Listening to Mondrian (2 page)

This guy’s really cool.

First there’s a painting of spooky arches that recede from each other, like a trick mirror that lets you see yourself going on for ever and ever and ever. You could lose yourself down that corridor, no risk. (Maybe that’s where our Fearless Leader has got to. Very funny, Jo.)

Then there’s a skewiff picture of
The City 1911
. Next there’s something called
Eiffel Tower 1911
. Somehow the building is tilted so it seems to be floating above the city, among all these white and yellow clouds, and the other buildings around it sort of bend, like saplings in a wind. And next to that there’s a painting of a smaller,
red
Eiffel Tower (the first one was pink).

In all these pictures, it looks as if the buildings are collapsing into each other. That makes it sound as if there’s been a bomb or something, but it’s not violent like that. It’s as if the turning of the earth is something that you can really feel, shifting you around in the gentlest of circles. And it’s like . . . you know when you’re about to go to sleep – you’re almost dreaming – then suddenly you feel yourself drop about 200 metres through sheer space? And it’s scary, but also exciting, and somehow a bit sexy too at the same time?

That’s what Delaunay’s city was like.

But speaking of dreams, I guess talking about pictures is about as thrilling as when some guy at breakfast reckons ‘You’d never guess what I dreamed last night!’ And you all go, ‘Oh no, you weren’t stuck in a lift with Madonna again, were you? Pass the cornflakes, someone please.’

So suffice it to say (as the Reverend Doctor says: ‘Suffice it to say that the name of the boy who was smoking in the box room at 7.27 p.m. on Sunday is not unknown to me . . .’) suffice it to say that we listen to:

STOP NUMBER 3:
Statue of Adam and Eve
by Brancusi. (Gem giggles: it’s like huge wooden boobs and balls sitting on top of a giant corkscrew.)

STOP NUMBER 4: Marc Chagall,
Paris Through the
Window 1913
. (Gem likes this: there’s an upside-down train and a cat with a lady’s face.)

STOP NUMBER 5:
Nude 1917
and
Jeanne Hébuterne with
Yellow Sweater
by Amedeo Modigliani.

To get here, we’ve gone through into another room, that leads in turn to a couple more big rooms. We are just finishing Modigliani and the tape guy is telling us that at STOP NUMBER 6 we’ll see the paintings of Piet Mondrian, when through the next archway I spot Papa.

Oh yes, make no mistake, it is Papa now. From the other side of the gallery you can almost smell the combination of French champagne and candlelight and gypsy violins and twelve-red-roses-by-special-delivery and (yes, I’m afraid) dirty old tomcat too.

He is ooooooooozing.

She is –

Well, for a start, she’d only be five years older than me, at the most. She’s nearly the same height as me, too, and she makes me think of that line about how you can’t be too thin or too rich. Her blonde hair is twisted into a French plait, and she is wearing a creamy-coloured sleeveless little tunic-thing that would look like a flour sack on anyone else but on her . . .

Bare legs. Bare brown l-o-n-g legs that are smooth as silk. They end in feet that somehow turn you on, the way they’re trapped in these lizard-skin sandals with high high heels that seem to make her bottom noticeable. (To put it mildly.)

Around her throat is a single strand of pearls.

‘
Get a look at this!
’ I nudge, but my shadow twin is absorbed in Art.

When Gemmy was a little kid, before we knew she had bad eyes, she used to get right up close to things (the television; the cat; my face) and seem to become entranced by what she saw, she studied it so hard. I guess that’s maybe why I liked her so much: it’s very flattering, when you’re ten years old and someone (even your two-year-old sister) comes up and gazes and gazes at you, as if you’re Superperson or something.

I guess she was four or five when Mum worked out that there was maybe some reason for this close staring (that was towards the end of the Good Old Days, but still at a time when Mum was able to work things out and Dad was home often enough for her to tell him) and so Gem was taken to the optometrist.

