Elias shrugged. ‘This is the address she gave me. Maybe she’s got a secret double life, too.’
As we piled out of the van, I began to question the wisdom of my decision. Yvonne was probably being polite—supportive—when she met us earlier. Elias was so painfully earnest, it was basically impossible not to want to help him out somehow.
But Elias was bounding ahead of me, rapping on the front door before I could stop him. Yvonne must have seen us coming. She opened the door straight away. She looked at Vogue, then at Elias, then at me. ‘Someone’s little sister?’ she asked, quizzical.
‘Don’t give him ideas,’ I told her dryly.
She ushered us in. The house was minimally furnished and impeccably tidy. Not a toy or a shoe lying around anywhere. No drawings on the fridge. A white modern-style leather couch. Somehow it wasn’t what I’d been expecting. Yvonne had seemed so warm and friendly, I’d assumed her house would have a more comfortable vibe to it.
‘I’m guessing you don’t have kids,’ I said, gesturing at the generally pristine state of things.
Yvonne was in the kitchen, peering in the fridge. ‘I’m not so much a kids person.’ She closed the fridge and turned to look at us. ‘What can I get you? Tea? Coffee? Juice?’
There was a wine glass sitting in the sink, I noticed. Water droplets on it as if it had just been rinsed. It was the only thing in the kitchen that seemed at all out of place. I had no idea what it meant, but I filed it away anyway, like I do.
I thought Elias would turn down her offer since he was so keen to get moving, but apparently he’d decided he was happy to hang around for a bit. I guess his natural instinct to socialise was overriding everything else.
‘I’ll have tea. I’ve already had way too much coffee this morning.’ He bounded into the kitchen, reaching for the kettle. ‘I’ll make it, you sit down.’
Yvonne seemed about to object, then she made a show of leaving the kitchen to sit in one of the pristine armchairs. I took the couch. Vogue was wandering around the room, looking at the large canvas photographic prints that adorned the walls. Black and white, mostly: a range of different exotic locations. Like the photos I pull out of magazines, but printed on canvas and costing an arm and a leg.
Yvonne looked at me. ‘So, what brings you here? Still looking for Sephora?’
I nodded. ‘We think we’ve narrowed down the general area she’s living. Out past Lithgow, near a place called Capertee Valley.’
Yvonne seemed surprised. ‘How’d you figure that out? I thought nobody knew where she was.’
‘Lindsay’s pretty good at finding a needle in a haystack.’ That was Elias. His back was turned to us as he searched the kitchen cupboards for cups.
‘I see.’ Yvonne was watching Elias. She didn’t look too crazy about him going through her cupboards. He moved with such ease, I figured she’d see quickly enough that she didn’t have anything to worry about, but she kept her eyes on him, even as she spoke to me. ‘So what are you going to do about it?’
‘We thought we’d drive up that way and have a poke around. See if anybody knows her or could tell us where she might be.’
Yvonne took her eyes off Elias long enough to glance at me. ‘I don’t quite understand. How did you work out she was there? I mean, how can you know for sure that’s where she is?’
‘Well, we don’t know for sure,’ I allowed, straightening my back a little. Maybe I’d been spoilt by Elias’ unwavering optimism when it came to my finding abilities, but I didn’t like being doubted. ‘But it’s a solid start. We didn’t have a lot to go on, so I think we’ve done a good job to get this far.’
‘Yeah, you have. I don’t mean to discourage you, I just really didn’t think there was much to go on. I mean, she pretty much disappeared off the face of the earth.’
‘We think she’s going by a different name.’ With practised confidence, Elias swept in and put a mug on the side table beside Yvonne. It was a delicate design, a warm orange with a gold filigree pattern that seemed much more what I’d expect from Yvonne. He put another one down on the coffee table in front of me, this time a plain white mug. Yvonne’s eyes tracked him as he returned to the kitchen to retrieve his own mug—he’d chosen a purple one with red spots—and then came to sit on the couch with me. There seemed something strangely meaningful about the whole process, some subtext I should have been catching but couldn’t quite grasp.
