I have bought the book, had it signed and now the author and her guests are entering in pairs from the street into the clattery, crowded restaurant. Once through the crush I can see Jeremy, who left the selling to his assistants so he could come to the dinner. No sign of David. I made sure I was among the later comers so I could keep an eye on where he went but I lost sight of him on the way here.
Jeremy is at the long, over-chaired wooden table that hasn’t shifted in the thirty years people have been coming here for this sort of occasion. There’s a vacant place beside him. He beckons me over and I’m glad to fall on his neck.
He has risen greatly in wealth and respectability since the little literary booth he used to rent near Mad Meg. ‘Hello! Too long, too long!’ he cries, as I sit down, noticing, alas, that bloody Elspeth Roach has settled in a little further up the table on the other side. She smirks at me, but there’s an involuntary kinking of the neck, I notice, as if she’s been pricked in the carotid by the sight of a friendship she doesn’t want me to have.
Jeremy, who has read the new book, is keen to reminisce about times when we were struggling to hold on to Mad Meg and the book booth against developers with megabucks to spend ‘renovating’ our precinct. Jeremy’s once-black hair is white. He’s much more distinguished and much less dishevelled than he used to be. He’s given up smoking, doesn’t drink and his kids are Nin’s age – thirty-odd. He looks as though he’s just out of a rejuvenating bath, his mucous membranes quite pink with glee as he hugs me to his chest.
‘How are you anyway, Isobel?’
I give him a sloppy smooch but, as it would be a lie to say I’m fine, I say, ‘Could be better.’
‘Oh?’
‘Well, my mother’s been booted out of her nursing home and I have to find her another.’
‘M-hm.’
‘And…’ I tap the table edge. ‘I’m being sued. Maybe you know.’
‘Oh that?’ He holds me back and sits down, hiding his gleaming membranes with his lips. ‘She’s serious then?’
‘Checkie loves a good sue.’
‘M-hm.’
No cackles?
Uh-oh…
Don’t tell me he thinks the Siècle Trust has a point?
I hate to say it, but I think I’m off on the wrong track here. I’m such an impulsive person. I wrench a fingernail off with my teeth. It’s like being in a skid: you know you’re in it, you know you have brakes, but you can’t seem to apply them effectively to come to a graceful halt…
Jeremy glances over at Elspeth, but she’s busy receiving her entrée. ‘You know,’ he says, sounding irritable all of a sudden, ‘you shouldn’t have dusted off that old fight at Mad Meg for this book. It’s all water under the bridge.’
‘It’s not water under the bridge for me,’ I say, my belly hardening.
‘But it was just somebody in his cups slugging someone else in the wrong place.’
‘Yeah, like my brother-in-law at the launch of my exhibition at the gallery coordinated by my sister, who happened to be his wife.’
Jeremy sighs. ‘Time to bury the hatchet?’
‘Where? In his great hairless head?’
‘You’re still upset? After all this time? It’s thirty years, for Christ’s sake!’
But there was the damage David did, the gashed and holed work, the slung red wine. It was an act of complete shithood. The Mad Meg collective decided, with one abstention, me, to leave the show on the walls and invite commentary. I, I wanted to take it down, go away, hide, mourn my paintings, rid myself of humankind, but instead, the wrecked exhibition was photographed, written up, featured. People said, ‘Sue!’ and ‘Get even!’ but I was demoralised and the idea of suing was alien to me. I wouldn’t have known where to start and it was quite clear where it would end – David hadn’t any means of making restitution.
‘I don’t want to be known as a feminist test case,’ I say, ‘the exemplary victim – not then and not now. I want to be known for what I do. That’s not too much to ask for a lifetime of trying.’
Jeremy says, ‘So why bring it up again?’
‘Mad Meg existed because of attitudes like David’s, Jeremy. It existed so that people like me could make a name for ourselves as artists.’
‘And Mad Meg got a lot of mileage out of it. It was written up everywhere. You couldn’t talk about anything else for a long time.’
‘I suffered because of it. My work suffered because of it.’
‘And David suffered because of it.’
‘And he shouldn’t have?’
It’s no wonder I stay home. I used to get on terrifically well with Jeremy. I can feel my eyeballs lumping up over my half-specs at him.
