Perfections (25 page)

Antoinette gets to her feet. ‘I have to go.’

‘Right now?’

‘I can’t listen to any more of this.’

‘Antoinette, wait.’

She makes it all the way back to her car before Sally Paige catches up, photo album clutched to her chest like a shield. Antoinette rolls down the window. ‘I’m not staying,’ she says ‘I need some time to get all of this straight in my head.’
To stop wanting to throttle you.

Sally Paige hands her the album. ‘Don’t let Jacqueline know.’

‘You have to be kidding.’

‘Show her the photos like you planned. Convince her she’s wrong.’

‘Why on earth would I do that?’

‘So she can live her life. Your sister’s grown up believing she’s human; what do you think it will do to her to find out she’s not?’

‘It’s what she already suspects.’

‘But it’s not what she wants to believe, trust me.’ Sally Paige rubs at her forehead again. ‘I know you must think me an ogre, but I’ve tried so hard to be a good mother to you girls,
both
you girls. Despite the obvious handicaps. Please, don’t ruin everything. Don’t ruin it for Jacqueline.’

Antoinette keeps her eyes fixed on straight ahead. ‘It’s a long drive home,’ she replies at last. ‘I’ll think about it.’

Jacqueline watches Loki’s face as he moves around the statues, investigating them from different angles. ‘It’s called
Nest
,’ she tells him. A life-size motor scooter, stylised and reformed to invoke a deer or perhaps an antelope. Some placid but wild herbivore. A mother, lying on her haunch. Propped up on her front wheel as she encourages her newborn – fearful and undeveloped, no trace yet of a saddle and only featureless, black nubs where its tyres will be – to come closer. To settle within the protective curl of her chassis. To be safe. To be loved.

‘Patricia Piccinini,’ Jacqueline says. ‘She’s done a series of similar works that zoomorphise the mechanical. It’s what we all do, when you think about it. Our vehicles, our computers, any machine with which we have close and regular contact. We treat them as though they are alive, as though they are sentient beings with personalities of their own. We cajole them, berate them, abuse them, and ultimately dispose of them.’ She gestures towards the statues. ‘Of course, we know machines are not living creatures. But what does it say about humans that we need to create these false personas? Personas we can then so easily abandon or destroy?’

Loki returns to stand by her side.

‘Is it like training wheels?’ she muses. ‘Do we practise on the machines, so that we’ll be better equipped to ill-treat each other?’

‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘But none of that is why you love it.’

Jacqueline stares at the baby scooter. As always, she yearns to pick it up. Cradle it in her arms. ‘The way they look at each other – not that they even have proper faces, only those dials and gauges – but still. That mother-child bond, it’s almost tangible. If you tried to step between them, it would bounce you off.’

Loki nudges her with his elbow. ‘Go on, you know you want to.’

‘What?’

‘Touch him. The little guy.’

‘This is an art gallery, Loki. It’s not like walking through IKEA.’

He leans over. His breath is warm against her face. ‘Go on,’ he whispers. ‘What would be the harm?’

It’s only a small step up onto the raised platform. Two more have her crouching beside the baby scooter. The fibreglass is smooth and polished. The warmth is surely a trick of expectation. She runs her hand over the curve of its back. The stubby handles that serve as ears. ‘Beautiful,’ she murmurs.

‘Hey! Get off there!’

Across the hall, a security guard marches towards them. One hand on his radio. The half-dozen or so people in the vicinity have stopped what they were doing and are now staring at Jacqueline.

‘Don’t worry,’ Loki tells her. ‘Stay where you are.’

‘Miss, you need to get down.’ The guard cultivates a neutral expression but his eyes are flat and hostile. ‘You aren’t allowed to touch the exhibits.’

Loki’s grin stretches wide and dazzling.
I am the friend you thought you would never find
, that grin says.
And I will be that friend forever
. The guard falters. Blinks and shakes his head. ‘It’s okay,’ Loki says. His voice is hypnotic. Sweet and treacherous as honey from wild bees. ‘She isn’t hurting anyone. She can stay a bit longer.’

