Watercolours

by Adrienne Ferreira

  ‘You should look with your eyes, not with your fingers,’ says the woman from the front desk, who has a freckled face and bushy ponytail scraped back so tight her eyes are stretched. She is clasping her hands together and looks like she’s in pain and not just from the ponytail.

  I pull my hand away. ‘But … it looks more beautiful when I touch it.’

  Eleanor is here now, saying we have to hurry if we want to see the Museum, too. I leave the woman by the drink-crate paddock and head outside. It isn’t until we are almost at the Cathedral again that I remember my backpack and have to run back under all the fig trees to get it.

  The Museum’s entrance is airy and full of light. I stare at the map, all lines and boxes and no pictures, trying to make sense of it. We only have an hour, Eleanor says, not long enough but it will have to do. I can see that the dinosaur display is on Level 2, but it’s hard to work out how to get up there. A tour group piles in through the front door and surrounds me. I twist around, searching for the stairs, but there are too many people in the way, standing in a big huddle, craning their necks. I’m about to push my way through the middle of them when curiosity makes me look up, too.

  A whale skeleton floating above us takes up most of the ceiling. I stand there gawking and feel shoved again, like yesterday when the height of the skyscraper tried to push me over. It’s hard to imagine an animal so big swimming around and yet there’s not much to it, really; hardly any bones. Each rib is thick and chunky, like a log carved and set in place, but I can see how helpless a whale would feel washed up on the beach. Its whole stomach would be crushed under the weight of those heavy bones. I think of myself out in the deep water with the whale swimming under me and all my breath rushes out. I feel afraid, for myself and for the whale, too.

  I find a bench to sit on so I can study the whale without getting dizzy. Looking up, I feel as though I’m sitting on the ocean floor, as small as a speck of phosphorescence. After a while I pull out my sketchpad and start drawing. Gradually I make out the suspension wires and the connecting bits that let each joint of the skeleton sit as it would in muscle. I study each smooth rib, each snug piece of vertebrae, and the hollow feeling I’ve been carrying starts to fill up with water. I’m flowing out with the tide, melting into a current of calm, hovering on the ocean’s graveyard bottom, while the monster fish — the ugly ones with strange protrusions and useless, gaping eyes — scavenge around me for threads of filtered food. The whole ocean presses down. It feels soothing to be pressed by a weight so much greater than my own; peaceful. Down here, nothing much matters.

  Eleanor comes to sit beside me. She asks to see what I’ve drawn. Without realising, I have filled several pages with ribs and spine and horror fish. ‘It looks like your father’s boat.’

  I take another look at my sketchpad. She’s right, the boat and the whale are the same — one set of ribcages reaching up, the other down. In a flash, I think of the patterns I saw from the aeroplane window. I wonder whether everything starts out like this, no matter how big or small. Just a simple pattern.

  The idea fills me with air. From the dark ocean floor I shoot up, rushing through bubbles, bursting through the water’s sloppy skin into warm sunlight. Up on the surface I take a deep breath. Everything is sparkling clear. The cicadas are screaming in my ears, full throttle.

  Eleanor says, ‘I came here with your grandfather, once.’

  I look at her in surprise. She looks back with a sad smile, puts her arm around me and squeezes. Then she stands up. ‘Do you want to see the silkworms?’

  THE WET

  1996

  Chapter 15

  Camille couldn’t believe how quickly Thursday had come around. This had been happening a lot lately, suddenly the weeks were flying by. Today she glanced at the clock on the wall and was amazed to see that it was already five past three. Wondering where the day had gone she had just begun to register the full disaster of her desk when she heard the library doors swing open. She looked through her office window and her heart almost stopped. The Book Deliverer was wheeling his trolley across the carpet towards her office.

  He hadn’t crossed her mind in ages, although it could only have been a month. Incredible, how much her life had moved on in that time. For what felt like an eternity everything had been the same and she had been resigned to it never changing. Now she inhabited a new universe.

