Watercolours (4 page)

He glanced towards the doorway. There was no sign of them yet. He shuffled Novi's work into a manila folder and on top of the folder he put his notebook and a pen, making a tidy pile in front of him. He added his stapler to the pile. He decided to put the whole lot away, to have the desk completely clear when the Lepidos walked in, to demonstrate how organised he was. He sat and waited, eyes ahead, arms resting casually on the empty surface. After a few seconds he felt stupid sitting like that with nothing in front of him so he tugged open the drawer, grabbed the notebook and folder and placed them on the desktop again.

God, his palms were damp. He dried them on the front of his cargo shorts and noticed a streak of jam — it must have been from that cake before! He tried to remove the jam with his finger, smearing it. He licked his finger and rubbed frantically but the stain only nestled deeper into the tan fabric, determined in its raspberry-red way to stay right where it was.

They were late. Twin trickles of sweat ran from his armpits down to his waistband. He looked out the front again but all he could see was Pete, the caretaker, setting up a sprinkler on a garden bed. The sprinkler began to hiss, and listening to it Dom imagined how good it would feel to run out into the spray. In the suburbs where he'd grown up, the backyard sprinkler was the only relief in summer and he remembered fondly the fun of running about on the lawn, trying halfheartedly to dodge the cold water flung out in perfect patterns in the sunshine. Through the window he watched mist rising from the thirsty shrubs and sank back into his chair with a sigh.

Where the hell were they?

Sweat was pouring off him now. He jumped up and turned on the ceiling fans. They wobbled and clicked alarmingly but the moving air felt better. He noticed some posters had come loose in the heat and he pressed their corners back:
Birds of Australia
,
Dangerous Snakes
,
An Estuary
. Further along and covering half the wall were the results of the kids' art class last week. Camille took that class, Dom remembered suddenly; she ran the library and took the kids for art as well. Camille was clever. He wondered what she would have thought of Novi's timeline.

Grouped together, the children's paintings created a giant montage of garish colour and wild, wobbly figures. Dom hadn't had a chance to look at them all closely; now he took the
time, smoothing down stray edges as he went.
My Favourite Place
was the theme Camille had set and he saw that the river was a popular subject. Stick-figure families had been painted around barbecues with blobby dogs stealing strings of sausages as people canoed on the water. There were beach pictures, too, with kids surfing impossibly big waves. One group of girls had agreed
My Room
was their favourite place, with titles done carefully and illustrations showing themselves lounging on pink bedspreads, writing in diaries and surrounded by posters. He scanned the names: Kate, Nicole, Sharon, Rachael. They could be so serious, so intent on growing up! Just the other day he'd said to them, ‘Enjoy your childhood, girls, be free! Don't get caught up in all the adult stuff yet!' His outburst had been received by a row of perfect eyebrows arched in withering contempt and it had scared him off giving them any more advice. Dom shook his head and sighed. Girls were just so different from boys.

Moving along the wall he came to Novi's painting. He stared, his eyes widening. It was the best painting he'd ever seen done by a child: a boat, drawn from below where the water would be. There was a strip of yellow sky at the top and the boat was sitting half in shadow, half in sun — Novi had used purple and orange to highlight the difference, with each curved plank of timber overlapping the next in a beautiful pattern. But most striking of all was the bare-breasted mermaid carved into the prow. That mermaid was quite something.

Dom pulled the page from the wall with a sense of dread. How had he managed to miss a pair of boobs on his classroom wall, wooden though they were? But it wasn't just that. Dom studied the other paintings in front of him, trying to figure out why
Novi's was unique. The people and objects in the others seemed flat and distant, as though floating in space, whereas Novi's picture was full and detailed and almost three dimensional. The colours were exhilarating.

He sank onto a table and clasped his hands on top of his head in dismay. The room was spinning around him like a hurricane. Novi was talented. More than that — the kid was some kind of artistic prodigy, and not only had Dom failed to realise it, he didn't know the first thing about art. He hadn't taken it at high school — he was hopeless at drawing! Absently, he rubbed at the raspberry streak on his thigh and felt his heart collapse.

