The Wolves - by Josephine Rowe
ISLAND | ISSUE 153
How was it? We grew up inside those crumbling estate houses, where kikuyu grass knuckled through indifferent brickwork, through the husks of cars, and still we shot up like miraculous gymnosperms to various kinds of fame. Something in that dreadful water, maybe. The mercury content, we joked. Helped us rise. I don’t know. Only that there was a high concentration – what could be considered a disproportionate tendency – towards brilliance, at bewildering odds with circumstance and resource. I swear somebody might have gone back and studied the pH levels and the radio waves and whatnot if enough of us had actually admitted where we were from. Perhaps it was simply a velocity borne of the desire to get away, Far Away, to put as much distance between ourselves and our beginnings as life would allow.
I was the least of us. I’ll be straight up and say that I was, that I am, the very least. In stature as well as accomplishment. And even so: three modest but not inconsequential volumes on archaeoastronomy – hooray hooray – and the resultant accolades, public speaking circuits, the proffer of tenure at a prominent European university. (Embargoed, I’m afraid, but it’s not important.)
Vu started in textiles but became a kind of artisan coffee mogul, and from there juggernauted into fair trade entrepreneurship. Miriam had a disconcerting foray in the lesser soaps, which seemed to us a televised purgatory (her ascent snagged at playing out audience- approved dramas of the mostly-white working middle-class), but was mercifully recognised as belonging to a higher theatrical order. Now you can’t hope for more of her than an eighth-row comp and a digital Christmas card but, in those regards, she is unfailing.
*
Roli is our brightest, our Dog Star. Those junkyard bricolages he just gave away in the ’90s appreciated sufficient to pay our rents and student loans as the century rolled over and his name caught the light. Ignited, rather. I’d like to say I still have mine, but no. I stretched my PhD stipend as far as I was able, running on gut-rot wine and stale baklava from the corner deli. But when a molar inevitably cracked, that Stidolph – as they’re now called – was the only valuable thing I owned. He’d gifted it to me as a birthday present, so it felt grubby at the time, to sell, and it feels still worse now knowing how much he fetches at auction. If I had known, I might have capped the molar myself with painters’ caulk and chewed very carefully for just a few more years. But one mustn’t dwell. (In hindsight, it seems only right that he should have been so generous.)
When I accepted an invitation to speak at a two-day conference in Reykjavik, I admit the decision was greatly influenced by the possibility of seeing Roli, for the first time in a decade, and learning how he lives now.
*
In reply to an email in which I mention the conference, casually wondering at the prospect of drinks – time permitting – Roli fires back a strand of effusive emojis (fireworks, volcano, pint glass, volcano) asking which hotel he can collect me from. I upgrade from a three-star to a four, and send the address. I then feel foolish at the expensive pretence: I might have simply kept the cheaper hotel, and scuttled out early to wait in front of the more stately Hotel Viktoría.
As it goes, the conference is cancelled due to poor health. That of the attendance list, I suspect. I accept the university’s compensation for the airfares, but hold onto the flights, and Roli collects me from the Viktoría in a 4WD pickup with mud-caked monster tyres and refuse piled in the open tray. His face has adopted a Nordic countenance; he looks like a sherman saint, and is dressed as such, right down to the white linen and sandals. He jumps down from the cab, waving away a valet to swing my daypack onto the pile of soon-to-be-glorified detritus.
I climb in and embark on a fruitless excavation for a seatbelt.
Alexander, mate! (I inch at the mate.) Roli whistles at the hotel, says he hopes it’s on university krona.
I cover the minibar and incidentals, I lie with convincing banality, abandoning the hunt for the seatbelt. The road we’re travelling flanks the water. Even the seabirds hanging above Faxa Bay look to be of Nordic design; gestural curves, efficiently elegant.
Hey, Roli says. Did you hear the latest?
Probably not, I admit. Mostly I’ve been ... And here I replace the truth (sleeping) with a sort of winnowing hand gesture that could just as well mean ‘conferencing’.
Kaleb, he says, and I know it can’t be anything good.
You’ve heard from him then?
Roli shakes his head. Not in person, not for years. The papers though; they’re saying Life.
Kaleb, if you’re wondering; this is as much about him.
