My Life as a Fake Read online

  How relieved I was to see the familiar police station and then, diagonally across Jalan Campbell, the bicycle shop, its roller door wide open, the clear white light spilling out into the smoky night. There was no-one inside! That surely meant that the women were at the station, just as Chubb had said. I threaded my way through the tangled bicycles, calling out hello as I ascended the stairs. I heard a thump. Chubb, I thought.

  Upstairs there was sufficient light to reveal Mrs Lim lying on the floor with Tina kneeling at her side. The girl turned towards me and in the glow from the window I could see that her luscious top lip was split open like a burst sausage, blood washing her teeth, black as betel.

  I don’t know what I said but I certainly believed, even before understanding what had happened, that I was to blame.

  Mrs Lim tried to sit up, then groaned and fell back to the floor. She too had been cut and her blouse was dark with blood. The floor around them was shining, black and wet.

  What had Chubb done? What horror was I responsible for? I got no answer. They stared up at me as if at the enemy eyes narrowed.

  I asked again and cannot remember how I put it, but the girl’s answer was in the rough Australian accent she had inherited from McCorkle: The mongrel-lah. He ran away.

  It was Mr Chubb who did this to you?

  Mrs Lim gasped and pointed towards the window.

  But the window was barred. No-one could have escaped through it.

  She continued pointing and then I saw, beneath the sill, what I took to be a pile of abandoned boots and clothes.

  They kill him, Mrs Lim said. We could not stop them. They try to kill us too.

  I cannot describe the confusion of my mind as it attempted to explain what my eyes were seeing. The last thing my brain would tell me was the truth. From the lane outside came an old man’s voice—‘paper lama, paper lama’—and I walked to the window. On the floor below was the pile of clothes. The light was slightly blue, making Chubb’s shoes appear almost purple. There was something else: I imagined it was a dog. I don’t know what I thought exactly, but I know I reached down and felt meat, as raw as in a Chow Kit butcher’s shop. Then I saw the soft burr of that beautifully shaped monk’s head, and I knew at last what it must be. Sparagmos. This was the horror at the poem’s end. The man I had spent the afternoon with was now dismembered, his warm blood on my hands and spreading like honey across the floor.

  Suddenly I was kneeling and then Slater was there, his big hands underneath my arms, pulling me to my feet.

  Come, he said, we must go.

  I decided he was afraid that the attacker would return. As he pulled me towards the stairs I insisted that the women come with us. When they would not budge I thought they wished to bravely guard the book.

  Come, I said, bring the book with you.

  Book gone, said Mrs Lim. Stole the book.

  On her hard, square face was a sheen of satisfaction I could not understand.

  Come, said Slater. Micks, darling, you must not stay.

  The Chinese woman’s face was so strange. By now it was clear, even to me, that she did not wish me well.

  Micks, do as I say. Come now.

  Confused as a drunk who dimly understands she has given offence, I permitted him to escort me down the stairs and out into Jalan Campbell and across to the police station, so conveniently close.

  We were treated with the utmost seriousness and taken immediately to a kind of conference room. Then I was shown to a separate, smaller office. I was given a towel and bowl and only then did I fully appreciate that my hands and arms were bright with blood. As I washed I brooded that the women were alone and unprotected. I recall very little, only that I was extremely cold and they gave me a blanket and took my statement. No-one removed the bowl. Whenever the door opened or closed, the surface of the red liquid shook. It was Chubb, his substance, the blood that had coursed through his beating heart.

  When they told me I could go, John Slater was waiting by the door. He gave the policemen back their blanket and wrapped his jacket round my shoulders. Everything I had hoped for was lost, gone, dead.

  Back at the Merlin, a wedding party was spilling into the foyer. I badly wanted a drink but Slater bundled me into the lift. There were three men in the car with us—Japanese, I think.

  Slater got me inside his room which, unlike mine, turned out to be very well provisioned. He poured me a large single-malt but not even its distinctive peaty flavour could mask the taste of blood.

  Slater sat on the bed opposite me. Micks, darling, he said quietly, do you understand what has happened?

  Poor Christopher is dead. The book is stolen.

  You understand the women are lying?

  No, I saw him. He’s dead.

  Yes, but didn’t you see the mad triumph on their faces?

  They were in shock, I said. They’d been attacked.

  They’re lying, darling. About bloody everything. Didn’t you see the book? It was sitting on the shelf where it always is.