A kid like Novi was way beyond his experience. Any second now his parents would come charging through the door and he would have to come clean. If they questioned his capabilities as a teacher he would have to be honest. He would have to agree with them.

 

When Mira Lepido finally stepped into the classroom, Dom couldn't help staring. It was the mermaid, dressed, but with the same buxom figure and luxuriant black curls. She walked straight up to him and thrust out a small, sun-browned hand.

‘Hello, I'm Mira, Novi's mother.'

‘Dom Best.'

They shook, Mira seeming to Dom several inches taller than she actually was, her chin lifted in defiance, her dark eyes scrutinising him. Her husband came in a few steps behind her, a stocky man with thick glasses that made his eyes look huge and moist, and introduced himself as George. He had an almost apologetic look about him and in his hand was a roll of papers fastened with an elastic band.

Mira continued to size up Dom openly. After a few seconds the hostility in her eyes faded a bit. ‘My God, you're just a baby!'

Dom laughed in embarrassment. He searched for a diversion. ‘Sorry it's so hot in here.' He swiped at a drip on his temple. If only he'd stop sweating! It was making him even more selfconscious.

‘El Niño Southern Oscillation,' George nodded. ‘Moves in a seven-year cycle, or thereabouts. We're bound to get some rain soon. Flood, no doubt.' He tilted his head towards his wife. ‘Don't worry, Mira's a mad sweater, too. Italian background.'

‘It's healthy to sweat,' she said with a shrug. ‘Eliminates toxins. Let it out if it has to come out, I say!'

Dom was silent. Bodily fluids seemed too intimate a subject to be broaching so early in the piece. There was an awkward pause.

‘Let's sit down, shall we?' Dom suggested at last, leading them to a group of student tables. They each took a seat, perching on the too-small plastic chairs at odd angles to accommodate their knees. Remembering Novi's work, Dom jumped up, grabbed the folder from his desk and sat down again, sweating more than ever. The Lepidos watched as he arranged himself. Dom took a deep breath in and out.

Earlier, he'd decided to wait for them to speak first, but now he found himself blurting out a sort of apology. ‘Listen, I think I know what you want to see me about. And I just want to say I feel bad about what happened with Novi's timeline. I'm new at this job … and I actually didn't think anything was wrong with it. But because of the complaint the school had to do something. People can be sensitive … they don't like dead people, well, not in the classroom … I mean, you can show convicts getting the lash and everything and when we look at bushrangers a bit later
we do talk about them being hanged and shot and stuff, but some people don't like seeing pictures of dead Aboriginals … I mean, nobody does …'

What the hell was he saying? He was just digging himself in deeper with this pathetic rambling. Then, to his horror, he saw tears welling up in Mira's eyes.
Oh, Christ. She's crying!

‘I'm sorry,' she said with a sniff, straightening her shoulders. ‘But I still don't think my son should have been punished for drawing the facts.'

‘He wasn't punished!' Dom insisted. But it didn't feel true.

George put an arm around his wife. ‘You know there really was a massacre at Riley Creek?'

Dom nodded. ‘I know. Terrible.'

‘People would rather forget.'

‘It would seem so.'

Mira flicked her tears away fiercely. She looked Dom square in the eye and he shrank back a little.

‘This is Novi, okay?' she said to him. ‘He notices everything and he draws it. And we encourage him. He's always been like this, ever since he was little. He's bright.'

‘And he's obviously very creative,' Dom added.

Mira paused. She sat back a little. ‘He is. But he's too introspective — maybe because he's an only child?' She turned to George for help.

His hands made a rasping sound as he rubbed them together in consideration. ‘Well, he's never been that interested in sport or joining a team. He's not the competitive type.'

She nodded. ‘But he's fantastic at occupying himself. Mostly drawing and painting. Reading, too, and collecting. He's an industrious soul. He gets it from his dad.' Here she gave George's
knee a tender pat and he studied his hands bashfully, picking at a nail that was blunt and stained.

