Watercolours (3 page)

It appealed to an old longing: ever since she was a teenager desperate for romance, Mira had dreamed of being an artist's muse. Muses were always curvaceous, and to her best friend, Diana, she had vowed, ‘I will marry a painter and spend my days reclining on plump velvet lounges in high-ceilinged studios, draped in silk scarves and shafts of hazy sunlight while my husband, who of course will be wearing a beret and loose shirt and worn leather slippers,
inflamed
by my feminine radiance, will create masterpiece after masterpiece, slashing wildly at giant canvases until he can't stand it anymore and breaks down weeping at the sheer
divinity
of my beauty while I meditate on all the stupid boring boys who spurned me in my early life.' At this, Diana would sigh and say she'd like to be a muse too, or a marine biologist.

As it turned out, Mira married George Lepido, not an artist but a passionate man nonetheless, and prone to weeping; a man of humble farming origins who once spent a summer on his uncle's boat and had been obsessed with building his own ever since. It was a small wedding and Diana was her only bridesmaid but Mira hadn't seen her in years; she lived in San Diego now, studying dolphins.

In one of Diana's early letters from the States she'd written, ‘You can come and visit when George finishes the boat — we're right on the water here!' That was before Novi was born. If Mira thought about it too much she got depressed and then she had to give herself a stern talking-to, reminding herself of all the good things she had. Novi was an artist. In the end she hadn't married one, but made her own.

Struggling with a fitted sheet she thought about the school project he'd brought home the other day. It was a beautiful
timeline, no doubt a hundred times more imaginative than any of the others! She pegged the sheet to the line with little violent jabs. It made her blood boil to think that new teacher had taken it down! But she'd go and sort it out this week. She was resolved. On the whole, Morus Primary was a good little school but if this new guy was as hopeless as the last one she'd insist Novi be moved. In less than twelve months he'd be off to high school and it wouldn't do for him to become any more withdrawn. He had to be encouraged out of his shell and that certainly wasn't going to happen with some buffoon of a teacher who didn't understand him properly.

Mira let out a sigh. As proud as she was of Novi's creativity, she had to admit she worried about him. He was so
absorbed
in his drawings lately. All those long hours spent alone as though consumed by a fever; his poor friend Hughie had to pester him to play. Maybe it was just the start of adolescence? Gathering up a handful of his underpants she marvelled at how quickly he was growing up, and yet he was still so tiny! Pegging them out, she felt her stomach flip over and prayed that this would be the year he had his growth spurt.

Novi looked much younger than eleven. His school cap swallowed his head; he had to pull the Velcro band at the back as tight as it would go and it left a stiff blue tail sticking out behind him. Likewise, his backpack seemed enormous, hanging down past his bottom with his brown legs poking out beneath like a couple of twigs. Mira thought her heart would break if she had to watch him trudge off to school for another year, threatening to collapse under the weight of it. From the day he was born he'd never grown as he should and she'd always been concerned about his health.

Even his birth had been extraordinary. When at last she'd surrendered to the contractions and pushed Novi into the world, the midwife's loud gasp had struck her with fear. Mira knew of babies born with problems: cleft lips, cleft palates, reproductive deformities. Their mothers had suffered miscarriages like she had. When George burst into tears she went stiff with dread until she heard him bawl, ‘It's a boy, my love! A perfect little boy!' The midwife handed him over and they'd laughed and cried together at the miracle. The doctor arrived in a flurry of self-importance to scrutinise Novi's genitals before proclaiming that indeed it was true: they had a son and he was underweight. Nurses came from across the ward to witness the spectacle. It wasn't every day a boy was born in Morus, the town with the highest ratio of female to male births in the entire state.

Since then she'd been forever making him delicious meals and fancy snacks in an attempt to fatten him up. The result was that Novi remained small while she and George grew at an alarming rate, developing padding in places they'd assumed would always be trim and youthful. George referred to his belly as their second child — it was solid and demanding and preceded him everywhere; in bed at night it looked like a pale mountain covered in a dark, wispy wood.

