by Linda Jaivin
I halted, set down my gear, wiped my sweat with my sleeve and took in my surrounds. The beautiful old house, the thick moist ferns, vine-tangled scrub and ironbark gums, the loud sawing of the crickets, the magical tinkling of the bellbirds and the hysterics of the kookaburras revived all my old Romantic fantasies. I was Turner and Constable and Blake, Géricault and Millet.
‘Bloody birds,’ said Verbero. ‘We oughta get a cat.’
He seemed nervous as we came in sight of the house. It occurred to me that if Verbero was apprehensive, maybe I should be too.
No one came out to greet us. We climbed the rickety steps to the front door, which was open. Some bunker. Verbero showed me to a room that would be mine for however long it took to do what I’d come to do. It was plain but comfortable, with a wicker sofa and chairs, table, wardrobe and double bed with a mosquito net. One door led into the hallway, another onto a small bathroom and a third onto the verandah. Dropping my gear on the floor, I switched on the ceiling fan; groaning into action, it pushed the heavy air around. I pulled out my two tshirts and hung them up in the wardrobe. I rattled the wire hangers. I put my toothbrush in the bathroom and washed my face. I scattered my few possessions around the room, threw my empty rucksack in a corner, tested the bed springs, went out onto the verandah and rolled a ciggie. In the background I could hear conversation, and just made out the voice of the prime minister. I’d read that British critics compared actors’ voices to wine. Gielgud was a claret, and Irons a whisky. Destiny had a voice like cask riesling. Thin, cheap and a touch too sweet. I was to discover that it could be intoxicating, but the hangover vicious.
That hangover will be history in a little over one hour.
It was probably getting onto six o’clock when Verbero knocked on my door. He was accompanied by a young Aboriginal girl who he said would wash my clothes and bring my meals. This made me uneasy. When she reappeared about half an hour later carrying a tray with dinner—chops, spuds and two veg—I asked her how she came to be there. She bit her lip and rolled her eyes nervously at the ceiling. Following her gaze, I noticed the barely concealed eye of a video camera. She put down the tray and padded out on bare feet.
Unnerved, I shifted the table away from what I estimated was the range of the camera and sat down. I was too hungry to think clearly about the implications of what was happening to me. I prodded a spear of dull green broccoli with my fork. It was dead all right.
I was just wondering what the evening’s entertainment would be when Verbero popped his head in the door.
‘How was the tucker?’ He seemed more at ease now.
‘Tetsuya would be proud.’
He frowned, searching my sublimely innocent features for traces of mockery. ‘Who’s that?’ he demanded. ‘Some Jap fwiend of yours?’
I nodded. What could I say?
‘And the digs?’
I said I felt like I’d landed in the middle of an Henri Rousseau painting. He gave me a blank look. I considered asking him about the video camera but thought it might be wiser not to let him know I’d discovered it.
He eased himself into the wicker chair in the corner of the room. His movements were smooth, yet there was a kind of wariness about them that put me on edge. ‘She’s vewy excited,’ he informed me.
I looked at the floor. ‘What if, you know, she doesn’t like it?’
‘Walker, if you’re half as good as those two poofters say you are, then you’re home ‘n hosed. I wouldn’t twy any funny stuff, mind you. None of that, whatchamacallit, clubbism.’
‘Clubbism?’
‘You know, weirdo stuff like that Picasso bloke was into.’ He pronounced Picasso ‘pick-ass-oh’. ‘Two eyes on the same side of the nose, that sort of bullshit.’
‘Cubism?’
‘Yeah.’ In one fluid gesture he snapped his fingers and pointed his forefinger at me. ‘That’s the one.’
I didn’t sleep very well that night. Giant mosquitoes threw themselves at my mosquito net, trying to bash their way in. Occasionally one or two got through, just like the thoughts I was trying to keep at bay, about what ZakDot and Maddie would think if they knew where I was. I slapped and scratched, and put my hands over my ears.
