The Slipping Place

by Joanna Baker

  Veronica pulled her glasses from her bag. None of Roland’s drawings were completed. They were experiments, pieces of people – shoulders, hands. There was one rough sketch of a woman’s face, a blurred, nervous line. He had scribbled over and over the eyes, as if he couldn’t decide where the woman should be looking, and then had become frustrated and tried to erase the gaze altogether.

  ‘Around the church widdershins. Woe to the mother’s son who attempts it.’

  The horrible bookshop woman – Charlotte? Maxine? – had come into the room. Veronica turned around. She sounded as if she was still quoting something. Was it a game? Were people supposed to try to identify the source?

  ‘I’m sorry … Colette, is it?’

  She had made an attempt at elegance. Her hair was dyed black and pulled back into some kind of bun on the back of her head. But her face was long and thin, mannish around the jaw, and her skin had a grey, drained look, stained yellow on the upper lip. She still had the glass, fuller than before. And there was a cigarette too, newly lit, dangerously close to the folds of the dress.

  She said, ‘Judith.’

  ‘Oh, I …’ That hadn’t been the name.

  ‘Fuck the French.’

  In the fireplace there was an old manual typewriter. Judith picked up a set of bellows and put them beside it, carefully, as if the placement of her things was important.

  The young woman grabbed Veronica’s arm. ‘You don’t know what he’s been through. His father’s been belting him. Not the father.’ There was some kind of rash at the corner of her mouth, white and moist. She could put honey on it. Veronica should tell her. Instead she tried to shake her away. But the young woman wouldn’t let go.

  ‘He said you’d help us.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Roland said you’d help us. He said to ask you.’ Now the young woman was pulling up the child’s sleeve to show marks on his arm, long red lines, as if he’d been drawing on himself. Her eyes were watery, the lashes clogged with black, make-up thickening in the corners. ‘You have to help us.’

  Judith said, ‘He has been dragged into mud and slime and low passion and delusion …’ She met Veronica’s eyes and there was a flicker of intelligence, more disturbing than the alcoholic stupor. ‘The iron bit that destiny had put in his mouth, the blight on his life.’ Her eyes were set wide apart, light green and very clear. She was studying Veronica closely, as if assessing her capacity to perform some difficult task.

  Veronica said, ‘You should tell me where to find him. I’m his mother.’

  Judith said, ‘Every story begins with a mother. Many of them end with one.’

  Veronica started to move away. But the woman with the pram grabbed her again. ‘Wait.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Veronica was frightened now, irrationally panicked. She wanted to get away, back to the street and the cars.

  ‘Roland wants you to help us. Please. Please.’

  She was whining now, a repulsive sound. Veronica yanked her arm away. As she went around them, she tripped on a wheel of the pram and stumbled. The little boy’s head banged into the metal bar. She stopped long enough to look at him. He hadn’t woken.

  Chapter 5

  ______

  As Veronica hurried back to her car, the fear didn’t leave her. Georgie was right. Roland was in one of his messes and this one was bad. It was hard to imagine exactly what the mess could be, but people kept talking about children. Lesley had said something, A child who was hurt. And the boy in the pub. And now there was that woman, showing her son’s bruised forehead.

  Roland knows.

  She had to find him. And there was one person who knew where he would be, one person who always knew. Paul. Georgie said Paul lied, but she would make him tell her.

  Lesley’s gallery was in Brooke Street, one block back from Watermans Dock, squeezed between a low pub and an old flour mill that was now a chandlery. The gallery was a nineteenth-century sandstone warehouse: square roofed, slightly crooked, with four storeys and central windows where once there had been a pulley system. At ground level there was a large new window, and a sign by the door in bare letters: Illumin.

  The door led to an airy room with a polished floor. Glass shelving had been fixed against the rough stone walls to hold jewellery, Jeroen pewter and inlaid myrtle boxes. Veronica normally found this room soothing. She loved the polished glass against the stone, the roughness emphasising perfection of form, that feeling of clarity that came from precision and glossy surfaces.

