Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  ‘And I found out he was her father. She said you were a better painter than him, but she didn’t have any of your work to show me. I ran into her again last week at the market and I asked if there was anywhere I could go to see your paintings. She said if I wanted to see for myself, why didn’t I come to this party? She said you’d be having a New Year’s party, and that’s why I came.’ He takes a deep breath, stretching his magnificent arms like a little boy about to jump into a swimming pool, then blows out his breath and relaxes again, glad to have got that lot off his chest. ‘But I don’t think you could possibly be a better painter,’ he adds in a scarcely audible voice, ‘and anyway,’ he continues, ‘I saw some of your paintings here. I wandered into a few of the rooms. And you’re not, so there.’

  Casually, I empty a bottle of soda water over his head, but he is hardly even surprised. It splashes down over his shoulders and fizzes through the fuzz on his legs without him doing anything to stop it. He just sits there, unimpressed, his arms jacked up on his knees and folded across his chest. ‘Those ones in the front room upstairs, for instance …’

  ‘There’s only one in the front room upstairs. A couple of Stone’s Green Ginger Wine bottles lying at the base of a wall.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s the one. I mean, I can’t see the point of it. There’s hardly anything in it.’

  ‘How much do you know about Australian painting, Link?’

  ‘Not much, I’ll admit. But I trust my own judgement. I like to think I have some judgement … though I probably don’t have.’

  ‘It’s one of my father’s most famous paintings. It’s the subject of litigation at this very moment. I’ve had to have a burglar alarm installed. I’m not given to securing my possessions,’ I explain, ‘and if Where the Nice Girls Live No. 2 belonged to me, it wouldn’t be protected. It belongs to my son and my niece, however – or will do one of these days. I’m not much of a guardian. I have always lived with an open door.

  ‘Not so long ago a show of mine was vandalised and some of my work was destroyed. Other people urged me to be angry and sue, but I was sorry for the person who did it, really sorry. To him it must’ve seemed that my work was directed against him. But one’s artistic work is only ever about what one knows. I was sorry for having caused someone unconquerable pain, sorry he had to lard his actions by roundly disparaging my talent, but if I fail to paint, even in my head, there’s nothing left for me. I didn’t take the matter any further, though people said I should have.’

  ‘That means that person gets away with what he’s done.’

  ‘No. He probably lives with it all the time. He needs help. Not my help, but some kind of help. No one will help him. Perhaps no one knows how. I don’t suppose anybody wants to help, either. You go seeking help for people like that and doctors turn round and tell you you’re sick. People have the attitude that it’s a waste of time to try to salvage vandals and bashers, but what they’re really saying is such people are inconvenient. It’s passive extermination. Like poor people are inconvenient.’

  We drink our coffee slowly, letting the new sunlight warm the blood in our eyelids, like lizards on a rock. Then Link wants me to explain Dadda’s painting to him so I take him upstairs to where the painting is hanging.

  Reg Sorby brought it here and had it bolted to my wall. The seeing eye blinks on and off above the door behind us. It isn’t an ideal place to hang the painting, a small, front-facing room giving onto a balcony through curtained French doors. There’s a lot of natural light, which means the painting will deteriorate over time if I don’t cover it in summer. Reg’s insurer suggests a large pane of bullet-proof glass anchored into the wall with steel pins. It seems a bit extreme to me and would cost me more than the guardianship is worth. Furthermore, although that would protect it from attack, it would hardly cope with the light problem and my walls are of such poor quality that anything heavy falls off them, taking chunks of plaster with it.

  Dadda’s painting is a seeming blank, and yet it is a hive of riches. I explain the surface qualities and the latent messages in what is depicted. Little ironies in graffiti and subtleties in the application of the paint that cause the image of a girl to come and go as the viewer moves. I explain how it is a transitional painting, making reference to abstraction and hard-edge. It is an unusual painting for its time, clean and puritanical in execution but depicting something unclean and licentious. In the middle of the wall, in neat little letters, is written: LET HER R.I.P.

