Harry wanted to stun them with Big Red Bite – a two-metre square canvas of a goliath businessman with screaming Africans stuck between his teeth as he takes a bite from a bleeding world. Put it on the wall right opposite the gallery entrance and make a statement. Let them know he wasn’t some shrinking violet of the Shrinking Violet school of art. Here was a painter deep inside the mind of man, gorging the full psychic smorgasbord. But when he suggested Big Red Bite should hang in the foyer, Chloe Gwyther, the gallery owner, laid a hand on his buttock and pulled him within whisper, close enough for him to see the whiskers lying prone in the slurry of her foundation. ‘The annex, Harry, the annex. A room it will entirely vanquish,’ she assured him.

So Big Red Bite is hanging in the annex and in the foyer is a painting of his sister masturbating with a boot. Rendered impressionistically enough to be only faintly pornographic so no one would be repulsed, and impressionistically enough to be only faintly his sister so she would never know he had spent all those nights in her wardrobe. He hoped it was a strong enough work. First impressions are everything. But at $2000, is it too expensive? Maybe he should have put something cheaper here, something that would sell early and let people know it was all right to buy.

For days he has arranged and rearranged the order in which his works should hang, until this morning Chloe lost patience and snapped at Michael, her assistant, ‘Hang them. Not in any special order – but by five o’clock.’ Michael, a failed gay who has retreated into a lofty asexuality, became a blur of hammer, nail, tape measure and spirit level in his Ermenegildo Zegna suit. And now a painting of Harry’s sister masturbating with a boot hangs in the foyer. And while her face is partly obscured by her forearm, she is using a distinctive green knee-high boot with a purple heart on its heel. One of a pair his mother long ago donated to the Salvos. Will she recognise these boots? Harry wonders. Will she storm in here and call me a disgusting pig and throw champagne on me in front of everyone? She loves a scene. Not above her to flounce in and steal my thunder just because I’ve used my own life in my art, and part of my own life was standing in her wardrobe watching her bring herself off with a boot. Maybe she’ll throw herself across the painting to screen it from public view, screaming at people to look away. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s stolen centre stage by screaming about her need for privacy.

These are only a few of the thoughts haunting Harry as the guests begin to arrive into these spaces of blond floorboards strewn with light shards exploding off plastic chandeliers. Suddenly the people in his paintings look ugly to him. They undergo a horrifying metamorphosis, the sight of which stuns him. When he first stood back to look at them, freshly finished, still wet, in his studio, the Australians he had painted had an inner depth illuminated by the psychiatry of Freud. Here in the Colditz Gallery they look like smirking muggers. Carjackers cashed up from hauling housewives out of Mazdas at traffic lights. Violent and opportunistic people.

I’ve made a mistake, he tells himself. No one wants to buy these leering muggers, these delirious masturbators. Art is hung in living rooms. And living rooms are refuges designed to exclude muggers and wankers. Living rooms are built to hold armchairs and books and a family and a bottle of wine and a meal and a conversation held around a vase of flowers. I should have painted flowers.

After four champagnes he is strong enough to ask his father what he thinks.

‘Pretty existential, Harry. Pretty existential.’ Give me chrysanthemums.

‘They’re marvellously … operatic, Harry,’ his mother says. I’m for rhododendrons.

Hardly anyone is looking at his paintings, anyway. They’re talking and laughing, each immersed in another person. Drinking champagne and waiting their turn to tell their stories and have their jokes laughed at. Their backs to the walls, a crowd facing itself.

Harry begins to feel all these people have been called together to shun his art. Turton Pym, his tutor, furtively circumnavigates the room, talking to no one, his back hunched under the dead weight of all his unbearable anonymity, hands in his trench-coat pockets, silver sideboards glistening with Black Diamond pomade, canting his whole torso twenty degrees to starboard to view the paintings as if they were hung askew.

This is failure. The bell tolling on his career as an artist. Harry can actually hear a bell tolling. And there is the old crone Gwyther herself, the gallery owner, squealing at some woman’s anecdote like a mule on fire, then smiling at him over the woman’s pale shoulder. Smiling at him in disappointment, because Harry Broome, an up-and-comer she has gambled a glossy catalogue and a Friday night and six-dozen bottles of méthode champenoise on, has let her down. Harry Broome has just burst from the closet and announced himself the town’s freshest dud. And she’s pointing now. Pointing. To the exit? Get out? You’re finished? His eyes follow her rheumatically knobbed forefinger.