‘No,’ the guard replies. Less command than question. As though he doubts his own tongue. ‘It isn’t . . . she can’t . . .’

‘Just a few more minutes.’ Loki keeps grinning.

Jacqueline turns away from him. Away from them both. Sits down and rests her cheek against the baby scooter’s flank. Closes her eyes. Somewhere deep inside, low in her belly, she feels a shift. A bright flare of pain. Then a settling.

‘Take your time, Miss,’ the guard says. He sounds more at ease now. Happily bewildered. ‘You’re not hurting anyone.’

Antoinette lets herself into the apartment and pauses for a moment, back pressed to the front door while she tries to catch her breath. She’s never lied to Jacqueline before, not about anything so serious as this, and there’s a constriction across her chest like she’s wearing some cheap-arse corset cinched two sizes too small.

Let your sister live her life. Isn’t that what she deserves?

Sally Paige’s parting words stuck on repeat as Antoinette drove back to Port Melbourne, because maybe just maybe the woman is right – what benefit would there actually be in laying such revelations at Jacqueline’s feet? If truth can bring only horror and pain, is there any real value in telling it?

‘Stop it,’ Antoinette mutters. Stop procrastinating, girlie-girl, and move your arse. Get it over and done with. Stay angry enough, stay scared enough, you might just pull it off.

Loki’s in the living room, standing alone by the balcony door. He turns as she comes in, glances at the photo album in her hands. ‘Is that . . .’

‘Proof,’ Antoinette snaps. ‘Where is she?’

‘In her room. She . . . isn’t sure she wants to see you.’

‘Too bad.’

‘Wait, please wait.’ He moves with the lithe, enviable grace of a dancer, all coiled energy and control, and Antoinette feels that familiar hitch of wonder and astonished pride. She made this boy,
she
made him
. ‘Be careful,’ Loki says. ‘She’s so frightened, confused. She did seem better while we were out but–’

‘You went out?’

‘Just for brunch, I thought it would take her mind off things and it did, for a while. But as soon as we got back here she was . . .’ He shakes his head. ‘She’s been sorting through her stuff, like it’s an archaeological dig or something. She won’t say what she’s looking for.’

Antoinette brandishes the album at him. ‘Which is why I have this.’

‘Just don’t forget that you’re her sister.’

‘Oh, for godsake.’ She’s barely taken two steps before he’s in front of her again, his hands falling firm-but-gentle onto her shoulders, his face so close to hers she has little choice but to meet his gaze.

‘She loves you,’ Loki says. ‘And she
does
trust you, no matter how confused she might feel. So, whatever you tell her, don’t make it any kind of a lie. You lie to her now, you lie to her about this – that’s not something you’ll ever be able to fix.’ He kisses her brow, then steps aside. ‘Go on. She needs you.’

Jacqueline has pulled all her clothes from the wardrobe and is busy sorting them into piles on the bed, though if there’s any kind of rhyme or reason to the arrangement, Antoinette can’t figure it. Her sister frowns as she lifts a cream camisole from one pile and places it onto another, brushing the silk with her hand.

‘I don’t think I can talk to you right now,’ she says without looking up.

‘That’s okay.’ Antoinette nudges aside a pair of slacks and perches herself on the corner of the bed, cradling the album in her lap. The weight of it is a comfort and gives her anxious fingers something to grasp, something to fiddle with, but that’s about all it’s good for. There may be some kind of truth pressed between its covers – a story of one sister who did in fact fall first into the world, who is the oldest by any definition, and of her younger sibling who has never been anything else – but it’s not the whole truth, not by any cruel or desperate stretch.

And the whole truth, or as much of it as Antoinette knows, is the least of what Jacqueline deserves. Jacqueline, who is now glancing warily at her sister, at what she holds in her hands.

‘You don’t need to talk,’ Antoinette says, and she smiles, and she hopes that the smile is more reassuring than it feels. ‘All you need to do is listen.’