‘Isobel, those were the days of happenings. You’ve got to get over things like that.’
‘Mad Meg failed directly afterwards.’
‘Because you guys didn’t keep proper books, you were too idealistic.’
‘You mean you’ve suffered similar setbacks to that brawl, Jeremy?’
‘Sure, we all have them. You laugh them off.’
‘Do you?’
‘Remember when those bastards who wanted to redevelop us out of existence backed their fucking truck into my shop? I didn’t run away and cry about it. I went to the papers. I got compo.’
‘I didn’t,’ I say. And I wonder how Jeremy thinks you can compensate the destruction of an artist’s inspiration. I was appalled by the thuggery, desolate – you can’t compensate for that. It felt like murder to me.
‘But you didn’t even try to, Isobel. There was a lot of sympathy for you. You have to grab the moment.’
‘Who from? Your sister’s husband? David didn’t have a crumb to his name. Allegra and I kept him in food, shelter and funds. And anyway, what if you don’t want to be a celebrity because someone’s made a victim of you?’
‘But the whole town was talking about your work…’
‘For the wrong reasons!’
‘…and hunting you out for your opinion and you were nowhere to be seen. You left it all to the others.’
‘My sister was suicidal…’
‘Tons of people get suicidal.’
‘But Allegra was dying inside. She died.’
‘We all die.’
Well, what do you know? I’m in tears. Doesn’t take much to get me into tears, does it, world?
He takes no notice and starts talking to the people opposite. ‘There was an old drunk who used to wander around Mad Meg filching cask wine and blowing raspberries. What was his name, Isobel?’
I could get up and go home now and swear off Jeremy forever, but I have to be tougher than that and they have to see that I’m tougher. ‘Tom Courtney,’ I say, blowing my nose and feeling the wad of goo come down warm into my palm.
‘Tom Courtney, that’s right.’ And he leans over to the ageing couple sitting opposite while I come off the sizzle. ‘We used to call him Courtly Tom because he was a parole officer at Pentridge and used to go out there in his tux on the tram and teach the crims the trombone. Isobel’s sister Allegra put up an installation at Mad Meg where you had to walk through a gigantic vagina dentata to watch a video of a cunt being masturbated at the end of it and old Tom goes marching through with his bottle in a brown paper bag and says, “What’s wrong with that person’s ear?”…’
And they laugh now just as we laughed then…
So…have I always been too twee? Too timid? Could I have stood my ground? I wonder where I’d be now if I’d stood my ground. Maybe I could have been a hearty relic on TV! A smiling bag of pulp.
‘God, those developers,’ says Jeremy. ‘In every day, they were, trying to buy us out left, right and centre and that bloody stepmother of yours, Isobel, she developed Courtly Tom out of his derelict’s home when she opened that monster up on the hill.’
I’m just going to tell the others about the fight we had on our hands to relocate the detoxifying pensioners out of the building that Viva bought to develop for Siècle – w
hen ‘I think Siècle’s a lovely gallery, actually,’ fires off Elspeth from where her ears have been pricking. ‘One of the best things that ever happened to the art scene in Melbourne.’
‘But I was just going to say to Jeremy…’
‘I think some wonderful work’s being done there. It’s beautifully managed. David Silver runs their archive brilliantly.’
‘Well, yes, Elspeth, I’m sure that’s so. David is a born archivist.’
‘A born artist, too.’
‘He was here tonight,’ says Jeremy, ‘looking not too bad, I thought.’
So I say, ‘What’s with that bloody silly haircut, though?’ Trying to sound like a woman with a good thick hide. ‘Don’t tell me he’s taken a dislike to his own hair! He had a good head of hair, the silly bastard, all thick and dark and wavy…next, he’ll be getting rid of his hands and feet just to spite himself. His hands and feet are the best parts of him…’
Across the table, Elspeth says, loudly, ‘Well, Isobel, I haven’t seen you for a long time. What have you been doing lately?’
As if she doesn’t know.
‘I’ve just had a show in town.’
‘Really, whereabouts?’
‘Didn’t you receive an invitation? I’m sure I asked them to send you an invitation.’
‘Oh, there might be one lying around somewhere.’
