Trust (32 page)

Susanna drifted round, checking out frames, wondering about prices. The biggest expense in putting together an exhibition is the framing, that’s what she’d always heard. Brochures and price lists lay scattered on Vinnie’s messy counter. Susanna started sifting through them, getting distracted by the many invitations and catalogues for shows at other galleries.
So much art.
The pictures on the cover of a small square catalogue peeking out near the bottom of the pile caught her eye. She tweaked it out and had started flipping through the pages before she realised what was familiar about it. The little sculptures, the jewellery, were no such thing: these were the same sex toys that had been in the emerald-green bag, hidden in Gerry’s suitcase!

‘What’s up?’ asked Vinnie. Susanna must have gasped, or made some noise. Vinnie was coming over, and Susanna first made to stash the catalogue again under the pile, but that was too … childish. Instead, she held it up bravely.

‘What’s this?’ she asked, and was embarrassed to hear the squeak in her voice.

Vinnie peered at it, and grinned. ‘Catalogue from Toys in Babeland,’ she said. ‘Best products, best range, and thank the goddess for mail order. You want to borrow it?’

‘No!’ said Susanna with a level of vehemence that made her blush. ‘I didn’t — I’ve never —’

‘You’ve
never
? Not ever?’ Vinnie teased, the tilt of her head seeming to complement the rakish gap between her teeth. ‘Well, do yourself a favour, girl!’ She reached over, plucked the catalogue from between Susanna’s fingers and dropped it into the open top of the bag hanging from her shoulder. ‘Satisfaction guaranteed. That husband of yours’ll love you for it, too. Trust me.’

My husband’s already well acquainted with these products
, Susanna thought. Suddenly she wanted to tell Vinnie about what she’d found, how devastated she’d been, how she’d suppressed all the — but Vinnie, after giving her a big wink, had already moved on, and was beckoning Susanna to follow her up the wide wooden stairs.

‘Let’s go and inspect your new studio then, eh? You want a space to yourself, right, not shared? Right.’ Vinnie led the way through the warren of partitions on the second floor. Some studio doors were open, a few people calling out greetings as they went past. ‘Here you are.’ She opened a door and stood back, allowing Susanna to enter first. ‘If I may say, I do believe it will suit madam nicely. You don’t have to keep that ancient table if you don’t want it, obviously.’

Susanna put down the large black folio she’d been carrying. Except for the scarred and paint-spattered wooden table pushed up against one off-white wall, the space was bare bones. A single window faced south. ‘It’s perfect.’

‘Knew you’d say that,’ said Vinnie, leaning against the wall with a proprietorial smirk. ‘And now that we’ve lured you into a studio, I want you to come back to the life drawing classes too.’

‘I don’t know if I can manage both. This studio and classes.’

‘Susanna. I know this is a – a very weird, difficult time for you, but think about it. The classes are good; you like Rita. You
need
to draw. And you need to prepare work for that exhibition, yes?’

‘Yes.’ Susanna pressed her lips together.
Come on, you have to start somewhere. Vinnie’s the perfect —
She opened her mouth and the words seemed to jump out, eagerly. ‘Vinnie, I
have
been drawing. New stuff, completely new.’

‘You have?’ Vinnie straightened, alert as a gun dog at point. Her eyes lit on the black folio. ‘Show me.’

‘But they’re not life drawings,’ said Susanna. ‘I guess they’re —’ She was having trouble with the word ‘comics’, it seemed so undignified. ‘They’re more like — well, not graphic novels, more like graphic short stories. And they’re really rough, just cut and paste at this stage. What I plan on doing —’

Vinnie snapped her fingers impatiently, twice. ‘Okay, so they’re rough. Let’s see ’em.’

Susanna was still standing in front of the folio as though guarding it. ‘And I need to warn you: they’re awful. I mean, they’re of awful things. I don’t know —’

‘
Show
me!’

‘Here, then.’ She hoisted the folio on to the table.

Vinnie drew out the topmost sheet. Blinking, she dipped her head to peer at it more closely. ‘This is in … Bali?’

‘Yeah. Part of the dark side of Bali’s history,’ Susanna said. ‘Up until about a hundred years ago, when a prince or sultan died, the widows and concubines were expected to throw themselves onto the funeral pyre and be burnt to death.’

