27.
Our bedroom overlooked a golf course, among other things. It was on the tenth floor in a large apartment block that sat beside a busy road running between Sydney Airport and the city.
Early one morning, in our first week of staying at my brother’s, I watched through the window as two male golfers approached the green, one wheeling his buggy behind the sand bunker as the other lined up for a chip at the front of the green. The shot was overplayed, shooting the ball through the green into some rough grass. After watching his ball disappear the man flung his golf club high into the air before stepping away to avoid it landing on him. He stood for a few seconds with his hands on his hips, his club on the ground beside him; he was yelling but this couldn’t be heard through the glass and traffic.
While watching the man’s angry body I had been reminded of being twelve or so, on a golf course somewhere outside Sydney. It was a hot and torturous afternoon, and my brother had teased me for hours about not being able to get the ball off the ground. I had eventually snapped, whacking him in the back with my father’s putter. To this day, when we occasionally play a round together, my brother recollects that moment, laughing in a way that makes it clear a sense of shock has lingered.
A few mornings after seeing the putter get flung into the air I watched again, this time while sitting on the balcony, as two players approached the green. One player stood beside the bunker while his playing companion chipped towards the hole from twenty or thirty metres away. I only caught sight of the tiny white ball as it hit the pin – the metal rod with the flag which sits in the hole – before rolling sideways a couple of feet. The man standing beside the green responded by lifting his arms and putter into the air, his enthusiastic cheers lost to the din of traffic.
28.
In what had previously been an empty part of my brother’s living room we accumulated a set of objects and materials that rotated and told of three people who all, in their different ways, suffered from chronic back pain.
My pain was around the sacrum. It made sitting on couches, particularly soft ones, unbearable. I liked to stretch and exercise in the evening, either before or after dinner. There was often a moment when I went to join my brother on the couch, where he liked to relax after work, before remembering the pain. I would then lie down behind the couch, amid the blocks and balls and mats, and continue our conversation.
Lenka did her exercises late at night, on a woollen blanket with a red rubber ball propped under her lower back. Her back pain was the result of sitting in front of a computer all day at work, a problem that had emerged in the weeks before I went overseas, when my own lower back pain had been too much. Since falling pregnant and signing up for the Natural Birthing Clinic at a hospital in Sydney, she had incorporated a number of pelvis strengthening exercises into her routine.
My brother’s pain was further up the spine, the result of a fall while playing basketball many years earlier. He swam and did exercises with the aid of a cork brick, usually first thing in the morning.
One night I was stretching while Lenka stood in the kitchen chopping vegetables, a classical music station playing on the radio. She was in profile, her body and face visible but not her hands, stationed over the bench. She turned up the dial when a piano concerto began, no doubt recalling, as I did, the occasion of meeting my parents for the first time. As she put her weight over the knife, cutting through what could only have been a pumpkin, she smiled in a way that confirmed this.
29.
The sky was exactly the colour of my shirt, I realised while striding towards the studio. I was speculating about where the shirt had been hiding for so many months, in a bag of Lenka’s or my brother’s clothes being the most plausible answer, when my mind turned to a video work I’d long ago abandoned. The footage showed a spotless monochrome of sky, as viewed though my bedroom window, and was accompanied by the music from an ice-cream truck stationed across the street.
The video had originally gone for several minutes but after chipping away at all the bits that seemed unnecessary there were only two scenes, together lasting less than thirty seconds: an opening sequence of my then neighbour’s cat standing on the front lawn, surveying the street, followed by the image of blue sky and tune of the ice-cream truck.
Eventually all the footage was discarded and the work was reduced to two adjoining video stills, the sky and the cat. These were printed, one above the other, on a piece of paper that shifted around my desk for a number of months, before I woke up one day and decided to do a painting of the coupling.
Wanting the blue to be exactly right, I looked up ‘best blue for sky painting’, before having my attention drawn to the bottom of the page, to the ‘related searches’ provided by Google: ‘blue sky noise painting’, ‘best golf blue sky’, ‘best buy blue sky’ and ‘goodbye blue sky’, among others. At that moment the painting idea was abandoned.
30.
I made the decision to listen to the numerology reading while using my pinky finger to carefully wind the loose tape back into its shell. After being commissioned by my mother over eighteen years earlier, the tape had spent its life at the bottom of boxes, its case having been crushed during a move a number of years ago. With its contents verging on being lost forever it was time to act. I rang a friend and arranged to borrow a tape player before wondering how and where it would be best to listen to the reading: should I be at home or in my studio, lying down or sitting up?
A few days later Lenka and I listened to the tape after dinner. I was lying on a yoga mat on the floor with a pillow from the couch propped under my head while Lenka stood drinking tea in the kitchen. Much of the information was vague but there were some points that clearly rang true; as we listened I watched Lenka, reflected in a window backed by the darkness of night, acknowledging certain points the woman was making with a nod and smile.
