Offcuts Read online

  OFFCUTS

  PATRICK HARTIGAN

  GAZEBO BOOKS - SUMMER HILL - 2019

  1.

  The ashes slid out at once, like a bag of flour into a bowl. My mother turned the rectangular blue vessel in her hand. ‘I suppose we’ll recycle it,’ she said, resting it on a bench.

  Using a shovel left by the caretaker, I shifted the square foot of dirt back into the hole, flattening the surface with the back of the blade. With the side of my shoe, I brushed leaves and sticks, spreading and scratching until the ground was convincing.

  The ashes had hung around for over a year. Now they were gone.

  A small metal plaque, much like the one on the container, but commemorating my father’s time at the school, was screwed to the back of the bench we were gathered around. A gentle rain was setting in. Nobody was talking – it was as if the grief we were supposed to be feeling had expired.

  Passing the school building on our way to the car, I noticed a picture inside a classroom. I stepped over a flower bed, cupped my hands against the glass and took a closer look at a painting of a blue tree ablaze with red blossoms. I remembered all the watercolours I had done as a child, as well as the oddly shaped windows and blackboards. I tried to recall why in Waldorf schools it was considered inappropriate to expose children to too many right angles.

  It was nearly dark when we drove back to my mother’s apartment. I was half listening to a conversation about my father while watching tiny dots of rain gather on the windscreen. There was talk of intricate financial arrangements, the marked man’s retreat into wine and long afternoon naps and how, in contrast to all this, the teaching brought so much lightness and joy to his life. The rain spread gently and evenly, the appearance of unity taking the eye by surprise at the exact moment of being wiped away.

  2.

  The world was loud and too bright when I stepped outside the gallery. I’d spent the morning unpacking works and discussing framing for my upcoming exhibition – some nudes done in a two-month frenzy that starkly contrasted with the subdued works of my previous exhibition, a group of still-lifes and a painting of a bed. The experience in the gallery had left me exposed, vulnerable; for the first time I’d had the sense that my paintings weren’t entirely welcome.

  I put on my sunglasses and walked towards a pile of rubbish on the nature strip outside the house next door. There was a clock radio that looked new despite probably being fifty years old; I put it in my bag before flicking through some documents and letters. They all dated back to the 1950s and showed the name Tibor. I fished out a photograph and box of slides, then left.

  On the bus home I looked at the small black and white photo. From the size and finish of the print, and the aeroplane it showed, it would have been taken in the 1950s or 1960s. The top of a propeller in the foreground made it clear that the author was inside a plane; they were taking a picture of another plane, seen through the window, heading up a runway. It was impossible to say who was landing and who was about to take off.

  I was familiar with the compulsion to take photographs in airports and aeroplanes. My own inventory includes the insect-like heads of planes close up; miniature fluorescent-vested figures transporting luggage across tarmacs; fields and paddocks seen from miles above, stretching and stitching together like skin grafts; the hair of passengers sitting in front of me, made compelling by being kept still for so many hours.

  On one level the image I was looking at had been deprived of meaning. I was custodian to a mystery, by way of the events and feelings lying beyond its borders. And yet I felt like I knew the sense of hope it captured, the truth that only fragments can tell.

  I put the photo aside then moved onto the slides, using my thumb and index fingernails to pick them out of their small orange plastic box, holding them up to the window. Against the blur of roads, trees and power lines, I saw in each of the slides a slightly different version of the same scene: a concreted yard with Tibor, I assumed, sitting stiffly at a table, a vase of pink and white roses at its centre.

  At home I parked my bag on a chair in the kitchen and took out the clock radio. Spinning a small plastic dial, I set it to the correct time before plugging it into the wall socket. With suspense I waited as a minute passed, the flipping metal tabs reminding me of the fluttering noises that arrival and departure boards used to make. The clock radio has remained in my kitchen while the photo and slides live in a box. I want to throw these relics away but each time I try I am stopped by the thought they might somehow be useful.

  3.

  By the time we reached the top of the mountain the fog’s obliteration of the landscape was complete. We stood on the viewing platform looking at nothing, feeling the cool air on our skin. The absence of view brought attention to the surrounding infrastructure – the railing, platform and signage. Everything was set up, as if for a show. But the curtains were drawn and we were left to play out the drama.

  The keys to the new house had arrived when Lenka was visiting family in Europe. Not wanting to spend my first night in the house alone, I invited an old friend to stay. We took with us the basics for sleeping and eating but besides those few items the house would be empty.

  As we looked into the fog I described, in general terms, what lay beyond the curtain of moisture – what I knew well but my friend hadn’t seen before. He was taking photos, clearly amused by the strange theatricality, the way space was turned into a construct and made theoretical. It took me back to drawing lessons on negative space when we would have to define objects and bodies through the activation of their surroundings. There was a young couple dining on a picnic rug nearby; they had been painted in while much of the canvas, the background and central point of focus, was yet to be added.