— 18 —

Jacquel
ine studies the portrait of the old woman holding a blue feather. Both her arms are gleaming chrome, jointed at elbow and wrist. Her fingers, still wrinkled flesh, clasp the feather with obvious care. Her neck is also chrome and beneath her modest summer frock bulge the pert breasts of an eighteen year old. If the eighteen year old was a robot. But her face. Her face is aged and lined. Her eyes don’t quite meet those of the viewer. They stare past. Through. The old woman is not concerned for her audience. She has her feather. That is enough.

It is the only one of the series without a red dot next to its name.

The gallery floor is empty. Becca is upstairs with Dante. Jacqueline can’t recall what they’re working on. She finds it difficult to care. Seventh Circle politics hold remarkably little interest for her now.

Instead, she delves inwards. Sectioning and separating herself into smaller and smaller parts. An exact and detailed catalogue of Jacqueline Paige. All that she is and ever was subjected to thorough, repetitive examination. It is a difficult process, deciding which facets might be hers – genuinely
hers
– and which were likely crafted by the woman who made her.

Sally Paige, in search of the perfect daughter.

Still, she is calm. Has been calm ever since Ant revealed what their mother – what
Ant’s
mother – had told her. It’s a peculiar serenity, unlike anything she has been able to cultivate before. She feels safe within it. Within it? No. It’s not something that surrounds or encloses her. Rather, it’s something she possesses, something she holds. It’s the feather, bright and certain and blue.

Who am I then, Loki? What am I?

Whoever you want to be. Whoever you choose to be.

She starts small. She starts with
Lina
. Rolling the word in her mouth like a pebble. Tucking it beneath her tongue. It’s a good name. She likes the sound of it. The cool, polished-glass feel of it. Perhaps. Perhaps she might be Lina. No one has ever called her that before Loki. It feels fresh, unsullied. Full of promise. She whispers it to herself from time to time over the next few days. Breaking it in like a pair of shoes. Making sure it doesn’t blister or pinch. Lina is someone new. She is a blank canvas, an unmarked page – terrifying yet exhilarating to contemplate. She is everything that Jacqueline Paige could never be. Could never dare to be. Lina is neither careful nor precise. She is expansive and changeable. She is vast.

Most important of all, Lina is nobody’s daughter. And if . . .

. . . that’s what Jacqueline wants to be called now, then of course Antoinette’s cool with it and she’ll do her best to remember, though it might take a little while and Jacqueline –
Lina
– will need to forgive the odd slip-up or two. And her sister nods and smiles her queer new smile, lopsided and shy like she’s pulled the thing straight out of the box and isn’t exactly sure what to do with it, and ‘Hey,’ Antoinette says before she has a chance to leave again. ‘We haven’t really talked much. Since . . .’

‘I know,’ Jacqueline says.
Lina
says. ‘I’ve been thinking things over.’

‘Are we . . .’ She wishes she could have the answer first, so she would know whether or not she really wanted to ask the question. ‘Are we okay?’

Her sister frowns. ‘I think so. Yes.’

‘That’s it? You
think
so?’

‘I’m still trying to work out what this all means for me. There’s a lot to sort through, but one thing I do already know is that I don’t
have
to love you.’

A punch in the gut couldn’t hurt any worse. Antoinette swivels around in her chair, turns back to the computer. She doesn’t want Jacqueline to see the tears in her eyes. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Glad that’s sorted, then.’

‘Ant, no. That’s not what I meant.’

And then her sister’s arms are around her shoulders, and her sister’s cheek is pressed to her own, and her sister is sorry, so sorry for how that sounded. Loki’s been encouraging her to stop second-guessing herself, to stop prepping every sentence in her head before allowing it to leave her mouth. Which is good. Which is liberating. But it’s still new, and she does stumble at times.

‘I do love you,’ Jacqueline says. ‘Of course I do. What I meant was, I know that it’s
real
now. I know it comes from
me
. It’s not because Sally
made
me to love you, it wasn’t some kind of big sister parameter she built into me – how could it be when she didn’t plan on having you? When she didn’t even think she could?’

Antoinette wipes at her eyes. ‘I’m not sure I get it.’

