Miles Walker, You're Dead Read online

  Summoning all my strength, I rock from side to side, trying to loosen the ropes. It doesn’t work. I lose my balance and, together with the chair, crash to the floor of the cabin, hitting my head, and just narrowly missing a fierce-looking shard of crystal.

  I feel woozy. My head throbs. Verbero pops his face out of the toilet and laughs his machine-gun laugh. Ack ack ack.

  A sharp rap on the door shuts him up fast. He glares at me. Another knock—louder, more authoritative. ‘Security. Everything all right in there?’

  ‘Fine. Just fine,’ Verbero shoots back.

  That voice. It sounds so much like Grevillea’s. I must be hallucinating. I’d give anything to see Grevillea Bent just one last time before I die. I close my eyes and fade into a pool of regret.

  I’m awash in Eternity. I hate that aftershave. Verbero’s bending over me, feeling my pulse. I don’t move. My head aches, my eye smarts, my jaw hurts. I’m not getting any more champagne, I’m never going to see Grevillea again, and I’m a dead man. After all these months, after what—a year or more?—of thinking about my death, imagining it, obsessing about it, it’s really going to happen.

  ‘Enough of this bullshit.’ Cursing, Verbero hauls me upright, chair and all. I let my head flop down on my chest. He pinches my cheek, pulling my face up towards his. I let my eyes roll back. Verbero mutters something under his breath and strides to the window, where he jerks open the curtain. He peers outside and then returns to me. ‘Miles Walker, you’re dead.’

  I’ve heard that before. I make some gargling noises around the gag, hoping he’ll think I’m going to agree to what he wants and remove it. This time I won’t waste a moment in telling him about the bomb.

  ‘Did I ever tell you that my wife wan off with an artist? Does that explain anything to you?’ His mouth set, his eyes mean, he snatches up the key and is out the door in two strides. The door slams and I hear the key turn in the lock.

  He forgot to pull the curtain closed.

  Sydney sparkles beyond my window. I now have an unimpeded view of the harbour. That’s something most people in this city would die for. Ack ack ack.

  The neon logos of the CBD glow seduction indigo and passion red, and the lights of the city wink in the twilight. Masts tinkle, motors hum, people hoot and yell above the music that comes from all directions now. Sydney’s a tart and an exhibitionist. Every balcony of every waterfront home, the deck of every yacht, fishing vessel, clipper, dinghy, ferry, party boat, speedboat and tall ship that we pass, and every promenade and walkway and rooftop in sight has been transformed into a stage for the New Year’s Eve theatrics of celebration and angst. The Opera House flutters its huge white wings and the giant buttock of the Harbour Bridge moons the night. The lights of the shore cast coloured streamers over the water where they pulsate like electrocardiograms for an overexcited world.

  Against the odds, the human race has failed to extinguish itself. Despite burning forests and toxic wastes and nuclear accidents, not all the air is unbreathable, the water undrinkable or the land unliveable. Humanity has somehow survived feudalism, imperialism and colonialism, revolutions, religious wars, world wars, gulf wars and Balkan wars, not to mention Jeff Koons, the end of ‘Seinfeld’, and even Monica Lewinsky.

  Me—I can’t even survive my friends.

  Underpainting (allegorical, large canvas)

  A small clutch of party-goers has swept into the breezeway outside the cabin. No one turns to look in the window. They are all gazing out over the harbour, pointing and laughing and chattering. One of them, who is dressed like a clown, puts a paper whistle to his sad red lips and blows it at the others. Over the p.a., Kylie Minogue urges me to celebrate.

  Little countries like ours don’t often come first in life’s track-and-field events. But we go for gold on the New Year’s front. I’m sure that Trimalkyo, being an art dealer, takes some pleasure knowing that in this regard, at least, we are ahead of New York and London. We don’t just glide first into the New Year, either. We do so with acres of exposed skin, caressed by warm breezes, licking a gelato. Lucky country. Lucky people. Some little patch of New Zealand gets the first sun of the year a millisecond or two before we do, but who cares? You wouldn’t want to be there if you could be here, would you?

