Miles Walker, You're Dead

by Linda Jaivin

  I reached for another pie. ‘I suppose not,’ I shrugged. I refused to be responsible for the banning of meat pies.

  There was a pause. ‘Do you think my opinions are ignorant?’ Her voice had gone very small.

  ‘Frankly, yes.’ It felt like a risky thing to say, but I wasn’t a good enough liar to answer otherwise.

  She nodded, biting her lips. She didn’t stay long, and kept her hands to herself. There was a part of me, not solely restricted to the vicinity of Little Miles, that felt unaccountably sad at this.

  The next morning, I ventured down to the conservatory in an apprehensive mood and hungry, too. There had been no breakfast. When I arrived, Verbero was pacing up and down the room, making it small. ‘When’s this bloody thing gonna be finished?’ he accosted me. ‘It’s almost Chwistmas for Chwist’s sake.’

  It was actually about two brushstrokes away from being finished but I was perverse enough not to want to tell Verbero that. ‘I’m working in oils. They dry slowly.’

  ‘What’s the good of ‘em then? Haven’t they invented something that dries fast yet?’ He was growing splenetic.

  Truth was, I was thinking about Christmas too. My mum was probably wondering whether I’d be coming home. If she’d called the warehouse, they’d have told her—shit, what would they have told her?

  ‘I need to use a phone.’

  ‘There aren’t any,’ he hissed.

  ‘How about your mobile?’

  His hand flew protectively to where it sat clipped on his belt. ‘National emergencies only.’

  ‘Forget it,’ I said, picking up my brush and adding what I realised was probably a final touch. I painted with excruciating slowness, for Verbero’s benefit. I was as keen to finish as he was to see the back of me.

  I sat down in front of my easel and studied my work while waiting for Destiny to arrive. If I say so myself, it was looking good. The expression in her face was fantastic. Her eyes burned with a kind of crazy innocence. Not unlike mine, I was taken aback to realise one night when I looked in the mirror. Except for the corner that I’d left, as was my wont, at the stage of underpainting, the painting was done.

  Destiny entered, looking pleased with herself. ‘Thought we’d have breakfast down here for a change,’ she said. ‘Hope you don’t mind.’ Following her was a little white girl in a smart black dress and tiny Doc Martens boots, a row of tiny silver hoops piercing one ear. On the tray she carried were three mugs of coffee, a pitcher of juice and, instead of the usual Vegemite toast or Weet-Bix, a pile of croissants.

  ‘Croy-sants?’ pronounced Destiny proudly. ‘Thought we’d get some more food culture around here.’

  I smiled wanly, though the croissants did look good. ‘Destiny,’ I said. ‘I have to ask you something.’

  ‘Shoot?’ She spread her butter over the top of the croissant. Verbero, observing her, followed suit.

  ‘What’s with the children?’

  ‘That one,’ she said, as the little girl closed the door behind her, ‘is the child of inner-city cappuccino-sipping elite? The others are the children of ethnic minorities with long cultural traditions? We’ve, uh, I think stolen is too loaded a word? We’ve borrowed ‘em from their families in order to try and raise a new generation of citizens unburdened by culture?’

  I almost choked on my croissant.

  ‘Maybe we were a bit rash? But it’s well-intentioned? What? Don’t you like croy-sants?’ she asked, disappointment in her voice. ‘Why aren’t you eating? Something wrong?’

  What was wrong was me. I’d imagined myself a court painter and found I’d become the court jester. From Last Art Hero to First Art Traitor.

  I desperately needed to see ZakDot and Maddie, to fall to my knees, to beg their forgiveness, to get as far away as possible from Destiny and her stupid, cockamamie ideas. I felt more contaminated than Homebush and twice as toxic.

  I leapt up and started packing up my paints. ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘I see?’ Destiny said coolly, putting a half-eaten croissant back down on her plate. ‘And where would you be going?’

  ‘Back to Sydney.’ I pined for my mother and my friends. ‘I’d like to spend Christmas with my family.’

  Destiny and Verbero exchanged glances. Destiny raised her chin defiantly as she spoke. ‘I’d rather hoped you thought of us as family, Miles?’ The cask riesling soured, turned to vinegar.

