Double Exposure (9 page)

‘Maybe I want to. I've never done it with anyone I liked. Maybe I want to experience that. For once.'

She is standing close now, her face a centimetre from his, her gaze steady. He closes his eyes, measuring his words.

‘Maybe I want to too,' he replies. ‘Maybe there's nothing I'd rather do. But in the end it would still seem like … repayment. And that would make me no better than …'

‘One of my johns?'

A look of hurt ghosts across her face, but then it is gone. She smiles unconvincingly and steps back.

‘I forgot. The white knight never takes advantage of the damsel in distress, does he? He's too damned … honourable. Even if the damsel's a whore.'

‘You're not a whore.'

‘No? What
am
I then? An innocent victim? A candidate for a frigging sainthood? Read your dictionary sometime. Actually, don't bother. I memorised it. Whore (noun): a prostitute, a courtesan, a strumpet, an unchaste woman … Unchaste … That's a joke. I've been chased since I was twelve years old. But get one thing straight, Chris. Up front. I had a choice. I
chose.
I had sex with strangers for money. I've done things you never even dreamed of doing. And it was my decision. I'm not going to pretend it wasn't. So, if there's anything you can't handle –'

‘But your stepfather …'

‘My stepfather was a dick. A sick, pathetic loser. Maybe even a monster. But I haven't seen him in almost two years. The thing is, Chris,
I'm
responsible for my own actions, and if you can't accept that, then maybe I should get out of here and leave you with your honourable … illusions.'

He takes a step towards her, then stops.

‘You don't have to do that.'

‘And you don't have to sleep with me, so I guess we're even.'

He smiles slightly.

‘I guess we are.'

Sixteen
Echoes of innocence

In the dream, you don't hear sounds. You feel them.

Through your skin. Through the water that fills your ears. Sounds, like the crawl of strangers' fingers across your skin. Like insects scrabbling on the surface of your face.

You tumble in the current and open your eyes, hanging upside-down in the black water, with the surface green and shimmering somewhere above you, behind you. And the huge shadow, settling slowly, inexorably into the dark.

And as the current spins you, turns you upwards towards the light, as you close your eyes and open yourself to the green, the thud of entry speaks its meaning through your skin.

And you sense the touch of reaching hands …

*

Cain's story

I read somewhere that more people dream of flying or falling than anything else, but dreams of drowning come a pretty close second. And that both of them are way ahead of dreams about sex – unless you happen to be fifteen years old and male.

I've never dreamed of flying. But for as long as I can remember I've had drowning dreams.

Chris reckons it's all sexual – a ‘womb fixation', he calls it. From the moment they leave the womb, he argues, most males spend the rest of their lives trying to get back into one. He told me I should read Freud. I told him he should get laid more. That Freud should have got laid more.

And that was when he hit me. Not hard, but effectively enough to leave a bruise.

Which I guessed meant I'd won that round.

I hadn't been around to his place in a couple of weeks. I was uncomfortable dropping in with Abby there.

It wasn't that she did anything to make me uncomfortable. She didn't. On the couple of occasions I had dropped in, we'd had pleasant enough conversations and she certainly kept the place spotless.

It was nothing she did.

And I hoped that it wasn't who she was or the trouble she was in, because I really don't like to think of myself as a person who judges people in that way.

You go through life with this image of yourself inside your head. Cain the Tolerant. Willing to accept people for who they are, not for who you'd like them to be.

Not so difficult, really. Until you find yourself out of your depth – out of your tiny sphere of experience.

Like when your only brother sets up house with a hooker.

That's when all your self-righteous crap comes crashing down around your self-righteous ears, while you try to rationalise feelings you have no right to be feeling. Unless, that is, you're willing to admit that all the tolerance, all the open-mindedness, is an act. A mask to deny in you the bigotry you hate in everyone else.

In your father.

I let myself in. The place was quiet and I thought they were out. I was about to leave when I heard a noise in the studio. A chair scraping on the bare boards and someone cursing under his breath.

‘Chris?' I shouted. ‘You in there?'

‘Cain? Come on through. I'm just having a minor meltdown.'

I pulled the curtain aside and moved through into the open space beyond. Chris was on the floor, wiping at a small puddle of brown paint with a cloth and some thinners. He looked up at me, still wiping mechanically.

‘Hi, Stranger. Slumming?'

There was an edge to the humour. I crouched down beside him, grabbed another cloth and began wiping ineffectually at the stain.

‘It's only been a couple of weeks. I've been busy at work. School holidays. Where is she?'

He shrugged.

