Listening to Mondrian

by Nadia Wheatley

  She is right up close to Composition 1938–39 by Piet Mondrian. Here the tape guy goes on about something called Concrete Painting (which sounds like it ought to be done on concrete but it’s just done on canvas like all the others). And he reckons there’s a lot of maths in Mondrian too, which I’d agree with, because the pictures are basically rectangles done in the sort of colours that kindergarten kids use.

  ‘The paintings of Franz Marc are our next STOP – that’s NUMBER 7,’ the tape reckons now, but it doesn’t look as if we’ll ever make it because my better half sits, yes sits down plop on the floor, crosses her legs, places her hands in her lap, and continues to gaze (upwards now) at Composition 1938–39.

  Of course, when she sits, there’s a jerk on the cassette player, and I feel like a dog pulled up short on a lead. I guess I could disconnect her plug and leave her here by herself, but you don’t just leave little girls totally unsupervised in strange places. Besides, I’m a bit weary of the whole thing myself by now, so after a little while I sit down beside her, despite the look I get from a passing art-lover. Who knows, maybe if we make a public spectacle of ourselves Dad’ll get so embarrassed he’ll come and take us out to lunch. Personally speaking, I could eat a horse right at this minute, and chase the rider.

  But if Gemstone can go blind at will, so can (maybe it’s hereditary?) our father.

  We sit and sit, and the tape runs on, though I turn it down now till it’s just a drone – white noise I think it’s called, when electronic signals are transmitted in a way that has a sort of sound-masking effect.

  And come to think of it, White Noise would be a good name for this picture, not that it really is a picture, just . . .

  I’ll give you the recipe:

  Take a piece of white canvas, about one metre square.

  With black paint, do three lines down the right-hand side and one down the left-hand side, like prison bars. Then do four black lines horizontally from the left-hand side of the canvas to the first of the vertical right-hand lines. Then, in the middle and at the very bottom, do another black line across the canvas, right through the prison window.

  Now, with red paint fill in a little rectangle (about 3 cm by 10 cm) that has been made at the bottom of the picture by the meeting of the horizontal and vertical black lines.

  That’s it.

  It’s not a lot to look at but I sit and I sit.

  Suddenly I go off my brain. I don’t jump up, rant and rave, yell and scream, storm over to our father and demand: ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, treating us like this? How dare you pretend to take us out for the day and then just dump us – leave us to sit for hours in front of the stupidest picture in the universe while you chat up some new girlfriend!’

  I don’t do that, not outwardly, but inwardly I do. I say everything imaginable and unimaginable. I remind him how, last time, back in July, Gem ended the day in tears because Daddy kept telling his little Sugarplum that she was too fat, and he wouldn’t let her have her favourite – strawberries and icecream – for dessert, even though she’d gone without the entrée. (Oysters are her other favourite.)

  I remind him how, the time before that, back in January, he arrived with our (late as always) Christmas presents: a maths computer program for me and a globe of the world for Sis. Wow. The worst of it was that he’d given Sis a globe of the world the Christmas before, too.

  Now it gets really bad and I start reminding him how he drove Mum to where she is. Oh yes. When he met her she was someone who thought a drink meant a shandy at New Year for the sake of auld lang syne. But when Golden Boy got his first big promotion he decided that he liked her to be all dressed up and waiting when he got home, with a martini in the shaker and olives in the glass. So she started doing that, but he started coming home later and later, or not at all, and the ice started to melt and the martini was going warm so there was no solution but to drink it, was there? I mean, he doesn’t like waste.

  Soon it was straight gin, pass on the vermouth, forget about the olives too.

  It only took a couple of years – from when I was in Year 7 to when I was in Year 9 – for Old Mother Macreadie to get right into it. I’d come home from footy training and Gem would be glued to the TV screen and Ma would already have passed out for the night. I’d dial a pizza, pay for it out of Mum’s purse, feed the kid, put her to bed, watch the box, go to bed myself, and wait for the sound of the Porsche coming down the drive.

  Then all hell would break loose.

  She’d have slept enough of the gin off by then for him to wake her with his abuse: slag, slut, slackarse; he called her every name in the book – and all the names that don’t get into books, too. And it was quite untrue. I mean, she may have been a drunk, but as far as sex was concerned, he was the one who was playing around.

