When I explained what I wanted, Bernice didn’t believe it. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Ministerial adviser for the Arts? Agnelli must be crazy. You’re a cultural illiterate.’
‘That’s why I’ve come to you, Bernice,’ I said. ‘I’m after some on-the-job training.’
When I’d convinced her that I really did need background information for Agnelli’s speech at the exhibition opening, she reached into a drawer of her filing cabinet and pulled out a thick folder. She was, it transpired, ex-officio company secretary of the Combined Unions Superannuation Scheme. ‘CUSS manages several million dollars of union members’ money. And while the art collection is only a small percentage of our total assets—its current value is estimated at approximately half a million dollars—it is an important element in maintaining a broadly diversified portfolio. Frankly, the way the financial markets have been performing lately, art is probably our most effectively appreciating investment.’
My amusement must have been too apparent. Bernice changed tack, handing me a page from the file. ‘Here’s the content guidelines, as laid down by the CUSS board of directors. Keep it. Feel free to quote.’
The emphasis of the collection, read the blurb, was on works that presented a positive view of working life and reflected the outlook and aspirations of ordinary working people. ‘Angelo’s speech should point out that it includes works by some very prominent artists.’
It did, too. The one-page catalogue Bernice handed me was leavened with the sort of household names guaranteed to reassure the rank and file that its pension funds were not being squandered on the avant-garde. Potoroo 2 by Clifton Pugh, I read. Dry Gully by Russell Drysdale. Man in Singlet by William Dobell.
‘Did a mob of you go round Sotheby’s and Christies with a chequebook or what?’
I didn’t take Bernice’s withering glance of contempt personally. She thought everyone was an idiot. ‘The collection was initiated by the board of directors a little over a year ago, essentially as an investment vehicle. Since purchases of this nature are a specialised skill, we retain an expert consulting firm, Austral Fine Art, to advise us. Austral identifies suitable works for inclusion in the collection, buys and sells on our behalf, takes care of insurance and so on. Up until now, the works have all been held in storage. But a few months ago we decided to put them on show, so our members could better appreciate the investment we made on their behalf. In fact—and this is a point Angelo might also care to make—this is the only time the entire collection has ever been seen by the public.’ She put her hands on the edge of the desk and wearily pulled herself upright, levering for two. ‘And now I really must go. Can’t keep the doctor waiting.’
I walked her to the lift. A waddle was already in evidence. ‘So, you’ll soon know if it’s a boy or a girl—or would you prefer not to find out until the actual birth?’
Bernice might’ve been up the duff, but she hadn’t lost her marbles. ‘Information is power, Murray,’ she said. ‘Don’t you know anything?’
Pocketing the pages of bumph she’d given me, I headed back to the exhibition room. Apart from Bob Allroy’s ladder and toolbox abandoned in the middle of the floor and the unhung painting lining the walls, it was empty. An icy wave of panic gripped my innards. I should never have let the boys out of my sight. ‘Red!’ I called. ‘Tarquin!’ The sound echoed back at me from the deserted corridor.
Suddenly, arms spread wide like music-hall song-and-dance men, the boys sprang from behind the far partition. ‘Tricked ya!’ they shrieked.
Even as the words left their lips, Tarquin tripped backwards over Bob Allroy’s toolbox and slammed full pelt into the step-ladder. The flimsy aluminium tower skidded sideways, rocked on its legs and began to topple over. I rushed forward to arrest its fall and collided with Red. Tarquin, useful as ever, stood open-mouthed. For a moment time seemed to stand still.
The ladder didn’t, though. With an almighty metallic clatter, it collided with the upper edge of one of the pictures leaning against the wall, smashing the frame into gilded kindling and squashing the canvas into a buckled heap. The result looked like a piano accordion that had been kicked to death by an electricity pylon.
‘Wow,’ said Tarquin.
‘Shuddup.’ I fell to my knees beside the catastrophe. ‘Shuddup, shuddup, shuddup.’ My heart was so firmly lodged in my mouth that further conversation was impossible.
The picture’s frame was utterly demolished, the joints burst asunder, the side panels reduced to four separate pieces of ornately useless timber moulding. The internal framing was a flattened rhomboid from which the canvas dangled in crumpled folds.