  I swallowed.

  She disappeared to that spot behind her eyes. ‘And how are you planning to get there then?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Verbero, leaning back in his chair and pressing some sort of button on the wall that I’d never noticed before. ‘How are you planning to get there?’

  Two things occurred to me. One, that they were not asking in order to organise a flight. Two, that I hadn’t a clue where I was. There was nothing but rainforest for miles around.

  I had about three and a half seconds to consider my options before Wayne burst into the room with an assault weapon. I had a vision of myself as a figure from the volume of Gray’s Anatomy that I’d studied for life drawing classes. I was a collection of puncturable organs and tearable flesh arranged around an easily damaged skeleton, all held in, along with my blood, by a very thin membrane known as skin. Then, for one surreal moment, I felt like laughing—Thurston and his crazy formula. I’d done it!

  To be perfectly honest, I pissed myself. There’s a difference between an art hero and a regular hero and I never claimed to be the latter. Little Miles, correctly assessing the situation for once, tried to make himself as small and inconspicuous as possible, something he ought to have done right from the start around Destiny.

  Her face was a frozen mask of hurt and defiance. ‘I thought you might pull something like this,’ she said. ‘You are, after all, an artist.’

  I shifted my gaze to the barrel of the gun. It seemed safer.

  After what seemed like an interminable pause, she told Wayne to lower his weapon. Disappointment carved itself into his dumb, meaty face.

  ‘You’ll finish the painting?’ she said, her expression impenetrable, her lips quivering. It wasn’t a question.

  ‘It’s finished.’

  Verbero exploded in a harsh laugh. He pointed to the unfinished corner.

  ‘That’s a trademark of my style,’ I explained miserably. I was uncomfortable where piss had run down my leg. ‘It’s a statement on the impossibility of closure.’ They looked dubious but, Destiny signalled for Wayne to leave. Thank you, Cynthia. I’d never appreciated the importance of theory before.

  Verbero’s mobile rang. ‘Yes,’ he barked. He frowned, and then handed the phone to Destiny. She walked out of the room with it.

  When she returned, she seemed more composed. She handed back the phone. ‘Trimalkyo wants to know how everything is going?’ She glanced at me. ‘I said it was going good? He’s invited us to celebrate with him at a party on the harbour on New Year’s Eve? On the Dinkum?”

  ‘You didn’t accept.’ This from Verbero. He looked like she’d told him he’d won a holiday for two to Kosovo.

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Have you lost your mind? It’ll be a fucking love boat full of artists and poofs.’

  Destiny drew herself up.

  I looked from one to the other. I hadn’t a clue what was going on.

  ‘I said we’d go and that’s that?’ She’d been doing some thinking and she’d decided that New Year’s Eve would be a perfect occasion to tell the world just what she’d been thinking about. I didn’t know that then, of course.

  ‘I’ll have to keep me date to the wall all night,’ Verbero grumbled.

  As she gathered her troops and swept out of the room, Destiny turned and offered me a wan smile. ‘You’re invited too, by the way?’

  ‘I hate New Year’s parties,’ I said.

  I had no idea how much I could hate a New Year’s party before tonight.

  ‘You’ll be there?’ were her parting words.


  That night, I tossed and turned, thinking Destiny might barge in at any moment. I dozed off, only to dream about a tap-dancing jester like the one in Barrie Kosky’s King Lear. The taps of my dream-jester beat an insistent tattoo across the stage of my nightmare. Someone was rapping on my window.

  What now?

  I assumed it was Destiny, not wanting to attract Verbero’s attention by knocking on the door. I didn’t think I could take any more of Destiny at that moment. I pretended to be asleep. Then I heard the window open. There was a quiet thud of bare feet on the floorboards and a feral pong like I’d never smelled before. My heart raced. I forced my eyes open and, as they grew accustomed to the dark, I made out the figure of a muscular woman, probably in her forties, her skin as dark as gumnuts and leathery as an old saddle, her hair wild and dreadlocked. She was stark naked except for a roughly woven hemp belt that circled her waist and from which dangled a bowie knife and the bloody legs of a freshly killed boar.

