In the morning Harry is hung-over. He is reading The Saturday Age, in which there is a big black and white close-up of him, a contrail from his Camel curling in front of his face. The journalist in the aqua cashmere cardigan has called him the newest kid on the bleak blue block of post-modernism. Says he’s a nut who inhabits a loft and wants to hunt down Sidney Nolan. ‘Look out, Sidney,’ is the vote of confidence with which she finishes her article.

Harry snatches a carving fork out of a drawer and stabs himself right in the mouth, through the whole Arts and Entertainment section and on into the wilderness of Real Estate.

Suddenly they’re talking about him, and it makes him sick with fear. Where will it lead? It will lead to them finding out he’s a fake. It will lead to them finding out his paintings are just a thousand consecutive decisions made snappish and random to get his arm moving and the paint flowing: big nose or small? Red hair or blue? Floating on the water or in a dark room? His sister or a chick from Greek mythology? A Scottie dog or the king of beasts? Make a choice. Fast. One minute with Pink Floyd cranked up to ten, wielding his brush like a conductor with a baton, swooping and swaying before the canvas, naked and clueless as a caveman. Next minute on guard, stabbing at the canvas with his brush, like Zorro. No cohesive theory. No all-embracing vision. Just Zorro slashing Zs into a chubby jailer’s shirt. Is this what artists are?

The world has discovered him, and the world can’t help but discover this about him. Look out, Sidney? Did he really say he was hunting Sidney Nolan? His stomach churns and he scrambles for the sink, where he vomits a floodtide that launches a flotilla of empty bean cans.

The Saturday Age isn’t fooling Harry Broome. He knows Mireille bought him out of a close shave with anonymity. He knows he should feel grateful, and he tries for some moments to admire what she’s done for him. But his attempt at gratitude quickly curdles into resentment. As he showers and his hangover recedes, his resentment grows. Once he has had coffee and is in his T14 Renault driving to her address, and has lit his first Camel, his resentment turns into anger and he damns her name out loud. ‘Bloody Mireille.’

Now he’s strong again he is no longer afraid to admit that he really is an artist who has Sidney Nolan in his sights. And if only this menopausal skank hadn’t leapt in and bought all his works before the true connoisseurs could unfog their pince-nez and winkle their chequebooks from their sports-coat pockets, he might be hanging in boardrooms this morning. He might be hanging in galleries. Weston Guest, director of the NGV, might have anointed him by buying one. But none of them was given a chance.

Worse, he suspects she purchased his paintings as a means of purchasing him, and that he is now beholden to her and expected to pay with himself. The big reward the world has to offer this fifty-year-old is a twenty-two-year-old, taut in the gut and veins, smooth skin tight with muscle. Last night’s artistic success was a fraud, a sale of bicep and cock, not heart and eye. She’s a rich woman and he’s been purchased like a gigolo.

In raised lettering high on the front of her building a sign reads: THE HELL’S BELLS. This was once a waterside pub, a blood-house where, at day’s end, wharfies would pay for drinks with cargo they had smuggled off the docks. On 3 December 1954, in the front bar of the Hell’s Bells, dock workers were trying to trade half-thawed Narragansett turkeys for whisky, brandishing the birds at the publican like the treasures of Montezuma, when a lone customs agent held his badge aloft and shouted, ‘That poultry is the property of Macintosh and Sons Importers. Everybody is arrested.’

The wharfies looked around, back and forth, to confirm he was alone, before clubbing him with the thawing birds until both he and they were at room temperature. Nineteen fifty-four is still known as the Year of Premature Christmas in Port Melbourne, because on the night of the third the whole suburb reeked joyously of yuletide feast as the murderers ate their weapons and toasted Santa, and Macintosh and Sons.

Mireille will answer the door barefoot and bright-toenailed in a silk nightshirt blaring nipples, he thinks. With minted breath she will pretend to be surprised to see him, then pivot on emeritus ballerina’s legs, carefully oiled, into her apartment where incense burns and Serge Gainsbourg plays.