‘It was a beaut show. I went and saw it,’ says Jeremy. ‘I would have been at the opening night, Bel, but there was that crazy alert for a freak storm.’
‘Yeah,’ I try to quash the psychic dust storm in my head so I can hear properly. The only way forward now is straight. ‘I’ve never heard one of those before and I’ve lived in Melbourne most of my life. I’ve never heard of a cyclone this far south. But it didn’t seem to make much difference to the attendance. There were lots of people.’
‘I know,’ says Jeremy, ‘I saw it on the telly.’
‘Telly yet?’ goes Elspeth. ‘Oh yes, I remember. I remember the gallery now. You have to pay to exhibit there, don’t you? But I didn’t think that the bit on telly was about your show. Wasn’t it something about Siècle? Everyone was so preoccupied with what was happening to poor David, I didn’t take it in.’
‘What’s happened to David?’
‘Oh, you didn’t know? He had to have half his lung out. He’s got cancer.’ As she says it, I can feel the blood lining up to get out of the capillaries in my cheeks. Why are people like this? Why can’t they just be civil and quietly give you a piece of information you might not have? She’s actually gloating as she primly slices through her rare beef entrée. I turn to look at Jeremy.
‘Oh! Oh, that comes as quite a shock, actually…I didn’t know.’
‘You didn’t?’ he says.
I feel like saying well, why didn’t you tell me, but I say, ‘No, I didn’t. Cancer – how long has he known?’
‘Ten, twelve weeks,’ says Jeremy. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Did it start in the lung?’
‘What difference does it make?’ Elspeth snaps.
‘Well, he used to smoke heavily,’ I say, and I think of David inhaling cigarette smoke as if it were as vital to his being as mother’s milk. He would draw it in until you knew his toes must be tingling with the hit of nicotine. I was always told I was too cocksure for words when I advised against it – David ate apple pips, apple pips had a substance he called ‘laetrile’ in them, ‘laetrile’ prevented cancer. I got my ear clipped for saying that the people around him weren’t protecting themselves with apple pips, but they were breathing in the smoke from his cigarettes. ‘We were always trying to make him cut down or give up. And then, if it’s localised in the lung…’
‘Oh he gave up ages ago,’ says Elspeth, licking her lips.
It sends me off on the wrong track immediately because I hate it that people are so stubbornly ignorant about cigarettes. ‘That doesn’t mean he didn’t get it from smoking. He smoked twenty to forty filterless a day for years.’ What I say might be true, but you can bet your boots that the words are just bouts in a knockout comp.
‘Lots of people who don’t smoke die of lung cancer,’ Elspeth lowers her lids to half mast and pulls her chin in disdainfully.
I’m about to say it’s possibly because other people around them smoke, but I don’t. Instead, I ask, ‘And you say he’s had the op?’
‘He had half a lung out five weeks ago. I’m surprised you didn’t know. He’d have told his daughter, surely.’
That leaves me teetering. The inference being that Nin would immediately have told me.
Jeremy says, ‘It’s marvellous how quickly people get back on their feet after surgery.’
A sigh heaves itself up clumsily out of my lungs and tumbles, unnoticed, into my lap. When David and his sparring partner destroyed my show, the commentary even reached the major papers, but David and his rival recovered – the rival, a bloke called Barry Bull, is hung all over the country and he has an AO. David’s work is respected rather than celebrated, but he also writes and has developed a name for himself for that, as well. People talk about him as if he were some kind of genius – all I can say is that I’ve never met such a contradictory person – at his wedding to Allegra, he kissed me, ran his hand down my forearm and said in the gentlest of all possible voices, ‘You have ugly arms.’ It was meant to be an endearment. Ugly arms, for fuck’s sake!
‘Oh I expect he’ll pull through,’ goes Elspeth. ‘They can do marvellous things these days. When I spoke to him tonight, he said he only had a few hot spots in the bone.’
‘A few hot spots in the bone!’ Unintentionally, I hit the end of my waiting fork and it somersaults onto the floorboards. ‘So the malignancy has spread?’
‘That doesn’t mean he’ll die.’
‘You mean it doesn’t mean he’ll live, Elspeth.’
‘Oh, rubbish!’
