They’re parked outside an old Queenslander, the rickety wooden box perched high on stilts like an overly ambitious cubby house. Jacqueline follows the woman up the stairs to the huge, enclosed verandah that appears to encircle the entire house. The front door is really just a screen, dilapidated grey mesh framed by cracked and peeling woodwork.
‘Ryan?’ His sister rattles the door in its frame. It doesn’t open.
There are flecks of peeled paint on Jacqueline’s hand from where she held onto the stair railing. She brushes her palms together. Watches white scraps fall like dandruff to the floorboards.
‘Ryan!’ the woman shouts again. ‘Ryan, love, it’s me.’
‘Out here.’ The voice is close, coming from where the verandah turns to run along the far side of the house. Ryan Jellicoe’s sister glares at Jacqueline then leads the way, sandals slapping the soles of her feet with a damp, fleshy sound that’s almost obscene.
Her brother is slouched in a rattan chair. Three glasses of what looks to be iced water sit on the table in front of him. He has something small and round and green in his hands – a ball perhaps, or perhaps not. The way he’s playing with it, turning it over and over and over, Jacqueline can’t really tell. His fingers are long and tanned. They move with a juggler’s grace.
‘I’m Ryan,’ he says.
‘Good to meet you at last,’ she replies. ‘Jacqueline Paige. I’ve left some messages on your voicemail.’
‘Sure you have.’ He smiles, crows feet crinkling at the corners of his eyes. He looks older than she expected. Somewhere in his late thirties, wiry and well-worn, though some of that might only be the effect of the sun. His skin holds a tan that belongs on someone who works outdoors for a living. Blond dreadlocks hang down past his shoulders, swaying as he leans forward. ‘Lime?’
‘Pardon me?’
Ryan waves the green sphere. ‘For your G and T.’ He produces a folding knife from his pocket and flips it open. Cuts the fruit into thick wedges.
‘Thanks, but no,’ Jacqueline says. ‘Not in this heat.’
‘Best weather for drinking, you ask me.’ He winks, slow and lazy, then crushes a chunk of lime into each of the three glasses.
‘I’ll have hers, love.’ Ryan Jellicoe’s sister pushes past. Slumps into one of the empty chairs. A land-bound seal would possess more grace.
A scowl shadows Ryan’s face. ‘You’ve met Alice, then.’ He picks up one of the drinks and holds it out to Jacqueline. ‘C’mon, it’s not getting any cooler round here.’ The glass is sweating nearly as much as she is and almost slips from her grasp as she raises it to her mouth. The taste is too bitter, even with the lime. More gin than tonic and Jacqueline is used to neither. She grimaces. Returns the drink to the table.
‘Your knees broke or what?’ He nods at the third, still empty chair.
Jacqueline sits down and crosses her legs. Watches him watch her cross them. Straightens her back. ‘Ryan, there are some things we need to discuss.’ She smiles. ‘There’s not a lot of time left before your show and I have to tell you, Dante is worried. He’s concerned that–’
‘He’s concerned he’ll lose his dosh,’ Alice chimes in.
Jacqueline nods curtly at the woman. ‘The money is a factor, granted. Seventh Circle is a business after all, not a charitable foundation, and Dante has already invested a sizeable amount to see this show go ahead. I do think the finances are secondary, though; right now, he’s more concerned about Ryan’s reputation.’
‘Ryan’s reputation, yeah right.’ Alice stabs a pudgy finger onto the tabletop. ‘Listen to me, missy: we know how much his paintings are worth, as opposed to what Dante’s gonna give him. Your boss needs to be asking a lot more, or taking a smaller cut, one or the other.’
Jacqueline turns back to Ryan. ‘If you want to discuss pricing, I’m sure that will be fine. You need to understand, though, that the market is rather tight at the moment. Dante is trying to position your work–’
‘That’s not what we’ve been told,’ Alice says. ‘There’s a place right here in Brisbane would kill to have Ryan’s stuff on their walls. And they’ll represent him properly, the way he deserves.’
Jacqueline turns to the woman. ‘That might be problematic, Alice. We have . . . well, there are contracts in place.’