By the time Novi was five he was complaining of headaches. Strange pains in his joints woke him at night. The doctor wasn't sure what the problem was. ‘Perhaps just growing pains?' he ventured. He put Novi on the scales, felt his glands, took his blood pressure. ‘He's still in the bottom percentile for height and weight. It might be thyroid related. Let's do some tests to make sure.'

Tests! Mira was terrified. Memories from her childhood returned to haunt her, the thrill of the neighbour's crop duster flying low, running out into the pale drift to feel it settle on her skin and behold in wonder her ordinary backyard transformed into the misty landscape of a storybook. She remembered helping her father treat the grapes for rot and the mulberries for speckle and borers. In the early years of her market garden business everyone used broad-spectrum sprays before it was understood how they built up in the soil, how they built up in people.

What had she done to her little boy?

She felt she'd go mad in the weeks it took for the results to come back. In an attempt to take her mind off things she set herself the task of cooking every recipe in her late father's favourite cookbook, the Italian one he'd bought on a trip to the ancestral village years ago when he met her mother. The cover was falling apart and the pages were yellowing and spattered with tomato and olive oil, but it was such a strong reminder of Umberto. She liked to flick through it on the days she missed him most, instantly sensing him in the kitchen with her, urging her to be gentle with the garlic, to add more oil, to be less uniform with the vegetables.
Just chop, don't measure!

On the day the tests were due back she was up to page 12: Faraone all'Uva ed Olive. But at the butcher's, her man Frank shook his head. ‘Guinea fowl? None in stock, Mira, sorry. Not much demand, see. I can order them in, but it'll take a week.'

It was a bad sign. Overwhelmed with worry, exhaustion and repressed Italian superstition she broke down there and then, sliding to the floor and sobbing her heart out on the cold, scrubbed tiles. Frank — a burly man who prided himself on his ability to bring smiles to the faces of his female customers —
had been horrified. He rushed around the counter and gathered her up, pressed half a kilo of free sausages into her hands and murmured, ‘Now, now. She'll be right. Leave it with me, love.' Mira didn't find out until months later that he'd resorted to trading half a side of lamb for some of his neighbour's beloved doves, which he'd plucked himself.

When at last the phone call came she clutched the handset and prepared herself for the worst. ‘The tests are inconclusive,' the doctor reported. ‘His thyroid's fine. Just growing pains, it seems.'

On hearing this, Mira's anxiety slunk back to its hiding place. She and George danced around the kitchen with little Novi pinned between them in a love sandwich. Then they wiped their eyes, blew their noses and celebrated with a double serving each of zabaione.

Coming to the last of the sheets, Mira heard the koel strike up its morning call. She turned to squint towards the top of the mulberry tree. As if on cue a flock of lorikeets came charging through the orchard, then some noisy miners arrived to berate Varmint, lazily scratching her claws on the trunk of the turpentine. The cat flung them a couple of insults before slinking off.

The last of the early morning haze had burned away into a bright blue sky. In the gathering heat the cicadas began to throb and echo in one voice, like the hiss and gulp of ocean waves. Mira turned back to collect the washing basket but first took a moment to admire her sheets, radiant and already half dry. And that's when she saw them, like a set of evil eyes: two fresh dark splotches flashing at her.

She couldn't believe it. From that dark place deep inside her, where all her worry and guilt and grief stewed, came an eruption. Up it shot, seeking release. She lunged at the basket and flung it
with all her might into the tree. It bounced against the branches. The birds fled in terror.

Pegs snapped. Bras and underpants jumped. With the mulberry-soiled sheets bunched in her arms, she stormed off towards the laundry, straight for a tub of bleach.

The bell rang, signalling the end of lunch. Dom was heading back to his classroom from playground duty when he was hailed by Warwick Van Gestel, who took Year 5, on his way to the oval for cricket practice.

‘Those crazy Lepidos after you already, eh?'

No secrets in this place, then.

Warwick barked some orders at the straggly group of kids lugging equipment, got them throwing balls to each other. Then, with hands plunged deep in the pockets of his shorts, he strolled over.

