Good Money (13 page)

‘Yes, Ben. You can. You can be a complete tool for being too careful. Now come on before we die of old age.'

The Footscray streets were wet and empty, except for an elderly citizen inspecting the rubbish bins for treasure. We walked on until I stopped at the gallery entrance.

‘Here?' Ben asked, apprehensive.

The door flew open; a girl rushed past us to vomit in the gutter.

‘Yes,' I said, and moved my sandal away in the nick of time, avoiding a spray of carrot.

13

IT WAS
not so much an elegant gathering of art-lovers as an old-fashioned punk party. The music was crazy loud. People lined the stairs and the corridors, and yelled in each other's ears. The main gallery space itself was packed with punters of all ages, dancing, drinking, and in some cases, pashing on. It was a bit early in the night for all this carry-on, I thought. And I was feeling way over-dressed. Most people were wearing clothes suitable for, say, mowing the lawn. But at least there was cheese — or there had been. An empty tray with vacant toothpicks was on a small table by the door.

I found a kitchen in which two people could comfortably stand; about fifteen people were in there. I squeezed past and added my beers to the ice in the sink. Grabbing two bottles, I squeezed out again. I found Ben in the hall and gave him a stubby. The heat was stifling and I reluctantly took off my coat; in my party dress and French twist I couldn't have been more overdressed if I was wearing a tiara.

‘Where's the artist?' he asked.

‘Don't know.' I'd been scanning every room we passed but so far had not located him.

Someone called out, ‘Hey, Brophy!' Ben's eyes flicked behind me. I tried to pivot but a heel stuck in the carpet and I stumbled back, slamming into the wall. I looked up, dazed, into Peter's smiling face.

‘Sold anything?' I asked.

‘A few.'

‘The seagull one?'

‘Not sure. Let's go and see.'

I followed him into the exhibition space. Most of the works had red dots beside them. Labels put each one at $1500. The seagull one was sold. I could have cried. It felt personal. It was lost to me.

‘Doesn't matter,' he slurred. ‘I can do another one. Just for you.'

A charmer. My suspicion response kicked in.

‘Hey, you want to see something?' he breathed into my ear. He ushered me out, along the corridor, in the direction of a ladder.

High-heels and ladders don't mix. ‘You first,' I said.

I followed him as best I could, up through a manhole and into the roof. We crawled along a small cavity and out onto an open, junk-strewn rooftop. The rain had stopped, mist drifted in batches across the sky. I was freezing. I didn't care.

He attempted to erect a deckchair.

‘Stella,' I said.

‘What? Where?'

‘Me. I'm Stella. Stella Hardy.'

‘Stella Hardy.' He patted the wobbly chair. ‘Here you go.'

The torn canvas was uninviting, and instead I took an Austen-esque turn about the rooftop. Brightly lit cranes were working on the docks. Further to the west, the curvature of the long bridge was bustling with white light flowing one way and a river of red going the other. A wind gust brought numbing cold, and the smell of rotting fruit from the street. A graceful tabby was picking its way along the wall. ‘Whose cat?'

Peter was cross-legged on the floor beside the deckchair. He retrieved a beer from his pocket and waved it at the cat. ‘That's Aragorn.'

‘Aragorn? As in …' my heart rate changed tempo, ‘…
Return of the King
?'

‘Yeah.' He seemed slightly embarrassed.

I looked at him anew. Yes, that was a handsome profile. I watched the cat slinking, sleek paws and languid movements, to press its head against Peter's leg. ‘He's not mine. He's Marigold's.' He stroked the cat's chin. ‘Arn'cha, Aragorn?'

So. There was a Marigold. Of course there was a Marigold. She was probably my exact opposite. Beautiful. Creative. Her parents were probably gifted artists who'd never eaten meat or uttered a racist slur in their lives. I exhaled a sigh of white fog and wandered to the other side of the roof. ‘Be nice up here in summer. Hot nights.'

‘Yeah.' He looked around. ‘Where are you? Come back.'

I walked around back to him. Everywhere was wet. No choice but to risk the deckchair. It held, just. He inched closer to me. ‘Where're you from?'

