by Linda Jaivin
Coming home, I headed straight for the kitchen, intending to drink a whole carton of milk. I’d read somewhere that milk neutralised poison. There, I almost stumbled over a stocky fellow on all fours wearing a leather harness and nothing else. He was lapping water from a saucer while Bacon watched disdainfully from the doorway.
‘Gabe?’ I gasped. ‘Fuck are you doing?’
Gabe was a student from the theory department. His honours thesis consisted of him installing giant red plastic ‘D’s in public toilets and bus shelters, which I believe he referred to as ‘random existential nodalities’, and then writing about their inevitable vandalisation.
Gabe looked up, eyes as big as the saucer he was drinking from. Just then, a whiff of sweat and talc tickled my nostrils. I turned to see Maddie, wearing a skintight black PVC minidress and twitching a folded lead against her palm. She winked at me.
‘Heel, boy,’ she commanded. Gabe withdrew his gaze from mine. Tongue out, tail wagging, he followed Maddie back to her room.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. How was I to know that was my first mistake?
‘C’mon, Mi.’ ZakDot came into the studio one evening a few weeks later and stood there with his hands on his hips. ‘It’s ‘our class party. It’ll be good for you to get out and socialise.’
‘Why?’
‘Because isolation is turning you into a complete loon.’
‘I just want to get this one little bit…’ I let my voice trail off and raised my brush to the canvas. I was the very picture of artistic distraction.
‘Are you really into it or are you trying to prove something?’
‘I’m trying to prove something. Satisfied?’
ZakDot peered around the easel. ‘Miles, you haven’t even begun yet. It’s a blank canvas.’
‘How am I supposed to get started with everyone hanging around here all the time?’ I grumbled.
‘Take a break. You need it. Besides, everyone’s gonna be there. Even Maddie’s going.’
‘With Gabe? Great. That’ll be fun for the whole family.’ I’d put Gabe on my list of people to watch out for.
‘Without Gabe. She dumped him.’ With his thumbs, ZakDot lifted the lapels of his smoking jacket, a maroon brocade number, and wiggled his shoulders. ‘I reckon she’s ready for a “real man”.’
‘Well, cool. Hope she finds one at the party.’
ZakDot left, shaking his head. I heard Maddie ask him something, then the warehouse door clicked shut behind them.
I never was comfortable at parties, anyway.
I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so uncomfortable at a party as I am now, of course. I’m getting more uncomfortable by the minute. My arms and legs are all pins and needles and my muscles are sending signals like shrieks up and down my nerve paths. My mouth is dry, my stomach empty, my breath shallow and a claustrophobic panic is beginning to overwhelm me. I wish I could let ZakDot know I’m in here. I wish I could open that curtain again. I wish someone would chuck Mist off the Sea into the sea.
I wouldn’t even mind another visit from Verbero.
The night of the class party, part of me felt like running out after ZakDot and Maddie. Then I reminded myself that studio time was precious and genius, being random and miraculous, was not for squandering. I slipped Ashok Roy into the player, rolled up my sleeves and selected a small flat brush from an old Farmland tin. Occasionally, bursts of laughter, traffic noise or drunken argument from the street below would drift up into the studio and punctuate the asymmetric rhythms of the sarod. Yet, as I worked, my concentration grew deep and wide, throwing up its barricades against the world. Once an artist set his watch to immortality, Eastern Standard Time held no meaning. Hours flew by like cherubim across some Venetian dome.
At God knows what time of morning, Maddie and ZakDot returned, pissed as newts.
Eventually, I became aware of a noise like crying or laughter. Maddie’s laughter. Beneath the delicious soprano twitter, ZakDot was mewling my name in an oddly muffled voice. I advanced cautiously towards the snuffling and cries, which were coming from ZakDot’s room, and knocked.
‘Come in!’ Maddie’s voice rang out.
I was greeted with a martini glass. The one tattooed on ZakDot’s arse. His arse was pointed straight at the door. The bubbles rose towards the ceiling. Maddie’s feet semaphored his arse-cheeks from either side like the ultimate in air-quotes. His balls were hanging down between his legs and his face was sunk into her muff. His whole body was shaking with laughter.
