Watercolours (21 page)

He asked her if she enjoyed opera — he tried to go whenever he made it to the city, his one indulgence. Would she care to join him that evening? The restaurateur rushed off to make the arrangements, popping a tape of
La Traviata
into the stereo before busying himself with a phone call to the box office. The prelude swept over them, the emotion in the strings bringing goosebumps to her arms, and the tape meandered from aria to aria until the lunch crowd bustled off and Umberto and Eleanor were the only customers left. They sipped espresso, then grappa, while the staff polished glasses, swept the floor and went home. They both agreed the seminar was overpriced and the guru a bit of a shyster. Neither of them needed to mention that the afternoon session had begun. It was clear they hadn't any intention of returning.

Afterwards they wandered up Stanley Street, past cafes with iron tables on the footpath and squashed-looking terrace houses with grimy facades. At the top of the hill, Eleanor paused for breath at a set of sandstone steps. Her heart was racing. On impulse, she walked up and Umberto followed.

It was late afternoon and the Museum was almost empty. They wandered through the mammal room giggling like schoolchildren at the stunned stuffed animals, their mangy fur and stiff poses comical among the carefully arranged foliage. In the skeleton room they peered over backbones and through ribcages. In the insect room they saw hundreds of butterflies with unpronounceable names, stick insects with grotesque protrusions and giant horned beetles. When Umberto stopped still, Eleanor moved closer, curious to see which display had captured his interest.

Silkworms.

She stole a glance at him. She knew about Umberto's father, his obsession with silk and the ruin it had caused his family; everybody did. In a small town like Morus, such a tragedy was never allowed to pass without the community sucking all the delicious woe out of it; the story had lumbered around town like a sick cow covered in ticks. She wondered how Umberto felt about it, whether he harboured shame or anger or sadness. His face only seemed thoughtful, his moustache at rest.

Beside him, she peered into the glass cabinet. One of the silkworms had been dissected and a cross-section of its body was illuminated from beneath. The silk glands had been carefully removed and strung out in long, milky loops.

‘
By the time a silkworm is fully grown,
' Eleanor read, ‘
its silk glands make up more than a quarter of its body weight.
' They observed the life cycle set out before them, from tiny eggs to wrigglers, then five stages of growth until cocoon, metamorphosis and moth — shaggy-looking and completely covered in pale fur.

Silk is the strongest natural fibre known to man,
the display noted. Eleanor looked at the golden cocoons, their woven mass the colour and texture of finely spun toffee. ‘How do the moths break out of the cocoons, then?' she wondered.

Umberto turned to study her for a long moment. Eleanor stood very still as his eyes explored her face with the tickly caress of insect wings. Suddenly she was terrified he would kiss her. A moment later she felt disappointed when he did not.

‘A bead develops on top of the head,' he explained, pointing. ‘When the moth grows big enough, the bead bursts against the cocoon and the fluid inside dissolves the glue that binds the silk together. See the antennae? How they're feathered? They act as
little combs to pull the threads aside and make space for the moth to crawl out.'

Eleanor looked at the cocoons, struck by the wondrous design of nature. It was the same design that had thrown her and Umberto together that day. She met his gaze. They looked into each other's unguarded faces as though for the first time. She felt desire gathering within her, filling her up, a pulsing along every fibre of her body. Then an attendant appeared and told them the Museum was closing.

After the opera that evening they ate late in Chinatown, ordering dishes one by one until the staff turned surly and kicked them out. Eleanor insisted they take a taxi to her favourite all-night cafe in Kings Cross, declaring that the Spanish blend and lemon cake shouldn't be missed. In truth she wasn't the least bit hungry and knew the coffee would only send her already-galloping heartbeat to dangerous levels. But she couldn't let the evening end. Some scheme of fate had brought the two of them together and tomorrow they would fly back to Morus, where there would be no room for further discovery, where the walls would close in and the old awkwardness would return to stifle everything.

