My Life as a Fake Read Online Free PDF Page B

shown to by the waiter. Soup has to be made hotter when any of us would eat it as it came. You must not think me an anti-Semite. Perhaps I sound like one.
    Indeed he did.
    Well, I was jealous of Weiss, won’t say I wasn’t. We were all struggling poets, trying to find our voices, to be published in little magazines printed on brown wrapping paper. It was the war, the end of civilisation, who could know? I wastwenty-four, a private in the army in New Guinea. Weiss had some cushy job in the Department of Defence. He sat on his bum in Melbourne. I was shot by bloody Japs, carried on a litter for sixty miles, dropped and bloody-well abandoned in an ambush.
Cheh
. No end to it. Delivered to hospital in Rabaul; transferred to Townsville, where I was given this poetry magazine called
Personae
. No brown paper
here-lah
. Top-hole only, the best stock, a cover painting in colour. Inside, all the very latest fashions in poetry and art. And who was its editor? David Weiss! My first feeling? Jealousy. Why not? He was three years younger. No war for him, and now so far ahead. But then I read what he had chosen, and what I felt was not jealousy but … how pathetic, Mem. It was so fake, so half past six. No head, no tail. I truly could not bear it— sick in my gut. I will tell you the feeling—exactly like listening to my mother in the Church of England in Haberfield. Always the smell of something false about her. Holy, holy holy. Bellowing the responses more loudly than anyone else, making an exhibition of herself.
Samah-samah
, all the same— fake is fake no matter where you find it.
    In Australia they think I am the great conservative. Listen, I had spent more time reading Eliot and Pound than Weiss ever did, and later I would prove this. Even great poets have tics. No problem to trick a lazy reader with the mannerisms. Weiss knew of writers I had never heard of, but there was something shallow in his character. Send him a poem with the line ‘Look, my Anopheles’ as if it were some classical allusion and he would never admit he did not know Anopheles. He might try to look it up, but if he couldn’t find it—forget it. Fake it. Never mind.
    Well, Mem, Anopheles is a mosquito, and when I saw his magazine I had it in mind to sting him where his skin was bare. I know I said I would not bot on you….
    Please, I said, whatever you want.
    He ordered a cucumber sandwich, the cheapest item on the menu.
    But you invented a whole life for your poet, I said. Is it true that you even produced a birth certificate?
    He stared at me. Slater told you, yes or not? What
lagi
?
    That’s all he said.
    Weiss was a pinko, he said angrily. I would have made McCorkle a coal miner except they’d have gone looking for his union card. I gave birth to a bicycle mechanic instead. But his poems would be learned, so many classical allusions— from a grease monkey. Explain that. It cannot be. What a notion, that the ignorant can make great art.
    It sounds as if you were very convincing, I said.
    It
reeked of rat-lah
.
    His sandwich arrived and he paused to pick it up, turning it this way and that as if he hadn’t seen one for many years.
    Reeked, he said, but I knew young Weiss had lost his schnozzle. He would so
want
pearls in the shit of swine, so want the genius to be a mechanic that he would never stop to question the evidence. This is why I wrote this letter. Meant to come from McCorkle’s sister.
    He replaced the cucumber sandwich, and as he did so his entire face changed, the cheeks sinking and the shadowy mouth becoming as tight and small as a widow’s purse. The transformation was disturbing and did not become less so when I realised that he was taking on the sister’s character.
    ‘Beatrice McCorkle,’ he announced in a careful nasal accent which was marked in equal part by its lack of education and its great desire for propriety.
    ‘Dear Sir, When I was going through my brother’s things after his death, I found some poetry he had