The Convent (11 page)

‘Why don't you go out now and learn the ropes with Cassie for a bit and then turn up tomorrow morning? I'll be there and we'll iron out the details then.'

‘Okay.'

And that is it. I have the job.

For the next couple of hours I hang out behind the counter with Cassie and Nick, learning the names of all the cakes and their prices, and how to make the different coffees. They teach me how the cash register works and the particularities of the warming oven and the microwave. The other guy, Max, and the girl, Yalna, are really nice about taking over the serving while I learn, until it gets on for lunchtime and it's too busy for them to manage. But by then I feel confident that I have the hang of it all, more or less.

I step outside to wait for Cassie, parking myself at a table near the door under a big canvas umbrella to keep off the bright sun. But it's still very hot.

‘Get this into you, Peaches!' Nick appears over my shoulder, plonks a bottle of cold juice in front of me, and heads back to the brown doors.

‘You're an angel, Nick,' I call back.

‘Yeah? Tell that to my mother!' He disappears inside. But his head pokes around the door again almost immediately. ‘You coming tonight?'

‘Where?'

‘Night Cat at eleven. We're on.'

‘Oh wow! Hit the big time now, have we?'

‘You said it, babe.'

‘I'll be there,' I say, wondering if I will in the end. Will I be able to sneak Stella in, and if she refuses to go would it be okay to leave her? Nick is a stocky guy, going bald way too prematurely – he's only twenty-three – with crooked teeth and a voice like a gravel truck unloading. And yet … he has these warm, twinkling eyes that look straight at you. I love that.

‘Thanks, Nick,' I call. That he thought to ask me along suddenly makes me feel really good.

‘Good one!' He gives me the thumbs-up and disappears.

After Fluke and I broke up I stopped going out because it seemed that everywhere I went I ran into him, and seeing him was like rubbing salt into my wounds. So I sort of closed down the hatches, hung out with Det and Cass and tried to help my parents out with Stella. Of course, running into
me
didn't seem to affect him at all, which only made it worse.

It's not long before Cassie finishes her shift. She and Nick come out together, chatting and laughing. Nick has a bag over his shoulder and his guitar case in his other hand.

‘See you tomorrow, Greek,' Cassie calls.

‘Should do, wog girl.' Nick grins. ‘If I survive rehearsal. So where are you chicks going now?'

‘To see that mad artist starving in her garret.' Cassie holds up a brown paper bag. There are three filled baguettes poking out the end.

‘Tell her if she needs to do a serious portrait one day then my rates are very reasonable.'

‘Will do.' We wave him off in the direction of the bus stop. ‘See you tonight.'

Cass and I walk along the path towards the bluestone church.

‘This place is pretty amazing,' I murmur looking up at the tall gothic buildings. The long arched windows are edged in red brick.

‘Det knows all about it,' Cassie replies.

‘Of course.' We smile at each other and take a swift left turn from the main path into an enclosed square courtyard surrounded on three sides by a lovely three-storey building in the same grey brick as the other big buildings.

‘Wow.' I look up in wonder. ‘Make a good film set.'

‘I think this was where the nuns lived,' Cassie says.‘Every window up there was a nun's cell.'

‘So where does Det hang out?'

Cassie stops in the middle of the lawn and points up. ‘See that second window from the end on the top floor? That's her room.' She puts her two hands around her mouth and calls loudly, ‘Hey, Det!' No answer. She shrugs. ‘I saw her this morning. She knows we're coming.'

The ground floor has a high vaulted ceiling, and we walk past a dark lobby with an intricately tiled floor. I stop to look at the light coming in through the stained-glass windows set around the heavy wooden door. The central one at the top is of a shepherd in a red cloak holding a lamb in one arm and his staff in the other.

The carpet and the walls are shabby, with holes and peeling paint, but the actual structure is awe-inspiring. Up we go to a long empty corridor with more shabby walls and more flights of stairs. The place sort of smells of another age.