The forest was noisier than an inner city warehouse full of artists. There were chirps and rustles and squeaks, rich squelchy sounds and crackling noises. The music of frogs and bats, bandicoots and bunyips. I slipped out the door that led from my room to the verandah and switched on an outside light. A moth with a half-metre-long wingspan flew out of the dark and hurled itself against the globe. My stomach churned at the sight. I turned the light off and the moth flapped around for a while, thudding into the window before returning to the forest.
I’d just managed to doze off when an explosive bark like that of a dog erupted from the trees, followed by a sound like someone screaming in distress. I jumped to my feet, terrified. Eventually I made out a pair of round yellow eyes in a nearby bloodwood. It was a barking owl. I was well and truly spooked now.
I’d stashed some whisky in my rucksack. I drank half the bottle. Above me the contracting tin roof popped and pinged like a John Cage symphony.
I was feeling seedy when, just on seven o’clock, a little Asian girl knocked on my door holding a tray with tea and Vegemite toast. I asked for a Panadol and this time it was a little Arabic-looking boy who brought me the tablet with a glass of water. Like the other two children, he looked uncomfortable when I asked him how he’d come to be working there. He didn’t answer. I assumed their parents were employed by Destiny. Yet she had always been so dismissive of Aborigines and Asians and Arabs on account of the depth of their cultures and their attachment to them. Maybe there was another side to her that I didn’t understand. I didn’t feel up to the task of working it out at that moment. I had enough to do herding my brain cells into one paddock. I concentrated on organising my paints and brushes.
‘How you feeling today?’ Verbero poked his head in the door.
‘My head’s as furry as the inside of one of Meret Oppenheim’s teacups,’ I quipped.
‘Who’s this Oppenheim, another mate of yours then? Jewish fellow?’ I’d forgotten that Clean Slate wasn’t too keen on Jews either, their being responsible for such a big swathe of culture and all. I didn’t say anything.
‘Why doesn’t he just put ‘em in the washing machine?’ Verbero persisted.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I’ll ask him next time I see him.’
‘You can take the artist out of the slum,’ he scoffed, ‘but you can’t take the slum out of the artist. Well, you weady or what?’
I gathered up my paints and things and followed him to a conservatory that had been built as an extension of the house. It was full of ferns and plants that gave the light a beautiful, dappled quality. It was like a miniature, safer version of the rainforest outside. Ceiling fans rotated, distributing the cool exhalations of the plants. In the centre of the room stood a brand new easel. Not a drop of paint had spilled on its polished frame. It looked like a movie prop. It faced a plain yellow sofa, not old but already faded by the sunlight.
I told Verbero I’d need a staple gun and a hammer and nails. Without taking his beady eyes off me, he punched a few numbers on his mobile. Minutes later a burly fellow in a bad suit who Verbero introduced to me as Destiny’s personal bodyguard, Wayne, appeared with the tools. I set about making a stretcher and tacking the canvas to it. Wayne, Verbero, and two federal agents who’d been slouching in opposite corners of the room, huddled round, peering over my shoulder. The agents murmured observations about my activities into their wrists, cocking their heads to hear each other’s answer in their earpieces. The attention thrilled me. I fantasised that I was Gentileschi or some other Renaissance master working on a grand commission for the church, surrounded by lackeys who would mix my paints and tend to my needs while I concentrated on my masterpiece. ‘I’d like a coffee,’ I said, without looking up. ‘Black. Two sugars. Espresso if you have it.’
‘You’re pushing it,’ Verbero muttered. He nodded at one of the others, who reappeared with a steaming mug of instant.
I suppose, when they were on commissions in the sticks, the Renaissance masters found it hard to get a good coffee as well. I put the mug down on the floor at my feet. I felt important, professional.
A hush fell over the room. I could hear the leather of the men’s shoes squeak and the cloth of their suit jackets swish as they stood to attention. Deliberately, I kept at my task, though my heart was racing. High heels clicked across the tiled floor, stopping just centimetres from where I squatted. I had one more corner of the canvas to go. I pulled the cloth tight over the frame. The staple gun exploded into the silence. When I finally looked up, it was at a pair of shapely female calves encased in nylon stockings. I stood up, brushed my hands on my trousers and shook the proffered hand, which was little, smooth and soft. ‘Prime Minister,’ I said.