‘A different name?’ Yvonne queried finally, as if remembering the conversation.
‘Yeah. Bridget Green. Does that sound familiar to you?’ ‘Mmm…Yeah.’ Yvonne thought about it. ‘I think she went by Bridget for a while, back when she was in high school. She was older, so I never heard why. She was always a bit out there; nobody really questioned when she did things like that.’ She shrugged a little.
‘Did you know she made artworks? Under that name. She’s pretty good.’
‘Is that how you found her? Through the artworks?’
Elias nodded. ‘She has a lot of landscapes. We picked out some of the distinctive features of places—mountains, rivers, that sort of thing. Lindsay found a match. Like I said—needle in a haystack.’
Yvonne nodded, surveying me over the top of her mug as she took another sip. ‘That’s impressive.’
Elias glanced around the room. Vogue had given up looking at the photos and had perched in the other armchair with her gaze fixed on her phone, apparently not interested in our conversation. Elias seemed to notice the photos for the first time. ‘Did you take those?’
‘Most of them.’
‘You must travel a lot.’
‘A fair bit. I’ve been very fortunate.’
I didn’t know what she did at my dad’s work, I realised. I’d assumed it was the same sort of work he did but, looking at the house, it seemed like she was paid a lot more. Big house, plenty of money, travelling the world…She didn’t really seem especially happy about it. I scrutinised her, trying to work it out. At her work the other day she’d been relaxed and funny. Now she seemed almost sad.
I don’t know if Elias picked up on it or not. He was just chatting away, as always. ‘Is it just you here?’
Her lips curved into a half-smile, and she seemed more like before. ‘It’s embarrassingly big for one person, isn’t it?’ She cocked an eyebrow, self-deprecating. ‘It didn’t look so big on the plan.’
‘I like it. Lots of space.’ Trust Elias to turn any sort of lemons into lemonade. ‘Besides,’ he added teasingly, ‘you’re hardly ancient. Still time to find a man.’ He gave her a cheeky shrug. ‘Or a woman.’
Yvonne smiled again, apparently not at all fazed by Elias’ presumption. An indulgent, slightly wistful smile. ‘If only it was that simple.’
I looked around the room. Vogue, still in her own world. Elias, looking as completely at home here as he did everywhere. Yvonne, thoughtful.
I was the one who had suggested we come here, but I wasn’t sure what we were looking for. My instincts said that Yvonne was holding back something. It was like when you know an adult is keeping things from you because they think it’s in your best interests not to know. It made me wary. But then I’d started out wary—because of her working with my dad. It bothered me that she knew my past more intimately than the average person. I still wasn’t a hundred per cent sure she hadn’t already told him about me and Elias. In short, I didn’t completely trust her. How much was that colouring my perceptions?
I looked at her, meeting her gaze squarely. ‘Is there anything you can tell us that might help us narrow our search?’
Was that a flicker of something in her eyes? She held my gaze, shaking her head slowly. ‘Not that I can think of. As I’ve told you already, I haven’t kept in touch with Sephora. I’m sorry.’
There really didn’t seem much more to say. It would probably be rude to ask her why she’d been drinking wine at ten in the morning, so I didn’t. She and Elias chatted a bit more about random things—the places in the photos on her walls and how Elias was just dying t
o see Laos and whatever else—and then we headed out.
Elias didn’t seem to mind that we’d come away from seeing Yvonne without learning anything new. He strapped himself into the driver’s seat and tapped out a drum roll on the steering wheel, finishing with a flourish.
‘Ready to road trip?’
Vogue pretty much ignored both of us for the whole ride, still glued to her phone. I don’t know why she’d even wanted to come along if that was all she wanted to do, but I’d given up trying to understand her. Elias was chatting on and off, singing along to the radio—not as talented vocally as he was at drawing, I thought privately—and generally just being Elias. I borrowed his phone, since he had unlimited data, and spent some time trying to learn as much as I could about the place we were going to. It didn’t help that the internet kept dropping out along stretches of empty highway. I was about ready to give up and toss the damn phone out the window in frustration when I finally found something useful.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘There’s a sort of unofficial artists’ co-op in the area. It’s about five minutes’ drive from the canyon. There’s a corner shop–servo sort of place with a small gallery space. Maybe that’s our starting point.’
