by Linda Jaivin
‘NNNNZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’ went the saw from across the warehouse, stripping another layer off my nerves.
With a grunt of exasperation, I wrenched the stupid rope. Pots and pans and woks and ladles and spatulas thundered down around me as I crouched on the floor, my arms wrapped around my head. ‘Ow!’ I cried as a large colander capped me like a helmet, noisily deflecting all the other kitchenware that came tumbling after.
When the hard rain stopped, I lifted the lid of the colander to see Maddie, Thurston and Zak staring at me. Thurston flung himself at me. I recoiled intuitively. ‘Oh, Miles,’ he gasped, clutching my shoulders, ‘you must be so thrunched.’
‘I would have been if it weren’t for the colander,’ I grumbled, pushing him away. I removed the colander and examined the dings in it.
‘I think you really should leave the details of the plan to us, Miles,’ ZakDot said. ‘You’re only going to hurt yourself this way.’ Maddie, sucking on her tongue piercing, said nothing.
‘I found out why she’d been asked to leave her last school in Melbourne,’ Zak informed me later, after Maddie had gone out. ‘She set off an explosive device that burnt the entire second-year exhibition down to the ground. According to her, she’d only meant it to make a loud noise and a tiny little fireball. She goes,’ and here ZakDot imitated her low, lazy tone, ‘“Sometimes, when you try and fuck shit up, you end up fucking more shit up than you intended.”’
I shook my head. ‘Delightful.’
‘She told me she likes nothing more than blowing things up. Video games, mobile phones, and computers.’
She had yet to add cruise ships to her repertoire.
‘Nice hobby,’ I said.
‘It’s got a lot to do with her childhood. She told me all about it the other day. She grew up in Nimbin. Her parents were hippies. Her dad died in a smash-up when his Kombi exploded.’
I made a sympathetic face.
‘Yeah, pretty grim. She’s been wreaking revenge on “the machine” ever since.’
Thurston passed by the door of the studio, dragging a flanged mace.
‘You know the reason Thurston’s been locking his door?’ ZakDot whispered. ‘It’s because he’s nervous she’ll get to his computer.’ He would say that. I knew better, of course.
‘So what’s Maddie doing in the painting department?’ I asked.
‘Fucked if anyone knows. I overheard Lynda Tangent telling Cynthia Mopely that if Maddie was that keen on the random destruction of electrical appliances, she should be in sculpture.’ ZakDot threw his arms over his head and stretched. His jumper rode up, exposing his downy navel. He twisted his head from side to side. The sinews of his neck stood out sharp and defined, as did the lean muscles of his forearms.
What went through my head at that point disturbed me. I scrabbled around in my overheated brain for something else to think about. The face of Destiny Doppler popped unbidden into my mind. All I can say in my defence here is that I really was going loopy.
I think I rather relished this fact. Madness and genius were, after all, intertwined. If I was going to have to die young, at least the full legend would be in place.
I don’t think I’m insane any more, by the way. Actual near-death experience does have a way of clearing the cobwebs. In fact, I now think I may be the only one left who is sane. This is not a comforting thought under the circumstances.
‘What’s this then?’ ZakDot suddenly noticed the painting I was working on. It was another self-portrait. I won’t describe it in detail. But suffice it to say that I had become obsessed with the subject of my own death. After that first cut-throat portrait, I embarked on a series, in which I was killed by various other means, occasionally co-starring my housemates, fellow students and teachers. I had decided to make this the focus for my final year’s work. I drew my inspiration from a number of sources, including ZakDot’s many creative suggestions. The painting he was gawping at now, however, featured a device I’d read about in one of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. I was reading a lot of Poe.
‘You’re a sick puppy,’ ZakDot commented after a long pause. He sighed. ‘Sometimes I really envy you, Miles.’
I looked up at him sharply. ‘You taking the piss?’
‘Not at all. I wish I was as deep and weird and tortured as you.’ He held out a hand to silence me. ‘No, let me finish. You see, while my efforts at “preconceptual” dada represent a kind of “mock-noble” attempt to evoke traditional aesthetic strategies and artistic techniques while simultaneously parodying them and thus “desacralising” the creative act, well, I’m not sure it really “means” a hell of a lot in the “long run”.’
