would keep. My appetites at that point were more basic. ‘If I don’t eat soon,’ I said, sociably, ‘I won’t be answerable.’
The phone rang. Fiona went into a little study opening off the living room. ‘Hello.’ She listened for a moment, then reached back with her foot and hooked the door shut. I stood up and sucked my piece of lemon, beginning to get impatient, not sure why we were still here. Pacing to the window, I saw Spider leaning against a tree, a mobile phone pressed to his ear. Wanker.
Lined up on the mantelpiece was a row of framed photographs. Family snaps. Incidental mileposts in life’s little journey. Me, Mummy and Toby the pony. Provence on a hundred dollars a day. I took my drink over and picked one up, a five by eight colour print. This Fiona was a good ten years younger. A real little chubby-bubby. Her hair was longer, still brown, her dress a shapeless shift. She was smiling at the camera, close-lipped as though hiding braces. An old man had his arm around her shoulder. He was maybe sixty-five, barrel-chested, with a round face and a bare scalp, tufts of grey hair sticking out above his ears, grinning like a wicked old koala. The background was blurred, providing no clues to the setting.
I held the frame up. ‘Her father?’
Eastlake nearly choked on his G amp; T. ‘Christ no!’ he spluttered, glancing furtively back at the closed door of the study. ‘That’s Victor Szabo.’ He took the photograph out of my hand, regarded it with ill-concealed amazement and returned it to its place on the mantel. His eyes swivelled upwards, to the nude, and his mouth opened to say something. The study door opened and Fiona reappeared, frowning.
‘Bad news?’ said Eastlake, turning quickly to face her.
She made a dismissive gesture and shook her head. ‘Nothing.’ She yawned-it looked forced-and tugged off her earrings, plain pearl studs, one black, one white. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I really am, but I’m exhausted.’ She was trying hard to sound tired, but there was a tight brittleness in her voice. ‘Would you think I was terribly rude if I begged off dinner?’
Frankly, it suited me fine. Eastlake made some dissuading noises, thankfully to no avail, I expressed more gratitude for the first aid than was warranted and two minutes later we were back in the street. ‘Think I’ll give it a miss, too,’ said Eastlake, looking at his watch.
The night was young and I was half-cut and fancy-free. A hundred metres up the road women with backsides by Henry Moore were entering the most fashionable wet-throat emporium in town. As soon as Eastlake began across the street towards the Mercedes, I hastened to join them.
Shuffling down the footpath towards me was my nemesis, the flying cowboy. All the stuffing had gone out of him. He was lost in thought, mumbling to himself. ‘Jus you wait,’ he was saying, repeating it under his breath. As poignant a solitary drunk as ever I had seen. I gave him a wide berth and went into the pub.
So much fashionable architecture had been inflicted on the Botanical Hotel that it could have passed for the engine room of an aircraft carrier, all distressed boiler-plate and industrial rubber. Business was booming. Salina Fleet was in the far corner of the bistro section, at a raucous table crowded with faces from the CMA back lawn. Down boy, I told myself. Read the mood. Take it slowly.
I ordered a beer, examining myself in the bar mirror. Uglier men were stalking the earth. The barman was one of them. ‘Grolsch?’ he said. I thought he was clearing his throat. He handed me a tomato sauce bottle of pale brown liquid. Grolsch Premium Lager, read the label. Brewed in Holland. ‘That’ll be four eighty,’ he said.
That explained the balance of payments deficit. Time was when you could get paralytic for four dollars eighty. On Australian beer, at that. I put my hand on my hip pocket and discovered my wallet was gone.
There was a limited number of places I might have mislaid it. Mentally retracing my steps, I got as far back as that low-slung designer chair in Fiona Lambert’s apartment. I went back down the street, took the stairs two at a time, and rapped on Fiona’s little brass knocker. Five minutes, ten at the most, had elapsed since Eastlake and I had left, so it wasn’t like I’d be waking her up. There was no answer. I rapped again, the sound reverberating down the stairwell. Either Fiona Lambert was a very sound sleeper or there was no-one home. Somewhere inside, the phone began to bleat. When it finally rang out, I raised the edge of the Ming Dynasty shrub tub. The key was back in its hiding place. I let myself in.