  New Year’s Eve. The night when everyone searches for the best, the wildest, the most saturnalian party of all, the Ultimate Bash, the one that’s going to change their lives, the one where they’ll find the hottest dance music, the truest love. Not that I ever believed that. Unlike ZakDot, I’ve never been much of a party boy. And the chances that I’m going to meet my true love tonight are slimmer than Grevillea Bent’s ankles.

  New Year’s Eve. The focus of more bullshit and hype than even the art world. The art world. Such as it is. Such as it was. Let me paint you a picture. I’ve got time—by my best reckoning, some three and a half hours—so I’ll do it properly. Underpainting and all. I find a good underpainting helps with composition. It lets you fix the light source and see where the shadows will fall.

  Once upon a time, our country, a little country that is also a very big island, lost its way. The way I see it, we were suffering from an existential form of continental drift. Foreigners had never been able to get a fix on where we lived, many of them believing we were either within splashing distance of Hawaii or, due to a fluke of pronunciation, next door to Germany. On account of our colourful Mardi Gras, some people mistook us for Brazil and, because so many of us love to surf, others mixed us up with southern California.

  Making fun of this problem, our satirists nicknamed the country ‘Strayer’. We ‘Strayuns’ liked to laugh at ourselves. I think it’s fair to say that before the Troubles set in, we considered ourselves the most relaxed, easy-going, fortunate people on the face of the planet.

  If we were passionate about anything, it was culture. The streets swarmed with poets and sculptors and film-makers. You couldn’t turn a corner without bumping into public artwork, or lick a stamp without finding a famous artist on the tip of your tongue. People awaited with bated breath the announcements of who’d won the numerous, coveted art prizes, music awards, and literary medals. Some doctors even attributed the prevalence of asthma in our country to this habit of collective breath-holding.

  It’s no exaggeration to say that our people were mad about culture. Corporations vied to sponsor new works of modern dance and experimental jazz. There were so many literary festivals that municipal governments employed special counsellors to help novelists and playwrights adjust to normal life when the festival season was finally over. Even the commercial television stations dedicated nearly all their prime-time programming to the arts. There were tabloid shows called ‘Art/Life’ and sitcoms like ‘One for the Monet’. Painters and sculptors developed RSI from the effort of peeling off red dots and sticking them to the wall. I was only a student at the time so, unfortunately, this was not my problem. But I was confident that it would be, one day.

  We pitied people without any creative potential. Unable to contribute to society, they tended to turn to politics. Once in office, the politicians clamoured for invitations to open art exhibitions; they begged for the chance to launch books. Their parties competed in promising ever better conditions for artists, grander festivals, bigger prizes. The government funded fellowships for, oh, teenage librettists and transsexual ceramicists and three-toed violinists. It even gave artists money to send their work overseas. Not, the politicians emphasised, that their work wasn’t welcome at home, but in order that it might gain what was known as an ‘international audience’ and win glory for the country.

  You might find this hard to believe, but there was dancing in the streets whenever one of our films screened in Cannes. Some people did wonder what the fuss was about, believing Cannes to be a small town on the country’s north-east coast. Still, we were so proud of our culture that newspapers published front-page reports on such triumphs as our national tap-dancing troupe’s European tour. Television stations interr
upted their regular programming to run special bulletins on the opening of seminars in Minsk devoted to the art of our indigenous people, or the appearance in a Finnish newspaper of a review of one of our books. For all that, it’s my impression that the rest of the world never took much notice of us at all. They simply assumed that every one of our internationally successful playwrights or rock groups or painters had come from somewhere else.

  The reason for our invisibility was that our little country was located smack in the middle of nowhere, directly on the periphery of everything. No one ever just ‘passed through’ or ‘dropped in’. Sometimes the fact that we were smack in the middle of nowhere, directly on the periphery of everything, made people despair. They’d get on big metal birds that flew them to bigger, more important countries with fixed locations. Our country didn’t exercise much gravitational pull on its people—once they’d flown away, they often neglected to return. We even lost a prime minister once when he swam out to sea and kept on drifting.

