Spotted Lily (12 page)

The door opens and a girl who must be on work experience stands uncertainly, not in, not out.

'Well, Miss Bridges,' booms the chairman.

'Mr Bosh is here,' she says, and the man who must be Bosh pushes her aside,  strides towards the table, and sticks his left hand out towards the closest board member, who turns back towards the chairman without touching flesh.

'Ch'm,' the chairman clears his throat. 'You're late, but never mind. We had
hoped
to launch the campaign two months ago, but let's see what you've got.'

Bosh shrugs almost imperceptibly, but I noticed. He's smooth, he is. Dressed with stunning nonchalance, he looks great, except for those tiny, black-rimmed glasses that scream Euro Intellectual. Nevertheless, he judges his best place, and walks to it. A huge room this is. He turns his back on us (very cool), unzips a scuffed portfolio, and pulls out a large poster. No. It's a painting on canvas.

He's the Bosh with the 'c'. And that's one of his hell scenes.

He holds it up in front of him till he notices a whiteboard, bristling with bulldog clips. He clips the top of the canvas to the whiteboard, but then has to hold his arm against the bottom of the painting to keep it from rolling up. The first amateur move he's made but I don't think it matters.

The chairman speaks. 'We
gave
you the brief, both verbally and in writing, did we not.'

'Um?' Bosch is bent over, looking at his painting while still holding his arm in position. He peers closer at something on it.

'Mr Bosch. We are satisfied. Please ... Please!'

Bosch twists his body to face the chairman. 'Would you like to look closer?'

'Mr Bosch. Was this what you have brought for the bus campaign, or is it for some other client?'

Bosch removes his arm from the painting and guides its curl upwards, leaving the clips in position.

'Buses,' he says. 'Trains, billboards. You can use it everywhere.'

'That's a crock!' the chairman yells, He whips out a stockwhip and snaps it over our heads with a rifle shot
crack
. The man's got some arm on him! and that whip! Long as an anaconda. The explosion shakes the windows, and some hats. 'Your brief,' he says to Bosch, 'was one ... simple ...  image.' He says this so softly that everyone has to lean forward.

'One message.' he yells. 'What is this?'

A lesser man would have been cowed. The robed mob at the table slumped in its chairs. Bosch was unbowed. 'You wanted hell. I gave you hell. No one has ever gone into it so finely as I have. No one has ever reached the heights of horror as I have. That anti-smoking ad when Death comes to visit? That most recent Chainsaw Massacre? Tomato sauce! You want kids eating popcorn, laughing at your hell? Go hire a multinational. You want hell? I give you...'

And here he went into such detail that the chairman's mood turned from outrage, to boredom. A snore came from the table (mine?), until the whip snapped.

'Thank you,' the chairman finally said, cutting Bosch off in mid-detail. The chairman spoke to Bosch, not as a person to an artist, but as a client to an advertising agency hack. That was bad enough to wreck anyone's ego. And wrong. Dr Cleeg from Art History
loved
Bosch. He raved about the man. Humour! Metaphor! and of course, Brushwork! But Dr Cleeg didn't
know
Bosch. This man with the stupid glasses was mad as a butterfly collector. That's all these clients saw, if they saw that. No. All they saw was that he had overstepped his brief. Only one person in the room knew—Bosch wasn't lovable, but he
would be loved
.

'We seem to have had a misunderstanding, Mr Bosch,' the chairman said. 'This has cost us two months. Precious time ... gurgled away ... down the hourglass...' He fingered his stockwhip, ruminating  ... 'Gerald?'

A hat fell off.

'Gerald. I should like to have a word with you after.' And he nodded to the room.

Everyone stood but him, sitting solidly on a curiously solid chair.

Bosch zipped his portfolio with a snarl and stormed to the door. 'Don't pay me,' he spat at the chairman.

The chairman raised his hands. 'We will pay,' he intoned, magnanimity personified .'But do take that with you. And remember, less is more.'

Bosch stormed back, almost ripped the canvas from the jaws of the clips, and stopped himself in time. Instead, he tenderly handled his painting, and left.

I ran after him, scooting into the lift just as the doors closed. It was full of people and a long way down to Ground.

