by Linda Jaivin
At the time we moved to Chippendale, warehouse spaces were plentiful and cheap. You couldn’t flick a cigarette butt out the window in Chippo without setting some artist’s hair on fire. It’s within cooee of two universities, a couple of art schools and Newtown. You can almost smell the cheap pizza and curry places on King Street, and it’s only a short walk to the second-hand bookshops on Glebe Point Road and the new cinemas on Broadway. Due east is Surry Hills, with its Turkish pizza, Leb roll joints and artist-run galleries. East of Surry Hills of course is the posh, upstart suburb of Paddington, with its expensive boutiques, four-wheel drives and exclusive galleries. Unlike Newtown, Glebe and Surry Hills, Paddington is not quite within spitting distance—which is probably lucky for Paddington.
The day ZakDot and I went warehouse hunting, I laughed at the name of the old factory building we were about to check out—‘Century Dyeing Products Pty Ltd’.
‘So “millennial”,’ ZakDot marvelled. He made air quotes around the word. ‘We have to live here.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said. And that was that.
Our warehouse space was once a storeroom for ball bearings. A slight tilt in the floor doomed that enterprise. We still find them in the corners from time to time. A few incarnations later the space became ‘Artha and Marther’s Social Dancing School’. There were still how-to-dance diagrams with male and female footsteps stencilled across the floor when we moved in. Tango, cha-cha, fox trot, polka, bootscooting and even rock n roll, a pattern which never made sense no matter how many times we tried it.
The ceiling was all exposed concrete beams, chaotic wiring and piping. Something like the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris. I haven’t actually been to Paris, but I’ve seen photos. There was a pile of timber in one corner, and scraps of fake fur and velvet: relics of the days when the place was used for furniture-making and costume-design. It was a repository of half-stated ideas, unfinished projects and uncartable dreams. I didn’t mind being surrounded by the trappings of failure. They lent me camouflage for my ambitions.
Artha and Marther had put in a small tea-room which the addition of a two-burner and a bar fridge turned into a basic kitchen. They’d installed male and female loos, designated by the same footprints that mapped out the dance steps on the floor. I took what used to be the office for my bedroom, and ZakDot claimed the ‘chill-out room’, though I don’t think it was called that back then. Leaving the central space for a common area, we quickly knocked up two studios along the back wall as well as an extra bedroom. ZakDot set up an old café sandwich-board by the door on which he chalked inspirational sayings: ‘Before you decide the sun shines out of someone else’s arse, check to see that their jeans fade from the inside’ was a typical offering.
Our first co-tenant was a paranoid journo who would pick over the shower curtains for ASIO bugs. Then we got a pair of lesbian trapeze artists prone to violent mid-air stoushes and, after them, a mournful avant-garde music composer named Joy. When Joy moved out, we put an advertisement in the Herald for a new flatmate.
ZakDot suggested we accept the seventh caller, no questions asked. That’s how we ended up with Thurston.
Thurston looks like the subject of Frans Hals’ portrait The Jolly Toper. He’s got a big, open, meaty face and trusting, lashless blue eyes, except Thurston’s beard is bushier than the Toper’s. No sooner had he moved in than people with names like Rodmur and Gwydion started leaving messages on the answering machine about misbehaving Druids and urgent meetings in the Shire of Dismal Fogs, which is, I think, somewhere in the Blue Mountains. Thurston’s favourite CD was Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum, which he played continuously and which I once caught him weeping over. He peppered his speech with medieval words. He spent a lot of time at his computer. He had a habit of knitting chain mail in front of the TV. When he laughed, it sounded like this: nuk nuk nuk.
ZakDot remarked that he didn’t think Thurston was actually a psychopath, though one could always live in hope. ZakDot would say things like this, never having met an actual psychopath in his life. At the time, of course, neither had I.
It all started one late spring night not long after Thurston moved in. This was about, let’s see, two years ago. Both ZakDot and I were still in art school. The Troubles had started, but we didn’t take much notice of them. They didn’t affect us, really. So far as I was concerned, the future was a limitless canvas, stretched and primed and ready for me to work my magic upon it.