I follow Cassie along yet another wide, high corridor with dozens of identical heavy wooden doors leading off either side. Some of the doors have names and occupations on them – artists and writers and playwrights and puppeteers. Some are pinned with pictures, photographs and notes.

‘This is her.' Cassie stops outside one of the doors.

In typical style, Det has written her name in black ink and nothing else. No indication of what she does.

Cassie knocks loudly. ‘Hey, Det,' she calls.

There is the sound of garbled talking from inside the room and the door is pulled open.

Det, dressed in a dirty shirt over a red skirt and rubber thongs, motions us in with one paint-splattered hand and a distracted smile. The other hand is holding her mobile to her ear. She mouths
Hang
on
and walks off into a corner to argue with someone about her phone service.

I follow Cassie into the room, and the intoxicating smell of paint and paper and art materials fills my nostrils. I take a deep breath and look around. This is unlike any other place of Det's I've seen. It's so ordered and neat. Two open steel cabinets sit along one wall. The shelves hold tins of paint, jars of all kinds, packets of paper, pens and charcoal, all carefully set out. On the large wooden table in the corner sits a kind of raised drawing board with piles of paper pads and charcoal and pens and inks. A number of ink-wash drawings of a funny-looking kid in a strange hat are stuck up on the huge pin-board near the table. Two piles of CDs sit on a small table near the window along with a player and a couple of speakers.

Det is thin, bordering on scrawny. She has long straggly red hair, which she should wash more often, fair skin and sharp, even features .

We met her in our last year at school, and she's a bit older than us. She was brought up in Mildura. Her father committed suicide when she was twelve and her mother's reaction was to drop the ball completely. Mrs Donovan apparently took off with some guy twenty years younger and more or less stopped coming home. Det was left in the house with her three older brothers. The only part she willingly talks about is her need to escape. With the help of a sympathetic teacher she sat the entrance test for Mac.Robertson Girls' High at fourteen years old. When she was accepted, she applied for government support to move to Melbourne and lived with the same teacher's grandmother for four years while she completed school.

Det was dux in Year Twelve doing languages and humanities subjects. Then she came back the next year and did all the science subjects and was dux again. Perfect scores two years in a row. Unbelievable. Her second Year Twelve was when Cassie and I got to know her. Naturally she was accepted into all the prestigious university courses, but in the end she chose Fine Art. It seemed a completely crazy choice at the time. She'd never talked about art, and none of us had ever seen her draw anything or even pick up a paintbrush at school. The teachers were beside themselves and went into overdrive trying to dissuade her, but Det stuck to her guns.

As far as we know she has nothing to do with any member of her family in Mildura, and ever since we've known her she has carried a knife with a carved ivory handle in a leather sheath in her bag. I've never seen it in use, but … I have no doubt that it has a purpose.

‘Why?' I asked her once.

But she only shrugged and made a face. ‘Why not?'

By that stage, I knew it was the only answer I was going to get.

It's the huge unfinished canvas on the easel that grabs my attention now. I walk over, captivated by its dramatic central image. Three young men, faces turned away, arms raised in the act of throwing small canisters of … something. Tear gas? A thick fog hovers over and around them like a cloud. The misty whiteness covers most of the painting, making the men's bodies seem caught in a dream. In the distance, through the fog, I make out dilapidated walls and buildings with bits of plaster hanging off open doorframes, the bricks and boards worn and battered. In the foreground, some space away, are three children – boys, I think – squatting down and playing in the dirt at the side of the road. The eldest, maybe ten years old, holds himself apart looking out. He has a gun slung across his back. In spite of myself I'm intrigued. Even unfinished the image hauls me in and makes me anxious. Who are the kids? And the men? What are they doing? What does it mean?

‘Good huh?' Cassie goes to the window and pulls up the sash, allowing the hot air to rush in. ‘She's done a whole lot more on the kids since I saw it two days ago.'

I study them more closely and see one of the younger ones is a girl. She's in a windcheater and worn sneakers and is writing something on the pavement with chalk. The barely discernable words
Here I am
are scratched in a childish scrawl.
Oh Jeez, what
is that meant to mean?

