Stealing Picasso (6 page)

Turton Pym scrubs the russet paint from his fingertips under the tap, watching it vortex pinkly in the concrete trough. He sighs. Shit. He had been rather proud of this wan russet, having mixed it himself from two parts lactescent oil and one part geranium and a shallow finger-dip of Indian ink. It was the exact hue of our drunken prime minister's face as captured by
New Idea
at Carols by Candlelight, and with it he had begun to paint the man. It was to be his entry in the Archibald Prize. But the russet jowls of the PM's face reminded Turton of the showgirl's inflamed buttock that he'd had the pleasure of spanking at the Far Arts Ball a month ago. Whereupon the face of Turton's prime minister quickly and inevitably transmogrified into the bare buttock of the showgirl, and then her other bare buttock, and with just a dash of plum to deepen its importance, her labia. By the time his palette had run dry
he had an upended ballerina and an erection and was cursing his lack of artistic focus. Jesus wept. If it wasn't one appetite intervening between him and his art, it was another.

An artist needs to reach a certain dreamlike state in which to paint well. And it is in this dreamlike state that Turton is most vulnerable to his appetites; it is then that they take control of him and hijack his prime ministers. This is the seventh prime minister in a month that has broken from its carapace of drunkenness and lechery and become a showgirl's parts. Another metamorphosised into the rampant tool of a goat, which shook Turton so much he splashed it with turpentine, slashed it to nothingness and, slumping into an armchair and wondering what it really said about an artist that his prime ministers were turning into goats' tools, burst into tears.

God, shit, if bloody Whiteley painted, say, a regatta, it stayed a regatta. All Kevlar spars and sun on the hundred smiles of the waves and the curve of the world. As soon as a sunburnt sailor was attempted, it didn't become excited womanly privates. Whiteley hadn't lost all discipline and his mind didn't slip sideways under the leverage of his appetites. Turton takes hold of his head by his sideboards and shakes it. ‘Jesus wept.'

Harry finds him in the washroom, shaking his head as if it were a stopped clock, and says to him, ‘Easy, Turton, easy. What's wrong?' Harry knows enough about artists to realise they are serial melodramatics whose collapses are staged within the proximity of a peer, so that he or she may bear witness and race to the rescue and praise their work beyond all truth. So upon seeing Turton in this state of distress he feels a thrill of pride that his tutor thinks enough of him to have staged this collapse for him.

Turton stares down at the russet paint in the basin. ‘I've lost control of my work,' he admits softly.

‘But … “Let your painting become.” You're always saying it.'

‘Yes. But vulva? Buttocks? Breasts? That's all it becomes. I'm trying to paint our prime minister and I end up with vaginas.' Turton's breath is tight and his voice panicky.

‘Metaphor,' Harry suggests.

‘The Archibald doesn't accept metaphor.'

Turton begins to cry and Harry sits beside him and puts an arm around him and rolls and lights a joint, holding it for him to drag. He is pleased to find his tutor so distressed because he has a favour to ask and he figures if he comforts Turton through this episode, it is unlikely to be refused.

Hope is a hard habit to break and Turton, at fifty-eight, is going through the final throes of addiction to it. Harry settles his fears by telling him that mutinous creativity from within is what they are all striving for; ideas and moods that can't be contained or controlled bursting from below deck with daggers in their teeth and their hackles risen, and it sounds to Harry as if he, Turton, has finally found mutinous creativity from within. He congratulates him. And if a dinky little prescription comp like the Archibald can't accommodate mutinous creativity, then fuck them. Privately, Harry thinks that any man this old painting this much pussy can't be getting enough and needs to buy himself a woman once in a while.

After they have sat and smoked a while and Harry judges that Turton is somewhat reassured but still comparatively weak, he feels it's the perfect moment to ask his favour, and rushes it at him in such a torrent of information that it can hardly be identified as a question, or protested against.

