by Linda Jaivin
Thinking back on that now, my hair stands on end. Earlier, when Verbero told me that the party’s theme was Roman decadence, it hadn’t clicked. Didn’t he say that Trimalkyo was dressed as Nero? Had Trimalkyo always intended to fiddle while Rome, or at least the Dinkum, burned?
One afternoon, she dismissed the feds.
‘What’d you do that for?’ Verbero accused. ‘There are secuwity issues, you know. Stop gawping,’ he added for my benefit. ‘You’re one of ‘em.’
‘Artists are sooo dangerous,’ I mocked him. ‘I’m surprised you’re not wearing a Situationist-proof vest.’ He raised his fist.
‘V?’ She put a hand on his arm. I felt unreasonably jealous. ‘Go devise a taxation policy or something.’ Verbero narrowed his eyes at me.
Once we were alone, she surprised me by asking, ‘What do you think about culture, Miles?’
‘What do you mean?’ I was wary of a trap. ‘Well, like, is it important to people?’
‘I think so. It’s important to me, anyway.’
She beckoned me over and patted the cushions of the sofa. ‘Please explain?’ I recalled another woman politician who had used those words. I recoiled.
‘I really want to know? Please?’
‘All right.’ I wiped my hands on my trousers and sat on the sofa, not too close to Destiny but not too far away either. I smiled uncertainly at her. She smiled uncertainly back. Ringing a bell, she got a little Aboriginal girl to get us some G&Ts.
Maybe it was the languid environment, maybe the isolation, maybe just the sheer absurdity of it all. Sitting cross-legged on the end of the yellow sofa, sipping from a tall glass, faced with this eager listener who also happened to be our prime minister, it all poured out. I told Destiny how I felt creativity was at the very heart and soul of what it meant to be human, how culture was humanity’s legacy to itself. How great art and literature and dance and music expanded the boundaries of our minds and excited our senses. I talked to her about all the artists who have had an influence on me, from Caravaggio to Frida Kahlo and Odd Nerdrum and Jenny Saville, and about other artists whose work I appreciate even though it’s quite different from my own, like Howard Arkley and Andy Goldsworthy.
‘Those blokes which you talk about? I ain’t heard of most of ‘em?’ she remarked dubiously.
‘That’s all right,’ I retorted. ‘They’re not all blokes. And most of them haven’t heard of you either.’
Her face darkened. Now I’d done it; I’d gone too far. She reached out and, for one tense moment, I expected her to slap me. Instead, she stroked my hair; I could feel her long nails scratching my scalp. Goose bumps rose on my legs and arms. ‘Fair enough, too?’ she chuckled. ‘You know, Miles, you’re funny? And you’re smart? I like you?’
‘I’d better get back to it,’ I mumbled, my throat suddenly dry. I jumped up and raced back to the safe place behind my easel, blushing, mixing pigments furiously.
This became our new routine. Every day, after a few hours of painting, she’d shut the others out and we’d talk. Or rather, I’d talk, and she’d listen. She was a good listener. I was flattered. No one had ever listened to me with such attention before.
She’d still occasionally come out with the most outrageous statements. ‘You know the Sixteenth Chapel?’ she asked once. ‘In, like, overseas? With those paintings all over the ceiling?’
I nodded. She must have meant the Sistine Chapel. I tried not to smile.
‘That’s one of those things about art I don’t get? No one would’ve looked up if it weren’t for the paintings by Michael, Michael…’
‘…angelo?’ I prompted.
‘Yeah, Angelo. If it weren’t for Angelo, everyone would look straight ahead and see where they’re going? Art makes you look in different directions than you would normally? And sometimes it’s impractical? I mean, if everyone’s looking up? And no one’s looking where they’re going? They bump into each other?’
She had a point. ‘I’ll buy that,’ I said.
‘You can’t buy it? It’s just an opinion?’
Another week or so and I began to think that I had never been anywhere else. Sometimes, sitting on my verandah at night, I tried to regain my perspective on things. To remember how outraged we all were when Destiny got into power. How we’d laughed at her. My life in Sydney became as distant as the vanishing point in an exercise in perspective.
