by Paul Collins
‘That’s enough about me,’ she said. ‘What’s your story?’
I wanted to make it sound riveting, like a book you can’t put down. But my life wasn’t that kind of book. Sticking to my plan about taking me as I am, I blabbed out the boring truth.
‘Since I was twelve,’ I began, ‘I’ve helped out at the family servo. Mum does the accounts and works in the shop. I’ve got a little sister, Karen. She goes to the shop, too - but only to be annoying. Mum says that’s her job. Dad’s the mechanic. When I leave school - which is any time soon - he wants me to come work with him. Says he’ll teach me the trade.’
Shari folded her arms. Her sunny face became a stern, no-nonsense one.
‘Is that what you want, Andrew?’
‘No way. I don’t know about cars - don’t want to know. I want to write.’
‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘So it’s all settled. Just tell him that. Problem solved.’
Shari didn’t know my dad.
‘Thanks,’ I told her. ‘I’ll give it a try.’
‘You better.’ She wagged a finger at me. ‘I’ll know if you don’t.’
Soon our drinks and muffins were only a fond memory. Shari looked at her watch, confirming my fears - it was time for her to go.
‘I’m sorry I can’t stay longer.’ She pushed back her chair and stood. ‘This has been fun. But you know how it is - things to do, people to see.’
‘Maybe we could meet up again some time?’ I tried to say it as casually as I could, as if it didn’t really matter to me.
Her answer wasn’t made of words. She took my hand in hers and squeezed it tightly. I swear, in that second, there was no one else in the mall, in the country, who felt what I did. It was like my heart lifted up, and all the drudgery that had been my life, was swept away.
She strolled off, and less than a minute later I wanted to kick myself for not at least asking for her mobile number. I had no way of contacting her. I asked around at school the next day, but drew a blank. A mystery girl; that was Shari.
All the same, in the weeks that followed, I felt that she wasn’t far away. I sensed that she was with me when I dyed my hair jet black, to match my new clothes.
Also, I think it might have been Shari’s idea for me to have one thick and dangerous lock draped across my forehead. It looked like a monster’s claw emerg ing from primeval slime. The slime was hair gel. I was considering getting a lip-ring, too, but the body piercing shop wouldn’t give me a general anaesthetic.
And I was sure Shari was right beside me, nearly a month later, when I at last found the courage to tell Dad that I wouldn’t be joining him in the servo, because I was going to be a writer.
‘Writer? You gotta be jokin’!’ That was his response.
‘Andrew’s always talked about writing, George.’
Mum was in my corner, as usual.
‘My point exactly.’ Dad jabbed a hole in the air with his finger. ‘All he ever does is talk. This is twad dle, Dorothy. I’ve never seen anything he’s written yet.’
‘He’s done plenty,’ Mum said. ‘All sorts of stuff
But he’s only ever let me see one thing.’
‘Is that so?’ Dad turned to me. ‘Well how come I haven’t seen this masterpiece, then?’
‘It was nothing.’ I shrugged. ‘Forget it.’
‘It was a poem.’ Mum straightened her back as she said it and stood up tall. Like she was proud. ‘He didn’t show it to you, George, because it was about you.’
‘A poem?’
He looked at me, scratching his head and seeming perplexed.
‘You wrote a poem about me?’
‘Yeah, Dad.’
‘That’s about the dopiest thing I ever heard.’ Mum sighed, loudly. ‘Andrew knew you’d react like this.’
Dad slumped deep in his chair and scraped a hand up and down his chin. I’m pretty sure I know what he was thinking -
Gawd! Cars aren’t as much trouble as people!
‘All right then,’ he said finally, ‘give me a look at this fiamin’ poem.’
‘I tore it up, Dad. It was garbage.’
‘It wasn’t garbage.’ Mum’s arm circled my waist.
‘It was about a boy who believes his father doesn’t know the first thing about him - doesn’t care about him.’
Dad grimaced.
‘You don’t see how sad he gets, George. It’s right there in front of you, but you never see it.’