‘Too much information, thank you very much,’ I croaked and started to leave.
Maddie raised her head. ‘Don’t go,’ she ordered in her flat, velvety voice. ‘We need you.’
‘My, uh, eyebrow ring is caught in Maddie’s labial jewellery,’ ZakDot explained. ‘Could you give us a hand?’
‘Keep talking,’ Maddie sighed. ‘The vibrations really get me going.’
‘Well, don’t just stand there,’ Zak reprimanded.
My fingers were trembling, and I took it she liked that as well. The air in the room was close and reeked of sex and sweat. I felt myself flush to my ears. What were they thinking when they invited me in? I was mortified, horrified and aroused. I glanced at Maddie’s face, but her ecstatic expression threw me even more, as did the sight of her erect brown nipples. I quickly looked away, only to find myself staring at ZakDot’s cock. How could it be that he hadn’t been lying about the size of it? ZakDot angled his head as best he could and gave my wrist a slow lick.
Little Miles stood to attention and saluted.
The tremor that ran through my arm coincided with my loosening of their infernal tangle. ‘Ta, babe,’ sighed Maddie, fixing me with glittering eyes. ‘Care to join us?’
‘I, uh, c-can’t breathe,’ I stuttered, flapping my hands around my face. It felt like something was in my eyes.
‘Stay,’ ZakDot suggested.
‘Mmm,’ Maddie concurred. She stared at my crotch, a smile growing on her lips.
‘I, uh, I need air,’ I gasped. Rushing out of the room, I failed to register the peculiar, metallic chunkchunkchunkchunk that is the sound of someone proceeding across a room in full body armour. And that’s when I tripped over the last of the ball bearings and hurtled full tilt into a large figure covered in chain mail and wearing a forged-steel helmet.
‘Miles? Miles?’ The words, slippery with strangeness, were like pinpricks of light glimmering in a fog.
I fell back into the darkness.
I thought about opening my eyes, but wasn’t sure if they were already open. I wondered what day it was, and if I was in Sydney or New York, which is odd, as I’d never been to New York. My eye was stinging but I couldn’t hear it for all the hammering. I wished that whoever was doing the hammering would stop it. I thought about this. Could you hear an eye sting?
He’d finally done it. I wanted to say ‘good on ya, Thurston’, but it came out more like ‘gdnyathn’.
‘Maybe we should call an ambulance.’ This was ZakDot’s voice.
With enormous effort, I slowly jacked up my lids, onto which someone had suspended entire Henry Moore sculptures. Three pixilated blurs gradually clarified into the faces of ZakDot, Thurston and Maddie. Just as I’d suspected. They were all in on it together.
I put my hand to my forehead. It was wet and sticky like paint. Paint. Who said painting’s dead? It’s the painter who’s dead here. I laughed and laughed.
‘You’re spooking me,’ said ZakDot.
I laughed even harder. Maddie and ZakDot exchanged glances. Back in the studio, Ashok Roy continued to pluck at his sarod. The CD was as long as the history of India.
Thurston started to cry. His sobs shook his helmet and the visor slammed shut with a great clang. He regretted it now, did he? Oh, life was too rich. Too wonderful.
I tried to raise myself up on my elbows and noticed I was lying on one of the how-to-dance diagrams. ‘Chachacha,’ I giggled, gasping for air.
‘It’s actuall
y a polka,’ Thurston corrected, lifting off his helmet and sniffling. ‘I feel terrible, Miles. Didn’t see you coming.’
‘Do you want us to take you to a hospital?’ ZakDot’s fingertips tugged on the kohl-blackened area just beneath his eyes. He looked like a child pulling a scary face, a caricature of shock.
‘Oh no no no.’ They weren’t taking me anywhere. ‘I’m fine, really, although I might need to throw up soon,’ I replied cheerfully, unaware that it had taken me a full five minutes to answer the question. Then I passed out again.
New wave
When I came to, I was lying in my bed. There was an icepack on my forehead, trapping the dull throbbing underneath. I opened my eyes. To my left, a looming form resolved itself into the old hat tree from which hung my collection of paint-spattered trousers and shirts. On the floor at the foot of the tree were a smattering of art books, as well as some pre-loved Penguin classics. I kept trying to read books like the Satyricon but, after hours of concentrating on canvas, I usually ended up just veging in front of the telly.