The things I have remained thoughtful about include her saying I would make a good detective, that I should be careful with alcohol as well as my curiosity towards marginal or underdog figures, that I would be drawn to a caring role, which in its less obvious manifestations could include being an artist, writer, critic or philosopher, and that constantly analysing things would at times make me feel ‘mad’ – a word she stated at least four times, the emphasis making it clear she was referring to a state of unsound mind rather than anger.
While walking to my studio this morning I thought about the reading, reminding myself it had been made prior to events the numerologist seemed to know so much about. After an hour of writing I clicked open a photo of the cassette tape, taken on the carpeted floor of my brother’s apartment that morning, before swivelling my chair to face the paintings I’d been working on.
A few minutes later I stood up and walked towards a board sitting on the floor with its back propped up against the wall. The board had a painting either side of it, each of which I’d lost interest in. I ran a finger over the two surfaces to see if they were dry, weighing up which side was less worthy of keeping. Finally, after securing the board to the wall, I painted the cassette tape.
31.
Stepping around the rocks and tree roots of the track we used to wander as teenagers I felt impatience towards the increased numbers of tourists but also more like them – less agile and somehow more fearful of the landscape. Where we would have once smoked a joint and gazed at the ancient and gnarly forms in silent wonder before climbing down a cliff to have a swim at one of the secluded beaches, my childhood friend and I now discussed jobs and exhibitions and plans for the future.
At the first rock carving we sat down for a rest. Guzzling half my water supply I looked at the boomerangs and fish and felt silly for not having worn my hat. I was calculating how far we’d come, how long it would take to walk back to the car, when three men turned up. In their brightly coloured T-shirts – one blue, one red and one yellow – their appearance was striking against the subdued tones of bush.
The men were talking loudly, discussing and a
rguing about the rock drawing. As they moved around the carved lines I thought of how, in the western tradition, we are taught to paint – first sketching lines onto the surface, then adding colour by mixing the three primaries.
As Blue demonstrated what the drawing was of, by walking around its edges, Red told him to get off the sacred site. Meanwhile, Yellow was reading out the information on the accompanying placard, his voice steady and dull like somebody reciting lines for the first time. Within a few minutes the men had moved on to the next carving, their bright colours receding through the grey, green and brown layers of bush.
32.
I typed then paused, reading through the list of the search engine’s other predictions – black mirror, black friday, black panther. I clicked on the top option, ‘black boxes’, entered a site and scanned through the first couple of paragraphs, learning that the devices also known as ‘flight recorders’ basically store data, including the sounds from the cockpit. Despite their name they are generally orange, to make them more visible.
The commercial flight that had vanished from radars before presumably crashing into the ocean had occupied news headlines every day for two weeks – firstly in relation to the search for the plane, or its debris, and secondly in terms of the possible scenarios that led to its loss on radar. Recent news reports were casting suspicious light on the pilot, an inquiry being pursued after it emerged that the plane’s radar beacon had been switched off.
Besides referring to the need to find the black box and access the data necessary for an investigation, the news items always contained satellite pictures of the ocean where bits of metal had been found – what might be parts of a plane. Possible leads tended to last a day or two before being replaced by fresher theories and findings in entirely different parts of the ocean. The ambiguous nature of the images, showing dark passages of ocean with a few indiscernible fragments floating in them, lent an eerie quality to the event.
There was something hypnotic about the way each new image, no less abstract and mysterious than the last, lured one’s attention. This reminded me of a story told to me by a friend of my mother’s, after she and her husband returned from a holiday in Rome. While walking home from a museum they had come upon a commotion beside the river; curious, they had entered the crowd of people before watching a man trying to retrieve a set of keys from the river with a very long stick. Each time the man managed to hook the keys onto his stick they would fall off at the last second. As the crowd gasped at the suspense, their pockets and handbags were being emptied by a gang of thieves.
33.
The red panel with white, hand-written text appeared beyond the hedge like a protest placard. I’d been looking at this sign for LEO’S NURSERY in the front garden of a house between my school and home since I was twelve. I’d always noted how clean it was, how carefully the upper-case words had been spaced and the way the corners had been cut off the square panel.
While waiting at the lights the other day, I decided to visit the nursery; I’d just been to visit a friend who had a collection of succulents – perhaps I’d find something for him at Leo’s.
At the front door I was greeted by a man in his sixties; he spoke softly with an accent I took to be southern European. I was taken around the side of the house to a concrete backyard full of tables, plants and netting. Everything had been arranged with great care, the ground and tables meticulously swept. I asked him about succulents and he took me down one row, then another, towards a large selection of them; he explained the different varieties, picking tiny dead leaves out of their pots, before going into the house.
I chose two succulents, both different from those I’d seen at my friend’s house, before returning to the front door, noticing beside the porch some very big cactuses. When I asked Leo about them I watched his smile turn into a frown. He told me that he used to have bigger ones; these had been taken by a man who had offered $80 for each large cactus, leaving annoyed when told by Leo that they weren’t for sale.
