Things I Did for Money

by Meg Mundell

  Derek peered at her. ‘I dunno. I was planning on taking it easy tonight.’

  But now she could see it, the difference it would make. She was on her feet, making brisk suggestions; bossier than usual, halfway between insistent and cajoling.

  The TV was showing a documentary about voles. ‘All right.’ Derek sighed. ‘Just don’t smash the bong, that’s all I need.’

  Two days passed in a blur of heat. Penny left her CV at a couple of cafes and registered for the dole. There’d been a long wait before her number was called. The woman behind the desk asked questions and noisily banged Penny’s replies into her computer. ‘What was the reason for leaving your last job?’

  ‘It wasn’t really a proper job,’ Penny said, ‘just shifts here and there. They’ve got none at the moment.’

  The woman looked up. ‘They just stopped calling?’

  Penny nodded and the keyboard clattered for what seemed like a long time.

  Her mum had emailed. The cat had had a lump removed from his ear, someone had set a car on fire down the street, and she hoped Penny was making friends at university. No mention of her stepdad. Miranda still hadn’t replied to any of her texts. Fuck her, thought Penny. Stupid cow had probably dobbed her in about that face cream — one measly jar. You couldn’t trust anyone.

  In the hot afternoons she stayed in her room, parked by the fan in her underwear, reading up about ballistics. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams, one fortune cookie had instructed. But her dreams all starred that aimless train, stuck on its circular route to nowhere. And sometimes that other dream came: the one where she lay wide awake, frozen motionless, feigning sleep as she watched the silent shape of a man standing at the foot of her bed. Her dreams had nothing good to say.

  Now, after dark, she’d go out walking. ‘Later,’ she called to Derek as she left that evening. She kept a quick pace on these night walks, as if it wasn’t just wandering around, as if she knew exactly where she was going. The air was still sweet with woodsmoke, and the day’s heat radiated off the footpaths, sending hot swirls around her bare legs. The streets were empty and TVs flickered through windows as she crossed the road to cut through the park. It was a decent-sized park, about five minutes’ walk from one side to the other. She was less than halfway across when she heard the footsteps.

  The man was behind her and gaining steadily. He made no effort to lighten his step; it sounded as if he was wearing heavy boots, like the ones tradies wear. She could just make out the path ahead, hemmed in with tall shrubs and stretching into blackness. Walking faster would do no good; she was still a long way from the far side. She had two choices: run, or turn around to face him. She slid her hand into her bag and felt her fingers slot neatly into the gun’s handgrip. As she turned she heard him speak: ‘Hey. You got a light?’

  He stopped a couple of metres away. Penny could not see much, but the man’s outline looked tall and heavyset; she could hear him breathing. She kept her voice level. ‘No,’ she said, ‘and you better just keep walking.’

  It wasn’t until he laughed, a dry noise with no humour in it, that she took the gun from her bag and held it low against her leg.

  ‘You were the one just walking,’ said the man in a pleasant voice. ‘Now you’ve stopped, so I’m asking if you got a light.’

  She thought fast: should she pull back the hammer, or was the first shot primed to go if you squeezed the trigger hard? She couldn’t remember. ‘No, I’ve quit,’ was all she could think to say.

  ‘What you doing out here by yourself?’ he asked, and this time he made no effort to sound friendly.

  She had no idea where the words came from: ‘I’m looking for assholes. Are you an asshole?’ The gun was raised now, pointed at his middle.

  The man didn’t answer at first, just hovered there. ‘What’s that you got?’ His outline shifted, craning a little closer. ‘What is that?’

  Then he backed off and she could just make out his hands, lifted up in front of him. ‘I just wanted a light,’ he said. ‘You need to fucking relax.’

  Penny tried to keep her voice strong. ‘Go away. Just go, right now.’

  He stood there a moment, then his footsteps began retreating. ‘Crazy fucken bitch,’ she heard him call back.

  Penny listened until there was nothing but the high screech of cicadas and her own shallow breathing. She turned and ran, her heart slamming in her chest and the tears already coming, blurring the lights from the highway on the far side of the trees.