  And then one night she wasn’t there . . .

  I must’ve dozed off, not heard her slip out.

  They found her the next morning on the railway track.

  Oh, she was OK, dead to the world but not deady-bones dead. Silly sausage, she’d been so pissed she’d gone and lain down on a disused goods line.

  That was the end.

  Off she whizzed on an aeroplane to this clinic (read loony bin) in snowy Switzerland. We were not allowed to say goodbye at the airport. Gemma howled and I held her, but then we were taken away from each other. Once we were safely stashed into boarding school, Adolf could whiz off too. Next time I saw the little Gemfish, I realised she’d gone back to the stare-and-disappear trick. (Maybe red-hot birdseye chillies do work after all. I mean, Sis can make the whole world invisible!)

  So I’m raging, OK? Raging right back through the record (I told you the gory bits of Ancient History are what I’m best at) as I watch our father do his suavo-sleazo act upon this new chick.

  Red/red/red/red/red/red/red/red – I find myself focusing all my anger through the bit at the bottom of the picture, as I stare through the prison bars.

  And suddenly now I slip.

  I can’t say it any other way.

  It’s a bit like that dream-falling, but less dramatic, not a plunge, just a kind of amoeba-jelly slide through the black lines and into the white space that opens before me like the avenue of Delaunay’s archways, only even more infinite.

  Maybe it’s because we’re like two divers connected to the same air tank, but somehow as I sit joined to my sister and listening to the white noise of Mondrian through the cassette player, I find myself moving into the space that she finds when she disappears.

  I can’t say any more, because it is not a place of words or even feelings, it is just –

  I do not know how long we sit, but the refuge is such that when our father appears beside us I feel free of him. He cannot hurt me any more. Or not today. I am beyond the bars, and far away.

  ‘This is Miss Silkin,’ he informs me, meanwhile giving his companion a reassuring little pat on her bottom. ‘Would you believe it – she works here in our Sydney branch? And then we just happened to bump into each other . . .’

  No, I would not believe it. But nor would I give a shit.

  ‘Unfortunately, however, Miss Silkin has mentioned a little problem that has just cropped up on the Tokyo Exchange . . .’

  (How about that!)

  ‘And so I’m afraid that I’ll have to take a raincheck on our lunch, and pop into our office here.’

  It’s so transparent, I could laugh. But I just say that’s OK, I’ll get a cab, drop Gemmy back at her school, then go on to mine.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ he turns to his new consort, ‘meet my son Jonathan.’

  I turn up the volume on the tape machine, but all I get is static.

  ‘And this is my daughter Gemma. Miss Silkin.’

  ‘Oh call me Louisa,’ she protests.

  ‘Hi, Lulu!’ I grin, but Dad is hurrying us off too fast to even notice.

  Back to the cash register. By now the queue has all the lunchtime art crowd, but Stalin isn’t in a mood for stalling. ‘We�
�re just returning these.’ He barges through the front of the line and yanks the earplugs from Gem’s and my ears, hoists the cassette player off me, and stacks the lot on the desk.

  Louisa murmurs something to Gemma and they discreetly vanish in the direction of the toilets.

  ‘Here, hold this.’ My father dumps his suit coat into my arms before following them.

  The idea comes as a flash: here’s your chance, Jo. And I take it.

  Coming out into sunshine I feel free as a bird let out of its cage.

  Dad hands me a fifty-dollar note to cover the taxi fare, changes his mind, makes it a twenty and a ten, and I feel even better. Stingy bastard.

  A cab pulls up, and now Dad’s last concern is over. ‘Well, Jonathan. Well, Gemma.’ He opens the car door and almost pushes us in. ‘I’m afraid I won’t be back again before Christmas. Your presents will have to wait until the New Year . . .’

  (After all, we wouldn’t want to waste money on postage, would we? It doesn’t worry me, but I know Murgatroyd is always disappointed if she doesn’t get something on The Day.)

  ‘Bye, Dad.’

  ‘Bye bye, Daddy.’

  But he is off. And so are we.

  ‘Just drop us at the quay, please,’ I tell the driver.

