, but soon he had a great STIFFY, THROBBING LIKE A SOCK FULL OF GRASSHOPPERS. And who am I to understand his secret squirming brain? All I know is that Butcher saw the silver Japanese characters on the back and was therefore so completely converted to Mitsukoshi that he could never change his mind, not even when he discovered the Jackson Pollock exhibition had been opened by a TELEVISION PERSONALITY.

From that night began his enthusiasm for uncooked fish of every kind and as a result of eating TUNA RIGHT OFF THE BOAT he was infested with a parasite producing bloating, cramping, diarrhea and unusual bowel movements. This was not the least of the excitements in the months ahead.

17

There is always Hugh, and his chair and his chicken-and-lettuce sandwich, and you cannot take a slash or park the truck without considering him, and it has been like that since—to be extremely fucking precise—his twentieth birthday which he celebrated by trying to drown his father in the bath. Blue Bones was a shocking bastard, as strong and slippery as an old goanna, and he flipped Slow Bones on his back and, aided no doubt by all the dreadful bawling, half-filled his lungs with soapy water before Mum broke the door down with the kindling axe. If you relied on Hugh for family history you would never hear this incident, for he loved his daddy to the point of giddiness, and we all four acted a loud and violent melodrama on the day I arrived to take him down to Melbourne.

Our poor mother. She had been a pretty girl.

Hugh and I were thenceforth joined at the fucking hip and I will not depress myself by remembering the living arrangements in those years when I was half mad with rage and disappointment to find myself reduced to cutting beef for William Angliss in a factory out at Williamstown, and my brother often suffered badly, being abandoned in cars at night, pubs past closing time, in the care of car thieves, junkies, Monash undergraduates. By the time I met the Plaintiff, as she now prefers to be known, he would not tolerate being left with others and there was no choice but that he continue in my so-called care.

I had bought the house in East Ryde when my auction prices were riding high, i.e. in 1973 the Art Gallery of New South Wales had finally condescended to give me a retrospective. I cannot tell you how beautiful the street was then, when there was still light industry, before Jean-Paul, before the pool houses, the BMWs. The land sloped towards the north and the garden was a wild and living thing with secret daffodils and cherry tomatoes tangled in the grass, also twisted geriatric apple trees, Ribston Pippin, Laxton's Fortune, varieties since eliminated by product managers, chain-store buyers, all greater pests than the Codling Moth.

The Plaintiff was tall and as graceful as a cat, and I was as vain and foolish as a twenty-eight-year-old could be, plodding through the popping lights of cameras with a bloody tigress on my arm. Who would not have envied me? She was gorgeous as a movie star, honey-coloured, her genetic history a continual puzzle although people would often say she was a queen. From the first night we met my hop-sour house began spilling such perfumes—cumin, cardamom, basil, leeks softening in my battered frying pan. It was summer and the garden was drunk with fermented fruit and new-cut grass and in a humble corner of my studio she set up a table where she drew very small images of imaginary natural objects, completely original, like no-one else, and these she slowly carved into blocks of wood and printed. I loved their scale, their seeming modesty and would get into an awful fury to see them overlooked in favour of the big bragging bullshit of Sydney art. And yes, I was in love with her, and fought for her, perhaps embarrassingly.