by Fiona Capp
But not quite yet. If anything, we had reached the toughest part of the vigil. Kate could see her way out of the tunnel but before she reached the light she had to get through the next few months: the madness of the election campaign and her final exams. And she would need all the help she could get.
Which was why I had to sour the moment by confronting her with my suspicions. There was something she wasn’t telling me. Much as I wanted to trust her instincts and judgment, I couldn’t afford to wait until she was ready to fess up. Too much was at risk. Normally, I had to drag her out of bed in the mornings and virtually push her out the door. But for almost a month now, she’d been up at dawn to walk the dog and there was something fishy about it.
‘So tell me,’ I said, trying to sound light-hearted, ‘why this sudden passion for walking Jerry in the morning?’
Kate’s back stiffened. Disappointment flashed in her eyes, as though I’d taken advantage of her show of affection. She stepped away from me. ‘You tell me not to do my stuff late at night. So the morning walks are another way. At least I’m not sneaking out when you’ve gone to bed.’ Then she mentioned the Emptyshow and how it would open the following week.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘What if you’d said I couldn’t be in it? Because of Dad.’
I eyed the three small pots of cacti on the windowsill. There was something soothing about cacti. Their stillness. Their implacability. ‘I thought we trusted each other. Don’t I let you do your stuff?’
‘I guess.’
‘Dad may,’ I added, ‘find out. And, he won’t be happy.’
‘Did he ask me how I felt about him running for politics? Did he ask me about being leader?’
‘Actually, he did ask you the second question.’
‘He wasn’t really asking.’
It was true. Neither of us had really had a choice.
‘I’m so fed up with the whole thing already,’ Kate went on, ‘and the campaign hasn’t even started. I can’t go down to the local shops without strangers coming up to me and asking me if I’m David Nash’s daughter. Then they tell me how wonderful he is and how proud I –’
‘Well, don’t you think he is wonderful?’
‘He’s great because he’s Dad, not because he might be the next fucking prime minister!’ The sobs she had been holding back came tumbling out like hiccups. ‘I don’t want people staring at me in the street and pointing. It makes me want to get a burkha.’
I said it might be hard wielding a spray can in a burkha.
Kate ripped off a square of paper-towel and blew her nose. ‘Funny, Mum.’ She sniffed for a bit and then cleared her throat with a snort. She’d been thinking about next year, she said. That she’d like to defer uni and go overseas. Check out the Banksys in London and just chill. Or maybe New York. ‘Somewhere nobody knows me.’
This was something I hadn’t seen coming. I lifted my hands from the sink where I was doing the washing up and watched the white suds dripping from them. Tears were smarting in my eyes but I couldn’t wipe them away. ‘What about art school?’ I kept my back to her and reached for another dish.
‘Things have changed, Mum. I couldn’t hack it here if Dad was prime minister. And how could I keep doing street art?’
Damn the dishes. I dried my hands on a tea-towel and quickly brushed my cheeks. At least if Kate went to London, Ros would be there to keep an eye on her. And she could still go to art school. If only she had the same passion for sculpture or print-making or old-fashioned painting. Why did it have to be graffiti? But I already knew the answer; I’d witnessed the moment when the idea took hold. It was something to be grateful for, I suppose, that I was actually there. A chance crossing of paths when Kate was barely seven years old. We were walking to the local milkbar, taking a shortcut down a laneway, when we came across a teenager squatting by a wall. At first I thought he was urinating and tried to drag Kate away but then she saw the cans at his feet and wouldn’t budge, her eyes glued to his freshly sprayed stencil. It was a captivating black and red dragon with yellow eyes and colossal, outstretched wings, and it looked like it was about to fly off the wall. Kate wanted to know how he’d done it but when we asked him, he just smiled, grabbed his cans and fled.
After that, Kate started noticing graffiti everywhere and talking about it excitedly. She loved the way it magically appeared overnight. She wanted to know about the people who made it, the mysterious, nocturnal creatures who haunted the laneways and then vanished into thin air. I should have known that she’d end up doing it herself.
Kate saw my wobbly smile and said, ‘Don’t you cry too. I have to go. You can visit me, and see Ros. Escape the whole circus. I think about it all the time. I can just see myself in this cosy corner of an English pub. Watching the people come and go. And best of all, no one knows me.’
‘I wish you’d told me.’
‘But there’s nothing you can do about it, is there?’
The awful thing was it was true.
I had no idea what to expect of the Emptyshow. All I knew was that Kate and her friends had been working on it for weeks. As we stepped out into the foggy night air, I asked her if I should bring my camera. It didn’t seem to bother her at all that the old metalworks factory was soon to be demolished and that her art work would disappear with it.
She let out a puff of white breath and said she’d taken photos already.
I often passed the metalworks factory on my afternoon walks, never imagining that Kate and her friends might be inside, doing their thing on its crumbling walls. It didn’t surprise me that the building was condemned. A cyclone-wire fence had been erected around it to stop people wandering in and wooden struts had been added to hold up dodgy-looking doorways and walls. Kate insisted it wasn’t half as dangerous as it looked.
