Stray Dog Winter

by David Francis

  When Darcy returned to the apartment it was unlocked. A vague bituminous odour came up from the central heating and the place was hot again. He tried to forget where he’d been, his already broken promise, and yet all he’d really done was take care of an animal briefly. He hung the leather leash on a coat hook as if it belonged.

  Fin was perched on a stool near the edge of the frosted window, her face swathed in a cream satin scarf. Innocent as a young Muslim woman, but fairer. Where were you? she asked. She was working on a small canvas that leaned against an old wooden easel, outlining a shape in crayon.

  Isn’t that what I should be asking?

  She told him she had gone back to the railway station but the office was closed. I’ll sort it out tomorrow, she said. She seemed to regard it as a formality. Crouching further forward, she spat on her thumb and rubbed it against the canvas to make the crayon resemble paint.

  Are you sure you want me here? asked Darcy.

  Fin stood up, concerned, and came to him. No evidence of anything under her smock, just the shadow of her breasts and the faint elastic of her underpants. He was never attracted to anyone pale but her. She held him to her gently. I’m sorry, she said.

  He tried to relax into her but the questions still niggled at him. Tell me about the money belt.

  Don’t worry, she said, no drugs or explosives, but she freed herself and gazed past the canvas out into the grey afternoon, and Darcy remembered how they’d left the station so hurriedly. Whatever he’d brought in with him had been more valuable to her than his passport or camera. As he knelt to see what she’d drawn, an abstract mountain shrouded in pink, he felt disappointment taking seed in him. He’d been her carrier pigeon.

  I just want to know what’s going on, he said, but she was copying a Polaroid pinned to the wing of the easel. A bleached-out picture of a woman’s chest, a large single breast on one side and a florid scar on the other, the stitches wide and primitive, a miniature rope. The freshness of the scar and the rough-hewn needlework were disquieting. She wasn’t drawing a mountain.

  Soviet mastectomy, she said. She tore paper from the end of another crayon. She’d mixed red and purple for the mottled burgundy scar. Am I onto something? she asked almost timidly. Abstract Feminism? She smudged the edges with the remains of crayon on her thumbs.

  Darcy looked back at the photo, more lurid and disconcerting than anything she could recreate. The photo speaks for itself, he said. He stood up. Why don’t you paint what you’re supposed to?

  She looked at him seriously, her pupils a piercing green against the scarf. They want a big canvas of the Museum of Science and Achievement. It’s a whole field of buildings and fountains and statues, she said. Soviet Realism. The exhibition’s next Sunday. Her knuckles seemed knotty and anxious. I need you, little brother, she said.

  Darcy looked at her canvas and felt a tightness in his skin, a disingenuousness in the way she’d called him that. Or perhaps it was just her admitting her work wasn’t painterly; she was a moulder of things, an installationist. She’d studied Russian and psychology, not art. He remembered her abstracts back at Monash, the incinerated witch-hunt books. I don’t understand how you got this gig in the first place, he said. Didn’t you have to submit a portfolio?

  She glanced at him and then examined the paint on her hands, red on her brown nail polish. I sent Polaroids of your Melbourne paintings, she said.

  Darcy sat on the arm of the couch, felt the tightness rise up through his neck. The charcoal and oils of art-deco warehouses in Footscray, the curves of the red-brick walls off Dynan Road as you wound through the back way to the showgrounds. They got him the scholarship to Sydney. He pressed his fingernails hard against his chin. You could have asked me.

  She cautiously pushed a snake of white from a tube and mixed it with turps into a pale, viscous grey. You might have said no, she said. I needed to get myself here.

  But for what?

  I can’t tell you, she said. Not here. She surveyed the ceiling as if the cornices were listening. I just need your help with the painting. She reached for his Fodor’s guidebook from the arm of the sofa, flipped to a photo of the strange museum.

  Darcy stared at a spread of neoclassical buildings strewn with ice-crusted lakes and frozen fountains, no smokestacks or chimneys. I need to know about the money belt.

  Darce, please don’t harp on it, she whispered.

  I hate it when you call me that. In the photo a shining obelisk projected high above the buildings into a low white sky. As if the only reason she’d wanted him here was to paint this.

