Listening to Mondrian Read online

  NADIA WHEATLEY began writing full-time in 1976, after completing postgraduate work in Australian history. Her published work includes fiction, history, biography and picture books. She writes for adults as well as children and young adults.

  Nadia Wheatley’s books have won many awards, including the New South Wales Premier’s Children’s Book Prize (1983 and 1986), the Children’s Book of the Year for Younger Readers (1988), the Age Book of the Year (Non-fiction) for 2001 and the New South Wales Premier’s History Award (Australian History) for 2002. Among her best-known titles are My Place, Five Times Dizzy and The House That Was Eureka. The Night Tolkien Died, from which six of the stories in the present collection have been taken, was an Honour Book in the 1995 CBCA awards.

  What critics said about The Night Tolkien Died:

  ‘These terrific, compressed, passionate, frank stories announce themselves as being about serious adolescence, about ideas, emotions, experiences, relationships, and not just for young people … the insights are for adults too.’ Pam Macintyre, The Age

  ‘Each sophisticated self-contained story [is] a miniature novel in itself, a miracle of compression that expands in the mind for a long time after the initial reading.’ Katharine England, Adelaide Advertiser

  LISTENING TO

  MONDRIAN

  NADIA WHEATLEY

  This collection first published in 2006

  Six of the stories in this collection were previously published in The Night Tolkien Died.

  Copyright © Nadia Wheatley 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander St

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Wheatley, Nadia, 1949–.

  Listening to Mondrian and other stories.

  For teenagers.

  ISBN 1 74114 875 8.

  I. Title A.823.3

  Cover and text design by Pigs Might Fly

  Set in 11.5/17.5 pt Berkeley Book by Midland Typesetters, Australia.

  Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group, Australia

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Teachers’ notes available from www.allenandunwin.com

  CONTENTS

  LISTENING TO MONDRIAN

  THE BLAST FURNACE

  LEADLIGHT

  THE CONVICT BOX

  PASTORAL

  MUM’S DATE

  ALIEN

  LAND/SCAPE

  LISTENING TO

  MONDRIAN

  Call me Jo.

  That’s not my name. But it sure makes our father wild.

  Jonathan. That’s what he calls me. ‘Meet my son Jonathan.’ Never Jon or Jonnie or Jonno. Even when I was a really little kid it was always the full bit, and of course never any of those affectionate nicknames (Sonny-Jim, Kiddo, Buster, Bugalugs) that fathers call their sons.

  Maybe that’s why I’ve always had lots of different names for people. For instance, Gemma is Gem and Gemstone and Gemfish and Fishface and even Little Fishter and of course Sis and Bub and Bud and sometimes really weird things like Murgatroyd and Captain Starlight and Mr Palfreyman.

  And he is Dad when I address him in public (said in the deep manly voice that he likes) and Daddy when Gem speaks to him (said in the high girly voice that he likes). But he is the Pater (isn’t that word great? I found it in a snobby English school story) when he comes to get me from school and has a pompous little chat with the Reverend Doctor Principal about ‘the lad’s future’. And he is Papa when he is strolling along the boulevardes with a Maurice Chevalier air. And he is Father when he presides at the dining table. And he is also Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Genghis Khan, and Phalaris the tyrant of Agracas. (That’s the guy who used to put his victims inside the bronze cast of a bull and then roast them alive over a low fire. The gory bits of Ancient History are my best subject.)

  As for my poor bloody mother, once upon a time she was Mummy, but he thought it was sissy for me to call her that, so then she was Mum. She was never Mother (that was part of the problem) and neither was she Mademoiselle of the Boulevardes (though he had plenty of substitutes; that was part of the problem too). She was the Boss’s Wife for a while, when he brought visiting execs home for dinner, but she was too shy for that – just a simple country girl and a plain cook as well – and so she became Old Mother Macreadie, with her hair in a scarf and gin bottle at hand. It wasn’t long before she was Mad Mrs Rochester (you know, the loony wife in Jane Eyre who is kept locked up and secret in the attic; in Mum’s case it’s an expensive clinic in Switzerland, but it amounts to the same thing).

