He buys a poster of the painting from the gallery shop and pins it to an easel in his studio alongside a blank canvas. Then he searches among hundreds of used tubes of paint in a drawer of a sideboard until he is satisfied he has the colours. He squeezes paint onto the lid of a shoebox and carries it to the blank canvas. His hand hovers, not knowing where to begin. Her hair? The cuff of her shirt? Eventually, with two bold strokes he outlines her nose. ‘Shit, Turton. Slow down,’ he tells himself. He slows into torpor and by dawn he has painted the Weeping Woman.
That night he takes her into the gallery and looks at her alongside the original. She will not do, she isn’t right. He missed her eyes and his brushstrokes are longer than Picasso’s. Too confident. But he has come to know her better while painting this first draft. He smiles at the real one now, and nods. I know you now. I have you.
In his studio Turton staples an ancient linen onto a rectangular stretcher. He puts a saucepan of water on a gas camper-cooker and sprinkles crystallised rabbit skin into it, stirring until the crystals dissolve and the brew bubbles and thickens into glue. This stench of rendered rodent must have assaulted Picasso’s nose thousands of times. Turton lights a stick of incense to camouflage the smell. Then he paints a coat of the glue onto the linen, lets it dry and sands it back, before painting on another coat. Next day, when the glue has hardened, he tightens the linen and paints it with a white Jesso. He is ready to begin.
Never has a man thrown himself into a forgery with such passion. If he replicates Picasso’s work perfectly he wins Mireille for a night. And, who knows, if he takes her to a ruinous ecstasy (many a good tune played on an old fiddle) he might win her for longer. He goes to a mirror and combs his hair before beginning.
At midnight he sets his easel up beside the Weeping Woman in the Hall of the Great Europeans, with Harry and Mireille sitting silently on the bench behind him smoking. A distant clank of a tram on St Kilda Road is the only sound. Beside him on a card table he squeezes blobs of paint from lead tubes. Greens, pinks, blue, yellow, black. Harry counts fifteen colours. Turton lays a brush alongside each one. He takes a tape measure from his pocket and, stepping rapidly from one canvas to another, he makes a grid on his canvas and outlines her profile in pencil on it. Then, with his glasses down the weather end of his nose, he steps up close enough to the Weeping Woman to kiss her, and studies a small terrain, a square centimetre of her, for minutes on end, before stepping sideways to his own canvas and reproducing that centimetre there.
This is how he takes the one and makes the other, in parts small enough to be called DNA. He ingests an eyelash here, a runnel of tear-track there, a nostril, a tooth. Each is studied and known before being carried across and rebirthed as part of the new woman. It is a terribly laborious process and though Harry and Mireille are fascinated at first, as though watching an ant trying to relocate the Taj Mahal, before long they are both asleep, knowing Mireille has lost her bet.
For seven nights he returns, moving the Weeping Woman fragment by fragment – an iris, a brushstroke, her collar-point – until he has replicated her. Finally, holding aloft a brush that is the lilac colour of her lips, he stands back from his own Weeping Woman and says, matter of factly, ‘Done.’
Mireille doesn’t even compare the paintings, because she has watched the new one grow. ‘And done like you said. The identical twin. I have lost our bet.’
Having known for days that he was going to win the bet and that he was going to have Mireille for a night, he’d studied his nude self in a full-length mirror that morning, trying to see what she would see. He flexed a quadricep and sighed at the result, flexed a bicep and blinked three times at its deficiency. He thrust his hips forwards and closed one eye for perspective, and made a frame of his thumbs and forefingers. Looking through it he saw himself, almost hairless, his muscles withered, gone, leaving the skin hanging in flaccid pouches. His penis angling pale and knotted from his wizened torso. He could not, in all conscience, present this to a woman of Mireille’s beauty.
‘Our bet?’ he asks now, feigning ignorance. ‘Our bet? Oh, that. Forget that. I knew I could replicate the painting. There was no bet.’ Releasing Mireille from the debt of sleeping with his despicable self, Turton feels like a man who has rescued a princess from the libidinous attentions of a gibbon. He feels heroic. Stands tall. Probably, he thinks to himself, this flush of chivalry is a better pay-off than I could have got by having sex with her. He wonders, briefly, if this means he is in love with her.
Mireille kisses him. Harry is relieved and pats Turton’s back and hugs him and tells him he didn’t think he could do it, but, gee, he surely did do it. I … dentical. They drink Armagnac in the dark of the gallery, admiring Turton’s Weeping Woman. As they lie there Turton massages Mireille’s feet, the loser’s task, her head in Harry’s lap.
But before long Turton’s mood darkens. He is beginning to regard his own Weeping Woman suspiciously. Staring from her to Mireille, he begins to massage Mireille’s feet more and more violently, until she yelps, ‘Ow, too hard. I am not a bear.’ She pulls them from him.
‘Why would you make a bet like that? Risk having to sleep with a dirty old man?’
‘You are not so old or so dirty.’
‘Oh, I am. A decrepit thing. Why? Why did you want me to paint her?’ He reaches out for her feet again and puts them in his lap. ‘If we stole the original and left mine in its place, I wonder how long it would be before anyone noticed.’ He closes his eyes and holds her feet gently in his cupped hands, using them as a seismograph to feel for the telltale vibrations of her guilt. Did she flinch when he said the word ‘stole’?
‘It’d probably be quite a while, wouldn’t it?’ he asks. ‘Time enough to sell the real painting and get away.’ He is fishing now. Why did she want this new painting?
She sits up, folding her feet beneath her. ‘Your reasoning is faulty, Turton. What is the point of stealing a painting if no one knew it was gone? People who buy stolen art must know it stolen before they can buy it. It must announce its availability on the black market in a great scandale of front pages and TV newsflashes and detectives making big statements and politicians harrumphing.’
‘I won’t do it,’ he tells Mireille. ‘Don’t even ask me.’ He lets her feet go and takes hold of his sideboards. ‘Don’t even tell me.’
She reaches out and unlocks his fingers from his sideboards and puts his hands in her lap. ‘Ask yourself what Picasso would have done,’ she whispers, kissing him on the lips, pulling his body against hers.
She doesn’t wink at Harry. It would have been better if she had, but Harry knows she wants to. And he is consoled by being sure that Mireille and he are in this together. She is a siren calling a sucker onto the rocks. A woman taking hold of a man’s workaday sanity and his proudly held morality and crushing them between her thighs as if she were a vice. It excites Harry that Turton is being gathered up and crushed in the vice of her allure. He feels complicit in the sting. His woman is doing this and he can trust her to do it: take another man’s penis in her mouth and not get into it; never, during the entire process have a thought or flicker of lust, because he, Harry, is so strongly the centrepiece of her desire. He isn’t worried at the thought of Mireille’s sexual predilections being discovered by Turton. He is confident she won’t betray them. She will serve Turton up a Punch & Judy show of her own needs.
Still, the sounds of lovemaking, the groans, hyperventilations and whimpers (despite Harry knowing them a crumb-trail of language to lead Turton falsely to a conclusion of his own sexual magnificence) are terrible to hear. Harry feels sick and wanders away humming ‘Advance Australia Fair’ loudly enough to drown out Mireille’s sounds. He meanders through neo-Byzantine ceramics and into the cul-de-sac of post-modernism, leaving Modigliani’s portrait of Manuel Humbert (that straitlaced virgin, with his startled vicar’s eyes and high white collar) to eavesdrop the purple gratitude voiced by Turton Pym as he lays his hands on Mireille. ‘Oh … Oh, yes, indeed … thank you … Yes.’