‘Contracts, yeah right. Our lawyer might have something to say about those contracts. I’m sure he can find us a loophole or two.’
‘You may be right,’ Jacqueline says. ‘But really, do you want to go down that road? Legal fees and courtrooms, dragging it out for possibly years. Dante won’t take that lying down, you know. He has lawyers of his own.’ Ryan is staring out over the road, his drink more than half gone. Jacqueline wonders when he stopped paying attention. ‘You don’t want to go through all that, do you? Ryan?’
His gaze snaps back to her, slips down over her breasts, her legs, then back up to her face. He grins and his teeth are straight and white like an American movie star. For a moment he looks all of seventeen years old. ‘Are you doing anything tonight?’
‘Ryan, be serious,’ Alice says.
Jacqueline resists an urge to throttle the woman. To throw her bodily down the stairs and watch her flail and sear on the concrete driveway below. With sister dearest out of the way, Jacqueline has few qualms about her ability to handle Ryan Jellicoe, thank you kindly. Casually, she reaches down to wipe a line of sweat from the back of her crossed leg. Her skirt hitches a little higher up her thigh as she straightens. She neglects to smooth it down again.
‘There’s this club in the valley,’ Ryan says. ‘Couple of mates doing a gig there tonight, thought you might want to come along. They’re good.’
‘I don’t know.’ Jacqueline curves her lips into a regretful smile. ‘I need to report back to Dante this afternoon. If there isn’t good news, he’ll most likely want me straight back on a plane to Melbourne.’
‘Good news, eh?’ Ryan scratches his chin. ‘And what do you reckon your boss’s idea of good news is, then?’
‘A reassurance that things are still on track. If I could tell him that I’ve seen your painting, the one that’s to be the focus of the show?’
‘It’s not ready to be seen.’
The man’s jaw tightens and Jacqueline calmly backtracks. Assures him that she understands, absolutely she understands. Perhaps some of the other paintings then, just the ones he’s happy for her to view? Anything at all, as long as she has something to tell Dante. Surely, he can meet her halfway?
Alice bangs her empty glass down on the table. ‘You won’t see squat till certain contracts get changed – take that back to Dante and see how he likes it.’ All the muscles in her face conspire to a self-satisfied sneer. ‘Time to go, my brother has work to be getting on with. You’ve wasted enough of his day.’
But it’s Ryan who gets to his feet. ‘Alice, zip your fucking lip.’ He holds out his right hand to Jacqueline. She takes it. Allows him to pull her up and out of her chair in a single, fluid motion. Sweat shifts between their palms and for the first time she notices the tattoo on the inside of his wrist, an elongated blue sun that ripples above the flex of his tendons. Finally, belatedly, he releases his grip. ‘C’mon then, girl, let’s you and me go take a gander at some etchings.’
His studio occupies the entire rear of the house, an area which must have originally been three separate rooms. Patches of raw, exposed wood remain where dividing walls once stood. At the far end, angled towards one of several curtainless windows, twin easels support what can only be the painting she’s been sent to reconnoitre. Wider than the spread of her arms and almost as tall, the canvas is shrouded in a grey, paint-spattered sheet. Pointedly, Jacqueline averts her gaze. Allows it to drift instead over the smaller canvases that lie stacked against the outer walls, their faces turned uniformly away. The jars of brushes and half-curled tubes of
paint cluttering the corners and windowsills. The single mattress with its colourfully stained and crumpled sheet.
‘Sometimes I crash in here,’ Ryan says. ‘Easier’n cleaning myself up for bed.’
Jacqueline smiles. ‘I can imagine.’
‘Ryan?’ Alice pokes her head around the door. ‘Ryan, I got things of my own to do today. You gonna be long with her?’
Jacqueline opens her mouth to tell the woman not to wait on her account, that she’s quite capable of calling a taxi, but she doesn’t get the chance.
Ryan whips around, his face dark with fury. ‘Get the fuck out of here, Alice!’
‘I only–’
‘Piss off!’ Right in her face, so close that Jacqueline sees spittle arc through the air and land on Alice’s cheek. Her heart beats faster. Her breath sticks in her throat. The woman backs quickly out of sight and Ryan slams the door. Hard enough to make all the windows rattle in their frames.