I wondered if his fingers ever got tired with all that air-quoting. ‘There’s a thin line between what you do and what you parody,’ I agreed.
I watched, alarmed, as he spiralled down into the beanbag. ‘It’s true.’ He moaned. ‘I’m just so, so…fluffy.’
I was struggling with the notion that everyone I knew was trying to kill me and he was worried about being fluffy?
‘Maybe I should get “political” with my art.’
‘What art?’ I asked.
There are some people coming into the breezeway. My ears perk up. I swear I can make out ZakDot’s voice above the burble of conversation. ZakDot! ZakDot! I’m sorry I took the piss out of you! I’m so happy you’re alive!
Then it dawns on me: if ZakDot is alive, then I’m as good as dead.
Sticky like paint
‘Can I interest you in some gustatio?’ That’s ZakDot’s voice all right.
‘Gus-what? That a fancy word for horses doovers, is it?’ And that’s her, Destiny. They must be standing right outside my door.
‘It’s Latin, actually.’
‘Latin like in Latin lovers?’ She giggles. Was she flirting with him? I am outraged. I strain against my ropes, my eyes bulging.
‘I suppose you could say that.’ I can hear the amusement in his voice. I want to kill him. Which is kind of funny, if you think about it. I make a hopeless attempt at attracting their attention. ‘Nnngh! Wwwwwwhhhh!’
An all-too-familiar voice breaks into the conversation. ‘You can leave that tway with us, boy. Now wun along.’
‘You’re the “boss”.’ I’m sure he didn’t actually air-quote the word. But I can hear it in his inflection.
‘Verbero.’ She sounds annoyed. I recognise that tone of voice as well. ‘You never let me have any fun.’
‘Twust me. There’s something I need to talk to you about.’ He opens the door to the next cabin and, I presume, they both go in. The door shuts. The walls are thin. If I concentrate, maybe I can hear what they are saying.
The breezeway erupts with familiar girlish giggles. The door on the other side of me opens and shuts. Within minutes, there’s bodies thumping against the wall, and the bed is creaking. The air is filled with shrieks and moans and strangulated cries. Something crashes to the floor and there’s more giggling. There’s no way I can hear a thing from the other side.
Bloody Maddie.
ZakDot and I were still lusting desultorily over Maddie when she brought home a girl. Kya had spiky hair and a personality to match. She was also carrying two pairs of scissors for no apparent reason, which she spun on her thumbs like pistols. This is how Maddie introduced her: ‘Kya used to be heterosexual but she had a bad experience with men and now she hates the lot of you.’ Shears clicking, they disappeared into Maddie’s room and, within about five minutes, started to make girl-fucking noises that we could’ve bottled and sold for Viagra.
‘Should’ve known she was a lezzo,’ ZakDot said, turning on the TV and upping the volume. ‘It’s almost a relief. Don’t know if I could’ve coped with that intensity. Can you imagine?’
‘I have. In detail.’ I sat down, abandoning any notion of returning to my studio until the worst of it was over.
‘Me too. Well, anyway, I read in Pulse that “intensity” is out. “Apathy” is in.’
Pulse wa
s one of those magazines that told true individuals what they ought to be wearing this season. ‘Any particular reason?’ I asked. Something landed on the sofa beside me with a thud. I leapt to my feet, and looked around with alarm.
It was only Bacon. He stared at me with round eyes and gave his head a violent shake. I think even Bacon had cottoned on to the fact that I was going crazy. I sat back down as though nothing had happened, scooping him into my lap. I swear he and ZakDot exchanged knowing glances.
‘According to Pulse’s style editor,’ ZakDot continued, acting as if nothing had happened, ‘passion is for bogans. Apathy is the only appropriate response of truly cool people to the Troubles.’
‘What about your idea of getting more political with your art? You can’t be apathetic and political.’
ZakDot plucked off his beauty spot, studied it and then put it back on again. He did this whenever he was deep in thought. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said at last. ‘But if I have to choose, I suppose I’ll go with apathetic.’
‘Because it’s cool?’
ZakDot shrugged. He didn’t want to admit it, I could tell.