Later that night, alone in her hotel room, Eleanor wept as though she were dying. In fact she had come to life, but the effect was equally unbearable.

 

I sit on the carpet, listening to the whispering air-conditioning and Eleanor, who is dozing on her bed and snoring softly. Orange juice trickles down my oesophagus like a cold worm. I want to cough but stop myself.

Through the tinted hotel window I watch the sunset. The sky looks full of smoke or storm clouds, but it isn't. The window masks the real colour of the city, just like it masks the noise.

In the corner sit the bags from the art shop. I don't want to look at them. To start going through them would mean they were mine.

I can't remember what we bought in the end, there was too much to choose from and no good place to start. As I glance at them now, the bags seem to hold hardly anything. The woman in the shop said I could order more, whatever I liked, over the phone, as long as I had a credit card. Eleanor said that wouldn't be a problem.

I feel tired but restless, too. My mind can't focus on anything. The silence inside me echoes until it becomes a whine, circling round and round, searching for something that isn't there. Like those concrete overpasses, my insides feel like an endless loop of people lost in traffic.

I miss home. My chest hurts with missing. I try to imagine our house, how good it feels to be in the kitchen with Varmint on my lap, Mum attacking cloves of garlic, Dad poring over his blueprints. But they are all too far away and I am too changed. There is only this hotel room; this fake air, this filtered view. In the corner, my future sits waiting for me in a mess of plastic bags.

The sun sets. It grows dark in the room but I don't move to switch on a light. Through the window the city is glimmering. Traffic twists in streams of white and red, an endless flow of opposites.

Eleanor is up now, padding in and out of the bathroom. She runs me a bath, which I have while she changes for dinner. Afterwards I feel a bit better. Heading back out into the night
air when I am so clean and ready for bed feels special. A spark shoots up inside my hollow body. I let the thick night ooze over me.

 

In the morning we pack our suitcases and leave them in the hotel lobby. I try to fill my empty-shell feeling at the breakfast buffet, forcing down buttery jam-eyed pastries and scrambled eggs and chewy bacon until I feel sick. The buffet room has a long wall of glass and overlooks a section of the harbour where boats flit like insects. Every time a ferry passes by, Eleanor sighs because there is no time for us to ride on one.

At Hyde Park our taxi stops in front of a fancy department store. Inside there are giant urns of flowers on marble pillars and somewhere a piano is being played with lazy fingers. At the bustling make-up counters I let myself be sprayed with four different types of cologne, but none of them smell like Mr Symonds. The combination on my skin is bad. Trying not to think of scrambled eggs, I ride up a wooden escalator for the breeze and back down again. Still Eleanor isn't ready so I wander through the display of silk scarves, pressing their cool material against my face, then over to the hats with exotic-looking feathers.

Outside at last we cross the road and walk past a giant chess set into the park. Eleanor takes my photo in front of a fountain full of animals and naked people flexing their muscles. We take a tunnel under the road and come out at the Cathedral, then follow a line of big old fig trees to the Gallery. As I walk up the stone steps I feel suddenly nervous, it's such an old and stern-looking building, a place where pictures are obviously taken very seriously.

At the counter I give my backpack to a man in a grey coat and he gives me a ticket in return. Eleanor says we should see the contemporary Australian collection first, lots of bright blue with boats and birds and jetties squashed into the corners or pale hills and paddocks all hazy with drought dust. But I like the European rooms best, with their heavy frames and dark armies clashing under storm clouds. The soldiers look so powerful, even when they're being slaughtered. Over the next two hours we look at so many faces and figures, so many splatters and splashes and blocks of colour, that my brain starts to feel numb. There are pictures I've seen before in books or on cards or even in prints around our house and it's interesting how different they look here, the way they are bigger or smaller, how some colours are brighter; it changes what I think of them.