Chloe Gwyther is pointing at Fun with Shoes. In the lower right-hand corner of its frame is a red spot. It is sold. Surely his mother has done this. Taken his father by a shirt-button and pulled him close. ‘We’ll sell the campervan, Lee. We’ll buy a painting.’ She has seen him dying and reached out to save him. That’s what mothers are for.

But even as he watches, Chloe, shorter by a half head than usual because she’s stooped in supplication, nods at something the pale-skinned woman is saying, then catches Michael’s eye and points a finger at BeachHead. He rushes forwards and sticks a red spot to its frame. They wander, Chloe Gwyther and the woman, Harry following at a distance behind. Michael, a scampering monkey now, finds ever more theatrical ways to lay on the red spots.

The woman buying his paintings is the woman who assured him she wouldn’t. Bright eyed beneath shoulder-length hair striped with silver. Chloe Gwyther is thought attractive, but she looks like a broiled crawfish standing next to this woman, who nods now at Big Red Bite. Chloe semaphores to Michael and he goes to the painting, bends his knees, lowers his head and lays on the red spot with the solemnity of a general pinning on a medal.

The tolling of the bell has stopped, St Paul’s Cathedral having told the town it is 9 pm. In the silence a lie has also stopped. Harry Broome has sold a painting and the lie of art school is behind him. The lie he and his friends have told each other a thousand times: they are artists because they say they are artists and they paint; it has nothing to do with any judgement the world can confer. What the world says doesn’t matter because the world is peopled by tiny, retreating souls whose approval is no validation of their art. This is the lie they tell out loud while silently, desperately, wanting the world to buy their paintings.

Every one of them knows it is a lie. Harry often thinks this is what it must have been like to be part of a Communist regime or a Church: all secretly aware of the inherent fallacy of the faith, all secretly aware of the awareness of others of the inherent fallacy of the faith, yet spruiking the faith, morning, noon and night.

Harry has sold a painting. He looks around at his works. They have become strong again, their colours beautiful and their cast profound.

A journalist from The Age in an aqua cashmere cardigan takes him into Chloe Gwyther’s office and sits cross-legged on Chloe’s desk while he struggles to tell her his influences, motivations, aspirations. Where does he get his ideas from? He holds back from telling her Picasso and Freud. It is a secret, and would make him sound derivative and maybe an obvious plagiarist. ‘Who can say where ideas come from?’ He stares at her, shaking his head while he lifts his open hands towards the ceiling. ‘I think them up.’

His sister, Amelia, turns up in fancy stitched rodeo boots. She stands in front of Fun with Shoes twirling her fingers in her hair with her eyes squinted. ‘The boots with the purple hearts. Whatever happened to them?’

‘Mum gave them to the Salvos.’

‘The Salvos? What do bag ladies want with four-inch heels?’ She makes no mention of what the purple hearts are being used for in the painting. Did she know all along he was in that wardrobe?

A group surrounds him and Chloe Gwyther unrolls a hand towards him and says, ‘This is the young man we’re all so excited about.’ Three people congratulate him simultaneously, but he only hears the silver-striped woman say, ‘Ah, the anonymous kid. Hello.’

Harry feels wildly beholden to her. She has saved him and he feels a surge of gratitude. To express this gratitude he looks her up and down, slowly, showily, with a lecher’s cocked lip, as a compliment to her beauty, her unfaded sexuality. Those brightly sad eyes behind wire-rimmed, square-lensed glasses. She blinks, waiting until he has completed his gaudy perusal, and says, ‘Oh, kid.’ A reproach that reddens his face.

‘Harry … Mireille.’ Chloe shows each to the other with the flat of her hand as she says their names.

‘I am thinking to do a room of you. At my place,’ Mireille says.

‘Yeah?’

‘I wish you could help me to decide where to hang them. Which should be the neighbour of which. I think an artist knows which baby belongs with which baby.’ Mireille nods, willing him to agree.

‘I’ll give it a go,’ Harry shrugs.

‘Between us, then, we might have the decisions.’

‘Well, yeah. We might. Yeah.’