Benjamin, sitting at the table eating lunch, raised an eyebrow of his own over his sandwich in greeting. He didn’t say it, but I got the impression his opinion of Elias’ ‘performance art’ was the same as mine.
It was strange how familiar the kitchen had already become to me. We pulled up chairs while Aurora fussed over coffee and sandwiches. Elias had a whole bunch of questions scribbled down in neat, looping handwriting. He started at the top.
‘Who were my mum’s friends? Can you give us a list so we can ask them if they’ve heard from her?’
Aurora put a mug of coffee down in front of me. I found myself breathing it in and did a double take. When did I start actually liking coffee? Before I’d only been drinking it to be polite.
‘Friends, let me see…There’s that Emma girl, she was probably her best friend in high school. And the other one—was it Olivia? Livvy, I think they called her. And the Asian one. Mai-Lin, I think. Lin-Mai? Something Asian like that.’
I cringed at the casual racism. Elias didn’t seem to notice. He was scribbling down the names. ‘Anyone else?’
‘There were others in the group, but I think they were her closest friends. I don’t know how many she kept in touch with, though.’ A pause. ‘Yvonne, her cousin, I suppose. My brother’s daughter—Joseph’s sister, you know. She’s younger than Sephora—two years, I think?—but they always kept in touch.’ A coffee mug placed in front of Elias. ‘Now Yvonne, she’s a lovely girl! I’m biased, of course. She was always a bit calmer than Seph. One of those straight-as-a-line types. Sephora was a bit of a wild child.’
The familiar dull throb started between my eyes as Aurora rambled. I knew Elias had more questions but he seemed happy to let Aurora bang on. I was less patient.
‘Did she have any dodgy connections?’ I asked. ‘Anyone who might have been connected to drugs?’
‘Drugs?’ Surprise. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ A moment’s thought. ‘I dare say there was some of that going on, but I didn’t know about it. Nobody in particular springs to mind.’
I pressed on. ‘Did she ever mention any sort of business deal with anyone? Like, she had some get-rich-quick scheme?’
A humph from Benjamin. He’d finished his sandwich. Aurora swept in and dropped a piece of chocolate slice onto his plate. Cherry Ripe slice, maybe. My stomach rumbled.
‘Oh, no. Nothing like that. Well, I mean, she was going to start a hairdressing business for a while. But that was before she did her pharmacy training and started working there. And she always bought Lotto tickets. Is that what you mean?’
I resisted the urge to rub my forehead. Looking at Benjamin, I could almost see a permanent headache hanging over him and felt a pang of empathy.
I looked directly at him. ‘Did she ever say anything to you, during your phone calls?’
He shook his head.
‘What about a boyfriend?’ Elias asked. He looked from Benjamin to Aurora and back again, an open invitation to respond. But it was Aurora who answered, putting plates down in front of me and Elias. Sandwiches—white bread, Mum would have had a fit—piled high, sprouts and grated carrot falling out everywhere. It was the only proper meal I was going to get all day, so I dug in.
‘Nobody she seemed serious about. I mean, obviously, she was head over heels with all of them, but then a few weeks later it would be over, and then another few weeks and she’d be onto the next one…Nothing that lasted, far as I know. She was living out of home at that point, of course, so we weren’t keeping close tabs on her. But she’d come over for dinner a lot. She didn’t like cooking.’
I started in on my sandwich while Elias asked a few more questions. None of the answers was especially helpful but the sandwich was good, and within three seconds of my plate being emptied a piece of the chocolate slice had appeared on my plate. I was right. Cherry Ripe. Maybe we’d get sent home with leftovers again. There was no food in the empty house. I wasn’t sure where I’d get any.
Aurora settled at the table opposite us with a big mug of tea and leaned in close to Elias, almost conspiratorial. ‘I think you already told me, but I’ve forgotten what you said—tell me why you plucked your eyebrows?’
