Watercolours

by Adrienne Ferreira

  He wished Novi’s assessment was over and done with, too. Till then he was in limbo. Once the results were in he’d know what to think. Then at least he’d have something firm to discuss with Camille.

  The evenings were getting cooler. He sat alone on the veranda and listened to the night air prickling with activity. The rushing river sounded cheerful now, no longer a destructive force. He could hear the miniature industry of insects rebuilding their washed-out lives, and underneath it the slow sigh of groundwater soaking into soil. In the aftermath of the flood, a strange quiet had come over the town. Even his neighbours were subdued.

  All alone, Dom couldn’t prevent paranoia creeping in; he wondered if the widows had heard what had happened and were disapproving. Perhaps, in a gesture of female solidarity, they were avoiding him, too? He hadn’t seen much of Mavis lately. She was lying low. ‘Preparing for my winter hibernation,’ she’d explained when he last knocked on her door, but her tone had been evasive and Dom had withdrawn to the solitude of his own flat with a sense that she was holding something back. Since then he’d barely heard a peep out of her.

  On Thursday afternoon Camille came around to see him at last. When he saw her blushing in the doorway he was filled with relief; the week had felt so empty without her. She smiled briefly and the sight brought him such a dazzling rush of pleasure that he couldn’t help grinning back.

  ‘I’ve come to pick up my things,’ she said.

  He refused to acknowledge what this meant. ‘Cup of tea?’ he offered.

  She hesitated. ‘Okay.’

  Inside, she went first to the bedroom and quickly collected items of clothing and toiletries before returning to the living area. She stopped for a minute by the dining table and then sat down stiffly on one of the chairs, her bag on her lap. Her eyes took in the piles of old newspapers, junk mail and pizza boxes covering the table. Dom swooped on the boxes and took them into the kitchen. There was a smell coming from the bin; it was almost overflowing. He hadn’t realised what a mess the place had become.

  Camille remained at the table, her eyes downcast. She didn’t speak. Dom couldn’t think of anything to say either. The silence became excruciating. He busied himself rinsing dirty mugs. When he opened the fridge his heart fell. He poked his head around the door with a rueful smile. ‘I’m out of milk.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. I have to get home anyway.’

  She stood up, hoisting her bag to her shoulder. Dom rushed forward and caught her hand. ‘Camille, please stay.’

  Gently she drew away. She wouldn’t look at him; instead she focused on the lino at his feet. They could both see it was filthy.

  ‘Let’s talk,’ he pleaded.

  When she finally glanced up her expression was cool, but she sat down again. He shoved the mounds of rubbish against the wall and took the chair across from hers, struggling to find a way across the divide.

  ‘Look, we’re not going to agree on everything,’ he said at last. ‘We’ll have our differences. But I thought we were stronger than that.’

  She raised her eyes. ‘We?’

  ‘This. Us.’

  She shook her head and gave him a sad smile. ‘You’re twenty-four, Dom.’

  ‘So?’

  She sighed gently. ‘I mean, really … where’s this going?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answered truthfully.

  ‘It won’t work. I just don’t have time to muck around.’

  Dom didn’t know what to say. It hadn’t felt like mucking around to him. He gazed miserably towards the balcony. Then he remembered.

  ‘Novi’s assessment is tomorrow.’ He looked at her anxiously but her expression remained closed. ‘You’re really not worried, not even a little bit?’

  ‘I worry about him socially,’ she said with a frown, ‘because he’s copping it at school. I guess it’s gross for kids to think of mothers as having any kind of sensuality … but as an artist he seems more confident than ever, experimenting with different styles. He’s hitting his stride. If he can survive growing up in this place he’ll be a major talent.’

  ‘But his art, Camille. It’s kind of morbid.’

  ‘Sometimes. His family has been through a tough time, though. He’s drawing from the world around him and let’s face it, Dom — life can be horrible! I mean, have you met Joy Kelley? God! If you’re going to worry about anyone, worry about her.’

  He let out a puff of air. At least there was one thing they agreed on.

