‘Not for me. Look … Shaun’s just lost both his parents in that dreadful fire. Right now he needs to be occupied. It’s awful that he’s obliged to stay around here all day. He could work for you, run errands, clean up, wash dishes … He just wants something to do.’
‘I’m sorry to hear about your parents, Shaun.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘But I’m afraid I just can’t help you.’
‘Okay.’
Stef studied Shaun’s dark, penetrating eyes, and couldn’t help but compare his intensity with the unhappy disposition of her own daughter.
‘Is it true what your aunty says? Do you really want some work? Cleaning and washing dishes?’
The boy stood very still and held her gaze. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Could I?’
IT WAS ONE of the Englishman’s favourites: a modified version of shireen palow. Arman had replaced the basmati rice with a side-serving of mashed pumpkin and sesame seeds. It went perfectly with the chicken thighs cooked with orange rind, caramelised onions, garlic, raisins and pistachios. He’d suggested the dish when Benton came in an hour earlier, rather the worse for wear, but more as a strategy than an act of generosity; it might divert his friend from further imbibing. How did I ever get along without you? the Englishman had said as he climbed the stairs. Arman worked quickly before the man could sink further into oblivion – in God’s eyes as well as his own.
When the meal was prepared he called Benton, but the man did not respond. Arman climbed the stairs and paused on the top landing before calling again.
‘Ben. Do you want to come down? I have waiting for you some nice dinner.’
He stepped up to the man’s door that was standing open a mere crack, and touched his fingertips to it.
‘Ben?’
When no answer came, he pushed lightly and the door swung slowly open. Benton was stretched out fully clothed, his size-ten shoes indecently pointing their scuffed leather soles directly at him. The room smelled of aftershave, stale linen and oldness: shoes, socks and woollen garments compacted in drawers or hanging in the freestanding wardrobe that carried traces of naphthalene.
A play of light flickered across the man’s prostrate form and Arman realised it came from the computer turned away from him. He slipped off his shoes and took two steps into the fetid interior, and then another. Should he stir him? Was there reason for concern? As he moved towards Benton with his arm gently raised, his attention was drawn to the computer screen. At first he saw animated figures, a performance of some kind, but the image was quickly replaced by a close-up of hairless male genitals before a cut to an open door. Had he seen correctly? His jaw dropped as a naked child entered – a boy or girl, it was difficult to say – and a man with large hands clasped the innocent’s head, pressing his own broad skull upon it. A shot now of another boy, tied wrists, a ring on a wall, white skin, red welts, blue glazed eyes. Suddenly there appeared a thick penis, red and raw, an inflamed trunk of glistening carnality, the very essence of Satan’s abominations. The focus moved to a pair of skinny legs which rose to small reddened buttocks and …
Arman retched, the alkaline bile rising in his throat. His body convulsed as he stumbled into the passage, hastily closing the door, locking up the obscenity, separating its disgusting reach from his own vulnerable being. Benton, Benton, Benton, what have you done; what have you done?
How had this loathsome depravity overtaken the man? How had Satan managed to fasten his talons upon him, to insinuate his evil into the body of such a gentleman, such an engaging, handsome, elegant man? Arman rushed downstairs, through the kitchen to the bathroom at the rear and locked the door. It was the furthest he could remove himself. He stripped down to his white underpants and stepped under the hot shower. He dropped to his knees on the tiled floor and prayed: Oh God; please save us, please drive out the evil that has infected this dwelling.
In the morning Benton appeared on his way to work. Arman, again in the kitchen, did not turn and tried to steady his involuntary trembling. Benton’s dinner and his own of the night before now sat cold under plastic in the fridge.
‘Cheerio, then,’ Ben intoned from behind him. ‘Keep smiling, eh?’ And then he was gone.
Arman prayed for guidance. More than once at the appropriate hour he thanked Allah and directed his being towards Mecca in the hope of a solution: how to save himself, how to save his home and the soul of Benton Hattersley. If only the Englishman’s demons could be exorcised. Arman consulted the Quran. O ye who believe – When you meet a force, be firm … for God is with those who patiently persevere. But how?
