Watercolours

by Adrienne Ferreira

  ‘Cheerful? Are you mad?’ Mavis rested bony knuckles on her hips and shook her head sadly. ‘Joy always did have her taste in her arse.’

  Dom gaped.

  ‘Pardon my French, dear,’ she demurred, her face radiating innocence.

  Dom studied her covertly as he did up his buttons. She seemed to move in and out of focus. Just when he thought he had her figured out she shifted. It was disconcerting. ‘Who’s Joy?’

  ‘Your landlady, of course!’

  Mavis cruised the flat, taking her time to inspect the art collection. In the bright afternoon light the rooms dazzled, a ye olde cottage kaleidoscope of lilac and rose, apricot and lavender. Through the sliding door a breeze billowed the curtains, lifted the frills on the lampshades, set the basket of dried flowers rocking lamely. She looked at him and burst out laughing.

  ‘Sweet Jesus!’ she said, sweeping her arms wide to encompass the horror. ‘Look at this place!’

  Her cackling gave way to a loose, hacking cough. She pressed her chest with one hand for a moment until she recovered, then scooped tears from beneath her eyes with a crooked finger.

  ‘Oh, you poor boy! Joy’s decked this out specially, I can tell. All her own work, you know. You should be flattered! She doesn’t usually go to this much trouble. The last tenants were a sweet young couple. Out of wedlock, though, so she didn’t approve. There was none of this for them.’ She fingered a lace-fringed lampshade with distaste. ‘She must have been saving all these treats for someone she thought deserving of them. A respectable teacher. Are you respectable, Dom?’

  They were in the kitchen now and Mavis was helping herself to wine glasses, knowing just where to find them. From the glint in her eye it was clear which answer she was hoping for, but before he could reply a burst of yapping came from downstairs.

  ‘Beryl’s mutts,’ she murmured. ‘Drive you mad. It’s a wonder someone hasn’t baited them.’

  There was a long pause during which Dom wondered if Mavis was the baiting type. He heard a canary trill further along the hall and the sound made him think again of his grandparents. For a while they’d owned a series of birds and were deeply attached to them, despite complaining about the work it took to look after them — all that seed to clean up, thistles to collect. On afternoon visits he would sit with them in their small sunroom, his grandparents bemoaning their deafness, hearing aids whining and whistling, cranked up to the highest volume, both of them straining to converse over the impossibly loud warble of the canary, singing its heart out, on and on. Those visits always left him exhausted.

  Mavis had poured a generous amount of wine into two glasses. She handed one to Dom.

  ‘Welcome to Morus,’ she said with a merry clink.

  Dom took a sip of the reddish liquid. It tasted strange: spicy and sweet. He couldn’t decide whether the flavour reminded him more of lollies or medicine.

  ‘And welcome,’ Mavis added, ‘to Camelot Mews. Joy named it, of course. So pretentious. She and Stanley built the place and still own half the units.’

  Dom smiled. He was enjoying her company and was disappointed when she downed her glass quickly and declined a second.

  ‘No, I’ve got a tomato chutney on the boil. Ta-ta love.’

  She made for the door, then stopped on the threshold, her finger raised. ‘Sinclair’s Produce is the place to get your toilet paper. Across from the Roper Centre. You’ll have to buy it in bulk and they don’t have any of that recycled stuff, but the supermarket’s always running out. It’s very irritating. Big demand, you see.’

  Dom was confused. ‘Why is there such a big demand for toilet paper?’

  Mavis looked at him as if he was thick. ‘The girls, Dom! Morus has the biggest ratio of females to males in the state. Tell me you’ve noticed that, at least!’

  Dom nodded. ‘How come?’

  She shrugged. ‘Mystery. But you know women and toilet paper, we don’t drip dry like you do.’

  Her eyes flashed with anatomical knowledge and then she was out the door. A few seconds later a blast of Cuban music came tumbling into the hall from her apartment.

  Dom had a shower to the sound of frantic trumpet. Afterwards he put on a load of washing. When night fell, things quietened down over at number 8. He flicked through the local television stations, watching men dressed as leprechauns advertising liquor, men dressed as bulls selling tractors, men dressed as lawyers spruiking personal injury representation.