*
Kaleb’s fame lay buried in him like a poisonous secret, but it rose to the surface sometimes in angry red welts. We mostly resisted provoking him, but it was very often not resistible. Anything might set him off. His mother was dead, his father as good as culpable. Often Kaleb’s eruptions had a protective impulsion. He once slashed the tyres and keyed the showroom duco of a new Mercedes, parked with the windows up in high summer, a chow dog panting limply in the back seat. He did not back down when the owner materialised, and it took several of us to pull him away from the shouting match and police threats and into a dead-sprint. On such occasions, his volatility might be considered heroic. More often, it was simply ridiculous. Like the time the piss-and-vinegar woman who ran the chip shop charged him extra for sweet chilli sauce and he went berserk.
“Kaleb’s fame lay buried in him like a poisonous secret, but it rose to the surface sometimes in angry red welts. We mostly resisted provoking him, but it was very often not resistible. Anything might set him off.”
Aldebaran, Miri called him when he flipped that way. The fiery eye of Taurus who might one day wink us out. No doubt this flattered him – he adopted the name, after all – as it did me (having presumed that Miriam had always tuned out my star-raving.)
My own home was not marked by tragedy, nor any especial marginalising force. Not even violence. It was merely poor, made poorer by a scarcity of books, and of interest: in the world at large, and my place in it. The most valuable thing I owned was a library card. I was small and weak, and from outer suburbia I took refuge in old gods, and so then, inevitably, in stars.
I learned the names for every constellation in the Southern skies. And then those of other skies, and other names for familiar configurations. While a constellation might hold its dimensions and component stars, the stories invented for it are infinite. Ursa Minor: two horses tied to a stake. If their guards ever drop their vigil, wolves will inevitably slaughter the horses. And then? Oblivion. So seen by the Kyrgyz, in place of a couple of saucepans. In Norse mythology, the destruction of the cosmos – Ragnarök – is also brought about by a pair of wolves who swallow the sun and the moon and plunge the world into darkness.
At age eleven I was entranced by this evidence; not so much that narrative claims on the heavens were multitude and ancient. I understood this as navigational necessity. More the frequency with which, for reasons elusive, these stories intersect or overlap, where their authors – culturally and geographically – could never have possibly. Why might the Pleiades be seen by the Greeks and the Chinese and the First Australians as Seven Sisters – the Maya-Mayi – when their visible number was so often greater, and a great many other beings might be made of them?
Our own horizons did not reach far beyond the bottling plant where my father worked – where most of our fathers and some of our mothers worked.
Kaleb was the first to get away, not even waiting for university for deliverance. Leaving at sixteen on a bus for the city, wearing his mother’s sheepskin jacket, carrying four pre-mixed vodkas and a biography of Vincent Price.
He did not keep in touch. Not directly. In recent years we’ve come to know about his ... exploits. No, that makes him sound like a wily orphan in a British children’s story. We are aware of his acts of ‘cultural terrorism’. What in gentler times might have been termed ‘activism’, or even ‘harmless prank’, if often faintly harming and in occasionally poor taste. (Gentler times – a fata morgana of rosy hind-glance. There never were such.)
Sabotaged exhibitions, violated public art, several unconsummated threats of greater violence to national treasures. All claimed by or attributed to Aldebaran. We knew right away it was him. Or, individually, we suspected, and – voiced collectively – these suspicions have been galvanised as knowledge. There has never really been the question of outing him. He is one of us, one of ours. Roli himself has suffered direct losses – works damaged by a slow-acting corrosive distributed (how? It remains unknown) at a prize show with financial ties to Yann Andrasko-Lowell, a mining magnate. But Roli went on the record with praise – for whoever this mystery provocateur might be. The Australian art world, he stated, has grown critically flaccid; even its revolts are government-funded. Only someone whose lips were not busy with arse-kissing might be properly heard.
“Sabotaged exhibitions, violated public art, several unconsummated threats of greater violence to national treasures. All claimed by or attributed to Aldebaran. We knew right away it was him.”
*
In Roli’s cavernous studio – a former shipbuilding works he snapped up in the crash – a girl in a creased linen shirt dress or perhaps simply a shirt is stretched like an animal across a Danish sofa I might otherwise be free to admire. Her name is Pearl but I first hear it, in Roli’s introduction, as Pearlmeat – Pearlmeat Alex – and this is the name she keeps, at least in my thoughts, because this is her scent as I come to know it: a mild, mineral-aquatic sweetness, resting right in the middle of the palate. Pleasant for now, delectable even, but one wouldn’t hazard to leave her in the sun too long, lest she spoil. An agreeable climate then, this. A midsummer day barely grazing 20°C.