‘Call me Destiny?’ she said. ‘I’ve just had highlights put through my hair? Reckon you’ll be able to work ‘em in?’
Narrative art
Destiny was wearing a blue shirt-waisted frock with short sleeves. Her arms were firm but not muscular. Her legs were gorgeous, and her neck long and soft, and only faintly ring-barked by age. She had extremely direct eyes.
I explained my approach to portrait painting, which draws upon the formalistic techniques of the old masters and yet has strong elements of the contemporary as well. She nodded blankly; I could see she wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. The men exchanged glances and one of the feds whispered something into his wrist. I told her that I’d start by doing sketches in various media.
Destiny looked worried. Her forehead knotted. ‘I’d rather keep the media out of it? You know, just do it confidential-like for now?’
I explained.
‘Oh?’ she said, biting her lip.
‘I’d like to begin sketching now, if you don’t mind.’
Verbero snickered at this. ‘Do you want to come up and see my sketchings?’ he chortled. All the men laughed with him: ‘huhhuhhuhhuh’.
‘That’s etchings,’ I corrected. Verbero’s smile dried up like gouache.
I invited Destiny to sit down on the sofa and make herself comfortable. I dragged a stool to a position about two metres in front of her and, sketchpad in my lap, studied her moon-like face with its smooth forehead, guileless eyes, thin nose and small, serious mouth. As my pencil started to move over the paper, Verbero positioned himself at my back. I could hear the breath whistling past his nostril hairs and the steady grinding of his teeth.
‘Do you mind?’ I said, after I could take it no longer.
‘Just making sure there’s no funny business.’
I put down my pencil. ‘I can’t work with you standing there.’
‘Do something useful, V,’ Destiny ordered.
Verbero scowled and retreated to a corner of the room, where he worried the fronds of a fern until his mobile rang. He scurried off to answer the call in private.
Destiny flung herself with verve into the task of posing. She vamped, she pouted, she slung her shapely legs this way and that. If she weren’t the prime minister and the nation’s most notorious artist-hater I’d even have said she was flirting with me.
‘It’s actually called sitting for a portrait,’ I pointed out. ‘It would be more helpful if you would pick one pose, something comfortable and natural, and hold it. It’s not a shoot for Vogue.’ I felt powerful. Destiny, looking chastened, settled, patted her sleek hair and stretched her lips into a smile.
‘It’s going to be hard to hold that smile,’ I warned her. ‘You might as well just relax.’
The smile melted.
At last, I could begin in earnest. As I’ve mentioned, the first time I saw her, she struck me as looking like Ingres’ Odalisque, and later like Jules Bastien-Lepage’s peasant girl. I’d seen her face hundreds of times since, on TV and in the papers. Now, as I studied her in person, she seemed to grow amorphous, intangible. I squeezed my eyes shut and looked at her again. Her features dissolved, reformed, dissolved again. I couldn’t get a fix. I could feel beads of sweat forming on my brow and upper lip. I crumpled up the paper and started again. I mentally reviewed all the rules of perspective and proportion and the mapping of faces. I switched to charcoal, then pastels, then pen and ink.
I began to wonder if I wasn’t blocking her out of political antipathy. But the truth was, while I hadn’t expected to like her, I found I didn’t dislike her either. I couldn’t work out what was going wrong. I put my pen down with a sigh of frustration. She looked startled at this and I realised she was even more nervous than I was. I must have smiled or something, for at that instant she beamed at me. I frowned, confused, and she retreated behind her eyes. She was eerily like a sponge, soaking up every emotion I threw her way.
A veritable Thredbo of discarded sketches rose from the floor near my feet. I glanced over at Verbero, who was smirking.