  He sat for a while on the balcony, where the bricks continued to let off heat into the night. He looked up. The sky was black and dense with stars, their glamour undiluted by the town’s lights. There was no drone of traffic, just the odd car rattling over the bridge. Every now and then a semi-trailer rumbled past in the distance in low gear. In between, everything was quiet and Dom could hear the soft breathing of the river. The inhabitants of Camelot Mews moved about their small kitchens preparing their evening meals. He felt comforted by the ordinary ritual going on around him.

  Following her instructions, Dom heated up Mavis’s casserole, glad of it now he was hungry. Back on the balcony again, nursing the hot dish on a tea towel, he poked a fork into the sauce, fishing for meat, and popped a piece into his mouth. It nearly blew his head off. He polished the rest off slowly, sweating buckets, pausing every now and then to suck in air through his teeth and blow his nose. By the time the dish was empty, he felt cleansed, cool and wide awake.

  Then he remembered the bottle of mulberry wine. He fetched it, unscrewed the cap and poured himself another glass. Really, its claim to be wine was a bit of a stretch, but it was drinkable. The flavour was certainly distinctive. Was he imagining it or was there a hint of night air in its bouquet? He chuckled to himself. In years to come, whenever he bought himself a bottle of Cherubini Mulberry Wine, the first sip would remind him of Morus: a deep sky thick with stars, the warm smell of dry grass and the spread of mulberry trees over a whispering river.

  Chapter 5

  My favourite place to draw is under the boat. It’s been in our backyard for as long as I can remember, that’s eleven years at least. Whenever I ask my mother — how long has it been there, how long exactly? — she just shakes her head and lets out a big sigh, which seems to take away all her energy. Sometimes I ask just to watch the effect it has on her, since she hardly ever deflates. I don’t like to ask my father. I wouldn’t want him to take it the wrong way.

  The boat looks like the skeleton of a huge animal, propped up on its spine in the grass above the river. Its thick wooden ribs reach up as if it’s trying to tickle the pepper tree or grab a cloud. It reminds me of the black piano at school. Whenever I lift up the piano’s shiny lid to peek underneath, it has the same wooden insides and warm sawdust smell.

  In the shade of the boat, protected on all sides by tall grass, is my drawing place. Just like Varmint finds hidden places in the garden to sleep, I have made my nest under the boat. I can draw whatever I want and nobody bothers me. The paspalum grows fast, taller than me, until Mum can’t stand it and sends Dad down with the whipper-snipper, but I like the grass when it is jungley. I crouch down in it, smell the clean sap and listen to the insects ticking. When I look up at the grass heads and the clouds mooching past, the boat looks like it’s riding on a sea of paspalum, gliding forward, majestic, with the wind coming up behind it.

  Varmint likes it down here, too, and sometimes she stays with me, scratching her cheeks on tough stems and pumping her jaws at the birds when they torment her from the trees. She practises her hunting on me, her pupils huge as she concentrates on my pencil moving across the paper. Her tail flashes and she pounces and I have to push her away so she flings herself onto the rug. She stretches out in a long fluffy strip, belly up, and then gives me the cutest look from between her paws so I’ll pat her. Then she gets down to the job of cleaning all that fur.

  I’m skilled at drawing cats. Varmint is a good subject and I’ve drawn her heaps of times. As for the boat, I like to draw it at sea even though it�
�s never felt the ocean, not yet. Docked on its props in the grass it’s done nothing except watch the rise and fall of the Lewis all its life. I feel sorry for it, waiting for water so long. I run my hands along the smooth planks, pat my palm against its ribs to make it feel better. Sometimes I lean in and whisper: Not long now!

  Whenever Hughie comes over we play by the boat. The grass is perfect for making tunnels and cubbies and is flattened easily under a good whipping stick. Hughie reckons paspalum seeds can stick to your skin and sprout. Once we tried harvesting some to see if it was true but they all fell off in the bath before they got a chance to grow. Only one in my armpit looked promising, until I forgot it was there and accidentally scratched it off when I was bored in maths. My mother wouldn’t let a seed grow on me for too long anyway, especially one that looked like a tick. She’s always grabbing me to check if there are ticks crawling in my hair. Hughie says ticks can kill you by burrowing into your head and poisoning your brain. I wish he’d never told Mum that.