  The following day was a sunny and clear one and we returned to the same lookout, this time finding an entirely new situation. The car park was full of cars, and a young man on a fold-up chair, beside a van, was strumming chords on his guitar. There were a dozen or so people on the viewing platform. They were mostly looking through their cameras or studying maps.

  We sat down on a rock away from the main viewing area, where the couple had been picnicking the day before, and stared out at the completed view. Across the first gulley I could see a group of walkers; their tiny orange, red and pink garments broke up the dark green, grey and brown tones of bush. In a few minutes they would be standing at the top of the cliff, drinking some water and looking back at the place where they’d begun their trek. I imagined the route they’d just walked, along the bottom of the canyon, beneath trees that looked small and harmless from where we sat but which sent a shiver through me when I imagined being down there as darkness descended. Being up high, among other people, was suddenly reassuring.

  4.

  As the log settled into the fire, making the gentle crackling and spitting noises that remind me of popcorn bursting in a microwave, I heard the thud of the possum landing on the low skillion roof at the back of the house. It always brought a smile to my face: hearing it scuttle over the roof ’s ridge I visualised the map of its journey, from the upper levels of the cedar tree down to the low branch reaching towards the house, up and over the roof, before leaping onto the cherry tree where it would pause for a snack of leaf under moonlight.

  Four or five hours later, when I was woken by the approach of a truck delivering goods to the supermarket behind our house, I heard the possum running up the side passage in the direction from which it had come. A moment of sleepy panic quickly turned into affection for the routine creature completing the final stretch of its circuit.

  The truck had turned off the highway a few hundred metres from where I was lying; somehow the oversize vehicle steered its way through the network of narrow streets before turning into the supermarket car park, m
y mind once again failing to understand its line of approach. After the truck had switched off its engine, I heard the doors being unlatched and swung open; I held my breath and listened for any voices that might be heard, a few minutes later hearing the doors being slammed shut and their squeaky metal latch secured.

  The truck driver sat in his cabin for a few minutes; he might have been drinking coffee from the lid of a thermos, looking at his GPS or listening to talkback radio. After starting the engine, he slowly left the car park and headed back to the highway along a different but no less perplexing route.

  I lay awake and listened to these sounds before my attention returned to the soft and steady noises of the fire: as the night-time rhythms carried on around us the hearth kept us warm, its last log gently burning away.

  5.

  In my dressing gown and slippers I sat at the small wrought iron table under the cedar tree, my feet beset by the needles I had spent so many mornings sweeping away. I was looking at a piece of tile, the latest in a series of items dug out of the ground Lenka was preparing for a vegetable bed, the others being a rubber ball with a funny face printed on it, a miniature plastic soldier, a marble, a chunk of asbestos and an old tincture bottle.

  The tile fragment had the same honey brown glaze as the tiles around the fireplace and was roughly the size of a piece I’d noticed missing. How had it ended up buried in the garden, I wondered, a minute or two later heading inside to test its shape against the broken tile.

  After two weeks of moping around the house – avoiding studio work, preoccupied with a soon to open exhibition – I compiled, with Lenka’s help, a list of jobs to keep myself busy. Each time I completed a task, some taking five minutes, others an hour, I drew a line through it. The tile restoration wasn’t on the list but it proved to be by far the most absorbing assignment.

  The piece of tile didn’t match, which was a shame. And yet the size and shape of the piece I was washing in the bathroom basin could definitely be used to recreate the missing piece, I decided. After drying the tile I pulled a sheet of paper out of the mouth of the printer on my desk, put it over the broken tile next to the fireplace, and began drawing the missing piece. I used a technique I’d learnt in art school called frottage. It had been popular with the Surrealists, the rubbing of textured surfaces supposedly allowing the unconscious to take over. For my purposes I would need to remain focused, precision being the key to this job.

  I rubbed with the side of the pencil, being sure to map the broken tile’s edge without letting the paper move. Once I had the shape of the missing piece of tile I used my Stanley knife to carefully cut it out; I stuck it to the tile found in the garden with tiny blobs of Blu-Tack then went into the room I’d set up as a studio, squeezed out some black acrylic paint and applied it in gentle daubs around the paper. Removing the paper, I saw in black what I would have to subtract from the garden fragment in order to create the missing piece.

  Without giving it too much thought I went to the shed and dug out a clamp and angle grinder. The tile piece was almost as small as the clamp’s head; I figured I would have to rotate it around the edge of the table and do one little section at a time. This went well until the tile broke in half and I had to glue it back together.

  While the silicone dried, I showered, dressed and ate a light lunch. A little later I was back outside, chiselling the finer contours before testing the fragment against the broken edge. I scraped and tested like this for over an hour till I was finally content with the match. It wasn’t perfect but it was pretty good. Using the same masonry silicone as I’d used for the repair, I glued it into place. I then returned to the studio to mix some paint to match the colour of the glaze.

