I should not say anything to Will about what Natasha said to me.
But it occurs to me: if Amelia can solve this particular problem of Will’s, maybe it isn’t all she can solve.
Chapter 19
WILL
I am climbing into a taxi with Harriet Price. On a Sunday. Before coffee. Life, it’s safe to say, has become weird.
Mum’s in the front yard with her bum in the air, tackling a weed. Does she garden every Sunday morning? I’m never up before eleven on Sundays so I don’t have a clue. It’s strange being awake this early: the street so quiet, the air so crisp, the sunlight refracting off roof tiles. If I were to ever commit a robbery, I decide, now would be the time of day to do it.
The weed comes free; Mum crashes onto the lawn, dirt spraying across her sloppy joe. I turn away from the taxi window in embarrassment and slot my seatbelt into its holder as we ease away from the kerb. ‘Are you going to tell me where we’re going?’
‘I told you already. It’s Amelia-related business,’ Harriet says.
‘So I’m giving up my Sunday because …?’
What I’m supposed to be doing, and in fact have promised a couple of people I’ll be doing (Mrs Degarno, for example, and Mum), is mapping out my major work. I even pocketed a Stanley knife from the Drama Club’s set design stores to size my canvas.
Harriet reaches over and gingerly touches my bandaged arm. ‘How is it feeling? Is it healing okay?’
She’s wearing jeans. This is new. On school casual clothes days she always wears skirts with various rotating knitted items. Today she has on a yellow cardigan, but also skinny jeans and yellow Converse sneakers. The outfit is working for her.
I inhale the smell of stale cigarette smoke and bottled air freshener. ‘It stung for a while, but it’s fine.’
I try to gather clues about where we’re going from the stuff she has with her. On the floor are a medium-sized satchel and a small cotton bag. This doesn’t help. She could have a baby ferret inside each of them for all I know.
‘Does today’s adventure have anything to do with the handwriting business you mentioned last night?’
Harriet pauses. ‘Sort of, yes. But before we get into that, I checked Instagram again, and Amelia Westlake’s email account.’ She is picking at the stickers on the inside of the door. ‘Still no word from that girl.’
‘If only somebody – a well-respected person in a leadership position at the school, for example – could demonstrate it was okay to come forward,’ I say.
Harriet says nothing.
The taxi trundles through the quiet streets, past shops and rundown warehouses. They’re not streets I often go down. But then, I usually catch buses, and they follow the main roads.
At the next corner I notice a green arrow sign, and on the green arrow, a picture of a little white plane.
My chest feels suddenly tight.
Another corner. Another green arrow. Another little white plane.
I could kill her.
I look at Harriet. She has placed a hand on my arm and is leaning towards me. Her mouth is moving, I can feel her breath on my face, but the pounding in my ears makes it hard for me to hear what she’s saying.
It’s always hard to hear things on a plane. The noise of the engine mutes everything else: stewards asking for meal orders, the rustle of food being opened, screams. That’s how you know you’re not in a disaster movie. In movies you can hear every word people speak. In real life it’s all chaos and engine roar and your own mad heartbeat.
Harriet is talking to me about Chuck Close. Have I heard of him, she’s asking. She’s asking me. About Chuck Close.
Of course I’ve heard of Chuck Close. I’ve seen his paintings at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I’ve pored over books of his portraits that my dad owns.
‘The American portrait artist,’ she says as we round another corner, sliding closer on the plastic-wrapped seat of the taxi. ‘He works with photographs and grids. He puts one grid on the photograph and one on a giant canvas and copies the photograph cell by cell.’
My heart has begun to pound against my ribcage.
‘Each cell is an artwork of its own. But when you put the cells together they make up the portrait perfectly. It’s so intricate, the work he does, that the finished product is almost indistinguishable from a real photo.’
Her voice rings high over the drone of talkback radio. We turn another corner, following the arrow sign in the direction of the little white plane.
My glands fizz.
‘Do you know why he does it? What keeps him so motivated?’ Her smile is bright. ‘He has a condition called face blindness. He doesn’t recognise faces, even the ones of people he knows. By studying a person’s face so carefully, by tackling it piece by piece, by absorbing it in small morsels, he gets to know the face so intimately that he overcomes his condition.’
The taxi drives into the shadow of an overpass. Above us is a sign that reads ‘Domestic Terminals 2 and 3’.
Blood is thick in my ears.
‘So what I’ve done,’ says Harriet, rooting in her backpack as the taxi slows to a halt beside the terminal’s revolving doors, ‘is booked us on a flight to Brisbane. There and back. Just for the day. I thought it was best to start with a relatively short distance. We can make some Amelia-related mischief when we get there, perhaps send a postcard or two. And my grandmother is expecting us for lunch.’
I feel my stomach heave.
Harriet places the cotton carry bag on my lap and squeezes my arm. ‘Here you go.’ She empties out the contents: a magazine, an iPod, a plastic-wrapped muffin and a small stack of note cards. ‘Don’t you see, Will? You can do this. All you have to do is break down each moment, just like Chuck Close does. To help you, I’ve
