He looked at the leaf in his hand and squinted down the street. Whatever these trees were, Morus was full of them. They stood weeping in front yards and vacant lots. They invaded the median strips, roots bursting through concrete. He’d noticed some gigantic ones down along the riverbank, too, and lucky someone had planted them, otherwise the place would have been a bit of a hole.
After the aimless drift of years at the factory and all that stumbling around Europe and the Middle East whacked by too much grand history, this was the place he’d ended up. Walking through the school grounds now he took it all in: brick and tin, weatherboard and woodchip, cladding, glass, asphalt and garden beds. Impossible to forecast a future from such a jumble but Morus was where he was meant to be. Dom felt certain of it.
It was a surprise how much he was enjoying the job, especially when he thought back to some of his early conversations at uni. There’d been so many girls in his course; he’d dated a few and they all seemed to have the same reason for being there. ‘I just love kids,’ they’d gush. ‘I’ve always wanted to give something back, make a difference. What about you?’
At first Dom could only smile awkwardly in response. He hadn’t felt that way at all. His silence didn’t put them off, though; these were confident girls and determined. Plus, given their numbers, he was at a distinct statistical advantage. Eventually, they’d press him for an answer. ‘So, why do you want to be a teacher?’
Still Dom had found it hard to know what to say. I had the marks didn’t go down so well. He learned it was easier to say he loved kids too and it had been like stumbling onto the magic words because usually girls insisted on sleeping with him after that. None of those relationships had lasted; the women he’d met were all goal oriented but immature, assuming that because he was older he’d be cashed up. His lack of money and ambition had made them lose interest pretty quickly but he hadn’t really minded. Everyone had been up for a good time at university and Dom had made the most of it, which no doubt contributed to his shabby grades.
High school or primary had been the other hot topic at the uni bar. ‘There’s no way I could do high school,’ someone would start. ‘Way too many hormones. Once was enough!’ Then somebody else would chime in, ‘Primary’s just babysitting, don’t you reckon, Dom? Where’s the challenge?’
They always assumed wrong; primary had been his preference from the beginning. It was a time in his own life he thought of fondly, the last frontier of dreams and wonder, unsullied by the quagmire of puberty; he remembered primary school as a sheltered place of innocence from which he had begun to explore safely the complexity of the world. Of course his first prac teaching had destroyed all that. It was in a suburb further west and rougher than where he’d grown up. There was no landscaping, no carpet, no equipment, not even a friendly noticeboard. He was in tears the first day, cowering alone in the staff toilet, and didn’t think he’d last a week. Up until then he’d had no idea what he’d got himself into and the weight of responsibility had struck him like a punch. It was up to him to make things better, to care enough. This is what making a difference meant, it was this hard. The kids weren’t what he’d been expecting at all. They were smarter than he ever was at their age, more sophisticated, more opinionated, far more demanding. He was especially unprepared for their lack of enthusiasm; they were all so disengaged and world weary, nonchalant as cats, expecting everything to be delivered on a plate. Their adult cynicism shocked him, he’d found it intimidating, but for the first time he’d felt truly interested in the job. That was when he’d made a decision: I’m going to motivate you brats. Determined to surprise them, his aim was to inspire at least a glimmer of childhood wonderment. He’d felt it was gold worth fossicking for, and by the end of his month there he’d glimpsed enough well-disguised naïvety and disarming good humour to want to keep at it.
Now, at the front office, he waved a quick hello to Jean Mackey. She glanced at him over her glasses but was thankfully preoccupied, talking into her headset in her Phone Voice. From day one, Jean had taken him under her ample wing but her mothering was starting to get on his nerves. He hurried on to his pigeonhole, where he found a warning about head lice and a memo calling for volunteers for T-ball coaching. There was also a note in Jean’s brisk cursive. As he read it, his breakfast formed a greasy lump in his stomach.
It was a phone message from Mira Lepido, Novi’s mother. It said she and her husband wanted to see him. She asked if Dom would call her back as soon as he could.
It isn’t easy being inconspicuous in a small town with a name like Novi. Being named after a caterpillar is weird, especially a silkworm. Silkworms are pale and fat and it only takes one look at me to see I’m scrawny as anything, with olive skin and hair as black as a koel’s feathers. Just like my mother, except for the scrawny part. I’ve been like this my whole life; I checked the baby photos. I was never a peachy kid with chubby knees and dimples, so it’s no wonder everyone thinks my parents are loons.
If I’d been born in some other country, where people get rich from making silk, my name would probably be fine. In Italy or China or Japan I could introduce myself and everyone would smile and nod and I’d fit right in. I wouldn’t stick out at all and I’d grow up to be one of the world’s best investigators. But I wasn’t born in any of those exotic places. I was born in Australia, where you only learn about silkworms from a shoebox experiment under the bed. Here, silkworms are like tadpoles — kids’ stuff.
