Eddie is no longer welcome to these little conferences. It’s because of the back room. There are many stories about Eddie’s back room. They are all guesses, because Eddie has never invited any of the other dealers to inspect it. However, a recent exhibition in the front room has given rise to a new spate of stories more shocking than anything before. Sixteen photographs of the bodies of murder victims lying on lino, on carpet, on cobblestone, surrounded by such everyday things as children’s toys, policemen’s shoes, and old cigarette packets. There is an ordinariness about the photographs which makes them all the more shocking. This new revelation of Eddie’s has brought his neighbours back into his shop. They haven’t liked what they’ve seen.
Even before this recent event he has been something of a scandal amongst them. They gossip about his women, they guess about his men friends, they shake their heads about the state of his Porsche which is now so battered and rusted that it is almost unrecognizable. And they wonder about the clients, some of them very well known and very wealthy, who come to visit Eddie’s back room and emerge carrying unidentified articles hidden in beer cartons or wrapped in newspaper.
Second-hand dealers are naturally jealous and bitchy about each other but Eddie Rayner somehow acted as a common bond to those in High Street. They said he paid too much at the auctions, that his prices were too high or too low, that his taste was dated, that he had no taste, that he knew nothing about business, that he received stolen goods, that he was a homosexual, that he was involved in witchcraft. All symbols by which they tried, somehow, to make the contents of the back room more concrete.
When Eddie hung the exhibition of murder victims they held a meeting and decided to send a deputation to ask him to remove the photographs at once. Eddie received the deputation with his cool, stoned, beautiful smile and left the photographs exactly where they were.
Incensed, they wrote him a very formal letter wherein they repeated their request in more forceful language. Eddie had the letter framed and hung it in the window.
It was, as Eddie said every day, a very interesting summer.
It was a terrible summer. Fires ringed the city itself, burning fiercely around the outer suburbs. At night the horizon glowed bright red as if the city were being fried on some incredible hot plate. The north wind pushed the fire into suburban streets where the sounds of its flames were picked up by excited men from radio stations and the same north wind brought ashes and still-burning leaves to float down High Street past Eddie’s shop, down Caroline Street, past his flat.
It was Eddie’s summer. Not the summer of white beaches and bronzed bodies, but the summer of burnt houses and blackened bodies, a summer you could believe was the beginning of the end of the world. At night Eddie sat on the balcony with Daphne smoking grass, watching the red glow in the sky and feeling an intensity of emotion that he had rarely experienced when confronted with nature.
2.
Eddie is waiting in Casualty at the Alfred Hospital. He is waiting for an intern called Dean Da Silva. He moves awkwardly from one foot to the other, tall and thin and lonely as a lighthouse.
He is unsure of whether he should have come. It is possibly dangerous, it is certainly indiscreet. Now, with the inquisitive rabbit eyes of the admissions clerk asking him silent questions, he feels that it has certainly been a bad move.
He sits, once more, on the vinyl bench, next to the weeping woman who continues to drop fat tears onto an old copy of Time. He can see the rabbit-eyed clerk saying something to a nurse about him. The nurse has a big arse and a small nose. She wrinkles her nose and Eddie sends her his most sinister sexual look. He is a master of this particular look and the nurse averts her eyes and whispers some cowardly message to the clerk, who waits a few seconds before looking up again.
Eddie Rayner has a face like Captain Hook in the Walt Disney version of Peter Pan & Wendy. His lower lip protrudes slightly, not enough to make him look stupid, but just enough to make him look vaguely debauched. He decorates this remarkable face with the marks of his caste: wire-flamed spectacles, thin drooping moustache that runs in parallel lines down his long chin, and shoulder-length hair of an undecided colour.
His body, however, is his real face. Legs so long and thin and tightly skinned in slinky velvet that he takes on something of the nature of a spider. It is an effect he is not unaware of. Now he stands and moves, once more, from leg to leg, dancing to some silent sensual music while he waits uncertainly for Dean Da Silva, who he has never met before. Dean Da Silva has a severed hand to sell him, or, more correctly, has hinted to a mutual friend that a severed hand might become available.
Dean Da Silva is somewhere in the unmapped area that lies behind the wall behind the counter where the admissions clerk is trying to locate a teddy-bear biscuit. Eddie hears him ask the nurse if she has seen a teddy-bear biscuit.
“Mr Rayner.”
Eddie jumps. He sees a plump, smooth, neatly suited, white-coated, shiny-shoed Dr Dean Da Silva standing in front of him. Dr Dean Da Silva has a smooth, bland, olive-skinned face. He asks Eddie, “What’s the trouble?”
“I’m Eddie Rayner.”
“That I know.”
“Yeah, well I believe my name has been mentioned …”
Eddie always finds these first contacts awkward. He looks at the clerk, who is peering at him over the top of a half-eaten teddy bear. He leads the way to a corner and Da Silva follows, frowning impatiently. Eddie hesitates. Then, with a shrug, he limply sheds his clothing: “It’s about the hand … a hand … you’re selling.”
“I see.” Da Silva’s face registers nothing. In it Eddie reads greed, fear, caution, superciliousness. He takes all his own anxieties and plants them in the empty bed of Da Silva’s face.
“That’s true, I take it, that you are?”
“More or less.”
Eddie smiles. He tries to plant a smile on Da Silva’s face. He encourages it with the serenity of his own smile but Da Silva only nods and waits. So he asks, “It’s OK for you to talk here, about this?”
“It is a little premature. What do you want it for, this… item?”
“I have a … you know … client.”
“A client?” Da Silva picks up the word and examines it critically with stainless-steel tweezers.
“Yes, a client.”
Dean Da Silva is doing his first year as an intern. Already he has found that fine balancing point between reserve and disdain. “It is not a very ethical request.”
“It is not a very ethical offer.” Eddie understands this language. The talk of ethics is really all about money. The less ethical it is the more expensive it will be.
“The offer has not been made. In any case,” Da Silva looks at his watch, a complicated piece of machinery which is probably a graduation present, “in any case, I believe I can contact you through our mutual friend.”
“The thing is a delivery date.”
“I’ll contact you when it becomes available. If,” he consults his graduation present again, “if it does become available.”
Eddie leaves the hospital wishing he hadn’t come. He has fallen victim, once more, to his own fierce impatience. Da Silva would have come to him sooner or later. There was no one else he could have gone to. Then Eddie could have controlled the deal and bought, if not cheaply, at a reasonable price. Now it was all going to be a hassle.