by Linda Jaivin
When the Troubles began, Destiny, who’d had a lot of time alone to think about things, felt called to public life. From the start, she made her position clear. Culture had to go. Art was for poofs and malcontents and Aborigines. If they didn’t like it, they could go back to where they came from.
Having said—along with so many other people over the years that gallery walls echoed with the words—‘a child could paint that’, she now faced her moment of truth. She ordered Verbero to buy her materials. He was surprised to discover the art-supplies shops had been doing a roaring trade ever since Clean Slate’s policies had made art the single most fashionable thing to do for rebellious youth. And all youth were rebellious. Besides, they didn’t have anything more pressing to do. They were youth.
He came back minus the prime ministerial petty cash and with a great swag of brushes and paints and pens and inks, pastels and charcoals and sketch pads and putty rubbers and stretchers and canvas, which he dumped on her desk. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ he snarled.
Destiny informed her private secretary, a doleful woman whose husband had been decapitated by a large, badly anchored public sculpture that fell over in a windstorm, that she was not to be disturbed except in the case of national emergency.
There was little chance of national emergency. Now that the Troubles were over, our country was rarely disturbed by emergencies of any kind. In other lands, religious groups that faced east when they prayed declared holy wars on groups that faced west. Wealthy terrorists ran around with bombs in their Louis Vuitton bags and poor terrorists cut off the ears of hostages with old butter knives. As the headquarters of strange new cults went up in flames, the heat caused the seeds of even more nutty theologies to germinate. The new Christian inquisition burnt down all the libraries in the American Bible Belt and people calling themselves ‘pro-lifers’ committed a murder a day. The rich got richer and went out with supermodels and the poor got poorer and went out with mudslides and floods and tidal waves.
The people of the little country that was a big island, meanwhile, just went out to dinner.
Behind closed doors, Destiny propped up her best makeup mirror from home on the big, jarrah-wood desk. With occasional glimpses up at Cap d’Antibes, she studied herself for a long while. Then she sketched and drew and painted, with brushes and paints and pens and inks and pastels and charcoals, on sketchpads and canvas. She napped on the lurid orange sofa and had her meals delivered to the private dining room adjoining the reception area of her office. She ate at a long table fashioned from blackheart sassafras with a marble centre. While eating her solitary meals, she frequently paused, fork halfway to her mouth, in order to stare at her even, plain features in the mirrors on either end of the room.
After ten days, she touched up her make-up and her hair, re-applied her lipstick and straightened her clothes. She threw all of her efforts, along with the brushes and paints and pens and inks and sketchpads and charcoals and putty rubbers and stretchers and canvas into the bin. She lit a match.
Toxic smoke billowed out, triggering the alarms. All twelve thousand speakers of the public address system in the parliament building crackled into life and bright red fire engines raced up the bright green hill towards the bright white building. Destiny, meanwhile, strode with a calm sense of purpose into Verbero’s office, where she found him bending over a small mirror, razor blade in hand, oblivious to the general commotion. She told him to get ready to fly to Sydney that night. First, she instructed him, he was to inform the media that she was going to make a very important announcement that evening. She wanted it televised live to the nation.
Painting is dead
At the time, I didn’t know any more about this than anyone else, which is to say, I knew jackshit. All I knew was, following Destiny’s ‘Fifty Days Reform’ and the birth of the underground, the world seemed to me a more benign place. Occasionally, lying in bed trying to concentrate on Ovid or Dante, I’d still fantasise about ways of doing myself in. Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I might become collateral damage in a political assassination, the victim of what I believe is called ‘friendly fire’.
I finished my ‘Paranoia’ series—well, as much as I finished anything. I was ready to move on. The afternoon preceding Destiny’s address to the nation, I was doing a pastel sketch of Thurston. The sketch was a study for a group portrait paying homage to Gustave Courbet’s Interior of My Studio, A Real Allegory Summing up Seven Years of My Life as an Artist. Mine would be called Interior of My Warehouse, A Real Allegory Summing up Three Years at Art School and One in the Underground.