ZakDot had gone off to his part-time job ‘art directing’ for the shopping channel. It was a job made for him. You could almost hear the swishing of the air quotes in the title. I also had a part-time job, in my teacher Lynda Tangent’s Triangle Factory. Lynda was famous for her paintings of equilateral triangles. They came in three sizes—‘travel’, ‘regular’ and ‘economy’. She laid on the theory in thick, impasto strokes; the paint itself was thin. ‘I want to give the world painting,’ she told us, ‘yet deny it painting at the same time.’ For postmodernist reasons, she never picked up a brush herself, hiring students like me to do the job for her. I hated it, but I switched off and just thought about my own work and the paints I could buy with the money I earned. I had that night off, so I was in my studio, working on a painting that I’d brought home from school.
I’d been at it for some time when Thurston snudged into the doorway. Though I saw him out of the corner of my eye, I was in a kind of groovy pose, leaning back, squinting at the canvas, and dragging on a rollie. I pretended to be so absorbed that I didn’t even notice his presence.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled after a while. ‘Hope I’m not disturbing you.’
‘Oh, Thurston! Hello!’ Feigning surprise, I beckoned him in. ‘What’s up?’ I stubbed out my cigarette.
Wiping the sweat off my brow with the back of my arm, I watched as Thurston tiptoed through the jumble of old tins and paints and sketchbooks that littered the floor. He looked awestruck at the walls, to which I’d sticky-taped sketches, images ripped out from newspapers and magazines and, since visiting the Brett Whiteley studio in Surry Hills, scraps of paper on which I’d scribbled favourite quotations and profound thoughts. Coming round to where I was standing, he looked at the painting I was working on. ‘Wow, Miles,’ he sighed. ‘That’s so ferly, I’m speechless.’
I didn’t want to break the spell by asking him what he meant. I noticed that his eyes were filling with tears. Embarrassed, I reached down to tickle Bacon, my cat, under his chin.
Thurston asked me, shyly, if I wanted to join him for a beer down the local. The local was just at the end of the street.
I was going in circles with the painting. I knew I had to leave it alone for a while or I’d ruin it. ‘Sure,’ I said. I was hoping for more compliments on the way.
Like so many pubs in our country, our local provided a highly cultured ambience. The ceiling was painted with fluffy clouds and fat angels like the dome of an Italian church. The back wall featured several naked figures rendered in the classical Greek style. We sat down at the bar near Ionic columns that were shedding chunks of plaster—in a most aesthetic way, of course—and ordered schooners. Across from us, some muscular poets limbered up for a poetry slam that was scheduled for later in the evening and, a few stools over, an old geezer tapped his feet to the strains of the experimental jazz pouring from the p.a.
It occurred to me that I knew almost nothing about our new housemate. ‘What do you actually do for a crust, Thurston? If you don’t mind my asking.’
Thurston bit his lower lip. ‘Freelance statistical analyst and consultant. Sounds pretty boring, hey?’
‘I’m not sure I know enough about it to say. What is it that you analyse?’
‘Depends. Often it’s just stuff like business productivity or market trends. But, about six months ago, this young executive came to me with an interesting project.’
‘Yeah?’ The words ‘productivity’ and ‘market trends’ made my eyes glaze. ‘What’d he want?’
‘She.’
> ‘She.’ Hate it when I do that.
‘She wanted, simply, to get to the top. She’d heard about this fellow who fed football data into a computer and worked out what it took for a team to win. She asked me to do something similar for her. It took some lateral thinking but, within a few months of my handing her a game plan, she got herself a promotion and a rise.’
‘Far out.’ I could feel myself dropping away behind my eyes.
‘It gets better,’ Thurston insisted. I hoped so. ‘Not long after this, she introduced me to a friend of hers, a writer who commissioned me to work out a plan for literary success. So, I collected info about bestselling novels and their creators. I studied the winners of the Nobel and the Booker and the Pulitzer, as well as the Vogel and the Miles Franklin. I factored in a few unusual case studies, Salman Rushdie, Helen Darville Demidenko and Primary Colors, and combined it all to come up with a strategy.’
