My Life as a Fake Read Online Free PDF

and self-importance.
    While I poured his tea he made himself very busy with his electrical tape, which he stubbornly forced to serve another time.
    You have been out to the Batu Caves, he asked. His treasure was sealed but as he lifted his tea-cup there was a slight tremble to his hand.
    I am a very bad tourist.
    Yes, he said, I never liked foreign places. Still, should see the
kavadi
bearers. People seem to like that, bamboos driven into the flesh. He paused, staring at me intently. Slater told you all about the McCorkle business?
    Yes.
    He told you that Weiss died?
    The editor?
    He nodded and sipped his tea. The hand was now shaking violently.
    You must’ve felt terrible.
    Worse than that, he said in that papery, nasal voice.
    At first I had been struck by his beauty, but there was now something very off-putting about him—neediness where I had seen strength, unsteady liver-spotted hands, and the disconcerting sensuality of those tea-wet lips.
    You’ll listen if I tell you a story?
    I looked over his shoulder to where Jalan Treacher had disappeared behind the knotted skeins of rain.
    I suppose I haven’t anything better to do, I said, but intruth I had no interest in his story at all. I wished to read that fragment again, as he well knew, and so I must endure his tale.

6
    I loathe dishonesty, he began, his grey eyes glittering. You would know that if you were familiar with
my verse-lah
. Like a good table or a chair, nothing there that does not do a useful job. So you see how bad it is that what I am remembered for is a fake. Smoke and mirrors, a joke, that’s all it was.
    He paused, glaring almost accusingly. Have you been to Australia? he demanded suddenly. No, of course
not-lah
.
    Actually, I said, my mother was Australian.
    Yes, we have a terror of being out of date.
    Mother did not like to talk about Australia. She had rather a set against it.
    Yes, she is Australian. She is wondering, what are people saying in France or wearing in London? That is the issue for her, isn’t it? He raised his reedy voice but seemed unaware of the attention he was drawing to himself. No, we cannot wait, he cried, slapping his knee. We cannot wait another day to know, and yet we must
wait-lah
. They call it the Tyranny of Distance now, so I am told.
    In the nineteenth century, he continued, energetically adding sugar to his tea, the women of Sydney would go down to Circular Quay to see what the English ladies were wearing when they stepped ashore.
Wah
, look at that. Must have onenow. Whatever they saw there would be copied in the week. It will still be the same, take my word. Must have whatever fashion comes down the gangway. Osbert Sitwell, Edith Sitwell, we will have poems just like theirs on the streets tomorrow. Now, he said, one of the fashion spotters on the dock was a young man named David Weiss.
    The editor?
    A very handsome Jew. Parents were in the
shmatte
business. A man of letters also, so he thought—boy of letters really, so young. The parents were cultured in the way these people often are. I never went into a Jewish house until I met him. Who could believe it? My home bare as a cupboard, no books, dried-out plates of leftovers in the fridge. Here, suddenly—bloody walls of books, Turkish rugs, modern paintings, De Chirico, Léger. So shocking to m
e-lah
. Unfair that anyone should have such a start in life.
    Weiss and I, he said, were students at Fort Street, school for clever boys. Who would guess it now that I have become a mongrel? Then I won the exhibition in Greek and the Special Prize for an essay on the influence of Hokusai on Renoir—all this from reproductions, you understand. But it was through David Weiss—three years younger, imagine—I learned of Rilke and Mallarmé. He lent me
The Little Review
. We were friends, members only, but he was always foreign to me. You know these people, no natural reticence or modesty. Always thrusting themselves forward, must have a different table than the one they are