Watercolours

by Adrienne Ferreira

  We cross the bridge and drive through town, where there seems to be a lot more traffic than usual. ‘A few drops of rain and everyone forgets how to drive!’ Dad says, throwing his hands up at another red light. My mother grips her seatbelt, holding it out so it won’t crush her new dress. ‘I didn’t bring an umbrella!’ she sighs. I don’t say anything, I just wipe my sweaty palms on the knees of my freshly ironed trousers.

  When we pull into the car park at Riverside Gallery there are already quite a few cars there. More people arrive as we climb out. I don’t recognise any of them. The cicadas fly in tight circles around my chest at the thought of so many strangers coming to see my work. We all hurry along the path and up the steps, rain messing up our neat hair and fancy clothes. Inside we land in the middle of a clump of people and the gallery air is clammy and full of excitement. Everyone is hanging around near the entrance, clutching programs and glasses of wine and at first everyone keeps looking outside and talking about the weather and nobody pays much attention to the art.

  The gallery owner, Liz, sees us through the crowd and swoops over to us. She is a large, dough-faced woman in purple layers and orange lipstick, with dangly earrings and bad breath. She takes us up a couple of steps to the back room to introduce me to the three other artists exhibiting.

  First I meet Frank, a tall man with curly grey hair who does ink and charcoal landscapes — big black-and-white pieces torn up into squares and rearranged. I like the way they tease you to find what’s jumbled up in their patterns. ‘Nature’s sneaky like that,’ I say and everybody laughs, although I didn’t mean to be funny.

  Frank is shy but his wife isn’t, she’s dark-haired and beautiful with enormous boobs almost falling out of a red dress. She shakes my hand, congratulating me on such bold, brave work. Soon she and my mother are deep in conversation while Dad smiles and hovers at the edges, blinking wet eyes behind his glasses and gulping his wine. I watch him feeling nervous. He’s so proud to be at my first show that he’s in real danger of sobbing.

  Next I meet Caz, a skinny printmaker with big hands. She makes linocuts of horses and dogs and curvy naked women under fruit trees. As we walk around I see that most of her prints are already tagged with red ‘sold’ dots and people are shouldering each other to get a closer look at their black shadows and white grooves and touches of red. The wobbly, fairytale look of Caz’s prints makes me feel a bit better; maybe my pictures won’t be so out of place in a gallery after all.

  The other artist is a glass-blower and his bulbous vases and translucent platters seem far too precious to be eaten off or stuffed with flowers. I study each of them, conveniently displayed right at my eye level on special white podiums about the place. There are fine swirls of colour and tiny bubbles trapped in the glass. I’d like to touch them but I don’t dare.

  Once everyone has said hello and congratulated me on my pictures and Mum has taken about fifty photographs and I’m sure I’ll die from all the attention, the snacks come out — little tarts and fried rice-ball things — and everyone dives on them like they haven’t eaten in a week. I’m not hungry, and now that they’re all distracted I take the chance to perform my withdrawing trick. We are back in the entrance room now where it’s more spacious and I move over to a wall and try my hardest to be inconspicuous. Sipping orange juice, I look for faces I know.

  There are quite a lot of people crammed into the gallery now, moving between the three rooms. I see Eleanor but Mr Roper is with her so I decide to stay out of sight. Miss Morrison arrives, and then Mr Best about a minute later. They talk to separate people at the front door and kind of ignore each other but then I see them wander up into the top room together. I notice a few other teachers and people my parents know. I’m the youngest person in the place.

  I wish Hughie was here, now. Mum told me to invite him but I felt weird about it. Some of the kids at school have been teasing me about the exhibition. ‘Bighead!’ Craig Parker called me, right in my face. ‘Teacher’s pet. You think you’re so good.’ He always says things like that. I drew a picture of his stupid fat head and beady eyes and mean mouth and Hughie almost wet himself laughing. He would have come, but I’ve had this bad feeling something embarrassing was going to happen. I felt sure someone would want to take my pictures down, even though Mr Best promised that wouldn’t happen and Miss Morrison said that the gallery wouldn’t be hanging my work if it wasn’t of a high standard.