  We dawdle downstairs. The summer morning has come up sleepy and still. It isn’t hot, but long in shadow and very green. Water is in the leaves of things and great hydrangeas, mysteriously blue, are being born from leaf wombs. It is the season of blue in Melbourne, the season of petal skulls, of agapanthus and intense lobelia, of purple marguerites growing in globes. Allegra is swaying slowly now, from foot to foot, as Link and Kelly and I stroll about the house, talking in low voices, waiting for it to be time to pack our car and go on our holiday. In the sitting room now, with Allegra, we stand each side of the fireplace, me swivelling on my right heel, grasping the mantelpiece; Link swivelling on his left, also grasping the mantelpiece; Kelly leaning back towards the fireplace.

  We are talking about Mad Meg and what our hopes were for it, when a key is thrust noisily into the front door lock and loud, angry footsteps sound in the hall.

  ‘My God, it’s David,’ I whisper, my heart knocking in my chest. He was supposed to have gone to spend New Year with Bart in Sydney. I run into the hall, flailing my arms about and crying out, ‘My God, this is pretty ridiculous!’ But David thuds on up my stairs and tries to wrench Dadda’s painting off the wall. Why has David got a key? Why does he know the painting’s here? Is it Eli who’s told him?

  ‘It’s bloody stupid, David, you know I’ll only have to get the police! Don’t be so silly! Please!’

  I keep going for his arm like a puppy, and he, single-minded, having worked himself up into a fury, keeps pushing me off.

  I yell for Link. When he reaches the upstairs room, David is still yanking away at the canvas with seemingly indomitable determination. Link lays his great hands on the door lintels. ‘I think you’d better leave it alone,’ he says. And it’s extraordinary – men are baboons – David takes one look at big strong Link and changes his tack completely. He stands there, to one side of Where the Nice Girls Live No. 2, like the sober subject of a Renaissance allegory choosing between a life of action and a life of contemplation and, sensing that the only advantage he has is age, he enquires almost genially, ‘And who are you?’

  Link lets go of the door lintels. He strolls into the room, keeping his knees stiff. He folds his hands across his chest and stands, legs apart, with his weight evenly distributed. ‘I think you’d better leave,’ he says.

  Then David says, ‘This is my painting,’ and does a John the Baptist appealing to God with his left hand.

  The gesture is too much. ‘God, I’m sick of you, David!’ I scream. ‘Get out of my house!’

  I have cost Link the situation. Archly David descends the stairs, but instead of heading for the front door, makes for the kitchen. He pours himself a cup of coffee.

  ‘You bastard!’ I roar. ‘I don’t want to talk to you! This isn’t your house! Get out!’

  David gazes out at the challis lilies, plucking his purple lower lip with his superb hand – how can he have such beautiful hands? ‘Those lilies are taking over,’ he says smarmily. ‘What do you call them again? Python lilies? Isn’t that your name for them? Your house is being strangled, Isobel. Snakes outside and snakes wivin.’

  ‘Oh, how ridiculous you are! Why don’t you wake up to yourself? If the painting belongs to anyone, it belongs to Eli and Nin.’

  David turns his back on the garden, faces me and folds his arms, elbows to his sides, like a bat. He is smoking, the smoke draws a sophisticated squiggle up his shirt and over his face. Casually he blows it to one side. ‘You’re going to seed, Isobel,’ he says in a low voice, so Link,
who is straddling the stairs to block the way, can’t hear. ‘Your skin’s all dry. You have cicatrices in your chin. You’re also a talentless bore. You come from a mad family. You’re mad yourself. Your father made a dreadful mistake when he married your mother and he spent the latter part of his life trying to unmake it. That’s why you inherited nothing. He left his work to the people who knew what it was worth.

  ‘That painting you have upstairs belongs to a series all collected and owned by one person. You and your sister were most injudicious in having it removed. It belongs to the Siècle Trust and that is where it will end up.’

  Link comes into the kitchen and says, ‘You’d better go.’

