Spotted Lily (18 page)

—29—

Screeches exploded into a quiet night. The moreton bay fig trees must have been in fruit because those blessed screeches were the squabbling fruit bats of—one sniff proved it—Sydney on a summer evening.

Two bats flapped over our heads. Brett and I stood between two fig trees, each as large as a house.

I was dressed in my favourite outfit of Kevin's, white muslin spotted with violet dots. I lifted up my skirts and Brett had even remembered my violet boots.

The dress wasn't the original, nor the boots.

Brett had noticed what I liked, but he had no natural talent nor eye for detail. So the way that buttons buttoned was not quite buttoned enough. The collar didn't jut out with the same distinctive flair. The underarms pinched. He'd cut my hair, he told me, and it was almost, but not quite right.

The final effect was half haute-couture, half publicly funded.

Brett took me by the elbow and led us to the edge of the park, to the shadowed gloom of a fig tree.

Across the tarmac was the art museum.

A small crowd of people clustered at the bottom of the steps. The men wore black suits, and the women, long, unfashionable pinafores. Some carried babies in their arms, and some, balloons hanging on strings.

A Rolls drove up. The couple that emerged moved older than they looked, the woman's shoulders flashing diamante straps. They walked up the steps, into the museum.

Brett cradled my elbow under his hand in the manner of the couple ahead.

We walked up the steps but had to wait as their names were checked against a guestlist.

As they entered, the cry of 'Brett!' shrilled from within.

As we entered, a ringed hand shot up out of the crowd, a twitter rose out of the noise, and a rustle of bodies warned that at least one person was rushing toward us.

Brett waved his hand toward the approachers (there were three that I could count, homing in fast). His action was  friendly but firmly dismissive. They stopped, their eyes on him and me. One of them waved, and they all put on those stage smiles for the deaf.

An all-female chamber orchestra sawed away at something tasteful. The bass player's white blouse was stained with sweat. The sound of the crowd itself made the musicians' job impossible, if music appreciation was their goal.

He guided me through the partygoers, not an easy task. There were so many, and so many hands tried to waylay him. But he didn't stop till he had led me to what must have been the exhibition's centrepiece.

He nudged people away.

I saw.

Huge
, so big I had to back off—the centre of my beauty, as ripely open as a fresh fig, and about a zillion times larger than life.

Brett was examining me as I examined it.

I felt my blush. 'Who did this?'

'I,' he said. 'Would you like to see the press release?'

He handed it to me anyway, before I was ready to say yes. 

LILY Retrospective: Encounters & Reflections

While ostensibly documentary, the dominant theme of Hartshorn's ouvre is oblique ambiguity. Peeling back the 'skin of reality', and eschewing the decorative of O'Keefe for what Hartshorn calls 'anatomicality', he defines the new reference, his unadorned black and whites of monumental size being what Piers Oulange has called 'the new brutality', seeming to invite the viewer to participate, or perhaps repelling from, a substantive relation between signifier and referent, while in some works, such as 'Lily 236', he navigates the intersection of ...

'Miss Lily!'

A familiar, excessively-groomed scent enveloped me, followed by a hand on my shoulder, light as a hummingbird. 'Miss Lily,' a voice whispered.

'Justin!'

'You look marvellous, darling,' he boomed in an artificial voice, 'and a thousand congratulations on this wonderful show!' Justin was a little grey around the temples, but that just added to his sleek well-being and bonhomie. 'Your delightful Brett—'

The thing who had tempted him before, or one just like it, attached itself to him now. Despite the inauthenticity of it, I was flattered. It was, without doubt, a bountiful imitation of me.

'You promised, Justie—' it whined.

Smiling  ruefully, Justin handed me a card, touched Brett's shoulder while saying cryptically, 'Later,' and allowed himself to be dragged away by his dominatrix.

I turned to Brett.

'A full restoration,' he said. 'It was someone in the company's finance department. He came unstuck a month later. Justin was out within three months of us leaving the Restonia.'

That explained part of it. I flicked the card. It didn't want to flick. It was, I think, a sliver of jade. It read:

JUSTIN ABERNATHY

Sydney   Moscow   Beijing   New York London   Bandar Seri Begawan

And there wasn't even a phone number.

