The Brush-Off (12 page)

Not that it wouldn't have been handy, I reflected as I rinsed the forlorn breakfast bowl that had been soaking in the sink.

Next Christmas he'd give me
Home Maintenance Made Easy.
And it, too, would go into the bookcase unopened. Right beside
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
. That one I bought myself. Got bogged down in the War of Spanish Succession. One night soon I'd try again, get right on top of Metternich.

Red gave me what he thought a boy should give his father. But he needn't have worried about my home maintenance needs. I had none. After seven years with Wendy, fruitlessly wrestling with cross-cut saws and counter-sunk wood screws, all I wanted was to change the odd light globe. That's why I'd bought a renovated house.

So what if all the bench tops were apple-green and the cupboards burnt-orange? So what if all my furniture came from the Ikea catalogue and looked like it was designed for Swedish dwarfs? So what if the walls were still bare after two years? I could walk to work whenever I wanted. Red had a room of his own when he came to stay. And perhaps my new-found friends in the arts could recommend something suitable to adorn my vacant hanging space. Home is where the heart is, after all. Even if it did get a little lonesome from time to time and the shelves in the fridge could've done with a good wipe.

My heart and I went into the bathroom, stood under a hundred icy needles of cold water and started making plans. The first item on my agenda was to forget about last night as soon as possible. Salina Fleet had been a bad idea, even without the business at the moat. In fact, the business at the moat may have been a blessing in disguise. A Salina Fleet was not what I needed at this juncture in my life.

What I needed was groceries. A ten-year-old kid can go through a hell of a lot of groceries in three days.

Hit the oracle, make a few calls, raid the supermarket, meet and brief Agnelli, take in Max Karlin's brunch, then out to the airport to pick up Red. After that, maybe the local swimming pool. Cool down, then take in a movie. Play it by ear.

My first call was to Ken Sproule. Half past seven on a Saturday morning was not the ideal time to go shopping for favours, but I remembered that Sproule had a two-year-old daughter. If he wasn't out of bed already then two-year-olds weren't what they used to be.

As a rule of thumb, personal networks are always preferable to official channels. Sproule would understand implicitly why I was calling. His boss Gil Methven may have been Police Minister for less than a day, but Ken was fast on the uptake and I preferred to be steered informally around police procedures than to go dropping Agnelli's name into the loop at this early stage.

Sproule was up all right, monitoring
Cartoon Connection
and cutting toast into fingers. He was thankful for the distraction and when I drew the map he laughed out loud. ‘Agnelli's only had the job twelve hours and already artists have started killing themselves.'

‘Maybe the guy hadn't heard about the reshuffle,' I said. ‘Maybe he couldn't stand the thought of Gil Methven staying in the job.'

We went on like this for a while until Sproule was in a thoroughly good mood, then I asked him to suggest the least conspicuous way for me to find out what was in the suicide note. Surprisingly, he volunteered to make the calls himself. Under normal circumstances getting someone like Sproule hitting the phone on my behalf would have taken a fair amount of horse-trading. But the idea of a corpse in the moat of the National Gallery stimulated his morbid curiosity. ‘Fifteen months in that job, the only bodies I ever saw were in the last act of
Hamlet
,' said Sproule. ‘I'll call you back in a couple of hours.'

It was closer to a couple of minutes. ‘Something just occurred to me. The name Marcus Taylor rings a bell. Don't quote me, but I think he might have applied for a grant.'

‘Did he get one?'

‘That's the part I can't remember.'

‘If I'm not here when you call back,' I told him, ‘try the Arts Ministry.'

I hiked over to Ethnic Affairs via a cup of coffee, picked up my car and drove to Arts, twiddling the radio dial across the eight o'clock news bulletins. The top-rating commercial station had already picked up the story.
Melbourne's arts
community
, it said,
was deeply shocked by the apparent suicide of the
promising young painter Marcus Taylor
—the young part was encouraging, given that Taylor had looked to be about my age—
in protest at lack of government support for the arts
. Salina, identified as a prominent art critic, was quoted as describing Taylor's death as a shocking waste.

As I passed the National Gallery, a television news crew was shooting background footage of the moat. The vultures were circling.

The ministry was locked, but Phillip Veale's name worked magic at the stage door of the Concert Hall. Keys were immediately conjured up and I was escorted to the top floor of the Ballet Centre and admitted to the deserted offices. The list of grant recipients was where I had left it. And Marcus Taylor's name was on it. Professional support, $2000.

Not exactly a king's ransom, but as a free gift it was a damned sight more generous than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick. By the standards of Joanna Public and her overtaxed consort, it might even teeter dangerously close to the edge of government extravagance. A layabout artist could be drinking red wine out of the public trough for six months with a cheque like that.

Swinging my feet up onto the desk, I let a contented smile settle over my lips. From a PR point of view, Agnelli now had an ace up his sleeve that could be played if the media decided there was mileage to be had from the starving-artist-versus-government-indifference issue. Not that it was likely it would ever come to that. My advice to Ange would be to keep his head down for a couple of days and wait for the whole thing to blow over.

I picked up the list again. While I was on the job, I might as well do it properly. So far, all I knew about this Marcus Taylor was that he tended to histrionics, had a poor sense of balance and had ruined my plans for the previous evening. Quietly aching parts of my own anatomy told me that much. Information of an official nature might be more useful. You can't have too much information. Beside the names on the grants list were reference numbers. Everything I had seen so far of Phillip Veale suggested he ran a tight ship. Somewhere in these offices would be a file containing Taylor's application form.

A cluster of glass-walled boxes, the last word in office design, occupied the whole top floor. At intervals, the layout was punctuated by small sky-lit enclosures, carpeted in white gravel, containing sculptural objects. Ministry management, slaving over a hot memo, needed only raise its jaded eye to find inspiration in an artful agglomeration of whitewashed driftwood or fluorescent space junk. The central registry, down the back beside the lunchroom, held a less encouraging sight—the latest in filing systems, securely locked.