  Out under the flight path she lay in the grass and tried to slow her breath. She had been lucky, she reasoned; if she hadn’t had the gun, if she hadn’t thought so quickly on the spot, it could have happened to her all over again. But she knew it was not quite that simple, because without the gun she’d never have cut through the park at night in the first place. The thing that had saved her … it was the same thing that had led her to take the risk. And what if she’d pulled the trigger and shot him, right there in the dark? How would that really feel, afterward?

  One split-second decision, one chance encounter, and your whole life could switch course, events tumbling on uncontrollably like those rows of falling dominoes. You can’t reverse things: once the bullet drops into the chamber it’s too late.

  In the sky a plane was circling, coming in to land on her runway. She cradled the gun against her stomach and tuned in to the approaching roar.

  Next morning Derek was watching the bushfire coverage again, a satellite image showing a cloud of smoke so vast it was visible from space.

  ‘Can’t we watch something else? This is depressing,’ said Penny.

  ‘There’s a cool change coming through,’ he said. ‘I wanna see what happens.’

  In the kitchen she snapped open a fortune cookie: Something you lost will soon turn up. She was thinking this over, trying to recall all the stuff she’d misplaced over the years, when the TV noise cut off abruptly and she heard Derek speaking on the phone. Something in his voice, an anxious note, brought her back into the lounge room.

  ‘So they got out?’ Derek was asking. ‘They’re safe, they’re going to be OK?’ He let out a long breath, nodding. On the silent screen a journalist was standing by a charred letterbox, its metal face partly melted.

  Penny waited until he’d hung up. ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Cousins. My mum’s sister. Probably lose the house, but everyone got out in time.’

  She wasn’t sure what to say. He’d never told her he had family up in the hills; but then again, she’d never asked. She felt a faint sense of shame. How would it feel, sitting there watching the fire devour whole towns, knowing someone you cared about was in its path? She got two icy poles from the freezer and offered one to Derek. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  It was mid morning when Penny left the house. The sun leaked across the sky like something bleeding, and in the amber light her shadow on the footpath took on a strange terracotta hue. She walked out to the bridge over the aqueduct. For a while she stood there in the heat, watching the planes take off and rise up into the hazy air, get smaller and eventually vanish.

  She took the gun from her bag. Down below, in the centre of the aqueduct, ran the thin channel with its dark streak of water. She opened the cylinder and positioned herself carefully. One by one, she took all six bullets from their chambers and dropped them into the water, which swallowed them with barely a sound. Then she placed the gun on the ledge of the aqueduct and walked away: not slow, not fast, just heading home.

  VERMILION

  Will

  The woman upstairs is drunk again. You can hear it in the slight drag of her footsteps across the floorboards, the little stagger as she steps away from the canvas to refill her glass or find another cigarette.

  Yes. This is the kind of woman who paints late into the night, wearing high heels and drinking he
avily, in an upstairs flat with floorboards.

  How do I know wine is her poison? She drops her empties in the bin on rubbish night. A wine bottle smashing sounds quite different from a beer or spirit bottle. She polished off six or seven last week, judging by the size of the crash. Red wine, not white — caught a whiff when I lifted the bin lid to dispose of my own glassware.

  My guess that she’s a painter is just that — a guess. But the smell of linseed oil and turps is hard to mistake. It floats in through my window like an exclamation mark.

  Voices carry in the stairwell, and hers is loud. That voice: a slight musical swoop in her vowels, carefully practised, a vocal trick that almost hides the dull whine of the suburbs. I hear her resonating Hellooo on the stairs whenever she passes a neighbour or answers her mobile phone. This morning I overheard half a conversation, the floating words pressure, pigment and finger food.

  Thankfully that voice, accompanied by the clacking of heels on concrete path, warns of her approach. Yesterday she almost caught me daydreaming in the stairwell, distracted by a beautiful scent — jasmine perhaps? — drifting up over the balcony, overpowering the mineral smell of the sea. When I heard her coming I slipped my palm over the smooth rail, traced it upstairs and vanished into my flat.