‘I thought “cool” was “over”.’ When I wanted to, I could air-quote with the best of ‘em.
‘It’s back again.’ ZakDot looked at the telly, as if he were suddenly really interested in what was on.
So, that explained it. Not the return of ‘cool’, but the advent of apathy. I’d noticed that lots of our fellow art students had in recent months taken to affecting a complete lack of interest in art. Like the irony which preceded it, their apathy rose in direct proportion to the rest of society’s cultural passions. I think they found the excitement of the general public embarrassing. Much as they hated being unappreciated or getting bad reviews, artists tended to interpret negativity as a sign of higher intelligence, and viewed enthusiasm with suspicion. For whatever reason, while the rest of Strayer debated, argued and fought over art, artists simply stopped producing it. ZakDot, of course, was a pioneer in this regard.
On the telly, the smiling blonde host promised, ‘We’ll be back with episode thirty-eight of the award-winning series, “Peeling Back the Layers: A Conservator at Work”, after these messages.’ On came an advert for an optometrist whose spectacles ‘put the dot back into Seurat!’
I was just about to get up and forage in the kitchen for a snack when a preview came on for a late night news program featuring Destiny Doppler. I was surprised to see that she no longer looked like Ingres’ Odalisque. In fact, I wasn’t sure how I’d ever had that impression at all. She had the same brown hair, staring eyes, long nose, and small lips, but there was a determined set to her jaw that I hadn’t noticed before. As she pounded home her message in that high-pitched, querulous voice, two uneven patches of red appeared on her cheeks. I’ll give her this, compared with the other politicians, who were so grey that they had to be digitally colourised for television broadcast, there was at least something undeniably real, irrefutably vivid about her. She reminded me now of another painting, one I’d seen in the National Gallery. Young Peasant Woman by some French guy. Jean…no, Jules…Jules Bastien-Lepage. That’s his name.
‘Mr Mumbles?’
Shit. I must have been doing it again.
‘Hate to interrupt, but did you notice something else about Kya?’ ZakDot asked. He lowered his voice. ‘She was wearing a badge for Clean Slate.’
‘Weird.’
‘Maybe not. I’ve noticed a few other people with Clean Slate badges at art school lately. I think it’s supposed to be an ironic statement.’
‘Of course it is.’ I rolled my eyes.
As the months rolled on, there were times when I could see how people might sincerely be attracted to any party offering a solution to the Troubles. I suspected that at first the Troubles were a fabrication of the media, which was starved for any sort of home-grown conflict. The reports of the Troubles then inspired real Troubles. They were beginning to affect our lives as well.
One night, as I was walking home from the Triangle Factory, I was accosted by a gang of boys younger than myself and a lot tougher. They wore the classic homeboy uniform of shiny tracksuit pants, moon-landing runners and hooded sweatshirts emblazoned with the names of foreign art galleries. Their leader, whose shirt advertised Barcelona’s Picasso Museum, grabbed me by the collar. ‘All right, pretty boy,’ he menaced, as his mates leaned in, sneering. ‘What do youse think of Barrie Kosky’s interpretation of King Lear? Reckon he took too many liberties with the text?’ Panicked, I searched his face for the required answer. It seemed to be yes. I nodded. His grip relaxed.
Truth was, I actually liked Kosky’s Lear, but I wasn’t going to tell them that. I may have been the Last Art Hero, but I never intended to be a martyr, whatever anyone else thought.
‘Fine,’ the leader snarled, releasing me with a shove. ‘Let this one go.’ I scurried off before he could change his mind.
If the outside world was a scary place, the warehouse wasn’t much better. One day, without explanation, Maddie sticky-taped an index card to her door on which she’d written, ‘“A work of art is a dream of murder which is realised by an act”—Sartre.’ It was one of those freakishly warm days in August that pop up like previews for the coming attractions of summer, but I shivered as I read the card. The next day, she left gelignite in the fruit bowl. And she was teaching the evil Kya how to use her chainsaw. Kya made me nervous. Whenever Maddie had Kya sleep over, I locked my bedroom door.