‘The mother's the one who wears the pants in that family,' he began, squinting up at the balls making wobbly arcs against the sky. ‘She's the one you've got to get onside. George is a bit of a hopeless character, nothing to fear from him.' His eyes flickered. ‘Come on, Crawford! Eye on the ball, girl!'

He shifted his belt under the eave of his paunch. ‘I had Novi last year. Bloody painful, those parents. Don't know when to butt out.' He scratched at a freckled forearm, raking white lines. ‘They think the kid's a genius, of course.' He broke off. ‘Hey! Shorter! Stop throwing like a girl. Eh? I don't care if you
are
one, smartypants, I don't want to see you throwing like that on my cricket team.
Jesus.'
He gave Dom a what-can-you-do look. ‘Anyway, all I can say is good luck trying to improve his
handwriting. Typical left-hander, shocking scrawl. I tried to do something about it but the mother kicked up a stink. Reckoned I was stifling his creativity or some such bullshit. All he does is doodle all day, hopeless attention span.' He gave an exasperated cough and pulled his socks back up to his chalky knees. ‘Kid needs discipline — crikey, Schmidt! How many times have I told you, you've got to get
under
the ball? Well, of
course
you'll hurt your fingers if you snatch at it like that. Get
under
it next time.'

The girl was snivelling. Warwick sighed. ‘Off you go to Mrs Mackey, then.' He shook his head as he turned his attention back to Dom. ‘You better get going. Good luck, mate. You'll need it!'

He strode off towards the team, his voice bellowing after Dom as he made his way to the classrooms. ‘Come on then, you lot, twice round the oval! What's that, Singh? Well, if you forgot your sneakers you'll just have to run in your school shoes, won't you! Quick smart …'

The encounter had set Dom's nerves on edge. For the rest of the day he couldn't stop going over the incident with Novi's timeline and how badly he'd handled it. Personally, he thought it was a fantastic effort, even though it wasn't to scale or set out exactly the way he'd instructed.

Instead it was a kind of map of the river, looping back and forward across the paper on a journey through time. At the top, Novi had drawn a camp of Aboriginals dancing around a fire in the hills. Further along, some white men in the forest were cutting down giant trees with hand-held saws and from here the river wound back to follow a team of bullocks down to the harbour, where logs lay in the foam to be loaded onto ships. The river looped again, this time through farmland where settlers and
Aboriginals waged war, then up into town along High Street — Dom saw the butcher shop, drapery and general store, buildings he'd ridden past every day without realising how old they were. On it flowed, past orchards and vineyards until a string of red-brick houses sprang up like toadstools in the bottom right-hand corner of the page. The whole thing suddenly came to an end because Novi had run out of cardboard.

Dom had been delighted with it and he'd praised Novi in class for his originality. But then a complaint came through to the principal, Malcolm Donaldson. All the senior teachers had waded in to debate what was right and wrong and potentially damaging to young minds; apparently you couldn't have a massacre in a timeline, even if it was historically accurate. Dom had felt out of his depth. He wanted to defend the work but he assumed the others knew what they were on about. Anyway, the boy had seemed all right about him taking it down. It was almost as though he'd expected it and Dom had felt relieved. But now he realised he should have taken the time to better explain the decision — only he still didn't understand it himself. Deep down, Dom suspected that at this stage it was probably best not to admit to all the things he didn't understand.

By the time the last bell rang, his head was throbbing and his throat was so dry he could barely swallow. Ducking up to the empty staffroom he took a couple of Panadol and tried to collect himself before the Lepidos arrived. He made a strong coffee, stirred in two sugars and took a sip.
Ugh.
The coffee was awful. So was the mug: government-supplied, too small to hold a decent volume and smothered in an ugly brown glaze. But he couldn't come at the others sitting in the cupboard, the ones with quirky sayings and cartoon figures looking stressed. He couldn't
imagine owning a mug that said
Old teachers never die, they just lose their class.
They belonged to other people, older teachers like Warwick who'd been striding through corridors and classrooms for years. He suspected people like that were born fully grown, with a genetic tolerance for International Roast, their massive calves launching them from the womb into a lifetime of pastel polo shirts.