The portrait was coming along well. I was enjoying myself. I love the process of painting, the intoxicating smells, the small whispers of the brush against the canvas, the way a picture grows and blooms before your eyes. That’s what it was all really about, anyway, wasn’t it? I mean, who cares who the Mona Lisa was, anyway? The point is, she and Leonardo will both live forever.
Back in my room, at night, I could still detect a faint citrusy scent.
I suppose it was inevitable.
‘Can I come in?’ She was in by the time she asked. It was late, and I was already in bed, lights off, trying to conjure up Grevillea Bent’s ankles. I sat up, pulling the bed sheets up to my neck, hoping she hadn’t noticed what I was doing. Little Miles was on full alert. I brought my knees up to my chest, hoping the bugger would calm down, but he seemed happily intrigued by this unexpected visit.
To my alarm, Destiny sat down on the edge of the bed. I reached over to turn on the bedside lamp, but she stayed my hand with her own. Her skin looked luminescent in the moonlight. I realised with a jolt that she was wearing nothing but a silk nightie.
From the moment I realised it was Destiny knocking on my door, I knew it had the word ‘wrong’ written all over it. Not just ‘wrong’, either. ‘Disastrous’ and ‘big trouble’ were also etched in giant, flashing neon letters. Unfortunately, unlike his purported master, Little Miles was functionally illiterate. Little Miles was starved for attention. Little Miles had yearned to play with ZakDot and Maddie the night of the piercing lock, and with ZakDot when I got home from Oscar’s that time, and with Sativa and Grevillea and, all right, I admit it, Lynda and Julia and about two per cent of the male and fifty per cent of the female population the rest of the time. And I’d always stopped him. Well, Little Miles was not going to be stopped this time. Little Miles barrelled straight past all the warning signs and saw the only word he recognised: S-E-X. Little Miles, if no judge of character, had an excellent eye for opportunity.
And when the prime minister is pulling her nightie off right in front of you, and she pauses with her hands over her head, the nightie held as though binding her wrists together, and you can see the soft curves of her flesh and the rounded swell of her breasts and the soft hint of hair under her arms and the glistening between her thighs, and her big brown eyes are fixed on you with a look of total adoration, well, it’s some sort of opportunity.
And when she lifts the mosquito netting and slips inside, and takes that nightie and puts it behind your neck and pulls your face up to hers and teases the tips of your eyelashes with her tongue and nibbles on your cheeks and when you find that your hands are roaming over her breasts and the smooth skin of her stomach and tickling their way through the curly hairs of her pubis, and she shifts her position to open her thighs wider and you slide your fingers over the slippery folds of her labia and into her warm wet depths and she is reaching for your erect cock with first her hand and then her mouth, and her hair cascades over your thighs, well, by then, it’s an opportunity you are not going to pass up.
‘You know,’ she said in a little voice as I urged her ankles up over my shoulders, ‘I’ve never had an organism?’
I stopped thrusting.
‘My teacher at art school? The bloke which I told you about? He said that art is inseparable from desire? I reckon I’ve been a bit suspicious of desire ever since?’ Looking down at her, I noticed her eyes had gone sad. Little Miles did not like the idea of either intellectual exchange or emotional drama at this point. He called time out.
Although I didn’t actually have a lot of sexual experience, I had given the sub
ject of sex a lot of thought over the years. It was a matter of pride to go where no man—apparently, in this case—had gone before. But when I lowered my head to her mound, she squirmed so violently and I had to bounce around so much to keep up with her moving target that the bed gave way and we tumbled with a crash to the floor, dragging the bed sheets and the mosquito netting after us. Within seconds, there was a rap on the door.
‘Walker. Fuck are you doing in there?’
I froze at the sound of Verbero’s voice. I was fucking the prime minister. I was certifiably insane. Outside, insects shrieked, filling the silence.
Destiny looked at me, eyes wide, finger to her lips. I took a deep breath. ‘Nothing. Just, uh, rearranging some furniture.’
‘Wee-a-wanging furniture? In the middle of the night?’
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
There was no answer. After a while, I heard his footsteps recede down the hall and his door close. It was the sensible time to call a halt to the whole thing, to say that it was all a terrible mistake and that we should just forget it ever happened. ‘Now then,’ I whispered. ‘Where were we?’