There’s no such thing as an abridged version with Elias. He went over the whole story for Aurora, telling her about some of the other performance pieces from students in his class. I ate my Cherry Ripe slice one tiny bite at a time, looking at the marks my teeth made in the dark chocolate. I had pretty much tuned Elias out; I could hear him talking, but wasn’t bothering to follow the words. Aurora, of course, was listening intently.
‘I’m not at all surprised you like art, of course,’ she said when he was finally done. ‘It makes a lot of sense, really.’
My ears pricked up at those words. I saw Elias straighten in his chair. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, didn’t I tell you already? I thought I would have. I must have thought you already knew. Sephora was an artist, too.’
21
Elias looked horrified. Not that Sephora was an artist, but that Aurora had seemingly forgotten to mention the fact. I could understand why. So far what we’d heard about Sephora had not cast her in the most flattering light. But this…
Elias found his voice. ‘What sort of art?’
‘Well, it’s painting, but not real painting, if you know what I mean. It’s quite difficult to explain. Kind of modern—is that the right term? Or post-modern or contemporary…I’ve never understood why artists use terms like that, when it’s inevitably going to end up quite dated…Anyway, she wasn’t trying to show things exactly as they are. More capture the, umm, the essence…Oh, I’m explaining it badly. Here, let me just show you one instead.’
I could see the unsteadiness of Elias’ hands as he stood and stepped back from the table, pushing his chair in before following Aurora through a wide doorway to the lounge room. Not willing to miss out myself, I got up quickly and followed them.
The lounge room was like the rest of the house, cluttered but tidy enough. There was a brick fireplace and dozens of mismatched photo frames sat on the mantel. I recognised a few here and there of Sephora, and others of her parents. Behind them all an unframed canvas was propped up, spanning most of the width of the fireplace. It was—my brain started clutching at memories from year eight art lessons—abstract?
But abstract seemed too shallow a term for it. Abstract artworks have random blocky patches of colour and hang in hotel rooms and offices. This seemed to have more to it than that. The longer I looked at it, the more I thought I could see. Ethereal tree silhouettes seemed to emerge out of the blue-green haze. Hints of texture here and there, scribbles of text that seemed to drift in and out, layer upon layer of paint.
Elias was gazing at it reverently, his hand stretched out towards the painting, hovering over the surface as if he dared not touch it.
I cleared my throat. I decided to ask, even though I knew it would make me sound stupid. ‘What is it?’
‘She was always going on about these old Australian painters. She liked all the old paintings, the colours and the textures. She liked them, but she didn’t want to paint like them. She wanted to do her own thing.’
‘The Heidelberg School?’ Elias asked quickly, looking away from the painting for the first time since he’d laid eyes on it. ‘Tom Roberts? Arthur Streeton?’
Aurora gave a helpless little shrug. ‘I don’t know, darling. It’s been such a long time.’
Elias’ gaze returned to the painting. He seemed to be scanning it methodically, drinking in every detail. Then, suddenly, he went quite still. He pointed to the bottom right corner of the canvas. ‘It says a different name here,’ he said, and his voice sounded strange, a little bit hoarse, as if he was holding back emotion. ‘It says Bridget Green.’ He turned to look at Aurora, and I could see hurt and accusation struggling on his face.
‘Oh, I’d forgotten all about that. Yes, that’s the name she went by at school. Bridget, at least. She didn’t like her real name. She
made all her friends and all of the teachers call her Bridget through most of high school. Eventually she got over it and went back to Sephora, but she’d still use Bridget now and then, for different things. For her art mostly, come to think of it. It was like her—what’s the word?—pseudonym. For her art.’
The cogs were turning in my head, and I could see Elias was experiencing the same thing. All this time, Aurora had known that Sephora went by a different name, and had never thought to tell us? And now, we had a name we could search for. If she was still practising as an artist, somewhere out there…
‘Did you ever try to track her down, search for her using that name?’ Elias asked finally.
