16

SYDNEY ROAD

A week goes by, and another one. Not seeing Mitali at work, my days become shadows of themselves. Tonight I go and see her at home. When I ring the bell, Ian greets me easily, as if I were a sibling turned up out of nowhere. He points to the garden, and follows when I go to find her. We discover Mitali gardening slowly, planting a grevillea. Her boyishness has vanished. Ian stands behind me with his hands in his pockets. She sits back on her heels when I come and flicks my knee with her muddy glove. I sit down next to her on the ground. And suddenly all is as before. She swears about the medication, or Ian’s fussing about her, but the sting has gone from her tone.

When I leave, it is not dark. The armless melaleucas with their unimaginable sap, their sagging folds, usher me down the street. I walk into the empty house. Its tiny garden is looking depleted, out of breath. My mobile rings in my pocket. It’s Mary. At the start I don’t understand what she wants. It’s about an art opening.

‘You remember that guy Philip Paulson? It’s his exhibition … a show of his latest works. You must come, please. We can’t do this without you old mate.’

I smile, but before I can say anything she presses on.

‘Sarah will be there with my Dad. They’re both turning up. Please … Listen, I know she told you he’s alive and kicking.’

‘With your Dad …’

It takes me a few seconds to digest this.

‘But that’s grand, Mary.’

Mary is not so enthusiastic.

‘They’ll probably be quarrelling all the way over … Or fucking like rabbits … Anyway, it’s now. I wasn’t even going to be there, but … I changed my mind. It’s in Sydney Road, just around the corner from you. So you have no excuse.’

All the same, she spells out the address in a grave tone as if it were some outlandish place. As she begs and explains, you’d think she was asking me to be present at her guillotining in the city square. ‘Listen, Philip has painted me and included the thing in his exhibition. The picture is here, in Brunswick.’

‘But why did you let Philip impose this on you if you’re not keen?’

She allows herself a small silence.

‘It was a last-minute decision. Now it’s done. I’m there already. And they’re both going to see it.’

Soon, a handful of tram stops later, I’m in Sydney Road. I scan a crowd spilling out onto the street – girls in bright socks and big boots; slim-ankled, narrow-waisted, white-haired beauties in tuxedos; men in T-shirts and tight jeans with hangman’s cravats; a gamut of pixies, giants, divas and trendy academics, beers in hand. The exhibition is in a hidden laneway with warehouses, graffiti, big dustbins and music on loud. Then you go up a few steps into a white space.

As I climb those steps, I have no idea what I’m going to step into. I can’t make any sense of Mary’s phone call. Why was she so worried? Surely, the chance of her parents getting back together can’t make her that unhappy. As I step into the room I look for a burqa and see none. There’s no painting of a blue-veiled woman either.

I recognise Philip in the middle of a long wall of paintings. He’s standing next to a blond girl. Her hair is cut in a bob. Each line and detail of her face quiver into beauty. But when she turns round towards me, I see that her other profile is marred – from temple to chin, by a scar the shape of a large blood-red goldfish, swimming down the side of her cheek. She was burnt, just like your grandmother, something whispers in my head. The girl is staring straight at me. Suddenly I know this is my friend Mary. I start walking towards her.

She and Philip are in front of a large painting. It’s hung among all the others, which seem to converge towards it, as do the people draining their way to a focal point – the picture of this face, of this girl, who emerges from her burqa, a blue puddle at her feet. She is painted like an El Greco, with streaks of colour, where the strong and the doubtful blend to form a rendering of a mangled figure which is neither smothered, nor flaunted, but which has kept itself, somehow, intact.

This is a painting of a woman with her two feet on Brunswick ground. It is more a sound than a picture, almost a cry. Not of beauty, or of ugliness, or of terror, or of seduction, but of all of that. Something seen and heard in all its disquieting presence, accepted as it is – a breathing whole.

Julia Gillard has just been white-anted out of politics. The crowd in the room is buzzing with her ousting. There is something quietly apposite in Philip’s painting. It has nothing to do with politics, and yet everything. Its clarity transcends all mere difference of opinion. In spite of himself he may have created, for some, a sacrificial figure – when all he has done, it seems to me, is to paint a human being: a human being like Jill Meagher, like Julia Gillard, nothing more, but surely never anything less.

