"I am the authenticator," she said. "It is me."

Oh fuck, I thought. Who gives a fuck?

As I ascended the stairs, two steps behind, I could actually feel her heat. When we arrived in the loft where my painting stood waiting, her cheeks were pink, her eyes narrowed. She glanced at the painting briefly, and nodded.

"Now listen," she said. "This is what we're going to do."

So what about my bloody painting? No doubt she saw the Golem but there was no—Well done, Butcher, who else could have ever made such a thing?

Rather she was busy hurling the writ across the room then laying out the Kodak prints like a hand of patience. There was the original Broussard in all its glutinous vanity. The photographs were extremely unsettling in other ways, suggesting an interest Marlene had managed to hide from me completely.

"You took these?"

"You didn't understand I knew what you were doing?"

"But why?"

She was completely without humour, all hot and closed down.

"You said I had to establish the provenance. Well this is how we're going to do it. You're going to paint the Broussard back on top."

I laughed. "Perhaps you'd like to look at it before I cover it!"

"Of course I've looked at it. What do you think I've been thinking about, baby?"

"You peeked."

"Of course I peeked. What did you expect?"

"You like it?"

"It's brilliant, OK? Now you're going to paint this back over your Golem." She slid the photographs around like a pea-andthimble man on lower Broadway. "Not exactly as it was, but close. Trust me. You're going to use the same pigments, exactly."

"I threw them out."

"You what?"

"Hey, calm down baby."

"You what? Where did you throw them?"

"In a skip."

"Skip where?"

"Leroy."

"Leroy and what?" But she already had one foot in a running shoe.

"Leroy and Greenwich."

She tied up the second shoe and she was gone. I watched her from the fire escape. Although I had often seen her set off for exercise, I had never actually seen her run. On another occasion it would have made my fond heart beat faster, for she ran over those cold grey cobbles as across the surface of a hamburger grill, so straight that she might have had a string attached to that little springy tuft of hair on her straw-coloured head. Seeing her then, my lover, my supporter, my tender funny angel, I was frightened by my own complacency.

48

Re: sexual intercourse. They say you DO NOT LOOK AT THE MANTELPIECE when you are poking the fire so I poked her, bless me, what blazing logs, she squealed and HOLLERED as if consumed by BUSHFIRE, crimson edges on the floating leaves, by crikey it was a long time between drinks.

It is true the BARONESS was not TOP HOLE. No kids at Sydney Grammar, etc., if Olivier did not have a job I would not have visited the Rousseau Houses at all. Olivier went to work, taking his bottles of LORAZEPAM and ADDERALL, but no SUBSTANCE could make him happy and he was continually saying bad things about Marlene. When he began to cry at breakfast I knew I had chosen the losing side, forgive me, bless me, I wish I was a nicer man.

I tried to return to Butcher but he would not answer the bell.

I had made UNSUITABLE friends, whose fault was that? They were often artists from the movies and the stage i. e. Vinnie and the Baron. I went to see them with my chair and they encouraged me to put my sausage in the baroness. Too many dead pigs cooked in that apartment. No LILAC and ROSEMARY as in A TOUCH OF CLASS when Butcher would sit out in the car reading ARTnews wishing he could find his long-lost name.

The Baron said he respect me man but he took the money from my back pocket and also Olivier's VALIUM. But I was ON THE JOB, just on the foothills as they say, the tide just turning, seaweed floating, little fishes, bless me. Then Vinnie and the Baron took RABBIT EARS off the TV and used them to jab my bum. Then they went too far. The room was dark and small with six lava lamps and I knocked Vinnie on his bright red little SNOUT so he left a SNAIL TRAIL of black boot polish across the wallpaper as he descended. I should have done the Baron with a BELAYING PIN but not being a character in The Magic Pudding I was forced to use my chair instead. The Baroness, socalled, was screaming like a STUCK PIG in the backyard of a house in STARKVILLE MISSISSIPPI from where she came hoping to be a dancer although only five foot tall. I never hit a woman. I picked up my clothes and it was WALTZING MATILDA TA-TA BYE-BYE.

I had already given the Baroness twenty dollars, enough for all of them to have another 24th Street BLOCK PARTY bless me but I had to walk down twenty flights of stairs-because what the Americans call the ELEVATOR had jammed with people trapped inside shouting and screaming. I had been happy. Now I was not. I wished I was in the Marsh where there were not one single elevator, not even a LIFT, hardly any stairs more than ten steps I refer to the Presbyterian Church, always trouble with the coffins it was called the WATERSLIDE.

On the fifth floor I passed Vinnie's apartment the sign on the door reading FILM MUSICIAN CHELSEA DINER. He was what is called a PACK RAT in VIOLATION of the fire regulations with his FANZINES and BIG BUTT MAGAZINE stacked up along the wall.

On the second floor I had time to dress but my head was sparking and my muscles very bad indeed and I kept on going, still pulling on my new CALVIN KLEIN socks as I hopped out onto Tenth Avenue. I started running with the evening traffic then realised that was wrong. I fitted my shoe and then ran back down Tenth Avenue all the way to the West Side Highway where I took a rest. Blumey, do me sideways as my father would have said.

I could have walked to the Bicker Club I wish I were braver but I'm not. I wanted a holiday from Olivier. He was going through a DIFFICULT PATCH grinding up his ADD medicine and sniffing it up a drinking straw and so his snot was red and clotted and the colour of his eyelids was the purple of a bruise, wild orchid to be polite, skin so weary from the effort to refuse admittance to the light of day. He swam in a sea of ghosts, stung by jellyfish, red welts rising on his hands and neck.

There was also the cassette recorder every night the same song.

FLIES BLOWING ROUND THE DITCH. BLOOD ON

YOUR SADDLE. He had been always so kind to me, had cared for me, paid for my room, had bought me clothes, sat with me, introduced me to so many laundries, and interesting people, Princes and Paupers old chum, but now I was afraid.

My socks were not smooth inside my shoes but I would not stop to fix them and by the time I finally found myself at Mercer Street my feet were bleeding in the dark.

I rang the buzzer.

It replied.

Thank God, thank Jesus, bless us all. I would not have cared if Blue Bones was waiting for me with the flex or razor strop I entered the dark stairs as a wombat returning to the smell of earth and roots.