ZakDot and Maddie were hanging around, waiting for their turns to pose. ZakDot was sprawled on the beanbag chair flipping through an old copy of Art + Connections and Maddie was doing biceps curls with a pair of barbells in the doorway. She was wearing a tight grey Bonds t-shirt and trackies. I snuck glances at the perspiration marks spreading out from her armpits towards the swell of her beautiful breasts. As the weather warmed up, Maddie had taken to hanging out in greater and greater degrees of undress.
Cashie was going to be in the painting as well. She’d commissioned it, in fact. Thank God for Cashie. I needed the money.
Shortly before Clean Slate came into power, I’d got myself sacked from Lynda Tangent’s Triangle Factory. I’m not sure if it was a response to the king’s yellow scare or a sign of my general lack of balance, but one evening I just flipped. I laid a fat, expressionistic slash of defiance across the unpainterly surface of the triangle I was working on, and then on every triangle in the room. Lynda fired me, but you know what? The critics loved them. Crapped on and on about ‘cryptoconceptual breakthroughs’.
Even Cynthia Mopely, who was working on a critical biography of Lynda, called to thank me. ‘I’ve almost run out of philosophical references and symbolic interpretations and even synonyms for the number three, as it were,’ she confided. Breathing into the phone, she whispered, ‘I had a dream the other night in which Lynda unveiled a new series of paintings featuring rhomboids. In it, I rushed forward and bit one of them. When I woke up, there were saliva stains on my pillow. I think I was just anxious to get my teeth into something new. As it were.’
Every piece sold, by the way. Lynda apologised for sacking me and asked me to come back to work, but then Clean Slate got into power and that was that.
I went on the dole. But Clean Slate put into effect its strict policy of cutting off benefits for anyone caught using his or her time making art. My case manager at JobLess, the government agency overseeing unemployment benefits, was a man with small pink eyes like a bull terrier and a tired mouth. At my last meeting with him, I caught him staring at my hands, which, I realised too late, were covered in paint.
If they cut me off, I’d be fucked. Three years at art school doesn’t even qualify you to drive a forklift. Commissions were more my style. Well, I’d always believed that, anyway. This group portrait was actually my first.
‘How much longer do you want me to hold this pose?’ Thurston asked meekly.
I’d been daydreaming.
‘It’s just that, uh, it’s a wee bit hot in this gear.’ His cheeks had coloured bright pink, beads of sweat clung to his brow and he looked like he was about to pass out. It was a hot day for a suit of armour. ‘Of course,’ he hastened to add, ‘I’ll stand here as long as you need me to.’
‘Oh, sorry, Thurston,’ I said. ‘Take a break. I’ll get Maddie to pose for a while—if that’s okay with you, Maddie.’
Maddie sat on a stool, long legs angled. She held up her arms and flexed her muscles.
The door was open and Cashie called out from the foyer in that singsong voice of hers, which betrayed her not-so-distant past as a real-estate saleswoman from one of those suburbs where lattes come in tall glass mugs with handles. ‘Halloo?’ she trilled. ‘Ha—loo—oo! I have arrivée!’ Cashie liked to throw in a bit of French.
‘Halloo!’ ZakDot trilled back.
‘Hi there dudes,’
she greeted, waving a bottle of gin. In her other hand was a bag with tonic and limes.
She moved about the studio, bussing the air a few centimetres off everyone’s cheeks. You could see Maddie just tolerated the affection, and only because Cashie had become a ‘comrade’. Examining my sketches, Cashie clapped her hands with delight, sending her bangles jingling down her arms.
Returning with a clutch of glasses, ZakDot made us all G&Ts and put on the Verve’s Urban Hymns. It was a cosy scene. I liked to think, at times like that, that we lived in a world that was beautiful and bright and insulated from the rest of society. I didn’t like to dwell on the fact that police were storming the clubs and underground galleries, or stories like that of the bestselling novelist who had literally to eat her words when the cultural vice squad came pounding on her door.