  ‘Who is this bore?’ David snaps.

  ‘Go,’ says Link, without raising his voice.

  ‘How old are you?’ David harps at him, and it’s such a pathetic ploy that I feel a weary laugh hump in my chest.

  Link raises an eyebrow, takes a sharp little breath and repeats, ‘Go.’ ‘Are you a painter?’ David pesters. ‘Haven’t I seen you around before? When I find out who you are, you’re done for. Do you realise that?’

  ‘Go,’ says Link and casually saunters into my sitting room where he sits on the arm of a chair and begins to whistle noiselessly. Her back to us, Allegra is standing stock-still.

  ‘Isobel, if you don’t tell me who this person is, I’ll sue for my share of your ridiculous gallery.’ David has begun to hiss and jab.

  ‘That would be an odd pretext for suing,’ I mumble.

  ‘I think you said his name. It was something like Link. Yes, it was Link, wasn’t it? You said Link …’

  ‘No, it was Michael, actually,’ I answer on an impulse. ‘Michael Beatty from Ballarat, remember? You said you rather liked his water-colours once. Miles showed them about three years ago at Figments. He can draw, too.’

  ‘That’s not Michael Beatty.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m Michael Beatty,’ says Link from the sitting room.

  David sits down on the edge of the kitchen table, slaps his forehead a few times with the heel of his hand and starts to laugh. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he goes, rocking back and forth. ‘That isn’t Michael Beatty. You’re insane. That man’s name’s Link. I remember where I’ve seen him. He delivers paintings for shows. He’s a truckie! Isobel’s taken up with a truckie! Ha ha! Ha ha!’ And then he barks, ‘You’re a liar!’ and he dances up to me and does the John the Baptist thing at my face as if he were about to beckon my brains out of my nostrils. ‘You’ve never told the truth in your whole life!’

  ‘Keep trying, David,’ I sigh, ruing the terrible waste of time. I leave the kitchen slowly and go to sit on the other arm of the chair where Link is sitting. It is as if we agree at all costs that Allegra is to be protected. David thunders after me. All Link has to do is stand. He is much the bigger man. David, faced with physical defeat, suddenly struts out of the house, slamming the front door heartily as he goes.

  The very molecules of air unclump themselves as we relax.

  ‘Why does he have the key?’ Link asks.

  I’m worn out and my voice begins to shake. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it was Eli, or perhaps I left one lying round inadvertently, I’m careless with things like keys.’

  ‘I’m going to ring a locksmith.’ He looks at me for assent.

  ‘It’ll cost a fortune on New Year’s Day,’ I say.

  ‘He’s a maniac,’ says Link simply. ‘He could kill you.’

  ‘Only by accident,’ says Allegra at last, still turned away from us but meeting our eyes in the mirror over the mantelpiece. ‘He judges his bashings. If I were as strong as you I don’t suppose his slaps would even feel hard.’

  Link raises his large palm as if to warm it at Allegra’s hair. I think he is madly in love with Allegra. ‘What you’re saying is preposterous,’ he whispers.

  ‘But there’s something else wrong!’ she says.

  ‘No. It’s plain what’s wrong.’

  ‘But it matters where the violence came from,’ she says. ‘He learnt it. He learnt to blame women for everything that goes wrong in his life and to punish them. He keeps on doing it because it’s a catharsis for him. He goes away, gets all worked up over what he thinks is a real situation where people are pernicious and out to destroy him. No one will take him aside and show him there are other, more effective ways of behaving. The person you hate can’t teach you love. It needs to be someone else, someone with a baritone and muscles. Men who hit are men who learnt it from their fathers. Only men they respect more than their fathers can unteach them. They’re terribly injured and they inflict terrible injuries as a consequence.’

  ‘I’m going to stay here tonight,’ says Link. ‘And then I’m going to call a locksmith.’ He says to me, ‘You ought to get ready now and take Allegra for her holiday.’