But it’s not rubbish. I bend down and scrabble around for my fork on the floor. She’s stupider than I remember. I find it overwhelmingly extraordinary that everyone at the table – they all have good educations – thinks he’ll pull through. They’re all going at it now, hammer and tongs. Mind over matter: this one knowing that one who drank his own piss and lived. And look at so-and-so…it’s all just the story of cure in the nick of time to them.
‘He says he’s going to fight it,’ says Elspeth, smugly. ‘So you can eat your meal in peace, can’t you, Isobel? Or can you? Anyway,’ she continues, ‘we’re celebrating Bronwyn’s book launch. Here’s to the author!’ and Elspeth wields her wine glass on high. ‘To Bronwyn.’
‘Bitch!’ hurdles my lips but in such strangled tones she doesn’t hear and Jeremy shoots me a behind-the-glass query. ‘He’ll die from it,’ I say.
And he asks under the hubbub how I know that.
‘It’s not a question of how I know it, Jeremy. It’s a question of how I feel about it. And if you want to know, I feel bloody awful.’
I don’t know whether anyone’s chosen to tell Nin about David. Or she’d have told me, surely?
Surely?
Still, she may not have…
‘So you don’t hate him, after all?’ asks Jeremy.
‘It’s not a question of love or hate. It’s a question of being and non-being. He’s tested extreme feelings in me for years and years.’
‘So at least you know you have extreme feelings?’
‘Something like that. Everyone’s contradictory but I never met somebody as against himself as David. He’s a bastard and yet he’s managed to produce some charming art.’
‘Sure…’ Jeremy pats my shoulder and gets up to go to the loo, leaving me sitting in a painful place.
I’d just bought my house when David went berserk. I’d scrimped and saved for a deposit while under fire from the collective whose slogan was ‘property is theft’. Stella found the house, actually – in her interminable befriending she’d come across an estate agent who took to her and worked a bargain for me. Eli and I moved into a l
ittle weatherboard on a huge piece of land in the staid Eastern Suburbs. After the show wreck, Allegra fled the digs we’d shared with David and came to me with Nin.
Finding himself alone in premises rented by someone else, David didn’t know what to do. All he could think of was making himself indispensible to Viva and Checkie, keeping the door and helping with the hangs at Siècle. Checkie became his ally against me during Allegra’s troubles and her death.
He’s been Checkie’s archivist now for years. He’s good at it. He used to be a good painter, too, but he’s always been fastidious, as if he hated getting paint on his fingers and clothes and he stopped using real paint long ago. Now he creates artists’ books and I certainly don’t begrudge him those.
Dear little books, they are, almost gamine, like Nin. Books with word nests in them, dainty, gorgeous words, roosting in the corners of pages – not a whacking great vagina dentata and a video of masturbation – you can’t accuse David of sledgehammering in his art. And through the pages are neatly cut little passages that play new roles each time the page is turned. In a book he made for Nin that was inspired by the night Stella’s furniture ran amok in her room and knocked her cold, the contents of a house ran through the pages to empty itself into a night party on a back lawn. Chairs and tables cavort and spring. Sheets and almond blossom fly away together to some life where the essence of good sheets is distilled in the senses. I was very taken with it when she showed me. I don’t begrudge him his talent. It reminds me of Une Semaine de Bonté. He was the first person to draw my attention to Ernst and I’m glad he did. It’s just that you wouldn’t think the man who created such lovely things and had such delightful thoughts was capable of brutality and filthy rages, and David is.
Everyone is eating around me and my meal is slow in coming. Forks click, knives screech and lips are smacked – a game of who can devour their food with the greatest self-satisfaction.
I hated David for a long time for his sabotage; my emotions had me by the throat – here comes my pasta and once again I find that my emotions have me by the throat. He and his quarry thumped each other in the small space of Mad Meg, doing far more harm to my work than to each other – that’s the way it is with brutes; brutes are so cowardly they even rampage with caution. They broke glass, threw wine and put holes through things – not neatly cut, sweet little holes, but jags and clout holes – yet they didn’t need medical attention for their own wounds. I should hate him still. One moment he’ll utter his favourite saying, ‘we are what we do’ and the next he’ll be so over-brimming with jealousy – or is it genuine loathing for what makes my art – that he can’t control his rage and wrecks what I do.
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