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  Abandoning my search for summer shirts I took the painting to the woman at the counter. With a no-nonsense expression she took the object I handed her, scrunched her face at the muddy surface and said: ‘What am I supposed to charge you for that?’

  10.

  I dusted the soil off the small marble and held it up to the light: besides some dirt sticking to the chipped areas of its surface, the glass was clear with a curved yellow form at its centre. I saw why they were called cat’s eyes, these marbles, and put it in my pocket, lifting my pick into the air and digging up the garden of the builder I sometimes work for.

  On the same day I dug up the marble I unearthed a jar. When opening it and the plastic bag inside it I found a bundle of wet $20 notes, the old paper ones. I showed them to my boss, who told me to put them in the sun so they could dry out and perhaps be salvaged. A few minutes later I found a second jar. It contained two plastic bags, one with green liquid, the other with purple liquid – the ink from the old $5 and $2 notes.

  Later that afternoon, when my boss got around to inspecting the display of notes and gravy-like substances, he said: ‘That’s what happens to money when you don’t spend it.’

  11.

  I remember an event involving my friend, whose collection of marbles was everybody’s envy. While staying at his house one weekend we decided to play a few games in his front yard. I won every game and every marble he owned – including the Japanese ones nobody had previously been granted the privilege of competing for. I remember the downward spiral: the way my friend, usually the best player, had become flustered. The more determined he became to regain his losses the more his game fell apart.

  After parting with his last marble my friend looked at me with an anger that was verging on delirium. He stood over me, told me to go home, then went inside. I remember sitting on the low brick wall that was his fence, inspecting the extra-fat bag of marbles in my lap. It didn’t matter that I had been locked out and told to go home. I was the new marble king.

  At some point my friend’s mum came outside and asked me to give back her son’s marbles. My friend was standing on the porch. His face was still red and it was clear he had been crying. I told his mum I had won the marbles but this didn’t seem important to her. The only thing that mattered was that her son was upset and I should return what had been his.

  I spent the next ten minutes on the grass, separating the marbles, taking out about two thirds of them, before my friend came over. He pointed out a few I’d overlooked, then refilled his bag. He no doubt thanked me for this enforced act of kindness but all I remember is the smugness on his face the second he had all his marbles back.

  12.

  The builder turned away from the wall he was drilling to highlight the merits of bricks. He held his hand around an imaginary brick, then stretched out his arm, explaining that the width and weight of a brick allows it to be picked up and moved comfortably. The length of a brick is exactly twice its width, which makes them easy to stack. He started talking about ancient Egypt and the origins of bricks but he was back to drilling the wall and I didn’t catch what he said.

  An hour later, after ordering and paying for our coffees, my boss sat down at the table and picked up the thread of a conversation we’d had on our way to the café. It was typical for our breaks to have a theme like this – generally whatever it was he had spent the week learning and thinking about. On that day we were discussing how people remember things.

  When he spoke about racing commentators and the way they memorise horse names according to the colours and shapes of jockey silks, I saw a portrait, possibly from the inside of a book cover, of Australian author Gerald Murnane. The image was replaced by one of Murnane’s drawings of jockey silks – the cover image of a book I’d once read. My mind came to rest on a scene described by Murnane. I saw the author, as a young boy, crouching in a threadbare yard, his stripy-shirted back blocking my view of an elaborate horse race staged using marbles.

  As my boss and I talked, me mostly listening, I was constructing a story around our conversation; I was earmarking the moment of being in the café, remembering and seeing certain things, as the basis for a story about painting. I already had a title in my mind: painting within a painting. It is this story I am now trying to remember.

  13.

  As we got closer to the mud-splattered ute I realised that what had looked like a body was indeed a body, lying face down in the grass beside the road. In my rear-view mirror, I saw a second figure leaning into the front passenger window. Hearing me exclaim, my mother and Lenka woke up and looked back but we’d come over a hump and the scene was already gone. We were on our way home from a cousin’s wedding in Wagga Wagga, driving along a quiet stretch of road through parched fields. I pulled over, my body shaking slightly as I told the others what I’d seen. Lenka suggested we return for a second look. My mother agreed.

  I turned the car around and watched as the scene flashed by, equally clearly, only from the other side: a body dressed in a light peach-coloured shirt and blue jeans, seemingly to be a man’s, lying face down in long grass, apparently unconscious. A second man, tall with curly hair, was sitting in the back of the vehicle, his face obscured by darkness.

  After doing another U-turn and coming back in the direction we were supposed to be heading, we saw a third man, who must have been crouching behind the vehicle; he was standing beside the road in a torn shirt stained with blood. He was also tall, his hair sandy-coloured. As we passed, my foot remaining steady on the pedal, he seemed to stare straight through us, his head not turning. He was either very drunk or in a state of shock.

  I pulled over again, this time a few hundred metres further down the road. We all agreed we shouldn’t return and offer our help, our logic being that if help were needed the man standing beside the road would have waved us down. Instead we called the police and provided details of what we’d seen. The police officer seemed friendly, thanking me for the call, and yet I felt myself hesitating for a moment when he asked me for my name and phone number.

