She came in from work after my first big clean-up and started pulling books out and throwing them on the floor.
“What in the fuck are you doing?”
“Where did you put them?”
“Put what?”
She pulled down a pile of old pamphlets and threw them on the floor as she looked between each one.
“What?”
“My posters, you bastard. How dare you.”
I was nonplussed. My view of posters was purely practical. It had never occurred to me that they might have any function other than to advertise what they appeared to advertise. When the event was past the poster had no function.
Confused and angry at her behaviour, I retrieved the posters from the bin in the kitchen.
“You creased them.”
“I’m sorry.”
She started putting them up again.
“Why did you take them down? It’s your house now, is it? Would you like to paint the walls, eh? Do you want to change the furniture, too? Is there anything else that isn’t to your liking?”
“Carla,” I said, “I’m very sorry. I took them down because they were out-of-date.”
“Out-of-date,” she snorted. “You mean you think they’re ugly.”
I looked at the poster she was holding, a glorification of crooked forms and ugly faces.
“Well if you want to put it like that, yes, I think they’re fucking ugly.”
She glowered at me, self-righteous and prim. “You only say that because you’re so conditioned that you can only admire looks like mine. How pathetic. That’s why you like me, isn’t it?”
Her face was red, the skin taut with rage.
“Isn’t it?”
I’d thought this damn Hup thing had gone away, but here it was. The stupidity of it. It drove me insane. Her books became weapons in my hands. I threw them at her, hard, in a frenzy.
“Idiot. Dolt. You don’t believe what you say. You’re too young to know anything. You don’t know what these damn people are like,” I poked at the posters, “you’re too young to know anything. You’re a fool. You’re playing with life.” I hurled another book. “Playing with it.”
She was young and nimble with a boxer’s reflexes. She dodged the books easily enough and retaliated viciously, slamming a thick sociology text into the side of my head.
Staggering back to the window I was confronted with the vision of an old man’s face, looking in.
I pulled up the window and transferred my abuse in that direction.
“Who in the fuck are you?”
A very nervous old man stood on a long ladder, teetering nervously above the street.
“I’m a painter.”
“Well piss off.”
He looked down into the street below as I grabbed the top rung of the ladder and gave it a little bit of a shake.
“Who is it?” Carla called.
“It’s a painter.”
“What’s he doing?”
I looked outside. “He’s painting the bloody place orange.”
The painter, seeing me occupied with other matters, started to retreat down the ladder.
“Hey,” I shook the ladder to make him stop.
“It’s only a primer,” he pleaded.
“It doesn’t need any primer,” I yelled, “those bloody boards will last a hundred years.”
“You’re yelling at the wrong person, fellah.” The painter was at the bottom of the ladder now, and all the bolder because of it.
“If you touch that ladder again I’ll have the civil police here.” He backed into the street and shook his finger at me. “They’ll do you, my friend, so just watch it.”
I slammed the window shut and locked it for good measure. “You’ve got to talk to the landlord,” I said, “before they ruin the place.”
“Got to?”
“Please.”
Her face became quiet and secretive. She started picking up books and pamphlets and stacking them against the wall with exaggerated care.
“Please Carla.”
“You tell them,” she shrugged. “I won’t be here.” She fetched the heavy sociology text from beneath the window and frowned over the bookshelves, looking for a place to put it.
“What in the hell does that mean?”
“It means I’m a Hup. I told you that before. I told you the first time I met you. I’m taking a Chance and you won’t like what comes out. I told you before,” she repeated, “you’ve known all along.”
“Be buggered you’re taking a Chance.”
She shrugged. She refused to look at me. She started picking up books and carrying them to the kitchen, her movements uncharacteristically brisk.
“People only take a Chance when they’re pissed off. Are you?”
She stood by the stove, the books cradled in her arms, tears streaming down her face.
Even as I held her, even as I stroked her hair, I began to plot to keep her in the body she was born in. It became my obsession.
4.
I came home the next night to find the outside of the house bright orange and the inside filled with a collection of people as romantically ugly as any I had ever seen. They betrayed their upper-class origins by dressing their crooked forms in such romantic styles that they were in danger of creating a new foppishness. Faults and infirmities were displayed with a pride that would have been alien to any but a Hup.
A dwarf reclined in a Danish-style armchair, an attenuated hand waving a cigarette. His overalls, obviously tailored, were very soft, an expensive material splattered with “original” paint. If he hadn’t been smoking so languorously he might have passed for real.
Next to him, propped against the wall, was the one I later knew as Daniel. The grotesque pock-marks on his face proudly accentuated by the subtle use of make-up and, I swear to God, colour coordinated with a flamboyant pink scarf.
Then, a tall thin woman with the most pronounced curvature of the spine and a gaunt face dominated by a most extraordinary hooked nose. Her form was clad in the tightest garments and from it emanated the not unsubtle aroma of power and privilege.
If I had seen them anywhere else I would have found them laughable, not worthy of serious attention. Masters amusing themselves by dressing as servants. Returned tourists clad in beggars’ rags. Educated fops doing a bad charade of my tough, grisly companions in the boarding house.
But I was not anywhere else. This was our home and they had turned it into some spiderweb or nightmare where dog turds smell like French wine and roses stink of the charnel-house.
And there squatting in their midst, my most beautiful Carla, her eyes shining with enthusiasm and admiration whilst the hook-nosed lady waved her bony fingers.
I stayed by the door and Carla, smiling too eagerly, came to greet me and introduce me to her friends. I watched her dark eyes flick nervously from one face to the next, fearful of everybody’s reaction to me, and mine to them.
