Chapter 6 Sunrise, Sunset

Billie was standing on the balcony with George, Rini's partner. George was giving Billie a pep talk about cultivating a positive outlook even though she might have to leave her flat, if her landlord sold the property.

"You are an atypical Greek," Billie said to George. "A normal Greek would be more melancholic and cynical."

"My family is not Greek originally," said George, "they were Jews from Thessalonika. They came here via Israel. They could have any of three nationalities."

Billie and George were silhouetted against the sea and the light evening sky and framed by the leaves of a vine growing around the balcony opening. Alex and Rini watched them from inside the living room, as George leaned over the balcony rail to watch someone downstairs entering the flats.

"We are not typically Russian," said Alex. "My mother was a gypsy. And our ancestors were not Russians, they came from Turkey. But it was a long time ago. They adopted Russian names."

He sat staring back into his family past, his shoulders hunched, his elbows on his knees. There was a burning cigarette in his left hand.

"That's where my brother Leon gets his looks, from the gypsy side of the family. I take after the Turkish side of the family."

Rini stared again at the dark rings around his eyes and saw them now as pigment, not as a sign of bad health.

"The Turk," said Rini.

"I love the Byzantine period and everything Greek," replied Alex.

The bungalow door full of coloured glass. From outside, the warm glow in the darkness lights up the bushes around the door, the red bougainvillea around the verandah posts. The feeling of family cosiness. Something intangible. Those thousands of glowing interiors. From inside, the street beyond partially obscured behind the screen of translucent green leaves and red flowers.

Billie gets out some fabric and stretchers and makes a canvas to paint on. She paints a transparent sealer on the raw cloth and leaves it to dry.

How to paint. To use the style she used a decade ago. To adopt another style altogether. To do a painted drawing. To draw with paint. The figuration dictates the style. It's a painting of something. There's a story. The Ku Klux Klan in George Street. But does the story have to be readable. Can it be used as the basis of a non-figurative work. Can it be gestural. Is it always necessary to destroy bits you like to achieve closure. The conventional wisdom of male artists running in her head. "I paint because I have to." "I don't have to, I want to," whispers Billie to her dog, Tui lying outside on the verandah. "Ghosts of meetings past will haunt these racists. They're going to rewrite Australian history: 'In the beginning there were Australians. Some were white and some were black'..."

Tui buried his black muzzle in his white chest fur.

She sketches the drawing in charcoal, then rubs it out, then sketches it again, then lays on washes with a large brush, lets it dry, then sketches with brushes in progressively darker tones. Then she paints in the Ku Klux Klan figures as tall thin white triangular shapes. Surrounded by the soft pinks, browns, creams and greys of sunset over George Street. The technique or the mark of the artist's hand dominates the subject.

In her dream, Billie sees him on the other side of a crowd, a relic from a past encounter. Now unattached. Dressed in the same type of clothes he wore back then. He makes his way towards her through the crowd and stands in front of her. She looks down onto the articulated muscles across his chest and shoulders, his smooth yellow skin, and smells his perfume. His chest is visible through the front lacing of his suede vest. He runs his fingers through his tawny mane of hair and moves closer to her as he did the first time they met. They don't speak but walk away to somewhere private. They go up the stairs to the glowing deck above, lit from below and translucent like a dance floor. They lie down on some coils of rope and have sex. Then Billie rolls over onto her stomach and looks at him stretched out on his back.

"But you can't be James," she says, examining his face. "You've got melanin but James is a true blond."

Then the owl appears in daylight. Billie wakes up and lies in bed thinking about this guy. Who is he. Does James have yellow skin.

Billie looked up from her stall in the markets and saw James across the crowd between her row of stalls and the fast food vendors next to the fence. She left the stall to her co-worker and walked off around the markets in the opposite direction. When she reached the gate of the markets, she could not see him but suddenly he was standing behind her and put his arm around her waist. Billie could smell his aftershave.

"I see that 'the subaltern can speak' to the general public, but not to me," he said, smiling.

He was wearing a chamois leather vest over a brown silk T-shirt and his long tawny hair was slightly damp around his forehead.

"I'm becoming interested in the Byzantine period," he said.

Then he spoke at length about how to gauge the authenticity of icons as related to him by someone involved in the restoration business. She checked out his skin. It was not yellow, it was freckled and this made it look browner than it really was. But she saw that between the freckles his skin was turning pink in the strong sun. A true blond with brown eyes.