  ‘Look,’ she said, leaning across the table in a last-ditch effort to make him understand. ‘It’s not right or wrong, it’s art. Everyone’s projecting their own crap onto Novi’s work — their own black thoughts and bad experiences and hidden agendas. Something weird is going on, Dom. Can’t you see that? This is a small town.’

  He ran his hand over his chin.

  ‘How can you be afraid of Novi?’ she cried in exasperation.

  ‘I’m not afraid of him! I just don’t understand what he’s doing.’

  She slapped the table. ‘Well, there you have it! You fear what you don’t understand, that’s natural. But come on, Dom. You’re smarter than that! You know Mira and George. You’ve been to their house — they’re good people. And straightaway you spotted Novi was special. Right from the start you believed in him.’

  Dom flicked at a bit of paper. She was right.

  ‘You were so passionate, so full of enthusiasm. But now that someone has questioned your beliefs, you’ve crumbled instantly!’

  He was in agony. ‘Camille, I’m inexperienced! I don’t understand these things like you do.’

  She wilted. After a deep breath she stood up. She walked over to him, reached out her hand and placed it on his chest. Dom looked up at her.

  ‘You are experienced,’ she insisted. ‘Open your eyes! You felt it. You feel it.’ She pressed her hand to his heart. ‘The question is why don’t you trust it?’

  He rubbed his knees and glanced away, unsure.

  Her hand dropped. She picked up her bag and keys from the table. At the front door she turned, as though taking stock of him for the last time. He imagined how he must look to her in his sorry little flat with its scattering of kitsch furniture, its bachelor mess. Then her expression shifted. Instead of heading out the door she walked past him into the spare room. He heard her banging around in there. After a few seconds he got up to see what she was doing and had to jump out of the way as she charged past him with a painting in each hand.

  He watched in silence as piece by piece she pulled out the artwork they had hidden away months ago and hung each picture back on its hook until they were all in place again: the ill-proportioned kangaroos, the wonky sundial, the crude cottage garden, the demented lorikeets, the grimy country landscapes, the blurry vases of unidentifiable flowers. Afterwards she stood trembling before him, her cheeks on fire, the vein at her throat a violet streak. ‘You don’t know anything? Fine! Enjoy.’ She left, slamming the door behind her. The reinstated pictures rattled in their frames a moment and then were still.

  Slowly, Dom walked into the lounge area and stood there on his own. But he wasn’t alone. The pictures were there, too, everywhere, unavoidable in their drab banality. Somehow they seemed even more awful than before, mysteriously bigger than the sum of their terrible parts. Immediately, he felt the old oppressiveness return. He couldn’t stand it.

  One by one he took them down again, stacking them back in the cupboard. Each absurdly self-important JK signed with a flourish in the bottom right-hand corner made him roll his eyes. He looked closely at the deformed kangaroo — really, it was more like a cross between a dog and a man. He shuddered. Even though he knew his own efforts couldn’t produce anything better, he’d sure as hell never bother to put his name to such dross, much less impose it on strangers. Whoever JK was …

  Dom sank onto the lounge. He knew who it was. JK was his landlady. This was all Joy Kelley’s work.

  The realisation rang through him. If these were Joy Kelley’s
paintings then she had the perfect motive for discrediting Novi. She would have to be sick with jealousy.

  Camille was right, something sinister was going on. For the first time since arriving in Morus, Dom sensed the presence of invisible threads connecting the people around him. Before, when he was on his own, he’d been oblivious. But now he was connected, too. He was a part of it, caught up like everyone else.

  He grabbed his helmet and ran down the stairs. He needed to tell Camille, nothing seemed more important. Did she say she was going home or to her dad’s? He tried to think. Home, that’s what she’d said. Fumbling with the keys he unlocked his bike in the carport, mounted it and threw on his helmet. Then he pedalled hard into the dying afternoon.

  His senses were wide awake. Suddenly he was alert to every fall of light, every luminous leaf and rich streak of earth. He took the track by the river, riding quickly along the watermark of silt. Drifts of matted vegetation had collected on the embankment and hung in ragged tassels from barbed-wire fences. At the paperbark grove all the pale trunks were wearing brown skirts of mud. On he rode through the flood’s residue, observing patterns in the arrangement of washed-up debris. It made him think of Novi’s maps. He pedalled harder.