  The Book Deliverer was from the faded old world of before, and yet here he came, striding towards her as he always had, smiling a shy greeting and stopping courteously in the doorway with his clipboard and tethered pen ready. His aftershave arrived a second later. From the pocket of his navy trousers he retrieved his Stanley knife and was about to slice through the tape on the box of books when she cried out, ‘No!’

  He looked up in surprise, his blade hovering over the glossy brown strip. She hurried on, ‘Don’t worry about it — I’m sure they’re all there.’

  Beneath the fringe of brown curls his face looked startled, thrown by the unexpected change in routine and the impatience in her voice. Slowly his smile faded. Disappointment drew his shoulders down. Camille was struck by confusion, irritation and then an odd surge of power. So she hadn’t imagined the spark between them; clearly he’d looked forward to seeing her, too. Maybe he’d been entertaining similar fantasies all along? She sighed. The whole thing suddenly seemed too tedious for words.

  He shoved the knife back into his pocket and, in an attempt to hide his embarrassment, took up the clipboard to scrutinise her invoice. She couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for him. ‘I don’t have time this afternoon,’ she said, by way of apology.

  The Book Deliverer gave a shrug but his shoulders took the brunt of her rejection and collapsed a little further. The bell rang. Kids tumbled out of classrooms. They were still locked in awkward silence when Novi appeared in the doorway, a pixie with a giant’s backpack. Camille was grateful for the distraction. ‘You ready?’

  He nodded, clutching the straps at his shoulders, eager to get going.

  She turned back. ‘Sorry I can’t chat. We have to head off — Novi and I have an art lesson.’

  ‘Yeah. No problem.’ He made no enquiry, just perfunctorily set the box on her desk. His lack of curiosity dissolved any sympathy she may have been feeling for him. She signed the invoice and clipped the pen back in its place on the folder. From the doorway Novi watched, unblinking as an owl.

  ‘See you next month,’ she said.

  He nodded, grabbed his trolley and left without another word.

  Camille’s face was burning. She smiled selfconsciously at Novi, feeling somehow caught out. Did he understand what had just happened? The boy merely shifted his backpack on his thin shoulders, oblivious to everything but his own need for her.

  She left the box of books unopened and collected her things. ‘Okay. Let’s hit it.’

  They drove to the high school. Novi ate his afternoon tea in the passenger seat and looked out the window. When she asked him how his day had been he replied ‘Good’, as he always did. She didn’t push him for more. Neither of them was very good at chit-chat, both shy in their own way.

  At first Camille had felt nervous being on her own with Novi. She wondered what he thought of her. Had her previous lack of initiative let him down? Would he mind that she wasn’t an artist herself? But he didn’t seem bothered by any of this, just soaked up her limited knowledge like blotting paper thirsty for ink. After a couple of weeks she’d started to relax and now the broad, quiet spaces between them rolled out comfortably, a lush pasture where thoughts were free to roam. They drove in silence, preparing their ideas, envisioning the work ahead.

  The high school art department was at the end of a pebble-dash walkway, flanked along one side by bush. There were a couple of classrooms with big windows and a ceramics space with potting wheels and a kiln. It was peaceful this time of day, strewn with unattended artworks in various stages of completion. Apart from the odd senior student perched alone at an assign
ment, Camille and Novi usually had the place to themselves. With light flowing in through the windows and equipment stacked all around, the art annexe had the relaxed atmosphere of a studio. Camille was pleased; she felt it was important for Novi to experience working in a dedicated space. It would help him see himself as an artist, not just a kid with a knack for drawing.

  While he retrieved his stuff from the cupboard and set up at one of the tables, she went to make herself a cup of tea in the adjoining kitchenette.

  ‘Hi, Kay,’ she called.