Pearlmeat is perhaps two-thirds our age. Her hair is short and wild, streaked silver and ash in a way that is either very expensive or very unfortunate. I guess the former; her accent is pure north-shore Sydney.
Iceland’s the new Berlin, isn’t it? And Portugal’s the new Iceland, she retorts, not missing a beat nor hiding derision, barely glancing up. She has open an American magazine, and from behind it she asks – she asks Roli – Did you hear that in the States, Lyme disease is the new Genius?
It says that?
In not so many words, it might as well.
Presumably it travels, though, Roli offers, pushing some stuff off an armchair for me to sit.
I’m not certain it does travel, says Pearlmeat. It’s non-transmittable, human to human. It is transferred directly from ... the source. A luscious little shiver ripples through the linen.
I mean the people afflicted with this Lyme-derived Genius. He drops onto the last free square of couch and takes hold of the girl’s foot, gives it an affectionate shake. Presumably they’re still issued passports, still able to travel?
Perhaps the symptoms are not recognised as Genius outside of North America, I venture, and Pearlmeat looks at me properly for the first time, unsure of whether I’m taking the piss. Her face in that moment is piercingly familiar, but I cannot place it.
That could explain our old mate, Roli says. Just tick sick on the wrong continent.
Pearlmeat flicks grey eyes from one of us to the other with a dreamy turn of her neck. Aware that she’s being left out of something, unconvinced of its importance. (She’s new, I realise, with a torrent of relief and hope: little claim on Roli, nor he on her.)
Kaleb. From ... back home.
Oh, she says, dropping her eyes back to the magazine with agitated intent. Him. Of the-place-that-shall-not- be-named. (Perhaps not as new as I hoped.)
Tick sick? I tell Roli that I doubt it. Reluctant even now to joke about what lasting injuries Kaleb might have sustained within the walls of that brick Commission shoebox, built identical to ours but declined to an even more miserable state – the mauve bed-sheet curtains, the hoarded silver wine bladders from which we sucked the acrid dregs of Fruity Lexia, and later adopted as convenient travel pillows for when we were stoned brainless down at the grassy reserve. Roli would go on to incorporate these in his early sculptures, the inflated casks suspended amidst a paroxysm of building refuse, swollen silver bellies a hair’s breadth from rupture against snarled wire or splintered timber. And he fashioned a sort of homecoming reprise to this juvenilia for the Sydney Biennale – Blackwood Springs, 1992 – a title which came abrasively close to breaching the pact tacitly understood between the rest of us. (Of course I can’t presume to include Kaleb in this understanding, as we’d heard nothing at all from him at that stage, and perhaps thought him a suburban casualty.) One of the girls might’ve gotten in Roli’s ear about it, as the next time that work showed, in Mexico City, it was titled simply Estate.
What might Kaleb have made of that work, had he been active then? Pop, pop, pop.
*
The landscapes framed in Roli’s massive windows – monochromatic, save an other-worldy, algaeic green – seem lifted from the covers of death-metal albums we pretended to worship in high school, so as not to get beaten up. (I say we, of course meaning only myself).
He speaks of renovations made to the studio, sympathetic architecture, his tactical befriending of shipwrights. I steal what I hope are covert glances at the girl. In certain slants of light, she is wrenchingly familiar. But it might simply be the ambient influence. While the living area seems constructed mostly of plants and light and mid-century teak, it adjoins a shadowy scrapscape, looming with numerous dream-familiar artefacts that have apparently migrated tens of thousands of kilometres from Roli’s original workshop. Or have possibly been fabricated in homage to their predecessors. In either case: wandering amongst them is like skulking through a backlot of the man’s brain. An orange-capped phonebox casts everything into the seedy-hopeful glow of milk-bar drug deals and anonymous calls to high-school crushes in the time before mobile phones. Mustered into a far corner, a mob of rusted shopping trolleys, and an entire dismantled playground which once stood in the reserve at the end of our street. When the playground was pulled down, Roli snapped it up from the salvage yard at the bargain rate of a couple of slabs of beer. They’d loved him there, at the yard, especially the middle-aged Greek who ran the place and got to know his preferred materials: anything once-standing-now-not, glimmer of the ironic. Such prizes were tucked aside before they ever saw the shop floor. At Roli’s early home shows, there was often a flash of hi-vis amidst the crowd.