He took up my offer to buy him a coffee.

I was lucky about where to go. There, just where I looked to get my bearings, was my old hangout, Nostramamma's, right across the street. I led the way.

The table was sticky and the legs of the chairs and table didn't all reach the floor. This had never bothered me in the past, and I couldn't let it bug me now.

'May I look...' I asked, pointing respectfully.

He used his sleeve to clean the table top, then spread his painting over it.

A girl passed by. A zip hanging from her jacket snagged the canvas. She turned to grab hold of whatever it was holding her up—and saw.

'Cool!'

I was aghast. Bosch was busy. His fingers worked with surgical delicacy, wriggling the canvas in the metal teeth. 

'Is it for sale?' she asked.

He didn't hear, or didn't reply.

'Do you take cards?' she asked.

Finally, the painting came free—its corner now, a puppy's ear.

'Or cash? I have ten dollars on me,' she said. 'But if that's not enough ... You paint dragons, too? I love dragons.'

He leaned back in his chair. 'It's for sale,' he said, 'but not for fifty.'

Her mouth made itself small. 'Look,' she said. 'In this country, we don't bargain. You want ... okay. Fifty? Take it or—'

'Don't!' I yelled, as he rolled it up.

'Thank you,' he said, shoving me aside. 'But I can't live on coffee. I need the money.'

She handed him a hundred and asked for change. He didn't have any. She took the $100 out of his hand and gave him a fifty, grabbed the rolled-up painting, tsk'd that he didn't supply a rubber band, used her hair elastic instead, and walked to a table in the corner where she threw the painting and her bag on the opposite chair.

I stood up to buy it from her, knowing what it would be worth one day. My bag, when I opened it—Mother Hubbard's cupboard.

Bosch was selling himself short, and besides, he was too obsessive. If he was stuck on wanting to paint detail, he could sell much more if he took to other subjects, like, say, food. I turned to ask him if he wanted to explore his full potential, and woke up.

~

One conclusion I came to: The worse things get, the more people escape into enthusiasms—and the more vulnerable to
you know what
they become. First ... food, fashion, wine, steam trains. Next stop: boredom. And next ... One easy conclusion, that.

I looked back on the sheep-stinking epic and laughed—a beach-read. Sitting up in bed surrounded by, say, ten post-(or is it post-post-?) modern-world reports, each impossibly opposite the others, I'd reach for another and the only conclusion I'd come to was a burp, biliously fresh from my cavernous insides.

~

When the knock came, I didn't hear it, possibly because I was both concentrating, and giddy.

Brett opened the door and stuck his head in. 'Mind if I come in?'

I dropped what I was reading beside my bed, but there was no place for him to sit. The chair was stacked with papers I'd read, and the tables, too. I crawled over and swept another mess off. But he couldn't sit there. It was filthy with newsprint.

He sat, anyway. 'When was the last time you ate?'

I tried to remember.

'And have you looked at yourself?'

The same sheer nightie that I'd put on days ago was still on me, but not so see-through now.

He walked into the water room. 'I'm running you a bath,' he called. 'What do you put in?'

After telling me that breakfast would be served in an hour, he left.

—18—

Something had happened to my body. My shape had deserted me. I was now jutting collarbones, jutting hipbones, a hard-edged sharecropper face. My hands, those  'plump little partridges' (Mr Hazumi's description, translated by Kevin, so who knows what Mr Hazumi was describing) were now chicken feet. The skin on my breasts and buttocks hung.

The bath didn't make me feel good. I thought I was sitting on soap bars till I discovered they were my bones. Brett had seen me in my dirty and wizened state. As for Kevin ... I tried to think of the implications but felt too giddy, and the heat of the bath brought on a nausea attack. I threw up some water mixed with bile.

Wrapped in my robe, I padded out to meet Brett in the lounge. On the way, I noticed my bedroom. All the reading matter had disappeared. Even the racks. The only evidence of all those newspapers: coal-cellar smudges all over the formerly snowy bedclothes.

Breakfast was waiting: a coddled egg, one piece of white toast, and a cup of weak milk tea, already poured. I tasted it. Two sugars.