That day, I was feeling particularly buoyant. After all, I was the focus of attention, the master, the hub of our little social axis, the Artist, the Hero. And no one, to the best of my knowledge, was trying to kill me. By the end of the night, I would be amazed that no one had succeeded in killing me, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
‘Oi, guys.’ Julia popped her head in the studio. Julia was a photographer in her early thirties. She lived downstairs. Julia was easy on the eyes, a petite little thing with olive skin, long dark hair and a quirky line in op shop clothing. She shared her warehouse space with Gabe and a poet who emoted at length about her neuroses to audiences that demonstrated their appreciation by taking off their sandals and slapping them against the tables. ‘Doppler’s making some big announcement in fifteen minutes,’ Julia informed us. ‘Come to my place and watch it on my TV if you like.’
Julia sold a lot of photos to magazines and owned the best television set in the building. One of those big screen jobs.
I never watched television anymore. Clean Slate had introduced changes to media ownership laws which allowed a wealthy and reclusive dwarf to buy all the newspapers and television networks. He forbade coverage of anything that smacked of culture, even yoghurt. Pulling all the arts programs, he replaced them with shows like ‘Most Appalling Home Videos’, and ‘Morons Say the Stupidest Things’. The McNews reached depths of irrelevance, superficiality and bad taste to which previous owners could only have aspired. Neither of the state broadcasters ran any news programs at all; their budgets had been slashed to the point where they could broadcast only Slovenian comedies and second-run New Zealand police dramas.
‘Boring,’ I said without looking up. Julia was spoiling my tableau.
‘She is the prime minister,’ Julia insisted.
‘Blow the bitch up,’ muttered Maddie, with a gorgeous snarl. Our own Enyo, goddess of war. Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons.
‘Look, suit yourselves,’ Julia replied, sounding hurt. ‘I just thought I’d tell you guys. If you don’t want to come, that’s cool.’
Now I felt bad. Julia was a nice chick. Her heart was in the right place, even if her other bits frequently went astray—most recently with ZakDot. He’d been spending a lot of time down at her place. He said her fridge always had stuff like smoked trout and the kind of pasta that came in sealed pouches in the refrigerator section of the supermarket.
ZakDot was holding Julia’s hand and swinging it in a big arc. ‘Uh, I might go along to Jules’ place, Mi, if you don’t mind. Could I model for you some other time?’
I shrugged. ‘Whatever.’ I looked at Maddie and was about to make a stroke on the paper when she made a ‘T’ with her hands. Time out.
‘I’d better see this, Miles,’ she said. ‘Could be important.’
I looked at Cashie. She screwed up her face apologetically. ‘Fine, fine, fine,’ I said, ‘just piss off, everyone. Don’t mind me. I’m just trying to create art.’ I looked for my packet of Drum, fearing even it had deserted me.
‘Well, Art Hero, you’re invited too, you know.’ I wished ZakDot wouldn’t call me that in front of other people. My mood, so happy just moments earlier, grew blacker than a gallery full of Ad Reinhardts.
‘Be there or be square,’ piped up a voice from behind Julia. It was Gabe. ‘Hey, Miles. How’s it hanging?’ Everyone always asked painters that. It was supposed to be funny.
‘Woof,’ I replied.
Gabe blushed. ‘Fuck off.’
I looked at Thurston. ‘Feel free,’ I said, making a shooing motion with my hands. ‘Everyone else is abandoning me.’
‘I’ll stick with you, Miles,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I want to,’ he replied, a touch too ardently.
I sighed. ‘All right, all right,’ I said, putting down my chalk.
We all quickly freshened our G&Ts. I made mine a double. Just as we were about to leave the warehouse, this girl I’d never seen before marched in, a swag over one shoulder. She was chewing on what appeared to be a slab of raw meat. A thin trail of blood dribbled down her chin. She dabbed at the blood with a finger and sucked it with the inborn intensity of really skinny people. Then she threw the swag down on the floor and exchanged high fives with Maddie.
‘Guys,’ Maddie said, ‘Sativa. My cousin. She’s from Queensland.’
‘Oh, really,’ we all exhaled. Queensland was a state in the north-east of the little country. Since Clean Slate came into power, our city had received a lot of refugees from Queensland, even more than usual. An almost mythical land of golden beaches and giant pineapples, Queensland had been an intermittently difficult place for artists even before the Troubles. Destiny Doppler had grown up in a small town out west, but, as she put it, ‘I consider the north-east my spirchal home?’