  ‘It will be a friendly crowd there,’ she reassured me last week. ‘They will all be appreciative. But you have to be brave to be an artist, Novi. Artists are provocative, they make statements. And all the better if you’re controversial because then you’ve succeeded in making people think and talk and argue!’

  It’s easy for her to say.

  But I suppose she’s right because as I’m standing here out of the way behind a giant glass bowl on one of the podiums, I peer into the bottom room and see that the people looking at my work are behaving politely enough. No-one seems angry, nobody’s lunging at the walls in protest. They just smile or frown or tilt their heads and hold their chins like they do with all the other work. Anyway, most people seem more interested in chatting to each other than spending very much time looking at the art.

  After a while the crowd thins out. Almost everyone has moved to the drinks table near the front desk and so I now have a clear view of my wall. The two maps, the ones inspired by my plane trip, are hanging together. Then there’s my bushfire picture, my washed-up fish and next to it my river boulders collage. A little further along, hanging together, are my etching of Pyramus under the mulberry tree and one of my murder pictures. Apart from the maps, which I painted on canvas, everything is mounted and set in the frames Dad made. Hung along a clean white wall like that they look different. It’s as though I wasn’t even the one who did them. They have a life of their own, now.

  Mr Best was the one who convinced me to show a murder picture. ‘It’s all right that it’s sad,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be ashamed of missing your grandfather. And it might make you feel better if you share your loss with other people.’ That’s when I told him something I hadn’t admitted to anyone. I told him how I was afraid of forgetting Nonno. I feel bad because I have to look at the photo on the sideboard to remember his face. Mr Best thought about it for a while and then he said, ‘You know, you’re not the only one who misses him. If you share your pictures, then the people who love him will have a chance to remember him, too.’ I hadn’t thought of that. It made me think of Eleanor on our trip to Sydney, how her eyes got all shiny when I told her about my walks along the river with Nonno and the treasures we found. She had a few memories of her own, stories I hadn’t heard before, not even from my mother. What if Mr Best was right?

  When I showed Miss Morrison my murder pictures she said they were my most powerful work yet. Liz from the gallery described them as breathtaking. So there on the wall in Riverside Gallery is Nonno. He is lying at the bottom of the river while up above the koel flits from tree to tree, looking for clues. Nonno’s eyes are closed in this one and his face is calm. I like that he’s peaceful, even though it doesn’t feel accurate. I drain my orange juice and take another look over at my maps, imagining Nonno’s final journey through town. The Lewis carried him from his orchard, down past all the trees and houses and the shops, past this very gallery and the caravan park and around behind the Roper Centre — under three bridges altogether — before dumping him in a clump of mangroves near the national park. I’m sure it would have felt like a long way, swirling around in the floodwater, but my maps show it wasn’t really that far, just one big loop. Since my trip to Sydney I can’t stop drawing maps. Miss Morrison let me photocopy a whole lot of them in the library on A3 sheets of paper — she calls it my new perspective. A bird’s-eye view shows that Morus isn’t very big at all. Everyone who lives here is much closer than I thought.

  Eventually Mr Best and Miss Morrison find me. Mr Best bounds over. ‘You see, mate! I told you everything would b
e okay!’ He grabs me in a pretend headlock and rubs his knuckles on my hair. ‘Everyone loves you!’

  Giggling, I duck away from him and try to jab him in the side but he’s too fast and blocks me with his hand. Miss Morrison watches us with a funny smile, then she looks down at my section and nods at how my pictures have come together. She asks me about the other artists. We are deciding who we like best when Liz comes past to put a red dot on my picture of Nonno. I look around, surprised, and it’s Eleanor. With shiny eyes she gives me a big hug and whispers, ‘I’m so proud of you.’

  As the night wears on, glasses are refilled and the rain gets harder. It makes a racket on the roof and people have to shout to hear each other. The art is forgotten and the place has become one big party, everyone drunk on wine and rain. People huddle under the awning smoking, occasionally bolting out into the garden to yelp and gasp and run inside again to drip onto the sea-grass matting. Someone has turned up the music, a frantic, old-time jazz band, and Frank, the shy artist, is performing a Cossack-style rain dance in the foyer, flinging his legs out while people cheer and whoop. I watch it all, amazed at how childish adults can be when they let their guard down. I can tell my parents are enjoying themselves, though. My mother’s cheeks are pink and her hair is all corkscrewy from the damp. She has her arm linked with Eleanor’s and they are watching Dad, glasses askew, attempt his own version of a Cossack dance to hearty claps and hup! hup! encouragement from Frank.

