Trick of the Light

by Laura Elvery

  Even at the worst moments – the ones back in 2012 that people still ask her about – Kayla wanted to stay with her mother. Is that right? her father wanted to know. At times her life had its freedom. At other times: claustrophobia, meanness, despair. Kayla used to think she’d rather be close to her mother than far away. Once, in the car on the way to their next house, after whatever dilemma it had been that time – the bed bugs; or the small but fearsome laundry fire; or the rotting deck their kitten had fallen through, surviving – Kayla asked her mother if she felt any sadness about leaving.

  ‘You can’t feel sad about things that are awful to begin with.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘They’re just houses, Kayla,’ her mum said, even though together they’d snipped photos of flowers from magazines to arrange across the front of the fridge. They’d bought birdseed from the service station and watched from the kitchen as rosellas landed on the patchy grass below.

  ‘It meant something to Gran,’ Kayla said quietly. ‘Having a house. And now she’s lost it.’

  Her mum, running a palm around the steering wheel, said, ‘See?’

  Kayla checks the watch that the foster care agency gave her for Christmas – purple, and a bit juvenile, but owning this thing against her skin makes it special. She excuses herself past shoppers, jogging down the escalator to the ground floor. In a brightly lit store with nothing but white and tan clothes on featureless mannequins, she takes a leather belt into her hands. The tag says $129.95. In a beachwear shop, Kayla tries on a sixty-dollar wide-brimmed hat. In a jewellery store where she is the only customer, Kayla tells the man with a diamond earring that she’s looking for something for her mum. He explains cut and clarity. He doesn’t ask how much Kayla has to spend. He says, Have a think. He tells her she’s a wonderful daughter.

  In a dim shop spicy with incense, Kayla touches the corners of her lips and pinches away grains of sugar from the doughnuts. Soon, Shannon will be hopping into her red hatchback to circle down her suburban hill towards the freeway.

  Scanning, Kayla eyes a set of glass shelves. Ceramic figurines of animals are set inches apart from one another. She picks up a black and cream cat the length of her fingers. It plays with a ball of wool in its paws. Kayla thinks her mum will like it and she’s satisfied with the clink it makes when she sets it down to pay. Prettier, more solid, more gifty than a notepad, the cat leaves Kayla with a single coin. The shop assistant wraps the animal roughly in white paper.

  Another Christmas, years ago. Kayla remembers James in her lap. He had a solid, heavy body. Their oftentimes hunger showed in other ways: James sniffled and murmured with a cold. He was maybe eight or nine. Old enough to let suspicions about Santa Claus stop him from getting too loud or excited in front of Kayla. But this chaos of wanting and needing, and the rhythm of frustration about just why, exactly, other kids got things all year round, kept her brother quiet, and hopeful that Santa was real. He rested his head back against Kayla’s chest while they watched a movie. Their mum had gotten a job cooking at a nursing home, but then she’d gotten sick. Kayla thought surely there’d be another job before Christmas. Best not to talk about presents or the beach or pavlova. No one but James had mentioned a tree. The decorations he’d made in the final weeks of school sat on top of the TV.

  Kayla heard a key in the lock and then saw the sliver of her mother’s tiny body against the midday light.

  ‘Good, kids, you’re here. Quick. We’re moving out.’

  Kayla felt her face burning. ‘No, we’re not.’

  ‘Get some clothes. Here.’ She unfolded green supermarket bags into Kayla’s hands. ‘Help him, please.’

  ‘Where are we moving?’ Kayla asked. ‘Somewhere better?’

  Their mum started to take her shoes off, but kept them on. ‘Sure. Somewhere better.’

  ‘Why right now?’

  ‘Now, Kayla. The essentials for now. I said help him.’

  James dropped from her lap. Used tissues tumbled to the floor. ‘Maybe a holiday?’ he asked, almost convinced.

  Their mum stopped and stared. ‘Not a holiday. Not like that, mate.’

  Kayla headed for her room. She thought she would like to take a look at Gran’s bright, beautiful jewellery coiled in the biscuit tin inside her wardrobe. She thought she would like to take it with her.

  ‘This is a good thing,’ their mum said. ‘Kids? This is a good thing.’ She picked up the remote and turned off the movie so she could say it again, louder.