Thurston, meanwhile, continued to lurk in his ug boots. His friend Gwydion, a frail medievaloid wench who wore velvet gowns even in summer, held urgent, whispered conversations with him over games of Dungeons and Dragons. Whenever I walked past, their voices lowered further and I could feel their eyes burning like brands into my back. Thurston now looked to me less like the Jolly Toper and more like Charles Manson. He was always watching me and he followed me around, too. If I was in the kitchen, he’d have an urge for a cuppa, if I was watching TV, he’d conclude it was time for a break. He was overly interested, I thought, in my new paintings.
Our last year at art school was winding up. I was completely absorbed in my self-portraits. I was well pleased with them and hoped they would form the basis for my first solo show, to be held, if all went well, sometime in the following year. ZakDot suggested I call the series ‘Paranoia: Killing Miles Walker’. I think he was being facetious, but I went with it.
For his final project, ZakDot had decided to stick with preconceptualism and the empty plinth shtick. To show that he had deepened his sense of self-awareness, however, he covered his plinth with fake fur and called it—what else—Fluffy. That resolved, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the task of attending every pre-graduation cocktail hour, party, and rave, on and off campus.
The Troubles intensified. Writers were throwing their words around, and people were getting hurt. A novelist wrote that a certain politician’s wife was so un-bohemian as to have been a virgin when she married her husband. She became a laughing-stock, and sued the novelist for defamation. The law courts were clogged with arts-related cases: people regularly sued writers and film-makers when they discovered no reference to them at all in their work. In the visual arts, there was a nasty incident involving a hard-edge painting, though police were refusing to release the details for fear of copycat crimes.
One night in October, the prime minister appeared on the news, all sloping shoulders and shapeless grey suit, a tombstone on legs. Licking his lips, he cited the government’s accomplishments to date. ‘Seven point three. Four point two eight. Thirty-six point nine.’ He then denigrated the opposition—‘three point six four’—and called an election. It occurred to me that he never blinked.
Soon, the campaigning was in full swing. The opposition attacked the government’s record and promised better: ‘Eight point five.’ Even some of the minority parties began to talk in numbers. Clean Slate could sling statistics with the best of them, but their real strength lay in the fact
that they actually addressed the issues. They used the wrong size envelopes, got the street numbers wrong and put the stamps on upside down—but at least they addressed them. That’s what one of the commentators on late night radio said, anyway. I didn’t hear much more because I switched to a jazz station.
ZakDot, in his relentless search for diversion, began going to all the political rallies, including those for Clean Slate. I asked him whatever happened to apathy. He informed me that apathy was ‘last month’.
Despite—or maybe on account of—its loopy policies, Clean Slate was soon ahead in all the polls. I was mildly curious to see what Destiny Doppler looked like in person, because each time I saw her on TV she seemed slightly different, but I really didn’t want to leave the warehouse unless I had to. In fact, I didn’t even like leaving my studio. The walls were now entirely masked by sketches and clippings and scraps of paper, in some places two or three sheets deep. The floor was so cluttered with paints and tins and rags that even Bacon complained. I still wage-slaved a few evenings a week at Lynda Tangent’s Triangle Factory, and attended the few classes that still interested me, but it was getting harder and harder to make the effort to go to either.
I tended to work late into the night, a cup of tea cooling at my feet, my favourite Ashok Roy CD on the stereo. I eventually stopped listening to the radio altogether. There was too much weird news and it was making me nervous. Painting was my world and I had elected to live in it and nowhere else.
Easier said than done, of course.
It was around this time that Kya and Maddie finally split up. I felt so relieved at Kya’s final departure—red-eyed, shirt on inside out, stuffing a dildo into her backpack—that it never occurred to me that worse was to come. Indeed, had I known the problems that Maddie’s next lover would help set in train, I might have begged Kya to stay, scissors and all.
I remember well the night he arrived on the scene. I’d been working late at the Triangle Factory. Lynda had instructed me to ‘execute’ a series of triangles in king’s yellow and french ultramarine. I didn’t like the way she said ‘execute’. Worse, I knew that king’s yellow, or orpiment, was actually made of trisulphide of arsenic. Arsenic. Could someone have told Lynda about Thurston’s formula? How many people knew about it, anyway?