Elias reached over Vogue to high-five me. ‘Sounds like a plan.’
I found myself leaning forward in my seat. I could feel my own heart beating faster, and I wondered how much was Elias’ excitement being contagious—and how much was anxiety that we were making some terrible mistake.
Elias seemed to be thinking along the same lines. He glanced across at me. ‘I’m kinda nervous. I don’t normally get nervous about stuff.’
I shrugged, trying to make light of it. ‘Can’t be any worse than coming out of the closet.’
He laughed. Mission accomplished.
‘I take it your parents were okay with it,’ I noted dryly.
‘My parents were pretty much the ones who broke the news to me.’
That wasn’t what I’d expected. ‘Explain?’
He smiled at the road ahead and seemed to relax his grip on the steering wheel a little. ‘When I was in primary school, I heard my teacher talking about me to another teacher. She called me “the campest little boy I’ve ever met”. I had no idea what that meant, so I went home and asked my parents.’
I tried to imagine how that conversation would go with my parents, and failed. Mum would have had a fit. Dad would have died from embarrassment.
‘And? What did they say?’
‘They just said it meant I loved dress-ups and Barbie dolls, which I did. I didn’t understand what it had to do with camping, though.’ He threw me a wry grin.
I shook my head. He was so casual about it. ‘How old were you?’
He wrinkled his nose, thinking back. ‘Seven? It was Miss Finlay, and she was my Year Two teacher. Anyway, I thought about it for a bit, and figured it was cool to be the best at something, even if it was “being camp”. I didn’t really know what it was, but it didn’t seem like a bad thing. So I just kept being me.’
I studied his face. ‘So you just…knew?’
A shrug. ‘I am who I am. I didn’t wake up one day and decide to “be” anything. I like the stuff I like. It never seemed complicated to me. Maybe I just got lucky, because my parents were so cool with it. They knew who I was, and they never tried to convince me otherwise. Or themselves, I guess.’
I stared at him, stupidly, pathetically jealous. How much easier would my life be if my parents actually got me?
‘Are you absolutely sure you don’t want to swap parents?’ I asked finally.
He laughed. ‘I’m sure. But we can share.’
We pulled up at our destination a minute later. Gallery was a generous description. The town’s main street seemed to be its only street, and the ‘gallery’ had petrol pumps and a very faded Streets icecream flag out front.
Elias, not surprisingly, was undeterred. He jumped out of the van as if he hadn’t just spent three hours driving. ‘Oh, they do coffee too. Awesome.’
I took my time as I slid out my side, unfurling a little after being squashed in next to Vogue. I stood beside the van for a long moment, stretching. Vogue skipped around to join Elias and the two of them stood there, clearly waiting for me.
Elias was bouncing on the balls of his feet in that apprehensive, excited way he’d had before meeting Aurora and Benjamin, twirling his car keys around his fingers with the same nervous energy. His eyes were bright and my heart sank a little at the thought that we might be about to hit another dead end. What that would do to him.
He grinned at me as I joined them. ‘Let’s go.’
It was dim inside, packed from floor to ceiling with sagging shelves. At the unattended counter was a modern-enough-looking coffee machine, out of place in its cluttered surroundings. Between the shelves, old folding tables were piled high with all sorts of junk—new and what might generously be called antique. Stacks of ratty books alongside packets of lollies, mismatched teacups and paper-wrapped rolls of toilet paper. A chest freezer was half-filled with icecreams, half with Weight Watchers frozen dinners. Even the ceiling was pressed into service—hanging wind chimes, men’s belts, fly swatters.
The back of the long room seemed to be the designated gallery space. A random collection of frames on white-painted pegboard, a little card tucked in the corner of each with a handwritten price.
Elias made a beeline for it.
His gaze skimmed quickly along the rows of paintings and I saw his face shift. ‘This is hers.’