  Kayla circles back and up the escalator where the charity guy is talking to a young couple in front of the photos of premature babies. She slips the five cents into the bucket.

  A notepad and a ceramic cat tussling with a ball of blue wool are all she has to show for the hour. Kayla wonders if the person who’d bought the romance novel and the salad servers is still in the shopping centre, and if the lost bag has been remembered: steps retraced on square tiles to dodge CAUTION: WET signs and stubborn toddlers in a frenzy outside toy stores. Kayla figures that the items were presents for someone, and she tries not to think what will be wrapped in their place.

  Apparently Gran left them a bit of money when she died, but she was their dad’s mum, and Kayla didn’t think to press the point after he said he was using it for something else. It was one of those things he said he’d pay back. ASAP, he said. But his car needed fixing ASAP, too. Her mother sobbed sobbed sobbed as though all the time she’d spent not crying – and Kayla couldn’t remember seeing it before – she’d been thinking about it, wanting to, and here was her chance. From then on, her mother took her chance often. Kayla lay on the couch with her head turned in the direction of the kitchen. She listened to her mother through the doorway and tried not to think about the packages of pasta and tins of tuna and beetroot slices that came in the food bank cartons, or the regulation black leather-upper shoes her new school demanded by the end of the holidays. Instead: the vivid green of the football field, high and bright in the sun. Gran’s soft fingers plumping the lollies. The tang of sugar in the air. The ball soaring between two posts. Something to play with. Something to hold.

  Out in the sunshine, Kayla crosses Sullivan Road to get to the pet shop. She sees James waiting, his chin tilted up to gaze at the kittens and guinea pigs playing. ‘I spent it all,’ Kayla says. ‘I’ve got nothing left.’

  James pats his pocket. ‘I didn’t spend any. It’s all there. I’m just going to give it to her.’

  He’s always been a gentle boy, always with cold hands that reached for hers in the bed they’d shared in the weatherboard house years ago. Their dad had covered the missing window panes with plastic bags that rustled in the night, sounding like mice, right by her ears.

  She stares at him, feels her eyes sting. ‘That’s actually very smart of you.’ Swallowing, she shows him the menu planner, and explains what’s inside the palm-sized paper package.

  ‘I really think she’ll show up,’ James says.

  ‘Who? Shannon?’ Kayla surveys the road. ‘Of course she will.’

  ‘No – Mum. For the visit tomorrow, at the agency.’

  ‘She might,’ Kayla says. ‘She probably will.’ No apology messages on her phone yet. Every night before a contact visit Kayla turns her phone to silent.

  ‘And she’ll like the menu thing and the cat. But she can use my money to buy whatever else she needs.’ James pauses. ‘Unless we should buy something for Shannon.’

  ‘Nah. She doesn’t need anything.’ Right on time, Shannon’s red car turns the corner at the bottom of the road, and Kayla says, ‘Wave, James. So she can see us.’

  La Otra

  Sarah pulled an apron and a pot of paintbrushes from the store cupboard. Her friends Monique, Henrietta and Tess floated into the classroom. Monique blew her a kiss and Sarah caught it, swiping at it with her paintbrush in the fumey air. Their Art teacher, Ms Farrell, called the roll and fielded
questions from her nineteen Year 12 students as they moved through the studio hefting portfolios and papier mâché busts of Frida Kahlo. Yes, Ms Farrell was coming to their formal. No, she would not be getting her hair and makeup done. Yes, she thought the whole thing was a bit ridiculous. Yes, yes, her love for her students outweighed any politico-social concerns she had about the Australian high school formal industrial complex. But for now, girls: Art.

  The eighty-minute class moved gently. Sarah called Ms Farrell over. ‘Miss, what do you think? I’m trying to revoke the power of the male gaze by subverting the perspective of The Birth of Venus.’ Ms Farrell nodded, took the paintbrush from her and added some texture to Venus’s tendrils.

  ‘I think you’re trying hard to play nice,’ Ms Farrell said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘No need to play nice all the time. They’ll put you in quarantine if you’re not careful.’ Ms Farrell cleared her throat and leant in. ‘What do you reckon she’s thinking, Sarah – Venus?’

  Sarah had wondered herself. ‘Where are my clothes?’ She started to laugh.