  Crouched over the fireplace with my palette and small brush, I touched up the bits of chipped glaze on either side of the crack, and thought about the paintings I had abandoned a few weeks before. This was precisely the level of patience and devotion I had been lacking in my studio, I realised. The restoration had me feeling connected to the grand history of painting – to all those chapels and frescoes that had been brought into existence with the patient hands and eyes of artists long since dead.

  Once the tile was in place I stood back and surveyed my work; when Lenka and her mother came in to have a look at what I’d spent the best part of a day doing, I suggested we might celebrate with some champagne.

  6.

  I only caught part of the story being told by Lenka’s grandpa. There was mention of a woman called Maria, flowers, church, a funeral. It was late here, very early there; Grandpa would have been in the kitchen, in the house in Slovakia where Lenka was born. As I listened to his voice coming through the speaker of my mother-in-law’s phone, I stared at the words on my computer screen and wondered what he was saying.

  When the conversation began, I was shocked by how frail his voice sounded. The words of best wishes he expressed to my mother-in-law, whose birthday it was, were spoken softly and slowly, as if the sentences couldn’t be assembled. As the conversation went on, his voice had become more fluid and vibrant – at one point he chuckled during the long and meandering story he was telling her.

  When my mother-in-law got off the phone, she told me about Maria, the woman who had spent much of her adult life looking after the flowers in the church and the House of Sorrow, the chapel where her funeral would be held the following day. The woman, who had died in her fifties, had apparently been smiling when she ‘went’.

  With a twinkle of mischief Grandpa had pointed out that Maria, having once worked as a surveyor, would be very useful in heaven – for helping people from the village with their plots up there.

  7.

  During my early visits to Lenka’s village there was an expectation that I would set up an easel and paint en plein air. When her family asked about this I tried to explain to them that I didn’t work outside, that I made my paintings in a studio. This, along with my not going to church, attracted a degree of suspicion and confusion.

  The only time I met the priest was on New Year’s Day, when he was walking through the village blessing people’s houses. I was in a room upstairs photographing a collection of buttons on a chair when I heard the tinkling of bells approaching. I went to the window and saw him coming through the front gate accompanied by an altar boy swinging a censer, a cloud of frankincense trailing behind them.

  The priest must have known I was visiting and a few minutes later I was called downstairs to meet him. After some small talk, most of which I didn’t understand, the priest asked me if I could paint the village church. The way this was translated, accompanied by broad brushing motions he made with his hand, left me with an impression of ‘painting the church’ rather than creating a painting ‘of the church’. From what I’d seen of the peeling church walls it was definitely due for a new coat.

  I nodded and smiled at the priest while non-committal murmurs were made on my behalf by Lenka and her grandmother. It was only when he was leaving, having politely declined Grandma’s offer of Christmas biscuits, that I understood my mistake. Before walking through the door the priest turned to me and drew a rectangle in the air, each hand describing what I could now see was half a canvas of the church.

  8.

  Next door to our house in the Blue Mountains is a small church with a large lawn that local children play on after school. Since our moving in a number of months ago, a succession of plastic balls – red, yellow and blue – have come over the fence into our garden. On each occasion I’ve been nearby and listened to the children gasping and laughing, yelling ‘Thank you,’ when I’ve thrown it back over.

  While drinking tea and texting my brother this afternoon, sitting under the large cedar tree as autumn sunlight filtered through its low-hanging branches and leaves, I heard a ball land in our side passage, bouncing its way towards the front yard. I got up and walked to the bush it had rolled under, noticing, as I retrieved it, the legs of two small figures between the fence palings. Before they’d had time to come through t
he gate or say anything I tossed the ball over the fence; they thanked me and ran back into the church.

  I returned to my chair in the garden and finished writing my message. While waiting for my brother’s reply I listened to the happy, screaming children and remembered that childhood temptation to risk losing something – a ball disappeared over a fence, a school bag flung up into a tree, a shoe thrown onto a roof. In the gaps between the fence palings small bodies and colourful objects flitted by, usually in quick succession. I was on standby for the next ball to fly over, wondering what colour it would be.

  9.

  I spotted the painting while sifting through a rack of shirts. It was behind some shoes, leaning against the wall with its back to me. It was set inside a hand-cut timber frame the size of a shoe box. This and the thickness of the linen, not to mention the way it was hiding, made me curious.

  On getting closer and seeing the name of the painter, I felt myself blushing. Chancing upon a thing of value in a charity shop – should I declare this?

  Turning the painting around I saw an abstract composition of earthy red tones; pieces of string had been stuck down beneath the paint to break up the rectangle into a field of smaller shapes. It gave the impression of a desert or arid plots of farmland viewed from an aeroplane.

  I wasn’t a big fan of this artist. I’d never read the biographies he had written during the 1960s and 1970s, never lingered before one of his paintings. But I immediately felt the substance of what I was holding. It was a painting that wanted to be held, a painting which had body – its back and sides as intriguing as its front.

  Any guilty thoughts were dismissed, firstly on the grounds that I wanted to keep the painting rather than profit from it, and secondly because the foundation I was buying from had recently been mired in financial controversy.