  Today she was preoccupied. And there was a jarring note. The woman behind the counter was new, and not the kind of person Lesley would normally employ. She was fortyish with large, heavy breasts in an inadequate bra. The skin on her chest had faint vertical wrinkles and her hair was scraped into a ponytail.

  As Veronica went towards the stairs the woman came hurrying across. ‘Can I help you?’ Her voice was hard, nasal. The room absorbed nothing of it, leaving the sounds ringing in the air.

  ‘I’m going up to see Paul.’

  But the woman got in front of her. Her black T-shirt was fussy at the neckline, pilling at the sides, badly stitched at the shoulder seams. ‘What’s it about?’

  Veronica knew she shouldn’t judge people on the basis of their clothes, whether they were expensive or cheap. It was just that this person seemed out of place. That was unsettling. And she needed to concentrate. ‘I’m a friend. I just have to –’

  ‘I’ll take you up.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t … Who are you?’

  ‘Well …’ A pleasant, open smile, no malice in it. ‘I’m a friend too.’ As she led the way up the stairs, the woman’s plastic court shoes slipped on her feet.

  The stairs had been stripped of carpet, revealing solid beams, suspended on an iron frame. As with the shelving, there was real beauty in the contrast – smooth, heavy material against the powdery sandstone of the wall.

  At the top was a small open area surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass partitions, with Paul’s partner, John, sitting at a desk. One hand was bound in a velcroed wrist and thumb splint. Veronica remembered hearing about some overuse injury, but couldn’t remember the details. His other hand hovered over the keys of a laptop. Without looking up he said, ‘Vicky, you are the worst IT person we’ve ever had. This is completely fucked.’ Then he saw Veronica and rose out of the chair. Vicky moved in behind him and started pressing buttons on the keyboard.

  After high school Paul had gone to Sydney for three years. He returned with a Diploma in Fine Arts from UTS, a passion for inks and fabric painting, and with John Oh, artisan jeweller, born in Hong Kong. John always treated Veronica with an urbane air of patient condescension. She expected him to react to someone like Vicky with open contempt. Instead they seemed to be sharing a joke.

  ‘I’ve come to see Paul.’

  Vicky and John gave each other blank looks and then looked back at her. She left them to it and went through the glass doors into the gallery.

  Over the last year, Lesley and Paul had emptied out the first floor of the building to make one large space. They had stripped the walls back to show large lumps of uneven sandstone, with thick mortar and holes where chunks had fallen away. The space wasn’t set up yet. There was one long trestle table stretching from the door to the front wall. The rest of the room was empty except for a group of twenty or so square posts, waist high, painted black, sitting on heavy bases in the middle of the room. The space was dimly lit by windows at the front and back and today only two halogen lights were on: one over Paul, sitting near Veronica at the trestle, the other over Lesley at the far end.

  Paul was talking into a phone. On the table in front of him Veronica could see a photograph and she recognised it immediately – Paul and Roland aged about ten, by the harbour at St Helens with Paul’s father, Gordon. They all had their jeans rolled up, standing on a patch of greyish sand. When he saw Veronica looking at it, Paul put a sheet of paper over the photograph, ashamed, maybe
, of his sentimentality. She pretended not to notice, instead casting her eye over the other things on the desk: a flat steel case, an array of silver jewellery, a friand on a plate.

  Paul’s hair was glossy under the downlight. It was thick and dark brown and he was letting it grow to shoulder length, the same as John’s. He imitated people, she thought again. As a boy he had taken his lead from Roland, and now he was copying John, whether consciously or unconsciously she couldn’t guess. But the hair was a mistake. It crowded the shape from his soft face.

  Paul was listening to the phone, but she knew he was thinking about her. He looked wary, tight across the eyes and forehead. Veronica had known him all his life. She was familiar with all his expressions, and she could read him now. He knew exactly why she was here. She held his eyes for a few long seconds. This was his guilty look, the look he had given her fifteen years ago, after he’d flattened her Princess Margaret rose with a wheelbarrow.

  She said, ‘He’s in Hobart.’

  Paul turned away to finish his phone conversation.