‘I had no idea.’ Vinnie, aghast, but riveted, hunched over the rows of black-and-white images, all of varying sizes, some captioned. A drawing in a circular frame was in the centre. She was looking, reading, for several minutes, shaking her head occasionally. ‘This is so – god, it’s like being an eyewitness. Were there photos?’

‘No. I read a description years ago, by a Dutch observer; he described these five young women walking one by one out along a kind of bridge above the funeral pyre and jumping in to the flames. He said they seemed to be in a kind of trance. I’d forgotten about it, but then just a couple of weeks ago I was thinking – I don’t know, about how Stella-Jean was nagging me to go back to Bali, and the bushfires, and how there’s … how there’s a dark side to everything.’

‘Boy oh boy. All the preparation: the dances, the girls making offerings. It’s … you know, it’s fascinating, but then you see what it’s all been leading up to and that’s
so
horrible.’

‘I know. I warned you.’

Vinnie took the next sheet out of the folio. ‘In a village in Guatemala …’ she read aloud, and then after a little while she gasped. ‘Oh!
God.
’

‘Again, something I read about years ago,’ Susanna said, amazed that she could talk about these things at last, and in such a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Just an ordinary Guatemalan peasant woman whose village was suspected of being used by guerillas. A gang of paramilitaries raped her two teenage daughters and then flayed them alive, in front of her.’

‘Oh
no
. How could anyone …’ Horrifed,Vinnie still examined the whole drawing, every frame. ‘Oh, and their lives were so … well, we can see what they were: hard, but beautiful, too. You show us that, as well as the – ugh. What those men did.’

‘I’ve never been able to get that story out of my mind. Well, that’s not really true: I put it
right
out of my mind, or at least I thought I had. For ages.’

Vinnie looked up from the drawing, directly into Susanna’s eyes. ‘How
is
it that human beings are capable of such cruelty?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. I think I understand some of the whys, but
how
– no. I can’t figure that out, at all.’

‘It’s so awful.’

‘You don’t have to look at any more of them,’Susanna said, moving toward the folio as though to remove it, but Vinnie fended her off.

‘No, I didn’t mean the drawings,’ she said, and took out another.

Susanna leaned across to see what it was. ‘Well, this is a different sort of awful. This happened right here, in Melbourne. A Japanese woman who’d been living here with her husband got in the car with her young son one morning and drove flat strap all the way along Station Pier and straight off the end. The people who saw her said she was screaming the whole way. And here, the car’s going down: you know how murky the bay is. They both drowned.’

‘Look at her, poor thing,’ Vinnie sighed, taking in the woman’s memories of childhood, then her foreign isolation, her husband’s long hours and coldness. ‘So
lonely
.’

‘And so ashamed. That’s what I figure: she was ashamed of having failed,’ Susanna said. ‘I know what that’s like. I’ve been feeling so ashamed myself, Vinnie.’

‘Ashamed? You? What on earth would
you
feel ashamed about?’

‘Lots of things,’ said Susanna heavily. ‘That I called my mother that night, that I didn’t know about her eye problems. That I —’
That I was such a fool about my marriage. That I’m too gutless to face my husband with the truth.
Susanna gestured at the densely covered sheets of paper. ‘I feel like the only thing I really know about is this. The way people’s lives can be destroyed in just a single, terrible instant. And then they’re gone.’

‘But
look
, Susanna,’ said Vinnie, who had been frowning intently as she listened. ‘Look at what you’ve been able to do. All these people may be gone, but at least they’re not forgotten. Because you’ve remembered them.’

Susanna went quite still. ‘How strange you should say that. That’s exactly what’s been going through my head every time I do these drawings. Like there’s a thousand little voices and they’re all saying, I was here, this is what happened.
Remember me.
’

‘Bearing witness,’ Vinnie said. ‘That’s what you’re doing. Bearing witness to other people’s suffering.’

She gets it
, Susanna realised, and a tremor of excitement rippled invisibly through her
.
She went over to the window and looked out; there was building work going on next door, men in hard hats, trucks, activity, but she wasn’t seeing any of that.
And if Vinnie gets it, maybe other people will too.
‘Bearing witness …’ She turned around. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what it feels like.’

‘So,’ said Vinnie, nodding. ‘This is your exhibition.’

‘You really think it could be?’ Susanna asked, facing her. ‘I’ve wondered if it isn’t just some ghastly form of – you know,’ she made air quotes, ‘
letting go of my pain
. Art as therapy. The bloody grief process everyone goes on about. Sorry. I don’t mean to sound bitter.’