Sweaty-handed, I smoothed the tangled mass into the rough approximation of its original rectangular shape. What I saw filled me with a mixture of unspeakable dismay and utter relief.
The mangled picture was a small oil painting. It depicted a solitary stick-figure stockman. He was perched on a gnarled tree-stump beside the mouldering bones of a bullock. His drought-ravaged gaze extended across a blasted landscape towards a featureless horizon. There was no signature. There was no need.
Nobody else did red dirt and rust-rotted corrugated iron like this. Nobody else would dare. It was the trademark, instantly recognisable, of an artist whose rangy bushmen and desiccated verandas had once adorned the walls of every pub and primary school from Hobart to Humpty Doo.
‘Dry Gully,’ I groaned. ‘By Sir Russell Fucking Drysdale.’
Red and Tarquin meekly dragged the ladder upright, more abashed by my obviously panic-stricken state than by the damage their game had inflicted. ‘Doesn’t look too bad,’ offered Red lamely.
‘Shuddup,’ I informed him.
But my boy was a smart lad and there was truth in his statement. The canvas sagged and buckled over its skewiff skeleton, but the actual paintwork appeared to have survived intact. Apart from some very minute cracks, arguably ancient, there was no visible evidence to suggest that the phlegmatic boundary rider had been struck from a great height by a plummeting pile of scrap metal.
And, in light of the fact that the actual art part was still intact, the destruction of the frame suddenly seemed less disastrous. It was just a few pieces of gilded timber, after all. If I acted quickly, it might just be possible to reassemble the whole thing into some passable semblance of its previous condition before Bob Allroy returned. Particularly since Bob’s toolbox was sitting conveniently to hand on the parquet floor.
‘Quick,’ I ordered the boys. ‘Watch the door.’ Then, grabbing a pair of pliers and a screwdriver, I bundled up the buggered item, sprinted down the hall to the Gents and locked myself in a vacant stall.
In less time than it took to wedge the ruptured joints of the frame back into place, the futility of my task was obvious. Even in ideal working conditions and with the right tools, the job would have been beyond me. With the timber of the internal stretcher snapped clear through, it was impossible to get any tension in the canvas. The more I fiddled, the more hopeless it became. On top of which, barely a minute had gone by before Red came knocking on the cubicle door. ‘Dad! Dad!’ he hissed. ‘He’s back.’ There was no option but to face the music.
Holding the picture before me like an icon at a Russian funeral, I advanced down the corridor towards the scene of the crime, its perpetrators in single, guilty file behind me. As we neared the exhibition room, Bob Allroy stepped out the door and pulled it shut. Without so much as a glance our way, he turned on his heels and scurried down the stairs.
‘Can’t we just leave it here?’ said Red, trying the locked door of the exhibition room. ‘And run.’
We could. But Bernice knew that I’d been there. And, faced with a demolished painting, Bob Allroy would soon remember that the only other people to visit the unopened exhibition were that guy who used to work downstairs for the MEU and his two kids.
The time was precisely 12.30. Through a window at the top of the stairs I watched Bob cross the street and enter the John Curtin Hotel.
<
br /> The days when the industrial arm of the labour movement bent its collective elbow in the front bar of the John Curtin Hotel were long gone. But tradition died hard in some men and Bob was one of them. At least an hour would pass before he completed his liquid lunch and returned for his ladder and toolbox.
‘Who’s Sir Russell Fucking Drysdale?’ said Tarquin.
‘Shuddup,’ I suggested. ‘And follow me.’
Scooping up the bits and pieces of Dry Gully, I sped nonchalantly down the stairs. The undercroft was deserted.
‘Are we keeping it, then?’ said Red, incredulously watching me wrap the picture in an old beach towel.
‘Shuddup,’ I muttered, throwing a left into Victoria Parade and stomping on the accelerator. What I needed was an art conservator with while-you-wait service.
Artemis Prints and Framing was just down the hill from Ethnic Affairs, at the Victoria Parade end of the Smith Street retail strip. Technically, being on the west side of the street, it was located in Fitzroy, a suburb well on the way to total gentrification. But Smith Street, both sides, was universally regarded as Collingwood, an address that could never successfully shed its more raffish working-class associations. As though clutched in the jaws of this ambiguity, Artemis was slotted between a health-food shop called the Tasty Tao and a second-hand electrical goods retailer whose refrigerators were chained together to discourage shoplifters.