  Don’t be a detective, she said, just focus on what you’re good at, but he wondered what she’d become good at. He looked out into the dark afternoon. No sunset here, just grey then an orbiting blackness. If you’ll come clean, he said, I’ll paint the museum for you. I’ll need photos and decent brushes and paints.

  A light came on outside. Again, the woman in the kitchen opposite, standing at her sink. Fin got up, took the torn sheet she used to clean brushes and twisted it over a window hinge to block the view, but as she pulled it the sheet caught the corner of the canvas. Her painting fell slowly against the side of the couch. Darcy didn’t jump to save it, just crouched to peel the canvas back. The ridges of the scar had smudged flat against the velvet couch like a birthmark, the nipple smeared; remnants of paint on the fabric. A landscape now. You don’t have breast cancer? he asked.

  No, she said.

  But she had something. He took a chrome Crayola from her paintbox and angrily scrubbed an abstract new moon shape onto the canvas, from the ground up into the sky. The crayon impressed lines in the wet oils like fingerpainting. He added rough black squares for buildings, fronted them with silver Corinthian columns. He tried to ignore Fin as she wiped paint from the couch then rubbed her hands in turpentine, cleaning each finger separately, but he knew she had what she wanted: him beginning to work. She lit a cigarette and leaned against the window sash in her scarf and paint-stained smock, watching.

  Darcy daubed the crayons with turps instead of saliva, made it paint-like, then etched more boxes with random columns, everything out of proportion. He could feel her lips gathering to pull on her cigarette, calculating. The mastectomy scar he morphed into a railway track, the surviving nipple a fountain. Frustrated by his own naivety, he tore wrappers from other Crayolas and scribbled hard in white, added oversized petals to the base of the fountain, a jagged black lake beside the swooning obelisk, everything rushed and random, more her style than his. The waxy nub of the black was near the end of its colour as her roughshod picture became his.

  Fin examined her Polaroid. Where did you get that? he asked but she didn’t answer. She went to stab her cigarette out on the glass of the half-covered window, but changed her mind, and he wondered if she’d purloined the photo from some office, like she’d slipped copies of the portfolio photos from his desk in St Kilda to get herself here. Now she had him as well. He’d breathed life into her canvas, turned a breast into structures. He rubbed at the pigment on his hands and looked at her in the scarf, her face the shape of a leaf. You’re different here, he said.

  How do you mean?

  You’re just not the same. He stood and pushed a coloured finger onto the ridge between her eyes, branded her with a bindi. You even look different.

  She lifted her cigarette to her mouth, blew a smoke ring that wandered between them. Some of us are capable of change, she said.

  Mount Eliza, Summer 1969

  Darcy sat alone on the railing outside school when everyone else had gone home. His mother had forgotten him. He imagined her drunk on the chaise, the late afternoon sun coming in beneath the awning and her cigarette burning down in her half-asleep fingers, the ashtray on her chest. He started walking down Wooralla Drive towards the Nepean Highway. It was hot so he took off his flannel shirt, tied it loosely about his waist.

  He followed the trail that ran through the scrub alongside the highway but stopped when he saw the missionary
on a bike, approaching. The missionary slowed, put his foot down in the dirt, and they stared at each other, Darcy with the sun in his face. The missionary smiled curiously but Darcy didn’t smile back. He held his satchel to his bare chest and watched with a dry mouth as the missionary slid the bike beneath a clump of oleanders and disappeared from the verge, down into the gully.

  Darcy walked up, the tyre of the bike just visible in the bushes. He felt a queasiness he didn’t understand as he held a branch for balance, picked his way down through Scotch broom and bees, the sound of the cars on the highway behind him. He was drawn to the edge of a clearing sheltered by flowering wattles. The missionary, waiting, dappled in both light and shade, one hand in the pocket of his khaki pants. A hand gently moving, and Darcy watched it.

  You’re a beautiful child of God, the missionary said to him softly, coming nearer. The sweat on the missionary’s sunburnt neck trickling down into his open collar. No one had ever called Darcy beautiful; they’d just teased him in mean ways about being pretty. Darcy looked up as he felt the missionary’s fingers run over his chin then quietly slip the strap of the satchel from his narrow uncovered shoulders, over his head. Then Darcy looked down as the missionary gently untied the shirt from his waist, spread it out carefully on the ground.

