Stealing Picasso

by Anson Cameron

  ‘The Stinking Pariahs.’

  ‘Rubbish. The Stinking Pariahs have a code.’

  ‘I told them I was your son who’d been away.’ Harry shrugs. It was true. He had seen Turton dropped off at the gallery by Stinking Pariahs on several occasions, so he knew he had a connection with them and guessed he was either tattooing them or painting their bikes. Information gave him the number of the Pariah headquarters and some stoned thug there, upon hearing that a happy reunion between father and son was in the offing, told him where Turton could be found.

  ‘The Stinking Pariahs told you I was out here? You said you were my son and they gave you this address?’ Harry nods and Turton turns on Wal, shouting, ‘Jesus, Wal. Half your chapter are dodging child support and you lag me to a son who rings up. I’ll have words with your president, you bastards.’

  Turton is bending at the knees, incredulous, clutching his sideboards. ‘What about your code? Of silence? No-one-says-nothing-to-no-one? Omerta?’

  Wal strokes his moustache with the back of his forefinger, then holds the finger up in the air, nodding, accepting responsibility. ‘’Pologies, Turds.’ He stands and casually snatches Harry towards him by the collar of his coat, pulling a revolver from his belt, touching it to Harry’s nose gently. ‘You want him to go away again?’ he asks, the grotesque ramifications of the question paved under a monotone nonchalance.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Turton turns his head towards Wal by leverage of his sideboards. ‘You damn bikies. You set up a sacred code and swear in blood you’ll abide by it. Then the code is totally ignored. “Codes are too hard and bothersome for us, we’re fat and lazy and stoned, which is why we became bikies in the first place.” And when the shit hits the fan because no arsehole has abided by the code, you’re straight away into rash acts and hoodlum high jinks to avenge the fucking code.’

  Wal looks slightly saddened by this tirade. He taps Harry’s Adam’s apple gently with the muzzle of the revolver. ‘So is that a yes or no on the lad?’

  ‘Shoot yourself,’ Turton shouts. ‘He never swore to abide by the code. You did. You …’ Wal, holding the revolver loose in the palm of his hand like a stopwatch, slaps Turton in the side of the head with it. He is bending over him to slap him again when Mireille, still on her knees, snatches it from his hand. She holds it before her face, blinking at it, the perplexed frown of a woman who has just unwrapped a new appliance. She asks the gun, ‘Here?’

  The muzzle-blast lights a fire in Wal’s hair that flares and dies, leaving a soup-bowl-sized crater in his afro with wisps of smoke rising from it. Wal grabs at his assaulted eardrum with one hand and takes hold of his penis through his jeans with the other, much like a scolded toddler.

  ‘That was so loud.’ Mireille says, shocked, still talking to the gun.

  She stands, not pointing the gun at anything and not not pointing it at anything. Its black eye wanders lazily. Harry and Wal and Turton cower and wince in turn as they come under its incidental stare. She begins to berate Wal. ‘A man who painted for you a wolverine of beauty. An old man. Maybe not right in the head.’

  Turton is lying at Mireille’s feet. And though assaulted, and with gunplay taking place above him and an angry Stinking Pariah on the premises and his sanity being questioned, he can’t help but move his head slightly, the better to see up her skirt. Even in his most desperate hour the seed of man’s propagation whistles a tune he can’t help but hear. Thankfully, she is keeping eye contact with Wal Wolverine Symonds, and is saved the unedifying sight of the man she has rescued trying to ogle her underwear. Turton glimpses her mound covered in a diaphanous garland of embroidered lace roses. The throbbing in the side of his head subsides.

  She steps towards the bikie and hands him the gun. ‘Here. I shot only your hair. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’ He takes it from her, so relieved he has to bite his lip to stop himself from saying thank you.

  When Turton is helped to his feet he introduces Wal, prompting Harry to introduce Mireille, after which they shuffle and smile in the small talk of a slightly embarrassed truce. Turton apologises to Wal and Wal tells him no big deal and apologises back, and Turton touches the side of his head and says when he got smacked he saw a quartet of lurid green goblins that might look good on a Harley if anyone down at the clubhouse is interested. Wal says he’ll ask around.