Streetlight lit the living room. The remains of our drinks sat on the coffee table condensing dribbles of water. My wallet was on the floor, just where I hoped it would be. As I bent to pick it up, my eye was caught by the picture hanging above the mantel, the nude. I stood and studied it.
Its subject was the younger, plumper Fiona Lambert, the one in the photograph. The artist’s approach was clinical, lurid and without a shred of sentimentality. Superbly confident, the picture captured not just Fiona’s likeness but her narcissism as well. The pose was blush-makingly provocative, anatomically explicit. The artist just had to be bonking her teenage ears off.
I did some quick mental arithmetic. At the time he painted the picture, Victor Szabo must have been at least sixty-five. The old goat.
Five minutes later I was back at the Botanical with four dollars eighty worth of Dutch courage in my hand, making eye contact with Salina Fleet.
She waved me over, making space at the table. ‘What did you say your name was, again?’ she demanded, her way of being smart. I didn’t doubt I was already tucked away in Sal’s mental Filofax, cross-referenced against future contingency. Everyone was talking at once, bellowing into the general din. Art scene party time. ‘Saw you at the CMA,’ she half-shouted. ‘Thought you were gone.’
‘So did I,’ I said. ‘When that guy landed on me.’
She laughed and bit her lip at the same time, a cornered look in her eyes. I rapidly changed the subject to the only other thing I could think of. ‘Got sidetracked by Fiona Lambert.’
She relaxed. ‘The Black Widow, we call her.’ I bent closer, the better to hear her, and the bare skin of our forearms touched. A little spark of static electricity shot between us. ‘Better watch yourself there.’
‘Why?’
She was even tighter than me. Not that we were drunk. And so what if we were? The waiter came and stuck a menu in front of my face. It was the sort you read right to left. Everything on offer was either char-grilled, stir- fried, snow-pead, or came with sheep’s cheese. What I really wanted to taste was the waxy fruit of Salina’s apricot lips.
‘Go on,’ I urged. ‘Tell me.’ Keep her talking until we found some common ground, that was the strategy. ‘Why do you call Fiona Lambert the Black Widow?’
A thin-lipped, imperious-beaked bloke was squeezed in on the other side of Salina. I’d met him at the CMA but his name escaped me. When he heard Fiona Lambert’s name, he pricked up his ears and leaned over. ‘They call her that,’ he whispered in an accent that sounded like it came from the same place as my beer, ‘because of the rumour that Victor Szabo died, shall we say, on the job with her.’
He had a bracket like a Borgia pontiff in a Titian portrait. To hear him properly, I had to lean even closer to Salina, so I kept up the questions. ‘They were lovers, were they?’
‘She modelled for him, slept with him, buried him, wrote the book on him, is curating his retrospective,’ said Salina with what sounded suspiciously like envy. ‘She practically invented him.’
‘And now he’s about to be the next big thing, eh?’ I said.
‘Bigger than Sir Ned Kelly himself, if the Black Widow has anything to do with it,’ confirmed the Pope’s nose.
By that stage, I could’ve eaten a nun’s bum through a cane chair. We moved on to the Koonunga Hill cabernet shiraz. Food arrived, cross-hatched from the grill, and I sawed into my fillet of salmon.
‘A brutal deconstruction of mordant reality,’ declaimed Salina.
‘Beg pardon?’ I chewed.
‘A sundering of the constituent components of antipodean materiality.’ She sucked in her cheeks and tried to look severe and authoritative.
‘Eh?’ I popped a french fry into my mouth.
‘The insertion into a distinctively Australian sensibility of the universalising impulse of an internationalist form.’
At last I got it. She was doing a Fiona Lambert impression. Quoting, I took it, catchphrases from her book on Victor Szabo.
‘An unflinching critic of the mundane,’ piped up the schnoz, getting in on the act.
‘ A Fierce Vision,’ we all chortled in chorus.