“An orange-capped phonebox casts everything into the seedy-hopeful glow of milk-bar drug deals and anonymous calls to high-school crushes in the time before mobile phones. Mustered into a far corner, a mob of rusted shopping trolleys, and an entire dismantled playground which once stood in the reserve at the end of our street.”
A metal slide gleams amidst the disassembled playground, a luge of rust-stippled steel, rarely seen now in the civilised world. The scorched thigh-backs of babes now a nostalgic hazard. I recall lying underneath this slide, or its prototype, holding lungfuls of Miri’s brother’s cheap-chop. We still swore there was oregano thinning it out (or more likely tarragon, according to Vu, who would not smoke that shit if you paid her, but stood sentry for evening dog walkers).
I crouch to read an inscription on the slide’s underbelly. Aldebaran. I remember Kaleb taking an hour to etch it with a compass lifted from a maths class.
What year did that thing come down? I call over to Roli.
End of ’94.
You shipped all this here?
Roli shrugs away the effort and expense. Who knows when I might need it. A tax deduction, anyway. Though according to Pearl I should be—
He justifes everything this way, she finishes, somewhere between a sigh and laugh.
When I return to the armchair, Roli whaps a Swedish newspaper, two days old, onto my lap. Have a read, he says.
I can’t read Swedish, I tell him. But the vital information is there: Kaleb, under a header that includes the word Kulturchock.
Here, Roli hands me his laptop. There’ll be updates, it’s all over the net.
There are updates. Grainy CCTV footage from a gallery in Stockholm; the shaky smartphone recordings of witnesses. Nothing of the act itself, but immediately before, and directly after. In most Kaleb is just a satellite figure, a passing glimpse, far from the focus of anyone’s attention.
“There are updates. Grainy CCTV footage from a gallery in Stockholm; the shaky smartphone recordings of witnesses. Nothing of the act itself, but immediately before, and directly after. In most Kaleb is just a satellite figure, a passing glimpse, far from the focus of anyone’s attention.”
Pearlmeat sighs, unfolding the discarded newspaper. Your old mate, she says. He reminds me of the dickhead who poured paint into the Strokkur geyser.
We rush in tandem to defend: no! Not like that at all! Though I cannot say for certain whether we’re defending him out of fraternal loyalty, or something less honourable, more possessive: our pet anarchist.
For my part, I suppose I’d imagined him grown to look more eccentric. Possibly even certifiably deranged. A weaselly, skewed-up grin and indirect or too-direct gaze. The imagined portrait over-embroidering to include a scar from a corrected harelip, which in fact he never suffered.
In reality, anyone would think him a good-looking man, and tasteful (if the breaks on his trousers were a little light for my liking, flashing vibrant socks). His hair is its old unruly scruff, but threaded with a silver-grey that lends a whiff of authority.
The images were captured during the exhibition of a celebrity shock artist. Kaleb wandering between works, no doubt pausing the dutiful seven seconds like any respectful art-goer. And afterwards, strolling calmly back through the gallery, as other visitors scattered with sleeves clamped protectively over their mouths, too much in fear of their lives to apprehend.
Attendees had been required to sign a waiver in order to enter a dimly lit cordoned-off room, where the glass bust of a woman sat atop a grey-black plinth. Some saw a resemblance to a certain pop star, others to the wife of a world leader synonymous with innumerable atrocities. There was a suggestion of likeness to the artist’s own ex-wife, perhaps everybody’s ex-wife. Her cerebellum comprised a grey-white compound, a reportedly deadly substance. The non-specific noun presumably allowed the mind to audition various horrors – anthrax, ricin, other. Whatever it was: sufficiently hazardous to warrant the waiver, along with two armed guards, who flanked the plinth with stoic menace.
The guards, evidently, were convinced of the work’s lethality. When the plinth toppled, they made for the door instead of their weapons, while the offender, allegedly, scooped up handfuls of white dust, the substance, and proceeded to sprinkle it over his clothes and hair, and to snort it off his starched shirtcuff.
It was not until the artist himself charged at Kaleb, knocked him down and repeatedly punched his face that the spell of immobilising terror was lifted. People remembered their smartphones, fished them out. The guards rematerialised, turned overly rough by way of compensation. A dozen shaky angles of Kaleb, grinning through powdered face and bloodied lips – something almost baroque about it – being hauled away.