  We spent the next hour speculating about the incident, weighing up every variation and theory until the topic exhausted itself, and my mother and Lenka went back to sleep. As we entered the city, crawling through a field of brake lights, the sun sinking below the horizon in my mirror, I returned to the mental associations I had made during the moments of passing and re-passing the scene in the country.

  On the first sighting my mind had flashed to one of the views of Marcel Duchamp’s peephole sculpture, Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas (inside the peephole) (1966). It shows a woman, what could either be a real body or that of a plastic mannequin, lying naked in grass – legs spread, upper body cut off by the hole in the wall through which we see her. The pink shirt of the man had been exactly the colour of the flesh, or whatever the material was, in Duchamp’s diorama.

  When returning to the scene for a second and third time – me keeping one eye on the road while the others stared through their windows and gave their observations and impressions – I thought of the murder mysteries my parents, now my mother, watched on television.

  14.

  I had finally taken my mother’s advice and gone to see the doctor about a mole on my chest, which in recent months seemed to be growing and becoming less defined at the edges. When I’d googled ‘melanoma’ and scrolled through the images, it was unclear exactly what constituted these very dangerous moles. But seeing some of the outcomes, particularly those in which the mole had taken over an entire limb or face, was enough to scare me into action.

  After filling out a form at the front desk I sat down and flicked through a National Geographic. Ten minutes later a doctor came out, took some papers over to the front desk then called out my name. I followed him into his office where he firmly shook my hand and offered me a seat. He seemed keen on making small talk: he asked me what sort of work I do, I said I was an artist; he asked what kind of artist, I said I was a painter; he asked what
kind of paintings I made, to which I replied: ‘All sorts.’ He said he didn’t have the brain for art but his brother, who sold landscape photographs via the web, seemed to.

  ‘Right, what can I do for you?’ he finally asked. I told him about the mole on my chest before taking my shirt off so he could have a look. He looked at the mole through a magnifying glass, picked a small plastic ruler off his desk and measured it. After sitting down and putting his hand on the computer mouse, he turned to me and said he could either cut it out for me now or wait for it to get a millimetre or two bigger. He was looking at me blankly, waiting for me to choose one of these options.

  15.

  Surrounded by paintings of nudes, waiting for people to gather, my mind flashed back to the recorder recital I gave for my school’s open day as a twelve-year-old. Mine had been the first in a string of performances, which meant I was up on stage waiting for what felt like an eternity while the audience entered the large hall, took their seats and stopped talking. During those ten or fifteen minutes my knees had started shaking so hard I was sure I would collapse.

  When everything had gone silent, everybody’s attention locked onto me, I looked across at my teacher, sitting behind a harpsichord, and waited for the nod. Her usually cheery and reassuring face was sharp and a deep red colour, as if she might be about to scold me. The performance went OK but the experience left a little scar. To this day, whenever I have to talk publicly, even before a class at university, I am rocked by feelings of unsteadiness and dread.

  The gallery owner suggested I stand in front of the painting of a woman getting undressed – her body is lost inside the billowing garments she is removing. The image was taken from a book, originally published in the nineteenth century, of stop-motion photography by Eadweard Muybridge. The photographic sequences show mostly unclothed women and men in action: picking up rocks, carrying jugs of water, walking up and down stairs and wrestling, among other things.

  The book had sat on my studio bookshelf for years before I looked closely at it. This happened in the weeks following my father’s death, when I was overcome by powerful sexual urges. I didn’t talk about the way death had somehow triggered this state of heightened arousal, leading me to obsessively paint the human body for the first time since art school. Instead I focused on the western tradition of painting and photographing nudes, the way painting had ushered in photography before steering towards less straightforwardly representational possibilities.

  I arrived at the image of a stage on which flesh is constantly being piled and reformed, the trace of each generation of painters being the psychological equivalent of condensation marks left on surfaces by naked bodies. I was happy with this analogy but it caught both me and the audience by surprise. With my attention suddenly drawn to the timber floor I felt a little dizzy: I looked at the collection of bodies around me, their faces no longer sympathetic and nodding, and thought that they were nothing more than masses of flesh.

  16.

  A couple of hundred metres ahead of us, on a road which skirts along the bush, we spotted our neighbour, the man who lives with his family in a two-storey house across from us. He was standing in the middle of the street sipping from a takeaway cup through the little hole in its plastic lid. He was looking intently at something. As we got closer, we watched him carefully place his coffee on the kerb before returning to the middle of the road. He held up his phone and took a photo of what I could now see was a row of old pine trees.

  He was still standing in that position, with his back to us, when we reached him. We greeted each other and had our usual three-minute conversation. We often saw this neighbour while taking our evening walks – he was usually drinking coffee while thoughtfully observing the surroundings. I asked him what he was taking a photo of; he pointed to the trees and said he liked to post images of old trees on his Facebook page for his friends in Korea. He explained that in Korea any remaining old trees had become national treasures following the war. ‘All trees – gone,’ he said, indicating the mass razing of forests with a slow sweep of his right arm.

