The Returns
Page 12
Lester can actually paint, and they are good paintings. This opens a gap in Trevor he hasn’t felt before. It astounds him, it also makes him feel naïve. Naïve is also the style of the paintings, knowingly or not. Lester has said he was never trained; he’s more like the crims he’s put behind bars who take up painting in their cells. Full of emotion and grunt. Over time, something more distinctive emerges.
Before going home, Trevor visits the IGA. And there she is again, in her black dress, the Russian woman who isn’t. She is sitting with her legs tucked to one side of her like an artist’s model, next to the wide doorway. Her face is mottled with dust or sun or something he cannot explain.
Perhaps she thinks people don’t see her when they walk past without stopping, or they see her too well and she haunts them. She is, perhaps they are, ghosts of the divide, where having/not having makes everyone defensive. He’s no different. Except she is no one’s neighbour, hasn’t half a dozen kids, has no address to write down.
He shuffles his bags as he speaks to her, though what to say? She knows more about the weather than anyone. When he pulls out and gives her $10 she grabs the note and shoves it into her sleeve. And starts crying.
The publisher has given her number to the new author Martina had recommended Elizabeth edit. Shia Newman. She is keen to pick Elizabeth’s brains and will, by the sound of it, be ringing her very soon. This means Elizabeth is going to have the manuscript after all. She is happy, so happy she grabs Gordon up onto her chest and hugs him until he struggles to be released. This is not his preferred form of love.
Elizabeth’s mobile plays its short waltz tune and Gordon is, even worse, briefly swung around in waltz time until she lowers him to the floor and he skitters off. Yes, it’s her: this Shia girl is in a hurry. To introduce herself and, she explains, because they have told her Elizabeth was brought up in a sect, which is awesome, so valuable as a primary source.
If it were true, and if the sect had been the abusive and mindrobbing kind, then her wording might have been unfortunate. Zeal is single-minded.
Elizabeth begins to correct Shia’s understanding, which she realises has come through Martina selling the idea, but she must do so without losing the conversation, especially this early.
‘My mother was a sannyasin,’ she says. ‘I was among them for a year or two even if I didn’t live on the commune. I can tell you everything I know. Use whatever you find useful. I don’t mind, and I’ll be reading it through anyway. I wasn’t captive in any way, the Rajneeshees weren’t that kind of sect, or cult, and that’s where the issue immediately gets messy. Those terms “sect” and “cult”. They don’t always help.’
‘Ah, I’m so glad you say that. It’s totally confusing,’ says Shia, her voice almost jumping through the phone. Because some groups are simply sui generis, like The Family, children who were being groomed by the woman who said she was Jesus Christ. Anne Hamilton-Byrne. She stole children and drugged them with LSD and huge doses of psychiatric drugs. She bleached their hair white and cut it in a bob so the children would think they were siblings. They looked like aliens.
‘God knows how they survived, and being starved, and beaten. It wasn’t religion, they were meant to re-educate the world after the Apocalypse. That’s a kind of Doomsday scenario, or it seems to be, except the woman was a sociopath who couldn’t have children of her own and who stole millions from the servile adults. Just another crook.
‘Have you read it yet?’ she adds.
‘No, I haven’t even received it. Things usually move … more slowly. They gave you my number because it’s a work in progress, so to speak, and because I was OK with … discussing it so soon.’
‘I’m jumping in too fast.’
‘No, not really,’ Elizabeth laughs. ‘Maybe a bit. Are you including that sort of detail you mentioned? You will need to be clear about what kind of narrative you’re writing if you want to fit … information in.’
‘That’s why I’m making it a novel, so anything goes, doesn’t it?!’