  The boat is in the backyard because my father is an Ideas Man. Ideas Men think up great adventures, which is just what George does. A Jack of All Trades, my father likes to call himself, but I’ve heard people call him other names. I’ve heard the sniggering of Mr Roper or Mrs Kelley in Sinclair’s when they don’t know I’m listening, when I’m invisible behind the drums of chemicals or sacks of feed.

  Jack of all trades, master of none!

  The first time I heard Mr Roper say that my whole body stiffened against the heavy sacks of my hiding place. My heart squeezed painfully and I felt my face burn up. Silently, I breathed the dusty smell of hessian and dug my fingernails into the fabric, imagining it was Mr Roper.

  Today it happened again, in the newsagent’s. The shop is deep and dark as a cave and stinks of dog from the German shepherd that’s always asleep in the doorway, but I like it. There’s something exciting about all those piles of blank notepads and unused pens and brushes and expensive boxes of watercolours from China. As usual, my father headed straight for the boating magazines while I stopped by the rusty stand of postcards and pretended to be fascinated by the faded pictures of the Lewis while sneaking a look at the more interesting ones with topless women and g-stringed bums. Mr Newey looked at me over his glasses from the counter, so I hurried up the back to the pencils. I can spend ages there, testing all the different leads on the little pad of paper, seeing which is the softest, the darkest or the grittiest. I was seeing how well the 4B smudged with my fingertip when Mrs Newey came out from behind the birthday cards to glare at me.

  Mrs Newey is like a mountain, soft on the outside and hard in the middle. She has a puffy face and red cheeks that trick you into thinking she’s jolly. Today she peered at me with narrow eyes. She looked like a Pontiac potato that had split in the oven. It would be fun to draw Mrs Newey, but it would be a not-nice picture.

  After she checked I wasn’t shoplifting she folded her enormous hairy arms and said, ‘So, what’s the latest get-rich-quick scheme?’ She smiled but there was a nasty look in her eye, as if she didn’t believe my family would ever get rich, quickly or slowly. I felt my face go hot and I looked away and shrugged, remembering what my mother said.

  Not everyone has good ideas.

  I hurried back to my father and stood next to him until Mrs Newey took her wobbly, hairy arms back to the lottery counter to dust off the Scratchie droppings. Dad was staring at a picture of a sleek wooden speedboat on Lake Como in Italy. It looked like something James Bond would ride in.

  ‘Can you see us in that, Novi?’ he asked, his big eyes shining with longing behind his glasses. I turned my back on Mrs Newey and gave Dad my full attention. Under my T-shirt, the 4B pencil tucked into my shorts felt like a concealed weapon.

  My mother is right. Not everyone has good ideas. After all, I’m the only kid in the whole school who has a boat in his backyard.

  Today is Thursday and a stinker, as my mother likes to say. She’s at the shop so Dad and I pick up Hughie from his place and we all drive down to Morus pool. I like going to the pool, which proves my point: I’m not scared of water, it’s just the river I don’t trust.

  The pool is a red-brick fortress surrounded by wire netting and it smells of chlorine, wet concrete and Redskins. I love the shape of it, its perfect aqua cube. The way all that water is held so neat and safe in its concrete shell.

  This afternoon the place is packed. Hughie and I test each other to see who can stay underwater the longest. We take deep breaths and let ourselves sink, pumping our arms until we reach the bottom and sit cross-legged on the floor. Eyes open, I look into the blue distance at all the thrashing legs. A string of bubbles trails from my nose. I wait until Hughie’s eyes start to bug out — he always has to shoot to the top first. I go on sitting there as long as I can because it is so peaceful on the bottom of the swimming pool. The feel of all that water pressing down. The quiet, all sounds dull and far away. The blue filtered light. This is what it must be like on the deep ocean floor. Hughie says drowning is supposed to be the most peaceful way to die. Once the struggle and panic are over, of course, and I suppose that would be true if you drowned at the bottom of Morus pool. But I know the river rose up and clamped its jaws around my grandfather, dragging him under the floodwater like some giant prehistoric monster. No matter how many pictures I draw I can’t change that. I don’t believe Nonno’s death was peaceful.