I tried to stop her.
‘Please, Mum. Drop it.’ She didn’t.
‘He’s like that because he can’t get close to you; can’t talk to you. He’s different, so you’ve shut him out, but he’s still your son, and he still loves you.’
Dad’s eyes moved slowly from Mum to me. He gulped and for a second I thought he might spill a tear. But he huffed, and blinked it away.
‘Was it any good, this poem?’
‘It was very good, Mum said.
‘Really?’
‘Yes, George. Really.’
Dad clicked his tongue. His brow was deeply fur rowed. It was an exact replay of how he looked when he first saw my dyed hair and Goth gear.
But this time he wasn’t angry.
‘I don’t care about ya, eh?’ he said to me. ‘You big hairy galoot. Come here.’
My dad was big like me, but where I had flab, he had muscles. He was bald and his nose was bent and he stomped more than he stepped. He looked like a wrestler who’d overdosed on head-butts. But when he hugged me, he was just my dad.
I never saw Shari again. Didn’t expect to, really. But to this day I still spend an awful lot of time in libraries.Just hoping. Hoping and writing.
# 1 ‘Butterfly and Ant’
‘Eeew!’ said Angel Divine’s mother. ‘You’re supposed to eat your breakfast, not draw with it!’ Hannah had only left the room for two minutes.
Long enough for thirteen-month-old Angel to smear pureed apple and mushy Weet-Bix all over the tray of her highchair. Hannah took her daughter’s spoon and bowl to the sink and returned with a damp tissue. But she only got as far as wiping her daughter’s hands.
‘Edward!’ she called, the tissue clutched forgotten in her hand. ‘Edward, come and look at this.’
Her husband bustled into the kitchen, doing up his tie. ‘What a mess!’ he said. ‘I told you she’s too young to feed herself’
‘I didn’t call you in here to have an argument,’ said Hannah. ‘Look at what she’s drawn.’
Edward studied the highchair’s food-smeared tray.
‘What’s it supposed to be?’
‘A butterfly.’ Hannah pointed. ‘Look - those are the wings. There’s the body and head. It’s even got eyes!’
‘If you say so,’ Edward said, turning to his wife.
‘Could you straighten my tie, honey? I’ve got a meet ing with some new clients in half an hour.’
Neither parent noticed that there was more than just pureed fruit and cereal in Angel’s artwork.
One of the butterfly’s tiny black eyes was moving.
#2 ‘Flower and Fly’
At lunchtime three days later, Angel made a flower with a bee on it. She used mashed banana, yoghurt, and something that her mother didn’t notice. Hannah took a photo with her mobile phone and showed it to Edward when he got home.
‘That’s not bad,’ he said.
Hannah’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Not bad]’ she cried.
‘Darling, our daughter’s only thirteen months old!’ nd obviously too young to be feeding herself,’ said Edward.
#3 ‘Spiderweb with Beede’
Angel’s ‘Spiderweb with Beetle’ was her break through work.
It was a Saturday afternoon and the Divines had friends o
ver for a barbecue. Someone bumped the food table, knocking a squeeze-bottle of tomato sauce onto the lawn. Nobody noticed until Angel had emptied most of it across the patio.
‘My goodness!’ cried a woman called Chloe. ‘Did you do that, Angel?’
‘Uh-oh! What’s she done?’ asked Edward, hurry ing over from the sizzling barbecue. He stopped in his tracks.
‘Holy smoke!’
A minute later, everyone was gathered in a circle around Angel’s creation. It was a huge, intricately drawn spider-web, all done in tomato-sauce.
‘Look, there’s even a fly!’ said Chloe’s husband,
Josh.
The fly was done in tomato sauce, too. Or most of it was. Its legs were black, and they were moving! Angel had pushed a large black beetle upside-down into the fly’s tomato-sauce body to make its legs.
‘Did Angel do that?’ asked a friend who had just arrived.
Edward beamed with pride. ‘We think she’s going to be an artist, don’t we, Hannah?’
