The Brush-Off mw-1 Read online

  A cluster of glass-walled boxes, the last word in office design, occupied the whole top floor. At intervals, the layout was punctuated by small sky-lit enclosures, carpeted in white gravel, containing sculptural objects. Ministry management, slaving over a hot memo, needed only raise its jaded eye to find inspiration in an artful agglomeration of whitewashed driftwood or fluorescent space junk. The central registry, down the back beside the lunchroom, held a less encouraging sight-the latest in filing systems, securely locked.

  But the offices of the executive staff were wide open. Within half an hour I was sitting at the desk of the Deputy Director Programs, thumbing through an overstuffed file containing the recommendations of the Visual Arts Advisory Panel. Attached to Marcus Taylor’s application form was an envelope containing a set of colour slides and an assessment note from Peggy Wainright. She was the one, if memory served me right, in the kinte cloth headdress and Ubangi jewellery.

  I took the file back to the minister’s office and started reading. I’d got as far as lighting a cigarette when the phone rang. ‘What do you want first?’ It was Ken Sproule. ‘The forensics or the hysterics?’

  The coroner’s office, alert to the attention a death like this would draw, had been working overtime.

  ‘One of two things can happen when you drown,’ explained Sproule. ‘Either you take a great big gulp and fill your lungs with fluid. Or you thrash about sucking in air and fill your plumbing with froth and foam until you choke. This bloke did the first. He also had a blood alcohol content of. 35 per cent, which means he was pretty whacked when he hit the water. On the medical evidence, opinion is currently divided as to whether the death was accidental or intentional. It’s up to the coroner to decide. The balance of probabilities, however, tends to favour suicide, given the note found near the body.

  And so to the nub of the matter. ‘What’s it say?’

  ‘Nothing you might call brilliantly lucid. Lots of crossing out, spelling mistakes, abbreviations. But then the guy was a painter, after all. It’s a wonder he could read and write. But he had a chip on his shoulder about something, that’s for sure. Listen to this.

  ‘ You so-called experts of the art world,’ Sproule quoted. ‘You curators and bureaucrats who hold yourselves up as the arbiters and judges. You big-spending speculators and collectors who do not even know what you are buying. You are all allowing yourselves to be deceived and defrauded.

  ‘I take this action to arouse public attention to this pretence, perpetrated in the name of art. Those with their hands on the levers of power are the most corrupt of all.

  ‘You who have seen fit to dismiss my work yet do not recognise what is before your very eyes. Who is embarrassed now?’

  As I rapidly jotted this down, it was as though I could hear again the hysterical voice of the figure on the table at the Centre for Modern Art. And I could see, too, the hangdog look on his face as he passed me in Domain Road, trudging towards his death.

  ‘In short,’ concluded Sproule. ‘The immemorial whine of the failed artist. I dunno where those journos got their bullshit line about a protest against lack of funding. The stiff didn’t say anything about the government. Not so much as a whiff of swamp gas.’

  Back at the electorate office, I’d heard plenty worse from disaffected punters every day of the week. And none of them had killed themselves, even if they sometimes made me wish they would. ‘Anything else of interest turn up? Personal background, psychiatric history?’ Perhaps the artistic temperament was more fragile.

  ‘No criminal priors. Always the possibility he was a registered nutcase, I suppose,’ said Sproule, optimistically. ‘We won’t know for a few days yet. What about the grant application?’

  ‘You were right,’ I told him. ‘No reason for him to be feeling sorry for himself on our account. We gave him $2000 last November. Nothing more life-affirming than free money.’

  That about covered the political aspect, such as it was. Any journalist trying to claim that Marcus Taylor had a legitimate grievance against the government would be drawing a very long bow indeed. ‘The story will blow over in a couple of days,’ said Sproule. ‘If the press try to shift any shit our way in the meantime, we’ll be ready.’ On that up-beat note, he rang off.

  Sproule had come up with a pretty fair haul. Any other useful background would be in the grant assessment file in front of me.

  This is Taylor’s fifth application for a Creative Development Grant in the last five years, wrote the Visual Arts Executive Officer. He is a proficient draughtsman whose work is executed in a highly technically competent manner. There is, however, general critical agreement that it lacks originality and vision. Very derivative. Applicant has been unable to secure representation by any commercial gallery. Recommend reject application.

