his hand. He went around the property with a surveyor's chain, measuring the distance from the river bank to the septic tank. That's how a small town gets rid of you. They declare your house in contravention of the regulations. Why would I give a shit? It wasn't mine.
Money very short. I cooked baked vegetables until even I was sick of them, and Hugh--God bless him--did not once complain. But all this time no-one actually told us why we were now hated. We were fighting the wrong war, for the wrong reasons, and it was not until eleven days after the broken finger that the police came rattling across the cattle grid, not the locals but two plainclothes fellows with a driver from Coffs Harbour.
Seeing the car, Hugh fled arrest, charging headfirst across the floodplain and I did not find him until dark when, having heard the police car finally depart, he emerged, wild-eyed and muddy, from a wombat hole.
9
The Art Police are cops, that's all, and they will come and call on you as unexpectedly as Jehovah's Witnesses and for reasons just as stupid. However, on that soupy day in Bellingen I was ignorant of the breed and I mistakenly assumed my visitors were typical.
There was an older man of fifty or so, tall and heavily built like an old-style walloper but with an odd almost lackadaisical gait and a big square head always turning this way and that as if he were trying to spot the Eiffel bloody Tower. He wore a ratty Fair Isle sweater and smoked a stinky pipe from which he continually blew globs of tar and spit onto my pasture. This Detective Ewbank exuded the sloppy good-naturedness of a packing clerk two weeks from retirement whilst, at the same time, having some weird aerial connection with his brainylooking partner.
The younger man, Amberstreet, was not much more than twenty-five but he had already carved on his face a deep set of V-shaped creases which pointed like diagram arrows towards his pale grey eyes. Barry, his mate called him; his mouth was thin, and downturned, and perhaps because he was so stooped and spectacularly unmuscled, he made me imagine that the Art Police must be a very fucking unusual caste indeed, and in the same way that Jean-Paul's beautiful wife might suggest hidden qualities in her very plain husband, Amberstreet's weird bird-like looks gave a value to his mate's pipe and Fair Isle sweater that could not have been more inflated, not even by Sotheby's.
These cops caught me flat-footed, why wouldn't they? They didn't say they were from Sydney. (I thought they had come from Bellingen, for Hugh. Instead they wished to inspect my work and I took them over to the shed to see it. Yes, I had obtained the paint and canvas by what you might call false pretences, so what
would they do? Hang me? Yes, I had sold about a ton of fertiliser to Mrs. Dyson and Jean-Paul, I guessed, had got upset. The rich are like that, overcome by panic attacks at the thought they are possibly being used. God, what sort of animal would do that to them?
I walked Ewbank and Amberstreet to the shed as if they were Macquarie Street collectors on a studio visit, and I must say Ewbank was very bloody amiable at that stage, even if he did inform me that I had a record or, as he put it, was "known to the police". Otherwise he was full of questions about the veggie garden and the Brahmin cattle Dozy had agisted on my roadside paddock. Amberstreet, meanwhile, was very quiet, but even this was in no way threatening. As Ewbank pointed out to me, his mate seemed mostly concerned about the danger of getting cow shit on his new Doc Martens.
The shed was a shed, the back third a loading ramp filled with Mrs. Dyson's hay bales, the front two-thirds earth-floored. Here I parked the tractor, stored the chainsaw, the brush cutter and what garden tools I had not left out in the weather. Here too I had rolled my nine canvases around long cardboard tubes. They leaned neatly against the wall, just like the rake, the shovel, the scythe and so on. Of
Money very short. I cooked baked vegetables until even I was sick of them, and Hugh--God bless him--did not once complain. But all this time no-one actually told us why we were now hated. We were fighting the wrong war, for the wrong reasons, and it was not until eleven days after the broken finger that the police came rattling across the cattle grid, not the locals but two plainclothes fellows with a driver from Coffs Harbour.
Seeing the car, Hugh fled arrest, charging headfirst across the floodplain and I did not find him until dark when, having heard the police car finally depart, he emerged, wild-eyed and muddy, from a wombat hole.
9
The Art Police are cops, that's all, and they will come and call on you as unexpectedly as Jehovah's Witnesses and for reasons just as stupid. However, on that soupy day in Bellingen I was ignorant of the breed and I mistakenly assumed my visitors were typical.
There was an older man of fifty or so, tall and heavily built like an old-style walloper but with an odd almost lackadaisical gait and a big square head always turning this way and that as if he were trying to spot the Eiffel bloody Tower. He wore a ratty Fair Isle sweater and smoked a stinky pipe from which he continually blew globs of tar and spit onto my pasture. This Detective Ewbank exuded the sloppy good-naturedness of a packing clerk two weeks from retirement whilst, at the same time, having some weird aerial connection with his brainylooking partner.
The younger man, Amberstreet, was not much more than twenty-five but he had already carved on his face a deep set of V-shaped creases which pointed like diagram arrows towards his pale grey eyes. Barry, his mate called him; his mouth was thin, and downturned, and perhaps because he was so stooped and spectacularly unmuscled, he made me imagine that the Art Police must be a very fucking unusual caste indeed, and in the same way that Jean-Paul's beautiful wife might suggest hidden qualities in her very plain husband, Amberstreet's weird bird-like looks gave a value to his mate's pipe and Fair Isle sweater that could not have been more inflated, not even by Sotheby's.
These cops caught me flat-footed, why wouldn't they? They didn't say they were from Sydney. (I thought they had come from Bellingen, for Hugh. Instead they wished to inspect my work and I took them over to the shed to see it. Yes, I had obtained the paint and canvas by what you might call false pretences, so what
would they do? Hang me? Yes, I had sold about a ton of fertiliser to Mrs. Dyson and Jean-Paul, I guessed, had got upset. The rich are like that, overcome by panic attacks at the thought they are possibly being used. God, what sort of animal would do that to them?
I walked Ewbank and Amberstreet to the shed as if they were Macquarie Street collectors on a studio visit, and I must say Ewbank was very bloody amiable at that stage, even if he did inform me that I had a record or, as he put it, was "known to the police". Otherwise he was full of questions about the veggie garden and the Brahmin cattle Dozy had agisted on my roadside paddock. Amberstreet, meanwhile, was very quiet, but even this was in no way threatening. As Ewbank pointed out to me, his mate seemed mostly concerned about the danger of getting cow shit on his new Doc Martens.
The shed was a shed, the back third a loading ramp filled with Mrs. Dyson's hay bales, the front two-thirds earth-floored. Here I parked the tractor, stored the chainsaw, the brush cutter and what garden tools I had not left out in the weather. Here too I had rolled my nine canvases around long cardboard tubes. They leaned neatly against the wall, just like the rake, the shovel, the scythe and so on. Of
Similar Books