'He's really made it, hasn't he?'

'His cellmate was a financier.'

That explained some of his success. Everyone needs style help, especially jailed financiers.

'He helped me get this organized, you know.'

'Did you think of being an artist before?'

'Oh no, my dear. Aren't you pleased?'

Of his success as an artist? I admit I was a wee bit jealous. But I was also flattered. His picture was the most unusual present I had ever had. I could feel eyes on us, and my skin tingled. For the first time in my life, I felt beautiful from the inside out.

We were about to be interrupted by an unattached female.

Brett smoothly turned away and took my arm. 'You don't know, do you?'

'What?'

'It's for you. For your uncle Percy.'

'Oh, Brett. No! Don't mix this up with Percy.'  I
was
having such a good time.

'But Percy—'

'Why can't you let me enjoy my surprise?' I pulled away. 'Party, Brett.'

'Your uncle was an axionymist!' he laughed.

'And some!' I hissed. 'Keep your voice down!'

'But I needed to get mixed up with Percy, as you say, or we could never have succeeded with this.'

The thought of that pervert haunting me, of everyone in the room zooming their critical faculties on me, of the axionymist info making the rounds even now, the thought of everyone viewing me with the amplified x-ray vision of an electron microscope, broke a ring of sweat out into the broderie anglaise under each of my too-tight armpits.

But Brett could be stubborn, and was always unpredictable. It was probably better to let him say whatever he thought so important. I gave him my arm.

He led me into a smaller room where people who were socially dysfunctional stood around like flies on a door.

Brett elbowed two aside and pointed to the far wall. A small framed poster featured the centre of my beauty—the same picture that Brett had rendered many times larger as the show's centrepiece. Yellowed with age, it destroyed  the intimacy of Brett's huge portrait. And this wasn't exactly a Toulouse-Lautrec. It didn't look artistic to me, and it'd had a shocking life—stained with what looked like brick dust, crumpled and torn, and even after careful piecing together, missing as much of itself as a dog's ear after a fight. There was writing on the thing, but I couldn't read it from here.

He peered into my face. 'Don't you know?'

'Is this a benefit show for some NGO?'

Looking closer, and thinking of the people who go off to do good, I guessed that this was not art, but artifact. 'A health education poster for New Guineans?' I guessed. 'And what the fuck does this have to do with Percy?'

He laughed out loud and took me further around the room. The rest of the wall space was hung with small, notebook-size sketches. The art was the pictorial equivalent of the social misfits lurking in the room. I didn't want to look closer, but Brett drew me closer, till I could identify something.

'Lilies!'

'Uncle Percy's!'

'Lilies?'

'My drawings...' He took me back to the main exhibition. 'Go look at them up close.'

Each was just an anatomical detail of a flower, blown up a zillion-fold.

Then he took me back to the small room again, where I read that tattered poster like a half-done crossword puzzle.

'The Bachelors and Spinsters Ball, Wombo, September something ... I can't read it. Nineteen-twenty ...four? proceeds ... I can't read it ... Africa?'

'Spot on!'

Brett rubbed his hands gleefully at my deciphering. 'Percy did a bunch of these, and the day after he put them up, he was made unwelcome in the area. I couldn't get the details, but as soon as he was well enough to travel, he took the first boat out from Brisbane. Justin helped me to track down this poster.'

He leaned toward me and whispered in my ear. 'Frightfully expensive!'

'My word!'

'On my honour!' he exclaimed, hand on his heart, not realizing anything in the least. I almost laughed, but decided not to put him out of his joy.

'But,' he frowned. 'One thing I couldn't find. Where's Wombo?'

I had to think, and it took me a while ... but then, bingo!

'A big shed on one of the back roads behind Wooronga Station.' And then I was unsure. I was always partial to names like that, but they're so many, and they all begin to sound alike—Bombo, Yatteyattah, Wagga Wagga, Nimmitabel ...

'Aha!' cried Brett, delighted at the solving of this mystery. 'No wonder.'

'What did you call him?' I asked.

'An axionymist?'