#4 ‘Poodle and Snail’
Edward made a movie of Angel and her tomato sauce spiderweb. He put it on YouTube. There were 523 views in the first twenty-four hours. Within a week, more than four thousand people had looked at it.
Word spread about the little girl in nappies who made amazing pictures with food. People com pared her to Picasso, to Van Gogh, to a young Michelangelo. The local newspaper sent a reporter and a photographer. They brought some butcher’s paper and non-toxic crayons, but all Angel would do was chew on the crayons.
‘She usually draws with food,’ explained Edward. Hannah got a selection of things from the fridge and put them on the floor next to their daughter.
Then she pointed at the butcher’s paper.
‘Draw something, darling.’
Angel got to work. She made a poodle out of left over spaghetti and dollops of mayonnaise. It had a pickled capsicum for a tongue and a black-olive nose.
‘Extraordinary!’ said the reporter, madly making notes.
The photographer took about fifty photos.
When the poodle seemed to be finished, every body clapped.
Angel looked up at them, frowning. ‘No fin,’ she said, shaking her head.
‘She says it isn’t finished,’ Hannah translated. Angel got up and toddled over to the sliding doors.
It had rained overnight and a big garden snail was sliding up the outside of the glass. Angel pointed at the snail and looked back at her mother.
‘Ta,’ she said.
Hannah shook her head. ‘It’s yucky, darling.’
‘Ta!’ Angel repeated, louder this time.
‘I think she wants it for her picture,’ Edward said. He opened the door and got the snail for Angel. She waddled back to her artwork, plopped down on her nappy-padded behind and pushed the snail into the poodle’s spaghetti-and-mayonnaise head. Now it had a big, round eye.
‘Fin!’ Angel said.
And the photographer took a photo that would appear on the front page of the weekend newspaper.
#5 ‘Giraffe with Worm’
Channel Nine got in touch. Angel went on Sixty Minutes. They filmed her in the Divines’ backyard making a giraffe out of bread slices, yo-yo biscuits and chocolate ice-cream topping.
It wasn’t ‘fin’ until Angel found a fat, pink worm under a flowerpot and used it for the giraffe’s tongue.
#6 ‘Coral Reef with Crayfish’
Late one night there was a phone call from America. It was the producer of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. They offered to fly Angel and her parents to Los Angeles, all expenses paid, so Ellen could have Australia’s young food-artist sensation on her show.
Edward took a week off work, a limousine drove them to the airport, and forty-eight hours later Angel Divine was on live television in ten million American homes.
The show’s production team had spared no ex pense in providing Angel with art materials. There was every sort of food you could think of, even a tank with a live crayfish inside.
Angel had watched Finding Nemo five times on the flight from Australia. She made the studio floor into a huge coral reef All the fish and the colourful coral and the seaweed were created from food.
It was spectacular.
Ellen was amazed. ‘How old is your daughter?’ she asked Angel’s parents.
‘Fifteen months last Saturday,’ Edward said proudly.
‘She is an absolute prodigy!’ Ellen said, bringing her hands together in a show of amazement.
That started the live audience clapping. But when the applause died down, Angel frowned at the audience.
‘No fin,’ she said, shaking her head.
‘What are you saying, sweetie?’ asked Ellen.
‘She’s saying it’s not finished,’ Hannah translated. Angel pointed up at the crayfish tank. ‘Ta,’ she said.
Ellen smiled. ‘That’s a lobster, sweetie.’
‘She wants it,’ said Hannah.
‘She always has something alive in her collages,’ explained Edward.
A stagehand wearing rubber gloves netted the crayfish and took it to Angel. Holding it against her jumpsuit to stop it wriggling, the tiny artist toddled over to her coral reef scene and carefully placed the crayfish next to the bagel-and-licorice octopus.
‘Fin!’ Angel declared, smiling in satisfaction. And everyone clapped again.
#7 ‘Garden with Caterpillar’
Something happened after The Ellen DeGeneres Show that changed the Divine family’s lives. They were talking backstage to Ellen when one of her personal assistants came over with a phone.