  Kay, the art department’s head teacher, waved and went on chatting to a few straggling kids reluctant to leave the sanctuary of the art rooms and go home. With her bare face and long dark hair parted in the middle, her thin arms laden with bangles and her devotion to seventies peasant skirts, Kay was equal parts bohemian and dag. She was often around when Novi and Camille arrived, preparing lessons in her tiny cubicle or shifting clay sculptures into the kiln for firing. Her manner of treating everyone as an adult earned her a loyal following; even the most difficult kids were putty in her hands.

  The students trailed off. Kay came up to the sink and pulled a knife from the dish rack. ‘How are you two getting on?’ She sliced an apple into pieces and offered some to Camille.

  Camille took a slice. ‘All right, thanks to you.’

  Along with giving her use of the rooms, Kay had taken the time to guide Camille through some of the less familiar equipment and materials. She had also suggested structuring Novi’s program into monthly blocks. Each month Camille would start him on three different pieces across different mediums, beginning with a painting, a print and a sculpture. Camille remembered Kay’s advice: ‘You said he usually works frantically without a break? Well, this approach will encourage him to slow down and appreciate the process. Explain to him that this isn’t primary school — he won’t be expected to finish his work in one afternoon, but over several weeks. He needs to learn that it takes two or three sessions simply to prepare a block of clay and centre it on the wheel before he attempts to mould it, that he should prime his canvas and practise sketching out his subject before picking up a paintbrush.’ She had handed Camille a wad of photocopied pages on gifted and talented children. ‘Encourage him to play with an idea in draft before committing to one particular vision and insist that he keep working on each piece — improving it, exploring the depth of the material — until the month’s over, even if he thinks he’s finished.’

  Since then, there had been no looking back. Camille was dazzled by Novi’s industriousness. He tried ideas, discarded them, tried again. He painted over things he felt weren’t working or tore them up to use in some other way, a habit she found alarming, painful even, but she left him to it. She admired his fearlessness and natural fluidity.

  He worked well on his own. For a lot of the time there was nothing much for her to do. At first she attempted some art herself, experimenting with ink and charcoal and pastels. Kay was very encouraging. Occasionally Camille was happy with the results but mostly she dismissed them as thin or stilted or selfconscious. There was no beauty in them and this she found profoundly discouraging. Novi’s work, on the other hand, was always beautiful. Recently he’d begun to explore an aerial perspective and it lent a map-like dimension to his work. Studying his pictures, Camille felt as though she was peering into a snowdome, a magical parallel world where undulations of rivers and trees, houses and streets, parted at random to reveal their unexpected secrets.

  Kay leaned a patchwork hip against the bench and folded her arms. ‘And how’s things with the new man?’

  Camille blushed. She hadn’t given Kay much detail about Dom or told her that he was a colleague. They were trying to keep their relationship discreet. But her thoughts were always drifting to the clean-soap smell of him, the scratchy stubble of his chin. Sometimes when they were alone she caught him watching her and the raw curiosity in his eyes was electrifying. That she could inspire such interest with so little effort was a revelation. ‘I feel like I’m eighteen again,’ she admitted.

  Kay nodded sagely. ‘A younger man can have that effect.’

  Camille shook her head in wonder. ‘It’s like I’ve woken up out of hibernation and I’m famished. A starving woman.’

  ‘I bet he’s happy to be devoured.’

  She blushed again. It was true. Today she’d been watching him through the library window when he was on playground duty. The children were bold with him, the girls teasing him, almost flirting. He had admitted this flustered him sometimes, but she saw that he handled it with good humour. She knew for certain he’d make a great father and it made her want him even more.

  In a matter of weeks her old lethargy had been replaced by a voracious energy and there was nothing she couldn’t accomplish. On the weekend, in a fit of mattock wielding, she’d dug a frog pond in her backyard, complete with a water feature she’d previously assumed would be too complicated to install on her own. Then she’d cooked up a big pot of goulash, dropped half off to her father and replaced all his dead pot-plants with new seedlings. ‘You’re going to wear yourself out!’ he’d protested, greedily slopping goulash into a saucepan.

