Free The Fat Man in History and Other Stories by Peter Carey Page B

beauty, delighting in the confidence it brought her, the certainty of small mannerisms, the chop of that beautiful rough-fingered hand when making a point. But also, this: the tentative question marks she hooked on to the ends of her most definite assertions. So I was impressed by her strength and charmed by her vulnerability all at once.
    One could not have asked for more.
    And this also I confessed to her, for it pleased her to be talked about and it gave me an intoxicating pleasure to be on such intimate terms.
    And I confessed why I had confessed.
    My conversation was mirrors within mirrors, onion skin behind onion skin. I revealed motives behind motives. I was amazing. I felt myself to be both saint and pirate, as beautiful and gnarled as an ancient olive. I talked with intensity. I devoured her, not like some poor beggar (which I was) but like a prince, a stylish master of the most elegant dissertations.
    She ate ravenously, but in no way neglected to listen. She talked impulsively with her mouth full. With mushrooms dropping from her mouth, she made a point. It made her beautiful, not ugly.
    I have always enjoyed women who, whilst being conventionally feminine enough in their appearance, have exhibited certain behavioural traits more commonly associated with men. A bare-breasted woman working on a tractor is the fastest, crudest approximation I can provide. An image, incidentally, guaranteed to give me an aching erection, which it has, on many lonely nights.
    But to come back to my new friend who rolled a cigarette with hands which might have been the hands of an apprentice bricklayer, hands which were connected to breasts which were connected to other parts doubtless female in gender, who had such grace and beauty in her form and manner and yet had had her hair shorn in such a manner as to deny her beauty.
    She was tall, my height. Across the table I noted that her hands were as large as mine. They matched. The excitement was exquisite. I anticipated nothing, vibrating in the crystal of the moment.
    We talked, finally, as everyone must, about the Lottery, for theLottery was life in those days and all of us, or most of us, were saving for another Chance.
    “I’m taking a Chance next week,” she said.
    “Good luck,” I said. It was automatic. That’s how life had got.
    “You look like you haven’t.”
    “Thank you,” I said. It was a compliment, like saying that my shirt suited me. “But I’ve had four.”
    “You move nicely,” she smiled. “I was watching you in the kitchen. You’re not awkward at all.”
    “You move nicely too,” I grinned. “I was watching you too. You’re crazy to take a Chance, what do you want?”
    “A people’s body.” She said it fast, briskly, and stared at me challengingly.
    “A what?”
    “A people’s body.” She picked up a knife, examined it and put it down.
    It dawned on me. “Oh, you’re a Hup.”
    Thinking back, I’m surprised I knew anything about the Hups. They were one of a hundred or more revolutionary crackpots. I didn’t give a damn about politics and I thought every little group was more insane than the next.
    And here, goddamn it, I was having dinner with a Hup, a rich crazy who thought the way to fight the revolution was to have a body as grotesque and ill-formed as my friends at the Parks and Gardens.
    “My parents took the Chance last week.”
    “How did it go?”
    “I didn’t see them. They’ve gone to …” she hesitated “… to another place where they’re needed.” She had become quiet now, and serious, explaining that her parents had upper-class bodies like hers, that their ideas were not at home with their physiognomy (a word I had to ask her to explain), that they would form the revolutionary vanguard to lead the misshapen Lumpen Proletariat (another term I’d never heard before) to overthrow the Fastas and their puppets.
    I had a desperate desire to change the subject, to plug my ears, to shut my eyes. I wouldn’t have been any