  Ms Farrell never laughed. ‘What else?’ She touched Sarah’s hand.

  ‘I think she seems tired.’

  ‘Everyone’s tired.’

  ‘Of being looked at.’

  Monique, immaculately groomed, impossibly perfumed, came up and put her head on Sarah’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m going to miss Art the most. I don’t know what I’ll do without it.’

  Ms Farrell smiled warmly. She took Monique’s portfolio from her hands and flicked through its pages.

  ‘I’m going to miss you, miss,’ said Henrietta, whose triptych based on representations of weaponry in The Hunger Games had sold particularly well at the school auction in term three. Someone’s father, probably Henrietta’s, probably a barrister, bought it unframed to hang in his offices at Waterfront Place. Loudly, he declared Henrietta’s effort entitled Arrows+Other Arsenal to be a ‘remarkable cohesion of feminist iconography and really, really great line work’. Sarah had rolled her eyes at Hen. She watched Hen’s father, his lips at a plastic goblet of unwooded chardonnay, eyeing Ms Farrell in her black dress, rubbing one bright blue-stockinged foot against her calf. A bitterness had risen in Sarah’s throat.

  Ms Farrell assured Henrietta that she would miss her, and all the girls, after graduation. When the bell rang at the end of class – their penultimate class together – the students gathered in close. With charcoaled knuckles and clay-stuck fingernails, they patted Ms Farrell’s soft, wrinkle-pleated arms.

  ‘Till next time, till next time,’ Ms Farrell said. ‘And if you don’t wash your brushes properly, I kill you.’ The girls’ laughter twirled above their heads. It was first period and they lingered in the warm room. Outside, kiln-fired ceramics projects rested in the docile sun.

  Finally, Sarah hung up her apron and waved as she began to leave. Other girls, ahead of her, one by one, called, ‘Bye, Ms Farrell.’

  Her teacher raised her voice. ‘Sarah? Can you stay for a moment? Monique, Henrietta, Tess? I will write you all late notes for period two. I have something in mind for four of my very best.’

  They settled on stools in front of Ms Farrell’s laptop. She turned off the lights and hit a key on her computer.

  ‘I was wondering if you’d heard of this man?’

  Diego – no last name – was a Spanish-born artist who had been commissioned by the state to produce an artwork for the western boardwalk at South Bank. Ms Farrell tapped a few keys and a photograph appeared projected onto the whiteboard. She clasped her hands together and faced the girls.

  ‘He calls it La Otra.’

  Monique, Henrietta and Tess gasped. Sarah gazed at Ms Farrell. The girls were very late to their next class.

  *

  Sarah invited her friends to her house because it was the closest to South Bank, and also the closest to the new liquid nitrogen ice-cream place they’d been meaning to try. Her mum buzzed Monique, Henrietta and Tess up to the apartment. They spilt out of the lift, all short denim and swinging hair. Their chests were criss-crossed with bags, like bandoliers.

  ‘My word,’ her mum said. ‘Are you staying for the night, or for a month?’

  ‘Just the night, Mrs Birch.’ Henrietta patted her fat duffel bag. ‘So much homework.’

  ‘Good girl, Hen. You’ll be an ophthalmologist yet!’

  Sarah kissed her friends hello. They said yes please to her mum’s offer of fruit toast and Earl Grey. She’d leave the goodies outside Sarah’s door. Tess was given a sticky note with the wi-fi password, and Sarah led them to her room. Beneath the pendant light the girls offloaded their luggage onto her bed. Tess marvelled at Sarah’s scarlet formal dress hanging in her wardrobe. Monique said, ‘Hen’s got a new flame at the train station,’ and Henrietta confessed everything: the part about the boy writing down the names of Hen’s favourite books and then the part about the boy copping a ticket from a transport inspector because he’d forgotten to tap his travel card.

  ‘He reckoned it was worth it,’ Monique said. ‘But I don’t think it was.’

  ‘Do you like him?’ Sarah asked.

  Henrietta shrugged. ‘Does it matter? He wouldn’t leave me alone.’

  They settled into a silence that was thrilled and expectant.

  ‘Okay?’ Sarah asked, and the others nodded.

  Sarah tapped on her laptop. Here was the photo Ms Farrell had emailed her. And here were another nine photographs that Sarah had taken this afternoon – on recon, she pointed out – of Diego’s sculpture by the Brisbane River.