  He fetched a big tub of cold cream and a box of tissues and, without asking permission, began to clean my face. I had no idea of my condition, blood all across my cheeks and ears. God knows what I had done.

  You have cold cream, John?

  Shush.

  He cleaned my neck and arms, and then took a cotton bud to my blood-lined nails. It had taken me years to realise that, for all his faults, John Slater was truly very kind.

  I was sure you were going to notice the book, he said. You’re a lucky girl not to have.

  How am I possibly lucky?

  Darling, don’t you understand yet? They killed him.

  Then who attacked them?

  They did it to themselves.

  I did howl then, most horribly, and the dear man held me and did everything he could to give me comfort.

  Though I thought I now understood exactly what had happened, it would take me an awfully long time to accept the full extent of the horror that had occurred in the shrine on Jalan Campbell, and even back in London I could not grasp it firmly, not least because I had no sensible explanation of McCorkle himself.

  The result, of course, was that I was left with a wound that would not heal no matter how I tended it, and tend it I did, obsessively, until even Annabelle was forced to tell me I had become a bore. I expelled her for her honesty. I did not care. I was now above such scrapes and hurts for I had turned into one of those ’sad friends of Truth Milton describes in his Areopagitica: ‘such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangl’d body of Osiris.’ The body of truth, he meant, dismembered and scattered—in Greek, sparagmos.

  I now commenced to travel compulsively ‘up and down gathering up limb by limb’ of that horrid puzzle. It was this quest that sent me journeying out to Australia at a time when I could scarcely afford the bus fare to Old Church Street, and at the end of all this ridiculous expense and anguish the only ‘fact’ I could be certain of was that McCorkle had a physical existence and it was separate from Chubb’s.

  This I would not accept and so I laboured madly on, stubborn as a goat, writing pestering letters, borrowing money, imperilling The Modern Review, getting sucked deeper and deeper into the morass until, one dark winter’s afternoon on Oxford Street, I suffered what is politely called a nervous breakdown.

  It was certainly not John Slater’s idea that I should return to K.L., but when this was deemed important for my convalescence he behaved like the dear friend he had become, and this time he did not slip away to Kuala Kangsar. No-one, certainly not the genius doctors at the Tavistock Clinic, had ever considered the possibility that the two murderers might be exactly where I had seen them last and that the sight of them would not be therapeutic in the least. By 1985 Jalan Campbell’s name had been changed to Jalan Dang Wangi, but the bicycle business was just as it had looked thirteen years before and the old black vise still sat where Chubb had left it, on the floor inside the door. Seeing that ugly device did rather wrench my heart
and I would have paid any price to have the dear old puritan alive, with his wry sweet smile and his sniffy snobbery, his desperation to tell the story of his sad, unlikely life.

  One can assume that McCorkle’s manuscript remained in the shrine upstairs, although by then it seemed as foul to me as the disgusting giant orchid with which Mrs Lim had first attracted the poet’s attention.

  Tina was by now in her thirties, and if she did not appear to recognise the tourists at the door, the scars made her perfectly identifiable to us. We remained there only a moment, until the Chinese woman looked up from her abacus. John doffed his hat and she, for her part, raised her upper lip to display the lethal edges of her small white crooked teeth.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Australian readers will have noted certain connections between Bob McCorkle and Ern Malley. Indeed, McCorkle’s early verse is lifted word for word from Malley’s ‘The Darkening Ecliptic,’ first published in the literary magazine Angry Penguins in 1944.

  Of course, Malley’s poetry and biography constituted a hoax conceived by two talented anti-modernists, Harold Stewart and James McAuley These conservatives wrote not only the verse I have borrowed for Bob McCorkle but also the wonderful letters they attributed to Malley’s equally fictitious sister, which fabrications also appear in My Life as a Fake, though in much-abbreviated form.

  The editor of Angry Penguins, Max Harris, having already been humiliated, was then called into court on the same charges faced by my fictional David Weiss, and I have drawn from transcripts of his bizarre trial.

  ‘I still believe in Ern Malley’ Harris wrote years later.