‘What’s to get?’ Jacqueline kisses the top of her head. ‘You’re my little sister and I love you. Because
I
love you.’

Then she leaves, padding barefoot back to her room and to Loki with whom she’s been sharing her bed for the past few days, and Antoinette’s happy for them, really, pleased to see their shared glances and cautious smiles. Because it’s not about them personally, the envious, belly-deep ache around which she curls, footsore and exhausted after work each night, the bars of the futon poking at shoulder and hip. She neither wants Loki, nor wishes her sister would let him alone, but still. To witness the emotions so clearly blossoming between them, emotions she might never again feel for herself – it grieves as much as it gladdens, and no matter how . . .

. . . many questions he asks, Lina knows that the middle-aged man in the green jacket doesn’t give a damn about the pen-and-ink collage on the wall in front of him. He is more interested in looking at Becca. The shape of her arse. The depth of her cleavage.

‘Tell me about the swans again,’ he says.

Becca is oblivious. Or perhaps she is merely pretending. Either way, she launches into her spiel about Leda and Zeus. She smiles and pushes the hair from her face. It falls straight back down again. She talks about seduction and the long, serpentine curve of a swan’s neck. Her hand makes suggestive motions in the air. The man in the green jacket laughs. He moves closer to Becca. Murmurs something into her ear. The girl giggles and shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t think so.’

Lina gets up from behind the sales desk and crosses the gallery. ‘It’s a very confronting piece,’ she says to the man in the green jacket. ‘Don’t you think?’

The man turns to look at her. His gaze travels swiftly over her legs and hips. Lingers for a moment at her breasts before skipping up to her face. His smile is at once simpering and sickeningly proprietary. ‘How’s that, then?’

‘The artist makes no bones about which interpretation of the Leda story she sides with.’ Jacqueline points to the centre of the frame. A multitude of hands, all of them gripping a sinuous, white-feathered throat. ‘Pre- or post-coital strangulation, you have to wonder. And here, look.’ The blood-limned edge of a blade. Several blades. Standing ramrod stiff amid sacks of soft, deflated flesh. ‘It’s somewhat stylised but you get the idea. Not many people know, but swans are among the few birds to possess a penis. They’re aggressive too – a good whack with a wing will break your arm. The rape of Leda was almost certainly penetrative. And violent.’

‘Did you say rape?’ The man with the green jacket is no longer grinning.

‘That’s a fairly modern reading of the myth,’ Becca is quick to tell him.

Lina nods her head. ‘Of course.’ She leans closer to the collage. Makes a show of wincing at what she sees there. ‘But if
seduction
is what you’re after, sir, I’m not sure we have anything to offer you at the moment.’

She smiles. Keeps smiling as the man in the green jacket checks his watch and mumbles something about needing to get back to work. He thanks Becca for her attention, thanks Lina as well. It’s not really his thing, he tells them. Maybe he’ll come back another time. When the exhibits change.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Becca hisses as soon as the man has stepped outside. ‘You’ve been acting weird all week. Weird
er
.’

‘I’m sorry, did you want to give him your phone number?’

‘Gross! I was trying to sell him some art. He was dead keen until you stuck your nose in.’

‘Yes, I saw just how keen he was.’ She looks the girl up and down. A slow, deliberate slide over every inch of her skin. By the time she returns to her face, Becca is blushing. Lina sighs and rubs at her forehead. She doesn’t want to be cruel. She doesn’t want to be that person. ‘You’re not stupid,’ she says. ‘Even if you think you need to pretend otherwise.’

‘I don’t have to listen to this,’ Becca replies. Starts to walk away.

Lina grabs her wrist. It’s not something she planned. The sight of her own fingers pressed into the girl’s skin is a mild shock. Jacqueline Paige doesn’t touch people like that. Jacqueline Paige goes out of her way not to touch people like that. Becca looks startled as well. She attempts to pull away but Lina tightens her grip.

‘If you want to get anywhere in this business, you need to stop using this–’

She flicks at that heavy flop of a fringe.

‘–and this–’

Taps a finger against those ruby-bright lips.

