On Tuesday morning Harry takes half a dozen deep breaths before dialling Mireille’s number with a beer in his hand. He drinks with his head laid back as he listens to her phone ring.

‘Mireille speaking.’

He nearly hangs up.

‘Ah … hello.’

‘Hello. Who is that?’

‘Harry.’ She doesn’t answer. ‘Kid,’ he tells her.

‘Ah, kid. How are you?’

‘Your cheque bounced. The cheque you gave Chloe Gwyther for my paintings, it was dishonoured. She’s … she’s calling me everything under the sun. Saying we pulled some sort of sting on her.’

‘We did, kid.’

‘We did?’

‘I do not have that sort of money. Especially for paintings by kids who are unknown.’

‘You’ve got Drysdales in your house.’

‘Not mine. Bought for a client, on my recommendation, with his money. They are shipped off to him now.’

‘Bitch,’ Harry says to himself in admiration.

‘Hey, kid. I got you in The Age. You are a star and it cost you nothing, and it cost me nothing. And Chloe got enough free publicity to pay for her champagne. She has done the same thing, one time or another, I will bet. Welcome to the art world. Smoke and mirrors. Come get your paintings any time.’

‘You said you liked my stuff,’ he accuses her.

‘I do. I think the world might, too. Sometimes the world must be told it is all right to like something. A sold-out first exhibition can do that. And this is a sold-out first exhibition to everyone but you, me, and Chloe. And none of us will tell. Will we, kid?’

‘But … I didn’t sell any paintings, then.’

‘Yes, you did. Ask anybody.’

Harry hangs up on her, a nauseating uncertainty inside him, not knowing now if he is an artist or a fake. Not knowing if she’s ruined him or saved him.

Three days later he is standing, drunk, at her door again. She doesn’t look angry or surprised, as he had feared she would. She laughs at him swaying there, paint-smeared and smiling. She takes him inside and turns on the wall spots and leaves him sitting, blinking at his own art hanging there. From his chair he watches her through her unclosed bedroom door taking off her clothes. Wriggling out of a skirt. Balancing on one leg as she unrolls a stocking over thigh, knee, and calf. Unfastening her bra behind her back. He can’t take his eyes off her – her neck and shoulders, the flare of her buttocks. Only much later does he realise it has been a performance. That she, a woman with silver in her hair, is proud of her young body.

She takes control. Tells him where to touch her, and how. Straddles him on the chair and rides him while he smiles at the paintings that have driven Drysdale and Pugh from the room. He watches her, nostrils flaring and her breasts rising and falling. When she comes her left eye winces, fluttering, half-closed, as if she was sucking something sour.

‘You’re so beautiful.’

It is not just her body that captivates him, but the way she holds herself. Her movements show a long culture of lovemaking, choreographed by a hundred carnal stars that have lit her nights. The fluttering of her fingers and the flickering light in her eyes as she orgasms make him think of the rose windows in Notre Dame, some jewel wrought by ancient masters. He falls in love with her this first night, and is amazed such a thing can happen.

He asks her to sit for him while he paints her. She agrees and each day for weeks she sits still, watching him painting her for hours before she will take him to bed. He compliments her on her patience. ‘My family is a good-looking family. They have often modelled for artists,’ she tells him.

Eventually, her dress pooling around her feet, she takes the brush from his hand and kisses him as she strips him. If he tries to touch her before she is ready, she slaps his hand away. She controls every advance they make on each other. His hands are wet with paint and she places them on herself, leaving his fingerprints in blue and green and red. He feels totally subordinate, but enjoys having his pleasure directed.

He asks about her accent – where it comes from, where her life has been lived. She waves a finger in the air and recites a roll-call of place names. She lives in the here-and-now and won’t tell him of her past life. He takes this to mean some man has scarred her. Harry hates that man, imagining him as Marcello Mastroianni. He confronts him in his tuxedo and thrashes him in a casino of dukes and viscounts.

‘Have you been hurt by someone?’ he asks her, lying beside her in her bed.