‘We brought these in for you to look at so you'd have a bit of background.' She reached for the roll of paper and removed the elastic band. George helped her to spread the sheets over the table and when the fans began blowing them about he got out of his chair to turn them down.

Slowly Dom picked up a picture. He set it down and picked up another. He spent several minutes doing this in silence. And in the blistering air of the classroom, under the red-hot gaze of two concerned parents, he felt a thrilling shiver shoot up his spine.

The pictures were incredible. Often it was a single object Novi had drawn: a leaf with a cluster of gumnuts, a lizard, an ants' nest, but there were landscapes, too, and complex scenes from around town of people shopping at the supermarket or in the newsagency, stepping over the dog in the doorway — a German shepherd it was, Dom could tell. Just as in the painting he'd removed from the classroom wall, Novi had filled each picture with bold colour, oranges and purples and greens in unlikely places. Dom studied the skies in a couple of landscapes that at first glance seemed psychedelic. But he'd spent three weeks now gazing from his balcony over the Lewis in that long stretch before nightfall; he'd seen the sky that very shade of orange at sunset, watched it turn to violet and then deep gold when a kind of chlorophyll tinge rose and fell along the horizon in the final moments before darkness came. To see this captured on paper, to feel a connection to it, gave Dom a rush of excitement.

‘How long has he been drawing like this?'

‘Oh, a long time.' George pushed his glasses back up his nose with a squint as he tried to recall. ‘He was drawing long before he was talking, always clutching a crayon or a pencil. He didn't talk until quite late. He was three, wasn't he, Mira? Then the first thing he came out with was, “Dad, it's raining, you better bring the washing in!”'

Mira's face lit up. ‘I let him draw wherever he wanted, even on the walls! He's always been so expressive.'

She pulled out a tight little drawing of a cat done in lead pencil in the bottom corner of a page. ‘That's Varmint. Novi was very young when he did this.'

Dom admired it. It wasn't much more than a patch of hard scribble and yet there was the cat sitting with one leg in the air as though caught in the act of cleaning its belly. It was looking up, irritated at being disturbed. Dom couldn't say how it was that the cat looked annoyed, but it did. Maybe it was something in the little grey eyebrows.

He looked through all the drawings, not wanting to miss a single one. Something strange was happening to his eyes, they were burning, quivering. Embarrassed, he had to wipe them hard with his palms so he could see clearly and he went through the pictures again, this time noticing how often Mira appeared in them. Sometimes she was the main feature standing under a tree or bent over digging in the garden; sometimes she was just a flash of bright clothing in the background.

‘Wow,' Dom breathed at last. He could think of no other response. After a moment he remembered Novi's picture of the boat. He pulled it out of the folder. George took up the page and peered at it through his glasses.

‘Ah yes, the
Bella Mira
. I'll finish her this year.'

Dom sat back in his chair. ‘You're building a boat?'

‘Worked on a few over the years. This one's going to be a beauty. We're sailing her to Papua New Guinea.'

‘Really?'

‘Yams, Dom! There's a fortune to be made in wild yams!'

Dom smiled as if this made perfect sense. He glanced at Mira. She was watching him closely.

‘Novi's sensitive,' she said in a soft voice. ‘I worry about him sometimes. He can misinterpret things. My father, for instance — he drowned in the river when Novi was five. They were very close. And now he won't swim in the river, he
refuses
to, even after all this time. He can be so stubborn! Like with his drawing. Ever since school started back I've been finding it impossible to get him to do his jobs around the house and his homework. Except that timeline, of course!'

She smiled and Dom was relieved to feel some of the tension between them ease. Then she threw her hands up.

‘All he wants to do is draw!'

With her head cocked, she searched his face. George's eyes were on him, too, large and moist and anxious. Dom realised they were looking to him for some kind of answer and he felt honoured, but baffled. What could he tell them? All he knew was that he wanted to see every picture Novi Lepido had ever done and more. Lots more.

‘Look,' he began, resisting the urge to gush, ‘clearly Novi's talented.'

It felt a ridiculously obvious statement, but George and Mira nodded gravely as though this knowledge was a heavy weight. They sat motionless and waited.