  ‘Oh, Veronica, thank goodness you’re here.’ Lesley’s voice echoed around the room. Her end of the table was piled with folders and books and her laptop was open. ‘I am completely stuck with this writing project. I might need you earlier than Friday.’

  Veronica allowed herself to be drawn over there. Paul needed time for her arrival to sink in. Soon he would see the pointlessness of trying to avoid her, or lying about Roland.

  ‘I feel under enormous pressure. Paul and John say galleries will only succeed if they can cut through, have some kind of authentic artistic vision. And really, I agree with them. I do. But I’m having the dickens of a time with it.’

  When she was in her gallery, Lesley affected a strangely old-fashioned way of speaking. She seemed to think it went with the image she wanted for a discerning curator of fine objects. Or, rather, the gallery was part of an image of herself that she wanted to project. John Oh had once referred to this, with a sly smile, as Lesley’s branding.

  She said, ‘It’s not at all like that Barter story we did. That was factual and straightforward. Whereas this …’ Lesley started rubbing the side of her left hand on the palm of her right, a distracted circular movement. ‘They want me to base it on these enormous old novels, but honestly. There’s so much that’s been written about them. I’ve printed out pages and pages. In a way, the more I have the harder it gets. I get completely lost. But apparently literature is the key to everything. Literature helps us understand people. Especially the unfortunate ones. Or some such.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Veronica thought she knew.

  Lesley twisted her hands together, then stopped herself from doing it and put them flat on the table. Her knuckles were red. She started moving pages around. ‘Of course, a drawing helps. If it’s done well. A picture of a face gives you an instant human connection.’

  John and Vicky came in and crossed the room. Vicky was carrying a shallow wooden box, the kind John used to hold his jewellery col-lections. She held it open near the group of short posts and with his good hand John arranged pieces of jewellery on three of them. Then they stood back to look. They were an incongruous pair, Vicky in her clumsy clothes, John in a floppy T-shirt and jeans, an outfit that somehow managed to look both expensive and completely cosmopolitan.

  At their intrusion – because it felt like an intrusion – Veronica was suddenly aware of a tension in the room.

  ‘Is it wise to leave the shop unattended?’ Lesley looked at Vicky with unconcealed distaste.

  John said something to Vicky and they went towards the door. Vicky hurried downstairs, but John stopped and stood in front of Paul. Paul half-turned away, still listening to the phone, looking pale and unhappy. John studied his face for a while, then picked up the plate with the friand and put it pointedly in front of him, gesturing that he should eat. Then he left.

  ‘Who is that?’ said Veronica.

  ‘Vicky?’ Lesley stared at the door. ‘Just one of John’s little schemes.’

  ‘Schemes?’ Veronica thought of Vicky’s broad face, the open smile. I’m a friend too.

  But she had more important things to worry about. And Paul’s phone call was starting to look like an act. She went to stand in front of him, the way John had.

  The photograph of St Helens was still hidden, but there was something else on the desk. She moved aside some rolled-up papers to reveal a poster.

  She Must Be Wicked to Deserve Such Pain.

  Jewellery by John Oh.

  Illumin Gallery, Level 2.

  Exhibition Opening: Friday 26th August 2016, 6.30 pm

  The words were printed over a drawing of an elegantly dressed nineteenth-century woman. At her feet was a title: MERLE.

  The drawing was one of Roland’s. It was done in the sharp lines and smudges. The style he had been practising in the bookshop. It was recent work. He had refined his characteristic uncanny quality, captured nuances of emotion and suggestions of an inner world. When you looked closely, at the eyes, at the mouth, you couldn’t see how he had done it – the emotion had somehow magically appeared, from the shadows and the spaces.

  Paul hung up the phone. He looked at Lesley, then at Veronica. Black-brown eyes. Look at those lashes, people used to say. Wasted on a boy.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He’s in Hobart. He was staying with Mum.’ Veronica turned to Lesley. ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘He asked us all not to,’ said Paul. ‘There’s something he has to sort out.’

  This tension was normal for the Sopels, Veronica thought. Paul and Lesley always behaved as if they were in the middle of a secret unspoken war. She assumed it was shared discomfort, stemming from the fact that Lesley was so judgemental with Paul, and from a degree of coldness she had towards him. But today there was something more.