  Primitivism

  ‘Who are you?’ I gasped. Sitting up in bed, I clutched the sheet to my chest, shivering though it wasn’t cold. I’d meant it when I told Thurston that living dangerously wasn’t my style.

  Ignoring my question, the female savage gestured towards the window with her chin.

  ‘Hold on a tick,’ I squeaked. She stared at me while I dressed. I was self-conscious of my pale thin body, wishing she would look away, though somehow unable to ask, as I pulled on my trousers. Little Miles was doing his best to become a vagina. My visitor picked up my rucksack and bunged it over at me.

  Whatever else this was all about, it looked like I was about to escape this lunatic asylum, and I was all for that. I grabbed my clothes from where they lay strewn about the room and threw them into my bag. ‘I need to get my paints,’ I said. She grabbed me by the ear and twisted. Mourning my beautiful new brushes, I followed her out onto the verandah and into the forest. She let go of my ear.

  She moved effortlessly through the bush. Me, I was always stumbling over roots or having to untangle my clothes from where they’d snagged on a branch. The feel of a spider web wrapping itself over my face sent me into a panic. She watched, smiling, as I flailed about pulling it off, slapping away imaginary spiders. Another time, she stopped short and put out a hand to keep me from moving. A two-metre taipan slithered across our path. I decided I hated nature. I missed the bricks and concrete and bitumen of Chippo. I hoped we were headed in that direction.

  Just as I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, when I was so tired and footsore I felt like weeping, the sky began to lighten. She bent down and sniffed the trail. The birds chose this moment to explode into song. I was overcome with a sense of wonder.

  She looked up into the air and made silent calculations. A quarter of an hour later, as dawn’s grey light slowly restored colour to the world, we came into a clearing. I was startled to see another half-dozen naked Amazons, all just as crusty as my new friend. Several were still asleep, or just waking. Two had risen and were making a fire. They grunted at our arrival. My guide untied the boar’s legs from her belt and flung them at her sisters, who caught them and chucked them straight onto the fire. No one said a word.

  Overwhelmed, exhausted and feeling shy and useless, I sat down a little out of the way on a fallen eucalypt. I untied my bootlaces and eased my aching feet out of the hot leather. I peeled off my socks and examined my blisters, which didn’t look half as bad as they felt. All the women were up now, scratching and yawning and stretching, and picking brambles out of their matted hair. There was a small, perfect creek nearby, its water delightfully cold and clear. After they’d washed their faces, I dipped my feet in and splashed my face and neck and chest. I drank from it as well. Maybe I still could be a Romantic painter after all. I stayed at the creek for a while, enjoying the cool trickle of water between my toes.

  Soon the meat was done. I watched as the women pulled out their knives and carved the flesh off the bone, before stuffing huge chunks of it into their mouths. My hunger overcame my revulsion and, seeing them signal me to come over and join them for breakfast, I didn’t hesitate.

  Chewing on the charred flesh, trying to keep my eyes off their tits and vulvas, which their habit of squatting tended alarmingly to expose, I could feel Little Miles stirring. Down, down, I commanded him. He’d gotten us into enough trouble already.

  The women looked at me, and then at each other, licking their lips and wiping their greasy hands on their muscular thighs. ‘Do you mind if I ask who you are and what this is all about?’ My words, slow and awkward, hung in the air like stringy pieces of bark. I started again. ‘My name is Miles. What are your names?’ A great roll of cackling laughter erupted from a kookaburra perched in a nearby tree.

  The leader was crusty as old bread, with a tangled mane of grey-streaked black hair, but almost magnetically attractive, with fierce brown eyes and cheekbones you could—well, cut a slice of meat off a boar’s leg with. ‘No names,’ she ejaculated, tossing back her hair.

  ‘What do you want from me? If you don’t mind my asking.’

  She began to laugh, a big throaty chuckle that grew to a roar and spread like bushfire through the group. For one delirious moment, I imagined that they had kidnapped me for sex. Despite my exhaustion and misgivings—when would any of them have had a bath last, 1970?—Little Miles was priming and stretching himself. Little Miles simply did not share in my high ideals of love, or even understand the concept of a quiet, contemplative life. But not even Little Miles could keep me awake. I have a misty recollection of collapsing sideways onto the ground. The next thing I knew one of the women was prodding me awake.

