It may be dumb, she said, but you know I get the feeling I could miss it here.
She was really full of such homey expressions.
Out of our element again in the shop on Darley Street we asked to speak to Perry Quinton. A more or less blonde in a chair for sale with a ledger on her knee and a horrid pencil stub between her teeth called to him without getting up. There was music, a comfort to the myopic. What’s the matter yelled Perry Quinton appearing between two L.P.s he was, it turned out, at the point of sorting into crates at the back of the shop. The woman in the chair coughed. Thelma and Thelma here want to sell you something.
He left the records and invited us to a coffee table spread over with the day’s newspaper and a sort of picnic lunch of cold chips and tobacco pouch. Suppose you’re going to tell me you’ve got a once in a lifetime. You read what they dragged out of the Thames today. No. Look at that. That’s rare as bog butter.
Is that the date already.
Eliza put Sullaman’s whole document down before him. Maybe the idea was not to appear over accommodating. I appreciated the gesture whatever the thought behind it was. We could hardly afford to bugger up again this far down the list so we may as well have come clean with as few extras as possible.
Quinton, in fact, was convivial. But he wouldn’t take much. He made a few scratches on the valuation, offered to pay what we were asking for, fixed a day to come round with the van. We shuffled down Whites Lane to Victoria Street in a low mood. St. John’s with the faceless clock that had stopped chiming the quarters at the behest of the more porous neighbours, a shrinking part of the population, looked somewhat gloomy under the lacklustre sky. Even the French bakery across the road, with which we were now also in charity, had a flatter frontage than it was wont to have. Would have wont to have. Tenses, those are the least of your worries. At least I, a failed millionaire, can say of myself that I am no slave to matter, devouring with supreme indifference the bars of my sensuous cage. Strawberry cream flan. I will even try onomastics. The whish of that familiar sphincter. Usually I found bad weather relaxing. Dodge had a habit of foaming at the mouth in the summertime, pacing the room in a limp cotton two piece, what’s that line of Keats’. Oh, chestnut tree. . But September was over! We’d get nowhere if we went on trying to palm the garbage this way. Eliza agreed. We needed a different tack. We’d both noticed the list finished with Lawson’s.
An auction house.
She must have guessed we’d run into this kind of trouble. Mother always said bad things about auctions. Deceased estates. See what they’ve been reduced to. What if they bargain us down to nothing. That doesn’t happen. You put a reserve on. Do the whole thing at once. If some things don’t move at least we’ll be in a better position. But the auctioneer must take a cut, if nothing else. And all that publicity. It’d be a risk. Eliza considered. If we abandoned the flat beforehand. Collect what we could on the day and quit town.
We went down to George Street and caught a bus to the Crescent.
In an office over furnished in tinted leather at the back of the Lawson’s warehouse, we handed our list to a classical kind of washed up heartthrob who said his name was Paul. He leaned against the desk and held the list out to focus as I weighed the moment privately. A crease through the front of his worsted suit sat more like a scar in his flawless demeanour; the chivalric token of his salt and pepper crew cut implied a whole repertoire of belated habits kept up with the stubborn privilege of experience. Now that was a sentence that didn’t make sense. As he pressed the thumb and forefinger of his free hand between his bloodshot eyes I heard the chair beside me squeak. Eliza had crossed her legs. She raised her reservations.
Paul didn’t miss a beat. Our commission is twenty two percent. We charge a service fee depending on the material, taken together. This is a charming estate, it would generate considerable interest. You can be sure you’d stand to make a tidy profit. It is a respectable venture. You know everything used to be sold by auction, groceries, the lot, down on the wharves. The first discount docks, better than the supermarket. Lawson’s has been there since the beginning. Now we deal in everything including the very best, the truly selective. We sold the Lloyd Jones collection at Rosemont Woollahra just last year. You’d be in safe hands.
When can we bring it all down to you.
Estates like this tend to sell well in situ. Buyers like to see the pieces in their original environment. It stimulates the imagination.