The Norman Lindsay etchings make me miss my mother all over again. Whenever she wanders out after a shower, frowning and clutching at the handfuls of flab on her stomach or bum, Dad snorts and tells her not to be silly — she has a classic Norman Lindsay figure. This always gets him a kiss and sends her prancing off to get dressed with a smile.

We eat lunch at the Gallery restaurant. Eleanor points out a piece by her favourite artist hanging across from us, a great big work made up of little wooden rectangles cut up and stuck back together in waves of black and yellow. Eleanor explains how it was made from old drink crates that the artist collected. I look at the picture all through lunch, wondering how it manages to be both clumsy and flowing at the same time, how a hundred bits of wood put together can look like hills and light and moving clouds. When Eleanor is paying the bill I walk over and I'm surprised at how rough the work actually is. The edges are torn,
the gaps uneven, the broken black lettering doesn't match and is faded and worn in places. Up close, the wavy pattern becomes a choppy sea. I put my hand up to explore the lumpy surface.

‘You should look with your eyes, not with your fingers,' says the woman from the front desk, who has a freckled face and bushy ponytail scraped back so tight her eyes are stretched. She is clasping her hands together and looks like she's in pain and not just from the ponytail.

I pull my hand away. ‘But … it looks more beautiful when I touch it.'

Eleanor is here now, saying we have to hurry if we want to see the Museum, too. I leave the woman by the drink-crate paddock and head outside. It isn't until we are almost at the Cathedral again that I remember my backpack and have to run back under all the fig trees to get it.

 

The Museum's entrance is airy and full of light. I stare at the map, all lines and boxes and no pictures, trying to make sense of it. We only have an hour, Eleanor says, not long enough but it will have to do. I can see that the dinosaur display is on Level 2, but it's hard to work out how to get up there. A tour group piles in through the front door and surrounds me. I twist around, searching for the stairs, but there are too many people in the way, standing in a big huddle, craning their necks. I'm about to push my way through the middle of them when curiosity makes me look up, too.

A whale skeleton floating above us takes up most of the ceiling. I stand there gawking and feel shoved again, like yesterday when the height of the skyscraper tried to push me over. It's hard to imagine an animal so big swimming around and
yet there's not much to it, really; hardly any bones. Each rib is thick and chunky, like a log carved and set in place, but I can see how helpless a whale would feel washed up on the beach. Its whole stomach would be crushed under the weight of those heavy bones. I think of myself out in the deep water with the whale swimming under me and all my breath rushes out. I feel afraid, for myself and for the whale, too.

I find a bench to sit on so I can study the whale without getting dizzy. Looking up, I feel as though I'm sitting on the ocean floor, as small as a speck of phosphorescence. After a while I pull out my sketchpad and start drawing. Gradually I make out the suspension wires and the connecting bits that let each joint of the skeleton sit as it would in muscle. I study each smooth rib, each snug piece of vertebrae, and the hollow feeling I've been carrying starts to fill up with water. I'm flowing out with the tide, melting into a current of calm, hovering on the ocean's graveyard bottom, while the monster fish — the ugly ones with strange protrusions and useless, gaping eyes — scavenge around me for threads of filtered food. The whole ocean presses down. It feels soothing to be pressed by a weight so much greater than my own; peaceful. Down here, nothing much matters.

Eleanor comes to sit beside me. She asks to see what I've drawn. Without realising, I have filled several pages with ribs and spine and horror fish. ‘It looks like your father's boat.'

I take another look at my sketchpad. She's right, the boat and the whale are the same — one set of ribcages reaching up, the other down. In a flash, I think of the patterns I saw from the aeroplane window. I wonder whether everything starts out like this, no matter how big or small. Just a simple pattern.

The idea fills me with air. From the dark ocean floor I shoot up, rushing through bubbles, bursting through the water's sloppy skin into warm sunlight. Up on the surface I take a deep breath. Everything is sparkling clear. The cicadas are screaming in my ears, full throttle.

Eleanor says, ‘I came here with your grandfather, once.'