  God help me — now she’s turned on the stereo, some loud rock music with guitars and screaming. What a cruel joke that I hear so well. (Earplugs, earplugs, where are they?)

  Often she drops things: brushes, keys, unnamed objects. An hour ago she flung something forcefully across the room, some mysterious clattering tool that painters use to torture their neighbours.

  I am not used to this. Change sets me adrift.

  The speaking clock says it’s three in the morning. She has set up her easel in the floorspace directly over my pillow.

  Tomorrow I will shift my bed. Tonight I will take a Stilnox, plug my ears and dream the sounds of wine bottles smashing and stilettos being sawn into tiny, useless pieces.

  Nina

  The cost of paint is killing me. But worse, I’m stuck … the show opens in two days and I’m still three paintings short.

  Nothing but red, and I’ve run out again. It seems you can’t manufacture passion, and now this whole red thing is making me so nervous. The exact colour I’m looking for — maybe it doesn’t exist? Or maybe I’m just tired.

  Scarlet … rose … auburn … brick … magenta … damask … cerise …

  Ten canvases line the walls. That first one is just right; that rosy stickiness is almost alive. The third one works too — the texture took forever but it looks effortless, like a blush on skin. And number seven: that beautiful light, a gold streak shooting through garnet.

  But the magic burned out. The ninth painting I’m not so sure about, and the last one is all wrong. That blob in the corner, what is it? Something ugly creeping in from the side, all hunched. The reds look slack and cheap. There’s a bitterness there but it’s not what I’d call compelling.

  A step-by-step map of my sinking brain. And so we come to number eleven.

  An empty canvas can be a terrifying thing. How can I fill these three white squares? They’re like the blank spaces left over in a crossword puzzle, proof of my limits. Talent can’t just evaporate, surely … assuming it was there to begin with. That woman reading the gallery program: Nina Verlane? Who’s she? Those words are stuck forever in my head.

  What does anyone remember about Van Gogh? Sold one painting, went mad, cut off his ear, shot himself. So who’s Nina Verlane in the scheme of things.

  Carmine … carnelian … oxblood … pillarbox … fire engine … garnet …

  The sky is getting light. This building is L-shaped and through my kitchen window I can see into the lounge room of the flat downstairs — a triangular slice of room so neat and bare, furniture set at perfect angles. I’ve never seen a single light on in that flat, but the room is partly lit by the street lamp over the road … There’s someone moving around down there. What’s he doing up so early, pacing around in the dark?

  Almost met him yesterday. My corkscrew has gone missing so I went to ask if I could borrow his. I’d just looked out the window and seen him down there, cat on knee, sitting around doing nothing. About fifty, backbone straight as bamboo. Nice profile, from a distance.

  Down the stairs I tramped, rehearsing the chit-chat of the borrower. That corkscrew … I needed it. I’d just got off the phone from Shona — How close am I to finished? Am I using some white? Who am I bringing to the opening? And will I please try not to drink too much, because she’s invited critics and what do they love better than making snide references to an artist’s weaknesses? Nothing! And Nina, sweet thing, you can be tactless when you drink and we don’t want to upset the nice people, do we.

  Anyway, him downstairs. I knocked and knocked until I felt ridiculous, called out ‘Hello? It’s Nina … I’ve just moved in upstairs?’

  Nothing. I gave up and stood there quietly, trying to see through the bubble glass. At the end of that dark hallway was a tall shape bobbing around, so obvious it was almost comical. An outline that lurked, and listened, and waited for me to go away.

  Our little game didn’t last long. If Mr Elusive didn’t want to lend me his corkscrew I had other doors to knock on.

  It’s so quiet down there. How can a person be so quiet?

  Anyway, there are other ways to open a bottle. Quick sharp knock of the neck across a bench will do the trick. Messy, but money’s too tight to waste on utensils.