  Wal rides away, the belching of his Harley shrinking into the night noises. Alone now with Harry and his woman, Turton begins to take on a look of shame. He clenches his jaw, purses his lips, his chin mottles and quivers like a boy about to cry and he looks away into the dark of the shed. ‘Here I am, then. You’ve found me out. I’m a hack. I airbrush angry stoats for a class of people no more visually erudite than moles. In the city I preach art – out here in the boondocks I raise up cobras and tigers.’ He turns to face them. ‘I’m a fraud.’

  ‘That depends on the cobras,’ Mireille observes. ‘Are your cobras as good as your wolverines?’

  ‘Cartoons,’ Turton says.

  ‘No. Why?’ Turton has photographs of other Harleys he has airbrushed posted on steel lockers all around his workstation. Mireille puts on her glasses and begins perusing them. She is engaged enough to tilt her head this way and that. ‘This is a genre, I think. These are good.’

  ‘You like them?’ asks Turton. Ever since he has begun working for the Stinking Pariahs he has secretly wondered why airbrushing ghouls isn’t considered a reputable art form. ‘It is Hieronymus Bosch in an age of robots,’ she tells him.

  ‘You know – I think it’s all right, too.’ He is astounded to be saying this.

  ‘How is it done? The technique?’ She picks up the fuel tank of a Sportster with a leering genie on it. ‘How do you three-dimension with a spray gun?’

  He puts his arms around her to show her how to hold the airbrush. ‘Like a pen, but with your index finger on top of the trigger.’ His hand holds hers. ‘This one is a gravity feed. The paint is in that little bowl there. Loop the hose over your wrist to keep it out of the way.’ He turns on the compressor and places a metal drum in front of her. ‘Push down on the trigger.’ She does so and air hisses through the nozzle of the gun. ‘Now pull back on it.’ A runnel of yellow paint is released through a valve and shredded by the rushing air into myriad droplets fired at the drum. ‘Sweep your hand back and forth. Move your hand. Kill the paint. Too much paint, move your thumb forwards.’

  ‘Aieee …’ Mireille shrieks as yellow paint floods the side of the drum and begins to drip to the floor. Turton snatches the gun from her and kills the compressor. With his handkerchief he wipes the yellow paint from his fingers. ‘It’s an acquired skill. It’s not easy,’ he says. ‘You’ve got to control the air, the paint, your own movements. It’s a juggling act. Choreographed. A dance, even. Then you’ve got masking techniques and shading and layering … It’s a mighty learning curve, even if certain people don’t know it.’

  He shows her a photo album of his work. ‘This skull was for Big Smith. He was master at arms for the Stinking Pariahs. He’s doing time for demanding money with menace – a fancy name for robbing a bottle shop with a sawn-off shotgun.’

  ‘You should have an exhibition. A herd of the Harley Davidsons painted with such crabby animals and parked in a … a church?’

  ‘Oh, no.’ His face flushes red. ‘No, no, no. It’s just fun. Just piecework. Pocket money.’ He stares down at the album, blinking. ‘You think it might make an exhibition?’

  ‘Why not? It is ferocious. A dreaming by outlaw bike guys.’

  They try again. Harry watches, the old man with his arms wrapped around her, guiding her hand as she holds the airbrush, showing her the sweep and rhythm of the technique. She seems fascinated, but Harry can’t decide: is he watching a beautiful woman con an old man, or does she genuinely like all these airbrushed creatures? Is she working this old man over? And if she’s this good, then maybe she’s working him too. What’s real about this woman?

  When they are leaving
Turton asks, ‘Are you the woman Harry is bringing along on one of our little excursions? I hope so. I think, perhaps, you’d enjoy it.’

  Harry stands blank-faced. ‘You said you didn’t want to be carted off to chokey.’

  ‘What are you talking about, lad? Chokey.’ He bends in close to Harry and whispers, ‘Bears and lions, Harry. Bears and lions. And quite right, too.’

  Then he turns to Mireille and insists she accompany them into the National Gallery some night, this heroine with a garland of lace roses adorning her pubic mound. ‘You must come with us. At night you can hear her weep. Both ghostly and mechanical, both distant and close, a great wailing, like a squadron of junkers. Sirens ricocheting off brick. I’m sure you will hear it, Mireille, though the masses in their cardigans are deaf to her. I have total faith you will hear her.’