'Yeah. What—'

'Your great-uncle, the parson Percy, the Reverend Percy Arthright Hutchinson Lily, Fellow of the Royal Society, was a world-renowned botanist, and died a mile from Kew Gardens, where he fled, having been exiled and reviled by the place and the family of his home. Most of  his notebooks and specimens were lost, and most of those studies you see now have been loaned by collectors around the world. Though he had much respect from abroad, it seems that his esteem there only lessened that at home.

'Nothing changes.'

'Say what?'

'We still do that,' I explained. 'But what about his weirdness, the axi—'

'Axionymist. And don't look it up. You don't seem to have a proper word for it. He was inspired by his name, you see. Lilies. Though he expanded to all the orchids, as you can see.'

'I'll take your word for it.'

Flowers are nice in vases—but otherwise, as I could see from their studies on the walls, flowers are either boring or disconcerting.

Brett had certainly done some good digging. Maybe he could answer another question. 'Why did he become a parson?'

'I wondered, too. Nothing definitive. But it seems that was the only way he found the freedom to collect and study, and still make a living.'

'Poor Percy.'

An exile. I could understand his pain. I had missed home, too, and I was now happier than I could have reckoned possible, just to be back on Earth.

'He died respected,' Brett murmured.

But then, this exhibition was back-arsed. Reverend Lily barely appeared. 'Why are they showing you as the main attraction?'

A grunt exploded from Brett, so loud that one of the human flies that had been edging close, moved away in fright. 'I'm surprised at you, Angela.'

'Why?'

'What is gallery-worthy, in this show?'

~

We did another run around the walls, and the show took on new meaning. The crowd was by this time, not only looking at the pictures on the walls and trying to look as if they weren't, but there was a distinct smell of thinking-about-rooting in the air. Though Lily 1 was the most prominent and largest work, each drawing attracted its own crowd. Lily 56 was surrounded by people with a lot of hair showing. Lily 30 drew a Kama Sutra crowd. Alcohol had released some of the latent energy in the room. But Brett's 'brutal' art supplied the burning torch to what would have only been your average party-smoulder.

I looked at Brett. He was a picture of health. No attack, though this was such a human situation.

'Why aren't you sick?' I whispered in his ear.

'Frankly, my dear, I don't know. But let's not analyse.'

Someone was tapping a mike. The time of speeches was nigh.

Brett shoved a piece of paper in my hand.

'What's this?'

'Your speech.'

An appalling thought! 'Whah?'

'You, the grand-niece of the late Lily, are this show's benefactor.'

I fear that my expression was not my most attractive.

'Public speaking, Brett. To these people! This isn't my crowd. I've only seen them in magazines.'

Using my eyes to finish the sentence, I tried to get him to fully understand the horror of the situation.

He paled under my look. Uh oh. 'Fresh air?' I asked.

'Umn.'

We pressed our way through the crowd, which pressed against us. Finally we popped out and I led him down the stairs, through the little crowd of black-suited men and dowdy women who were still gathered on the pavement outside the museum—to that calm place under the fig tree across the tarmac.

The bats were still active, but less argumentative. The sounds out here were the distant buzz of the big crowd in the museum, and the low murmur of the small crowd outside.

'Aren't you pleased?' he asked, and even his horns bent forward wanting something.  'I thought you would be happy to have your uncle's honour restored. For you. It mattered to you, didn't it?'

'Oh, yes!'
A total lie.

'Oh, yes!' I repeated, admittedly lamely. 'And your way to get him shown was brilliant.'

'It wasn't my idea. It was Justin's.'

There was something else he needed.

'Your artwork is brilliant.' I said.

'It is Justin's.'

'He did it?'

'He told me to copy those drawings of Percy's, but to make them big. People like big art.'

I didn't know what to say, but we had to get back and get this thing over with.

Punching his arm, I smiled into his face. 'A wonderful present. And thanks for the speech.'

Like hell, but the crowd was friendly, and the looks I'd gotten were a mixture of admiration and envy. The envy alone would fill my voice with confidence. I was ready to go in and face the crowd.

Brett was his happy self again as he took my elbow. 'I've practised my speech,' he said.