  After a while Mr Best and Miss Morrison come to say goodbye. ‘I’ll drop over next week!’ Mr Best says. I watch them as they walk away, past the front desk and out under the awning. Just as they are about to make a dash for it I catch Mr Best reach for Miss Morrison’s hand before they disappear through the dark curtain of rain. Other people start heading for home and I’m beginning to feel sleepy when I glance into the bottom room and see Mr Roper standing there all alone, right in front of my etching of Pyramus. He’s standing so still he could be made of stone.

  Suddenly I feel wide awake. I creep over to the podium and edge behind it until I can see Mr Roper’s face, but he can’t see me.

  Mr Roper has an expression I’ve never seen on him before. He has gone all white and his jaw is sort of tensed and his lips are pressed into a line, like he’s trying to stop something awful escaping from them. He seems frozen. Only his eyes are moving. Open wide, they flick from Pyramus to Nonno and back again.

  I know that look. I remember it. It’s the same look my grandfather had on his face the day he caught my arm to stop me falling into the river. Mr Roper is afraid. My pictures have scared him.

  For a minute he stands there, swaying slightly in his brown boots. Then he backs away and moves upstairs. I watch him approach Liz, she has the glass-blower trapped against one of his podiums and he is trying not to topple a vase while struggling to avoid her death-breath. Mr Roper says something to her and then, to the glass-blower’s relief, she pulls away and comes downstairs to stick a red dot on the tag below Pyramus and another on my washed-up fish. Mr Best bought my bushfire picture, Miss Morrison bought my river boulders and a lawyer from town bought both my maps for his office. Now all my pictures have sold.

  Later, back home in bed at last, I wipe the mud off Varmint’s paws and pat her fur until she’s all dry. I listen to the rain lashing the roof in waves and wonder what I’ll do with the money I made from the exhibition. I wonder, too, why anyone would want to own a picture of something they were afraid of.

  I fall asleep, imagining the look on Mr Roper’s face if he ever saw the rest of my collection in the shed.

  Chapter 17

  Just in time for the holidays, down came the rain. Between the lace ducks Dom watched the autumn sky open up and release every drop of water craved and prayed for during all the months of drought. For the first couple of days he celebrated along with everyone else, buoyed by the success of Novi’s exhibition and the anticipation of so many days off. But what began as a pleasant relief quickly dampened into endless days of rain: fat rain, thin rain; rain steady and purposeful; rain driven sideways by wind, exploded upwards from puddles, cascading from gutters. Rain, as though it had forgotten it had rained already, with the violent determination of dementia. Rain that didn’t know how to stop.

  First thing on Monday his cousin called him. ‘Aren’t you coming home?’

  Dom flopped onto the lounge. ‘I still don’t have a car.’

  ‘What?’ Dom pictured Ace’s big burly face all crumpled in disbelief. He was eight months older than Dom and they’d been friends their whole lives. It felt strange not to have him down the road.

  ‘I can’t afford it.’

  ‘Catch a bus, then!’ Ace said.

  ‘No, I don’t want Dad to know. Don’t say anything. I want to get things sorted before I come home again.’

  ‘You’re so far away,’ Ace complained. ‘You may as well be in Arnhem Land!’

  Dom smiled. He missed his cousin too.

  ‘I could drive up?’ Ace suggested.

  ‘What, all the way to Arnhem Land? No, the weather’s shit. Check it out.’ Dom held the receiver up to the sound of the downpour. ‘It’s supposed to be like this for days. Maybe next week when it fines up. We can do the beaches.’

  They were silent for a moment.

  ‘So how’s it going up there on your own?’

  Dom let a beat pass. ‘Who says I’m on my own?’

  ‘Chick?’

  ‘A woman, actually.’

  He could feel Ace’s curiosity all the way down the line. ‘How old?’