I look at her in surprise. She looks back with a sad smile, puts her arm around me and squeezes. Then she stands up. ‘Do you want to see the silkworms?'

Camille couldn't believe how quickly Thursday had come around. This had been happening a lot lately, suddenly the weeks were flying by. Today she glanced at the clock on the wall and was amazed to see that it was already five past three. Wondering where the day had gone she had just begun to register the full disaster of her desk when she heard the library doors swing open. She looked through her office window and her heart almost stopped. The Book Deliverer was wheeling his trolley across the carpet towards her office.

He hadn't crossed her mind in ages, although it could only have been a month. Incredible, how much her life had moved on in that time. For what felt like an eternity everything had been the same and she had been resigned to it never changing. Now she inhabited a new universe.

The Book Deliverer was from the faded old world of before, and yet here he came, striding towards her as he always had, smiling a shy greeting and stopping courteously in the doorway with his clipboard and tethered pen ready. His aftershave arrived a second later. From the pocket of his navy trousers he retrieved his Stanley knife and was about to slice through the tape on the box of books when she cried out, ‘No!'

He looked up in surprise, his blade hovering over the glossy
brown strip. She hurried on, ‘Don't worry about it — I'm sure they're all there.'

Beneath the fringe of brown curls his face looked startled, thrown by the unexpected change in routine and the impatience in her voice. Slowly his smile faded. Disappointment drew his shoulders down. Camille was struck by confusion, irritation and then an odd surge of power. So she hadn't imagined the spark between them; clearly he'd looked forward to seeing her, too. Maybe he'd been entertaining similar fantasies all along? She sighed. The whole thing suddenly seemed too tedious for words.

He shoved the knife back into his pocket and, in an attempt to hide his embarrassment, took up the clipboard to scrutinise her invoice. She couldn't help feeling a little sorry for him. ‘I don't have time this afternoon,' she said, by way of apology.

The Book Deliverer gave a shrug but his shoulders took the brunt of her rejection and collapsed a little further. The bell rang. Kids tumbled out of classrooms. They were still locked in awkward silence when Novi appeared in the doorway, a pixie with a giant's backpack. Camille was grateful for the distraction. ‘You ready?'

He nodded, clutching the straps at his shoulders, eager to get going.

She turned back. ‘Sorry I can't chat. We have to head off — Novi and I have an art lesson.'

‘Yeah. No problem.' He made no enquiry, just perfunctorily set the box on her desk. His lack of curiosity dissolved any sympathy she may have been feeling for him. She signed the invoice and clipped the pen back in its place on the folder. From the doorway Novi watched, unblinking as an owl.

‘See you next month,' she said.

He nodded, grabbed his trolley and left without another word.

Camille's face was burning. She smiled selfconsciously at Novi, feeling somehow caught out. Did he understand what had just happened? The boy merely shifted his backpack on his thin shoulders, oblivious to everything but his own need for her.

She left the box of books unopened and collected her things. ‘Okay. Let's hit it.'

 

They drove to the high school. Novi ate his afternoon tea in the passenger seat and looked out the window. When she asked him how his day had been he replied ‘Good', as he always did. She didn't push him for more. Neither of them was very good at chit-chat, both shy in their own way.

At first Camille had felt nervous being on her own with Novi. She wondered what he thought of her. Had her previous lack of initiative let him down? Would he mind that she wasn't an artist herself? But he didn't seem bothered by any of this, just soaked up her limited knowledge like blotting paper thirsty for ink. After a couple of weeks she'd started to relax and now the broad, quiet spaces between them rolled out comfortably, a lush pasture where thoughts were free to roam. They drove in silence, preparing their ideas, envisioning the work ahead.

The high school art department was at the end of a pebble-dash walkway, flanked along one side by bush. There were a couple of classrooms with big windows and a ceramics space with potting wheels and a kiln. It was peaceful this time of day, strewn with unattended artworks in various stages of completion. Apart from the odd senior student perched alone at an assignment, Camille and Novi usually had the place to themselves. With light flowing
in through the windows and equipment stacked all around, the art annexe had the relaxed atmosphere of a studio. Camille was pleased; she felt it was important for Novi to experience working in a dedicated space. It would help him see himself as an artist, not just a kid with a knack for drawing.