‘Mad.’ I was interested now. ‘How’d she go?’
‘He.’
‘He.’ You couldn’t win.
‘Dunno. He hadn’t actually written anything at the time. I think he’s started now though.’
I laughed.
‘Miles. Can I ask you a question?’
‘Shoot.’
‘What do you want from life?’
Coming from ZakDot, a question like that would’ve put me on guard. With the guileless Thurston, I found myself answering without hesitation. ‘Success without compromise. To be remembered forever for my art.’ I am the best fucking painter of my generation. It was never my idea to end up being the only person who knew it.
As soon as the words left my mouth, I felt embarrassment flood through me, turning my face and neck the same colour as my hair. My generation isn’t comfortable with the idea of success. Our heroes called themselves ‘losers’, though if you had the t-shirt you were already a winner. The point was, never admit to your ambition. Squinting up at the angels, avoiding Thurston’s eyes, I thought about this guy I knew. He loved surfing. He said it was intense, powerful and transforming. Yet you didn’t change the ocean or hurt it or leave any sign of your presence. His goal, he told me, was to get through life without leaving a single mark on the world. I envied him. I was so pathetically desperate to leave my mark.
Thurston didn’t bat an eye. ‘Wow, Miles,’ he exhaled. ‘Wow.’ After a pause during which he shook his head and blew out his cheeks a few times, he asked, ‘Were you always this artistic? I mean, were you born this way?’
I shrugged. What could I say? I was the Botticelli of the boxed crayons set, a pre-school pre-Raphaelite. I noticed that the bartender was taking advantage of a quiet moment to work on his novel. I knew it was a novel because I’d once overheard him discussing literary agents with a couple of regulars. I waited till he’d stopped typing to signal him for another round.
‘So,’ Thurston persisted, ‘is your mum or dad an artist?’
‘My mum’s not an artist. I wouldn’t know about my dad. I’ve never even met the bastard.’
This statement was rewarded with a suitably horrified look on Thurston’s part.
‘I was born on July fourth, American Independence Day, notable in our family for being the day that my father declared his own independence and split,’ I explained. ‘My mum emerged from the labour ward to find that he’d vamoosed. Neither of us has seen him since. As it transpired,’ I continued, ‘he was just the first of a series of Houdinis to whom my ever-hopeful mother chained herself. She’s a serial romantic. Unfortunately, the men in her life are just serial.’
‘Oh, Miles.’ Thurston reached out his hand to comfort me. He pulled it back almost the second it touched my arm, as though he’d received an electric shock.
‘Maybe the reason I’m so keen to leave my name to the world is because I’m not sure what it really is,’ I admitted, cradling my beer. ‘My mum won’t even tell me my dad’s name. Sometimes I wonder if she even knew what it was. Walker’s her surname.’
Thurston cringed. ‘At least my dad stayed around long enough to give us a few memories—and his name—before he split.’
I was only half-listening. Rolling another cigarette, I travelled in my mind back to the house on the south coast where I grew up, with its brick veneer and collapsing verandahs. Home was a clutter of kid stuff and lacteal smells. Oddly enough, there was no art on the walls at all. Not even the sad clowns, big-eyed children and murky landscapes that our neighbours all hung on their walls. My home town was the sort of place where people loved the idea of art but didn’t get it.
My mum’s not an artist. A long-submerged memory floated to the surface. One rainy day, I was rummaging in the attic and came across a stack of paintings. They were quite good, or so I thought at the time. There were several sophisticated-looking abstracts, a portrait or two and a couple of landscapes. I remember asking my mum about them. Her eyes flashed. For a moment, I thought she was going to hit me. ‘Stay out of the attic, Miles,’ was all she said. When, not long afterwards, I announced my intention to become an artist, mum looked sad. The next time I tried to go up into the attic, it was locked.
In our town, they spoke of people who ‘went Away’ and ‘came back from Away’. I wanted to be in that place called Away. As soon as I could, I fled to Sydney and art school.