  Paint, coffee, cigarettes, milk. (Maybe more wine, but don’t open that till later.) Then back to work. Three paintings, two days. I’ve done it before.

  Crimson … cherry … flame … puce … kermes … cinnabar … cochineal …

  I am starting to hate the colour red.

  Will

  My shins are covered in bruises. After half an hour’s heaving I managed to shift the bed, but it keeps surprising me with its new position. Running my fingers over the skin I can feel the bruises blooming, overlapping like coins beneath the surface.

  Things that change their location make me uneasy. I suppose I’ll get used to it, it’s just a bed. I must try to be more flexible.

  Yes, there’s a new noise coming from upstairs, and it has shifted: a rhythmic pounding and grinding, a gritty repetitive thump directly over the exact spot where I write. She’s been at it all morning. Through many solid feet of wood and brick, the woman has a knack for finding my head and filling it with noise.

  Her rhythm is blurred, sloppy, sullen. I know the signs of a drinker all too well.

  I can’t wear those earplugs — it’s like suffocation.

  So tomorrow I’ll shift yet another piece of my life to the opposite side of the room: my desk, the bookshelf, transcribing machine and tape recorder, my computer, the snarled cords and lumpy plugs. It will take hours.

  But I refuse to call James to rescue me. That makes me feel like a child. A backward situation, considering who spawned whom.

  I wonder if he’s handsome. His face, once set in my mind as six years old, has faded away. They say he looks like me. And I reply, half joking, Could you be more specific?

  Enough of that.

  The cat has scampered in and curled against me. His cold fur carries the rich, beautiful scent of night: damp sea air, wet rocks, looming rain and beneath it all something alive — his own musky skin, a hint of jasmine. Smart cats, Burmese. Quick-footed too. In four years I’ve only stepped on him once.

  What is that woman doing up there? Grinding up bones?

  Yesterday she came banging on my door, trumpeting her credentials. There was a smile in her voice but she sounded tense, overwrought. Given the little sleep I’d had I was hardly in the mood for a visit from the culprit herself. She persisted, but eventually concluded no one was home.

  Ah. I
t’s gone quiet up there. The silence is like a gap in traffic. Knowing it won’t last, I find myself waiting for what comes next.

  Nina

  Why can’t I find the red I need? I’m mixing up caput mortuum, a pigment named for the way the wet granules bunch together like tiny skulls. Must admit, can’t see that level of detail myself right now … blurred from too much merlot. Might need another walk down to the sea for some fresh air, wake myself up.

  Caput mortuum … merlot … plum … Venetian red … alizarin crimson …

  One canvas down, two to go. Problem is, I’ve run out of abstractions. I need a subject, something solid. Not people — I hate painting people. (That woman: Nina Verlane? Who’s she?)

  It’s soothing, grinding pigment. Almost hypnotic. But this building is so silent. I can just hear the faint crash of the sea, sometimes the clank of water in pipes. But the human silence is distracting.

  When a cat yowled on the stairs just now it was a relief. I opened the door and he walked right in — a silky Burmese with bright green eyes, an intelligent face. He circled the room once, brushed against me hard, threw back an approving look and left. I shut the door behind him to keep out the cold.

  Winter was announced on the radio today. I hadn’t noticed the cold until I tried to steady my hand to paint. They say a storm is coming. There’s an old fireplace; I’ll find something to burn.

  Russet … ruby … titian … Indian red … cadmium … maroon … fuchsia …

  Will

  There is nothing so shocking as waking from a dream to find it has followed you.

  I had a nightmare: an intruder, a tall man in a black cloak, was rifling through my desk drawers. His back tensed as I filled the doorway behind him. ‘Who are you?’ I asked coldly, buoyed by some fragile dream-delusion that I had the upper hand.

  I could see him clearly, and this fact alone made my heart lurch — the dark velvety cloak, the pale curve of one cheek against the light. In his hand was a bundle of my Braille papers. He did not turn to face me. A sharp sea wind was blowing in the window, scattering papers off the desk.