  After we drop Hughie off we head back home and I go straight down to my nest in the shade. I feel safe here, even when I’m drawing not-nice pictures. There have been a lot of those lately. That’s why I’ve been spending so much time down here.

  When I need to draw, it feels like something inside me is being squeezed, like when I walk through the paperbarks down to the swimming hole and the cicadas are all around me, their voices like a throbbing heart. My heart starts throbbing, too, as though there are cicadas inside me, bursting to escape and join the others in the trees. Then I draw a picture and they fly off. For a while the pressure goes away. But they always creep back when I’m not looking. Before long their little drum bodies start to hum and I need to draw again.

  This afternoon I draw a spring picture. The mulberries are long and black, weighing down the branches, and some kids, me and Hughie included, fill plastic containers. Our mouths are gory from the feast — we look like flesh-eating zombies on a rampage. With blood-coloured hands and feet we stagger home to our screaming mothers and are banished to bathtubs while the berries are trapped under pastry or boiled into jam. Birds fly overhead and land in the trees to gorge themselves. In the distance, a tiny clothesline is hung with purple-spotted sheets. A woman shakes a broom at the sky and I am pleased because even though she’s so tiny in the corner of the page I have managed to capture the anger in my mother’s face.

  I draw another picture. This time it’s me in another life — the cold English countryside at dawn. Here we carry large baskets for leaves instead of berries and fill them with green under a purple sky. At this time of the day the leaves are moist and tender, the best food for fussy silkworms. My mother leads us in a song to keep our spirits up.

  Here we go round the mulberry bush

  The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush

  Here we go round the mulberry bush

  On a cold and frosty morning.

  I draw another picture. Nonno, caught under a tangle of branches at the bottom of the river. It’s one of my not-nice pictures but I can’t help it. Once it’s out the pressure in me fades, like sitting in the bath and pulling out the plug; a kind of draining. The cicadas in my chest fly off. Without them I feel calm, also empty and alone.

  My neck is stiff. It aches from leaning over the page so long. I drop the pencil and rub my left hand to encourage blood back into it.

  The cicadas will be back. They never stay away long. Already I sense a tickle, the few beating wings of the ones who are always there, the ones who keep the nest warm and welcome back the others.

  I can hear my fat
her hammering in the shed. The sun is angling off. Mum will be home from the shop soon. I take another look at the picture of Nonno. I won’t show my parents this one. I’ll put it away with the others.

  Investigators do this. They keep things to themselves until the time is right, until the final moment when all the clues come together and nobody can argue with them. Until they can prove beyond reasonable doubt who the murderer is.

  Chapter 6

  Mira was only a casual at the fruit shop but her boss, Tony, often disappeared when it was quiet and left her to look after things. She liked the responsibility; resented that he didn’t pay her more. Today, he’d given some excuse about landscapers coming to the house but she didn’t believe it, not in this heat. More likely he was escaping to the Roper Centre to wallow in the air-conditioning.

  Not that she could blame him. It was hideously hot. The town was like a furnace, hunkered down silently as though waiting for a giant timer to ping and announce it thoroughly cooked. The day dragged by and for most of it she accomplished very little. There were hardly any customers. On days like this everyone shopped at the Centre, putting up with inferior fruit and vegetables, chemically ripened, weeks old and trucked halfway across the country, simply to enjoy some cool relief and perhaps a donut and a browse through the CD bargain bins. There was no point restacking the shelves. Waves of baked air were rolling in from the footpath and she could only watch as the produce shrank and decomposed around her. Alone, she couldn’t linger in the cool-room so instead she armed herself with a water-sprayer and perched on a stool by the refrigerated herb shelf, trying to revive herself and the wilting greenery she supplied to the shop with regular squirts of cool mist.

  For hours she sat there, flattened. Her thoughts drifted to the new teacher and his suggestion of an art program for Novi, but not even this little spark of hope could withstand the crushing heatwave. By the afternoon Mira felt as though she was suspended in a giant web, paralysed, destined to become some vile creature’s evening meal. Self-pity took hold as she began thinking of her father, missing him. When Tony finally returned at four o’clock he took one look at her and felt guilty enough to let her go home early.