Still on the phone, Det must have noticed me studying the painting, because she grabs a newspaper photo off the wall, gives it to me, points to the painting and retreats to her corner to continue her increasingly acrimonious call.

‘But I rang yesterday and the day before!' she shouts. ‘Don't give me that bullshit!' She is quiet for a while and then she sighs heavily. ‘Then take me off the plan, because you said it was going to cost fifty-nine dollars a month, not seventy-nine.'

I tune out and stare at the photo. It is a shot of three men throwing their canisters of tear gas. I can't really tell what nationality they are. Is it the Middle East, or maybe Vietnam? There is no caption. But I see now that Det has used the basic composition of the photo as the starting point for her painting, adding in her own elements: the buildings, the walls and the children.

‘Did she tell you that I'm going to be her agent?' Cassie whispers to me.

‘What does that involve?'

‘The business side.' Cassie waves at the painting. ‘She got so ripped off at that last exhibition.'

Det was invited to exhibit with these older, more experienced artists and she was the only one who sold every painting. But she didn't see enough of the money. Most of it went to the agent and the gallery owner.

I look around the room at some of the drawings lining the walls. Some are only half finished but still they take my breath away. Her renderings of faces and figures, trees and cityscapes are so realistic that they are almost scary. She uses them as her starting point. I didn't understand the process or the finished paintings at first. I'd see them at various stages and I couldn't see why, after all the painstaking detail was completed and the whole image was as perfect as a photograph, she set about subverting it, as if she was wilfully trying to wreck her own work. Once I seriously tried to stop her from scratching in stripes of thick green paint over this amazingly realistic face of a child. ‘Don't ruin it,' I protested.

But she kept scraping on the sick green stripes. I had to walk out of the room because I couldn't bear to watch.
So what is the
bloody point?
I wanted to yell.
What is the point but to be beautiful?

But when I came back the next week I saw that it wasn't ruined at all. She'd finished the whole painting, and I saw that it was beautiful in a tougher, more interesting way. The child wasn't just a lovely child anymore. He was peering out through a curtain of weird foliage at what looked like a totally alien landscape. There was the dark shadow of a man's profile over half his face, giving the finished image a menacing feel. Someone horrible was threatening the kid. It had the power of a vivid, disturbing dream, and the more I looked at it the more I understood that by scratching on that paint and messing with the perfect sky she'd done something sharper and more remarkable. The initial meticulous paintwork was still there underneath, like perfect machinery. That painting that I'd been so keen for her not to
ruin
had been the first to sell at the exhibition.

I join Cassie by the window. The view out into the square court is lovely, the enormous tree growing in the centre is spectacular, and I'm suddenly filled with gladness for Det that she has this wonderful place.

‘This place will be so good for her,' I say quietly.

‘I know.' Cassie takes a quick glance back at Det, who is still on the phone. ‘That grant is a life-changer.'

Det has lived in a number of crumby share houses with other students – her present one is no different – and she has never been able to afford a separate studio to work in.

I don't know what it says about me that my two best friends are exact opposites. I'm the lynchpin, I suppose. It's a weird thing to say, and maybe totally egotistical, but I don't think they'd be friends it weren't for me. Det has always been the dreamer; even when she was passing those exams with flying colours you had the feeling that she had her eye on something else. Something bigger, deeper, more … difficult. The practicalities of everyday life are pretty much outside her realm. Which is the opposite of Cassie. Every now and again Det will have a go at the day-to-day stuff, but she can never sustain interest for long, and the truth is she often just makes things worse.

Det clicks off the phone, throws her head back and gives an almighty groan of frustration. She comes over, puts her arms around our shoulders, and kisses us both hard on the cheek.

‘Did you get the job, Queen Peach?' she asks.

‘I did.'

‘Good for you!' We smack palms. ‘Isn't it so great that we're all going to be here together! Well … sort of. You pathetic dudes will be slaves downstairs, while I … I'm up here being the greatest talent of the age.'