Like a House on Fire (19 page)

‘You'll be finished by Thursday, won't you?' I say. ‘Because the opening's on Friday night and we can't change it — there's local councillors coming, and the minister.'

‘Yep. It'll be done. We're used to working through the night, aren't we, Jake?'

He nods and grins back — easy-going, unthreatening, pleasant. And yet nobody's come in here and expressed an interest in picking up one of those brushes and helping. Nobody.

I'll have to round up some of the primary kids in my after-school club tomorrow and get them in here. Take the photos then. We can give out some brushes and they can do some background, or something. Grass. Sky. Paint in those skin tones, all those larger-than-life-size arms draped around shoulders. They'll like that. At least, I hope they will. I hope they won't bounce off the walls with hyperactivity; throwing paint, scrawling their names, going crazy.

I unlock the office to get my bag out and scrabble in it for money to buy material for the women's fabric-painting class. I'm meant to use cash from the kitty, but it's such a business, writing out a request form and waiting round for the admin officer to open the cash box to sign it off. Easier if I just pay for the plain cotton pillowcases and white t-shirts they like to paint. I park outside Spotlight and race in, arriving back at the car just in time to see a parking inspector writing me a ticket.

‘Oh, come on, it's only two minutes past.'

‘It's a clearway after 4 p.m. just like the sign says.'

‘Look, I'm buying stuff for a class. For a group of refugee women.' I hate trotting that out, and in any case technically it's a bit of a white lie now, but this is my money we're talking about, my free time, my goodwill.

He sighs and looks at me.

‘See?' I say, showing him the discount pillowslips, the tiny children's t-shirts. ‘Please.'

‘Get going then,' he says, deleting something on his machine and walking off. Angry with himself for giving in to me.

He'd be a boy off the estate, himself. I bet thirty years ago he came with his parents from Lebanon and grew up on those stairwells and in that glass-strewn park. I bet he could still tell me the number of his flat, if I asked him. The number, the smell, the noise outside, the silent resolution of his parents to get out.

‘Thanks!' I call out, but he's already at the next car up the road, already disappearing in a gritty shimmer of peak-hour carbon monoxide.

‘What do you think of the mural?' I say to the women later as they bend over their fabric paintings. ‘The big picture, in the gym?'

They smile shyly. ‘Good.'

‘Do you think you'd like to go in and help them, just do a little bit of painting in there?'

I catch their quick, hidden glances of consternation.

‘No, no.' They're all smiling hard. ‘Is very nice, but no.'

‘You don't want to paint, though?'

‘With the girl with the … um, this?' Nahir gestures fleetingly to her tongue, where Mandy has a stud, and all the women giggle uncomfortably.

I smile back, and shrug. I thought they'd like it, a mural that showed their community's diversity. We can all reel the numbers off, the workers here, with a sort of proprietary pride: fourteen distinct cultural groups! Nine different languages! We shake our heads in bemusement at the multicultural, multilingual, multi-tasking jobs we've landed in, where every newsletter and flyer has to be in five different translations, where if we're not running to put up the nets for Vietnamese boys' volleyball we're busy setting up the cooking class for the East Timorese mothers' group.

Maybe there wasn't enough consultation, after all. It's hard finding something everyone's happy with. Or maybe the artists' hair and big boots, their thumping music, have scared them off.

‘You'll come on Friday, though? To the opening?' I cringe at the eager insistence in my voice.

They smile, confer among themselves in low voices, and nod obligingly at me. ‘Yes. We all come.'

‘Because, you know, you can wear national costume, if you like. Your traditional dresses? That would be wonderful. The minister would love to see that.'

Their faces grow wary and apologetic with unsayable things. The room is stiff with a charged awkwardness, with languages I can't speak.

‘No. But we come.' They go back to their painting, murmuring and sorting through the photocopied pages of designs. I should get a photo of this, I think absently; this pile of embroidery patterns they've all brought from Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq, all shared around and used as stencils. If I mentioned it to the centre manager, he'd want a photo for our annual general report. Still, at least they're all coming along to the same class, and God knows that took me a while. Maybe one day I'll convince them to share tables.

Here in Australia, the women don't embroider these traditional designs. They paint them straight onto fabric instead, finishing several pillowcases or table napkins in one afternoon. Out in the gym, the mural artists are painstakingly painting their figures in traditional dresses copied from a library book; in here, in the craft room, the real women are outfitted in pastel windcheaters, some of them decorated with flowery borders of quick-drying fabric paint. I heat up the iron and press their pillowcases flat to make the dyes permanent and washable. Steam billows up in my face; the hot, comforting smell of clean, pressed cotton, the same the world over.

Wednesday afternoon, and Mandy and Jake are still not finished. There are a couple of faces still just sketched in at the front, likenesses they're working on from the health centre's photo album of snapshots from last year's barbeque. It's a rainbow of faces now, the mural, a melting pot. A few Anglo faces are placed judiciously next to Laotian and Eritrean, Vietnamese alongside Salvadoran and Iraqi and Aboriginal, all standing ‘We Are the World' style with arms round each other, grinning as if the photographer's somehow cracked a joke they all find mutually hilarious, something that in real life would involve several simultaneous translators and a fair whack of fairy dust.

The centre director is thrilled, the minister's going to love it, the artists have a jaunty spring in their step because the mural itself, it must be said, is stunning. It's a multicultural vision to be proud of. Community workers from other centres and other estates are invited to the Friday opening to marvel and envy, and apply for their own grants.

‘You look a bit flat,' says Mandy, raising her eyes from the photo album to glance my way.

‘No, I'm great. It looks wonderful, it really does.'

‘We've left that bit there for the kids to work on this afternoon,' she says, pointing to an empty section of sky.