Very quietly, we tugged the mattress all the way down onto the floor. She lay back and opened her legs. I pinned her hands by her sides, and pressed down on her legs with my body to keep her still. As she bit her lips to keep from moaning, I fattened my tongue against her swollen vulva, licking her juices, sucking on her clit. Destiny turned out to be immune neither to desire nor its fulfilment. There was hope yet for art, I thought to myself.
I’d be a liar if I said it wasn’t fun. It was an incredible thrill to fuck Destiny and help her achieve her first ‘organism’. And her second and third. Afterwards, I was as floppy as a Claes Oldenburg. Even as I lay there, deliquescent, one part of my brain, not the part of which I’m most proud, mind you, was standing up and hooting, ‘Cor, Miles, you got your leg over the prime bloody minister!’
What happened next helped me regain my sense of perspective.
The thing is
‘The thing is,’ she said, as she lay with her head on my chest, her hair tickling my armpits, ‘I don’t get why youse have to get so carried away, right?’
I was just on the verge of dozing off. The tone of her voice alarmed me. ‘Sorry?’ I said sleepily, raising my heavy head to look at her. ‘Who’re you talking about?’
‘You know. Artists, writers, musicians?’ she said. ‘If I’m looking at a picture of a fish, right? I want it to look like a picture of a fish? Not some explosion in an Eye-tie delicatessen? And, like, poetry? I don’t get it. I mean, me mum always told me, if you’re gonna say something, say it straight? Say it so it can be understood, right?’
I was treated to a torrent of opinion on culture and the arts and the people who practised them that ranged from offensive to bizarre and back to offensive again. The screams of the barking owl sounded sweet by comparison. Had I flattered myself that my conversations with her had made some difference to her way of thinking? Was I so needy for sex that I didn’t care?
I now know that, if I’d paid more attention, I’d have realised she was testing not me but herself. I couldn’t hear it at the time. I felt ill. I thought guiltily of ZakDot and Maddie and the others, fighting the righteous fight while I was sleeping with the enemy. How could I? I wished I was able to place the blame entirely on Little Miles.
‘Look, Destiny,’ I gulped, untangling myself from her and snaking toward the edge of the mattress. ‘This isn’t going to work.’
‘Why not?’ She suddenly looked older, tired, mean. She squinted at me and faint lines crawled down from the corners of her mouth.
How could I explain? ‘No woman can compete with art for my devotion.’ Jesus, I was a git. ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled, grabbing a towel and rushing into the bathroom. I barred the door and leaned against it for a moment, catching my breath. Then I leapt into the shower and scrubbed myself with a facecloth till my skin was raw. I even shampooed my hair, which was so surprised at being washed twice in one season that it stood up and practically applauded. When I emerged, she’d gone.
The sheets smelled of sex. It took me ages to fall asleep.
I woke up alone on the mattress on the floor, wretched, conflicted. I couldn’t bear the thought of going to the conservatory. I inspected the bed frame and discovered that we hadn’t actually broken the slats, just displaced them, so I reconstructed the bed and then crawled into it. I found a pale blue ribbon on my pillow. It was from Destiny’s nightie. I wound it around my finger, over and over, trying to come up with a credible story for Verbero who, I knew, would be knocking on the door any moment now.
As he did.
From the way he stood there grinding his teeth and twisting his rings around his fingers I could see he was coked off his tits as usual. But there was something more going on. He was vibrating like one of Len Lye’s kinetic sculptures.
‘Fuck are you doing?’ he demanded as I cowered under the sheet, sweating convincingly. ‘You’re supposed to be down there.’
‘I think I’m coming down with a wog,’ I mumbled, wiping my forehead with the back of my hand and trying to raise a cough to illustrate the point.
Verbero studied me, hostility written all over his features. ‘You taking the piss?’ he asked. He sniffed, and his sinuses rearranged themselves loudly and wetly.
I shook my head.
‘Get one thing stwaight, Walker,’ he rasped. ‘You’re here to paint Destiny’s poor twit. That’s it. Full stop.’
‘Yeah, well, I don’t feel well,’ I countered. ‘I’m taking a sickie.’