  Harry watches Turton for some show of embarrassment, a shame-faced shrug behind Mireille’s back. Some sign to acknowledge that as soon as she showed the first tic of interest in his art he became her slave. But he sees no sign at all.

  ‘We’ll take a bottle of Moët and some top-drawer, skull-melting Marrakesh hash and an angora picnic rug. We’ll loll about and listen to her weep. We’ll weep ourselves. Not a critic or a Callithumpian in sight. Just us.’

  After several secret nocturnal journeys to see the Weeping Woman Turton has become conceited in his role as guide. Just as a modern Egyptian feels personal pride as he leads American tourists around the pyramids, as though he were sheened with sweat from lifting those very blocks of stone himself, so Turton Pym, an artist, just like Picasso was an artist, feels a sense of pride and responsibility when he shows off the Weeping Woman. When that light twangs on and his visitors gasp, Turton heats with a blush of accomplishment.

  Tonight he drapes an angora rug across Harry’s shoulders and hands him the picnic basket laden with petit-fours and two bottles of Moët. Harry is more than a little pissed off that his expedition and his woman have been hijacked by Turton dressed like a French Riviera cat-burglar in grey overalls, from beneath which emerge the cuffs and rollneck of a striped skivvy, on his head a beret and on his feet espadrilles. Turton looks likely to skip and dance. Spry, he looks, he thinks. He takes the key from his desk and, setting aside the painting of the boy in the candlebark tree, he unlocks the green steel door. Gently taking Mireille’s hand he steps into the gallery. He leads them with his torch beam up the dark stairs and along the goat-track through the thickets of art in the storeroom, Harry bumping canvases with the picnic basket and being called an ox and a zombie by his teacher.

  Turton leads them through dark galleries until they are in the hall of the Great Europeans. He spreads the rug, sits Harry and Mireille on the floor beneath the Weeping Woman and goes to the light switch. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, presenting, in all her divine pain … Señor Picasso’s Weeping Woman.’ In a gesture of showmanship he makes them wait five seconds before turning on the spotlight dedicated to her, leaving the rest of the enormous room in darkness.

  There she is. Isolated. A screaming diva upon a stage, her ostentatious horror accentuated by the silence and darkness of the gallery. Harry watches Mireille smiling at the woman. Not a smile of admiration, he thinks. Not a beam of adoration. The wistful smile that emerges slowly, unbidden, is of someone reminiscing. Turton pops the cork on the first bottle of Moët and pours the champagne into flutes.

  During the night they wander with their torches and glasses of champagne and joints from painting to painting, enjoying having these riches to themselves. Little tête-à-têtes break out between Harry and Rembrandt, Mireille and Sickert, Turton and Gauguin, such is the dream-like feeling in the air. But always they return to home base, the Weeping Woman, beneath which their picnic rug is spread, with news of their conversations with long-dead artists.

  As they are about to leave Mireille begins to cry. They ask her why. ‘It is … it is … so intimate,’ she says. ‘The dark. Such an intimacy that unshackles the art and allows it to … to live.’ Holding her cheek against Turton’s she whispers thanks.

  After this Turton stops taking his posse of students into the gallery at night. Instead he chaperones Harry and Mireille. Mireille packs picnic baskets and they camp beneath the Weeping Woman and take strolls from there. Turton puts his arm through hers and squires her around as if he were a duke or a tycoon, the owner of all this priceless wonder.

  On their fourth visit they are reclining beneath the Weeping Woman when Mireille asks, ‘What is so special about her? Why is she so difficult to paint that only Picasso could paint her?’

  ‘She’s not so difficult to paint,’ Turton says. ‘Now that she exists, anyone could paint her.’

  ‘Not anyone could paint her. I could not paint her. Harry could not paint her. You could not paint her.’

  ‘I could paint that same painting, stroke for stroke identical, inside a week. The artistic skill required is nothing to speak of. The thing is, I could never have invented her. Picasso invented her. He came up with the idea of her.’

  ‘You could not paint her. Not the same. Your animals are groovy, but, you know … this is another thing, Turton.’

  Turton is wounded by the mention of his animals. ‘Identical twin,’ he boasts. ‘Only half a dozen people in Oz could tell them apart. I’m not boasting, you understand. Many an artist can replicate another fellow’s work.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ she says. She is lying full length on the rug, her skirt pooled mid-thigh, a joint angling from her lips, staring at the Weeping Woman. ‘Bullshit. You could not get close.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says with stubborn finality, ‘I could do it.’