Aurora tapped her fingertip on the polished timber of the mantle thoughtfully. ‘No, I suppose I didn’t. Like I said, I’d forgotten all about that. We never called her by that name, you see. I guess I thought she had outgrown it, really.’
It was like a whole new world had opened up to us. Elias looked a bit dazed. I realised it was time to get him out of there so he could sit down and process the revelation, away from Aurora’s nonstop chatter. ‘Elias has work this afternoon, so we probably need to get going.’ Feeling awkward, I reached out to touch his elbow, hoping to snap him out of it.
He tore his gaze away from the painting to look at me and for a brief moment I thought he was going to ask if we could take it with us, but he just nodded.
I was right about the leftovers. We got sent home with some slice and surplus ripe mangoes that Aurora had a crateful of. ‘The man at the roadside stall’s always so friendly, and I only had a fifty and he didn’t have any change…’
It was still only early in the afternoon. The van had been sitting out in the sun and was baking inside, everything too hot to touch. Elias started the engine and cranked the aircon, then we stood outside in the shade of the van, waiting till it had cooled down a bit.
He found his voice finally. ‘Do you need to get home?’
I hadn’t decided how much to tell him about what was going on. It all seemed way too complicated and melodramatic to get into, and right then I didn’t think he had the capacity to take in the news anyway.
I shook my head. ‘Nope. Not today.’
‘I want to look into Bridget Green. There must be—she must have—’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t believe Aurora didn’t mention it sooner.’
‘It’s not too late.’
‘I know. It’s just…I feel like we’ve wasted all this time scrabbling around without so much as a decent lead to follow, thinking that Sephora’s some loser with no talent or passion or…And now…’ His eyes were bright. ‘She’s an artist. I mean, what are the odds?’
‘So where do you want to start?’
We went back to his place. The house was locked up tight. Elias deactivated the alarm and let us in, taking the stairs up to his room two at a time. He wasted no time getting his laptop out and punching in a search for Bridget Green. That seemed to give too many varied results, so he added some keywords—painting, art—and went to the image results page. And there it was.
Even I could see that the paintings were by the same hand. Earthy tones and the crisp blue of a summer sky, the grey-green of gum leaves. Some works seemed to be based on photos. The image results showed paintings close up, or hanging on plain white walls. Elias clicked on one image to look closer. ‘Whoa,’ he breathed.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. ‘What is it?’
‘It looks like she used a curved canvas somehow. So the audience can literally be surrounded by the work.’ He clicked another link. ‘Here, they’re hanging, so the audience can walk between the pieces. It’s an installation piece. I love installation art.’ He kept clicking, eyes fixed on the screen, giving me a running commentary as he looked at the images and scanned the accompanying web pages. ‘Look at this—she’s used projected images in this one, and speakers with an audio track. It’s totally immersive. And she’s covered the floor with sand, so the whole thing is a sensory experience. That’s awesome.’
He was skipping quickly through the pages, trying to soak it all up. Reading over his shoulder, I was scanning what I could see, trying to find anything that looked like it would help us contact Sephora. There was plenty of information about the artworks themselves, but nothing about the artist. Not even a photo of her working.
‘Isn’t that odd, to not have a photo of the artist?’ I queried Elias. ‘I mean, some of the websites are just about the artworks, I get that. But there’s articles that are essentially interviews with her, and they don’t say anything about her.’
Elias half-shrugged, eyes still fixed on the screen. ‘Maybe she’s just a really private person.’
It took him another ten minutes or so of skimming through the search results before he finally turned to look at me. ‘There’s nothing there about how to find her.’
‘There are galleries who obviously represent her. We could start by contacting them.’
‘I guess. I just don’t get it. Most artists working today have a website, or a Facebook page, or something…They need the publicity to help them sell their work.’
My turn to shrug. ‘Maybe she’s not about selling her work. Maybe it’s enough for her that people know her work, and it doesn’t have to be about her.’
Elias looked at me, and he suddenly grinned. It made me nervous. ‘What?’ I asked. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘You can be pretty insightful when you’re not being a hardarse.’