While he retrieved his stuff from the cupboard and set up at one of the tables, she went to make herself a cup of tea in the adjoining kitchenette.

‘Hi, Kay,' she called.

Kay, the art department's head teacher, waved and went on chatting to a few straggling kids reluctant to leave the sanctuary of the art rooms and go home. With her bare face and long dark hair parted in the middle, her thin arms laden with bangles and her devotion to seventies peasant skirts, Kay was equal parts bohemian and dag. She was often around when Novi and Camille arrived, preparing lessons in her tiny cubicle or shifting clay sculptures into the kiln for firing. Her manner of treating everyone as an adult earned her a loyal following; even the most difficult kids were putty in her hands.

The students trailed off. Kay came up to the sink and pulled a knife from the dish rack. ‘How are you two getting on?' She sliced an apple into pieces and offered some to Camille.

Camille took a slice. ‘All right, thanks to you.'

Along with giving her use of the rooms, Kay had taken the time to guide Camille through some of the less familiar equipment and materials. She had also suggested structuring Novi's program into monthly blocks. Each month Camille would start him on three different pieces across different mediums, beginning with a painting, a print and a sculpture. Camille remembered Kay's advice: ‘You said he usually works
frantically without a break? Well, this approach will encourage him to slow down and appreciate the process. Explain to him that this isn't primary school — he won't be expected to finish his work in one afternoon, but over several weeks. He needs to learn that it takes two or three sessions simply to prepare a block of clay and centre it on the wheel before he attempts to mould it, that he should prime his canvas and practise sketching out his subject before picking up a paintbrush.' She had handed Camille a wad of photocopied pages on gifted and talented children. ‘Encourage him to play with an idea in draft before committing to one particular vision and insist that he keep working on each piece — improving it, exploring the depth of the material — until the month's over, even if he thinks he's finished.'

Since then, there had been no looking back. Camille was dazzled by Novi's industriousness. He tried ideas, discarded them, tried again. He painted over things he felt weren't working or tore them up to use in some other way, a habit she found alarming, painful even, but she left him to it. She admired his fearlessness and natural fluidity.

He worked well on his own. For a lot of the time there was nothing much for her to do. At first she attempted some art herself, experimenting with ink and charcoal and pastels. Kay was very encouraging. Occasionally Camille was happy with the results but mostly she dismissed them as thin or stilted or selfconscious. There was no beauty in them and this she found profoundly discouraging. Novi's work, on the other hand, was always beautiful. Recently he'd begun to explore an aerial perspective and it lent a map-like dimension to his work. Studying his pictures, Camille felt as though she was peering
into a snowdome, a magical parallel world where undulations of rivers and trees, houses and streets, parted at random to reveal their unexpected secrets.

Kay leaned a patchwork hip against the bench and folded her arms. ‘And how's things with the new man?'

Camille blushed. She hadn't given Kay much detail about Dom or told her that he was a colleague. They were trying to keep their relationship discreet. But her thoughts were always drifting to the clean-soap smell of him, the scratchy stubble of his chin. Sometimes when they were alone she caught him watching her and the raw curiosity in his eyes was electrifying. That she could inspire such interest with so little effort was a revelation. ‘I feel like I'm eighteen again,' she admitted.

Kay nodded sagely. ‘A younger man can have that effect.'

Camille shook her head in wonder. ‘It's like I've woken up out of hibernation and I'm
famished
. A starving woman.'

‘I bet he's happy to be devoured.'

She blushed again. It was true. Today she'd been watching him through the library window when he was on playground duty. The children were bold with him, the girls teasing him, almost flirting. He had admitted this flustered him sometimes, but she saw that he handled it with good humour. She knew for certain he'd make a great father and it made her want him even more.