I move nearer and Philip shakes my hand.

‘I got to paint her in the end, eh.’

His kind, still eyes stare into mine without a hint of disquiet. We could just as well be in an open field, in the sunlight, to meet up for a picnic, a picnic where no balloon is taking off, no helium escaping into the air we breathe. Philip and Mary are standing close to each other, without touching. They remind me of columns on a Greek island. Nothing is left of the temple except for those pillars against the sky on top of a hill.

Mary’s face has slotted into its empty space. The eyes and the urgent half smile ask me to rid myself of questions. I take a breath and nod.

She moves closer.

‘They’re both going to see my face – at the same time.’

Her head moves from side to side, a bit like a neck exercise.

‘You will stay, won’t you, until they rock up?’

I promise. I have no comment to make on her scar; somehow, in some strange way, it seems a part of her. Philip sighs.

‘These idiots,’ he makes a dismissive wave of the arm around the gallery, ‘will probably see something political in this. I’ll bet you anything. Jesus, I can hear them already.’

He glances at Mary.

‘This was way sexier than getting a girl to undress, I can tell you.’

Philip’s eyes are on her burnt profile and his tone changes.

‘I thought I knew about beauty, but I didn’t.’

It suddenly seems clear to me that, rather than a disfigured face or a beautiful one, he has painted all I haven’t been able to sort out over this past year, all that Brunswick hasn’t been able to resolve – a woman. Then people are talking to Philip, and Mary whispers to me:

‘They’re here.’

I turn around and I see Sarah and a man I assume is Gerald. Sarah has no expression. She’s just walking straight towards us. Gerald has piercing blue eyes with a frantic expression. But as he approaches us, it becomes clear that the electric blue of his eyes is what gives them that strange intensity. They must be where Mary gets her burqa-piercing blue stare. Now Sarah has stepped right up to her daughter. She doesn’t say anything at first. Then her words come out in a voice I don’t recognise.

‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you hide it for so long?’

Her tone is as raw as meat in this white place. Gerald stands near them. He’s not very tall but has the presence of a footballer. His hands go out as if he were going to place them on both their shoulders, then fall to tug at the scarf around his neck.

Mary’s voice is husky and quiet.

‘It was an accident, Mum. I was taking photographs on a work site …’ Before focusing on Sarah again, she looks at her father, ‘… for a magazine … There was an explosion and I suffered this electrical burn. I couldn’t bear facing anyone. Sam helped with the Islamic stuff. We just cooked it up. He was kind …’

There is a silence like moss growing under trees, like a sheet of rain falling forever. Then Mary breaks it.

‘I saw the faces of the people who helped me when I had my accident … I just couldn’t deal with it. I’d discovered my so-called beauty in kindergarten. I remember suddenly realising as a kid that I was a shop front, like a pastry shop people go oh and ah in front of. If I wasn’t careful, I wouldn’t be real. Do you remember that playground with the wooden swings and roundabouts down the road from where we used to live? I went there on my own one time and I swore to the bloody trees that I would never pretend, that I would never be a fairy princess. Every time someone would sidle up to me and tell me I was their dream girl or some crap, they had the same expression in their eyes. It was making us both cheap. I was only a kid, but I knew this was about death. Why do you think Sleeping Beauty sleeps a hundred years? Because they don’t allow her be a real human being. Then I saw that look again at the time of the accident. Admiration, horror, what’s the difference? My whole life had come full circle. I just couldn’t take it. Mum?’

I look at them all staring at her – Philip Paulson, whose eyes seem to have enough room in them to contain this; Gerald, still and unhinged like one of Sarah’s sculptures; and Sarah herself, nodding slowly, moving her lips back and forth, as if she were chewing, or fighting back tears.

‘I don’t quite understand what you’re saying Mary, but I think maybe I’d react like that too. I couldn’t bear the pity. We’re a tough lot, aren’t we?’

And her straight, honest look is her gift. It’s all right, it says. Gerald’s hands move suddenly to where they wanted to be – one on each of their shoulders.

Even though there are so many other people here, I feel it’s time for me to go. To stay would be an intrusion. It’s dark now, but Sydney Road is full of lights.