Elizabeth doesn’t say anything. But she explains her mother, the Rajneesh phenomenon. How sects are seen to be offshoots of mainstream religions, heretical or purist or alternative … whereas cults are based around the deep belief and following of a charismatic person with religious, political or social vision. Or mystical. Or terrorist. They both emanate from powerful leaders so it blurs the difference. Neither option quite defined the Orange People. Charismatic leader, yes, but the Bhagwan encouraged his sannyasin to question their lives and religion, and follow him only if they wanted to. It was subversive socially and religiously because they talked mysticism but practised non-stop fucking. No one went out bombing the public, but they disdained the public. People were free to come and go, no one was brainwashed unless they were just susceptible. Lots were: he ran a cult of personality worship. Yes. He mesmerised them. Absolutely.
Sects have rules and punishments to enforce obedience, like the stories of members being chastised, ostracised, even beaten, and children being punished. The Bhagwan was being dreamy in India and if the sannyasin neglected children it was by having no boundaries at all, no rules, nothing. Her mother just ignored her. Elizabeth observed them in their Narcissism and drug-taking and knew they were high on it, but the personal and sexual wildness they called exploration often resulted in dramas of disloyalty and hurt (which had to be played down) and pregnancies for the women. And were the children preyed upon? Ah …
In bed that night she replays their conversation, aware Shia had been writing it all down. The shock of Hamilton-Byrne, who she’d forgotten about. The Bhagwan seemed mild in comparison. The long-haired, oversexed men and women, her mother, the children. That dismissive attitude of the Rajneeshees, worse if they were in your face like that, and how it jarred with her wanting to be a gymnast. When her mother decided to join the ashram in the southwest it became intolerable. ‘The Bhagwan is coming!’ her mother had cried. She had to go. Elizabeth had to go, everyone had to go! To live in the children’s shed where just about anything might happen, and live among the risk of some men who enjoyed grooming girls (not that “grooming” was a term used back then, and not for post-Apocalyptic but pre-adult sex). Or, in a judgemental tone, her mother saying if that’s what she felt then bloody well stay in Fremantle with the other kids, it hardly mattered which.
What mattered was the adults’ path with the Bhagwan.
As if Elizabeth should simply abandon gymnastics because her mother saw God in the guru’s inverted commas.
Life and death among the holy people. What begins in freedom ends in force.
Part Two
NOW TREVOR RE-WORKS the apartment canvases to revive them. And himself. He had worked as well as he could in the spare room, it had begun to feel like searching for the high he was sure was still there. Like opening the lid of a tin of house paint to discover how the blood red thrills him again. Like a surgeon said: if you don’t feel a thrill when the scalpel slices into the skin, you shouldn’t be a surgeon. Yes, Trevor uses house paint. Uses oils and gouache. And photomontage.
Montage is not like still life or portrait or figure painting, a mental image projected onto canvas, not Lucien Fried and his putty colours, a primary factual shape, which the artist imposes then modifies; Trevor finds his imagery with random and chosen edits from publications (not the scalpel, the scissors) and from his careful or slashing drawings, bringing these into collision like words shuffled against each other make unexpected meanings. Unavoidably, not merely shuffling but shunting though photos piques him and freaks him, their wanton emptiness. Magazines, anything that carries illustrations, the larger the better. To make something sharp or serious of them is their punishment. Glossy pics of models, high-rise architecture, traffic, figures in normal poses – normal, the hardest thing to find – why look normal when you can look glamorous and pouting? Trevor glues them down, their glamour momentary, or gone under glam as he paints them in half and mocks them.
The colour vib
rates at him, some images lift and others fall back.
This gives him sudden starts, and it risks every false start, as fragments in the physical space shift in the temporal one, the moments of line and shape or mere flurry expose a potential work. Only by this much making, by this much willingness to keep shifting, in however many stages it takes. Open the lid, see it. Keep opening lids. Use the knife on the skin. Then he paints the parts into an emerging whole.
The confined space of that room embarrassed him, especially if Diana stopped at the door to watch. The drop sheet he used was actually a plastic tarpaulin covered with an old sheet, so it crinkled underfoot and annoyed him, until he kept working and was able to ignore it.
There was no ignoring how cramped he was, how awkward he felt having no room to make the required degree of mess. There he was painting in his cell like one of those prisoners who take up painting, or like Lester. Except Trevor, in theory, knew how to.