  Mireille’s feet are in Turton’s lap and he is massaging them, forcing surprised whimpers from her. Harry looks on, wondering if he has the right to protest. Is she his woman or not? Are people in the art world naturally licentious? Maybe this is free love and he has to get used to it. It would probably be uncool to say anything. He tries not to bat an eyelid while Turton strokes and kneads her feet.

  ‘I could,’ Turton says softly. ‘Identical.’

  ‘No. No, no, no. I bet you a foot-massage to a fornication you cannot get anything close of her.’ She laughs. Harry strenuously doesn’t bat an eyelid.

  Turton looks at her with his face held calm and asks slowly, ‘If I can copy that painting exactly, you have sex with me? If I can’t, I give you a foot massage? That’s the bet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you aware I win either way?’

  ‘Well, you cannot do it. So … that is the bet.’ She is serious now. Harry looks on with the pulse rate of a charging Hussar, still frantically not batting an eyelid.

  ‘Then …’ says Turton, his mouth suddenly dry, pausing as if considering his options. ‘Then, yes. As my artistic integrity is at stake, yes – I accept the wager.’

  He buys a poster of the painting from the gallery shop and pins it to an easel in his studio alongside a blank canvas. Then he searches among hundreds of used tubes of paint in a drawer of a sideboard until he is satisfied he has the colours. He squeezes paint onto the lid of a shoebox and carries it to the blank canvas. His hand hovers, not knowing where to begin. Her hair? The cuff of her shirt? Eventually, with two bold strokes he outlines her nose. ‘Shit, Turton. Slow down,’ he tells himself. He slows into torpor and by dawn he has painted the Weeping Woman.

  That night he takes her into the gallery and looks at her alongside the original. She will not do, she isn’t right. He missed her eyes and his brushstrokes are longer than Picasso’s. Too confident. But he has come to know her better while painting this first draft. He smiles at the real one now, and nods. I know you now. I have you.

  In his studio Turton staples an ancient linen onto a rectangular stretcher. He puts a saucepan of water on a gas camper-cooker and sprinkles crystallised rabbit skin into it, stirring until the crystals dissolve and the brew bubbles and thickens into glue. This stench of rendered rodent must have assaulted Picasso’s nose thousands of time
s. Turton lights a stick of incense to camouflage the smell. Then he paints a coat of the glue onto the linen, lets it dry and sands it back, before painting on another coat. Next day, when the glue has hardened, he tightens the linen and paints it with a white Jesso. He is ready to begin.

  Never has a man thrown himself into a forgery with such passion. If he replicates Picasso’s work perfectly he wins Mireille for a night. And, who knows, if he takes her to a ruinous ecstasy (many a good tune played on an old fiddle) he might win her for longer. He goes to a mirror and combs his hair before beginning.

  At midnight he sets his easel up beside the Weeping Woman in the Hall of the Great Europeans, with Harry and Mireille sitting silently on the bench behind him smoking. A distant clank of a tram on St Kilda Road is the only sound. Beside him on a card table he squeezes blobs of paint from lead tubes. Greens, pinks, blue, yellow, black. Harry counts fifteen colours. Turton lays a brush alongside each one. He takes a tape measure from his pocket and, stepping rapidly from one canvas to another, he makes a grid on his canvas and outlines her profile in pencil on it. Then, with his glasses down the weather end of his nose, he steps up close enough to the Weeping Woman to kiss her, and studies a small terrain, a square centimetre of her, for minutes on end, before stepping sideways to his own canvas and reproducing that centimetre there.

  This is how he takes the one and makes the other, in parts small enough to be called DNA. He ingests an eyelash here, a runnel of tear-track there, a nostril, a tooth. Each is studied and known before being carried across and rebirthed as part of the new woman. It is a terribly laborious process and though Harry and Mireille are fascinated at first, as though watching an ant trying to relocate the Taj Mahal, before long they are both asleep, knowing Mireille has lost her bet.

  For seven nights he returns, moving the Weeping Woman fragment by fragment – an iris, a brushstroke, her collar-point – until he has replicated her. Finally, holding aloft a brush that is the lilac colour of her lips, he stands back from his own Weeping Woman and says, matter of factly, ‘Done.’