  At the reserve he veered right, taking a series of shortcuts across puddle-strewn spare blocks, through laneways and empty back streets until he joined the main flow of traffic. In no time at all he had turned into the steep road that wound up through Camille’s neighbourhood. He tackled the hill fiercely, hoping to beat her home, thinking he might have a shot at it at this rate. He pushed through to the summit of the hill and over the crest. Exhilaration swept through him on the descent. Now he was at her street; he could see her house. There was her car pulling into the driveway!

  Down he sped, crouching over the handlebars, the wind rushing past his face. He took the corner at the bottom in a triumphant sweep, but his wheels struck a patch of loose gravel deposited by the flood and in one long movement he went over. Still clutching the bike, he skidded in the slurry, skin vanishing from his left thigh, his left elbow, his left hand and ankle until he came to rest in a mortified heap in the gutter, three doors down from Camille’s house. She was out of her car now and turned at the sound of metal scraping on bitumen.

  ‘I’m okay!’ he called as she sprinted towards him.

  It took him a few minutes to register what had happened. Slowly, he heaved himself out from under the bike and sat up. He unclipped his helmet and let it clatter onto the road. Camille was beside him. Her hands hovered over his body, her eyes flitting anxiously from injury to injury. Dom felt woozy. He looked down and saw the long raw length of his thigh, the deep gashes on his elbow and hand. Beads of crimson were welling up through a coating of grey dirt. Each wound was embedded with tiny black stones.

  Camille helped him to his feet, gently brushing grit from his clothes.

  ‘Joy Kelley is a green-eyed monster!’ he blurted out. ‘You’re right!’

  Camille clearly had no idea what he was talking about. Her brow creased with concern and she stared hard into his eyes, searching for signs of shock. She tried to pick a lump of gravel from his shoulder but he caught her hand and held it.

  ‘Camille, I want to be with you. I don’t know where we’ll end up. I can’t give you a guarantee. All I know is I don’t like being without you.’

  Her face went still. She looked at him and said nothing. It didn’t matter. She had placed a soft hand on his cheek and was stroking it tenderly. Dom turned his head, pressed his lips into her palm and closed his eyes.

  Only then did it begin to hurt.

  Chapter 22

  I’m sitting in a room at school I never even knew was here. It’s down the hall from the office, a sort of interview room with a table that’s too big because half the room is already taken up by a rack of second-hand school tunics and shirts and a giant pile of faded blue school jumpers and shorts. There is a basin and a shower cubicle in the corner, although it doesn’t look like anyone has ever used it. You would have to be pretty dirty to bother moving all those clothes out of the way.

  The counsellor’s name is Yvonne.

  She’s younger than I expected and sort of pretty, except she has the type of nostrils that are always flared. Her tone is careful. She is trying to be friendly and polite at the same time. The calm way she’s speaking makes me feel like one of those cranky Shetland ponies in the paddock next to the Roper Centre, the ones you try really hard to get near because they are so little and cute but once you pat them they flutter their eyelashes and then bite you on the shirt. I am the Shetland pony and Yvonne is trying to be my friend, not sure yet if I’m the biting type. I wonder what she’d do if I went wild and jumped on the table and snorted and tossed all the old uniforms around the room. Suddenly it’s something I feel I could do. But it won’t help get my art supplies out of the cupboard so I just sit still.

  It isn’t easy. Yvonne is making me nervous because she’s trying so hard not to make me nervous. Teachers don’t normally try this hard with kids; we’re used to being herded around and told what to do and smiled at vaguely, so when one corners you in a room and tries politely to pick all the bad stuff out of your brain it’s pretty creepy.

  My hands are tingling. I don’t know what to do with them so I ask Yvonne if it’s okay to draw while we talk. ‘Of course!’ she says, as though she can’t believe her luck. She wants proof, like any good investigator.