‘You can sound bitter. Why the hell not? And so what if it
is
partly letting go, getting it out, self-therapy – so what? What do you think it should be, Susanna: pure art?’ Vinnie tossed her head impatiently, flipping her shaggy hair back from her face. ‘Pure art doesn’t exist.’

‘But Vinnie …’ Barbs of doubt pricked at Susanna again. ‘Can I really show this? I don’t know. It’s such awful stuff. No one needs to see this.’

Fiercely, Vinnie said, ‘I think
every
one needs to see this.’

TWENTY-NINE

‘Well, I want to see you doing some serious work on that arm over the weekend. I mean it, Seb!’ Still barking into the phone, Gerry motioned Marcus in to his office with an impatient wave. ‘Playing video games isn’t going to get you back into championship tennis.’ Pause. ‘All right then, I’ll see you tomorrow. And you better not have a bloody hangover!’

He slammed the phone down, hissing exasperatedly through his teeth.

‘Don’t tell me Seb’s finally turned into a normal teenager?’ said Marcus.

‘Get this. I ring him to find out why he hasn’t told me anything about this new doubles partner his coach has lined up, and you know what he says? “What’s the point?” What’s the fucking
point
?’ Gerry plucked a yellow highlighter from his desktop and arrowed it across the room. ‘And
then
he tells me he doesn’t want to keep going to this physio I busted my arse to get him to, the best in Victoria. Too rough! I told him, listen, son, no pain, no gain. And now he’s heading over to his girlfriend’s place with a bunch of mates to eat pizza and no doubt get shit-faced.’ A blue highlighter followed the yellow one.

‘Cut the kid some slack, Gez. The past month can’t have been a lot of fun for him.’

Gerry muttered to himself and looked out through the glass wall to the main part of the office. ‘Everyone’s cleared off, I see.’

‘What do you expect? It’s gone six o’clock on the Friday of a long weekend. Most places, the staff would’ve rostered off by midday. Or taken a sickie.’

‘Not these days. Not if they want to keep their jobs.’

Marcus widened his eyes at him, and hoisted a sixpack of Coopers Pale Ale in the air. ‘Come and have a beer out the back, Mr Cranky, it might improve your mood.’

Grumbling, Gerry followed his partner out to the small courtyard, where a tall lemon-scented gum planted in the centre made the inner-city air smell tangy and fresh. Marcus settled on the wide jarrah step. ‘So, fill me in,’ he said, handing a stubbie to Gerry, who’d sprawled on the wooden folding chair. ‘Better you get it off your chest now than take it home to Susanna.’

‘If Susanna
is
at home. And if she hears a word I say in any case, which is unlikely. I probably shouldn’t say this, but Susanna’s next best to a zombie these days.’

‘Zombie!’ Marcus clapped one hand to his forehead. ‘I hope you don’t say that to
her
.’

‘Course I don’t. But honestly, Marco, she spends all her time just sitting in Stella-Jean’s room wringing her hands, yet she knows no more about the kids’ medical issues – TBI, for instance, or brachial plexus injury – than she does about nuclear physics. I try and talk to her about test results or treatment options, and she just looks at me blankly.’

‘Maybe she’s depressed,’ suggested Marcus. He poked at a broken half-brick lying next to the step with the toe of his shoe. ‘Remember in
Six Feet Under
, the little Latino guy, what was his name? Rico, that’s right. Remember when Rico’s wife’s mother died, she went into this total depression? Just wanted to sit by her mum’s grave? And then she started self-medicating, because she was a nurse, and totally lost it, and they split up and —’

‘Whoa!’ Gerry held up his hand. ‘I get the picture. But
I
haven’t switched myself off, have I? She’s on leave from teaching, you know, but
I
haven’t stopped working.’

‘Yeah, I know. But it’s not your mother who got killed, is it?’

Gerry’s mouth was open, about to say something, then he closed it and stared off into the shaded corners of the courtyard. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Jean was a terrific woman. Somehow I keep forgetting how close Suze was to her.’

‘Yeah. Must be hard.’ The two of them drained their beers in thoughtful silence. ‘I don’t want to sound like a marriage counsellor, Gez, but what with everything else – have you been paying much attention to
her
?’ Marcus asked, handing him a fresh stubbie. ‘You know, one on one?’