A couple of weeks after this exchange, Leo returned home to discover that his three biggest cactuses were gone. On opening his front door, he found an envelope on the ground containing $240. Leo’s face had become less tense, his expression philosophical by the time he finished the story. He shrugged and said: ‘I’m not calling him a thief but people like that, what can you do?’
I was about to leave but he continued the story. He was telling me that many months after the cactuses were taken he saw them on a television show about ‘urban guerrilla gardening’. Listening to him describe what he saw on the show brought to mind an installation of desert rocks, corrugated-iron cows, and cactuses. It decorated a median strip next to some traffic lights across town. I’d always hated it.
By now I was slightly outraged. I told Leo I knew where his plants were – we could go there together and take them back. There was a brief moment when I thought he was going to take me up on my offer, his eyes locking onto mine. Then he looked away and waved his hand through the air, this being my cue to leave. Having turned to walk away I heard him whisper: ‘I just want to see them again.’
34.
I took the journal article out of my pocket, unfolded it on the table and looked at the painting, Madonna and Child with Two Angels (c. 1478) by Piero della Francesca. My eyes travelled from the grown-up body of the baby, his hand raised as if for an arm wrestle, to the demure face of his mother, then to the angel behind her, the only person looking back at me, my eyes determining that the shadow running down one side of her face, while true to the light source in the painting, was exaggerated by the fold in the paper, the direction of the light around me corresponding to that in the painting.
Beyond the angel a shaft of light entered through the window and hit the wall. My eyes rested there, my body feeling a temperature so clear and sensible, before moving up to the opening paragraph and beginning the article.
After finishing and paying for my coffee I refolded the article and put it back in my pocket, a few minutes later reaching the flat section of road that always has me thinking I’m already at my studio, even though it is seven or eight minutes further. I was moving as if towards something momentous.
I noticed the gathering of Moreton Bay chestnuts lying about thirty metres ahead of me – they must have dropped in the last two days when I hadn’t come to the studio. Something about the way they sat below the tree, the green shells and shiny brown nuts articulated against the grey footpath, reminded me of Piero and frescoes by other early Renaissance painters. Marching along, I watched my left foot approach and kick one of the large nuts and send it shooting and bouncing ahead of me. The physical sensation and sound of contact with the large nut was thrilling. It made me feel as if I suddenly understood what chestnuts were.
35.
A friend asked for a video to include in the film screening he was curating. I scrolled through my phone and found the video I had made while sitting beside my father’s bed. It showed a clock on the wall ticking for eighteen seconds before abruptly ending, its steady beat offset by the shakiness of my hand holding the camera.
When I sent the video through to my friend, he replied after a few minutes with the word ‘beautiful’ in the subject line. I was struck by the way that word crossed with an event and setting that had been overshadowed by so much dread and hopelessness.
When we took my father to the hospital, after his kidneys failed, the doctor said he wouldn’t be leaving and that she expected he had two or three weeks of life at most. I remember feeling the urgency of time during those first days; each minute went by less abstractly and increasingly more ominously.
I watched the footage several more times. Something about this amount of time left me restless and wanting more. I was taken back to the hospital and reminded of how fixated my father became with this clock in his morphine-induced delirium. It wasn’t entirely out of character: my father had been an incredibly punctual man, and when describing something, a walk for example, he always gave the
exact time it took, never rounding things off. He also counted steps and would have a number for all of the staircases he went up or down regularly.
On several occasions during those final weeks, after waking up from a long sleep and showing some confusion at seeing his family sitting around him, my father looked up at the clock, intensely focusing his gaze on those ticking hands, before shaking his head and saying: ‘They’ve got the time wrong!’
36.
It was my birthday. I lay in bed staring through the glass panel coated in dust from the traffic below. After eight months of looking at that view, the patchwork of roads, power lines, trees and rooftops spreading towards the city, I realised that the site my eyes were often drawn to was the hospital, now an apartment block, where I was born.
My mind entered the elegant façade with its rounded edges. I was in a long corridor lit by fluorescent panels, its floor a marbled, dark blue vinyl that ran up the first few inches of the wall. I saw my father standing at one end, outside some windows looking into an open, brightly lit room. He was in a pinstripe suit that his body, considerably slimmer than I ever knew it, wasn’t quite filling. His cheeks were ruddy, his eyebrows as bushy as ever. Reeking of alcohol and the half-smoked cigar in his pocket, he entered the room; a boyish smile lit up his face as he strode over to my mother’s bed and took me into his arms.
My head felt sore, my eyebrows strained as if I’d been focusing on a small painting or computer screen all night. There had been pockets of sleep but always packed with senseless combinations of people, the periods of wakefulness pursued by fresh concerns Lenka had about being in my brother’s apartment, rather than our own home, after the birth.
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