The most direct route took us straight across the railway line and into the only remaining industrial part of the suburb. It was a maze of dead-ends and laneways, with warehouses and factories the size of cathedrals dwarfing the workers’ cottages squeezed in between. All over the suburb the old factories were being transformed into apartments and townhouses. Every morning I would be woken by the piercing scream of drills, the smack of staple guns and the insistent beep of reversing trucks.
I slipped my arm through Kate’s, hoping she wouldn’t shrug me off, and to my surprise she didn’t seem to mind. We walked in silence, arm in arm, moving into ghostly clouds of fog and out again as if on a theatre set. Occasionally a figure would emerge from the gloom, someone out jogging or walking their dog. Whenever we passed a house with the lights on in the front window, we would stop to look at a student bent over a desk or the submarine flicker of a television or a child being put to bed. The fog made it feel like we’d stepped into another city, somewhere foreign and far away. How could I blame Kate for wanting to escape, to get out of the country, when I couldn’t wait to get away myself?
As if reading my thoughts Kate started talking about travel again, saying that she’d probably end up going to New York rather than London because that was where most of the action was. A girl she knew from street circles was part of a project in an abandoned subway station. Artists from all over the world had been invited to do their work on the walls of tunnels in a secret location.
I was about to ask her what the point of it was, if no one else could see what you’d done, when the factory came into view. Kate gave my arm a quick squeeze and pulled away. The massive building looked more derelict than ever, a relic of another age when the thump of heavy machinery had been the heartbeat of the suburb, day and night. On the footpath, white chalked arrows directed us towards the factory. I was suddenly aware of the sound of footsteps echoing through the foggy streets and tiny chinks of light glimmering through the cracks in the boarded-up windows.
Kate led the way through a flap in the fence that had been twisted back and secured to create an entrance. We crossed an apron of cracked concrete and weeds and then climbed a few cement steps to
a large wooden door. On the fuse box next to the door was a stencilled coat-of-arms with a legend that said ‘WELCOME TO OUR EMPTYSHOW’.
‘Hey, Skilla,’ said a low voice from the shadows.
‘Hey, Pretz,’ Kate replied.
The young man with spiky blue and green hair opened the door just wide enough to allow entry into the vast, dimly lit space. I could make out metal beams running across the ceiling, with pulleys dangling from them and great hooks hanging from chains. Although it was cavernous, it felt strangely close, as if crowded with ghosts from the past; the distant echo of all that machinery groaning and clanking. The smell of labour and sweat. In one corner were the remains of an office with ‘Staff Only’ written above the door and smashed windows like sightless eyes looking out over the factory floor.
I began to notice how many people there were, mostly teenagers and kids in their twenties slapping one another’s hands and playing it cool. A furtive kind of excitement in the air. Part of it, I suspected, was the thrill of trespass, of breaking the rules. The possibility that at any moment the police might descend.
I moved towards the images lit up by spotlights positioned at intervals around the room. Rugs had been flung over the power cords crisscrossing the concrete floor. Kate whispered to me to watch my step. ‘Tell me when you think you’ve found mine.’
The walls were so busy it was hard to know what to focus on. The biggest, loudest images were neon-coloured, three-dimensional tags and I knew Kate didn’t go for that kind of thing. I stopped in front of a cartoon character like something from Where the Wild Things Are, only this particular beast had a thin curly moustache and wore white, Y-front underpants. Nearby, I saw a stencil of a girl’s head with cracks radiating from it. Or perhaps they were roots. It was executed in the same style as the flying girl that Kate had shown me the day Gerald died. I followed some footprints on the floor that led to a black-and-white trompe l’oeil of a tunnel with a faint light at the end that made you want to crawl inside. On the floor in front of it were a gas mask and a pair of rubber gloves that may have been part of the exhibit or just thrown there by the artist when they finished. It was hard to say.
At the far end of the room I could see a tableau of stencilled images next to a stairwell. Something about it attracted me. Each image was of a girl doing ordinary things – getting out of bed, showering, eating a meal, sitting at her desk, walking the dog – and in every frame a surveillance camera was trained on her, following her every move. The images continued in the stairwell, the shadow of the girl fleeing down the steps. I followed the images into the gloom, gripping the railing and glad that someone had painted luminous stripes on the steps. A bit further down the girl was throwing a rock at the camera. In the final image, she was disappearing through a painted door.
Kate was waiting for me when I came back upstairs.
‘Does it really feel like that?’ I asked.
‘Sometimes.’
‘Why aren’t Kiko’s and Pretz’s parents here?’
Kate glanced over her shoulder. ‘They didn’t invite them.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why do you think? Their parents don’t know what they’re doing.’
‘The street art or the Emptyshow?’
‘Both.’
‘Would you have invited me if I hadn’t twigged?’
‘I would’ve, Mum. I wanted you to see what we do.’
I didn’t know whether to feel honoured or appalled. Part of me envied the other parents’ ignorant bliss. They weren’t complicit like I was, they hadn’t given their consent. But they were also in the dark and I’d never want that. During one of our many arguments, Kate accused me of overreacting. The kids in the local primary school were doing projects on street art, for heaven’s sake! And those graffiti-covered laneways in the centre of the city were a major tourist attraction! I told her that didn’t make any difference. Graffiti was still a crime. You could be up for massive fines. Kate had just laughed and said, ‘I’m glad it’s illegal, Mum. I like it that way.’