  ‘La Otra, hey,’ Tess said. She slid off the bed and checked outside Sarah’s door for the tea, but came back empty-handed.

  ‘I’m appalled,’ Monique said. ‘And you know I love being appalled.’

  Sarah addressed her best friends. She explained her thoughts as potentially reactionary, but no less valid because of their emotional sheen. She needed to weigh up the artist’s right to freedom of expression with a citizen’s right to police and resist that expression when the piece of art was imbued with so much fuckhoundedry.

  A knock on the door. ‘Toast!’ Tess screamed.

  When it was time to go, they all ducked to the loo, then Monique stacked the plates for Sarah’s mum. They gathered their bags and balaclavas and they bunched together in the lift, four warm bodies breathing deeply. An installation of bravery in an air-conditioned metal cube.

  *

  In La Otra, Diego-no-last-name had created a functional bronze sculpture for the people of Brisbane. At the base of a grassy hill that led to the river, a life-sized faceless woman perched on all fours on a low concrete plinth. She was round-bottomed, trophy-hipped, aglow in the moonshine to be molested by ibises. Naked, but for the scent of the grass and the river that settled on the small of her back. A seat for someone. A bed for someone. A shining folly seen from above by a mother marsupial with bauble eyes as she acrobated electrical wires with a baby on her back.

  Sarah circled the sculpture, her second time here. She felt her own, transmitted version of Ms Farrell’s fury. From a young age Sarah had known the fever of male eyes on her; she thought it was as common as flowers. Sarah laid a hand on the crown of the woman’s scorched bistre-brown head. A sign was bolted to the plinth. It read:

  Diego: La Otra (‘The Other’)

  Earlier, Ms Farrell had said Here when she unlocked the storeroom with the key she kept clipped to her waist. She turned her back while Sarah, Monique, Henrietta and Tess raided a metal cupboard for cans of spray paint.

  Monique set her bag on the grass. She wondered aloud about sitting on the sculpture. ‘I shouldn’t though, should I.’

  ‘Probably not,’ Henrietta said. She tossed Monique a can of purple spray paint, labelled with a sticker of the school logo.

  A can of green in her hand, Tess tried to choke
back nervous giggles. Sarah pulled a balaclava out of her duffel bag, and then a hammer. A jogger listened to his headphones as he shuffled by on the path below the sculpture, oblivious to the hammer, oblivious to the girls.

  Monique watched him leave. She shook her can of paint. The marble rattled in its throat. Sarah made dents with her hammer and Monique and Hen and Tess ran loops around the plinth to tinsel the burnished woman with white, green and purple.

  ‘Hey!’ a voice called out. ‘Stop there.’ A security guard swung torchlight down over grass, over river.

  ‘Go, go,’ Sarah called.

  She thought of Mary Richardson and the photograph of the Rokeby Venus that Ms Farrell had also shown them. She thought of Mary’s little axe, hidden in a suffragette’s sleeve. Such pleasing slashes on the glass, on the canvas. Mary Richardson trying to scramble away through the gallery, a fever at her throat. Sarah raced towards her friends, and her feet pounded the wooden boardwalk all the way home.

  *

  Sunshine Gardens had phoned the school formal committee with bad news about the drop-off zone out the front of the marquee. Due to earthworks, nothing larger than a four-wheel drive would be permitted to deliver students to the waiting crowds on the night of the formal. No limousines. No Hummers. No decommissioned fire engines.

  The girls in Ms Farrell’s period-four Art class were taking it well.

  ‘Probably better for the environment.’

  ‘Just showing off, anyway.’

  ‘Less is more, right, Ms Farrell?’

  Ms Farrell looked up from the buttery slab of clay she was slicing into strips with wire for her next class. ‘I agree wholeheartedly. What a fine, bold group of girls you’ve turned out to be.’ As she glanced around the studio, she made eye contact with Sarah at the opposite table. She and her friends hadn’t yet found the chance to talk to Ms Farrell alone, not since the destruction of La Otra was complete.

  Sarah nodded deliberately.

  Ms Farrell’s lips parted. She mouthed, Very good. She raised her voice to the whole class. ‘Please remember to staple your—’