Speaking of which, I could hear the theme song for ‘Art/Life’ striking up in the lounge. That was on at seven in the evening. I must have been out for a whole day. Slowly, I swivelled my head to look in that direction.
‘Jesus, Thurston!’ He’d been sitting there so quietly I hadn’t even registered his presence.
‘I’m sorry, Miles, I really am.’ He recovered the icepack from where it had fallen and replaced it on my forehead. I beamed the most wan of smiles. Though he’d startled me, I was suddenly aware of the fact that he no longer frightened me. My head injury, I later realised, had an effect in some ways like a frontal lobotomy. If I was still convinced that everyone around me was trying to kill me, I became remarkably calm about it.
A calm that, I admit, is deserting me at the moment.
I climbed unsteadily out of bed and, trailed by Thurston, made my way to the lounge. I sat down next to ZakDot. He took a squiz at my forehead, cringed, and draped an arm around my shoulder. ‘Drama queen.’
‘Sex maniac.’
Thurston scuttled off to his room.
‘Where’s Maddie?’ I asked.
‘Out. Oh Miles, you don’t know what you’re missing. You should’ve stayed.’
‘I don’t think I want to know.’ Well, I did, but that was beside the point. ‘Save it for your grandchildren.’
‘But Miles,’ ZakDot protested, ‘you are my grandchildren.’
I reached for the remote and turned up the sound. I was smiling, though.
‘This evening, we’ll look at how theatre companies are handling the chronic problem of over-subscription,’ chirped the ‘Art/Life’ host. ‘Also in the show tonight, our roving arts-supplies reporter comes up with some exciting new pigments. But first, let’s cross over to guest lecturer Cynthia Mopely at the Museum of the Most Cutting-Edge Art in Sydney.’
ZakDot gave my shoulder two quick squeezes. ‘How’s that, Mi? Our Cynthia’s on the tube. As it were.’
Cynthia Mopely, our theory teacher, was a fretful woman who always looked like she’d just ingested a handful of dog biscuits. She liked the phrase ‘as it were’.
The screen filled with an establishing shot of the MMCEA, across the front of which was slung a banner reading ‘This Is Not A Museum’.
‘I’ll score,’ ZakDot volunteered.
Cynthia Mopely stood stiffly next to a brown armchair that, a close-up revealed, was made entirely of TimTams. ‘Today we are looking at Seat of Wisdom by Annesta Fox.’ She cleared her throat. The camera zoomed in on her face. ‘Seat of Wisdom is, as it were, clearly a subverted symbol of the traditional masculine place in the home.’
ZakDot raised one finger.
‘The lace antimacassar flung at once casually and yet, paradoxically, so deliberatively across the back, meanwhile, articulates both the fragility and the universality of the feminine as well as the umbilical debt owed to the ur-mother by the mythic masculine. This magnificent artwork, as it were—’
Another finger shot up.
‘—is nothing less than a visual inquisition into the nexus between chocolate, lust and domesticity—or, seen in another way, the tiny chocolate biscuits represent the somatised re-imagination and the amplification of a paradigmatically dysfunctional childhood. As it were.’
Three fingers.
This was the stuff of which our art education was made, and the kind of crap that filled the television screens every day. I’d never have imagined then that, recalling it now, I’d be overcome with nostalgia.
‘The existence of celebrity art theorists,’ I posited to ZakDot, lowering the sound, ‘must be one of the signs of the end of civilisation.’
ZakDot shook his head. ‘Quite the opposite. Attaining and maintaining celebrity is the true art of the new millennium. It’s a sign that civilisation, having bored itself with such trite entertainments as—’
‘Don’t say painting.’
‘—whatever, can reinvent itself. And civilisation that can reinvent itself is forever young.’
My head hurt. Not just in the spot where it had come into contact with King Arthur, either.
An election ad came on for Clean Slate. It portrayed underwater film-makers getting in the way of jet-skiers, opera singers breaking glasses with their voices and even a few seconds of our old flatmate Joy pulling a bow across an old washing machine. ‘That’s our Minimatic!’ ZakDot cried. ‘I wondered where that went.’