Except when the door opens she is wearing grey overalls spattered with paint, brush smears on her thighs, the fingers of her right hand covered in wet green. She is so sure he is bought and paid for, she hasn’t even stooped to the clichés of allure. No lipstick or mascara, no cleavage, no lingerie, not a whiff of perfume. He’s insulted anew. Wiping her hand on a cloth she tells him, ‘You look like shit, kid.’

‘I don’t dress up for odd jobs.’ He has been bought, but he doesn’t have to be nice about it.

‘Death warmed up, I mean.’

‘I did some nightclubs.’

She stands back and he walks past her into the house. ‘Up the stairs.’ Up a flight of pressed metal stairs and into an enormous room, the floor of which is covered in sisal matting rained on with paint here and there where easels have stood. Floor-to-ceiling windows look over Port Phillip Bay, the clouds bulging low and cerebral atop the water. His bubble-wrapped paintings are stacked against a wall.

On an easel sits the canvas she has been working on, and across which, at the sound of the doorbell, she has run her fingers back and forth to deface it to a cross-hatch of greens, yellows, pinks – nothing of its previous structure discernible.

‘You paint?’ he asks.

‘Everyone paints sometime. I used to hike in the mountains. Next I do piano, maybe.’

He sits on a sofa of embroidered French farm scenes, submerged in a jigsaw of spillage and stain. Popping his press-stud shirt open, he rubs his hands across his flat stomach, his eyes half-closed and his lips pouting gently, wanting to bring the crass commerce of this situation out into the open, not let her get away with kidding herself this is an affaire de coeur. You paid for it, come and get it. He reaches down and caresses himself through his jeans.

She backs away from him as if he might be some sort of dangerous fiend liable to attack ladies before lunch. Her face whitens and she takes up a brush and begins to wash it in a jar, studying its bristles closely. ‘What are you doing?’ she asks softly.

‘What you paid for.’ He strokes his fingers across his nipples and smiles, happy to have unmasked her, to have told her what she really is.

‘Get out,’ she says softly.

‘Hard to get? Hard to get’s good. Good for the soul.’ He undoes the button on his jeans.

‘Get out.’ She throws the paintbrush and it leaves a wound of green on his chest.

‘Hey?’ His voice lifts an octave in confusion.

She looks up at him. ‘Go on.’

He buttons his jeans and shirt slowly, allowing her time to recant, not quite believing she wants him to go. Her anger could be all part of her masquerade that this is a natural affair of lust and hormones, and not a transaction.

‘I won’t come back,’ he tells her at the door.

‘I am throwing you out. You are talking about coming back?’

Slowly his face slackens with disbelief, his jaw hangs loose. ‘You’re really throwing me out? You don’t want to – you know …’ Harry feels a surge of happiness throb in his jaw and chest. ‘You like my stuff?’

She shakes her head. ‘You are a strange kid, kid.’

He reaches out and takes her hand and shakes it, stooping, nodding and smiling. His gratitude floods back so strongly it makes his breath shallow. She really bought his paintings. She didn’t buy him. He’s an artist. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’

‘Thank you?’ She touches her fingertips to her head to show his insanity. ‘For throwing you out?’

‘I thought – you wanted to …’

She takes her hand back from him. ‘Kid, I like your stuff. That is all.’

To hang Harry’s pictures they have to take down pictures that are already on the wall. Serious, famous art. ‘This is a Pugh,’ Harry says, holding it at arm’s length. ‘You can’t take down a Pugh to put me up.’

‘Pugh needs a holiday.’

‘A Drysdale. You can’t replace a Drysdale with me.’

‘Put it in the corner. It is not his best.’

‘It’s a Drysdale.’

‘You are not helping.’ She laughs, takes the Drysdale from him, thumps it down in the corner.’

‘Shit. Be careful. Russell Drysdale.’

He leaves her apartment that day scared again – Drysdales are being taken down to make way for him. As he walks the street he keeps his head bowed and his eyes down, so no one will recognise him from the newspaper or as the guy who is replacing Drysdale on walls.