  It was always a matter of great national excitement when, in an accident of anti-gravity, a foreign sailor meandered into our waters, or when a citizen, having ‘made it’ elsewhere, decided to come back for a visit.

  Still, most of the time, the people of our little country were happy, for the world’s strife was far away and not our own and, as the centuries changed over, the world had more than its share of strife. There were holy wars and unholy wars and bombs that went off in the night and weird cults where everyone prayed and died. It was shocking. It was terrible. But it never seemed to have an awful lot to do with us. Watching these events on the telly, we shook our heads and thanked our lucky stars (which were obviously different from other people’s stars) that we were safely ensconced smack in the middle of nowhere, directly on the periphery of everything.

  Then, one day, all that changed. That day marked the beginning of the Troubles. That day, the citizens of our country woke up crabby and confused. Perhaps it was something in the water—a source of anxiety for some time. Maybe it was a biological version of the millennium bug, or some odd, destabilising ripple in the astrolosphere.

  Whatever the reason, that day, instead of saying g’day and humming a few lines from the friendly ‘Neighbours’ theme song as everyone usually did first thing in the morning—after a spot of tai chi and before their first latte—they began arguing with uncharacteristic ill will. I myself nearly smacked ZakDot that day when he claimed that no painting could match the relevance or spiritual power of a supermarket docket pasted to a gallery wall.

  Since everyone was so passionate about culture, there had always been spirited discussions over such issues as whether the judges of the annual portrait competition could tell their arse from someone else’s elbow. But now the arguments grew vicious. It was reported that, in the Blue Mountains, fans of heroic couplets took up staves against proponents of blank verse, and that a traditionalist was badly injured when someone hurled a concrete poem. I thought that sounded like urban myth, but I did read in the Herald that there was a rise in reported assaults on values and conceptual breakouts. Interestingly enough, the most violent ructions were over the exact location of the little country itself—and by extension the source of its culture.

  It’s hard to say who started it. There were those who, clutching their cups of fine Bushells tea in one hand and a Sao biscuit in the other, claimed our country was obviously a part of Britain. The critic Jean-Paul d’Esdaigne was one of these. People like him called their homes their ‘cahstles’ and, when they went out, they said it was to ‘dahnce’. They put Promite on their toast instead of Vegemite. They declared that they’d be happy watching Jane Austen re-runs and reading tabloid supplements about dead princesses until the cows came home, and went out, and came home again—and that should be good enough for everyone else as well.

  Others insisted that Strayer was a part of Asia. These people waved their chopsticks around as they argued. They pointed for evidence at the popularity of Indian yoga, as well as a recent survey revealing that 87.4 per cent of the population preferred sushi to curried eggs, and cited other statistics showing the extraordinary number of imported dim sum trolleys per capita.

  Then there were those like Tony, our local café owner and a concert pianist. One day, I was in the café when he proclaimed, above the roar of the milk-frothing apparatus of his espresso machine, that the little country’s soul belonged to continental Europe. ‘Why else,’ he demanded with Gallic shrugs, ‘would half the population stay up all night every night for four weeks just to watch World Cup soccer?’

  A customer of Chilean origin leapt up onto the table at this point, spilling his Colombian brew. He shouted back at Tony that the fact we loved World Cup soccer was in fact proof we were part of South America. ‘We do the lambada!’ he cried. ‘We wear big straw hats!’

  Not many people seriously proposed that the little country belonged to Africa. Personally, I felt that, since Africa was the cradle of humankind, everyone belonged in some sense to Africa. But what did I know? Quite a few people, including, to my dismay, some of my fellow art students, insisted that the little country was part of America. They said ‘yo’ and ‘d’oh’ and wore baseball caps frontwards and backwards to push the point. They took eskies of Coca-Cola with them to the beach, just like in commercials, and never missed an episode of ‘Friends’.

  The original inhabitants piped up to say they knew exactly where the little country was—right under their feet. Under all of our feet. As this implied that we could define ourselves without reference to anywhere else, it was an even more destabilising concept than the notion that we were smack in the middle of nowhere, directly on the periphery of everything. Lots of people had Aboriginal dot paintings on their walls. They liked to use words from indigenous languages to name their boats and houses. Yet most people had never really listened to anything the original inhabitants had said. They were not going to start now.