  Gemma’s eyes sparkle. She is well and truly back now from the wherever it is that she disappears to. ‘Where’re we going, Jo?’

  ‘Lunch,’ I tell her.

  ‘But where?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘Oh Jo, go on . . .’

  We pull up now and the little Fishface eyes are goggling through their aquarium glass as they take in where we are. ‘Oh Jo! We’re not! We’re not truly, are we? Are we?’

  ‘Are we what?’ I tease.

  ‘Going to the – you know – the Revolting Restaurant!’ she explodes with joy.

  It’s really revolving, of course, and she knows it, but once upon a time in the Good Old Days when Genghis Khan was still just your common or garden family fascist and not the High Panjandrum of Them All, we went on an outing – Dad, Mum and the two kids – to this restaurant that revolves as you eat. Little Gem-baby (she would’ve been about four at the time) called it revolting instead of revolving, and we all laughed (our family laughed, I can distinctly remember it) and so she said it again and we laughed again, and she said it again and we . . . Well, to tell you the truth Daddy got sick of it by the third go and made his Baby Bunting cry, but it was good while it lasted, and ever since then Sis has always begged please couldn’t we go to the Revolting Restaurant instead of the Royal Sydney Golf Club Dining Room? Daddy? Just once?

  I tell you, just this once I hope and pray that Daddy takes his guest to the Royal Sydney, and not to some little restaurant that Lulu happens to know. At the Royal Sydney, see, he’s a member, so he just tabs it up on his account.

  Of course he will, I reassure myself. He’s as reliable as Mussolini’s train timetable. Then with any luck it’ll be off to her place for a quick root before he catches a taxi (he uses Cabcharge vouchers, so that’s OK) to the airport in time to board the commuter special to New York.

  All in all, I congratulate myself as the lift arrives at the zillionth floor and we exit into the restaurant foyer . . .

  I drape my arm across the school badge on my blazer pocket, pull myself up to my full height.

  ‘Monsieur? Mademoiselle?’

  ‘A table for two,’ I tell the waiter. ‘By the window if possible. Mademoiselle likes to enjoy the view.’

  ‘But of course, Monsieur.’

  The place is three-quarters empty. They’d be mad to quibble at a couple of customers, even if the monsieur does look a bit deformed with his arm across his chest and the mademoiselle is dancing for joy through the empty tables.

  We are seated, and given the menus. The wine list, sir? No worries. I take my coat off.

  All in all, I congratulate myself again as I scan the list (French champagne? Why not? It’s a special occasion after all. Only a half bottle, though. Don’t want to get like Ma), with any luck he’ll be in New York tomorrow morning (or last night or whatever time it’ll be when he arrives) before he realises what he’s lost.

  ‘Jo, how are you going to pay?’ Sis is nearly exploding with curiosity. ‘Did Daddy give you some money?’

  ‘He certainly did.’

  I go like James Bond or something and open my blazer, which hangs from my chair, and let her see the flash of dull gold which I transferred from our father’s inside pocket into mine.

  ‘Oh Jo! Don’t you feel guilty?’

  ‘Gemmles, it’s not stealing,’ I explain carefully to her. (I don’t want the kid to get the idea that you can just go and take people’s things.) ‘It’s like when we were with Mum, remember? And she wasn’t able to feed us, and I used to take money from her purse and buy us a pizza. Dad wasn’t able to feed us today, and if we went back to school now, we’d have missed boarders’ lunch. So I just helped him do his duty. It’s the law, Bub. Fathers have to feed their children.’

  Gemma isn’t as dumb as some people think. Once she gets the hang of the situation, she reads the menu with enthusiasm.

  ‘Do we just have to have an entrée and a main course, or a main course and a dessert, or can we have . . . ?’

  ‘Anything you like, Princess,’ I tell her.

  In the end, she decides to skip the middle, and settles for a dozen oysters kilpatrick followed by strawberry chantilly with cream and ice-cream, and a glass of Coke.

  ‘Just half a dozen oysters natural for me,’ I tell the waiter, ‘and for my main course, the grilled gemfish.’ I tease.

  Sis splutters. ‘Cannibal!’