There was little to be gained trying to do with more at that stage what was already getting done with less. We made an appointment at the flat to discuss the procedure and finalise a course of action. He or his boss would be there. In front of the warehouse we ducked under a folding screen as it was lifted into the back of a truck, picked our way between the chairs waiting in farouche clusters on the footpath, then followed the sloping line of Moreton Bay figs and the dirt sillage of the slaughterhouse along the water’s edge in the coming Bicentennial Park to Geh I mean Glebe, the graveyard, the depurated, and the bus to Railway Square, which was quite indirect. From there we walked. What useless torture. I wrote this lying down. I’d start again but me’d derive sooner. Where’s my arca. By the time we got back we were both exhausted. It’s a relief to come home to a kept house. What do they call it, negative space. Empty crannies. Pure arrangement. Purple and green. Night and the nicht absolut gleich. We spread out in the relative void and napped until sundown, when, in what promises to be the last of the series reversions, I discovered the head planted at the foot of Eliza’s bed until my vertigo had dissolved with the neon light pulsating like a bad habit in the curtains, and that striking silence. Must have dragged myself there half asleep. I found Eliza almost hanging off the end of the settee snoring. Some bacon in a pan brought her round, then we went out to see if we could find a place to hole up at auction time. Having talked over Paul’s proposition we had not only agreed that it would be too dangerous to advertise an auction at the flat, we’d stuck to our assumption that the best thing to do, once the business was underway, was clear out altogether. After some trial and error we tentatively booked two beds in a backpacker’s on Victoria Street for the week we hoped we would need them. We began packing our bags.
Almost everything not for sale was soon assembled into one place. What else. The urn. Better empty it first. We should scatter them in the harbour. Could do it from here, save the trip. We put the clean vessel in the china cabinet next to the flower girl. Lucky it isn’t inscribed. Eliza shook her head and grinned far into her cheeks like my own mindless goss. You’re ruthless.
Nothing else we could help was to be left to chance. The night before our appointment Eliza drew a bath. She had found a jar of what appeared almost incredibly to be called Codex bath salts somewhere among the oozing and peeling mound of extinct toiletries we had piled in the sink to get rid of and the stale lavender perfume had already begun creeping into the furthest corner of the flat when I heard a cry, then a dull moan from the bathroom.
I called her name. There was no response, which will appear justifiably noteworthy, given the state of constant communication we always ended up in. It’s not like I wasn’t used to such noises, and not just from the bathroom. But Dodge never needed to be asked twice to expatiate on her keenings, and I must have supposed the niece, according to the famous theory of family resemblance, etc. I went over to the door, knocked and called again. I made a forced entrance. Eliza sat upright in the steam, her body already half turned towards the door, transfixed. Her eyes hardly flickered as I approached and when I put my hand on her arm, not a tendon flinched beneath her puckered skin. Droplets of condensation had collected on the erect hairs of her body, fusing where I touched her and trickling down her arm from under my hand. I forced her down into the bathtub. Her body went suddenly limp in my hands and slid under the water, her knees up. I saw then that she had cut herself, not badly, but where. She didn’t move. As the oily surface calmed, the image of her body merged again, stilled, her thighs, her shimmering pubic mound, the long curve of her stomach, her dugs, slightly floating, her frozen mouth, her eyes, open, the lashes thick with bubbles, her hair wreathing in and out of place. I leant further in. She blinked, the surface shattered and she shot up gasping, pulled at my arm with both hands blindly, then put her head down, coughed out a foaming mouthful of water and caught her breath. I helped her out of the bathtub to the sink and took her towel and wrapped it round her shoulders. She rubbed at the foggy glass before her then turned to me. What happened. But she only shook her head, her shoulders rising a little. Well. At least she no longer seemed to be bleeding. I left her with the towel hanging open in the living room while I dug out a jumper and pair of slacks from my wardrobe. When I came back she seemed to be in better shape. She thanked me, could not suitably have sensed the pelt on my arm bristle from the far side of her wrapping, and dressed herself. For form’s sake I inquired again, I inquire again.