  And me – well, I am Jon to the younger teachers, Frazier to the older ones, and to my mates I am Fraz or Frazzles or Speedy Gonzales (I’m one of the wingers in the First XV). To my enemies, on the other hand, I guess I’m all sorts of names, though I haven’t got to hear them since the day when I was in Year 9 and one of the prefects said something about alkie mothers and I decked him. He was in the sick bay for a week.

  But the nicest thing I am is Jo. That’s what Gemfish calls me. In the Good Old Days, Mum used to read to her at night, and one of the books had this poem that goes:

  Jonathan Jo

  Has a mouth like an ‘O’

  And a wheelbarrow full of surprises . . .

  Sis picked up on it, I think partly because she had trouble with her ‘th’ sounds, and if she said ‘Jonafon’ Father would make her sit at the dinner table or even in the bath saying ‘Th-th-th-th thing, thong, Jonathan!’ Poor kid got so demented about it that she would take a deep breath and make an explosive ‘th’ sound on all the wrong words too. So she said ‘that’ as the opposite to ‘thin’ and on ‘Thridays we had ‘thish and chips’ and one day she told me to ‘Thuck oth!’ All in all, Jo was easier.

  But besides that, I guess when she was a little kid (she’s only nine now, so I mean when she was really little) and we lived together, I guess I maybe did seem full of surprises to her. Like the day when I said ‘Open your mouth’ and I squirted the soda water siphon down her gullet. Or the day when I told her that if you eat a handful of little red birdseye chillies you go invisible. To be fair to me, though, there were sometimes nice surprises too, such as doubling her on my bike to the beach and teaching her to be safe in the water. (‘Just to the first line of little breakers, and always keep your eyes on the flags, Gem!’) Or making a fort for her to hide in or showing her how to burn dead paspalum stalks with a magnifying glass. Or holding her when Mum was taken away.

  These days, of course, I don’t see Bub much. We board at different schools, and in the holidays she goes to old Auntie Roo’s and I’m sent to Tennis Camp and Maths Camp and Computer Camp et cetera. So we only get to meet on days like today, when the Great White Chief jets in from overseas, arrives unexpectedly at our schools and takes us out of class and off to the museum or the gallery, then (always) the Royal Sydney Golf Club Dining Room for lunch, a stroll (he calls it ‘a post-prandial consti
tutional’) around Centennial Park, and back to the lock-up in time for him to jet out again on the peak-hour super-shuttle to Wall Street or wherever.

  Last time (five months ago) it was the museum, so today it’s the gallery.

  ‘I thought I’d take them to see the Guggenheim,’ the Pater told the Reverend Doctor Prickhead this morning when I was pulled out of first period maths. (Hurray for that at least!)

  ‘The Guggenheim?’ I said. ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ Joke. I mean, I do know that the Guggenheim is a gallery in the Big Apple, and that they’ve got the pest exterminators in or something at the moment, so they’ve sent a collection out to Sydney so us yokel Down-underers can get to see a real live Picasso at first hand. So I do know that the Guggenheim’s home is in New York City, and it’s not at home now, and – oh, forget it.

  ‘Lack of general knowledge,’ my father complained. ‘This is precisely what I was speaking about.’ (When I’d come into the room I’d heard him objecting to the latest hike in the school fees.)

  The Reverend Doctor Browntongue squirmed. ‘However, I believe his mathematics is picking up. What was it you got in the yearly exams, boy?’

  ‘Nineteen.’

  ‘Out of a hundred?’ An explosion was starting, but good old Gemfish (Dad had picked her up first) put on one of her cute-as-a-button acts.

  ‘Oh come on, Daddy, you said you were taking me to see the pretty pictures, you promised . . .’

  Don’t overdo it, Shirley Temple, I thought, but it actually worked. (Owe you one, Gem!)

  So here we are.