‘You told me once it was a shame street art wasn’t shown in galleries so more people could see it. Well, look at all the people here. They think it’s really cool and then word goes out. The people who come understand. And that’s what matters.’
I made one last tour of the space, thinking about the ancient feel of the whole show, the direct link with prehistoric cave art, even though the works were about as modern as you could get.
Kate was standing near the entrance deep in discussion with friends. I touched her lightly on the shoulder as I passed.
‘I’ve got to go.’ I wished she would come back home with me but knew that I couldn’t ask. It was Saturday night and the rule was she could stay out till midnight.
‘Don’t look so worried, Mum,’ Kate said, laughing as she gave me a quick peck on the cheek. ‘I’ll get Pretz or one of the other guys to walk me home.’
Just as I was leaving, I noticed something in a cobwebby corner near the door. The shadow of hands on the walls with a spattered shower of white pigment around them. They might have been there for millennia.
As I walked away from the quiet back streets towards the lights and trams and traffic of the main road, I told myself that things could have been a lot worse. Kate might’ve been into rave parties, drugs, drink. Or obsessed with social networks. Might have wasted half her life in those virtual school yards rife with all the usual insecurities, cliques and popularity contests that penetrated every moment of the waking day and maybe even dreams. Or she might have dropped out completely and spent all her time doing street art. But she had found a way to be sensible about it and this surely deserved respect. I wasn’t crazy about the feral look of some of her friends, but there was a real camaraderie between them. They supported one another – and one another’s work. What harm were they doing anyone, pouring out their nightmares and dreams on the walls of an old factory? They weren’t vandals, they weren’t wrecking. They were giving old streets new life.
12
GOTLAND
September 2010
A ten-minute drive out of town and we arrived at a place called Fridhem, the old summer house of Princess Eugenie of the Swedish royal family. I had expected something grand and showy, the kind of thing that royalty normally goes in for, but it turned out to be a wooden chalet the size of a modest guesthouse – not even as big as the Lodge – with a deep balcony and white carved trimmings, sitting on the top of a cliff surrounded by a wild garden with such a melancholy atmosphere it made me think of Chekhov and thwarted lives.
There were many reasons I hadn’t wanted Ros to leave the island and one of them, I was beginning to realise, was my fear of being alone with my thoughts. While she was there, I could give her my full attention and keep the anxiety at bay. When she asked how things were at home, I made light of them, told stories to see her laugh. Like running away from David’s constituents. And no one knew as well as she did how to make me laugh at myself. ‘What’s this public eye you’re so afraid of?’ she teased. ‘You make it sound like some monster out of Doctor Who.’ This was good, because when you laugh at monsters they lose their power.
Fridhem was now a tearoom and Sven and I were the only people on the terrace overlooking the sea, waiting to be served. My guidebook said that Princess Eugenie came here for the sea air because of her ‘delicate constitution’. I wondered what was meant by ‘delicate’ and whether it was a euphemism for ‘frustrated’ or another way of saying ‘neurotic’. Clearly, though, the princess didn’t just waft about the place and gaze forlornly out to sea. Under her direction the gardens were landscaped in the Romantic style popular at the time. You could still feel the yearning that went into them. There were little wooden ‘pleasure houses’ amongst the trees and what looked like faux ruins, and from somewhere behind us I could hear the splashing of the waterfall she’d had built.
Not long after we arrived, four men in grey suits came and sat at a nearby table and I couldn’t help noti
cing the way they leaned back in their chairs, as if to take possession of them, and how pleased with themselves they seemed, and I found myself thinking of certain politicians I knew. It was only a short leap from these men in suits to what was happening in Canberra and the life I might be leading in six months’ time, all those political functions and official ceremonies I would have to go to if David became prime minister, and even though I was on the other side of the world and it was all just speculation, I could feel those cracks inside me beginning to shift, like seismic activity deep in the earth.
It must have been obvious – my mother used to say I had a face like an open book – because the next thing I knew, Sven was asking me if anything was wrong. I knew I had to hold up my end of the bargain, so I told him.
He was quiet for a moment and then he said, ‘Will you keep teaching?’
‘I couldn’t.’ It alarmed me to hear myself say this because I hadn’t dared admit it before. The scrutiny would make it impossible. What if a parent wasn’t happy with their child’s progress and made a fuss? Or if the teachers turned on the party?
‘That’s a shame. I think you must be a very good teacher.’
He looked at me with such solemnity that I found myself laughing and asking how he could possibly know. Sven was so different, so oddly formal, now that Ros had gone. I assumed it was his uneasiness about Ros’s departure, perhaps a sense of regret that he hadn’t done more to make her stay. Or perhaps it was just the responsibility of having to entertain me for the next five days. No doubt he had plenty of other things he’d rather be doing. I didn’t know then about the guilt he had nursed for so many years or have any idea of how I’d stirred it up. All I knew was that he had changed.