Thurston was asking me something.
‘Sorry?’
‘I was just wondering how you defined success?’
I considered the question. ‘According to Freud, the goal of the artist is fame, wealth and beautiful lovers.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘Personal satisfaction and the feeling that I’m fulfilling my creative potential are most important, of course. But if I could have the whole shebang, yeah, why not.’
Thurston nodded. ‘When you say beautiful lovers…’ He blushed.
‘I should qualify that,’ I said, my voice shot through with heroic melancholy. ‘You see, no woman has ever been able to compete with Art for my devotion.’ No woman had ever tried that hard either, but I wasn’t prepared to admit that. ‘I’ve always permitted Art more intimate moments, more liberties than any woman,’ I continued. ‘Art, in turn, makes women so jealous that they are ultimately forced to abandon me to her.’ Either that or they got so bored with my obsessions that they left. ‘You see, my passion for Art makes me emotionally unavailable, and my single-minded dedication to it means I am practically unobtainable.’
The truth was, I was so obtainable it was ridiculous. Though I couldn’t have imagined it at the time, I was so obtainable that I’d end up in the arms of a woman who stood against everything I valued. A woman so suspicious of art that she once refused to wear a necklace when she found out it was made from cultured pearls.
Thurston regarded me over the top of his schooner with doe eyes.
‘In any case,’ I said, ‘I’ve decided to remain celibate for a while.’ It was good to make these things look like a matter of choice.
‘Celibacy is honourable,’ Thurston remarked, nodding. It occurred to me that I didn’t know anything about Thurston’s own love life. I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to know.
‘Eventually,’ I concluded, ‘I’m confident that I’ll meet someone so beautiful, refined, artistic and sensitive that she will break through the barriers I’ve set up and we’ll have a lifelong, passionate and intellectual affair that will be the stuff of legend.’
Thurston forced out a funny little smile and dipped his finger into his beer. He drew geometric liquid doodles on the surface of the bar. With an annoyed expression, the bartender abandoned his Macintosh in order to swipe at them with his cloth, leaving a greasy streak where the patterns had been.
I could see that Thurston was embarrassed. ‘What d’ya say? Time to head back?’ I suggested.
We staggered home. Thurston had rented a video of an old film called Knights of the Round Table, which we watched sitting on the broken-down sofa, our bare feet up on the battered industrial spool that served as a coff
ee table. ‘The relationship between Lancelot and King Arthur is so beautiful,’ Thurston sighed when it was over. ‘Don’t you think?’
I gave the thumbs up. ‘Thanks for that,’ I said, stretching. ‘I’m off to bed.’
As I drifted off to sleep, I could hear the film starting again.
For several days after this, I sensed Thurston working like crazy in his room, banging away at his keyboard. One afternoon, I’d no sooner come home from class than he came flying out, a clutch of papers in his thick hand. ‘Well, you’re excited,’ I commented, dropping my heavy satchel of paints. He was wearing a homespun tunic. Just looking at it made me itch.
The front door opened and closed again and ZakDot, who didn’t have any classes on Fridays, barrelled into the lounge. He’d been busking in Victoria Park and carried an armful of juggling bats, each of which bore a stencilled phrase: ‘artistic integrity’, ‘commercial success’, ‘critical acclaim’ and ‘personal satisfaction’. ZakDot was not a good juggler, but I suppose that was the point. ‘Hello boychiks,’ he greeted, letting the bats clatter to the floor. He wiped the sweat from his brow with the hem of his t-shirt, exposing his taut stomach with its fine line of blonde hair leading down past the navel. Then he went into the kitchen for a glass of water.
‘I’ve got it,’ Thurston blurted the second ZakDot left the room. He was bouncing up and down in his ug boots.
‘What? Herpes? Bubonic plague? A winning lottery ticket?’ The hurt-puppy look in his eyes made me regret my flippancy. ‘I’m sorry, Thurston. What’ve you got?’
‘The formula,’ he said, excitement quivering in his voice.