It turned out that Gem was short-sighted, but very astigmatic too. ‘Asthmatic,’ I thought Mum said when she told me but Mum said no, ast-
ig
-matic isn’t wheezing and gasping. Ast
ig
matic is when the rays of light sort of converge unequally in the lens of the eye, so everything seems to have odd angles and sometimes things look as if they’re in a different place from where they really are. (Sis pouring milk was always the drama of the breakfast table when Father was home. She’d miss by a mile, and be yelled at or – worse – demolished with sarcasm. And when he finally discovered the reason, he just said Mum should have noticed sooner. What sort of mother was she? etc., etc.)

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that a couple of years ago, Little Fishter went back to her staring act. When she does it, she seems to go way off with the fairies somewhere – you could stick a pin in her and she wouldn’t blink, let alone scream.

That’s what she does now, when I try to draw her attention to the Dynamic Duo. (He must be getting all hot and bothered: he’s taken his coat off, I see.)

Nudge nudge. ‘Hey, Weezlebumps, take a look at this!’

But Papa and Helen of Troy could be rooting on the floor for all the difference it would make to my learned friend the eminent art critic.

She is right up close to
Composition 1938–39
by Piet Mondrian. Here the tape guy goes on about something called Concrete Painting (which sounds like it ought to be done on concrete but it’s just done on canvas like all the others). And he reckons there’s a lot of maths in Mondrian too, which I’d agree with, because the pictures are basically rectangles done in the sort of colours that kindergarten kids use.

‘The paintings of Franz Marc are our next STOP – that’s NUMBER 7,’ the tape reckons now, but it doesn’t look as if we’ll ever make it because my better half sits, yes sits down plop on the floor, crosses her legs, places her hands in her lap, and continues to gaze (upwards now) at
Composition 1938–39
.

Of course, when she sits, there’s a jerk on the cassette player, and I feel like a dog pulled up short on a lead. I guess I could disconnect her plug and leave her here by herself, but you don’t just leave little girls totally unsupervised in strange places. Besides, I’m a bit weary of the whole thing myself by now, so after a little while I sit down beside her, despite the look I get from a passing art-lover. Who knows, maybe if we make a public spectacle of ourselves Dad’ll get so embarrassed he’ll come and take us out to lunch. Personally speaking, I could eat a horse right at this minute, and chase the rider.

But if Gemstone can go blind at will, so can (maybe it’s hereditary?) our father.

We sit and sit, and the tape runs on, though I turn it down now till it’s just a drone – white noise I think it’s called, when electronic signals are transmitted in a way that has a sort of sound-masking effect.

And come to think of it,
White Noise
would be a good name for this picture, not that it really is a
picture
, just . . .

I’ll give you the recipe:

Take a piece of white canvas, about one metre square.

With black paint, do three lines down the right-hand side and one down the left-hand side, like prison bars. Then do four black lines horizontally from the left-hand side of the canvas to the first of the vertical right-hand lines. Then, in the middle and at the very bottom, do another black line across the canvas, right through the prison window.

Now, with red paint fill in a little rectangle (about 3 cm by 10 cm) that has been made at the bottom of the picture by the meeting of the horizontal and vertical black lines.

That’s it.

It’s not a lot to look at but I sit and I sit.

Suddenly I go off my brain. I don’t jump up, rant and rave, yell and scream, storm over to our father and demand: ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, treating us like this? How dare you pretend to take us out for the day and then just dump us – leave us to sit for hours in front of the stupidest picture in the universe while you chat up some new girlfriend!’

I don’t do that, not outwardly, but inwardly I do. I say everything imaginable and unimaginable. I remind him how, last time, back in July, Gem ended the day in tears because Daddy kept telling his little Sugarplum that she was too fat, and he wouldn’t let her have her favourite – strawberries and icecream – for dessert, even though she’d gone without the entrée. (Oysters are her other favourite.)

I remind him how, the time before that, back in January, he arrived with our (late as always) Christmas presents: a maths computer program for me and a globe of the world for Sis. Wow. The worst of it was that he’d given Sis a globe of the world the Christmas before, too.

Now it gets really bad and I start reminding him how he drove Mum to where she is. Oh yes. When he met her she was someone who thought a drink meant a shandy at New Year for the sake of auld lang syne. But when Golden Boy got his first big promotion he decided that he liked her to be all dressed up and waiting when he got home, with a martini in the shaker and olives in the glass. So she started doing that, but he started coming home later and later, or not at all, and the ice started to melt and the martini was going warm so there was no solution but to drink it, was there? I mean, he doesn’t like
waste
.