On the long Formica table were a couple of metal platters strewn with leftover sandwiches. Dom peeled back the plastic wrap and lifted the tops off a few triangles to see what was in them: mostly egg, by the look of it, with a yellow frill of lettuce. In the quiet room his stomach squeaked in complaint; the combination of nerves and instant coffee was making him feel sick and he knew he should try to get one of those limp-looking sandwiches down. He assumed it was Jean Mackey who'd left them out for him; she was the one who made sure he knew how to operate the temperamental urn, who urged him towards the best biscuits from the box of assorted creams and offered unsolicited gossip about students and their families. Not much escaped her eagle eye. At recess today she had pounced from the kitchen sink with a sponge to mop at some coffee he'd spilled on his shirt and Dom had submitted meekly, afraid she might spit on a tissue and start on the corners of his mouth. Her massive floral breast exerted itself while she dabbed and chattered, telling him about her son, Mick, who was a good-hearted boy, not much older than Dom, and still living at home. ‘Mick has trouble with food, too. It's a dental problem, just too many teeth for his poor mouth. That's probably why the girls haven't given him a chance yet. Still, I love having him at home. It's useful to have someone to defrost the chops for tea and bring the washing in if it looks
like rain. Given that Phil is useless around the house, can't even boil an egg! No, Phil and I aren't like some who push their little ones out of the nest too soon. Mick pays a bit of board and it works out best for all of us.' She paused to study Dom's jawline. ‘When's the last time you had
your
teeth checked, Dom?'

He couldn't tell Jean that the reason he'd spilled the coffee was because he'd been distracted. Camille Morrison had distracted him, Camille from the library. When they were first introduced she hadn't made much of an impression: skinny, pale-blonde hair, eyebrows so light they almost disappeared. Older. She was quiet that first day, wilting in the corner of the staffroom, eclipsed by the robustness of Jean Mackey and the rest of them. Dom decided she was like some pale exotic plant sown in the wrong climate, silently struggling not to incinerate. Then he forgot her.

So this morning in the library he'd been surprised to realise how attractive she was. First she'd walloped him with her blue eyes — it must have been the first time she'd actually looked straight at him. She had kind of an awkward manner but he'd noticed the strength in her body, the way her pale biceps flexed as she stamped the pile of new borrowing cards, the way she moved with athletic poise as she guided him around the shelves and ran him through the school's reference section. When he made a joke she laughed, not in the feathery, fluttery way he might have imagined, but deeply, unselfconsciously. Camille Morrison had a dirty laugh.

Back at the front desk, she'd asked him who his favourite authors were. Her gaze was so sharp that for a moment he was paralysed and couldn't think. He spotted a paperback, obviously hers, on her desk. ‘I've read that!' he cried like an
idiot. He was rewarded with a look the colour of holidays. Then she charged into a complicated analysis of the book's strengths and weaknesses and there in the muted environment of the library, her voice hushed and close, her eyes endless and her blouse revealing a hint of sun-freckled collarbone, he'd found it hard enough remembering the title of the novel, let alone its themes and historical context; all he could do was smile and nod and wish he'd taken the literature option at university. At last she'd stumbled to a halt, as if embarrassed. He'd stared at her, imagined running his hand over her shoulder, resting his thumb at that creamy collarbone to feel its ridge and indentation. Then she half turned to a nearby table, where she began straightening some magazines, and the conversation was apparently over.

Dom had left the library feeling dazed. He'd wandered up to the staffroom for morning tea, overfilled his coffee cup and slopped it at the first sip. When Jean had finally finished cleaning him up she'd looked at him with concern.

‘Feeling all right, love?'

Dom had nodded, still trying to figure out what had transpired in the library. Jean's curiosity was piqued. She'd edged him towards the biscuit tin, a heat-seeking missile for gossip. After a moment when he still hadn't spoken, she enquired casually, ‘You got that message from Mira Lepido?'

‘Yes. Thanks.'

She waited.