‘Sorry,’ he mutters. ‘She knows I don’t want her in here, I don’t ever want her in here.’ He turns to face her, hands spreading in a gesture she takes for contrition. ‘She doesn’t understand art, never has. Doesn’t get the process, you know?’
Jacqueline nods. ‘Sure.’
‘Only reason she’s interested now is there’s money involved.’
‘I imagine that interests a lot of people. More so than art, that is.’
Ryan grins. ‘Someone in mind?’
Jacqueline takes a couple of steps towards the nearest stack of canvases. The topmost bears a word scrawled in red across its back: median or perhaps meridian. ‘Dante does care more about the money, your sister was right about that. Art is his business, and a status symbol. To be honest, I doubt he’d spot the difference between a genuine Jackson Pollock and a mass-produced Chinese knock-off. If he could sell them for the same price, he’d quite likely argue there was no real difference at all.’ She points a toe at the canvas in front of her. ‘Could I . . .?’
Ryan moves to her side. ‘Yeah, I got that about Dante. A real bottom-line guy.’
He bends and flips the painting around to face them. A sunset, all bloody reds and rich, bruised purples, casts its dying light over a city which has long since ceased to breathe. Skyscrapers loom, their glassless windows gaping black as missing teeth, above a river the colour of raw sewage. A post-urban wasteland, concrete and iron decaying to rubble and rust – and amid it all, faces peering out. Or what might be faces; what might be nothing more than wishful thinking. What might be nothing ever again.
‘It’s Brisbane,’ Ryan says. ‘One day.’
Jacqueline nods. ‘What you have to understand about Dante, though, is that he’s good at his business. Very good. You need him, Ryan, you really do.’
He shrugs, noncommittal, then turns over another canvas. And another. He leads her around the room, becoming more animated as each new painting, each vision of his tragic, post-apocalyptic city, is revealed. They’re good, better than good. They’re grand and dismal and undeniably beautiful, although Jacqueline can’t but help feel that something is missing. A unity, a narrative. Perhaps when they’re hung. Perhaps when the centrepiece is there to tie them all together. If the centrepiece ties them together. Jacqueline glances at the shrouded bulk straddling the two easels. Her fingers ache to lift a corner of the sheet.
‘You coming out tonight, then?’ Ryan asks.
‘I might.’
‘Better than hanging around some roach motel, yeah?’
‘It would be that.’ The heat in the studio is intense. Sweat beads on her face faster than she can pat it dry, and the skin on her back, her chest, feels clammy and close. Jacqueline wonders how the man can stand to work in here. She tilts her chin towards the concealed canvas. ‘Just a peek, Ryan? For me, not Dante. I promise I won’t say a word to him about it.’ Smiling, she draws a lazy cross over her left breast.
Ryan watches her finger complete its path before lifting his eyes to hers. ‘Sorry, but it’s not done yet and I don’t show anything that isn’t done. Not to anyone, yeah?’
‘We open in less than eight weeks, Ryan, and we need to allow time for everything to be crated and shipped . . .’
‘Hey now, don’t get yourself in a knot. It’ll be done.’ He reaches up with both hands to scratch at his scalp. Nervous serpents, his dreads twitch with each movement. ‘Less than a week, maybe, I get my blood up. You can see it then if you’re hanging around that long. You gonna be hanging around that long?’
Jacqueline tries not to think of the heat and the humidity. How, after a week of it, she might be little more than a puddle on the motel’s cheap polyester carpet. Instead, she nods. ‘I’ll be here, at your disposal. Anything you need.’ The grin that splits his face is wolfish. A startling flash of tooth and fire that sparks something equally unexpected deep in her loins. Uncertain, Jacqueline laughs. ‘Well, nearly anything you need.’
‘What do I need, what do I need?’ Ryan stalks across the room. Squeezes both her hands in his. ‘I need you to come out with me tonight, girl. I need inspiration, I need to dance. C’mon, you can be my muse, my Calliope.’ He’s laughing now as well – Ryan Jellicoe, Court Jester – but still his hands swallow hers.
‘All right.’ She pulls free, grinning despite herself. ‘Tell me where the club is.’