  Life became one big quarrel. It got nasty. It got violent. The people who wanted to be part of America beat other people with baseball bats, and the people who wanted to be part of Britain beat other people with cricket bats, and the people who wanted to be part of Europe beat other people with stale baguettes. Everyone joined together to beat the indigenous people because their position was deemed the most annoying and provocative of all. The indigenous people, in turn, beat each other for the foolish decision to let the new people into the country in the first place.

  Someone burned Tony’s café down to the ground. At first police suspected a Vietnamese man whom Tony had attacked with a frozen lasagne in a dispute over the relative superiority of native cuisines. As it turned out, the arsonist was a Percy Grainger fan of Swedish background who’d taken umbrage at Tony’s interpretation of ‘To a Nordic Princess’.

  A popular rock star wrote a ballad called ‘The Troubles’ about this sad state of affairs. The name stuck.

  Like everyone else, I knew ‘The Troubles’ by heart. But I stayed clear of the turmoil. I was in art school. I believed that art and politics had nothing to do with each other and that true art had a purity that would survive all tests. Of the Troubles, I only knew what I read in the papers, or witnessed that day at Tony’s café before it burned down.

  I did know that it was a real pity that all this had happened. Strayer was such a beautiful land, with lush green rainforests and scrubby red deserts and long white beaches. It was a country of brightly coloured birds, oddly shaped wildflowers, giant lizards and blue trees. It had grey marsupials with tiny brains soaked in eucalyptus juice and ants with huge bums full of honey. It was a harsh and dramatic country, prone to flash floods and sudden fires and creeping droughts, the kind of country that made for heroes and legends and riveting weather forecasts. There was always plenty of sky to go around, if never quite enough water, and if the Troubles hadn’t started there would have been no better place on earth to live and work and play.

  It seemed that our little country that was also a big island w
as about to. go up in a raging bushfire of the vanities. Then along came a woman who promised to save the day, calm the citizenry and make Strayer a nice place, again, in which to live and work and play. She was known as Destiny. How she became known as my Destiny is the rest of this story.

  Futurism, according to plan

  The revellers have drifted back to the party. Outside the window, wispy clouds bleed into a darkening sky like watercolours.

  Verbero returns. I make urgent noises. ‘Gggghhh. Ggggghhh.’

  ‘Forget it, Walker. I’m over your little twicks.’ He steps into the tiny bathroom. ‘I’m gonna get medieval on yo’ ass,’ he threatens his reflection in the mirror and chuckles. His chuckle is like his laugh, except backwards: kca, kca, kca. He sees that I am watching him and shuts the door. Through it, I hear him opening the cabinet. There’s a soft sound like sugar shifting in a sack. That’s impossible. The sack of sugar is with ZakDot and Maddie. Could he have more? I’m dumbfounded. Without another glance in my direction, he departs, cassock rustling.

  Medieval on yo’ ass. I think, inevitably, of Thurston Tebbit. I’m not sure to what extent, if any, Thurston is responsible for my predicament. At least I can thank him for helping me see the brighter side of it. According to the theories of Thurston Tebbit, you see, I am about to make an excellent career move.

  Thurston Tebbit lives with ZakDot and me in our warehouse in Chippo. Chippo is short for Chippendale. We who live in the little country have a fondness for diminutive nicknames. We like to remind ourselves just how little we actually are. Chippo borders on Sydney’s inner west, colliding sloppily with Redfern. The arteries of Broadway and Cleveland Street pump traffic into, through and out of the heart of Chippo, giving it more the feel of a way station than destination. Formerly a leafy working-class suburb with a factory pay cheque in every pocket and a pub on every corner, Chippo has been choppo-ed and changeo-ed to the point where old timers will tell you over a pint at the local that they scarcely recognise their old neighbourhood anymore. The leaves that remain are coated with grime. Even the paperbarks that line our street, a narrow lane running between Broadway and Cleveland, are black with diesel fumes.