‘OK, good.'

I'll have to choose five or six kids, I'm thinking, bribe them with chocolate not to wreck it, just paint the blue like they're told.

‘Someone here to see you in the office,' a colleague tells me, putting her head round the door. The music's off, briefly, and her voice echoes in the big, empty space.

It's a guy in a suit. He steps forward to shake my hand.

‘You phoned me,' he says, ‘about the anti-graffiti sealant? I'm here from Pro-Guard, just to inspect the wall surface to make sure you purchase the right product.'

‘Oh, yes. Well, we want to treat a mural to protect it against graffiti.'

He nods. ‘That's a real asset-management issue now. Our products give years of repeat protection, whether you choose the impregnation-style pore-blocking penetrative sealer or something with a sacrificial surface …'

He keeps going like this until my head is swimming with compounds, polycarbons, two-packs and one-pot formulations. I keep nodding as he inspects the wall in the gym and talks about polysiloxane coatings versus silicone rubber, and finally I say, ‘Look, I need something we can apply ourselves which is quick-drying. And if someone graffities it, I want to be able to clean it off without too much fuss.'

‘They won't graffiti it,' interjects Mandy, who's listening. She's walking along past each big smiling face, giving each eye a realistic twinkle. ‘Nobody will graffiti anything they feel a sense of ownership and inclusion about.'

‘Right,' says the sealant salesman, eyeing her briefly before turning back to me. ‘Like I said, we're in the business of helping you maintain the value of your asset and protecting it from senseless defacing. So for your requirements, I'd recommend Armour-All.'

‘Great!' I respond, mustering a smile. I'm tired now.

‘It's a urethane product. You mix in the solvent and apply two coats twelve hours apart; using masks and gloves and adequate ventilation there's no reason why you can't apply it yourself. And it has terrific anti-stick. You can just remove any graffiti with white spirit.'

‘Fabulous. We'll take it.'

He says he can deliver it that afternoon and names a price. I nod, totting up the remainder of the grant money in the account. Just enough left over for snacks at the opening, catered for by the Vietnamese social group. Everyone likes spring rolls, as long as we don't make them with pork. We're having bread and dips too, so the Turkish cooking class members don't get their noses out of joint. And maybe I should get the East Timorese to sing something …

‘I'll go and get the after-school-club kids,' I tell the artists. ‘We've got to get this done by tonight so we can make sure the sealant's dry by Friday afternoon. The Armour-All.'

Jake and Mandy say they'll help me apply it. They're nice people, really. I don't understand why this whole process hasn't worked out like I thought, like I said it would on my grant project description.

It's got to cure properly, the sealant. So we end up applying the second coat at midnight on Thursday, the three of us slapping our fat brushes into the wall corners, wiping up drops with a turps-soaked rag, seeing it go on shiny and slick and impenetrable. I'm light-headed and starry from the fumes, so that the Nick Cave CD they're playing tonight beats in my skull like a racing, roaring pulse.

I've never been here on the estate this late at night. As I splash the sealant on I listen to cars revving and residents shouting, doors slamming, a quick blooping siren as the police pull someone over, the thumping woofers of passing car stereos. And through it all, I hear a babel of voices; every language group we're so proud of, calling and greeting, arguing and yelling, nearly two thousand people I couldn't name and who have no use for me. Who glance at me, leaving in my car every afternoon, and look away again, busy with the demands of getting by.

I dip my brush and grimly slop on the Armour-All, over the big smiles and laughing eyes and joined hands, sealing them all in behind a clear surface that promises to dry diamond-hard.

‘What a great event,' says the minister, and surveying the gymnasium I can see that, yes, this is just the minister's kind of thing: authentic ethnic food on the trestle tables, a welcoming song by the East Timorese choir, real grassroots community development in the shape of a hundred and thirty or so attendees. In an estate of eighteen hundred, that's hardly a throng, but the minister's delighted. And behind it all, towering across the long wall, the mural. Glistening bright. Just as the Queen is someone for whom the world smells like fresh paint, the minister is someone for whom the world must smell like fresh anti-graffiti sealant.

‘Such a positive message,' the minister is saying, ‘and I understand the community itself had a hand in creating it. Marvellous.'

A group of adolescents goes up to inspect the mural, pointing something out. These guys wanted pool tables with the grant money, and who can blame them? The two artists step up to engage them in some kind of conversation, Mandy passing a self-conscious hand through her outlandish hair as the boys look to the floor, sullen and cowed, and I think there must still be residual acetylene fumes in the air, because I'm feeling a faint itching behind the eyes, a crawling tight constriction in my throat.

‘You've certainly acquitted your grant,' the minister says, as I fiddle with my drink and see the Vietnamese women in my peripheral vision serving the spring rolls, wondering if they see their faces in the mural, or something approximating them. Then I drag my eyes away from the minister's charcoal lapel to catch the wondrous sight of my fabric-painting class, filing into the room nervously and stopping the show in a blaze of embroidered hijabs and fringed shawls and gathered layered skirts, seeing me there and smiling the faint encouraging smiles of the truly dutiful, the truly kind. Yes, it's a grant acquittal to be proud of, a culturally diverse photographic wet dream, and I'm blaming the Armour-All, with its patented anti-stick, for the pricking sting now in the corners of my eyes, for the way everyone here, all of these estate residents, seems to have formed themselves, for once, into one homogeneous whole; one discreet and circumspect crowd carefully distancing themselves, with subtle and infinite dignity, from the huge sprawling image that blares at them from the wall, bright and simplistic as a colouring book.

‘Thank you,' I say to the minister. ‘I wonder if you'll excuse me.'

I'm on my way over to the women when the centre manager grabs my arm, flushed and expansive.