Fin was perched on a stool near the edge of the frosted window, her face swathed in a cream satin scarf. Innocent as a young Muslim woman, but fairer. Where were you? she asked. She was working on a small canvas that leaned against an old wooden easel, outlining a shape in crayon.
Isn’t that what I should be asking?
She told him she had gone back to the railway station but the office was closed. I’ll sort it out tomorrow, she said. She seemed to regard it as a formality. Crouching further forward, she spat on her thumb and rubbed it against the canvas to make the crayon resemble paint.
Are you sure you want me here? asked Darcy.
Fin stood up, concerned, and came to him. No evidence of anything under her smock, just the shadow of her breasts and the faint elastic of her underpants. He was never attracted to anyone pale but her. She held him to her gently. I’m sorry, she said.
He tried to relax into her but the questions still niggled at him. Tell me about the money belt.
Don’t worry, she said, no drugs or explosives, but she freed herself and gazed past the canvas out into the grey afternoon, and Darcy remembered how they’d left the station so hurriedly. Whatever he’d brought in with him had been more valuable to her than his passport or camera. As he knelt to see what she’d drawn, an abstract mountain shrouded in pink, he felt disappointment taking seed in him. He’d been her carrier pigeon.
I just want to know what’s going on, he said, but she was copying a polaroid pinned to the wing of the easel. A bleached-out picture of a woman’s chest, a large single breast on one side and a florid scar on the other, the stitches wide and primitive, a miniature rope. The freshness of the scar and the rough-hewn needlework were disquieting. She wasn’t drawing a mountain.
Soviet mastectomy, she said. She tore paper from the end of another crayon. She’d mixed red and purple for the mottled burgundy scar. Am I onto something? she asked almost timidly. Abstract Feminism? She smudged the edges with the remains of crayon on her thumbs.
Darcy looked back at the photo, more lurid and disconcerting than anything she could recreate. The photo speaks for itself, he said. He stood up. Why don’t you paint what you’re supposed to?
She looked at him seriously, her pupils a piercing green against the scarf. They want a big canvas of the Museum of Science and Achievement. It’s a whole field of buildings and fountains and statues, she said. Soviet Realism. The exhibition’s next Sunday. Her knuckles seemed knotty and anxious. I need you, little brother, she said.
Darcy looked at her canvas and felt a tightness in his skin, a disingenuousness in the way she’d called him that. Or perhaps it was just her admitting her work wasn’t painterly; she was a moulder of things, an installationist. She’d studied Russian and psychology, not art. He remembered her abstracts back at Monash, the incinerated witch-hunt books. I don’t understand how you got this gig in the first place, he said. Didn’t you have to submit a portfolio?
She glanced at him and then examined the paint on her hands, red on her brown nail polish. I sent polaroids of your Melbourne paintings, she said.
Darcy sat on the arm of the couch, felt the tightness rise up through his neck. The charcoal and oils of art-deco warehouses in Footscray, the curves of the red-brick walls off Dynan Road as you wound through the back way to the showgrounds. They got him the scholarship to Sydney. He pressed his fingernails hard against his chin. You could have asked me.
She cautiously pushed a snake of white from a tube and mixed it with turps into a pale, viscous grey. You might have said no, she said. I needed to get myself here.
But for what?
I can’t tell you, she said. Not here. She surveyed the ceiling as if the cornices were listening. I just need your help with the painting. She reached for his Fodor’s guidebook from the arm of the sofa, flipped to a photo of the strange museum.
Darcy stared at a spread of neoclassical buildings strewn with ice-crusted lakes and frozen fountains, no smokestacks or chimneys. I need to know about the money belt.
Darce, please don’t harp on it, she whispered.
I hate it when you call me that. In the photo a shining obelisk projected high above the buildings into a low white sky. Was this the only reason she’d wanted him here, to paint this?
Don’t be a detective, she said, just focus on what you’re good at, but he wondered what she’d become good at. He looked out into the dark afternoon. No sunset here, just grey then an orbiting blackness. If you’ll come clean, he said, I’ll paint the museum for you. I’ll need photos and decent brushes and paints.
A light came on outside. Again, the woman in the kitchen opposite, standing at her sink. Fin got up, took the torn sheet she used to clean brushes and twisted it over a window hinge to block the view, but as she pulled it the sheet caught the corner of the canvas. Her painting fell slowly against the side of the couch. Darcy didn’t jump to save it, just crouched to peel the painting back. The ridges of the scar had smudged flat against the velvet couch like a birthmark, the nipple smeared; remnants of paint on the fabric. A landscape now. You don’t have breast cancer? he asked.
No, she said.
But she had something. He took a chrome Crayola from her paintbox and angrily scrubbed an abstract new moon shape onto the canvas, from the ground up into the sky. The crayon impressed lines in the wet oils like fingerpainting. He added rough black squares for buildings, fronted them with silver Corinthian columns. He tried to ignore Fin as she wiped paint from the couch then rubbed her hands in turpentine, cleaning each finger separately, but he knew she had what she wanted: him beginning to work. She lit a cigarette and leaned against the window sash in her scarf and paint-stained smock, watching.
Darcy daubed the crayons with turps instead of saliva, made it paint-like, then etched more boxes with random columns, everything out of proportion. He could feel her lips gathering to pull on her cigarette, calculating. The mastectomy scar he morphed into a railway track, the surviving nipple a fountain. Frustrated by his own naivety, he tore wrappers from other Crayolas and scribbled hard in white, added oversized petals to the base of the fountain, a jagged black lake beside the swooning obelisk, everything rushed and random, more her style than his. The waxy nub of the black was near the end of its colour as her roughshod picture became his.
Fin examined her polaroid. Where did you get that? he asked but she didn’t answer. She went to stab her cigarette out on the glass of the half-covered window, but changed her mind, and he wondered if she’d purloined the photo from some office, like she’d slipped copies of the portfolio photos from his desk in St Kilda to get herself here. Now she had him as well. He’d breathed life into her canvas, turned a breast into structures. He rubbed at the colour on his hands and looked at her in the scarf, her face the shape of a leaf. You’re different here, he said.
How do you mean?
You’re just not the same. He stood and pushed a coloured finger onto the ridge between her eyes, branded her with a bindi. You even look different.
She lifted her cigarette to her mouth, blew a smoke ring that wandered between them. Some of us are capable of change, she said.
Mount Eliza
Summer 1969
Darcy sat alone on the railing outside school when everyone else had gone home. His mother had forgotten him. He imagined her drunk on the chaise, the late afternoon sun coming in beneath the awning and her cigarette burning down in her half-asleep fingers, the ashtray on her chest. He started walking down Wooralla Drive towards the Nepean Highway. It was hot so he took off his flannel shirt, tied it loosely about his waist.