But Life? I say. For calling Bullshit?
Depends on whether he can be proven to know he was calling bullshit. They’re treating it as bioterrorism.
But he went in unprotected ...
In any case, there’s all the other stuff. He owned up to it.
The other stuff. I’d kept abreast of the other stuff: the installation of dead sea-life into the ventilation system of a major gallery (where it putrefied horrifically over the course of the eight-week exhibition) following said gallery’s acceptance of a large donation from an oil company. Torching a large inflatable – what even was it? – by a well-known misogynist. Several instances of release of animals set for live-slaughter or live-starvation. The typical blood and blood-coloured paint and corrosive spattering.
“Torching a large inflatable – what even was it? – by a well-known misogynist. Several instances of release of animals set for live-slaughter or live-starvation. The typical blood and blood-coloured paint and corrosive spattering.”
Online, they’re revisiting these – a virtual retrospective – and delving further into his personal background. The leaden feeling I have, seeing the name of the-place-that-shall-not-be-named. Several outlets now have cause to linger over the known offences of Kaleb’s father – drunk and disorderly, disruption of the peace, assault of an officer, etcetera – drawing a bold red arrow.
Jesus, people are always scratching, Roli says, making claws of his fingers and gently mauling the air. Scratch scratch scratch. People are always looking for the wound – the murky subterranean wellspring of Art. Of Genius! They never have to scratch very deep to find a wound that satisfies – dead mama; drunk, sadistic papa – if anything, they look past the true wounds to the wound they can recognise, one that appears in their little handbook of credible traumas. More often, there is no wound, or the nature of the wound is so ridiculous you couldn’t hope to guess at it.
He glares deeper into the nadir of his smartphone. Christ, that sanctimonious, shit-eating grin ... he went looking for this. The attention – validation, whatever you want to call it. Roli tosses his phone out of reach.
Well it’s hardly going to hurt you, is it? The girl raises her eyebrows to mean I do not know what.
It just seems senseless. A waste.
Other people were beginning to take credit for his work. Everyone wants recognition, in the end.
Do they, Pearl? A glinting question, from which she averts her eyes. Softening, Roli finishes. Yes, I s’pose they do.
I click again on the money shot, Kaleb powdered and bloodied. Powdered and bloodied, but triumphant. It’s true, I realise. He never intended to get away with it.
“I click again on the money shot, Kaleb powdered and bloodied. Powdered and bloodied, but triumphant. It’s true, I realise. He never intended to get away with it.”
Pearlmeat is still scanning the Swedish cover story. How does he do all this, exactly? It must cost, all the travel, all the ... materials. But it doesn’t say, anywhere, what it is he does for a living, banker or kindergarten teacher – such a nice man, a quiet man: none of that shit.
Roli draws a hand down over his saintly face. Me, he says. I’m his living.
She stifles something laugh-like. Oh yes? you’re funding this nutcase? A black silence drops as she realises – we both realise – that he is serious.
Tell me, she says, that you are fucking joking.
Not funding, he rushes. I’m not suicidal. I just gave him some work – a few smaller works, and whatever he did with them was his business. So he sold them. Okay!
After those sculptures he fucked up trebled in value, it seemed – fair. And I like, you know, generally I like where he’s coming from.
Well bravo, Charlie – you’ve subsidised your conscience. At my expense, but never mind.
Your expense?
Not money. Have you thought about how this will look? For you, I mean? I don’t expect you to think about how it might look for me or anyone else.
She withdraws her foot, sweeps a cigarette packet from the coffee table and stalks off to smoke amidst the abandoned-rescued play equipment. For an instant she looks like a superimposition: it could be Miriam or Vu I’m watching, one of our kind. A sooty-eyed teenage waif with sweet fuck-all to lose (save perhaps the IQ she was still deliberating on whether to cauterise with crystal meth). But of course, no, she couldn’t have been. We would have torn someone of her privilege to shreds.
“For an instant she looks like a superimposition: it could be Miriam or Vu I’m watching, one of our kind. A sooty-eyed teenage waif with sweet fuck-all to lose (save perhaps the IQ she was still deliberating on whether to cauterise with crystal meth). But of course, no, she couldn’t have been. We would have torn someone of her privilege to shreds.”
Sorry, Roli mouths. We should probably – Well, anyway, you’re not here to fuck spiders, are you? He holds his hand out for his laptop, snaps it closed. What’s your poison?