She pouts, as if considering this. Tears form at the corners of her eyes. ‘On the contrary, I have hurt men. Cursed by beauty, I have been a danger to men just by being alive, my mere existence an intoxicant of the sort that has made them challenge each other to knife fights and jump from high buildings through atrium roofs. Good young men have died for me in the most gaudy fashion. I remember their faces, though their names I sometimes did not even know. One fellow, Gerard, threw himself to the bears in the Paris zoo. It was winter and they were hibernating. He was openly mocked in Le Figaro as being a failed lover, and his photograph set alongside a photograph of sleeping bears. “Who is the dubious beauty who launched Gerard at hibernating pandas?” Le Figaro asked. It was seen as a great insult to me. Next day Gerard threw himself in with the lions, who slumber, but do not hibernate.’

Harry is propped up on an elbow, an eyebrow lifted, agog at her story, feeling pity for Mireille for the curse her beauty has been to her. Damn that show-off Gerard, though, who went and aggrandised his broken heart by throwing himself to lions, when he could have just as easily stepped in front of a bus. Damn him. My love is the equal of his, Harry tells himself. But I wouldn’t advertise it in such a way. I’d throw myself off a bridge. Or in front of a tram. Whatever fate best communicates the heartbreak of the modern-day lover to the woman concerned. I’d do it. But I wouldn’t need zoo animals and newspapers.

He looks so serious that she reaches out and runs her fingertips across his face; tries to lift his frown, smooth his forehead.

‘Do not be afraid, Harry. Now my hair is silver my beauty is dimmed from the dangerous luminescence of my younger years, and a man is able to woo me without staking his life on success.’

‘No, you’re still beautiful,’ he insists.

‘I am a memory of beauty. And I am happy that way. I do not want you to throw yourself to bears.’

He feels the rocking of the bed before he sees it in her face. Muscles spasming in laughter.

Weeks go by. Harry, in love, and knowing he is a hero who has won a goddess, and feeling that having achieved this it is not beyond him to also reinvent the whole of art and become a known genius, attends school less and less. He and Mireille drink late in bars and eat tapas for breakfast at the Victoria Market, and return to her apartment, where Harry paints her with Miles Davis lowing on his horn from the bedroom.

He is sketching her in this room, sunshine through the window lighting the silver in her hair, when the phone rings. ‘Stay still. I’ll get it. Stay still.’ He answers the phone.

‘Hello. Yeah, it’s Harry … Okay … Stay cool. Stay cool … I will. Yeah, I understand …’

He puts down the phone, the colour drained from his face. ‘That was Chloe Gwyther. She tracked me here. How did she track me here? She’s still pissed off. She’s going to send “people” now. And she’s going to tell everyone what we did. She thinks “we” set her up. Like … I did it.’

He rubs his fingertips anxiously up and down his thighs, wiping off paint. ‘She says I’m a conniving little shit who’s going to be ruined before I even begin, if I don’t pay her. I shouldn’t believe for a moment that I’ll ever get exhibited in this country again, she says.’

Harry’s paintings are still hanging in this room. He looks around at them now with his lip curled. How did these works, for which he held such great hopes, become such a burden? None of them are sold; none of them will ever hang anywhere significant, yet he owes money on them.

Mireille breaks from her pose and comes to him and takes him in her arms. ‘You should not have ripped her off, kid. You stole from a bigwig of art there. It is no surprise if she put out a death contract for you.’

‘On you. A contract on you. And it’s not funny, Mireille. I owe her the best part of twenty grand, which is a shitload of money to pay for not selling even one painting. And considering I’m a broke student.’

‘I would pay her … if I could.’

‘I really think she might fuck my chances. Put the word out on me. I’m a swindler. I’m a dud. I cheated the gallery that took a chance on me.’ He pauses and shakes his head. ‘She could do it.’

‘She is being so unreasonable. Why would she demand commission when she knows none of them sold?’

‘She’s somebody and I’m nobody. She could fuck me.’

‘This is my fault, Harry. I am sorry. I will get the money. It could not be that hard, getting money. We will get it.’