  ‘Thirty-five.’

  ‘Awww! A filthy cradle-snatcher! All right! Now I get it. You don’t want your cuz moving in. Scared of the competition, eh?’

  Dom laughed. ‘Come up next week when the weather’s better. You can meet her.’ Listening to the rain drumming on the roof, he tried to imagine what Camille would make of Ace. He wasn’t sure they’d hit it off.

  ‘I still can’t believe the Corolla’s finally dead.’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘Pity you’re so far away or I could have got Lex to have a look at it.’

  ‘It’s dead because of Lex, Ace.’

  ‘End of an era,’ he sighed. ‘Had to happen one day, I guess. Well, at least now you can get yourself a V-8.’

  ‘I can’t afford that kind of petrol.’

  ‘Jesus, Nicky. Prioritise!’

  Dom knew it was no use arguing. He changed the subject. ‘Anything new with you?’

  ‘Nah. Just work. We got a big contract in and your dad’s busting my balls. Almost got enough saved for Mel’s engagement ring, though.’ Ace had been dating the receptionist at the factory office for almost a year, a pretty girl who insisted on things being done in the right order. He had been infatuated with her since the day she flicked her long brown hair at him in the tea room and set about ignoring him; he liked a challenge. Dom thought he was crazy for rushing in like this. It was Ace’s style to rush into everything, though.

  ‘I’ll call you about next week,’ Dom said.

  ‘Okay. Take it easy, Nicky.’

  ‘You too.’

  With satisfaction, Camille watched her garden soaking up the rain. During rare breaks in the downpour the sky hung low and bloated, allowing a thin glare to penetrate to the soggy earth. Shimmering curtains of evaporation briefly ascended, only to empty again with fresh vigour. Up in the hills beyond the house, tendrils of cloud sat in clumps, giving the impression Morus had been transported to a much higher altitude. Mist languidly infiltrated the valley, with no intention of dissipating or blowing away. Mushrooms and toadstools popped up as pale clusters on the emerald lawn. Bright orange fungus fanned out on the sodden tree trunks like extravagant frilled lips.

  Her father caught a cold. When she made him soup and took it over she found him in bed with his transistor radio and a blanket up to his chin like a five year old. She washed up and vacuumed the living area. Afterwards she went into his room to study him anxiously.

/>   ‘Don’t hover!’ he said grumpily. ‘I’m fine.’

  He wasn’t fine. But he wasn’t dying either, so she left him in peace with his man-size Kleenex and a bedside table covered in cough lollies. With her garden saturated and her new pond overflowing, unable to prune or mulch or plant the autumn bulbs, unable even to venture out for a walk, Camille had no obligations other than to make some headway on the stack of unread novels waiting on her bedside table. Instead she found herself holed up at Camelot with Dom, classifying raindrops as Inuit did snow.

  It went on like this for days. Although it was wet, the temperature had only dropped a few degrees. It was still warm and uncomfortably muggy. From the pillow next to Dom’s she stared beyond the lace curtains with a scowl. ‘This is classic Easter holiday weather,’ she said, kicking the blanket off in irritation and rearranging the sweaty sheet. She felt desperate for a cool change, to feel the crisp bite of a real autumn. She longed to get cosy and wrap up in coats and scarves, don knee-high boots and snuggle under feather-down at night after a long, hot bath, but luxuries like these were redundant this far north until well into June, and even then only for a few weeks at the most.

  Dom didn’t mind so much. The rain brought out his inner slob. He grew a beard. It drove Camille wild. With T-ball washed out and nowhere to go on a bicycle there wasn’t any reason to get out of bed. Luckily he could think of nowhere he’d rather be than trapped under apricot chenille, inhaling the exasperated earthy aroma of Camille and putting his new beard to good use.

  Through the glass, they watched the river rise and rise.

  At Camelot the clothes dryers whirred constantly, spreading the fragrance of hot lint up the halls. The dollar coins that fed the machines became treasured gold pieces, traded reluctantly between neighbours. Doormats were littered with dripping umbrellas and bizarre rubber footwear designed to fit over high heels. On the little verandas, outdoor furniture slumped slick and neglected. The sliding glass doors were streaked with endless beads.