  Mum shifts her bum in the seat next to mine. She’s trying to be good but holding back isn’t easy for her, especially when she’s stressed — she doesn’t know how to be anything but a cyclone or a tsunami. With a big effort she manages to remain in the background for once instead of gushing forward and filling the room and blasting Yvonne with intimate details like she usually does. As I pull an exercise book and pencil out of my bag my mother gives me a smile. Even after all that’s happened she still loves to see me draw.

  I’m glad she’s here with me.

  Yvonne asks me questions and writes down my answers with a pen that takes real ink. The ink she uses is blue: Boat Blue, Mediterranean Blue. Watching her upside-down writing, I wonder where I can get a pen like that and what colour ink I’d choose. My answers become sets of small, choppy waves across her pad and after a while I start to sweat because I get the feeling nothing I say is going to be right. I know I’m not normal — I’m a child with a silkworm name and a murdered grandfather. My dad spends all his time building a boat that doesn’t float and my mum is an extreme weather zone. All my brothers are dead. Pretending won’t make any difference. Yvonne will write whatever she wants to on her pad and I can’t stop her.

  Blue waves fill up the page.

  After she’s talked to me for a while, Yvonne turns to my mother. She barely gets her first question out — How have things been at home? — when my mother starts leaking tears like a tap. She talks for a long time, about Nonno and her miscarriages and the winery and our money troubles and how she feels people in town are out to get her.

  Yvonne listens. This time she doesn’t take notes until the end. She finds a box of tissues and while Mum honks her way through a wad of them, Yvonne writes a name and number on the back of a card and hands it to her. ‘I think you’d benefit from talking to someone,’ she says. ‘Sonia is local and highly recommended.’ My mother nods and sniffs and dabs at her eyes. Yvonne turns her attention back to me.

  ‘May I see your drawing, Novi?’

  I frown because although I’ve been working on the sketch all this time I’m not that happy with it. It doesn’t look right. But I rip it out and hand it over anyway. ‘You can keep it,’ I tell her.

  Yvonne takes the drawing and her eyes widen in surprise when she sees what it is. Goodness! she says, and even though it isn’t a true likeness she can’t help smiling to see a picture of herself. It’s not a bad portrait, I suppose, but it doesn’t really look like her — I’ve drawn her nostrils like a normal person’s. I meant to do that. I want her
to like the picture. I want her to like me, too.

  Yvonne stares at it for ages. When she looks up there’s something new in her expression. ‘Well, thank you, Novi! I can see you’re very talented.’

  I’ll never be an investigator, I know that now. I’d be hopeless because the truth is I’m terrible at being inconspicuous. Wishing I was normal won’t get me anywhere. I can hope and pray until I pop an artery but it’s never going to happen, this is just the way things are.

  It’s all right, though. I don’t mind. I’m going to be an artist instead.

  After the interview, my mother says I can have the rest of the afternoon off. ‘Let’s spend some time together, just the two of us,’ she says.

  In town we park the ute on High Street and do a bit of shopping. At the bakery Mum lets me choose a cream bun without saying anything about mock cream or industrial-grade raspberry jam. While I eat my bun I look in the window of the trophy shop next door at all the gleaming gold statues and fancy pendulum clocks and pewter mugs. I notice they have some silver pens like Yvonne’s. When I finish my bun I go inside to have a closer look and that’s when I see it, a real ink pen made of glossy wood.

  ‘Polished walnut,’ the man behind the counter says. ‘German nib, iridium tip for excellent flow. Real craftsmanship, that one.’

  The pen has a black tip with three gold bands in the middle and a gold clip at the top. The wood has a dark swirling pattern and behind the darkness there is a red glow as though there’s a fire deep inside.

  ‘How much is it?’

  ‘A hundred and fifty.’

  I stare at the walnut pen. The man lets me hold it. It feels heavy and cool in my fingers. As I turn it over my chest aches with longing.

  ‘You should get it,’ my mother says and I turn to her in surprise. She shrugs. ‘Why not? You can afford it.’

  She opens her purse and hands her card to the man. ‘Pay me back later, okay?’

  Before I can say anything the man behind the counter lays the pen in a silk-lined box and wraps the whole thing up. He shows me his range of ink cartridges. I choose purple. He drops them into a bag.