Theft by Peter Carey Page A

breathing life, into the greatest of confusion. The world has ended, thought the fly. My heart was pumping, sloshing blood from one room to the next. Meat and music, two beats per second, I went ploughing down the hill, off the shoulder of the road down the embankment towards the river. What I had seen was my puppy's dry tail, his unlit byre, God save him. It was a shock, bless me, but there he was, his lip curled back, some evil thing had eaten at him. His bottom was half pulled out. God bless him, I pulled his feathery little body up with my whittled stick and I didn't know what then to do. I came up to the road, my new shirt torn by the fence. I was thinking I would get a wheat bag to put him in and take him home, it would be a muddy resting place, tucked up inside the ANCIENT FLOODPLAIN with the river rocks. I should have gone to the co-op they would have accommodated me, but the pub was closer and I went in there. I have my normal corner by the wireless. I didn't put him on the bar, everything hygienic.
    Nothing was usual except Merle brought me my schooner and I set out to drink it, even at that moment wishing to be polite.
    Normally I would make the drink last hours but now I set to finish it immediately. It was that wet-ashtray-stinking time of day, that is, before Kevin from the co-op farts and lights his pipe. At first I had no company excepting a heroin addict with no bum inside his trousers, but then the Guthries entered. There are two Guthries, the bigger one is Evan but his brother is normally of a very decent disposition. I learned the Guthries had been on a fencing contract for three weeks and having just discovered that their cheque had bounced they were not in the best of moods. Gary Guthrie had announced he would take his D24 out to the fence line and destroy the last three weeks of work. He was very bitter.
    As there was no-one but the heroin addict in the pub, and him completely silent, I could not help but hear the conversation.
    Likewise they observed my puppy. Evan did not speak to me but he told Merle I should be reported to the Health Inspector. I loudly asked Merle did she have a
    handy box because anything that would hold a dozen bottles could also hold my dog. She said she had just burned all the cardboard. The heroin addict took his beer out to the footpath.
    Evan then gave the opinion I was a moron for drinking with a dead dog. He was a big bugger, legs like the fence posts he spent his life burying in the earth. I did not answer him, relying on the brother, but the brother was downcast, his mind filled with vengeance such as ripping down three miles of fence and dozing it into the creek. In the hop-sour shadows of the public bar his plans were blooming like PATTERSON'S CURSE. Evan made a remark about the cause of the injury to the puppy's bottom, I turned the other cheek, but when he tried to violently confiscate the body, I was swift as an AZURE KINGFISHER flashing across the mustard yellow skin of the flood. I took his little finger, as crunchy as a dragonfly inside the beak.
    Evan was what you call an OLD FAMILY in the district. His photo was on the wall, a ruckman in the Bellingen XV but now he was forced to descend to the level of the skirting board, howling, holding his FRACTURED METACARPAL against his chest. IN THE WINK OF AN EYE he was brought low.
    Gary moved towards me. I placed the dog carefully on the bar and Evan's protector understood his danger perfectly.
    Listen Num-num, he said, you tell your fucking burglar brother he is no longer welcome in the district.
    Thus I mistakenly believed that it was on account of Evan Guthrie's fractured metacarpal my brother and I would be cast out. I could not bear it. Everything I blamed Butcher Bones for I had now done myself. I proceeded homewards in great distress, a fly, a wasp, an ENEMY OF ART.

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    I cannot blame Hugh--that would be ridiculous--nor can I equate myself with Van Gogh. Just the same I am entitled to make the point that it was