Soon it was straight gin, pass on the vermouth, forget about the olives too.

It only took a couple of years – from when I was in Year 7 to when I was in Year 9 – for Old Mother Macreadie to get right into it. I’d come home from footy training and Gem would be glued to the TV screen and Ma would already have passed out for the night. I’d dial a pizza, pay for it out of Mum’s purse, feed the kid, put her to bed, watch the box, go to bed myself, and wait for the sound of the Porsche coming down the drive.

Then all hell would break loose.

She’d have slept enough of the gin off by then for him to wake her with his abuse:
slag
,
slut
,
slackarse
; he called her every name in the book – and all the names that don’t get into books, too. And it was quite untrue. I mean, she may have been a drunk, but as far as sex was concerned,
he
was the one who was playing around.

And then one night she wasn’t there . . .

I must’ve dozed off, not heard her slip out.

They found her the next morning on the railway track.

Oh, she was OK, dead to the world but not deady-bones dead. Silly sausage, she’d been so pissed she’d gone and lain down on a disused goods line.

That was the end.

Off she whizzed on an aeroplane to this clinic (read loony bin) in snowy Switzerland. We were not allowed to say goodbye at the airport. Gemma howled and I held her, but then we were taken away from each other. Once we were safely stashed into boarding school, Adolf could whiz off too. Next time I saw the little Gemfish, I realised she’d gone back to the stare-and-disappear trick. (Maybe red-hot birdseye chillies do work after all. I mean, Sis can make the whole
world
invisible!)

So I’m raging, OK? Raging right back through the record (I told you the gory bits of Ancient History are what I’m best at) as I watch our father do his suavo-sleazo act upon this new chick.

Red/red/red/red/red/red/red/red
– I find myself focusing all my anger through the bit at the bottom of the picture, as I stare through the prison bars.

And suddenly now I slip.

I can’t say it any other way.

It’s a bit like that dream-falling, but less dramatic, not a plunge, just a kind of amoeba-jelly slide through the black lines and into the white space that opens before me like the avenue of Delaunay’s archways, only even more infinite.

Maybe it’s because we’re like two divers connected to the same air tank, but somehow as I sit joined to my sister and listening to the white noise of Mondrian through the cassette player, I find myself moving into the space that she finds when she disappears.

I can’t say any more, because it is not a place of words or even feelings, it is just –

I do not know how long we sit, but the refuge is such that when our father appears beside us I feel free of him. He cannot hurt me any more. Or not today. I am beyond the bars, and far away.

‘This is Miss Silkin,’ he informs me, meanwhile giving his companion a reassuring little pat on her bottom. ‘Would you believe it – she works here in our Sydney branch? And then we just happened to bump into each other . . .’

No, I would not believe it. But nor would I give a shit.

‘Unfortunately, however, Miss Silkin has mentioned a little problem that has just cropped up on the Tokyo Exchange . . .’

(How about that!)

‘And so I’m afraid that I’ll have to take a raincheck on our lunch, and pop into our office here.’

It’s so transparent, I could laugh. But I just say that’s OK, I’ll get a cab, drop Gemmy back at her school, then go on to mine.

‘Oh, by the way,’ he turns to his new consort, ‘meet my son Jonathan.’

I turn up the volume on the tape machine, but all I get is static.

‘And this is my daughter Gemma. Miss Silkin.’

‘Oh call me Louisa,’ she protests.

‘Hi, Lulu!’ I grin, but Dad is hurrying us off too fast to even notice.

Back to the cash register. By now the queue has all the lunchtime art crowd, but Stalin isn’t in a mood for stalling. ‘We’re just returning these.’ He barges through the front of the line and yanks the earplugs from Gem’s and my ears, hoists the cassette player off me, and stacks the lot on the desk.

Louisa murmurs something to Gemma and they discreetly vanish in the direction of the toilets.

‘Here, hold this.’ My father dumps his suit coat into my arms before following them.

The idea comes as a flash: here’s your chance, Jo. And I take it.

Coming out into sunshine I feel free as a bird let out of its cage.