That evening the Englishman returned, poured a glass of water and sat down in front of the security monitor.
‘What’s your impression, good man? Hot enough for you?’ Benton leaned forward and placed his forearms on the cool tabletop. He had removed his shirt and Arman noted the planet-like surface of his broad back: the nobby spine, pockmarks, freckles and lesions, evidence of a weathered past. ‘Any developments, old chap?’ he said, and Arman wondered to what he was referring: their relationship, the day’s activities, the happenings on the monitor before him?
‘Nothing, I think,’ he replied and watched the man for signs of acknowledgment, some faint recognition of the serious matters that hung in the humid air between them.
‘Look at this,’ Benton said. ‘Seen him before?’
Arman peered into the screen and saw a slender child waiting for the bus. He watched his flatmate lean in with the intensity of a hound pointing game. He was holding his breath and Arman held his.
‘You … you want to eat soon?’ he asked, but Benton failed to register it.
‘I want to talk about last night,’ Arman added tentatively, and stood waiting for the man to return to the present, for a hint of culpability or even remorse. But he could wait no longer. His eyes began to well and he dashed from the room. Benton hardly noticed and did not break concentration until Shaun finally boarded the bus.
NIKOS BEGAN the refill, reversing his dream, undoing the vision he’d once held of a subterranean hideaway, softly lit, stone-walled, warm, safe and silent. Now, that aspiration was amassing buckets of dirt at thirty dollars a metre – and for no other reason than to recover what had existed two months earlier. Now, he was in a hurry to complete the job. Once the front room was finished he might rent it to a retailer, and then he could start work on the rear wall utilising the mountain of bricks that lay waiting.
Arman had agreed to clean and stack them against the neighbour’s fence. It gave him time to reflect and to plan a way forward. And one Saturday morning as he toiled with God’s light shining upon him, the answer finally came. The previous day, he’d accepted a fare to Abbotsford and, caught in stationary traffic on Victoria Street, his eye had fallen upon a store selling Chinese medicine. Arman knew about herbal remedies. He’d come from generations of healers, the gift being passed down from one family member to another. Yet the actual calling seemed to have bypassed him completely, even though the knowledge had been impressed upon him from the time he could walk.
Of course all Afghans over the age of six knew the poppy, the fruit of which contained a resinous substance called opium from which morphine was derived and in turn yielded heroin. Many of the children toiled in the poppy fields, and his country supplied ninety percent of the world’s requirements, a fact that troubled many Afghans despite knowing that it kept their economy alive. Opium and foreign aid; the latter funded attacks on the Taliban, the former funded Taliban attacks on Western troops. But Arman’s botanical indoctrination extended far beyond that single addictive cultivar and embraced all of the traditional medicines: Mint for indigestion, Burdoch Root for venereal disease and Leopard Bane for snakebites. Henbane leaves were a poultice for syphilitic sores, Fleawort was a laxative and Sicilian Tulip bulbs gave strength.
And then there was Kudzu. An aggressive perennial vine of the pea family, the powder of its dried roots was well known as a suppressant for the consumption o
f alcohol.
When Arman thought of it, he downed tools and almost ran to his taxi. He drove a little too fast for a cab-driver, ignoring those who tried to flag him down, and pulled up jerkily in front of the herbal store. He purchased a large packet of the grey Kudzu powder, and while he was at it he bought some shredded Liquorice Root as well – a native plant of his country, it was known to be good for liver problems. In less than an hour after receiving the idea, via prayerful vigilance, Arman had returned to the yard and, with renewed vigour, began once more to strike the mortar off the old clinker bricks.
