I can stomach a little monologue, but a real live ensemble is too much for tonight.
“You’re not leaving yet, are you, Lily?” says Punci. “Dotsi may need some help!” She laughs heartily and the barrage continues from all directions, this time in Hungarian, as Dotsi scurries urgently down the hallway to the toilet.
Anyu accompanies me to the doorway with a take-home pack of a week’s supply of goulash and rye bread. I wave a broad goodbye in their general direction, dreaming of the day I’ll be able to join in the banter in their own tongue, beat them at their own game. Eva will teach me a little something worthwhile: scathing but elegant, razor-sharp but cool. Knock their socks off. Imagine, if only they knew what I have up my sleeve. If only they knew my source. I can’t wait till Saturday and my first Hungarian lesson.
“Forget the Muchovsky kid, daahrlink,” my grandmother whispers at the door, just out of earshot. “His grandmother cheats at rummy. Romanian peasant stock. Trust me on this one. This Zsuzsi always thinks she knows everything.”
I kiss her goodbye and leave her to her band of cronies. She won’t be lonely tonight, but I feel sad for this once beautiful woman who reluctantly traded Old World elegance for sensible underwear and comfortable pants. Sometimes I catch glimpses of her former, lively self, but mostly I see this once prominent member of society relegated to the position of the irritating grandmother who nags and cooks too much. She spends her days attending the funerals of people she hated and her evenings at the rummy table with other bitter, fading souls. She’s forever waiting for that miserable, monthly government cheque and for her daahrlink Lily to get on with it and live a happy life for her.
I step outside into the humid night, throw her leftovers into the rubbish bin on the corner, light a cigarette and start climbing the familiar hill towards the cliffs and home.
I guess when my grandmother sees me, she feels sad too. They say getting old is depressing, but it’s better than the alternative. She must know that, just like my Papa, I might not make it that far.
Chapter Four
I have the whole day off. The whole day, that is, except for an early brunch with my mother at the Tea Gardens in Watson’s Bay. This is Mama’s idea of refinement: a salad sandwich on multigrain bread followed by Devonshire tea prepared painfully slowly from scratch by a brother-sister team whose family has owned this house for a million years. She’ll make a point of asking for extra milk with her tea, of noting how the scones and cream are a luxury her hips can’t really afford, and of casually mentioning the fact that she herself was born right here in Sydney. We’ll spend the hour arguing about what we’re wearing, what we’re reading, what the Prime Minister should and shouldn’t be doing, and then she’ll empty out a purse full of silver and spend the next ten minutes excruciatingly assembling the total of the bill from ten and twenty cent coins. I’ll head back home drained, hungry and irritated with no energy left to paint.
I’m working on a set of portraits of women. Their faces have been haunting my thoughts now for what feels like an eternity, but it’s only in the last few weeks, since I quit my medical course, that I’ve had the chance to start bringing them to life on canvas. Most are still rough sketches with smatterings of colour, and two of them are still just eyes. I always start with the eyes: the centre, the window. My inspiration comes from those two little sparks. If the eyes don’t work, the rest of the face will never see the light of day. I’ve been practising, playing with colour and depth and highlights. Now I look at an eye and see the person, not the vitreous, sclera, cornea and how they all relate to the optic nerve. Gone are the days of learning a person by parts.
This morning I feel like painting, like taking bits and pieces from the world of the real and rearranging them on paper to please my imagination. I’m not bound to anyone’s vision of how things are but mine. I can take an eyebrow from here, a wrinkle from there, and create the look of how I’d like things to be. Mostly I paint the women of my family how I see them, not necessarily how they look. I paint my mother and my grandmother, I even paint myself – but I am not happy with those. The times I try to faithfully reproduce what I know, I am left dissatisfied. It is never enough.
My bedroom wall is plastered with eyes – scraps of photos, magazine cuttings and sketches: the beautiful, the interesting, the plain, the absurd, images I’ve liked and images I’ve hated, techniques I’ve mastered and those I’ve yet to explore. They are all there, staring at me while I paint and while I sleep. They make me feel less lonely. But they see all. Sam says it’s creepy, but I don’t think so. I like their company. They just watch; there’s no advice, no opinions, no judgement.
The telephone rings. I can’t find the phone. I scramble out from behind the easel and almost knock my head on the side of the internal archway separating my bedroom and the kitchen. It’s just two rooms, my flat: a decent-sized bedroom with a huge window looking out onto Blair Street and a combined kitchen/dining/living/entertaining room. From up here on the third floor you can see the line of red-brick apartment buildings go on forever and the all-day traffic jam at the roundabout outside the butcher. The kitchen is big enough for a table and a washing machine, and the cabinets hold all my cooking stuff with room to spare for my paints and brushes. The floor is faux-timber and the walls are painted pale yellow but it’s in pretty good condition for the measly three hundred and fifty dollars a week I pay for it. It is still North Bondi.
The phone keeps ringing. I finally find it. It’s under my pillow.
“What’s up?” I say.
It’s Sam.
“I need you,” he says. He is huffing and puffing and I wonder what inanity he has turned into the crisis of the century this time: his favourite café took the bread-and-butter pudding off the menu or Stephanie from The Bold and the Beautiful found out the man she thought was her real father was in fact her brother. Maybe Britney Spears is back in rehab.
“Don’t be a bitch,” he says. “I’ve had a fucking accident.”
“Fuck.”
“I know.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“What about Jackson?” Sam has names for all his important tools. His Jeep is Jackson, his phone is Monkey, his penis is Phoenix.
“Oh, he’s fine. A little scratch on the bumper. Nothing serious.”
“That’s a relief.”
Silence. I hear a faint rustling, a click, and then a deep exhale.
“Sam?”
“I don’t think anyone saw me. But I can’t be sure.”
“Sam – Sam, don’t tell me … Oh my God, what happened?”
“Don’t worry, nothing bad. It wasn’t my fault. I had a hideous migraine.”
“Well?”
“He had it coming.”
“Who?”
“The guy! I don’t know who! I just know he had it coming.”
“What happened, Sam? What did you do?”
“I was parking in the lane in Darlinghurst, you know the one, the tiny