‘Ascot Vale.'

‘Dangerous place. Bloke got shot.'

His hand was on my arm, nothing creepy in it. At that moment, my bobby pin pinged, the centre could not hold, and the hairdo fell apart. There was nothing to be done, and so I pretended not to care. At the same time, raised voices reached us from inside the building. A woman's hoarse accusation, and a male voice shouting a string of curses. I recognised Ben's unique turn of phrase.

‘Sorry,' I said, ‘I better see to this.'

I trotted down the ladder, slipped and fell for the last four rungs. A crowd had gathered around the kitchen. I couldn't see what was happening until I squeezed through. Ben stood with his back to the wall, cornered. A woman was pointing at him. ‘Bullshit!' she screamed. The music stopped. I made my way to Ben. ‘What's going on?'

‘Tell your friend,' the woman growled, ‘to keep his fucking hands off my phone.'

Before he could issue more abuse and denials, I took his arm. ‘Time to go.' We drove home in silence. By now, Brophy would know that I was associated with a petty criminal, one who was unable to refrain from thievery for one evening. The weight of my despondency thrust me lower into the Mazda's bucket seat.

Ben pulled up outside my building.

I wasn't angry, I was numb. ‘Ben —'

‘I know,' he said. ‘Back to the boarding house.'

It was pathetic, like he'd sent himself to the naughty corner. I had known many boarding houses over the years I worked with housing agencies. As a place to call home they were one step up from prison or rehab, which was where most of your fellow tenants there came from. A bunch of barely functional people forced to live in close proximity, with alcohol or drugs and the strain of poverty. It was not a recipe for happiness. I couldn't let him go back there, not in the middle of the night at any rate.

‘Come on up. We'll see about getting you sorted in the morning.'

He parked the Mazda in my spot under my building and we trudged up the stairs.

On the second floor landing, a man in trackpants, a hood pulled up over his head, came bounding down the stairs. He ran too fast to take the turn and slammed into the wall before sprinting down the next flight. His stupid thongs going
slap-slap-slap
as he cantered down the steps. When I reached my front door, I saw some of the paint on the doorjamb had been scraped off, focusing around the lock, where chisel marks dented the woodwork.

‘One of your ex-clients?' Ben asked. He inspected the damage. ‘Rank amateur.'

I had stone cold sludge in my veins. The book. Cesarelli. The money. The execution-style hit. The deadness. ‘I definitely think you should stay here tonight.'

Ben grinned. ‘Good call. I'll protect you.'

14

IN THE
bleary-eyed, semi-consciousness of morning, I staggered to the bathroom and did a quick wee. My head was heavy and I had chills. Virus season had taken its usual quota of victims, including, it seemed, me.
So be it
, I thought. If I was sick I could now indulge the raging self-pity that was welling up inside me. I sat on the toilet, idly pulling toilet paper from the roll. Only last night I'd had my moment on the roof with Brophy. That moment was a sweet centre in my world of shite. But any hope of seeing him again was irrevocably ruined. Sabotaged by the Hardy idiot gene. The main thing now was to let it disappear, to close the door and keep moving. I took the last sheet and groaned. Now I had to replace the toilet roll. The cupboard under the sink was empty. Thinking I would have to go without, I saw a stack of new rolls on the shelf above the toilet. I had to hand it to Ben, he was a domestic mastermind.

In the lounge room, his sleeping form snored softly under a pile of blankets on the sofa. Caffeine cravings led me to a packet of ground coffee in the fridge. I managed to assemble Ben's espresso pot, added a goodly dose of grounds, and set it on the stove. As I waited I noticed that something was different about the world outside, the noise level. Then it clicked: Saturday. The week was over. A blast of steam sputtered from the coffee machine. I poured the contents into a mug and had a cautious sip. It tasted — what was the word? — harmful. I tipped it down the sink and dressed for a Melbourne winter: jeans, thick socks, boots, spencer, shirt, jumper, second jumper, coat, beanie, scarf, and gloves.