  ‘Paul?’

  He shook his head, convulsively. He was deeply distressed about something, trying not to show it, almost shaking with the effort.

  She said, ‘Roland’s been drawing things – hands and faces – leaving them in pubs and on doors.’

  Paul said, ‘Drawing. Always a sign of trouble.’

  It was one of their lines from long ago. He was looking for a shared joke, reaching for the past. But his smile was bereft. Dear little boy. He’ll break a few hearts with those eyes.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Veronica,’ said Lesley, coming over. ‘He stayed for a week and it was about a week ago. He was determined that we didn’t tell you he was in town. He has some kind of giant mess to sort out, and he didn’t want to land it in your lap.’ She lifted her chin, miming a laugh, the mouth rueful. ‘He said he’s done that too much over the years. And I’m sure we would both agree that’s right.’

  Behind Lesley, Veronica could see the far wall had iron things stuck into it, brackets and bolts from the original warehouse days, and three large iron hooks. In the shadowy space between, the display posts looked strangely sinister, like a forest of young trees all sliced off at the same height.

  Lesley said, ‘He promised to tell you all about it very soon.’ ‘All about what?’

  Lesley looked at Paul. There was some kind of silent negotiation and neither answered.

  ‘Where is he now?’

  Paul looked down. Lesley said, ‘Veronica, I’m sorry, I am not supposed to say. I know he’s impossible. But look. He has been trying to be helpful. Look at the wonderful poster. He’s so talented.’

  Lesley had always indulged Roland, issuing constant effusive praise. Such a clever little boy. Oh, go on, Veronica, let him have another. What harm can it do? Always Roland and never Paul.

  The woman in the poster, Merle, stood with shoulders very straight, her large white hands held loosely in front of her. Her hair was drawn back from a strong, square forehead. The light was dim and coming from directly above, so that the downturned lines of her mouth were partly in shadow and the lower eyelids exaggerated, making her look exhausted.

  ‘It was kin
d of him to help us out like that.’

  ‘Mum, just stop it.’

  Paul’s expression had drifted into resistance and suppressed pain, as it often did in the presence of his mother. Veronica wanted to reach across, to tell him not to worry, to get back to … something … to the way they used to be.

  Lesley said, ‘I thought I was helping you, Vee, putting him up. I thought, when you knew, you’d think, “Well, at least it was Lesley”. It’s a strength of ours, isn’t it? With the really big problems, Paul goes to you and Roland comes to me. We help them in different ways, complement each other.’

  ‘What really big problems?’

  ‘Anyway, he’s gone,’ said Lesley. ‘A week ago. I upset him. You know how easy that is. I said the wrong thing about some awful girl … it doesn’t matter. He stormed out. He’s still got Paul’s car, though. He hasn’t offered to give that back.’ Paul swung his head to the right and then back to the left, trying to shake something off.

  Lesley said, ‘Of course, he’s welcome to the car.’

  Paul stood up. ‘He’s coming to see you, Veronica. He’s …’ His eyes jerked backwards and forwards between the two women.

  Lesley said, ‘He’s staying above some dreadful old shop in Macquarie Street. It’s only just around the corner from you, really. And I think it’s owned by that same bookshop woman he used to sit with when he was at school.’ She made a scoffing sound. ‘So you needn’t think I’ve supplanted you in any way. Not that you would think that. But now we’ve both been thrown over for some ghastly old drunk.’

  ‘There’s something he had to fix.’ Paul’s eyes were black and wet. ‘Something … bad. The worst thing. The worst of things …’

  ‘Paul, what are you talking about?’ Veronica couldn’t help taking this tone with him. The angry aunty.

  Paul went to the end of the table and then looked directly, only at her. ‘Come outside.’

  Chapter 6

  ______

  They walked across Morrison Street to Elizabeth Pier. The afternoon had become unnaturally warm, with a wind on the water. Rain on the way. They stood under the awning of a restaurant, looking back towards the ferries and the little gift-box ticket offices.