  You could take your pants off, the missionary said, if you wanted.

  Darcy didn’t say anything but the missionary knelt and was unzipping Darcy’s fly and at first Darcy moved away but the missionary extended his arms. I will take care of you, he said, and Darcy believed him, found himself slipping from his school shoes without untying the laces, pulling them off by the heels the way he did before bed. He felt self-conscious now, out here in his underpants, but the missionary laid Darcy’s trousers out with his shirt, Darcy’s shape on the grass. It will be comfortable, he said.

  As Darcy lay down he felt rigid, like a marionette, laying his arms along the spread-out sleeves. He looked up through the quivering wattles, their leaves like waving caterpillars. Then the trees were half hidden with the weight of the missionary, his stubble against Darcy’s chin, his soft breath kissing about his neck and ears, and Darcy heard the missionary’s whispers and thought they could be prayers. When I drink from your river, oh Lord…and the hum of cars seemed far away, Darcy’s mother on the chaise and his father in town, but none of that mattered with the missionary’s breath and the words that he swallowed, the Rose of Sharon in the missionary’s palm gently covering Darcy’s lips. Darcy stared up through a smothering panic, past the missionary’s sorrow-filled eyes, through the glinting caterpillar leaves, his own body shuddering, and for a moment he felt connected to the sky.

  Bolshoi Theatre, Monday night

  The Bolshoi looked spectacular at night, the columns lit yellow against the inky winter sky, a statue shadowed above the portico, a chariot. That’s Apollo, said Fin as they mounted shallow steps in a wind that licked the night, Fin in her woven grey-rabbit coat. They lined up in the colonnaded atrium among dour locals to collect their tickets, seats to Chekhov arranged through the embassy. This was more how Darcy had imagined his arrival.

  It’s The Lady with the Dog, said Fin, handing Darcy the tickets then shedding her coat. She gathered her wrap around her shoulders, shiny like butterfly wings, and the air around them hinted at her tuberose scent. Do you know it? she asked. It’s from a short story.

  Darcy remembered it vaguely from European Lit, but he’d not finished it. He’d also started Anna on the Neck but never worked out if it was the neck of a river or Anna’s own neck.

  Communists love ballet, Fin said as they walked amid the din and expectation, the echo of heels on the grey and white marble tiles. She pulled at her elbow-length gloves and Darcy carried her coat. It must have taken forty rabbits. Her clothes were from opportunity shops but she wore them as if they were haute couture. She had on a quilted velvet dress, high-heeled boots with a zip up the front. Her fresh-dyed hair was sienna and slick, plastered to her temples in little swoops, her lips red against her striking porcelain face.

  Darcy wore a fifties black tuxedo that fit like a glove; second-hand in Prague for thirty Australian dollars. He liked the narrow pants legs and the polyester was so flammable it was warm. You look like a lipstick lesbian, said Fin, without the lipstick. But Darcy didn’t mind feeling slightly androgynous. The local evening wear seemed heinous to him by comparison, although there was one glamorous woman, statuesque in a fitted indigo suit, something exclusive. That’s Chernenko’s daughter, I think, said Fin, as if a star had been spotted. Her father might be the next General Secretary.

  Darcy remembered Chernenko from newspaper photos, full-faced and glaucous; the woman looked like a different species. Most of the other Russian women wore dark scarves, the men clasping ushankas as if afraid they’d be stolen from the coat check, treating their hats like a Melbourne woman might treat a fur.

  Darcy followed Fin into the auditorium, past elderly ushers who didn’t seem interested. They could have sat anywhere. Five balconies ranged up above the orchestra level like a pile of shining ashtrays. It’s very red and gold, said Darcy.

  Ro-co-co, said Fin, three separate words. And it felt almost as if they were back to their old selves, now they were out in public. Most patrons sat up in the higher levels or way back in the orchestra cheap seats. The elegant woman was already up in a box with a group of grey-suited men. Apparatchiks, said Fin. She pointed at the chandelier, told Darcy it was famous, two tonnes of crystal floating above them.