It took me exactly seven minutes and fifteen seconds to get there, including parking time.
It was a quiet drive, despite near-misses when I ran the amber lights at two intersections. The boys were concentrating on perfecting their air of contrition and had kept recriminations to a minimum. I bustled them into the Tasty Tao with funds for soymilk ice-creams and instructions to wait at the table on the footpath out the front and stay out of trouble. ‘But what about our pizza…’ Tark started, until he was silenced by a shot across the bow from Red. I took the towel-wrapped bundle of canvas and kindling out of the Charade and pushed open the door of Artemis Prints. A buzzer sounded out the back.
The exposed-brick walls were hung thick with decorator items for the local home-renovator market. Aluminium-framed posters from art museum blockbusters. Georgia O’Keeffe at the Guggenheim. Modern masters. Klimt and Klee. Rustic frames around labels from long-defunct brands of tinned fruit. On the rear wall, beside a curtained archway, hung a selection of sample frames, their inverted right-angles like downturned mouths. Claire, I was pleased to see, carried an extensive range.
She was behind the counter, even more voluptuous than I remembered, serving a teenage girl in skin-tight stonewashed denim jeans and a chemise that showed her navel. Definitely the Collingwood side of the street, probably the Housing Commission high-rise flats. More your Joan Jett fan than your Joan Miro aficionado. ‘How much for the non-reflective glass, but?’ she was saying.
‘It’s five dollars more,’ said Claire. On the counter between them was a block-mounted poster of a cigar-smoking chimpanzee in a tartan waistcoat riding a unicycle, the glass repaired with tape. Hi-jinx in the high-rise. ‘But you get a much better result.’
Claire looked over the girl’s shoulder and acknowledged my arrival. Her expression was bland, but her eyes twinkled, inviting me to share the joke. ‘I’ll be with you in a moment,’ she said. ‘Sir.’
The teenager gave the non-reflective glass a moment’s lip-chewing consideration and decided to go the full distance.
‘I think you’ll find it well worthwhile,’ said Claire. ‘You get a clearer view. It’ll be ready to pick up tomorrow.’ She was, I sensed, doing it hard. All dressed up for the customers in a lick of make-up, pleated chinos and a sleeveless white blouse. Her chestnut hair, much more ravishing in the daylight, was piled high and held in place with combs.
‘So,’ she said as the girl left, eyeing my towel-wrapped bundle like it was an unnecessary but not unwelcome pretext. ‘Don’t say you want me to mount your street vendors too?’
Second thoughts had been assailing me from the moment I walked through the door. A few flirtatious glances over a bowl of tapenade were one thing. Bursting into the woman’s shop with a filched artwork under my arm was another. Desperado dipstick and his defective Drysdale. I smiled helplessly and mustered my resolve.
‘This may seem a little presumptuous,’ I started. ‘That is, this might not be the sort of thing you normally do. And even if it is, you might not be comfortable doing it in this particular instance. You really don’t know me, I know, but it’s sort of an emergency and, well, if you don’t feel comfortable, I’ll understand perfectly and perhaps you could refer me somewhere else…’
At this babble, Claire’s lips curled with undisguised amusement. ‘An emergency!’ She moved aside the cracked chimpanzee to clear the counter. ‘As you see, emergencies are our specialty.’ If I felt the need to make a bit of a production number, she didn’t mind playing along.
‘It belongs to friends,’ I said, laying my bundle before her. The painting was, strictly speaking, stolen property. If unforeseen difficulties arose, I didn’t want Claire implicated as an accessory to a crime. A little white lie seemed best. ‘Don’t ask what happened.’ I cast an accusing backward glance over my shoulder.
Claire followed it out her front window to where the boys sat flicking bits of ice-cream at each other over the pavement table. She gave me a comprehending nod. Detailed explanations weren’t necessary. What was parenthood, after all, but a lifelong mopping-up operation?