‘Excuse me, Ms DeGeneres,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a New York art collector on the line. He’s offering fifty thousand dollars for the little girl’s reef painting.’
Ellen laughed. ‘Tell him it’s not a painting - it’s made of food. You can’t hang food in an art gallery!’ That started Edward thinking. If there was some way to preserve Angel’s artworks - some way to keep them fresh so they could be hung on art gallery walls - people might buy them!
As soon as they got back to Australia, he phoned his friendjosh, who was an industrial chemist. When Edward told him what he had in mind,Josh said he’d work on it.
A month later, Josh came to visit. He had a bottle of pale yellow liquid and a small pressure sprayer.
‘I think this’ll work,’ he said.
They sprayed it on Angel’s latest artwork, a fruit and left-over-pizza creation called ‘Garden with Caterpillar’, and the result was perfect. When the spray dried- it only took a few minutes - the collage set rock-hard, as if it was made of china. But the food still seemed fresh and lifelike. Even the frozen caterpillar looked as if it was still alive.
Edward put the finished collage on eBay and the bidding was fierce. His auction finished at $12,466.
#8 ‘Balloon with Budgie’
Thanks to Josh’s preservative spray, Angel’s artworks could now be sold.
Edward hired an agent. His daughter’s collages went to art galleries and private collections all over the world. Within fifteen months, before she had turned three, Angel Divine was among the top ten most successful artists in the world.
One of her works, ‘Balloon with Budgie’, sold for
$3,000,000 at a New York art auction.
#9 ‘Me and Daddy Fishing’
The Divines moved house. They needed somewhere bigger. Angel wanted her own studio and her mother was expecting another child.
With the money from Angel’s three latest col lages, they bought a huge mansion on the Sydney foreshore. The views were magnificent. There was a lovely nursery for the coming baby and a spacious detached studio at the bottom of the garden where Angel could work without being interrupted.
Hannah boug
ht a new budgie and put a lock on its cage door.
Living on the seashore provided the artist with a whole new range of art materials. Crabs, scallops and sea anemones began appearing in her collages. She learned how to catch fish.
#10 ‘George Crossing the Harbour Bridge’
They hired a live-in housekeeper. She also cooked meals when Hannah was feeling a bit tired, as she often did lately. The housekeeper’s name was Mrs
Piperidis and she lived in a little unit behind the main house. She had a fourteen-year-old Australian terrier called George.
One day Angel came up from the beach in a bad mood. She needed something to finish her latest col lage, but it was high tide and the rock pools were underwater.
She was heading for her studio when she noticed old George waddling slowly across the yard.
‘Come here, George!’ Angel called softly.
Several hours later, Angel, Mrs Piperidis and Hannah were gathered in Angel’s studio. All three of them were crymg.
Angel, how could you!’ sobbed Hannah.
‘Sorry!’ sobbed Angel.
‘Say sorry to Mrs Piperidis,’ Hannah sobbed. ‘Not to me.’
‘Sorry, Mrs Pipi,’ sobbed Angel.
Mrs Piperidis was crying without making any noise. Tears streamed down her face as she stared and stared at ‘George Crossing the Harbour Bridge’.
Finally she spoke. ‘Can I buy it?’ she said softly.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Hannah.
‘Can I buy the art?’ Mrs Piperidis said, pointing at
Angel’s latest creation.
‘You can have it, Mrs Pipi,’ Angel snivelled, ‘for free.’
Then the housekeeper did a strange thing. She bent and gave Angel a big kiss and a hug. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you!’ she said.
‘George, he was very very old,’ Mrs Piperidis explained to Hannah. ‘He would have died soon anyway. But now, because of your little Angel, I will have him with me always.’
#11 ‘Untitled’
The next day Hannah had a car accident. She almost lost the baby. The doctors had to perform an emergency caesarean.
Michael Divine was born six weeks early. He was tiny. And something had happened to him in the accident. Nobody thought he would survive.