At Buffy's, I ordered a double-strength flat white.

‘Double? That's four shots.'

‘Yep. Defibrillator in a cup. A coffee that could raise the dead.'

Lucas worked the machine. ‘Got a plan?'

I looked at his face for signs of intelligence. I found only psoriasis. But then, oh right
,
the
dead
. ‘Should they actually rise?'

Lucas tilted his head. Naturally that's what he had meant.

‘I hadn't really thought about it,' I said airily. Oh, I had a plan all right. Who didn't? Who could watch a zombie apocalypse unfold on the screen without musing on the folly of the survivors and what they should have done instead? For me, it was the storing of tinned food, bottled water, spare batteries — and head for home. No zombie would be caught dead in Woolburn.

He looked alarmed. ‘You should so make a plan. With, like, an upstairs safe room. They have trouble with stairs.'

Well,
der
. ‘Right.'

‘I don't say this to everyone, but you're welcome to hide out here.'

I had stairs of my own. Three flights. But it was the thought that warmed me. ‘Thank you, Lucas. But I think you should know the juice has gone out of the zombie motif. It used to be a metaphor for dead-eyed consumerism and now it's just another fucking product. Soon there'll be a zombie Barbie, with little bite marks.'

Lucas winced. ‘Yeah, maybe, but don't say it like that.'

I picked up a copy of
The Saturday Age
— a reconstituted forest — and flicked through its pages. No Finchley. No Clayton Brodtmann. On the back page, there was serious concern for St Kilda's newest recruit's anterior cruciate ligament. Scans were being conducted on the valuable knee. What was it with knees? There's an argument against ‘intelligent design' right there.

I walked up the driveway to my apartment building replaying the Brophy moment in my head. The lovely offer of a painting, the touch of his hand on my arm, the heat inside me on the cold, cold night. I hadn't experienced heat like that for a very long time. I reminded myself that, thanks to Ben, I needed to forget about Brophy. The damage had been done. That didn't mean, however, that it wasn't opportune to lecture Ben — a reprimand was overdue. But the Mazda was not in the parking space, and when I got upstairs I saw the blankets were folded up on sofa, and the coffee mess had been cleared away. There was no note. Good riddance.

I made myself a breakfast of leftover tofu curry and scanned the paper, in a bored and disengaged fashion, until a headline caught my attention:
VELDT ART PRIZE ANNOUNCED
.

Mrs Mathilde Van Zyl, wife of South African billionaire Merritt Van Zyl, is hosting a cocktail party tonight at the Dragon Bar to announce the launch of the Veldt Art Prize …

Wife?
So Crystal was wrong. Van Zyl was not a ‘fucking poofta', just a snappy dresser. I read on.

… ‘This prize is my way of giving something back,' she said today. The annual prize, which is valued at $100,000, will be awarded to an artist whose work best captures the Australian mood. Mathilde will be on the judging panel for the inaugural year. The Van Zyl's have agreed to fund the prize for the next ten years. Clayton Brodtmann, a long-time friend of the family, said that Mathilde and Merritt have a long-standing interest in modern Australian art. They opened the Albatross Gallery in 2011. Mathilde is reported to have once said ‘I am completely comfortable about wealth. But one must be thankful to everybody who helped one get it.'

I had a momentary fantasy of Brophy and I showing up, arm in arm, schmoozing and sipping mojitos. I was taller, prettier, with nicer hair, and I was chatting to some insider and putting in a good word for Brophy. Oh, a girl could dream. A spasm of chills shook me. My headache was worse, my throat was sore, and my nose was running. I took a handful of analgesics and started the shower. Standing under the hot water, I allowed self-pity to descend into sobs.

An hour later I was on the couch in my pyjamas watching a DVD of
The Return of the King
on my defective television.
The Lord of the Rings
was my comfort food, my hot Milo. I needed to hear Howard Shore's soaring strains, witness Viggo's weary intensity. Halfway in, my ringtone interrupted everything — the ID was Mrs Chol so I relented and swiped the screen. ‘Hey Mrs Chol, are you okay?'