  ‘Make that the lobster thermidor, with a double serve of garlic bread, chocolate mudcake for dessert, and a half bottle of . . .’ I change my mind again, remembering how boring it is for little kids when people drink, ‘I mean a large bottle of Coke. In an ice bucket, if we may.’

  ‘Of course, Monsieur.’

  I could really take to this sort of thing, I think, as the city down below us slowly shifts and shifts again, like the gentle collapse of a Delaunay. But one thought leads to another, and after a while I think of a worry.

  ‘You know when you go away, Sis . . .’

  ‘In the holidays? To Auntie Roo’s?’

  ‘No – away. Like you did inside the picture.’

  She gives me a guilty look. Dad always yells at her for day-dreaming.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I start to reassure her.

  ‘You did too!’ she accuses.

  I sure did. As she says it, the feeling comes back, of the space inside. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there again. And actually, I’m not sure that I want to. But this one time, listening to Mondrian has been enough to let me go beyond the prison bars. And if you’ve escaped once, I reckon, you probably become like Zorro or the Scarlet Pimpernel or something: you’re always able to break free, one way or another.

  But there’s still this worry . . .

  ‘You don’t go too far, do you?’ That’s all I want to know. I have a nightmare suddenly, in which I am searching through the archways, trying to find my little gemfish as she flicks away into the wide white yonder . . .

  ‘Oh no,’ she tells me earnestly. ‘I used to nearly, when I was little, and then after Mum went away, I was going to go for good. But I didn’t want to miss you. And then, I dunno. I learnt to do it like swimming, just to the first line of breakers and keep watching the flags on the shore, like you showed me. I don’t do it much, you know. Just in class sometimes, when the arithmetic goes all jangly on the board. And when Daddy’s – you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  We toast each other:

  ‘Here’s to us.’

  ‘Here’s to us, too.’

  ‘Here’s to us two, too.’

  When the bill comes, I go like the ads: ‘You take American Express?’

  ‘But of course, Monsieur.’

  I sign the signature with a fl
ourish. Add in a generous sum for a tip.

  ‘Thank you, Monsieur.’

  ‘Any time,’ I lie.

  ‘What now?’ Sis urges as we hit the streets. ‘How about we catch a ferry to the zoo? Or . . .’

  I explain that we have no cash. ‘A liquidity problem, you might say.’

  Bubba’s face falls. ‘So it’s back to school.’

  ‘Well . . . as long as we stick to places where they take plastic, we could go Christmas shopping first.’

  Gem lights up again. ‘After all, he owes us prezzies. That’s the law.’

  ‘I could get you a globe of the world,’ I suggest.

  ‘And I could get you a wheelbarrow.’

  ‘A wheelbarrow?’

  ‘You know,’ my Gemini-twin prompts, ‘to fill with surprises.’

  THE BLAST

  FURNACE

  On Gramma’s bedside table, among the pills and medicines, the metho and tissues and cuttings from the obituary notices, there was a framed motto: ‘My Father’s house has many mansions.’ A few years ago, when Liv had first met Gramma, it used to puzzle her: how could lots of mansions fit inside the one house? It was like saying that a stack of beer cartons could be inside a shoebox. Or that a whole lot of girls could be inside Liv. Now, however, Liv knew exactly how it could happen. For within the ruins of the old blast furnace, Liv had mansions for all moods and all seasons.

  As she approached it now, on this nothing-day when she was in the process of turning fourteen, its solid power reached out to her as it had the very first time she’d seen it.

  An autumn afternoon. Liv is ten. Wearing an itchy pink wool dress (pink!) that Mum has specially bought her. (‘You can be bridesmaid!’ As if that’d reconcile her.) It is too tight. Already at ten Liv is a size 14, but since the Chinese smorgasbord after the registry office the pink dress pulls across her tum.

  They drive – well, he drives, Uncle Bruce, that’s what Mum says she has to call him – up the highway to the top of the Blue Mountains, then turn off to the right. (‘Might as well take the scenic route,’ he says. ‘I told Ma we wouldn’t be back till four.’) Now the road goes through gum trees for a while, then zigzags up a steep hill and Liv feels sick. He stops at the top and they get out into a scrubby mess of saplings and charred stubble. The wind bites through the pink dress.