He moved in closer, reaching out to almost-touch the painting like he had in the Greenfields’ house. It was a small canvas, unframed. Just propped up against the wall. It looked like a plain block of sand-coloured paint but on closer inspection I saw that it had a whole lot of flecks of other colours in it, and textures. Just like at the Greenfields’, the more I looked at it, the more seemed to emerge.
‘I love this,’ Elias murmured, fingertips still hovering above the surface. ‘It’s just got so many layers. So much depth of reference.’
‘Yeah, not bad,’ I allowed. ‘For art, I mean.’
There was a little piece of card dangling from a thread stapled to the back of the canvas. It said Bridget Green on one side and the word Untitled, then the price on the other. ‘A hundred and fifty bucks?’ I asked incredulously. ‘But that would have taken her—what? Half an hour, max.’
Elias looked affronted. ‘It’s not about how long it took to make it. Artists don’t charge by the hour.’
‘So then who decides this is worth a hundred and fifty dollars?’ I argued. ‘Is it just a completely arbitrary number? The artist just goes, hey, I want some money, give me this much?’
He looked increasingly horrified by what I was saying.
‘It’s an artwork.’
‘But they’re making it for money, right? So how is it that different from you paying me to help you find Sephora? Making an artwork is a type of service. It’s not…I don’t know, a religious experience. At the end of the day, how different can it be—painting a canvas or painting walls in someone’s house?’
‘Artworks have meaning,’ he protested. ‘House painters don’t work with concepts, or tone or perspective or scale…’
Vogue interrupted. ‘Hey, are you guys done yet?’
‘There’s another one here,’ I pointed out, noting another canvas, half-hidden, with Bridget Green printed neatly on the tag. It was similar to the first, but instead of a sand colour, it was mostly sky blue. There were half-a-dozen more canvases propped up, some stacked three deep, and I flicked through them, glancing over the tags as I went. ‘And two more.’
I pulled them out of the stacks and laid them flat for Elias to look at. I didn’t see what was so fantastic about them but I left Elias oohing and aahing and went to check out the rest of the shop.
There was one of those little button bells on the counter near the coffee machine so I dinged it, and waited.
Finally the door back there
opened and a grey-haired man in a high-vis shirt wandered in, the name Les embroidered on his pocket. He smiled. ‘Sorry, I was out the back gasbagging. I thought I heard someone in here.’
I put on my best polite-investigator smile. ‘Hi. I was wondering if we could ask you some questions about some of your artworks.’
Les nodded. ‘The artworks are the missus’ business, but let’s see what I can tell you.’
I glanced towards Elias, coming to the counter with one of the canvases. It was the sandy one, the first we’d seen.
‘This artist,’ he said excitedly, ‘Bridget Green. What can you tell us about her? Does she live around here?’
Les—he looked like a farmer, I thought, like someone who had spent too many years in the sun—raised an eyebrow. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘She’s—I’m—’ I wasn’t sure whether it was mainly nerves or excitement, but Elias was flustered. I stepped in.
‘We’re art students; we’re doing a project on the Australian vernacular. Looking at artworks and artists from this region, and how the depiction of the region has changed since Russell Drysdale did his Sofala painting in 1947.’ In my peripheral vision, I could see Elias staring at me, open-mouthed. I ignored him. ‘So we were wondering if you could tell us anything about Bridget Green. She does a lot of paintings of this area, right?’
‘She does, she does. Funny you would ask about her.’
‘Funny how?’
‘Well, she was just in here about an hour ago.’
31
For a second I honestly thought Elias was going to keel over. I saw the sequence of emotions cross his face—surprise, disbelief, hope. He found his voice finally. ‘So she…she lives near here somewhere?’
‘Yep, she’s a local all right. Manages the Riverview Cabins just down the road.’
‘Ohmigod.’ Elias might as well have just been told he was about to meet Beyoncé. He bounced on the balls of his feet, eyes bright.
Les looked bemused.
‘He’s a big fan,’ I explained, patting Elias on the arm. I could feel him trembling.
‘What are the Riverview Cabins?’ I asked. ‘Holiday places?’
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