‘Turton, a small favour to ask, on account of I let the cat out of the bag re our secret excursions into the gallery to this woman I'm seeing, even though she's way too old for me – she's
beautiful, you want me to tell you how beautiful? One guy she dumped threw himself to bears in the Paris zoo but it was winter and they were all asleep and so he dusted himself off and threw himself to the lions instead. Killed. In the news papers. Sort of woman we're talking about. Bears then lions. No joke. And anyway she's a great, great lover of art. You know my exhibition? All sold out? It was her. She bought them all. Must have buckets of cash. And she wants to come along one night and visit the
Weeping Woman
with us.'

‘Bears then lions?' Turton releases his sideboards and pouts in contemplation of this woman's beauty, until his face clouds with scepticism. ‘Maybe the bears and lions say more about the victim's romantic nature than about her beauty. Men have thrown themselves to lions for pigs.'

‘No. When you see her you'll know. I'd do it myself.'

‘When I see her I will be similarly affected? Is this your idea? This woman's beauty will be a passport into the gallery, even though my career might be ended, my reputation rogered in the tabloids and me carted off to chokey.'

Turton's face hardens and he takes hold of his shirt collar, sucking air with which to deliver judgement. ‘I may be an old fool bewitched by vulva, Harry. But I haven't sunk so low as to throw myself to lions for some flibbertigibbet who bought your paintings.'

‘Turton …'

‘No, Harry. You've breached a trust, telling her of our excursions. You've jeopardised my tenure. I won't jeopardise it further by allowing her to come along.'

From the moment Marcel Leech saw Michael Jackson, he wanted to be Michael Jackson. He started as far away from the thing Michael became as Michael did. Marcel set out as a chubby white kid with ginger hair. Michael set out as a skinny black kid with a wide nose and a big, happy mouth. So they travelled towards the Horrified White Lady look from points diametrically opposed, Marcel always one step behind Michael. Michael had his hair straightened; Marcel had his hair dyed. Michael had his skin bleached; Marcel had his freckles lasered. Michael had a nose job; Marcel had a nose job to match it.

He tracked Michael Jackson through a score of surgical procedures, each leaving him broke and forcing him to work double shifts at Safeways unloading pantechnicons of refrigerated vegetables through the night. Eventually, when Michael
had his last surgery and ended up looking like a snapshot of Jackie Kennedy five seconds after her husband's brains had been blown out, Marcel only needed to have his chin squared with a $2000 collagen implant to join him there as his twin, his impersonator and his acolyte.

When his surgical journey was complete, people on the streets of Melbourne stopped and openly stared at Marcel, before breaking into smiles. Here before them was someone who had changed his face to look the way the King of Pop had changed his face to look: Jackie Kennedy in an unfolding tragedy. Some broke into clunky moonwalks that backed them into parking meters, some broke into side-glides that sent them toppling into gutters. Children laughed and clapped. A joyous outbreak of piss-take followed Marcel wherever he went. He mistook it as a kind of adoration. The public loved him, it seemed to him, and as he had no one else to love him he felt it as strongly as a child feels the love of a mother.

So close was his likeness to the King of Pop that he became a registered, approved Michael Jackson impersonator. He had a licence issued to him by Michael's Australian representatives and had to abide by a certain code: no bucks' nights, no stripping, no profanity, etc. He threw in his job at Safeways and made a comfortable and happy living waving to delirious kids at shopping malls. He bought himself a Saatchi jacket and a Naugahyde divan, because he read in an interview that Michael loved the feel of Naugahyde and no animals suffered in its manufacture. Marcel was a self-made man. A success story.

Today he gets out of bed, checks himself in the mirror and smiles. The reflected smile amplifies the real smile amplifying
the reflected smile, like two friends complicit in the beautiful memory of yesterday, when he performed on a double bill at the Sydney Myer Music Bowl with the Easter bunny. He mimed along to ‘Billie Jean' while three thousand kids grooved in the aisles with their parents. He blew the bunny offstage. The parents forgot Jesus and the kids laid their eggs aside and danced. This was surely what it was like to be Michael Jackson: a triumph over religion and chocolate. Marcel runs his fingertips across his lips to confirm his smile and shakes his head at its unlikely existence.