‘You felt well enough last night,’ he shot back.
Guilt and fear wrapped themselves around my throat and stomach like an installation by Christo. ‘What are you talking about?’ I croaked, now feeling genuinely sick. It struck me that I might have taken Verbero’s place in Destiny’s bed. I didn’t want to consider the implications of that.
‘Get your clothes on, you fucken pwick. We’ll expect you down there in five.’ He looked as though he wanted to say something else, but decided against it. He left, slamming the door behind him. I was shocked. This was the first time he’d called me a ‘pwick’. Obviously, it wouldn’t be the last.
I considered my options. They were not many. When I got down there, Destiny was already seated on the sofa. Searching her face for some sign of emotion, I found none. The ideal resolution would be for me just to get on with it, finish the painting and get the fuck out of there. I was nearly done anyway. No one would ever have to know what had happened, it would never happen again and that would be that.
It seemed that these were her thoughts as well, for after lunch she didn’t dismiss the others as usual. An hour or so into the afternoon sitting, she said she felt like a kip and told me to take the rest of the afternoon off.
It was hot, and I wished, not for the first time, that there was a pool in the yard. A nice, safe, chlorinated, fauna-free pool. In the forest there was that creek, which, if you followed it far enough, led to a beautiful, refreshingly cold watering hole, but you had to take salt or matches for the leeches, and the spiders and snakes made me nervous, even when I didn’t see any. Especially when I didn’t see any. Once a wallaby hopped out of the bush and nearly scared me senseless. I took a walk to the landing strip and looked up, wishing for aeroplanes.
I felt fragmented, strung out: Braque meets Giacometti.
I missed my mum and ZakDot and Maddie and even Thurston. I wondered, pathetically, if Grevillea Bent ever thought of me.
There were no aeroplanes. I returned to the house. Climbing the stairs, I noticed that the door to my room was ajar, which was funny, as I always closed it when I was out. Trying not to make a sound, I crept up to the doorway. Verbero was crouching in the corner where my bag was. He jumped up when he heard me coming.
‘What’s going on?’ I accused.
‘Thought I saw a mouse,’ he mumbled, crabbing sideways out of the room.
Yeah, and I knew
I saw a rat. Well, if he were looking for anything, the joke was on him. My bag was empty. My total assets came to about twenty-five dollars, and that was stashed in the pocket of my cardie, which hung uselessly in the closet—trust me to take a cardigan to Queensland in the summer. I checked the cardie. The money was all there. It was depressing to think that, on top of everything else, Verbero was trying to steal from me. I closed the door and flopped down on the bed, blue as Yves Klein. Rolling over, I listened to my stomach growl. I’d been ostentatiously off my food all day, as part of my sick act. Now I regretted it. I could grab something from the kitchen, but I didn’t want to leave my room.
There was a rap on the door.
I held my breath.
The door creaked open. I sat up.
‘Destiny. I don’t think this is a good…’
‘Let’s not talk about it now?’ Plopping down next to me, she reached out to stroke my hair. I wriggled away. She looked hurt. ‘I know what they say about me, you know?’ she said quietly.
‘What’s that?’
‘That I’m a philistine?’
‘Now why would they say that?’
‘I don’t know?’ she replied. ‘I mean, I’ve never even been to the Middle East?’
I coughed.
‘You really aren’t feeling well, are you?’ She frowned. ‘Bloody Verbero? He insisted you were wagging, but I didn’t believe him? I know what you need?’ she said decisively, rose and walked out of the room.
A few minutes later, she came back in followed by a little Indonesian girl holding a tray with two tins of Fourex and a pile of steaming pies with tomato sauce.
‘This’ll set you right?’ She cracked one of the tinnies for herself. ‘That’s what always fixed up me dad when he was crook?’
I smiled. ‘Yum. Just what the doctor ordered.’ I cracked the other tinny, and tapped it against hers.
As I smothered a pie with sauce, I remarked, ‘Ah, the food culture of our country at its best.’
She regarded me with disbelief. ‘What d’ya mean? How can this be culture?’ She looked mistrustfully at her pie. ‘I mean, it’s just good Strayun tucker? Nothing to do with culture?’