'Eat slowly,' he said.

It felt strange, this stuff going into my mouth.

He watched me, only picking at his meal.

'Thanks, Brett,' I smiled.

'Eat,' he said, an encouragement. Not like that time at The Troppo.

When my stomach said no to another mouthful, I stopped. Half the egg and half a piece of toast were left on the plate. The teacup was empty.

'Would you like me to get more tea?' he asked.

'No thank you.'

He cleared his throat though he didn't need to. A manner of speaking. I had to begin.

'We come from different worlds.' I ventured.

He got up and carried the table out of the suite, returning quickly to sit on the floor, leaning against his futon mountain. 'Not so different,' he said.

'Do you think I don't respect you? Is that it?'

For days, I had tried to unravel the mystery. What was he trying to communicate? Why couldn't he just come out and
say
like a normal person? On day three when I said this to myself, I laughed. Lucidity came in streaks and turned into rainbows of confusion, just when I thought everything was so clear.

'Are you trying to make me believe, Brett?'

That was the conclusion, the only conclusion that I could come to. The world now, so taken up with God.

'God's armies are everywhere, Brett. And they are more able to communicate than ever.'

He nodded.

I was right. 'But why do you want me to believe, Brett? Isn't it enough that I
accept?
'

'Do you accept evil?'

That
was the point of it all! God, and evil, too. My brain was tired, and the food made me sleepy. Sleepy and relaxed to the point of taking out any snideness that would otherwise have intervened.

'Why did you pick me?'

He didn't answer.

'Do you know
anything
about me?'

'I thought I did,' he said, almost inaudibly.

Connections
.
Think
, I told my weary brain.
Think
...

'Uncle Percy!' A filthy splat of memory whomped into me, leaving me grizzling hot, soiled, angry tears. The injustice of it, getting me mixed up with him.

There was something I needed, but I couldn't delay what I had to say and it wouldn't have been dignified asking Brett to conjure up a hankie. I blew my nose into my sleeve and got on with it.

'Brett, how can I accept evil, no matter how evil Percy was? Did you understand what you gave me to read? Well, maybe you haven't understood enough about us to see it, so I'll tell you. Evil isn't a thing, Brett. It's a form of fashion. God's Army this and that, each killing on opposite instructions. How many people have been killed because they supposedly work for
you?
'

Looking at him listening so seriously, I reminded him, 'You forget, do you, it seems so long ago, but I remember. You said that there are those back and forths from heaven to your place, as the fashion changes.'

He nodded—a blancmange reaction, making me more suspicious than ever.

'You're not, perchance, a moralist, are you?' I needled him. God, I
hate
moralists!

He nodded again. Was he trying to incite violence, or was he doing this in self-unawareness? So hard to tell. I had to give up speculating, and try to teach him about the world.

'In our time,' I put to him, 'how can you even run your futures market when the present is so mixed up.'

He opened his mouth.

'Excuse me, Brett, but I have to finish. This is too difficult otherwise. The thread ... It isn't that I am into that Hollywood crap we had a few years ago, those "Somebody has to be a scummy hired assassin, so I might as well be it" ...those shit-hot movies ... Do you read Arts pages?'

Maybe not.

'Doesn't matter. What does is that this is all happening at the same time. And our communications are adding to our feelings that we are right.'

He was watching me talk. Was he listening to what I was saying? 'How much is Percy mixed up in this?'

'Who is Percy?'—his eyes wide, and innocent as a baby's—a baby with red irises. How irritating.

'You know Percy, so don't deny it.'

'I don't, my dear.'

'Let's not play games. But I will humour you, Brett, for whatever reason you have.'

Those innocent eyes stayed blank, and now to innocence was added an appearance of curiosity.

It was all too much. I hurled my plate against the wall, and its crash failed to satisfy.

Still, nothing changed on Brett's face.

'Do you accept evil?' he repeated, with the can't-be-perturbed passive aggression of a Church of Scientology sidewalk 'survey taker'.

Something was turning again inside me, and it didn't feel like food. It wanted to get out. There wasn't time to think it out. Just say it.