The Novi silkworm is the smallest kind but spins the strongest thread. It’s the most valuable of all, according to my mother, and she knows about these things because her grandfather was one of the first sericulturists in Australia. He came out from Italy and lost all his money trying to convince everyone silk was the way of the future here. When I was born I was tiny, nothing but a sultana by the sounds of it, and everyone was worried. My mother didn’t want to push me out. She was scared because of the others who came before me, my brothers who were born too early and didn’t survive. But she was no match for me. I was small but I was strong. Small and strong and valuable, that’s why she named me Novi.
Who has time to listen to that explanation, though?
I’m still the shortest in my class, Year 6 this year. Nobody knows why I haven’t grown properly. I think it’s because my mother takes up all the space and is impossible to compete with. She blasts outwards in a sort of explosion. It makes me curl inwards. The only exploding I do is in my drawings, but I have no control over that.
Mum loves to see my drawings. Sometimes I don’t show her, though. The ones I am working on at the moment I won’t show anyone because they are not-nice pictures and nobody will like them. This has happened before. I’ve drawn things at school that people didn’t like and it got me into trouble.
The problem is I can’t help it. I don’t plan what comes out on the page and I don’t draw to create a pretty scene for people to admire. So my latest pictures of the river, the ones with Nonno, I have hidden for the moment. I want to study them in silence on my own. It’s important I further my investigations in peace.
The picture of my teacher started it. That was last year, Year 5, when I had Mr Van Gestel. He was up the front going on about fractions or something and I didn’t even realise I was drawing him until the others at my table started giggling. Mr Van Gestel stopped talking then. He came walking over in that slow, knees-first way and stood right behind me. From the way everyone went quiet I could tell he didn’t think my picture was any good, even though I thought it looked just like him. Somehow I’d captured how his head was actually square and his hair stood up more at the sides than on the top because it was so thin up there, and the way he always did his belt up so tight that his belly squeezed over the top. I could never figure out why he didn’t just buy a bigger belt. He was angry all right. He confiscated my drawing and I got a strike and a note was sent home. My mother didn’t like Mr Van Gestel, but she was embarrassed by the picture. She told me it wasn’t very nice to draw people lik
e that. The kids in my class liked it, though, and from then on it didn’t matter that I didn’t say much at school. I could draw.
Then last week we started our project on settlers and Mr Best taught us about timelines. We were supposed to draw a timeline showing historical events in our town. Everyone measured straight lines along the bottom of their cardboard with sections ruled off and dates slotted in, two or three pictures at the most. That was the right way to do it.
I drew the river. I drew it snaking around with everything I knew about Morus sprouting up from its banks, stories my mother told me about Aborigines and loggers and whalers and farmers and silk growers and winemakers. But my timeline was bad. Now I know there’s a right way to draw and a wrong way and that there are things people don’t want to see in a picture.
Everyone said I drew the massacre on purpose, for the shock value. Their parents said my mum probably encouraged me to do it. But all I did was look up some books on the Lewis and there it was under its own heading, ‘The Massacre at Riley Creek’. It happened where the strawberry farm is now, a fight between some settlers and Aborigines over land. The settlers wanted it and the Aborigines wouldn’t go. A cow was speared and the Aborigines were hunted down in revenge. I didn’t make it up, I just drew it. But some of the parents protested. The school decided my timeline was inappropriate and Mr Best had to take it off the wall.
That set my mother right off. She said it was ridiculous, that people were in denial and the school had overreacted. But I could tell she was worried. She hovered around watching me and trying to catch me in casual little chats to find out if I was disturbed. I don’t like it when she’s like that. It’s better when she’s going full throttle and I know what I’m up against.
Dad had a totally different reaction. He went to the library to check out my story and then got sidetracked by a book he found on Edmund Torft, who the port’s named after. Now he’s obsessed with reading stories about Edmund Torft and has forgotten my timeline altogether.
I pretended it didn’t matter that my project was taken down. I just wanted the whole thing to be forgotten so I could try to get back to being inconspicuous.
From now on I have to be careful about what I draw. And if I can’t help what I draw, then I have to be careful who I show my drawings to.
Not everyone wants to see the truth.
The only thing Mira Lepido hated more than ticks was birdshit. Birdshit on her washing. It sent her into a fury.
Ticks, at least, were extractable. After years of practice she could remove them deftly from Novi’s head, from Varmint the cat’s thick fur, from the hairy crater of George’s bellybutton after an afternoon with the whipper-snipper. But mulberry stains were a different story. Once mulberry birdshit found its way onto a nice white sheet or towel or cotton shirt, then that was it. Grey and ghostly and fixed forever.