  He was smiling, his eyes, behind their thick rimless glasses, darting between us and the trees. When he emphasised a point I caught the scent of coffee on his breath. I would never drink coffee so late in the day for fear of insomnia, and the smell gave me a vicarious sense of alertness and abandon. This was a feature of our small exchanges I always found comforting.

  Lenka told him about the huge tree in our garden, which he said he could see from his bedroom. He asked us if we were going to chop it down and we explained we weren’t allowed to because very old trees were protected by the council. He then explained that when he bought his house, a couple of years before we bought ours, the backyard had been like a jungle. He mentioned the possibility of somebody being able to hide in it. He told us that after forking out nearly $10,000 in labour and fines all of the trees had been removed and he now had a lawn. ‘Flat space,’ he illustrated with another sweep of his arm: ‘my taste.’

  17.

  I was walking to the toilet, as I do most mornings at three or four am, when I saw somebody out the back window. The blond-haired, thin faced man was sitting with his profile to me in an open structure made of skeletal white lines that cut through the darkness like brushstrokes in a painting by Francis Bacon. I woke up sweating, panicked and confused. I got up and went to the toilet, taking a peek through the slats of the blind to make sure I had in fact been dreaming.

  The structure in my nightmare was the old outhouse, now a woodshed, only without its cladding. Lenka and I had been planning to get rid of it since first moving in but were both surprised by the violence and swiftness with which I eventually carried out the demolition. The morning after the dream I was in the garden drinking coffee when the urge to act came over me. I went to the shed, fetched a jimmy bar and hammer, then prised away the timber cladding until only the skeleton was left standing.

  Over lunch I decided that the transparent structure was definitely the one from my dream, the container in which the man had sat and looked towards the neighbouring church. The site of the partially destroyed room and the pile of timber boards made me feel sad. It dawned on me I was destroying a very useful woodshed. To combat this feeling I needed to erase all traces of the structure as quickly as possible.

  Standing on a ladder I removed the metal roof sheeting and knocked out the rafters; I then pushed and banged on the stud walls, watching as the square structure became a parallelogram. It was stronger than it looked: all of the wooden supports were intact – heavy and hard with hundreds of long nails holding them together.

  As daylight faded and the urgency to finish the job grew, I stumbled backwards over a chopping block and landed heavily on the concrete ground. Ignoring the pinch in my lower back I got up, pushed and banged until the structure eventually fell down. Finally, as the garden dissolved into darkness, I picked up my sledgehammer and started smashing up the concrete base.

  Later that night I lay on a bag of frozen peas, feeling nerve pain shoot up and down my leg. I reflected on the scene from my nightmare and the violent outburst that had followed. In my mind I was seeing a painting by Bacon: a dark and matte ground partitioned by decisive, dry brushstrokes, the pale, ghostly figure of a man at their centre. My woodshed had been sacrificed to a dream, to a nightmare now locked into my body and transposed onto the canvas in my mind.

  18.

  As the doctor read the piece of paper in his hands, I looked behind his desk at a pinboard crammed with photos of mothers holding babies. I thought of the paintings found in museums around the world showing baby Jesus being held by his mother. There was a lot shared by the photographs and paintings, particularly the sense of wonder and warmth in the faces of the mothers looking down at the infants cradled in their arms.

  The office we were sitting in was a few doors up the corridor from the pink room where I had taken the utmost care to get the first drop of my sperm into a small plastic container. The fertility doctor wa
s glancing between a piece of paper in his hands, presumably the analysis of those drops, and Lenka and me; he was asking questions about how we lived and how long we had been trying to have a baby.

  When he asked me how much alcohol I drank and whether or not I smoked I started counting the drinks I’d had over the past week, each bottle of beer and glass of wine bringing me into the rooms I’d had them in. ‘Around twelve a week … or fifteen?’ I said, adding that I used chemicals in my work.

  ‘Well, the good news is, your sperm is normal,’ he said, Lenka and I sharing a cautious smile while the doctor began laying out what he thought the next step should be. It was a non-intrusive procedure to remove some small polyps from Lenka’s uterus, which often proved to be successful in cases like ours. On a yellow sticky note he wrote down the number of a clinic, handing it to Lenka and telling her to book in as soon as possible.

  As we all stood up, I asked him if the photos on the pinboard were success stories. He said he hadn’t been working in the clinic that long and therefore didn’t know, but he presumed this to be the case. I asked him if I could take a photograph of it, explaining that I’d once done a series of paintings of mothers holding babies and that some of the pictures on the board reminded me of Madonna and child paintings. ‘That should be fine,’ he said.

  At the door the doctor asked me more about my paintings and whether I made a living from them. I told him that I regularly exhibited and sold but didn’t make enough money to live on. As I gave a few descriptors of my work, giving a sense of scale with my hands, I saw in his eyes an attempt to visualise what I was describing. He slowly nodded in appreciation of the paintings he was imagining.