'Brett, it's the wrong, wrong,
wrong
question. You should have asked if I accept good. And the answer is no. Not any more. Not as anything that anyone
says
, and now I don't know, myself.'

I had always avoided news, an avoidance I had mulled over in the past days. The conclusion I had come to, had initially surprised me.

'Brett, whether we read this stuff, whether we are connected or not, doesn't matter, because we all know we're right, whoever we are. And nothing you do changes that. Brett, you must have seen this, since the first heretics way back when.'

His eyes, those baby eyes, were not where I should have been concentrating my scrutiny of whatever he would call his soul. The muscles in his neck stood out. He wanted desperately,
something
. This something had to be part of his sickness, those attacks, those weakness attacks that made him lose his balance.

'And belief?' he asked.

Brett as missionary! He wanted me to believe because it made his mission here more comfortable. His vision: I'd help on Earth, to bring order to the Otherworld in a way it hadn't known since possibly, the telegraph. Was this indeed, a recent phenomenon, and that is why this working holiday? Was I to be a tool to make some Department of Extraordinary Powers function more efficiently?

This thought was a sharp stick, stirring my entrails.

'Brett. This belief thing.' I tried to say it gently. 'It is just what's wrong. I disagree with you, and I hope you won't be offended.'

'Please go on.'—politely said.

'If people did not believe, they might act better toward each other because they wouldn't have the excuse of God telling them to commit for Him, nor heaven waiting for themselves, and hell for others.' At the end of the spurt, I laughed, embarrassed.

'If people did not believe...' he prompted. He hadn't heard anything I'd said. What a relief.

'Maybe it would be like three men in a boat, worms and pinochle.'

Whatever that meant. It just came out, a cliché. But there was something else ... 'Do you know Australian fishermen?'

'Uh?' He must have been preoccupied, or thinking about the three men, for he wasn't one to grunt.

'I didn't till I visited the coast. They hang out on sandy beaches. Old blokes with bandy legs sticking out of floppy shorts. They wear knee-high socks in footy team colours, and  they keep their shoes on. The fisherman dangles the wife's nylon stocking in the shallows where waves lap the sand. In the foot of the stocking is rotting fish.'

He was listening.

'The old bloke wafts the fish in its stocking through the shallow water, and just as the waves draw back and all the little holes are exposed in the sand and they bubble and pop dry, he feels something tug at the toe of the stocking. I've never done it, but it's what they say. Anyway, he's got this pair of long-nose pliers, and he reaches down, and quick as your fingers pulling a string of  spaghetti from a boiling pot—' A ghost of an expression flitted across Brett's face, so I stopped.

'Please,' he said.

'Well, the fisherman nips his pliers in between the toe and the sand, and the pliers grab hold of the snout of the worm, he yanks up those pliers in one fast long swoop, and up comes a long worm. Night crawlers, they call them. He puts it in this little case he wears at his waist, and bends over the surf again, waving that stocking. He spends half a day there, sometimes with a mate. All the hours of low tide, catching worms with fish.'

'What do they do with them?'

'I wondered, too. They sell them for beer and smokes.'

A polite that-was-interesting silence descended.

Was it not even that? Interesting, that is. Did it have meaning at all? For the first time, I doubted. Yet until that after-telling silence, it was the most profound thing I had ever seen. Never had I even mentioned it to my journal. It was too deep to talk about, until now. And now, I wished I hadn't.

Suddenly his boots were bothersome again. They took a long time to satisfy him as to the looseness of their laces.

'Do you believe, Angela?' He startled me.

'In what I just said? Well, it's true.'

'No.
Believe
.'

'As in God?'

'And me?'

About God, a grunt escaped me. How many times does one need to say something, even to a foreigner?

However, the second part of the question leaned toward me, literally. His breath stirred my hair, willing me to say
Yes
.

In my weakness, for the first time I sensed the yearning that Gordon felt every time he willed me to give in.

Of course, I should have believed. I had signed my soul away, hadn't I? And Brett transmogrified through walls with the greatest of ease, and he wore a goddamn tail.

He waited, but even in my weakness I could not give him his yes. Incoherent tears saved me from an answer.

He left, but this time slowly and diaphanously, leaving behind a faint whiff of hot bitumen.