Theft by Peter Carey

not here," she said. She had an awful lot of braid and silver and piercing bright blue eyes.
    "Then how about Detective Ewbank." "He passed away."
    My God, the last time I saw the moron he had my painting. "Oh no," I cried. "No!"
    Her eyes moistened and she lay her hand upon my sleeve. "He was up in Coffs Harbour," she said.
    "What happened?"
    "He had a heart attack, I believe."
    But what about my canvas? It could still be in Coffs Harbour District Hospital. If the crate had dropped, it may have split and now it could be--worse than the hospital--in some coastal charters office at Coffs Harbour airport, all crunched up and folded, like a take-out menu in the back of an office drawer.
    "Detective Amberstreet has gone to the funeral," she said, her nostrils flaring with sympathy. "Out at La Perouse.", If not for the intimacy of the nostrils, I might have asked her for the denomination of the deceased. This would certainly have helped because that cemetery, at La Perouse is bloody endless, and when Hugh and I had driven through the Presbyterians and edged along the Jews we got ourselves jammed in by a factory wall which made the northern border, and our only way down was along a narrow road through a nest of Chinese mausoleums.
    Below us lay the Catholics and, down at the very bottom, where the cemetery is bordered by the Chinese market gardens along the creek, I spotted the remnants of a single funeral party. We had Buckley's chance but I edged the ute out of the grass and parked. Hugh took out his chair. I set off down towards the burial.
    I was about halfway down the hill, sticking mainly to the narrow bitumen, when I heard a great holler behind me, and looking back I saw Hugh pointing excitedly at--I didn't know at which religious territory--but in the general direction of the airport and Botany Bay container terminal.
    Had he spotted Barry Amberstreet?
    I hesitated, naturally. But then Hugh and his chair were off down the hill, jumping graves, falling, rolling, up again, through the Presbyterians and Methodists, charging towards the shadow of the Bunnerong power station. There was a solitary figure in a suit down almost to the bottom edge. He looked thin enough to be our man. I was wearing my leather slips-ons which were useless for this business, but Hugh was wearing sandshoes and he ran with great certainty, his head pushed forward, his left arm pumping as if he were prisoner at the Oxford Gym.
    Behind me, the cars were leaving the Catholic funeral and what did I think I was doing anyway? Why could I not wait to see Amberstreet tomorrow? Because I could not fucking bear to have my painting missing. Because it was my last hope. Because if this work was in Coffs Harbour I would be on the next plane.
    Because I was a child, a driven, anxious fretful fool, and now I was running parallel with my huge demented brother, linked and mirrored like a double bloody helix, and by now, having lost my poofter shoes, I was on the very lower levels of the cemetery, down with the Anabaptists and Jehovah's Witnesses, and I might as well have been a dog running for a stick, for I could no longer see the fellow in the suit, nothing but the final chain-link fence which I now watched Hugh climb, wrenching the chair brutally when its leg got snagged. It was the

beach that got me, made my eyes sting, my throat hurt, the sort of beach, the comparison with other beaches--the memory of Hugh holding my tiny boy in the pearly foam of Whale Beach surf. Now he stomped out onto that polluted sand at La Per-fucking-rouse and there he removed his Kmart shirt and, with his flesh all a creamy rosy ruin, sat to watch the rusty containers on the distant wharf. Behind, as in an amphitheatre, the dead pressed against us in their serried ranks and I jammed my finger through the wire and wept.

    14

    Baldy was in a rage with the sand from La Perouse and, as always, it was personal i. e. mountains had been born and broken--bloody rock, bloody tides, fish were dead,