But the offices of the executive staff were wide open. Within half an hour I was sitting at the desk of the Deputy Director Programs, thumbing through an overstuffed file containing the recommendations of the Visual Arts Advisory Panel. Attached to Marcus Taylor's application form was an envelope containing a set of colour slides and an assessment note from Peggy Wainright. She was the one, if memory served me right, in the kinte cloth headdress and Ubangi jewellery.

I took the file back to the minister's office and started reading. I'd got as far as lighting a cigarette when the phone rang. ‘What do you want first?' It was Ken Sproule. ‘The forensics or the hysterics?'

The coroner's office, alert to the attention a death like this would draw, had been working overtime.

‘One of two things can happen when you drown,' explained Sproule. ‘Either you take a great big gulp and fill your lungs with fluid. Or you thrash about sucking in air and fill your plumbing with froth and foam until you choke. This bloke did the first. He also had a blood alcohol content of .35 per cent, which means he was pretty whacked when he hit the water. On the medical evidence, opinion is currently divided as to whether the death was accidental or intentional. It's up to the coroner to decide. The balance of probabilities, however, tends to favour suicide, given the note found near the body.

And so to the nub of the matter. ‘What's it say?'

‘Nothing you might call brilliantly lucid. Lots of crossing out, spelling mistakes, abbreviations. But then the guy was a painter, after all. It's a wonder he could read and write. But he had a chip on his shoulder about something, that's for sure. Listen to this.

‘
You so-called experts of the art world,'
Sproule quoted
. ‘You
curators and bureaucrats who hold yourselves up as the arbiters and
judges. You big-spending speculators and collectors who do not even know
what you are buying. You are all allowing yourselves to be deceived and
defrauded.

‘I take this action to arouse public attention to this pretence, perpetrated
in the name of art. Those with their hands on the levers of power
are the most corrupt of all.

‘You who have seen fit to dismiss my work yet do not recognise what
is before your very eyes. Who is embarrassed now?'

As I rapidly jotted this down, it was as though I could hear again the hysterical voice of the figure on the table at the Centre for Modern Art. And I could see, too, the hangdog look on his face as he passed me in Domain Road, trudging towards his death.

‘In short,' concluded Sproule. ‘The immemorial whine of the failed artist. I dunno where those journos got their bullshit line about a protest against lack of funding. The stiff didn't say anything about the government. Not so much as a whiff of swamp gas.'

Back at the electorate office, I'd heard plenty worse from disaffected punters every day of the week. And none of them had killed themselves, even if they sometimes made me wish they would. ‘Anything else of interest turn up? Personal background, psychiatric history?' Perhaps the artistic temperament was more fragile.

‘No criminal priors. Always the possibility he was a registered nutcase, I suppose,' said Sproule, optimistically. ‘We won't know for a few days yet. What about the grant application?'

‘You were right,' I told him. ‘No reason for him to be feeling sorry for himself on our account. We gave him $2000 last November. Nothing more life-affirming than free money.'

That about covered the political aspect, such as it was. Any journalist trying to claim that Marcus Taylor had a legitimate grievance against the government would be drawing a very long bow indeed. ‘The story will blow over in a couple of days,' said Sproule. ‘If the press try to shift any shit our way in the meantime, we'll be ready.' On that up-beat note, he rang off.

Sproule had come up with a pretty fair haul. Any other useful background would be in the grant assessment file in front of me.

This is Taylor's fifth application for a Creative Development Grant in
the last five years,
wrote the Visual Arts Executive Officer.
He is a
proficient draughtsman whose work is executed in a highly technically
competent manner. There is, however, general critical agreement that it lacks
originality and vision. Very derivative. Applicant has been unable to secure
representation by any commercial gallery. Recommend reject application.

Poor prick. It was enough to make anyone want to slash his wrists. According to the application form, he'd shown his work only a couple of times in the previous year, at group exhibitions in regional civic centres—only a short step away from hobby painter shows in shopping malls. DOB 1953, Katoomba, NSW. An unfinished fine arts diploma at Sydney Tech. Address: care of YMCA building. Although he claimed to be painting full-time, his principal source of income was cited as unemployment benefits. The grant was sought to pay for materials.

Despite the executive officer's negative recommendation, the panel had approved a small grant, less than a quarter of what Taylor had asked for. Reading between the lines, I detected a kiss-off, a few crumbs of conscience money to get rid of a nuisance. Either that, or Taylor knew someone on the panel prepared to go into bat for him. I flicked to the front of the file and read the membership list. There were only two names I recognised: Salina Fleet and Lloyd Eastlake. Salina, presumably, had persuaded her fellow panel members that her boyfriend's talent was worth throwing a small bone at.

A sad story but a closed book. When I met Agnelli in two hours, I'd be able to advise him that Taylor's potential nuisance value was negligible.

Tossing the file back where it belonged, I shut the office door behind me and headed down three floors to the carpark. Now that I knew a little more about Marcus Taylor, I found myself increasingly sympathetic to the poor bugger. The man was obviously a social misfit. Spurned by the critics, ignored by buyers, barely qualifying for an official handout, snubbed by a gallery full of art-lovers, dumped by his girlfriend. Talk about suffering for your art. The only thing missing was the garret.

Or was it? The address he gave on his grant application was the YMCA, the ruin next door, so close it would've been cheaper to hand-deliver the letter than pay the postage. And certainly faster. But the YMCA had been derelict for years, slated for demolition as part of the Arts City development. Surely he wasn't living there? Shit, I could just see it: Drowned Artist Squatted in Shadow of Lavish Arts Bureaucracy.