The night air was hot and damp. In the sky there was a giant horizontal stripe of pale cloud above the houses. A currawong was singing in the flowering jacaranda tree which was growing through the deck. As the sky darkened, shadows appeared in the tree. The pattern of branches against the sky, the archetype for lace. Billie was visiting Felix. They were sitting on the deck of his warehouse, bathed in the golden glow of the light from the courtyard below coming through the slats in the deck. He was wearing a light shirt which was open at the front, revealing his hairless chest. His hair was long but afro, more like a halo than a mane. He produced a highly crafted silver snake to show Billie and laid it in coils on the coffee table between them. It looked darker on the glass table top, glowing like gold around the edges.

"Melanin," Billie said to Felix. "You've got quite a lot of it."

"This obsession you have with racists, Billie. You shouldn't let it intrude in your art."

"But you've been attacked by racists just like I have," replied Billie. "We can't ignore what's going on, it invades our whole lives."

"You have the genius of the true artist, Billie. You have the divine spark. Don't ruin it with didacticism and moralising."

"So you're not interested in The Ku Klux Klan in Australia series?"

"I'm interested in quality work. Don't expect me to like it because it's anti-racist."

Billie took the Ku Klux Klan in Sydney painting out of her bag and went into the studio beyond the deck. She unrolled it on the workbench and Felix came in to see it. The canvas was as light as silk and the painting on it had a gestural feeling about it. It showed a scene of the city at sunset and the buildings seemed to be burning.

"A bit like a Turner watercolour," said Felix, holding the fabric in his fingers.

"It's taken from the biblical scene on the rug which Alex showed you - the Sodom and Gomorrah scene with Lot's wife as a pillar of salt." Billie indicated the Klan figures.

There was thunder and lightning close by and it started to rain.

Felix took the painting downstairs to his strongroom with the silver snake and said he would show it to some friends to see if they thought it was marketable. He receipted the painting and walked towards the front door with her. The corridor and the rooms off it were all darkly lit. She looked into a room full of rugs and fabrics glowing in the soft darkness. The room of golden glazes. A showcase of the applied arts from around the world. Felix walked in and offered her a drink from the bar. She looked at the soft suede lounge long enough and wide enough for two people to lie down on.

"Do you sleep here?" she asked.

"Sometimes," replied Felix.

"Is this your bedroom or your living room?"

"You've never seen the third floor, my private area. You must come up and see it."

He immediately walked to the corner of the room and started climbing a wrought iron spiral staircase which was tucked into an alcove. Billie followed him. They climbed up two storeys. Through the studio which opened onto the deck and further up to the next storey. They stepped into a large open plan living space. It had plain white walls and a white terrazzo floor. The sitting area was distinguishable from the dining area and the kitchen. The sleeping area was hidden behind a white lacquerwork screen.

Felix continued climbing the staircase up through the space to the roof and beckoned Billie to follow. It was a roof garden and at its centre, the room below was visible through a glass dome. They went to the railing on the north side and looked at the view of the city beyond the first ridge. The blocks of flats in the foreground and the glittering lights of the office towers behind them.

Felix took out his wallet, removed a silver credit card and gave it to Billie.

"I want to give you some money for your group," he said. "I want you to know that I support what you're all doing. This is the same card I give to the dealers and galleries that I do business with."

"Isn't that bribery?" asked Billie.

"Not in your case," replied Felix, "because I'm not asking you for any favours in return."

The night air was still hot and more humid after the rain. The roads were already drying out. Billie drove with the front windows down. Tui was totally alert, snapping at parked cars from the back seat. When they arrived home there was a light blinking on the answering machine. She pressed the play button and flopped down onto her bed in her clothes. Tui stood staring at the voice from the answering machine with his head cocked to one side. The message was from Tan, offering her a cleaning shift in the city, starting at midnight and a lift if she wanted it.

He arrived early with some biscuits in a plastic bag. He stood talking at the door from the other side of the room, hanging back from Billie as he had done when they first met. He runs his fingers nervously through his mane of black hair.

"If we had children, they might be very confused," said Tan, laughing and darting towards the kitchen for a plate.

Billie followed him in. She looked at his pointed fingers as he arranged the yellow biscuits in a spiral shape. They made tea and returned with it to the living room. They sat in adjacent lounge chairs. Tan ate and drank with his legs stretched out in front of him and across in front of Billie's feet. His hand brushed hers as they reached for their cups. He looked up and held her gaze.

"I'm not intending to have children," said Billie. She reached over and touched the smooth skin on his forearm. He took her hand and entwined his fingers between hers. Two different colours.

After work, Billie and Tan walked together in the park with Tui. The sun was starting to send shafts of light through the faint mist over the harbour. The grey silos were soft and pink for a moment. Some kind of bell sounded across the water. Beautiful and sad. Cars along the expressway switched off their lights.

 

 

back | top | next