The fingers, the genius of the wrist, the forearm, the brain. The larger movements. Then the Braille, the actual detail. These cityscapes, loosely geometric and oddly smudged – he’s big on smudge – begun then, in the months before he left her. Some areas left raw, the primed canvas showing through. Fitting, really. As is obscuring faces, bodies, settings. Painting into a kind of paint-streaked shock of half realist, half nightmare memory. Or something like haunting.
Now, for longer hours then were possible before, he paints in Elizabeth’s shed. The studio. Big changes. He cannot do any of this as an amateur, to crimp down into naivety, to have that excuse. He knows too much – and therefore he must succeed or fail as a professional. Bloody Lester, what would he know?
Sometimes the long auburn shape of Gordon sits with Trevor when he paints. And he has been painting most nights, the labours of painting are concentrating him into imagery and carrying the past out and dumping it on the median strip. Elizabeth hasn’t mentioned his probation once, which he presumes is a good thing.
At first he wanted the paint uniform, smooth. He can’t stand the Australian trowelling style. Ben Quilty, the Porridge Expressionist. So much of it. Trevor plunges his wide house-painting brush into pots of paint, lays some thick, some in washes. Gashes, gaps, lines of hiatus. No one pretty uniformity.
Qualia, the raw, sensory experience. He is trying to force breaks in the space-time the imagery refers to – people frozen, or speeding – so the static images are smudged, interrupted, people in streets of the ’40s get contemporary fashion poses, and repeated so often they drown in commonality.
Some canvases look sexual, some industrial, media-arty-type. His fusions blended thus can have a crime-scene feel. Frank Miller. A mash-up of glam and industry and sleaze. This retraces his imagery from years behind a desk he doesn’t tell anyone about. Strange human faces seem to hover nearby like wilder things from Hollywood or Doctor Who. Not ghouls, souls. Some faces are living, emotional, some zombified.
It was genealogy of a kind, like those gunshots into Poland. Diasporas. Uncanny, perhaps. Sufficiently visible to discern human features but somehow vaporous, ambiguous and, set against the solidity of solid objects, un-nerving.
If his work were compared to tailoring, his shapes are not closefitting suits, immaculately cut, but oddments from a Salvos store.
If he is excited, he is also panicked: the familiar adrenaline begins to surge in him. Even when turning back to reckon through this imagery of his rebirth it is exciting, it irrupts through his armchair-in-a-bookshop life, the sedentary of sedentary.
Thank God painting became respectable again. Space for artists who go by feel, intuition, colour. The usual. Artists need intelligence but some painters just find it. Some are dim and find it. They get there. If there is a there. His getting there wasn’t an accident, he chose to do this; it was an accident that scrambled his head and stopped him.
Some days earlier Elizabeth had sneaked a look at his work. No one is expecting Trevor to bloom as a backyard Van Gogh. Not even Trevor. But what has he been doing? If he was doing anything. Perhaps he was out there reading. There are paintings, someone did them.
Now, for the first time Elizabeth comes out to watch him actually painting. Several works are turned away and several more exposed.
His brush is turning in orange paint like stirring a tiny pot of sauce. As he upturns it to inspect the load, she suddenly says:
‘There are so many faces! It’s … bewildering. I like the textures especially, the sensuousness of the actual paint.’
Of the paint, he thinks, still looking at the brush. There are faces, and in clear view, and different, but of no one in particular if she is looking. He asks her if she reads his faces as libidinous or concerned or, well, what …? For instance, he notes, the woman he has placed in the foreground of one painting who looks like a blind person, in dislocation from the social world of the people around her. She is sitting like that woman at the IGA, she has a chain. There is a small dog, or something like a dog. All just paint.
‘Yes, I can see all that,’ she says. ‘It’s objective.’
Then how does it make her feel?
She says the impact of his work banks up in her. Each painting is so big. And busy. She says how a painting is all there at once, at attention, everywhere you look and you can look everywhere! It’s a tautology of itself, being all present all the time. Whereas you read one sentence at a time, running page by page, linear. These moments are fairly seamless, like consciousness is, moving forwards in time. You comprehend its cause and effect and its coherence. Whenever you pause, or put the book down, the awareness of what came before returns into awareness. Reading is always this elegant moving forward then catching up. It accretes.