  On the rare nights she wasn’t with Dom she found she couldn’t concentrate on her pile of novels. Too impatient for fiction, she glutted herself on travel writing until she was fidgety and craving fajitas. It was all so invigorating. And to think how willingly she had given up on desire! Before, in an effort to guard against the ache of loneliness, she had swaddled herself against the world. Without realising, she had effectively tried to mummify her own beating heart. Thankfully, Dom was no archaeologist. He had stumbled into her darkened catacomb, grabbed the end of a bandage and reefed with all his might. Lo and behold, out she’d tumbled into golden sunlight: not the dusty, shrunken crone she’d feared, but fresh-faced, desirable and dizzy with love.

  At half past five George arrived to collect Novi. Today he brought her a bunch of beetroot and a shopping bag full of fresh basil. She was embarrassed. ‘Oh! You know you don’t need to, George.’

  He waved his hand. ‘We’ve got a tonne of it. Mira thought you could make pesto.’

  She put her nose to the bag and inhaled the powerful tang. Novi tugged at his father’s arm. ‘I can take these home today, Dad.’

  George followed him over to the table to admire his work. ‘Well! Don’t they look great!’ He pointed to the collage. ‘Is that lichen on the boulders?’ Novi nodded, pleased. His father’s eyes were brimming with pride. ‘It’s fantastic, mate.’

  While Novi packed up, George waited for him patiently, wandering around the room and looking at the art, the equipment, all of it. Every now and then he leaned in to study a work in detail, or the structure of an unusual tool, but he always kept his hands clasped behind his back as though afraid to disturb anything.

  ‘We’re doing clay next week, with the wheel!’ Novi called.

  Camille nodded. ‘And we’re painting in gouache.’

  George listened, smiling, his eyes bright with longing. After they’d bundled up Novi’s pieces and said goodbye, Camille took her mug to the kitchen and rinsed it, wondering what sort of artist George Lepido might have become if he’d been given the right encouragement.

  Today we begin an etching. It involves scratching a picture into wax on a copper plate, then dipping it into a solution to give the etching bite, then rolling on some ink and putting the whole thing through the printing press — a big iron vice that looks like an old instrument of torture. The press squashes the ink into the paper, but you have to be careful not to move the plate while this is happening or the image will smudge. Miss Morrison says this is how the first books were made.

  The paper we use is thick and spongy. It comes from France and is hand-made from cotton rag, not bark, which gives it a special texture. The ink comes from Spain and costs forty dollars a bottle. I am almost too nervous to touch it when Miss Morrison tells me this, but she says it is the ink that real artists use. She says my
print will last four hundred years because of the quality of the paper and the ink. Not if you leave it out in the rain, of course.

  After sketching for a bit I decide my etching will be of Pyramus under the mulberry tree. I plan to use blue ink at the top of the picture and red ink at the bottom so they’ll bleed together to form purple in the middle. It fits well into the story of how mulberries got their colour.

  I etch into the copper with my needle, giving Pyramus an old-fashioned moustache with twirly ends. He looks a bit like Nonno. Miss Morrison prepares the solution in the sink by the window and says we mustn’t breathe in the fumes or our lungs will burn. With a print you can make as many copies as you like, which is one advantage over painting, she tells me, taking little sips of air from the side of her mouth. Making one hundred prints means one hundred galleries can stock your work, giving you ninety-nine more chances of making a sale.

  As an artist it is always important to think how money can be made.

  In four hundred years I’ll be four hundred and eleven.

  Chapter 16

  It is Friday afternoon, the last day of term and the opening night of my exhibition. It’s also the night it has decided to rain at last.

  There isn’t much at first, only a light sprinkle as Mum and Dad and I squeeze into the ute and set off down Serpentine Road, just enough for the layer of dust on the windscreen to be smeared into mud by the bony wipers. Still, we cheer and stick our arms out the window to feel the raindrops on our skin and all the way down the hill we listen to the galahs, wings spread, going ape upside down on the power lines.