  Poor prick. It was enough to make anyone want to slash his wrists. According to the application form, he’d shown his work only a couple of times in the previous year, at group exhibitions in regional civic centres-only a short step away from hobby painter shows in shopping malls. DOB 1953, Katoomba, NSW. An unfinished fine arts diploma at Sydney Tech. Address: care of YMCA building. Although he claimed to be painting full-time, his principal source of income was cited as unemployment benefits. The grant was sought to pay for materials.

  Despite the executive officer’s negative recommendation, the panel had approved a small grant, less than a quarter of what Taylor had asked for. Reading between the lines, I detected a kiss-off, a few crumbs of conscience money to get rid of a nuisance. Either that, or Taylor knew someone on the panel prepared to go into bat for him. I flicked to the front of the file and read the membership list. There were only two names I recognised: Salina Fleet and Lloyd Eastlake. Salina, presumably, had persuaded her fellow panel members that her boyfriend’s talent was worth throwing a small bone at.

  A sad story but a closed book. When I met Agnelli in two hours, I’d be able to advise him that Taylor’s potential nuisance value was negligible.

  Tossing the file back where it belonged, I shut the office door behind me and headed down three floors to the carpark. Now that I knew a little more about Marcus Taylor, I found myself increasingly sympathetic to the poor bugger. The man was obviously a social misfit. Spurned by the critics, ignored by buyers, barely qualifying for an official handout, snubbed by a gallery full of art-lovers, dumped by his girlfriend. Talk about suffering for your art. The only thing missing was the garret.

  Or was it? The address he gave on his grant application was the YMCA, the ruin next door, so close it would’ve been cheaper to hand-deliver the letter than pay the postage. And certainly faster. But the YMCA had been derelict for years, slated for demolition as part of the Arts City development. Surely he wasn’t living there? Shit, I could just see it: Drowned Artist Squatted in Shadow of Lavish Arts Bureaucracy.

  I rode the lift to street level, walked through the parked cars, turned left and looked up. In its heyday, the Y must have been an impressive pile. Seven storeys tall, V-shaped, city views. But the tide had long since gone out, and now it had nothing to look forward to this side of demolition. Peeling grey paint and a hundred grimy windows. But apparently still in use. Although the street-level doors were bricked up, a set of stairs led to a first-floor entrance, a heavy door painted with the Ministry for the Arts logo: a pair of tragicomic masks surmounted by dancing semi-quavers above a crossed pen and paintbrush.

  The door was locked. As I turned away, it abruptly swung open and a hunched spine backed out. It belonged to a spotty youth with an armload of music stands. He propped the door open with the stands, went back in, re-emerged with a violin case in each hand. ‘Do you mind?’ He held the cases out from his sides and nodded at the music stands. I tucked them up under his armpits, holding the door open with my shoulder. ‘If you’re looking for Environmental,’ he said, pleased to be the bearer of bad news. ‘They’ve already left.’

  ‘I’m looking for someone who lives here,’ I said.

  He gave me
a queer look. ‘Bit late for that. Nobody’s lived here for years. It’s cheap storage now. Rehearsal rooms. Office space for low-budget arts organisations. Artist studios.’ He stood there, waiting for me to close the door.

  ‘I might just look about, then,’ I said.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t allow that,’ he said pompously. ‘Tenant access only at the weekend.’

  What was he going to do? Deck me with a Stradivarius?

  ‘Won’t be long.’ I stepped sideways into the building and the door swung shut behind me.

  An ill-lit vestibule faced an ancient cage-type elevator, its oily cables caked with grime. Exhausted linoleum covered the floor. Stairs ran up and down on either side of the lift and a poky corridor extended back into the building, punctuated by doors at regular intervals. The whole place had been painted with mushroom soup at the time of the Wall Street Crash and not swept since the Fall of Singapore. About twenty tenants were listed on a directory board, the names spelled out in movable letters, subject to availability. Th* Orph*us Ch*ir, J*llyw*gs The*tre*n Educ*tion Tr*up*, Comm*nity Ar*s *nform*tion*esource*ntre, Let’s D*nce Victor, Environ Men*l Puppets, Ac*ss Stud*os.