‘Don't know. She went out earlier. She's still looking for her friend. Tess – the one who saw what happened that night.'

‘No luck yet?'

He just looked at me. Sometimes you ask stupid questions just to fill the space between breaths.

He'd told me everything, of course. We never had secrets from each other, even as kids. There was no reason to start this late in the game. If I was being truthful, that's probably the reason I felt uncomfortable with Abby around.

Not that I doubted her version of the story. Chris believed her and that was good enough for me. He's always had an amazing intuition when it came to reading people. It was just … Well, it was just that she'd dragged him into it. Taken advantage of his Samaritan tendencies and involved him in something that had absolutely nothing to do with him.

Not that she could have stopped him.

Chris was always the type of kid who didn't just bring home the stray dog. He broke into the pound to rescue it.

I just didn't want to see him getting into serious trouble over something that had nothing to do with him. On the news, they were calling it murder – or as near as made any difference.

Police investigating the death of Salvatore Princi are appealing to the public for assistance in identifying the person or persons responsible. Anyone with information is requested to call Crime Stoppers on 1300 300 000 …

And my brother had the prime suspect sleeping on the sofa bed in his lounge-room.

Finally he gave up on the stain.

‘Coffee?' he suggested. I nodded. I was staring at his latest canvas. No dramatic symbolism in it. Not yet, at least. The background was just sketched roughly around the central portrait. Abby, seated, half-turned, on one of the round-backed chairs from the dining table, looking back over her naked shoulder, but with her eyes angled down slightly, not staring directly at the observer. And reflected in an oval mirror behind her, the curve of her arm over the suggestion of a rising breast. He had just begun applying the colours, defining the curves with shadow, rendering the flow of blood beneath the pale skin-tone.

‘I'm looking for a sort of Van Hove effect,' he said, standing behind me with his hand on my shoulder, ‘but using a slightly wider palette instead of the muted pastels she uses.'

I didn't have the heart to tell him I didn't have a clue who Van Hove was. I just nodded sagely and pretended I was on his wavelength.

He continued, staring at the half-finished painting.

‘It's a bit of a departure. Much more basic than most of my previous stuff. I'm going for the sensuality of the curve and the fall of the light. The echo of lost innocence.'

‘That's an odd phrase.'

I turned and looked at him. He was staring intently at the canvas and I knew I was in danger of losing him to the picture.

‘Chris? The echo of lost innocence?'

He broke from the picture and focused on my question.

‘It's just an idea at the moment. I want to create the illusion of a kind of innocent sensuality, then use the eyes to create a … dissonance. An emotional counter-point. Experience. Disillusionment. And yet, somehow – and this is the hardest thing – the hope of redemption. The echo of how it was before the loss of innocence. I'll get the coffee.'

And suddenly I was alone, staring at her and feeling guilty. I traced the curve of her shoulder with my fingertip, feeling the texture of the paint under my touch. After a few more seconds I turned and followed him out through the curtain.

‘It's simple. I'm not ready yet.' His eyes were focused on the contents of his coffee mug.

Okay, I was pressuring him again. I'd promised myself I wouldn't do it – that I'd let things run their course. When the time was right, he'd …

Who was I kidding? I knew he'd continue to find excuses for not grasping the nettle.

‘What do you mean, “not ready”? You know it's sensational. The way you capture –'

‘It's derivative, Cain. I don't have a style of my own. I'm developing original ideas but using other people's visions to do it.'

‘I don't …'

‘Look at it this way. One minute I'm Pino, the next I'm Van Hove, the next … who knows? When it comes to a consistent view, I don't know who
I
am.'

‘And what's wrong with that? You don't want to be creating the same work over and over.'

‘And you don't want to be creating a dog's breakfast of other people's inspirations either. Art has to take a stand. It has to have a unique style. Radical or conservative, it has to make a statement. Of its own.'

I drained my mug and placed it onto the surface in front of me.

‘Come on, Chris. It's art, not politics.'

‘All art is political,' he replied, flipping through one of his art books which lay open on the coffee table before him.

‘All
art? That's a big call.'

‘It has to be. It's all about choices. Perceptions. How we view the world and what's happening in it. What's the difference between a photograph and a snapshot?'

‘You're going to tell me, right?'

He smiled. ‘Naturally. With a snapshot, you're recording a moment in time. A hard-copy visual memory. It's an accurate representation of some instant that may or may not be important later down the track. But it's not Art. I mean, it doesn't try to be anything but what it is. And it really doesn't mean a whole lot to anyone but the person who took it – and anyone who happened to be there with them. Because its meaning is in the emotion of the experience it records – and that isn't accessible to anyone else. Which is why most people would rather have a tooth pulled than sit through a viewing of someone else's holiday snaps.