‘Do you really want culture in your life?’ the voice-over intoned. ‘Think on it. Better still, act on it. This Saturday, Vote 1 for Clean Slate.’ The voice speeded up: ‘This political announcement was authorised by Destiny Doppler for the Clean Slate Party.’
‘You know what?’ ZakDot commented. ‘I think I’ll vote for them just to see what happens.’
I put my head in my hands. ‘You do that,’ I said. ‘I’m going to bed.’
Over the next few days, ZakDot appeared to be absorbed in his new project of training himself in the art of celebrity. ‘What are you listening to these days?’ he’d murmur to himself while putting on a CD. ‘Where’s your favourite spot on a Saturday night?’ he’d ponder as he flicked through the latest issue of Pulse. ‘Juliette Lewis lost her virginity to Brad Pitt. Did you?’ he’d ask the mirror while torturing his sideburns into trendy little points.
Every time I looked at Maddie, meanwhile, all I could see was labial jewellery and brown nipples. I kept wondering if she and ZakDot were still doing it. It was hard to tell.
The bruise on my head went from raw umber with tinges of ultramarine to a sap green, settling finally on yellow ochre.
Saturday came and the people of our little country went to the polls. I voted for the Blues, who were a lot like the Greens, except sadder. They had no chance of getting in. It was a sort of protest vote. I didn’t think it made much difference whom I cast my ballot for. The results were always same old, same old. Or so I thought. Boy, was I wrong.
No one anticipated it. But ZakDot wasn’t the only one who voted for Clean Slate. That weekend, Destiny Doppler’s party secured a narrow majority of seats in the House of Reps—a mysterious, but convincing victory. Clean Slate may have had only one plank in its platform, but it was across this plank that they boarded the ship of state.
I tried to figure out what sort of person had voted for Clean Slate. The bank teller who’d blanched at my paint-encrusted fingernails? The teenager I saw at the bus stop wearing a ‘Youth Against Heavy Metal TShirts’ t-shirt? My own mother, who kept all the artwork in the house hidden in the attic? It had to be more than just a few perverse art students, didn’t it?
I didn’t get it. Then again, I was an art school graduate. I hadn’t a clue about what went on in the world.
With hardly a whisper of protest from the demoralised and splintered opposition, Destiny Doppler did everything she said she’d do. She pulled the plug on all funding of the arts. She whacked hefty taxes on corporate sponsorship, and imposed a f
orty-five per cent Creativity Tax that applied to sales of books and art as well as ticket prices for dance performances, concerts and plays. She imposed regulations on internet servers so that only over-eighteens would be able to access art-related sites on the net. She turned the MMCEA over to a sports committee, which, after a small mix-up involving an all-expenses paid trip to Bogota, ended up selling it to a Colombian drug cartel.
And this was all before parliament went into its summer recess. As fresh art school grads, we felt like we were in freefall. The notion of leaving school and joining the ‘real world’ (even I would air-quote that phrase) was scary enough before the changes. Now, it was terrifying.
Though Destiny intended to ban multiculturalism outright, that failed when it turned out no one, even among the experts, was quite sure what it was. But she did dispatch a Rapid Response Team to dim sum restaurants to prevent diners from using chopsticks. There were a few famous cockups like when she tried to confiscate computer jaz drives, thinking they had something to do with music. When she attempted to abolish arts degrees, student demonstrators flooded onto the streets in numbers not seen since the time the little country had intervened in the civil war of an even littler country some thirty-odd years earlier.
Despite this, acts of public protest were few—at first, anyway. For one thing, I believe people were too stunned to act. Or maybe they were simply hypnotised by newly prominent entertainments like sports, which were now on the telly all the time and attracting the kind of big corporate dollars that once went almost exclusively to the arts. It’s possible of course that people were simply relieved that the Troubles were over. From the day that Clean Slate took office, the Troubles just seemed to fade away.
Having united the country around the premise that the arts were ideologically indefensible, economically untenable and morally unsound, Clean Slate exposed art and artists to public derision. ZakDot stopped wearing his I Artists t-shirt after he was approached in all seriousness by businessmen in pin-striped suits who snarled, ‘Us too. Know any? Let’s get ‘em.’