  Standing at the cash register while our father has an argument about my age (I’m just seventeen but can pass for eighteen in a pub).

  ‘He is only fifteen,’ Dad argues, although whether because he’s forgotten or because he’s scared the child concession limit might be sixteen, I don’t know. (The thing I should explain here is that our father is mean as catshit. In order to get rid of us he’ll pay for expensive boarding schools and tennis camps and crap, but when we go out for lunch we’re allowed the main course and either an entrée or a dessert but never both. And I have seen him bend down and pick up a five-cent coin that someone has dropped on the footpath. Truly. Despite the fact that he is some sort of big wheel money-mover who zots trillions around the international Monopoly Board via the Net.)

  ‘Can’t you see he’s in school uniform, woman?’ he demands.

  The cash register lady peers at my blazer, to make sure. The badge on the breast pocket is pretty faded and the tie could be any boring Old School Tie. Meanwhile the queue behind us is stacked back to the dunnies and beyond.

  ‘Oh all right! One adult, two kiddies!’ She zings the amount up on the till.

  But our father isn’t finished. This is an Educational Experience, you understand, not bloody Bush Week, so we are all to have these personal cassette players you can hire for five dollars with a tape inside that tells you how to look at the pictures.

  We get our players, and the lady adds fifteen dollars to the bill, but now Dad realises that it’s possible to double up two sets of headphones and save a couple of bucks. So Murgatroyd’s player is taken from her, and she is made to plug into mine, and the bill is finally agreed upon and our father flips his gold American Express card out of his wallet in his inside breast pocket (the queue groans) and he signs with a flourish and finally we are off: Dad way out in front like the Lord of the Manor, and Sis and me attached through the cassette player like a couple of Siamese twins.

  ‘Me and my shadow . . .’ I start softly singing to her as the tape plays a short burst of trumpet music. (‘Welcome,’ says a voice, ‘to Cubism, Abstraction, Surrealism and Expressionism . . .’)

  ‘Shut up,’ Bub complains. ‘It’s not funny!

  ’ And I have to agree that while it isn’t funny for me to be trailing along in public with a plump little nine-year-old with pigtails and thick specs and her school socks fallen down round her ankles, it’s even less funny for her because her legs are half the length of mine and she has to do two steps and a skip to my one stride.

  ‘Slow down, Jo!’

  So I do, and that’s how we lose him by the end of STOP NUMBER 1: Pablo Picasso, Carafe, Jug and Fruit Bowl 1909.

  I look up, and the Rat has left the sinking ship.

  ‘When you are ready, go through the archway,’ the recorded voice tells us. It goes on to explain that there is a little jingle in between each STOP, and when you hear that you have to turn the tape off and proceed to the next numbered picture stop. It’s all a bit like musical chairs.

  We don’t have to look at anything in Room 2, which is good because I can already see (just around the corner in Room 3) something that is blowing my mind. It turns out to be STOP NUMBER 2: four pictures by some painter called Robert Delaunay.

  This guy’s really cool.

  First there’s a painting of spooky arches that recede from each other, like a trick mirror that lets you see yourself going on for ever and ever and ever. You could lose yourself down that corridor, no risk. (Maybe that’s where our Fearless Leader has got to. Very funny, Jo.)

  Then there’s a skewiff picture of The City 1911. Next there’s something called Eiffel Tower 1911. Somehow the building is tilted so it seems to be floating above the city, among all these white and yellow clouds, and the other buildings around it sort of bend, like saplings in a wind. And next to that there’s a painting of a smaller, red Eiffel Tower (the first one was pink).

  In all these pictures, it looks as if the buildings are collapsing into each other. That makes it sound as if there’s been a bomb or something, but it’s not violent like that. It’s as if the turning of the earth is something that you can really feel, shifting you around in the gentlest of circles. And it’s like . . . you know when you’re about to go to sleep – you’re almost dreaming – then suddenly you feel yourself drop about 200 metres through sheer space? And it’s scary, but also exciting, and somehow a bit sexy too at the same time?