‘And your friends don’t know about it yet?’ The way she said this suggested that such things were not unknown in her profession. ‘You’d like to get it back before they notice it’s gone?’
‘Exactly.’ I began to unfold the towel. She helped me. Her hands were neat and sturdy and when her fingers brushed mine, I felt myself blush. ‘The painting itself doesn’t seem to be damaged,’ I said, keeping my face down. ‘Just the frame. All it needs is a few staples, a bit of glue.’
The last flap of towel fell away, revealing what appeared to be the aftermath of a tropical cyclone. Drysdale’s lonesome drover, if anything, looked even more despondent. Claire let out an appreciative whistle. ‘Is this what I think it is?’
‘I’m afraid so. A Russell Drysdale original. But, like I said, the picture itself doesn’t seem to be damaged. A few staples, a nail or two…’
Under the counter was a black apron. Claire slipped it on, along with a pair of white cotton gloves. Minnie Mouse. ‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘The only other Drysdales I’ve seen were on masonite board.’ She began to separate the pieces of wood, wire and canvas. Ominous diagnostic noises came from the back of her throat.
‘Like I said, the picture itself doesn’t seem to be damaged.’ I smoothed at it uselessly, trying to be helpful. ‘A few staples…’
She smacked my hand away. ‘Let me be the judge of that,’ she said. ‘There’s quite a lot of work needed here.’
‘Um,’ I said, moving my shoulders from side to side and shuffling from foot to foot. ‘The thing is…’ I looked at my watch.
‘How long have I got?’ she said, not looking up from probing the debris.
‘Half an hour.’ I winced sheepishly.
‘You have got to be kidding.’ But she was already gathering up the ends of the towel.
Through the arch at the back of the shop was a narrow workroom dominated by a long tool-strewn table. Racks of moulded framing occupied one wall. In the other was a window overlooking the side fence. Stairs ran to an upper floor. Clearing away a half-cut cardboard mount, Claire laid the battered picture face-down and snipped away the tangled hanging wire with a pair of pliers.
‘You don’t know how much I appreciate this,’ I said, Mr Sincere.
‘Let’s just say it’s a long time since I’ve had the chance to work with an artist of this stature.’ She removed the stretched canvas from its frame and held it upright. Squeezing the opposing corners gingerly together, she forced the canvas to bulge a little. ‘Parti
cularly when he’s been hit by a bus.’
Out of its frame, the stretched canvas looked pathetically small, hardly much bigger than a couple of record covers. The edges, long concealed by the boxing of the frame, were a stark white contrast to the murky grey of the rest of the fabric. Claire wrinkled her nose. ‘Hmmm,’ she said. ‘Had this long?’
I looked at my watch. ‘About seventeen and a half minutes.’
‘Your friends, how long have they had this?’
‘Six months or so, I think. Why?’
‘Just wondered.’ She turned the painting face down and began rummaging through the racks of framing material.
‘Hello, Red’s dad.’ A child’s voice came from somewhere behind me. It took me a moment to locate its source. Claire’s little girl Grace was peering out shyly from behind the door of a cupboard built under the stairs. Delighted to have surprised me, she opened the cupboard door to reveal a tiny table spread with scrap paper and coloured pencils. ‘This is my play school,’ she said. ‘Mummy made it for me.’ Her eyes tracked me across the room as I accepted her invitation to take a closer look.
‘Your mummy’s very clever,’ I said, meaning every word of it. Taking this as a personal compliment, Gracie plumped herself down at the table and began drawing exuberantly with a felt-tipped pen.
‘That’s the sort of encouragement I like to hear when I’m working,’ said Claire. ‘Keep it up.’
She withdrew a length of moulded framing from the rack on the wall and matched it with a section of the broken frame, holding the two together so I could compare them. Apart from a slightly deeper gilding on the old frame, they were nearly identical. ‘It’ll be quicker to build a new frame than repair the damaged one. This moulding is a fairly common style, so it’s highly unlikely your friends will ever notice the difference.’ I couldn’t see Bob Allroy spotting the switch.
‘But first I’ll need to take the canvas off the stretcher, replace the broken struts, then re-attach the canvas.’ With a definitive smash, she tossed the broken frame into a metal rubbish bin full of off-cut shards of glass.
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