It was early Tuesday morning at the clothesline. She could smell smoke in the air; they must be burning off somewhere. It was another cloudless day and already the sun was fierce, biting the back of her neck as she pegged out a load of whites before work. She took pleasure in the heat, knowing that by the afternoon the sheets would be crisp and infused with the scent of the garden. She would put them on the beds and they would have delicious dreams all week.
Her glistening dark hair grew hot and her scalp was burning at the part but she endured the discomfort as she searched the branches of the nearby pepper tree. Most of the mulberry varieties had finished fruiting but some in the shaded gullies were late producers and she didn’t trust the birds. After a few moments she nodded with satisfaction at the empty tree and reached for the peg basket, free to contemplate the subject of ticks without distraction.
Rummaging through pieces of bleached plastic she tried to pinpoint exactly what it was that made ticks so detestable. It wasn’t so much their stubby bodies or their miniature scratching legs or even their hideously disproportionate heads, although all of those features gave her the shivers. It was the burrowing that repulsed her, their determination to penetrate their host. Eyes narrowed, she peered into the grass at the foot of the Hills hoist, certain she’d uncover one in its hiding place. But there was only Varmint, chewing on a green blade. She slapped at a strand of hair tickling her neck. In the hot morning sun her skin prickled as if traversed by tiny creeping legs.
It was all that burrowing that made the little devils so hard to remove. No matter how carefully she plied her tweezers and olive oil, their faceless little heads could still break off and continue without their bodies. A headless body, digging into flesh: disgusting! She shuddered in the heat, an oddly pleasant sensation. Reaching for a pair of socks, she watched the hairs on her forearms quiver.
All around her the garden was silent. There were no birds to be heard at all. Mira assumed they must have got their squawking out of the way at dawn and were now sheltering from the heat somewhere, cursing their feathers. She listened for a muffled chirp or coo, but detected only prickly, insect noises. Perhaps a storm was coming?
Eyes closed she inhaled deeply, hoping for a hint of autumn. She swallowed and tried to divine a change in the air: a cool current, a blast from the Tasman, a fresh breeze from the mountains. Only wood smoke and melaleuca, sour river and lilies.
The lilies were everywhere, growing like weeds throughout the garden, their shaggy necks straining with their heavy load of white bells. For months she had watched them inch upwards at an unbearably slow rate as they ripened their long buds for what seemed an eternity, hesitant in making their debut, and then all at once bursting open, exposing their deep, mauve-streaked throats to parks and paddocks, in ditches and along roadsides, revealing their secrets to all and sundry. After such a demure build-up, Mira always thought this climax astonishingly explicit. Now their pungent, fruity fragrance hung in the air, filling her head with its sweet fog. Early in the season she had picked an enormous bunch for the bedroom, but in the middle of the night had tossed it out the window; the perfume was so cloying it was impossible to sleep.
A faint breeze stirred the branches of the pepper tree. The mulberry nodded a slight response. A good drying day, at least. She pegged knickers and bras, saw underwire cutting through lace, made a promise to hand-wash her delicates in future, knew she wouldn’t keep it.
It had been the hottest summer Mira could remember, a summer of crisp laundry and lilies. And ticks. In the past she would have sprayed for them, they used to spray for everything on the farm, but not anymore, not since Novi. He was too precious to expose to those poisons. Just yesterday, though, she had found two ticks on his scalp; he’d been down by the boat again in the paspalum. Vigorous stuff, full of snakes no doubt, but she couldn’t keep him out of it. Every afternoon he would creep down there when she wasn’t looking, drawn to the boat like a magnet. In the end she compromised, insisting he tramp his feet loudly to let any snakes know he was coming, so they wouldn’t strike him out of surprise.
All through the holidays he’d been camped down there, coming up to the house only if summoned, or when night fell. Set up on the rug in the shade with his pencils strewn around him, his dark head bent in concentration, his pointy brown elbow raised like a wing, his little hand flitting over the paper as quiet as a whisper. His pictures had emerged at an astonishing rate: leaves and insects, birds and boulders. He drew the river obsessively and in all sorts of colours. Sometimes his drawings followed people as they went about their business in town, shopping for supplies at Sinclair’s, enduring a terrible coffee at Fifi’s or scudding lawn bowls across the greens. The faces were always recognisable and she was amazed by his ability to capture an individual’s features so simply. She was also filled with pride whenever she came across a picture of herself; she was usually in there somewhere, bent over in the vegetable plot or picking fruit in the orchard. Sometimes she appeared as a central figure, sometimes just a hint in the background, but at the end of each day as she looked over Novi’s work at the dinner table she was delighted whenever she spied a mess
y black ponytail high among the branches of a mulberry tree or a flash of a generous bare bum duck-diving in the river.
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.
Watercolours Page 2