Sativa had the same flat, bored voice as her cousin. It was weird. Enthusiasm and vivacity were clearly more desirable traits in a friend or, you’d think, a girlfriend, but there was something about languor and ennui and dangerous eccentricity that I was having trouble getting past. Besides, so far as I was concerned, any potential diversification of the gene pool was tantamount to an incitement.
As we ambled down to Julia’s warehouse, our voices ringing in the stairwell, I manoeuvred my way to Sativa’s side. ‘So, what do you do?’ she asked in a tone of voice that implied she couldn’t care less whether I answered the question.
‘I’m a painter.’ I smiled in my most debonair fashion. I could see myself having a short-lived, passionate but ultimately tragic affair with Sativa. You know, the sort that would suffer from my greater devotion to art, but would entail a lot of vigorous sex and leave us both exhausted and full of bittersweet memories.
‘Oh God,’ she said, shaking her head in disbelief, as if I’d told her I liked to pick up hitchhikers near the Belanglo State Forest and then bury them. ‘But, like, conventional two-dimensionality is so over.’ She bore into me with her cat-green eyes. ‘Know where I can get a bowl of sugar?’ she asked. ‘I’m ready for dessert.’
Life was so fucking difficult.
Julia’s place was stocked with the usual artsy mix of scavenged furniture, old signboards, industrial spools and twister mats. A couple of claw-toed bathtubs filled with pillows served as lounges. There were already lots of people there, all twittering excitedly. I even recognised a handful of famous artists, including Immense Miller and Tiny Harmonious, who were chatting with one of Julia’s friends, a chick called Philippa who apparently had written some scandalous novel a few years ago under a pen name. Sativa disappeared into the crowd.
A performance artist approached Thurston and me, holding a glass of milk. Pulling a breast out of her shirt, she dipped it in the milk. ‘Do you think I’m outrageous?’ she asked.
Thurston looked as embarrassed as I felt. ‘Uh, Miles, do you mind if I go back upstairs?’ He grimaced apologetically. ‘I’ve got to be up at graking.’
As he shuffled off, the performance artist smirked. I felt intensely self-conscious. The scene brought me straight back to the first day of art school. I’d so looked forward to that day. Moving away from the south coast, I expected to find my tr
ue community in Sydney. Instead, I felt like a total hick. The other students all seemed so sophisticated and fashionable with their pink and silver dreadlocks, funky hairclips and retro frocks—and that was just the boys. Well, that was ZakDot, actually.
It took me a while to realise that, for most of them, their first-day costumes would come to represent the pinnacle of their artistic careers. Shyly, I followed the assembly into the auditorium for the welcoming speech by the head of school. He told us that he didn’t buy into the ‘cult of technique’ and that individual genius was an outmoded concept. He assured us that he would not put the values of the academy in the way of our ‘creative fulfilment’.
I was outraged. I’d always known that alienation was a typical response of the artist to his environment, but it hadn’t occurred to me that art school would be the most alienating environment of all.
Now I relived that feeling. What the fuck was I doing there anyway? Did Leonardo da Vinci rush out of his studio every time the Duke of Milan handed down some new decree?
I turned and was about to head for the door when a strong little hand grabbed me by the waistband of my jeans and pulled me back and into one of the cushiony bathtubs. Sativa. We were thigh and thigh. Maybe it was true love after all. I decided to stay.
She offered me a spoonful of sugar. I shook my head. It suddenly occurred to me that I was a little tipsy from all that gin.
Destiny came on the tube. She was wearing a simple brown frock the same colour as her hair, which was pinned up. It accentuated her pretty rounded shoulders, small but firm breasts and long, pear-like body. She was in good nick for someone her age. She looked into the camera and smiled. I don’t think I’d ever seen her smile before. Her cheeks dimpled. When she began to speak, some people hissed. Others shushed. Everyone leaned towards the television, as if a few inches could make whatever she was about to say more audible, if not comprehensible.