‘I'm seeing them this afternoon.'

‘Ah!' She tried to keep her expression neutral. ‘
Interesting
family, that one. Always something on the back burner.'

Dom knew the drill by now. Jean would make a token attempt at discretion, but she couldn't hold back for long.

‘That Novi's a sweet little thing,' she said at last. ‘Mira's a bit mad, though. Bit alternate. Did you know she named him after a worm?' She shook her head. Then she launched.

The Lepido family, she informed Dom, lived hand to mouth in a rundown old property they couldn't buy because the bank kept refusing them the loan. George was always chasing some new project that never seemed to take off while Mira supported them all selling produce she grew in her garden. She'd been raised in tragic circumstances: abandoned by her mother as a child, her father struggling in debt until the day he died — drowned in the big flood of 1990. There was a rumour of drugs.

Jean reported all this in a voice of hushed gravity but Dom caught the tone of smug disapproval. He could tell she thought the couple deserved the life they had, that if they simply knuckled down instead of always being swept along on flights of fancy they might improve their lot and give their son a better future. Part of him agreed; Dom's father had drummed the importance of financial security into him until it became an ember in the pit of his stomach, flaring every time he thought about his pathetic teacher's wage, the prospect of a mortgage, the Corolla's predictable demise. If he'd taken his father's advice and stuck with the family business he'd be on his way to paying off a two-bedroom apartment in Sydney by now, like his sister, or behind the wheel of a decent car instead of riding around on a BMX like some overgrown delinquent. But something in him had resisted that future. It was a vision of the years stretching ahead, on and on towards retirement and eventual death with nothing to challenge him but aluminium window frames. In the end that prospect had terrified him more than anything.

He looked at his watch. It was time to head over to the classroom.

He pulled the plastic wrap back over the sandwiches and opened the fridge. Next to a shrivelled apple and someone's yoghurt was a plate Jean had put aside for him. It was a square of jam sponge from a birthday celebration he'd missed while on playground duty. Dom seized it triumphantly. Then he paused.

Camille, that's whose birthday.

He wondered how old she was, how much older than him. She was a bit intense. Kind of intimidating, actually. But those eyes, that skin …

He polished off the cake in three bites and threw the rest of his coffee into the sink. Then, dusting icing sugar from his fingers, he set off down the corridor.

He crossed the quadrangle and walked down a path trimmed with scrappy plants climbing over woodchip. Inside, the classroom was roasting. Afternoon sun poured through the windows, highlighting the smear of grubby handprints spread across the tables. He sat down at his desk with some of Novi's work and tried to prepare himself. He'd noticed that Novi was a quiet kid, one of only six boys in his class of twenty-nine. The school had a strange abundance of girls, an anomaly everyone in Morus simply accepted, and it seemed to be one of the main reasons Dom had been chosen for the job; his boss, Malcolm, had mentioned a few times already the importance of young male role models at Morus Primary.

Dom took a look at the work in front of him: a spelling test, some mathematics homework, geography notes. He was still getting to know his students; at the moment he was swamped with setting up a portfolio for each of them, and coping with all the
other paperwork that was required. Novi's work was competent, nothing special, except for the doodling. All along the margins of his worksheets Novi had drawn intricate miniature scenes. There was a bird swooping over a river, people picking fruit, a ship trailing spume as it powered past jungle islands towards a horizon somewhere off the page. In the midst of all this, text and numbers appeared to be an interruption, a hurried afterthought to something much more interesting lurking underneath.

Dom studied the handwriting. Typical left-hander, just as Warwick had said; Dom had already picked it, being left-handed himself. In the first days of class he'd watched the girls lovingly practise their cursive, perfecting fat loops and sweeping tails and dotting their
i's
with plump little heads. In contrast, Novi's writing was thin and squashed and slanted, a bit like Dom's own scrawl. He pictured the parents sitting opposite him, and imagined addressing them sternly:
Mr and Mrs Lepido
, w
e really
must
do something about your son's handwriting.
But he knew it didn't matter and so would they. He rubbed at his forehead. What would these people want from him?