‘A photograph, on the other hand, assembles images for effect. The composition, the lighting, the arrangement of the individual elements – it all has meaning. You don't need to have experienced the moment for it to speak to you. It's a statement to which we respond – positively or negatively doesn't matter -but it's a statement. It says, “This is how the world is. This is my perception. My vision.”'

‘And your photographs do that. I mean –'

‘My photographs, yes, but that's the point. Don't you see? Every time I talk about my drawing, my painting, I'm using someone else as the context – not myself. It's like … a borrowed vision. Like I can't make up my own mind.'

‘Tarantino manages it. All his movies are concocted of bits and pieces of other filmmakers' visions – but what he ends up with is amazing. Unique. Entirely his own. Maybe that's what –'

‘Nice try, bro.' Another smile. ‘Sometimes I feel like I'm arguing with myself.' He paused, as if searching for the right line of reasoning. He picked up the book he'd been thumbing through.

Victorian Painting.

‘Take women,' he said. I was about to make a half-arsed joke, but the look in his eye was too serious. He wasn't trying to convince me, as much as he was trying to work out something for himself. Something important. I bit my tongue and waited for him to go on.

Which, eventually, he did. He flipped through the pages until he reached the picture he was looking for.

‘John William Waterhouse. Almost all Waterhouse's paintings focus on women, and he chose the women of Greek mythology. As a group, they were probably the strongest women in the history of the western world. And they were dangerous –
femmes fatale
. In most of the stories he chose, the men were victims, betrayed or lured to their death by some female beauty or other. Look at this one. It's called
Hylas and the Nymphs.
One guy surrounded by seven beautiful, naked girls.'

‘Half his luck.' I couldn't help it. He shook his head.

‘Except they're about to drag him into the stream and drown him,' he said. ‘But look at them. The epitome of late nineteenth-century female beauty. Demure, innocent-looking, idealised. All his women are like that.' He flipped a few pages. ‘Now look at this one. Frederic Lord Leighton. Leighton's women had a similar look, but Leighton really had nothing much to say. He was a Victorian. To him, appearance was reality. His paintings were about classical beauty and the elegant lifestyle. But they don't look beneath the surface. Waterhouse, on the other hand … If you take his work as a whole, you'd have to conclude he was a bit of a misogynist. His message seemed to be, “Women are beautiful, yes, and we idealise them, place them on a pedestal. But watch out. They're dangerous.” He was using the contemporary concepts of beauty to make a point, by placing it against the mythology of a different cultural context. But the thing is, he'd mastered his own style. You can tell a Waterhouse woman, even if you've never seen the picture before. If nothing else, he makes a statement about beauty.'

He found another picture, and pushed the book across the table towards me.

‘It's the same with Rossetti. That's his wife, Lizzie. His women are elegant, too, but stronger, distinctive, more Mediterranean.'

He closed the book. I was a sounding board now, not an audience. He was staring at a point in the middle distance.

‘Pino paints reflective, almost impressionist visions of his women. Very sensual but a little introverted, and yet they're caring, domestic and maternal too. Van Hove is a woman painting women – or rather post-adolescent girls. And she captures that emerging sensuality. A kind of innocent narcissism, looking in mirrors, exploring the touch of sheets on naked flesh. Playing at womanhood. Her colours are muted to match the mood.

‘And then you get an artist like Kim Nelson. No obvious fixed style. He's fluid – realist, symbolist, impressionist, even abstract at times – but
his
women … Their beauty is strength. They stare at the viewer – or at the distant horizon – with a purpose. There's an almost tangible internal power in them, a confidence. They're modern and liberated, but not stereotyped. And they're beautiful. But they're nothing like Waterhouse's ideal. Nelson is a modern painter, painting modern women, even when his settings are classical. And
his
vision makes a statement. That's what
I
want to do.'

It began to make sense.

‘And Abby's a part of that.'

He nodded and looked back at me.

‘A big part. When I paint her, I come closer to …' He trailed off and stood up. ‘As a model, she's a natural. Like she understands what I need before I ask. Actually, the whole thing was her idea originally.' Picking up the empty mug, he crossed to the sink. ‘The modelling, I mean. She didn't have any money, but she wanted to “pay her way” – and I'd asked her once to sit for me, so …' The characteristic shrug. ‘It's a totally different experience drawing from life. It doesn't matter how good the photograph is, it's still two-dimensional.'