In a matter of weeks her old lethargy had been replaced by a voracious energy and there was nothing she couldn't accomplish. On the weekend, in a fit of mattock wielding, she'd dug a frog pond in her backyard, complete with a water feature she'd previously assumed would be too complicated to install on her own. Then she'd cooked up a big pot of goulash, dropped half off to her father and replaced all his dead pot-plants with new
seedlings. ‘You're going to wear yourself out!' he'd protested, greedily slopping goulash into a saucepan.

On the rare nights she wasn't with Dom she found she couldn't concentrate on her pile of novels. Too impatient for fiction, she glutted herself on travel writing until she was fidgety and craving fajitas. It was all so invigorating. And to think how willingly she had given up on desire! Before, in an effort to guard against the ache of loneliness, she had swaddled herself against the world. Without realising, she had effectively tried to mummify her own beating heart. Thankfully, Dom was no archaeologist. He had stumbled into her darkened catacomb, grabbed the end of a bandage and reefed with all his might. Lo and behold, out she'd tumbled into golden sunlight: not the dusty, shrunken crone she'd feared, but fresh-faced, desirable and dizzy with love.

 

At half past five George arrived to collect Novi. Today he brought her a bunch of beetroot and a shopping bag full of fresh basil. She was embarrassed. ‘Oh! You know you don't need to, George.'

He waved his hand. ‘We've got a tonne of it. Mira thought you could make pesto.'

She put her nose to the bag and inhaled the powerful tang. Novi tugged at his father's arm. ‘I can take these home today, Dad.'

George followed him over to the table to admire his work. ‘Well! Don't they look great!' He pointed to the collage. ‘Is that lichen on the boulders?' Novi nodded, pleased. His father's eyes were brimming with pride. ‘It's fantastic, mate.'

While Novi packed up, George waited for him patiently, wandering around the room and looking at the art, the equipment,
all of it. Every now and then he leaned in to study a work in detail, or the structure of an unusual tool, but he always kept his hands clasped behind his back as though afraid to disturb anything.

‘We're doing clay next week, with the wheel!' Novi called.

Camille nodded. ‘And we're painting in gouache.'

George listened, smiling, his eyes bright with longing. After they'd bundled up Novi's pieces and said goodbye, Camille took her mug to the kitchen and rinsed it, wondering what sort of artist George Lepido might have become if he'd been given the right encouragement.

 

Today we begin an etching. It involves scratching a picture into wax on a copper plate, then dipping it into a solution to give the etching bite, then rolling on some ink and putting the whole thing through the printing press — a big iron vice that looks like an old instrument of torture. The press squashes the ink into the paper, but you have to be careful not to move the plate while this is happening or the image will smudge. Miss Morrison says this is how the first books were made.

The paper we use is thick and spongy. It comes from France and is hand-made from cotton rag, not bark, which gives it a special texture. The ink comes from Spain and costs forty dollars a bottle. I am almost too nervous to touch it when Miss Morrison tells me this, but she says it is the ink that real artists use. She says my print will last four hundred years because of the quality of the paper and the ink. Not if you leave it out in the rain, of course.

After sketching for a bit I decide my etching will be of Pyramus under the mulberry tree. I plan to use blue ink at the top of
the picture and red ink at the bottom so they'll bleed together to form purple in the middle. It fits well into the story of how mulberries got their colour.

I etch into the copper with my needle, giving Pyramus an old-fashioned moustache with twirly ends. He looks a bit like Nonno. Miss Morrison prepares the solution in the sink by the window and says we mustn't breathe in the fumes or our lungs will burn. With a print you can make as many copies as you like, which is one advantage over painting, she tells me, taking little sips of air from the side of her mouth. Making one hundred prints means one hundred galleries can stock your work, giving you ninety-nine more chances of making a sale.

As an artist it is always important to think how money can be made.

In four hundred years I'll be four hundred and eleven.