  This last item, third floor, struck me as the best prospect. The elevator seemed a bit iffy, so I took the stairs. The third-floor corridor was a dingy passage indistinguishable from those on the floors below, a receding horizon of peeling lino and numbered doors with smoked-glass panels. I started knocking, raising an echo but nothing else. The whole building had a forsaken air. ‘Hello,’ I called, tentative at first, then hiking up the volume. My voice came back at me, unanswered. I’d worked my way nearly the full length of the corridor, knocking and trying door handles, before one of them gave.

  What I found could not have looked more like an artist’s studio if the Art Directors’ Guild had whipped it up for a production of La Boheme. Every inch of the place was crammed with canvases, crinkled tubes of paint, jars of used brushes, step- ladders, casually discarded sketches, stubs of charcoal. Paint spills Jackson Pollock would have been proud of lay thick on the floor. Mounted on an easel in the centre of the room was an example of the resident artist’s work.

  The subject was the quintessential suburban dream home of the nineteen fifties. Cream brick-veneer, red tile roof, green front lawn, cloudless sky. The style was photo-realist, hyper-realist, super-realist, whatever they call it. An exact rendering, anyway. Sharply vivid. Perfect in every detail, a real-estate agent’s vision splendid. Crowning this ideal, a lovely finishing touch, was a lawn-mower, a spanking new Victa two-stroke, sitting in the middle of the lawn. Although its topic was utterly banal, the picture was oddly disturbing, as though this commonplace scene contained within it a secret of some deep malevolence.

  But I wasn’t there to immerse myself in art. I tore myself away and continued my search. Half-concealed behind a heavy curtain was a hole in the wall, a short cut into the adjacent room. This was furnished as living quarters, rough but not entirely squalid. There was a small enamel sink, a trestle table with a gas camping-stove, a microwave oven and a rack of op-shop crockery. A futon on a slatted wooden base. A vinyl-covered club armchair. A brick-and-board bookcase filled with large-format colour-plate art books, filed by artist, Australians mainly. Brack, Boyd, Nolan, Pugh, Williams. Empty bottles, six wine, two vodka. An overfilled garbage bag, a little on the nose in the heat. At the window, a metal two-drawer desk and typist’s chair. Home sweet home. But whose?

  Moving quickly now, feeling like a burglar, I crossed to the desk. It was covered with loose sheets of doodled-on tracing paper, drafting pens, erasers, crayons, chinagraph pencils, note pads. Nothing to indicate the occupant’s name.

  I slid open the top drawer. A bulldog clip of receipts from Dean’s Artist Supplies. An art materials price-list. Envelopes containing colour transparencies of artworks, pictures of pictures, each labelled with a name. Familiar names from the bookcase. Beneath this clutter, held together by a paperclip, were three photographs. The first was old, the print dog-eared, square, black-and-white, a Box Brownie snap. A pretty teenager, full-faced, her hair permed for home defence. The next was also black-and-white, but glossier, a fifties feel. A man and a woman standing at a scenic lookout, a row of mountain peaks arrayed along the horizon behind them. The Twelve Apostles, the Seven Sisters, the Three Musketeers, somewhere famous. It was the same woman, now a twenty-year-old sophisticate in twin-set and pleated skirt, the man in baggy trousers and a beret. The pair of them relaxed, joky, hamming it up for the camera. Lovers. I had no idea who they were.

  The last print was colour, curved corners. A young man with shoulder-length hair and wire-rimmed glasses standing in a row of corn, hoe in hand, bare to the waist, the original ninety-pound weakling. Beside him, leaning on a fork, an older man, barrel-chested, high-scalped. The face unshaven, bags under the eyes, but the same comic tufts above the ears, the same brazen stare as I had seen on Fiona Lambert’s mantelpiece. Victor Szabo.

  The hippy could have been Marcus Taylor. He had the same elongated face, the same feral intensity. It could have been anyone. I held the photo motionless, observing from a great height, staring down like a bird floating on a thermal, waiting for something to reveal itself.

  Nothing did. I was asleep on my feet, miserably hungover. I opened the second drawer, working quickly, feeling furtive. A stamp album, most pages still empty. The few stamps it held were all Australian, low denominations. All bore the Bicentenary logo of 1988. Last year’s issues. Hand-written annotations in tiny print. Whoever lived here was no great philatelist. A new hobby, perhaps, the interest unsustained. Wedged into the back of the album was a bank passbook. I slipped it out of its plastic cover, flipped it open and read the name.