He chooses his drummer-boy suit with the gold braid and stovepipe trousers and white gloves, and walks light of foot, executing side-glides, shimmies, moonwalks and spins on the way to the Galleon Café in St Kilda, where he eats breakfast every day in a pool of borrowed limelight.

The first hint that something is wrong comes from a garbage truck. A young garbologist with dreadlocks wearing a Day-Glo safety vest shouts out at Marcel that he's a sicko as he goes by hanging from the truck's running board. He plucks a beer can from the garbage and tosses it skittering across the footpath to Marcel's feet.

Marcel starts to notice the world is tainted and changed. People blank-face him or snarl. There are no clumsy, happy moonwalks this morning. Kids that gawp are snatched away by parents.

In the Galleon, having drizzled honey over his porridge, he opens
The Herald Sun
. His own face stares up at him. Michael Jackson is accused of paedophilia; accused of taking advantage of his little friends at Neverland. Marcel quickly closes the paper.

Today is Wednesday, the day he poses for Turton Pym, a duty he carries out with pride. Since Marcel has become a
Michael Jackson look-alike Turton Pym has painted his portrait a number of times for different clients – organisations, clubs, fans. They have spent a lot of time together as model and artist, and have grown to like each other. While posing, Marcel has begun to confide in Turton through the side of Michael's mouth about his lonely life, his upbringing as a ward of the state, being beaten by nuns for wetting his bed. He's told Turton how at sixteen he fell for Michael and worked nights to pay for plastic surgery. He's told him how, step by step, piece by piece, he became Michael Jackson. How being Michael brings him happiness. How he sometimes has to pinch his own (Michael's own) cheek to make sure he is awake and not dreaming.

But today, by the time he reaches Turton's studio he feels diseased. Children have been snatched away from him and people on the street have moved him on with their eyes as though he were the carrier of a bubbling leprosy. Hunted and breathing hard, he slams the door and leans his back against it, thinking himself safe at last. Turton looks up from a canvas at him and flicks his eyebrows up and down to ask, what have you been up to?

‘It's not true,' Marcel explains. ‘It's lies. They're gold-diggers. It's blackmail.'

Turton flicks his eyebrows again. Maybe it's lies and maybe it isn't. Anyway, it's disappointing.

‘It's lies,' Marcel whimpers with his hands splayed across the gold braid of his drummer-boy jacket.

‘People want it to be true.' Turton nods slowly. ‘That's how things get to be true. God gets to be true that way.'

Turton is standing before a canvas that Marcel assumes is the painting for which he has been posing during these last weeks. He quickly takes up the inflatable moon he has been
posing with, drapes himself across the green velvet armchair and kicks his legs up over one armrest, leaning his head back over the other, holding the inflatable moon above himself, his arms fully extended, gazing at it dreamily. In this position he freezes.
Michael Jackson: the Man in the Moon.
He becomes completely still, save for the nervous flight of his eyes.

‘Marcel …'

‘What?' He side-mouths the question like a ventriloquist, not moving his lips, the perfect model.

‘Put the moon down.'

‘Why?' Again without moving his lips.

‘The commission has been withdrawn. The Royal Children's rang. They don't want a portrait of Michael any more. Put the moon down.'

But Marcel doesn't put the inflatable moon down. He holds it tighter. His gloved fingers sinking into its crust as it shakes in his hands, the Sea of Tranquillity rippling and tossing as his grip hardens. ‘No.'

Still no lip movement, still posing faithfully, as if he were the elfin wonder of yesterday. ‘Paint me,' he whispers from the corner of his mouth.

‘Marcel …'

‘Please paint me.'