As if in answer, one painting is skewing shelf above shelf of book spines into something like twisted laddering or fragments of cuneiform. His shop, his shape-changing.
‘The faces are of public people,’ he says, ‘and people I’ve seen from around here. So each face in the overall picture has a story. They’re barely even likenesses. Tell me if you can recognise anyone.’
Are they faces Elizabeth knows but cannot name? Are some of her? What does a portrait of her look like to her?
Then she sees him smirking.
‘Jesus, Trevor,’ she says, and walks inside.
Above them the clouds are slowly moving south. He feels the autumn sunlight increase through the acrylic section of sheer roof. Cool, white radiance, no heat in it.
A beam of light stands brightly in front of him like a girder, or a rafter that has fallen loose at one end. Dust floats in the light then out of range, enough lit motes for Trevor to sense this light beam, this standing rafter, as a light body within the soft body of the darkness. Its negative space. The more he stares at the light the less he sees of the studio and nothing at all of his canvases. It is embarrassing: the light/darkness effect is more powerful, more strange, than anything is making.
The lack of speech is where mystery is. Wordlessness.
He walks into the glow. His bald head glowing, eyelashes and brows glowing. The light accepts him, eternal and indifferent.
Inside again, in her familiar spaces, for some reason she remembers standing out there, in her backyard at dawn, and hearing the hot-air balloons overhead. Then they appeared. They were brightly striped and amazingly exuberant for things so silent, and almost intangible, but every so often she heard the soft roar of the gas flaming up, the sigh as the balloons moved further off, then another one or two came drifting over, then more. Her neck began to hurt. God knows how anyone would cope if the aliens came. All that happened was Trevor came.
She remembers standing close against the large glass windows on the 30th floor of a tower in the city and seeing maybe as many as ten or twelve hot-air balloons moving slowly towards her. It was the week her long-range boyfriend Richard’s novel had been announced on the shortlist of a major book prize and it was an early morning photo shoot of the authors and because she was incidental to this she stood aside, and for
half an hour was mesmerised by the balloons as they drifted towards her as if coming straight in, before passing over, above and out of sight.
Elizabeth’s wood-floored study is wired for essential uses. It hums and clatters plastically from morning to evening as she pounds her (she is a pounder) PC keyboard with questions, deletions and, occasionally, carefully worded psalms to the authors she is reading over the shoulders of. If they have earned them. Her room is busy with typing and thinking and flurring through pages of the already read and now rewritten, the zipping singsong of her printer and her dappled kinds of correcting.
The room is only just big enough for arguing over stylistic problems – and yet a novel’s assorted characters blunder around as well. These men and women occupy a great deal of space in the room.
As an editor she necessarily tinkers. Words, phrases, punctuation. Tenses. Most clichéd of all, and yet visceral as a paper cut, is the editorial cut. Cut! cut! cut! Immediacy is not at the expense of ideas or descriptions, it makes them. And now she will be mindfully inside the authoritarian psyche of sects.
Sometimes the tinkering returns in code at night. This morning she woke holding a dream, of a small cotton bag, inside it a metal plate with about fifteen loose screws and tiny loose bars. The problem was, Did she have a micro-screwdriver to assemble it, something like a watchmaker’s or optician’s tool? She had the same dream again, this time a worn leather pouch, inside it dozens of tiny gold chains and several small screws, a wristwatch wheel with a ruby hub.
Another kind comes back to her: she is sitting alone at her desk and a stern author stands behind her talking onto the top of her head. How dare she make these marks they are both staring at, cuts and scratches, in the desk, like a cyborg mouse desperate for food?
Sometimes she imagines her manuscripts as essential services, like the water which began as high rain pours down into the reservoirs and aquifers before streaming through pipes and stations until she stands beneath it, still on its way elsewhere, falling from the shower rose.