‘Shut up.’
He pushed back from the desk and stood. ‘Let’s hit the pantry.’
I trailed him down the stairs and to the pantry. It wasn’t that long since lunch at Aurora’s, but that didn’t seem to be stopping him.
‘You’re still hungry?’ I asked curiously, watching his gaze run over the shelves.
‘I’m always hungry. It’s a metabolism thing.’ He looked me over. ‘You’d be the same, right? Fast metabolism?’
I hadn’t really thought about it. I always think life in our house must be a bit like life in prison. You eat the food when it’s offered. Raiding the pantry just isn’t a thing.
He shut the pantry doors, still empty-handed, and opened the fridge door.
‘What do you feel like? We’ve got leftover meatballs… a bunch of fruit, yoghurt—oh, except it’s the Greek stuff, yuck…’ Fridge door shut again, freezer opened. ‘Magnum?’
My heart skipped a beat. He seriously might as well have been offering me a holiday in Fiji. The only icecream I’ve ever seen in our freezer is a four-litre tub of Homebrand vanilla.
‘Magnum, please,’ I said quickly.
He emerged from the freezer with two. Held one out to me, but didn’t let go when I went to take it from him. ‘You just said please.’
‘So?’
‘So, that’s the first time I’ve heard you say please.’
I tugged on the wrapper. ‘I won’t do it again.’
He released his grip. ‘Good. It was weird.’
He led the way to the lounge room and dropped down on the couch, peeling the wrapper open as he went.
‘Do you wanna keep working? Or we can just hang out for a bit?’
To be honest, I wasn’t sure I could process any new information right there and then. A break would be good. But was it okay to just hang out with him like we were friends?
‘Depends. Does hanging out mean you asking me a bunch of personal questions and wanting to talk about feelings?’ I could totally see him wanting to do that, and I couldn’t think of anything worse.
He shrugged. ‘Or we could just watch a movie.’
‘So long as it’s not Star Wars.’
‘What’s wrong with Star Wars?’
22
As pathetic as it sounds, that afternoon hanging out on the couch working our way through Elias’ DVD collection was the most fun I could remember having since…well, ever. Nobody was expecting anything from me or assigning me jobs. There was no steady stream of yelling and a
rguments in the background. And the bit that amazed me the most was that Elias actually shut up for most of it. I’d figured he was the sort to talk right through movies, but he didn’t. He seemed just as happy to have some down time as I was.
His mum arrived home just before six. My first thought was that Elias looked like her, until I remembered that if he did, it was just coincidence. She had dark hair and was dressed for some sort of corporate environment. I looked at her suit and suddenly felt very slobby in my cut-off jeans. She didn’t seem to notice, though. Like his dad, she was warm and relaxed. She introduced herself as Patricia.
‘Elias hasn’t stopped talking about you. The way you’re going I fully expect to hear you’ve found Harold Holt.’
‘Who?’ That was Elias. He had gone out to the garage to bring in some bags of groceries. He put them on the kitchen bench and his mum gave him a playful clip over the ear.
‘Someone didn’t listen in History.’
‘Who’s Harold Holt?’ he asked again.
She looked to me. I shrugged, and she shook her head in mock despair. She started to unpack. ‘I got a barbeque chicken. But we can have something different if you’re a vegetarian.’ That was directed at me, but Elias answered before I could.
‘She’s all good.’ He peeled the lid off a tub of pasta salad and fished out a piece of macaroni, tossing it in his mouth. ‘Low maintenance.’
It was just sort of assumed that I was staying for dinner, but I found I didn’t mind. It wasn’t like I had somewhere better to be. I wasn’t planning on going home, and there was nobody at the house waiting for me. And no food.
Elias’ dad came in just as we were sitting down to eat. ‘That moron is parked on the driveway again. I had to park half a k away.’
Patricia glanced out the front window. ‘He must have only just beaten you there. It was all clear when I came in.’
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