If Turton were to take up the brushes today he would paint Marcel's flit-eyed desperation, his steely attempt to be a worthy subject, a legitimate object of fascination, someone loved, worshipped. He would paint his determined stillness. As if, were he to remain there unmoving, unrenewed, the old truths could live on unshattered by the new. After this, Turton would paint Marcel's tears, then the fingers girdling and ploughing the moon, the lunar continents warping and becoming flaccid as it pops and deflates.

But he doesn't paint today. Instead he gets Marcel a glass of pastis and iced water. Marcel slowly releases his grip on the deflated husk of the moon and sits upright and takes the glass and sips from it, before holding it out in front of his face and furrowing his brow – even this magical concoction is soured now.

‘It's absolute baloney, Turton. I'm so angry.'

Turton nods. ‘He'll be acquitted then.'

‘Hundred per cent.'

‘In a year maybe.'

‘My God.' Marcel covers his eyes with his gloved hand, panting with despair.

‘It was a dangerous bandwagon to be on. Elvis would have been safe. Springsteen's a no-nonsense, dependable guy. But Michael – we were all waiting for the other shoe to drop, weren't we?'

Marcel groans at the mention of these other artists, at the thought of sharing either their music or their faces. ‘Michael hasn't done anything wrong.'

‘Michael's hiding behind big iron gates. Two hundred acres of zebras and Ferris wheels.' Turton goes to Marcel and bends before him and lays a hand on his knee. ‘You haven't got a fantasy ranch to hide in. We've got to change your look.'

Turton lends Marcel a baseball cap as an ad hoc disguise and takes him to sensible menswear store Fletcher Jones. As they walk through the city Marcel is called names from passing cars. Popcorn pimp. Chutney ferret. And if it never bothered him that he has done nothing to deserve Michael Jackson's accolades, certainly a sharp sense of injustice stings him now
that he, an innocent double of an innocent man, is hounded and heckled.

Together they choose a checked shirt and some casual bone slacks with a crease. A pair of Sperry Topsider boat shoes. In the changing room Marcel looks himself up and down and sees a suburban man and begins to cry. He untucks the shirt and lets it hang.

‘Would you like me to wrap them?' the shop guy asks through the curtain.

‘No, I'll wear them.' A new outfit for an impossibly boring life of blending in. Instead of going to the Grammys and performing for the Sultan of Brunei, he's on the run, disguising himself as a mortgagee. The shop guy bags his white gloves and his Little Drummer Boy braided jacket and his stovepipe trousers and white socks and sparkling black patent leather shoes. Out on the street Marcel keeps catching his reflection in shopfronts. Oh God, this weekend golfer is me.

Everyone sees through his disguise. Even those who don't recognise Michael Jackson have a creeping intuition they are in the presence of a sicko, a clerk who has imprisoned a girl in his cellar.

In his flat that night Marcel changes back into Michael's clothes and puts on
Thriller
. ‘Wanna Be Starting Something', ‘Billie Jean', ‘Beat It'. He scoots around his Naugahyde divan, sliding, posing, miming. But the music has changed. He stops and sits on the sofa. He has abandoned Michael in his darkest hour. Michael … innocent, innocent, innocent. Michael, who I've always loved. The music sounds like a rebuke, the ghostly voice of a deceived lover. He goes to the hi-fi and lifts the needle off
Thriller
for the last time.

Now that Michael is accused of misdeeds with lads, Marcel's professional appearances end. Nobody wants a registered and officially recognised Michael Jackson look-alike any more. No one wants to hire a Michael Jackson in any capacity. Not to deliver pizzas. Not to sweep streets. Marcel becomes desperately short of money. Southeast Water send red invoices. Eastern Gas call after 8 pm.

One night some months before, while Marcel and Turton were enjoying a limoncello in a nightclub called Handgun, a guy laid five hundred-dollar bills on the bar in front of Marcel. Fanned them out like a straight flush. Marcel didn't know what that money meant at first. He blinked at it and pouted at the guy, asking. When the guy licked his lips Marcel turned away, flustered. The guy laughed, picked up his money and left.