‘–and start showing people that you actually have a brain. Or else no one, not Dante, not the clients, not anyone who matters in any way at all, will ever consider you to be anything other than window dressing.’

Becca’s eyes glitter. Damaged, dangerous, like a bottle left broken in the gutter.

Lina releases her. ‘I’m being honest. That’s all.’

The girl steps back. Folds her arms. ‘Fuck you.’

‘Suit yourself.’ Lina walks back to the sales desk. Retrieves her bag from the bottom drawer. ‘I’m going to grab some lunch,’ she tells Becca, who has turned to face the Leda collage again, who responds with the barest hitch of her shoulder as Lina leaves the gallery. Her heart beats fast and loud. Her blood rushes in her veins. She covers her smile with one hand, then drops it. Allows her grin to widen and shine. Two men smile back at her in passing. One of them winks. And Lina laughs. Riding her shoulder, the shadow of Jacqueline Paige worries and frets –
people are looking at you, people are looking at us
– and she laughs at that too. Let them look. Let them smile and laugh to see a woman smiling and laughing to herself in the street. Let them think . . .

. . . whatever the hell they want. Antoinette is beyond caring. Chinese whispers and smirking innuendo, like being right back in high school.
Jackson, eh?
Michelle one of the first to sidle up all nudge-nudge and wink-wink, lascivious grin and friendly bump of the hip.
Sweet little upgrade you got yourself there
. Because, of course, someone has seen them together – maybe that first drunken session at the pub, maybe one of the other two nights she went home with him, clean and sober both times, just to make sure nothing was there – and Simpatico gossip spreads faster than grease fire.

Still, she’s surprised to find him waiting behind at the end of their shift.

‘So,’ he says. ‘You got any plans?’

Antoinette arches an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

Not after last night, surely, lying there with her fist stuffed into her mouth, fighting off an attack of the giggles while the bed creaked like it was about to collapse any minute and Jackson made that peculiar whiny noise in the back of his throat. Giggles which turned into hiccups, loud and sporadic and painful enough that she spent half an hour in the bathroom afterwards, sipping lukewarm mouthfuls of water and trying to hold her breath. At least it saved her from awkward conversation.

‘You need to chill,’ Jackson is saying. ‘I might be able to help you out with that.’ He opens his palm, low and surreptitious, flashes her glimpse of two neatly rolled joints. ‘It’s aces, this shit. Real mellow.’

Antoinette shakes her head. ‘Sorry, can’t say that’s ever done much for me.’

‘That’s cool. You still up for something tonight, though, right?’

He’s beyond cute, this boy, with a repertoire most women would find far from shabby, and yet she feels absolutely nothing, not even the faintest flutter of interest. As far as her vanished libido is concerned, Jackson might as well be suggesting they do laundry together.

Love is what you wanted, my girl, and love is what you gave.

Love, and a whole lot more besides.

‘Jackson . . . this isn’t going to go anywhere.’

He looks mildly surprised. ‘But we’re just having fun, aren’t we? I thought we were just having fun. No strings, no pressure, right?’

Right. And if she were actually having any fun . . .

‘Sorry,’ Antoinette tells him. ‘I really don’t need any more complications.’

‘So, it’s not me, it’s you?’

She would laugh at that, she really would, if Jackson didn’t seem a little hurt. Hurt or maybe just put out by his sudden loss of benefits, but if it’s the former then she’s glad not to be stringing this out any longer. ‘You don’t know how right you are,’ she says. ‘It is so
totally
me.’

And Jackson smiles and shrugs, that vague film of regret lifting so fast she wonders if it was ever there at all, and he tells her it’s cool, he understands.
Totally.
Then he leans in to kiss her goodbye and their noses bump, graceless and hard, and Antoinette is still rubbing hers when she gets on the tram. A couple of emo kids canoodle across the aisle, the girl twisting strands of the boy’s hair around black-nailed fingers, the boy stares into her face like it might be the last thing he ever lays eyes on, like that might be no kind of a bad thing, and Antoinette swallows and looks away. Move along, nothing to see here, nothing . . .