He guns the Porsche down Punt Road towards Caroline Street and then, on second thought, does a U-turn and heads back towards High Street so he can drive past the shop. As he comes up High Street he can see them: Jim Kenny and Alex Christopolous and someone he doesn’t know. They’re peering into his shop reading the letter that they themselves have signed. As he cruises past the shop he toots the horn, hoping they’ll jump. Instead they peer mildly in his direction and he watches them in the rear-vision mirror as they retreat slowly to Jim Kenny’s shop across the road.
He drops back into second and does a screaming wheelie that brings him to the front of Kenny’s shop, then another wheelie that brings him to his own front door. Now he has no idea what he should do next.
He could go back to the flat and see if Daphne is there. But if she isn’t there it’ll be worse. Better imagine she is there and go and check out the stocks in the back room.
He opens the door to the back room. There is nothing really to check out. He knows the extent of his wealth but enjoys, once more, looking at it with the assumed eyes of a stranger, saying to himself: you have never been here before, you wander down a street and browse in a shop, by mistake you open this door and find yourself in this room, this room that the world has always denied you. And there: the gold filling from Belsen. The phial of blood said to have once pulsed through Marilyn Monroe’s veins. The large file of genuine obscene letters and suicide notes obtained through his contact in the police department. Likewise the police photographs, recording details of crimes large and small, dead bodies and empty ashtrays set together in silver bromide. Many, many other items. A stained shirt with a foul smell which was certainly worn by Guevara in Bolivia, sold by a traitor to a policeman to a tourist to a woman collecting examples of folk weaving, and finally to Eddie. Less seriously there are a variety of trusses in glass cases with metal plaques attributing their ownership to important historical figures. These last are amusing fakes and are not expensive.
It is cool and dark here in the back room with its black walls and careful spotlights. Sharing the imaginary stranger’s delight Eddie wishes, once more, that the back room was not a back room. The exhibition of murder victims in the front room is a flirtation with his fantasy of declaring the back room open for general viewing. It is a calculated experiment.
The pine furniture and bentwood chairs bore him to death. But the things in this back room thrill him beyond measure, some strange mixture of fear and disgust and something else sends his nerve ends tingling. He is not an analytical man and has never wondered deeply about his love for these items. When challenged he has defended himself as a liberator, a man who has opened a door and let fresh air into a room musty with guilt. It is not a brilliant defence.
It was here, in this room where he is most sure of himself, that he first met Daphne. At that time she was the mistress of a cabinet minister who had a public reputation for Protestant austerity. The cabinet minister was an old customer of Eddie’s, a collector of strange photographs. Doubtless he could have obtained the same photographs through the police department but it would have been a risky business and he valued Eddie’s reputation for discretion. His particular interest was sadistic rape and these photographs, for some reason even Eddie wasn’t sure of, were the most difficult to obtain.
And it was here that Daphne saw Eddie, standing in his kingdom like the devil himself, talking in measured professional tones to the minister who, in his excitement and embarrassment, was stammering like a schoolboy.
On that day Eddie, with great subtlety and spiderlike certainty, humiliated the minister simply by asking him very specific questions about the photographs he wished to see. He was very, very polite, but his persona had changed, and he talked to the minister with the voice of the world outside. Normally he would have let him leaf through the files, but this was not to be a normal occasion. It was to be something of a duel. It was to be one of those strange occasions when neither the attacker nor the victim could really believe what was happening and thus smiled at each other throughout, each attempting to persuade the other of the supreme ordinariness of the occasion.
But the minister, like a man whose throat has been slashed by a very sharp razor, didn’t discover the damage till he had left the premises, and then only because it was reflected so painfully in the eyes of his mistress.
Daphne was not a beautiful girl, although she had a striking body with very long legs and big tits which she displayed to their most incredible advantage. Her face, however, had a flabbiness, a laxness about it that was not attractive. She had a large, loose mouth and a birdlike nose which lay beneath layers of make-up she applied so skilfully. There was, however, something about her, a combination of recklessness, sensuality, and strength. She had a novelist’s fascination for people, and an intuitive understanding of them. Her life was devoted to the study of people. She gossiped about them, fought with them, and fucked them and had, in a very few years, collected an incredible array of lovers including a professional gangster, an English footballer, a visiting Shakespearian actor, and a well-known second-hand car dealer.
And during this summer she moved in with Eddie and Eddie was frightened, flattered, and almost in love with her. He felt like a man who’s bought a racing car he’s too frightened to drive fast. A sense of inadequacy overwhelmed him every time he thought about Daphne because Daphne had certain very set ideas about who Eddie was and Eddie wasn’t entirely sure that he could live up to them.
Daphne put great store by her honesty. They had played on that first incredible night, a long, exciting game of emotional strip-tease where they dared each other to be honest about their feelings. It had ended with Eddie declaring his total infatuation with Daphne and Daphne hinting that the feeling might be mutual. Somewhere along the line Eddie felt that he had lost the game, but he continued to play it and was disconcerted to discover that his most honest admissions were not received well. Honest admissions of previous dishonesty did not go down well with Daphne, whose reservations about him began when she sensed weaknesses and secrets she had not suspected. She regarded him curiously, unsure of his authenticity.
Eddie was wondering whether he might now go and see if Daphne was home when he heard the front door of the shop open. He came out to find the smack freaks tilting back dangerously on his bentwood chairs.
Jo-Jo, before the beauties of heroin had led him along more private paths, had once been a friend. But Pete had never been. Pete had mad eyes and a psychotic, derisive smile that struck a chill in Eddie’s heart. He had once seen Pete at work with a broken beer bottle. In the end nothing had happened. Pete had laughed in his victim’s pale face and smashed the bottle at his feet. But it had been a nasty scene and Eddie didn’t like to remember it. Pete had since done time for possession. He looked like someone who had done time, his hair still cut short by Pentridge barbers.
Eddie began to talk about the fires. Pete and Jo-Jo knew nothing about the fires and weren’t interested in them. Jo-Jo told him how they had been driven from their haven in Williamstown by other natural forces. They couldn’t stand it any more — the dead woman sitting in the room with the pen in her hand, forever about to write something which they would never know about. Jo-Jo hated the blank paper almost as much as he hated the corpse of their landlady, an old woman of seventy or more who refused to decompose in spite of the heat, or because of it. Eddie thought he could see the fear showing through the unshaven whiskers of Jo-Jo’s baby face, but it was probably only malnutrition.
While the landlady sat at the table refusing to decompose, the house she had died in proved to be made of weaker stuff. Huge hunks of plaster, two inches thick and exceptionally dangerous, had begun to fall with frightening regularity. One such fall had ripped down a heavy bookshelf in the living room, another had knocked the bathroom cabinet from its wall and filled the bath with rubble. The dunny was blocked and they couldn’t shit in it.