Poison?
Geyser, glacier, crater, cave, geothermal pool, geothermal pool in grotto, lava field, tectonic rift, Viking ruins, Saga trails, good old humble water falling in massive tonnage, active volcano, sleeping volcano – did they show you anything, the conference people?
Ah, the conference people. (I cannot very well say, at this point and in front of the girl: I came to see you.) I look at Pearlmeat, or the lit tip of her, glowering amongst the dream junk – no, it seems she will not be joining us.
Dealer’s choice, I tell Roli.
Go well, she says, waving a hand.
Go well. As if she were pushing a boat off to some bleak voyage. Standing sombre on the darkening shore, swathed in cloak and lantern-light, already foreseeing the winding shrouds.
I know her, then.
*
How quickly the natural world sees fit to obliterate us. The truck, immediately engulfed by fog, a phenomenon to which Roli seems oblivious. To me it summons the misty nether-space of early RPGs, desultory sword swinging beyond the limits of the constructed world, unprogrammed and therefore ungoverned.
Pearl, I start.
She’s miffed. Roli says.
She’s an Andrasko-Lowell.
Well. Not by choice. He sniffs, taking a hand off the wheel and leaning his elbow unnaturally against the windowsill. An uncomfortable man’s pantomime of comfort.
Have you met him?
Tin Man? Once or twice.
Once? Or twice?
Twice.
And?
About what you’d expect. Look, I figure it matters less and less where we start from. We’re all going the same place. Hell in a handbasket.
Yes, but ... she’s basically at the helm of the handbasket.
Her father, he says, returning his hand to the steering wheel. Say what you like about him – I didn’t think much of mine. I bet Kaleb sure as shit doesn’t call his for Christmas. But she isn’t her father.
“Her father, he says, returning his hand to the steering wheel. Say what you like about him – I didn’t think much of mine. I bet Kaleb sure as shit doesn’t call his for Christmas. But she isn’t her father.”
Her father: mineral money, chiefly bauxite – of forest-clearing, township-poisoning, toxic red slurry fame, along with the subsequent PR attempts at make-better. Everything from children’s hospital wings to wildlife sanctuaries and art exhibitions. Her grandfather: phosphate money, back in the white-linen-and-croquet days, when it could not have been conceivable that Nauru might one day be repurposed as an Australian tax-funded oubliette. Heiress to that misery, too. And these are only the widely-known knowns. (Who could say what other human collateral lay neatly totted up in the double-entry columns of the family ledgers.)
In a way it sounds quite fabulistic, I begin in attempt to mollify.
Everything to you sounds—
‘I consign to you my only daughter if you hereby swear to never speak against the—’
Stop. For fuck’s sake. You think it’s about money, or power or something. You want to know the whole of it? She’s brilliant – the brains and the heart and the guts of everything I’ve made for years now. In fact, if you asked me to parse it, who did what and whose idea it was in the first place, I reckon I’d have a lot of trouble. And frankly I’d be thrilled to credit her, she deserves it, but she won’t have it.
Why not? I fail to keep the injury out of my voice.
She’s an Andrasko-Lowell, he spits, throwing my own voice, my earlier incredulity, back at me. Silver spoon, diamonds for breakfast, all that – who’d take her seriously?
A little while down the road he adds, more gently: or me, for that matter.
We drive another twenty fog-coddled minutes, in which more might be said – but nothing is. From somewhere a dirt road materialises, and Roli peels out of the thick of fog. Sky again. Farmland scalloped into lurid rows, that tritium green of cakes copied from Woman’s Weekly magazines, dyed to resemble synthetic turf, football pitches. Scattered across these are drums of hay baled into marshmallow-pink plastic, like giant musk lollies. My problem tooth twangs, a synaesthesia that ebbs amidst the cooler celadons of a lichen-crusted lava field. Roli parks the truck in a small scraped-out lot, alongside a couple of plasticky rental cars. Their passengers are just returning, cresting a hill with dry towels caped around their shoulders, a look of bewildered agitation flickering among them. They hold up phones, wave them about like Geiger counters, pile back into the hire cars and pull away.
A mistake in one of the big guidebooks, Roli explains. Wrong coordinates – not everybody gets the memo.
Another vehicle pulls in, a campervan airbrushed with a crude Viking. Four twenty-somethings bail out: sixers of beer, minispeakers, silver cooler bag.
Roli winds down his window and says something in Icelandic.