  Marcus Taylor. Bingo.

  The dead have no privacy. I thumbed blank pages, looking for a balance. Thunk. Whirr. Somebody had started the elevator. It shuddered and lurched upwards, the sound magnified in the deserted building.

  Startled by the sudden noise, I dropped the bankbook. It fell down the gap between the desk and the wall. I began to go down on my knees to retrieve it until it occurred to me that this was probably the police, come to examine the deceased’s effects. I felt like a tomb robber. Not that I was doing anything wrong. It’s just that I would have been hard put to explain exactly what I was doing. It was, I rapidly concluded, one of those situations where discretion was the better part of anything else you might care to mention.

  Dumping the rest of the stuff back into the drawer, I stepped out the door. Down the hallway, the lift groaned and shuddered to a halt, a vague shape behind the grille. Immediately in front of me, a rubbish bin propped open a door marked Fire Escape. The layout of the building suggested these stairs opened onto the adjoining lane. I took them two at a time, scattering litter.

  Three flights down, where the street exit should have been, the wall had been bricked up. Half a flight further, they ended at a large door. Environ Mental Puppet Company, it said. Beyond, a broad corridor lined with age-speckled white tiles extended towards the vague glow of daylight.

  I pressed on, and had taken perhaps a dozen steps when a sudden draft of air stirred the grime at my feet. A pneumatic woomph sounded in my ears. I swung around just in time to see the door slam shut behind me. It was some sort of fire door, steel, fitting snugly into a metal frame. There was no handle on my side.

  ‘Hey,’ I shouted, and banged the palms of my hands against the flat metal plate. ‘Hey.’ There was no answer.

  I balled my fist and banged again. The heavy steel reverberated with a dull echo, but there was still no answer. Either a draught in the stairwell had slammed the door shut or somebody was playing funny buggers. If I wanted out of this dump, I’d have to find another way.

  Giving the door one last futile kick, I turned and headed along the corridor. Its white-tiled walls, even in their grimy state, reminded me of a hospital or a science laboratory, a place of bodily messes and antiseptic solutions. Even the air seemed to have a fain
tly pervasive chemical odour, as fusty as the cracked porcelain of the tiles. I soon discovered why.

  The wide passageway opened abruptly into a cavernous basement, also lined with decrepit white tiles. Sunlight, struggling through a row of frosted windows high up in one wall, illuminated the room with its pallid wash. Occupying almost the entire space was a gigantic cement pit.

  Great scabs of peeling green paint clung to its walls like clumps of dried lichen. Overlapping the edge of the huge trough, at the far end of the room, was a tangle of corroded pipes. Attached to the decaying metalwork was a sign. DANGER, it said. NO DIVING. POOL CLOSED. Lying on the bottom of the empty swimming pool, right in the middle, was a body.

  Numerous bodies, actually. But the one that grabbed my attention was the whale. It was life-sized, aqua blue and made of fibreglass. Scattered around it was a pod of papiermache dolphins, several dozen polystyrene starfish mounted on bamboo poles, innumerable cardboard scallop shells, piles of flags and pendants embroidered with sea-horses, and a pair of hammerhead sharks made of lycra and chicken wire.

  But none of these were as compelling as the whale. Painted across its deep-sea dial was an idiotic anthropomorphic grin. I was buggered if I could figure out why it was smiling, though. It was high and dry, and so was I.

  The only other exit was a roller door, big enough for a truck and battened down with more locksmithery than Alcatraz. Through the narrow gap at the bottom, I could just make out the surface of a laneway. Blasts of hot air were already rising from the asphalt. I rattled the roller a few times and gave a yell, but there was nobody outside to hear.

  Next door was a long-disused changing room with vandalised lockers and ancient urinals full of desiccated deodorant balls. I tore a length of iron pipe from the wall of a shower recess. When I bashed it against the fire door, it produced considerably more noise than anything I’d been able to raise with my bare hands. Loud enough to make the blood in my temples throb and showers of sparks shoot into my eyes. But not loud enough, apparently, to be heard by anyone else in the building. I bashed away for a fair while, but all I got was a tired arm and an even more aggravated headache. The door was thicker than a Colleen McCullough novel. I could have banged away all day and not got a result.