  That’s what Delaunay’s city was like.

  But speaking of dreams, I guess talking about pictures is about as thrilling as when some guy at breakfast reckons ‘You’d never guess what I dreamed last night!’ And you all go, ‘Oh no, you weren’t stuck in a lift with Madonna again, were you? Pass the cornflakes, someone please.’

  So suffice it to say (as the Reverend Doctor says: ‘Suffice it to say that the name of the boy who was smoking in the box room at 7.27 p.m. on Sunday is not unknown to me . . .’) suffice it to say that we listen to:

  STOP NUMBER 3: Statue of Adam and Eve by Brancusi. (Gem giggles: it’s like huge wooden boobs and balls sitting on top of a giant corkscrew.)

  STOP NUMBER 4: Marc Chagall, Paris Through the Window 1913. (Gem likes this: there’s an upside-down train and a cat with a lady’s face.)

  STOP NUMBER 5: Nude 1917 and Jeanne Hébuterne with Yellow Sweater by Amedeo Modigliani.

  To get here, we’ve gone through into another room, that leads in turn to a couple more big rooms. We are just finishing Modigliani and the tape guy is telling us that at STOP NUMBER 6 we’ll see the paintings of Piet Mondrian, when through the next archway I spot Papa.

  Oh yes, make no mistake, it is Papa now. From the other side of the gallery you can almost smell the combination of French champagne and candlelight and gypsy violins and twelve-red-roses-by-special-delivery and (yes, I’m afraid) dirty old tomcat too.

  He is ooooooooozing.

  She is –

  Well, for a start, she’d only be five years older than me, at the most. She’s nearly the same height as me, too, and she makes me think of that line about how you can’t be too thin or too rich. Her blonde hair is twisted into a French plait, and she is wearing a creamy-coloured sleeveless little tunic-thing that would look like a flour sack on anyone else but on her . . .

  Bare legs. Bare brown l-o-n-g legs that are smooth as silk. They end in feet that somehow turn you on, the way they’re trapped in these lizard-skin sandal
s with high high heels that seem to make her bottom noticeable. (To put it mildly.)

  Around her throat is a single strand of pearls.

  ‘Get a look at this!’ I nudge, but my shadow twin is absorbed in Art.

  When Gemmy was a little kid, before we knew she had bad eyes, she used to get right up close to things (the television; the cat; my face) and seem to become entranced by what she saw, she studied it so hard. I guess that’s maybe why I liked her so much: it’s very flattering, when you’re ten years old and someone (even your two-year-old sister) comes up and gazes and gazes at you, as if you’re Superperson or something.

  I guess she was four or five when Mum worked out that there was maybe some reason for this close staring (that was towards the end of the Good Old Days, but still at a time when Mum was able to work things out and Dad was home often enough for her to tell him) and so Gem was taken to the optometrist.

  It turned out that Gem was short-sighted, but very astigmatic too. ‘Asthmatic,’ I thought Mum said when she told me but Mum said no, ast-ig-matic isn’t wheezing and gasping. Astigmatic is when the rays of light sort of converge unequally in the lens of the eye, so everything seems to have odd angles and sometimes things look as if they’re in a different place from where they really are. (Sis pouring milk was always the drama of the breakfast table when Father was home. She’d miss by a mile, and be yelled at or – worse – demolished with sarcasm. And when he finally discovered the reason, he just said Mum should have noticed sooner. What sort of mother was she? etc., etc.)

  Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that a couple of years ago, Little Fishter went back to her staring act. When she does it, she seems to go way off with the fairies somewhere – you could stick a pin in her and she wouldn’t blink, let alone scream.

  That’s what she does now, when I try to draw her attention to the Dynamic Duo. (He must be getting all hot and bothered: he’s taken his coat off, I see.)

  Nudge nudge. ‘Hey, Weezlebumps, take a look at this!’

  But Papa and Helen of Troy could be rooting on the floor for all the difference it would make to my learned friend the eminent art critic.