  My back was sore and I was covered in mosquito bites. A fat leech was hanging off my knee. I was bone tired and couldn’t believe we were on the move again. This time, I had the whole tribe to mock me for my problems with invisible spiders.

  I don’t know how far we travelled. We tended to keep to the woods and avoid the towns, probably a wise choice given my lady friends’ fashion sense. Well past midnight a few nights later, we arrived at a horse stud. I was exhausted. I was also scratched up from crawling through lantana and running through the woods. I was nervous about knocking on the door of a country home that late. The owners, two women, didn’t seem fazed in the least when they opened the door to us, as if it were perfectly normal for a tribe of naked feral women to deliver a bewildered young man to their door in the middle of the night. After we waved goodbye to the No Names, and I’d splashed some water on my face and washed my hands, they made me tea and gave me Christmas leftovers. When did Christmas happen? I felt disoriented. They invited me to crash in the spare room, but I was desperate to get back to Sydney, and the bus down south, they’d already told me, picked up in town in a couple of hours. Their car was broken but we could ride to the bus stop. All the horses on the farm, they explained, were named after artists and writers and musicians. They saddled up Artemisia for me and we trotted together through the dark into town and the bus stop. When the bus came, they waved goodbye to me, Claudel and Kozic stamping their hoofs in the dust.

  I can’t believe that was only the night before last.

  It was a long bus ride. Over fourteen hours. I intended to use the time to work through everything that had happened to me and sort things out and maybe even come up with a plan for dealing with, if not the rest of my life, at least the next day or two. I conked out the moment the bus started moving and awoke to discover we were already pulling into one of the bays outside of Central Station. The old sandstone façade of the station glowed in the soft, early evening light. It was a beautiful sight.

  Slinging my rucksack over my shoulder, I headed for the warehouse. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one going in that direction.

  Verbero’s back. He goes into the toilet. He seems in a jolly mood. ‘Thanks for bwinging this down to Sydney for me, by the way. Mucho appweciated, sucker. Ack ack ack.’

  So it’s true. He’s got the bag. That means he—or rather, his m
en—returned to the warehouse after…But I’ve been through this line of thought. Maddie and ZakDot are on the boat, right? That means they’re okay. That just leaves… Thurston. Oh shit. Loyal Thurston. You can only surprise someone with a broadaxe once.

  I beg Verbero, as best I can, to remove the gag. We don’t have much time left. I begin to panic in earnest. He just laughs. Ack ack ack.

  Smash ing

  As I rounded the corner to our street, I noticed that people were looking at me weirdly. I glanced at my reflection in a shop window. My hair was an Andy Warhol fright wig in red. I had dirt in creases and wrinkles I didn’t know existed. It looked as though I’d put my clothes through the shredder, put them back on and then rolled in the mud.

  I wasn’t going to win any beauty contests, that’s for sure. All I cared about was that I was nearing home sweet home. The street, with its rickety terraces and odd businesses, looked like paradise to me. Even the sign pointing the way to The Church of Our Princess Diana evoked a wee pang of nostalgia.

  ‘Miles! That you?’ I turned to see ZakDot coming up just behind me. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ he exclaimed, looking me up and down. ‘Where have you been? And what have you “done”? Even the police are looking for you.’ He stepped back and studied my appearance. ‘I’d say you looked shocking, except the latest issue of Pulse said that “shocking” was the new word for “cool”, “cool” apparently being “out” again.’ ZakDot was air-quoting so fast his fingers were a blur.

  I suddenly realised what he’d just said. ‘What do you mean, the police have been asking about me?’ I asked. I felt guilty enough, but I wasn’t sure that any of my various crimes were worthy of the attention of Sydney’s finest. By now, we were climbing the stairs together. ZakDot’s hand was on my shoulder, though he was keeping a space between us. I thought it was because he didn’t want to dirty his clothes, but what he said next made me wonder if he didn’t suspect I was soiled in some deeper sense.