  ‘I don’t mean that as a piece of smart talk. I mean it quite simply. I know that Ern Malley was not a real person, but a personality invented in order to hoax me. I was offered not only the poems of this mythical Ern Malley, but also his life, his ideas, his love, his disease, and his death…. Most of you probably didn’t think about the story of Ern Malley’s life. It got lost in the explosive revelation of the hoax. In the holocaust of argument and policemen, meaning versus nonsense, it was not likely you closed your eyes and tried to conjure up such a person as the mythical Ern Malley … a garage mechanic suffering from the onset of Grave’s Disease, with a solitary postcard of Durer’s ‘Innsbruck’ on his bedroom wall. Of someone knowing he is going to die young, in a world of war and death, and seeing the streets and the children with the eyes of the already dead.

  ‘A pretty fancy. It can have no meaning for you. But I believed in Ern Malley. In all simplicity and faith I believed such a person existed, and I believed it for many months before the newspapers threw their banner headline at me. For me Ern Malley embodies the true sorrow and pathos of our time. One had felt that somewhere in the streets of every city was an Ern Malley … a living person, alone, outside literary cliques, outside print, dying, outside humanity but of it….

  ‘As I imagined him Ern Malley had something of the soft staring brilliance of Franz Kafka; something of Rilke’s anguished solitude; something of Wilfred Owen’s angry fatalism. And I believe he really walked down Princess Street somewhere in Melbourne….

  ‘I can still close my eyes and conjure up such a person in our streets. A young person. A person without the protection of the world that comes from living in it. A man outside.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Four of those I wish to thank are poets whose names are not unfamiliar, while another, Sir Frank Swettenham, was a colonial administrator now of dubious repute. During the three years it took to write this novel I have been touched by the generosity of family and friends, and those so close it is often hard to tell the difference—Maria Aitken, Carol Davidson, Peter Best, Gary Fisketjon, Michael Heyward, Paul Kane, Alec Marsh, Patrick McGrath, Lucy Neave, Sharon Olds, Robert Polito, Jon Riley, Deborah Rogers, Mona Simpson, Alison Summers, Betsy Sussler, and Binky Urban. Two gifted Malaysian writers, Rehman Rashid and Kee Thuan Chye, were selfless in the assistance they offered one who had come to them as a stranger. If this book contains errors of locution or history, the fault is mine, the stranger’s. Another Malaysian writer, Dr. M. Shanmughalingam, not only offered advice and friendship but also allowed me to read his unfinished autobiography, which proved invaluable to my understanding of the Tamils who are such an important part of Malay society. In Kuala Lumpur, Victor Chin provided me with an intense tutorial in shophouse culture. Khoo Salma Nasution, the author of Streets of George Town, Penang, was a powerhouse; on my third visit to that almost perfect island, she found me an entire lifetime’s worth of places and memories which have made their way, sometimes coded, mostly transmuted, into this narrative. Lastly I must thank John Dauth, the former Australian High Commissioner in Malaysia, whom I am now pleased to call a friend; and also Simon Merrifield, presently counselor at that same High Commission, who organized that memorable dinner when, straight off the flight from New York City, I met with so many of Malaysia’s great minds and spirits. In a novel which contains its fair share of Ezra Pound, it is perhaps appropriate to conclude with the last lines of his translation of Rihaku’s “Exile’s Letter.”

  What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking,

  There is no end of things in the heart.

  I call in the boy,

  Have him sit on his knees here

  To seal this,

  And send it a thousand miles, thinking.

  Copyright © 2003 by Peter Carey

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Australia by Random House Australia, Sydney.

  Excerpts from The Darkening Ecliptic by Ern Malley reproduced by arrangement with the copyright owners of the James McAuley Estate, c/o Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd; the literary estate of Harold Stewart; and with permission of the Max Harris Estate from Ern Malley’s Collected Poems (ETT Imprint, Sydney, 1993).

  The writings of Max Harris have been reproduced with permission of the Max Harris Estate from Ern Malley’s Collected Poems (ETT Imprint, Sydney, 1993).

  Excerpts from Ezra Pounds “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” from Collected Shorter Poems reproduced with permission of Faber and Faber.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Carey, Peter [date]

  My life as a fake: a novel/Peter Carey.

  p. cm.

  1. Literary forgeries and mystifications—Fiction. 2. British—Australia—Fiction.

  3. British—Malaysia—Fiction. 4. Women editors—Fiction. 5. Australia—Fiction.

  6. Malaysia—Fiction. 7. Poets—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9619.3.C36M9 2003

  823’.914—dc21 2003052746

  eISBN: 978-0-307-53877-2

  www.vintagebooks.com

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