  Why are we the only ones under it? he asked. He imagined carnage: a crystal indoor Hindenburg, their bodies impaled on the red velvet seats. Fin read a program that looked made from paper bags. I wish they had one in English, said Darcy. She’d already lost interest in translating anything. He remembered plagiarising a paper of criticism on Chekhov: the language is colourless, devoid of verve or understanding. The Hungarian tutor thought his response original and radical. Darcy missed his time with Fin at uni, even though they studied different things and were in different years. They’d meet for lunch in the Small Caf and talk politics, smoke among the young bisexual communists, artists and stoners, the radical Mauritian he had a crush on—they all thought Darcy and Fin might be lovers. They acted like they were, didn’t tell their real story, hung out in a kind of sly cahoots, studying together in the library, making their versions of art. Darcy felt safer with her then. He looked up at the gilded Bolshoi ceiling, the way the light brushed over it; this wasn’t Monash. Instruments squawked in the pit, flutes and violins being tuned. Is Anna Pavlova dancing? he asked.

  She died in 1931, said Fin. It’s Lyudmila Semenyaka. Fin seemed to think that was good. Next Thursday there’s a tribute to the classical heritage of the peoples of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, she said. Marvellous.

  Darcy wondered if Bolshoi and Bolshevik were related but he didn’t ask. He knew there were patterns and connections he couldn’t yet see; he wished he’d read more Chekhov, and found out what Fin was really up to before he got on a plane.

  The bell jangled loudly and the lights went down. It’s about a man who searches only for passion but accidentally finds love, Fin whispered. She gave Darcy a peck on the cheek but he knew it was more for the Bolshoi than him, the place so grand and deteriorated, the crowd so frowzy. Darcy felt oddly off-kilter.

  The curtain folded up into itself and a woman flitted across the stage wearing a shining white tutu. Her movement was lovely. A flourish of strings, then a male dancer. Fin slipped a pair of small binoculars from her heart-shaped clutch and Darcy looked at her in the dark, her pale freckles barely visible but her concentration fierce, the binoculars pressed to her eyes. Passion and love. He supposed there were differences, that there could be one without the other.

  A fake satin seashore rippled over the stage and the ballerina twirled among its folds. He borrowed the binoculars, focused them on the male lead who reappeared from the trees. Lust was different from passion, he thought as the dancer was drowned
in a flood of ballerinas. Darcy focused on Chernenko’s daughter, already dozing up in her shell-shaped box. He felt redeemed somehow. It would be a long ballet for a short story but Fin was engrossed. Her leg rested easily up against Darcy’s and he felt the casual magnetism still there. He pressed his feet on the back of the seat in front of him, his toes still cold in his Albert Schweitzer boots. A new ballerina entered, wearing black, carrying a parasol. Is that the lady or the dog? he whispered, shifting in his seat. Someone along their row went shhhh and a masculine Slavic woman turned with her lorgnette. Next there’d be a troika on stage and cotton tufts of falling snow.

  Darcy stood and moved past the knees, trying to be discreet, then walked up the aisle and through the echoing foyer. Hardly anyone was out there now, just the remnants of their smoke and some ushers. A row of silver-framed ballet posters—a swan with flying ballerinas, a painting of a sylphlike dancer in harem pants and turban, playing in Scheherazade perhaps. Darcy found his way downstairs into the tiled darkness.

  It stank like a pissoir because that’s what it was. An inexplicable comfort, a stall, but the toilet was too filthy to sit on, no seat just a foul tin bowl. In the next stall a brown-suited man stood balanced with his feet on the flat metal rim of the seat, glancing anxiously over the rusted divider. His door was open, his old Russian erection half-hard. As Darcy went and stood at the urinal, he gave him a cheerless smile, a moment of graceless communion.

  A cistern ran but it was otherwise silent. Darcy wondered why he was here, inexorably, with himself in his hand; he didn’t need to pee. There would be no boys from the ballet, not even an understudy, just the cowering comrade with the shame in his eyes. In a shining strip of metal in front of Darcy, the shadowy shape of his own face, narrow and distorted, waiting for…what? A young Baryshnikov? He’d be upstairs dancing or in a dressing room, or watching the performance like everyone else. The reflection of his face and the old man behind him felt strangely safe even though he imagined places like this were probably under surveillance. Maybe they were looking at him through the strip of tin, adding to their registry of deviants.