‘That’s my girl!’ Ryan retrieves a small scrap of canvas from the mess that litters the floor. Using a stub of charcoal wetted against his tongue, he sketches a series of intersecting lines. Streets, Jacqueline realises as he starts to label them. One near the middle he marks with a big fat asterisk and a scribbled name. ‘Here you go.’
The tips of her fingers blacken as she turns the map around. ‘Merde? That’s really the name of the place?’
‘Hey, you’re in Brisbane now; no one knows shit up here.’ Ryan snorts at his own joke, then snatches the canvas back. Still grinning, he signs his name in the bottom right corner. ‘There, you see, that’ll be a worth a mint one day. Isn’t that right, Alice?’ The last word is shouted over her shoulder, and Jacqueline turns in time to catch a glimpse of a shadow beneath the studio door before it slips away. Sister dearest, indeed. How long had the woman been standing there, ear pressed to the dry and splintery wood? Jacqueline suppresses a shudder. Her skin crawls.
There is always a game; there is always an audience.
Her own private mantra, for as long as she can remember. It wouldn’t do for her to forget it, not now. Jacqueline tucks the map into her bag. Feels her composure return. Ryan Jellicoe may have slipped briefly beneath her skin for a few scattered, heat-swollen moments, but what of it? She is beginning to sense the rules now, the conditions and boundaries. Gentle flirtation and the padding of egos.
It’s a game she knows she can play. It’s a game she knows she can win.
— 5 —
Waking to darkness and disorientation, Antoinette spends a few seconds fumbling for a reading light that isn’t there, before remembering and rolling across to the other side of the bed. Jacqueline’s side, the side with the art nouveau lamp Antoinette bought as a housewarming present, its green-glass shade casting a faintly olivine glow once her fingers find the switch.
The room is as empty as the rest of the bed.
And, just for a second, Antoinette doubts. Allows herself to think that maybe, just maybe, it was all a dream, some crazy-eyed fantasy spun from alcohol and grief and the kind of imagination that’s better left to bounce against padded walls.
But only for a second.
Because she knows, because she feels. It’s real. He is real. He must be.
Antoinette gets out of bed, wincing as her injured foot hits the floor. Still in her work clothes, she feels stale and constricted, her white blouse now crumpled, smelling of old sweat, and she reaches up beneath it, rubs at the spots where her bra has dug into sleep-s
oft flesh. A shower is what she needs, coconut bodywash and water so hot it all but blisters skin; a shower, and a clock – because she has no idea what time it is, what day even – but there’s one thing she needs even more.
The hall is dark except for a slim line of light shining beneath the closed study door. Without allowing herself time for second thoughts, Antoinette limps across and turns the handle, belatedly rapping her knuckles on the door as she pushes it open. ‘Hello? You in here?’
He turns to face her, swivelling in his chair with an easy, open grin. ‘Lo! Sleeping beauty awakens!’
He’s tidied the room, returned the futon to its sofa state and piled her stuff neatly on top of it. Behind him, Jacqueline’s computer hums, what looks like a page from Wikipedia open on the screen, but that isn’t what grabs Antoinette’s attention, what makes her burst into laughter.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, covering her mouth with her hands. ‘Is that my dressing gown?’
‘I was cold.’ He pulls the faded pink terrycloth tighter across his chest. ‘It’s all I could find that would fit. Sort of.’
Antoinette tries to stop smirking. The robe is absurd, purple appliqué ponies cavorting across a background the colour of fairy floss, and she would have sent it off to Vinnies years ago except that it was a thirteenth birthday present from her grandmother – her mother’s mother, who died soon afterwards. At least two sizes too big back then, it fits her comfortably now, and despite the numerous coffee stains and the rip on one sleeve – inexpertly repaired but holding – she can’t bear to let it go.
On him, it looks at once ludicrous and strangely endearing.
‘We’ll have to get you some clothes,’ Antoinette says.
His grin returns, wider than ever, as he rises from the chair. ‘If you say so.’ It only takes him a couple of steps to reach her, and Antoinette puts out her hand when he gets near, flattens a palm against his chest. Still warm, still solid.
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