At that moment Shaun was gazing down from the rear window, a habit that seemed to ease his troubling thoughts. He was still sleeping fitfully and often in the night his eyes would suddenly open. He would gaze up at the UFO of a smoke-alarm parked upside down on ceiling, illuminated weakly by the street lamps, and in that strange penumbral half-light, visions would tumble in. He saw green forests, blazing infernos, gentle bushbirds, his parents laughing – and people’s faces: looks of horror, fear and heartfelt concern. He hated it all. Sometimes a kookaburra called and in a delusory state Shaun would call back, but no bird ever came. Jess would appear. He saw her sniggering at some ordinary thing – but she was sad. He pictured Elton gazing sadly into a computer; he saw Stef and Adele sharing the same sad arguments. Unhappiness filled his nocturnal hours and lingered long after dawn. The whole world seemed sad.
He looked down from the window and watched the dark-skinned man at his toil. For days now Shaun had observed him arrive at odd times, take up a small tomahawk and chip away at the bricks. When each one was clean, the man would stack it neatly against the fence separating the two yards. Now there was a double row that reached the top of the palings, yet the random pile seemed hardly diminished. Shaun wrote in his book: The taxi driver next door. Why is he cleaning the other man’s bricks? He looks serious. And sad.
4
ELTON DREW a cubic litre of living-room air deep into his lungs, expressly to prepare himself for an excursion into the unknown – a deep-sea diver would do no less, readying for a plunge to the ocean floor. He was taking Shaun next door. The boy was to accompany Stef to her studio and Elton, with reservations, thought he might like to try a face-to-face with Jess again.
As they stood in front of number 44, the twin brass numerals mimicking each other’s pointy stance, Shaun asked on an impulse, ‘Elton, what did you do when you were my age?’
‘What I do now, I guess. But the computer games were pretty basic. Google was new, no Instagram, no Twitter or Vine, no Tumblr or Kik or …’
‘What did you do when you were five?’
Elton tried to think. ‘It was a different world then, Shaun. You couldn’t do stuff that we take for granted today. Just 64 kilobytes. Unbelievable.’
A few minutes later, Jess answered and Elton held out a twenty-dollar note. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘The money I owe you.’
‘What for?’
‘I said I’d give you twenty bucks if you came with me when I took Shaun –’
‘Save it, Elton.’
‘She liked going to the park with you,’ Shaun volunteered. ‘Didn’t you, Jess?’
Jess backed away to allow them entry and fixed Elton with her inflexible stare. ‘Is that all you came for, to give me the cash?’
‘Yeah, I guess so.’
‘No he didn’t,’ Shaun said. ‘He likes you.’
‘No I don’t,’ objected Elton.
‘Shaun says you do, Ello, and Shaun doesn’t lie, do you Shaun?’
The boy opened his mouth but Elton jumped in. ‘If you cleaned up your act, I might like you.’
‘What? Look who’s talking. Facebook doesn’t save you from being a –’
‘Would you guys take me to the library some time?’
Jess paused. ‘The library?’
‘The big one in the city.’
‘He means the State Library,’ Elton said. ‘What for, Shaun? It’s just a big room full of dusty old books. What’s there that you can’t find online?’
‘You can’t argue with that,’ Jess said. ‘For once, I agree.’
‘I want to see the books.’
‘Which books?’
‘All of them.’
Jess’s mother appeared in the doorway. ‘Ready to go?’ She offered Shaun a polite smile.
The boy sat in the rear seat and observed the backs of Stef and Simon’s heads. They didn’t turn towards each other, they seemed distant, and Shaun guessed why: the man had hired his Aunty Adele. Why was she going out with people just so she could make some money? Stef was driving and glanced at her husband.
‘What are you doing today?’
‘What do you think?’ he said curtly, fiddling with his mobile phone.
‘Is it coming along okay?’
‘Yes, of course.’