  ‘It’s so squalid, so ridiculous, so stupid.’ I shoot my hands out, dolefully. ‘It isn’t just happening here. All over Melbourne there are people chucking themselves about in an aggrieved stupor. I don’t want to involve you. You can’t imagine how tiresome and stupid it all is! Allegra and I used to ask each other why it is that people paint; and now it seems that Dadda painted to cause wars. His wife pretends his memory is sacred and sets herself up to make millions by saying so. At Mad Meg we thought we were fighting her kind of evil and inventing a new way of life, when all we were doing was fighting pettiness with obscure gestures. Rose Hirsch – you know her, she’s the embroiderer – well, she is being dragged into something that isn’t her fault at all. Reg Sorby – everyone knows Reg Sorby – he’s playing Robin Hood with Dadda’s paintings, and David is locked into a fight that none of us comprehend. Why get involved in a mindless melee, Link?’

  ‘Where do you stand?’

  ‘Peace! All I want is peace. To paint. To buy my materials and continue with my thoughts and my life. I’ve had enough.’

  ‘Would you be calm down at the beach tonight if I didn’t stay here?’

  ‘No. I’d lie awake in a lather of anxiety. You’re right about David. He is dangerous, and he’s also a tool in other people’s hands.’

  Link says, ‘Well, I’m going to stay and guard the house and the painting … If you want me to. Do you want me to? It’ll save me from having to sleep under a bridge in my unmatching thongs.’

  I accepted his offer and, anyway, I’d begun to wonder why all mothers didn’t call their sons Link. It suddenly seemed a noble name. My love calibrator was obviously measuring him, poor boy, because his was obviously measuring Allegra.

  As we drove, Allegra slept on my shoulder and Nin on my lap, while Kelly read us strange, sad poems by John Crowe Ransom. It set us hankering after Browning, a neglected favourite of ours from our school days. We did a patch job on ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, but when Kelly tried to finish it with, Dear dead women, with such hair, too – what’s become of all the gold/Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old, the three of us wept as though our golden age had passed.

  We were going down the Great Ocean Road, the tragic headlands folding and unfolding towards Lorne, tragic because in February ’83, while I was formulating my politics with the aid of Uncle Nicola’s diaries and the Mad Meg collective was deciding to subject our shows to both male and female criticism, fire had swept down from the hills, surrounding Lorne and cutting it off in all landward directions. A town further up the coast towards Melbourne was burnt out almost completely, but as we’d driven through it, there was reconstruction going on everywhere, and the headlands, so many Golgothas, were already sprouting greenery.

  In April, I had taken a trip with Beryl Blake to collect and photograph the ground orchids that are only ever seen after fire. ‘Cruel flowers,’ she had said. ‘Cruel, cruel little flowers that need mountains to be razed before they’ll show themselves. That’s vanity for you, Isobel, and the doggedness of frailty.’

  We passed the Lorne pub, over whose crowded balcony a helicopter had hovered duri
ng the blaze, reporting it back to a stunned Melbourne, a hundred or so kilometres away. Melbourne suffered, first, a thick and shocking rain of topsoil blown over by strong winds from the Western District, and then flaming branches, singed leaves and coals, the outfall from Hell.

  That summer Melbourne’s magnificent deciduous trees had suffered. To keep them alive it had been necessary to dig trenches in the gorgeous parks and gardens and water the roots directly with reclaimed sewage water. There had been losses and the filthy outfall from the storm complicated things further by coating the vital surfaces of leaves.

  When we arrived in Lorne the house we’d rented was a disappointment; the tenants before us had obviously been roistering on New Year’s Eve. There was rubbish everywhere and sick in all three of the bedrooms.

  ‘Well, at least they didn’t stick around,’ Maggie said. Kelly had to race outside and retch into the bushes. Nin played with the kitten on a patch of garden by the house’s back door. It had wandered into our party off the street. Kelly decided to keep it and had brought it along, tied in a sock, where it had squirmed and parped in her lap and stuck its miniature claws through the mesh. Now it was happy to be out, skittering through grass tussocks.