It finally dawned on me what the problem was. Most of us are born into or choose some form of cultural identity. I could’ve easily painted a cattle station owner, with eyes used to looking straight at the horizon, the practical hands, the leathery skin. I’d have no trouble painting Maddie, the warrior princess, or ZakDot, a walking installation in search of inspiration, or the angular Lynda, or Oscar, for whom camp was a place you spent your whole life, or Thurston, big and awkward, yet shining in his armour. Destiny, by contrast, had worked so hard at denying culture—any culture—an entry into her soul that she appeared to have become the clean slate of her party’s title.
To paint her I needed to understand her. I asked her to tell me something about her childhood, her interests, her life both in and out of politics. This is when she told me about her mum and dad and her own brief career as an artist, her marriage, and how she’d plunged herself into saving the nation.
She related her misadventures in parliament, the tension in the Cabinet Room, the terrifying encounters with the press, the quiet time in the Meditation Room, the way that Cap d’Antibes had jolted her, and how, sitting among the Historic Memorials, she’d awoken to the power of portraiture—and art. As she spoke in that cask riesling voice, her features clarified and settled, and my sketches came to life. I stopped crumpling them up. I’d sussed it.
Destiny belonged to a culture all right. The culture of the anti-culture, which had always lurked beneath our art-soaked obsessions. It was a culture which over the years had put down deep roots in sandy soil, even if people like me had been blissfully—or perhaps just stubbornly—oblivious to it. When a few years back one of the richest art prizes went to someone who’d glued a printout from the website of a real estate agency over a cheesy landscape purchased at a garage sale, I’d bristled at what I saw as an insult to true art. The members of the anti-culture saw it as an insult to everyone. They fretted about what other people might think of our little country, forgetting that other people didn’t think of it at all.
What Destiny, sensitive and sponge-like, had done was to soak up our subterranean anxieties, our geographical uncertainty, the cultural cringe that was the flip side of cultural pride. She was the distillation of our collective disquiet.
I had her. I worked madly, not stopping till I’d completed half a dozen detailed studies. Laying down the sketchbook, I stood up to stretch.
‘Can I see?’ she asked, eager as a child.
‘Sure.’
She examined the drawings with great interest, touching my arm lightly with her nails as she did so. She smelled of lemon.
I told her I’d probably do another day or two of sketching and then begin work on the painting.
By the third day I began to get used to the pattern of it, the dense jungle nights that gave me heavy, sensual dreams, the mysterious presence of the sad little children, the malignant ubiquity of Verbero and the hypnotic hours at my easel with Destiny. There was little to remind me of the world outside. Occasionally, Verbero interrupted o
ur sessions to discuss some piece of urgent political business with Destiny, but parliament was in recess and the little country, being smack in the middle of nowhere and directly on the periphery of everything, didn’t generate an awful lot of urgent political business.
The evenings were long and still. The mournful children brought up my dinner on a tray each night and then hurried away before I could talk to them. There was no television, no radio. I passed the first few evenings just smoking on the verandah, gazing into the forest and thinking. For some reason, Trimalkyo’s face kept floating up before my eyes. Something nagged me about him. I also thought about ZakDot and Maddie and Thurston and occasionally even Grevillea Bent. I cursed myself for not bringing some light reading. Me and my fucking second-hand classics.
One evening, bored, I picked up the Satyricon. With a sigh of resignation, I curled up on my bed with the book. I was soon absorbed by it. Turning the page, I felt a chill run up my spine. I had come to a section called ‘Trimalchio’s Dinner’.
The narrator describes Trimalchio as a rich and uncouth man who desperately wants to be known as cultured, who treats his guests to an astounding feast, bad jokes and misquotations of Homer. Trimalchio’s wife is present, but he’s clearly far more interested in his slave boys. Could ‘Trimalkyo’ be an alias, I wondered. If it was, I reflected, it was an odd one for an art dealer to adopt. There was an element of self-mockery there that I couldn’t reconcile with my image of Trimalkyo. I turned to the translator’s introduction, which I’d skipped. It talked about the author’s difficult relationship with the emperor Nero, for whom the character Trimalchio was apparently a cipher.