But as only Simon knew, it wasn’t. He had half of Victoria’s junk piled up in his warehouse studio but none of it seemed to coalesce meaningfully. Simon knew that junk looked like junk until it was converted into art, and even then it might still look like junk – but then junk was an art genre all by itself. Male artists often went for metal, wire, stone or concrete, while their female counterparts sometimes preferred recycled paper, plastic, real hair or something involving animals. Yet for Simon, it was pointless piling bricks as Carl Andre had done forty years earlier, or assembling rusted metal as Anthony Caro did in the sixties. Found materials, oversized replicas, things using felt, glass, cardboard – they were all such contemptible clichés. The great movements of shock and confrontation had passed, that project was now impossible – viewers, collectors, critics, insisted on being affronted. No one wanted beauty in the traditional sense, no one expected to be uplifted. People wanted sensation: a shitmaking machine, d.o.g. painted on a gold cross, a hundred and fifty casts of real vaginas, a tattooed live pig. How can art that might outlive its novelty status be conceived in such an environment?
Simon watched a cyclist wobbling along the footpath. ‘What about you?’
Stef had temporarily forgotten their conversation. How should she answer? She braked at the lights and came to a stop. ‘I’m wasting time,’ she said, releasing the wheel and crossing her arms. She had not intended saying such a thing but right then no other words seemed fitting.
‘Nothing working?’
‘You might say that.’
Shaun listened attentively. They seemed to have forgotten all about him.
‘Perhaps you should try a new medium; take yourself right out of your comfort –’
‘I’m not a student anymore, Simon. And please don’t pretend you care.’
‘Stef, I –’
‘Just keep your powder dry for a while, okay? I don’t want to hear anything from you at the moment.’
Perhaps she might have responded differently if her art was progressing, but she’d completely lost sight of the ball. What ball? Was there one anymore? In her own way, she faced what Simon faced: a society that was indifferent to art, literature, poetry – unless it registered highly on the entertainment scale. It was even suggested that society could do without art altogether. The elite might be a bit put out but the other ninety-eight percent wouldn’t miss it at all. There was so much digital imagery to outrank it, any number of visual extravagances that could be conjured at the click of mouse.
She had often protested at the fifteen minutes of TV news given over to sport. Among the greater masses, it obviously ranked equally with any news item. Sport filled people’s lives with excitement; it gave them something to look forward to; it had skill levels that could be measured, clear standards that could be set, striven for and rewarded – and that’s where the ball could clearly be seen. A sport of one sort or another gave the populace something to follow without straining the intellect; without the slightest conceptual challenge. What did contemporary art give? Stef had been over it many times, but still she strove, for what she wasn’t sure.
Sh
e dropped Simon at his studio and the boy stayed in the back seat. ‘There may not be much for you to do today, Shaun,’ she told him.
‘That’s okay.’
‘Maybe you could just tidy things up for me.’
‘Okay.’
When he stepped into her studio, Shaun experienced for the first time, the peculiar aromas of turps, linseed and Dammar varnish. His eyes explored the interior: there were canvases everywhere, standing against walls and tables, leaning against each other. Scattered across the paint-splattered floor he saw paper, paint tins, old rags, magazines and yellowing newspapers. A large tabletop was littered with pots and tubes, rags, brushes, pencils and palettes. Shaun watched Stef approach a painting that rested on an easel. He heard her sigh before turning away.
‘Anything you see on the floor can go in the bin, Shaun. There’s a broom out the back – and a brush and shovel. I think the vacuum’s broken or blocked. Maybe you can fix it.’
When he returned Stef was sitting in a dilapidated office chair and appeared to be studying a glass palette smeared with oils. He pushed the broom silently around her and saw dust rise in the light coming through a bank of ripple glass windows. He carried bags to the wheelie bins out the back. There he found broken cardboard boxes spilling bottles onto the gravel and he decided to clean it all up. Through the base of a wine bottle he saw a dead lizard, a Marbled Gecko. He held the vessel to the light, before placing it in the bin with all the others. When he returned Stef decided to move some of her paintings and began carrying the large canvases across the room.
‘I like that one,’ Shaun said.
Stef was holding one of her newer works and was about to face it to the wall. She propped it against a bench.
‘Why?’
‘The colours.’
‘What about them?’
‘They look … right.’
‘It’s minimalism, Shaun. It’s supposed to be a reduction of the city park … in autumn. I’m painting the seasons of the city … It’s abstraction.’
The Colour of the Night Page 14