They give him a puzzled scowl, then follow the same sheep track over the same small hill.
What did you tell them?
I told them there’s no pool here.
They reappear a few minutes later, beers unopened, towels and speaker-cables still garlanding necks. Some commotion. In Spanish? One of the girls actually stamps her foot, tosses her mane about like one of the island’s haughty ponies.
After the campers’ engine has guttered away, Roli opens his door. I follow him across the car park, to where a contingent of allochthonous boulders are huddled in apparent conference. Conferring on what? Nothing definitive, says Roli. We’re a little short of megaliths and all that – what’s the dimensional definition for a megalith? Anyway, the best I could do.
A landscape that would intimidate even the Henge-builders. In the distance, smoke hangs quietly above Hekla in the shape of an alpenhorn, casual threat.
Roli waves in the direction of the vanished tourists. People don’t even notice, he says. Or they don’t care. They’re too pissed about not getting exactly what they thought they’d get, not having things go exactly according to plan.
That image of Kaleb being marched from the gallery, his face a gratified kabuki, unmoved by the violence of the artist. He must’ve known he’d be trading in his anonymity, there was the possibility of taking Roli down with him. Or was this always the point?
Another van pulls in. A three-legged, fox-like dog is the first out, followed by a silvery couple, who move (flow) like old gods.
The fox dog jigs off across the lava field, emitting small exploratory yips into crevices, alternately thrilled and spooked by the acoustics.
Roli watches, with a weary grin. I think I’m very possibly fucked, he says. Perhaps I can find a good cave to hide out in.
Is that still the done thing?
I reckon I could bring it back.
*
In the hotel I shower with reverent attention to the miniature armada of toiletries infused with moss and arctic thyme and volcanic ash. Descending the stairs I feel geologically venerable, imperviously elemental. A pleasing state that sifts away like so much glacial till during the course of dinner in the hotel’s restaurant, where my fellow diners all smell of precisely the same botanicals and minerals.
“Descending the stairs I feel geologically venerable, imperviously elemental. A pleasing state that sifts away like so much glacial till during the course of dinner in the hotel’s restaurant, where my fellow diners all smell of precisely the same botanicals and minerals.”
Rendered merely human again, bound by dermal, pathological time, I stump back upstairs. Mild perturbation at the turn-down service. Outside it is still day-bright, though edging on 10 pm. I flick a wafer-mint off my pillow and will a dense weightlessness into my limbs, coaxing down a velvety dark that is brilliantly shattered by the telephone. A bearish swipe knocks receiver from cradle, releasing the apologies of the concierge: very sorry to disturb, but a young woman, quite insistent ...
Of course, please, send her up.
*
I am allowed perhaps ninety seconds of frantic scrabbling towards presentability, dragging least-crumpled clothes from suitcase, rinsing mouth with what turns out to be a kind of rehydrating facial mist – never mind – before she appears at the door, a hundred (tiny, very white) teeth, her bright marine scent spilling into the room. Quintessential lopi cardigan drawn over the earlier dress, an expression of believable contrition over the earlier imperious disdain.
I’m sorry. I’ve woken you.
Not at all. I motion to an orange vinyl armchair, reminiscent of a 1950s coffee cup. Pearl curls into it like cream. Sitting across from her, at the foot of the bed, I cannot cotton what she could possibly want. Have she and Roli fallen out so badly that—? But she has more than means to get herself a room.
She refuses the minibar. I won’t keep you, she says, I know you fly early. I just wanted to ask you – if you don’t mind my asking – to not mention?
The funding agreement?
She kisses her teeth. If you can help it.
Help it? Is someone coming to tie me to a chair and beat me with a bike chain?
No, she says, through a small, forced laugh (crushing). And I imagine at least some of it will out, anyway, get all uglied up. But it might do without the help. Roli’s very trusting, you see that. And I’m really not saying he doesn’t have reason to trust you. But.
And he knows you’re here, talking to me now?
No, he doesn’t, she smiles, caught out. He’d hate it. But it’s important.
He’s an investment, I realise. Perhaps more than simply the good old-fashioned monetary kind. But an investment all the same.
I do not ask: to whom, of any influence, would I speak? I do not say: it would never have occurred to me to mention any of this, to anyone. Having been made aware of it, the potential leverage of silence rouses a flush of brutish ideations, demands: stand up. Turn around for me. Take that off.
Holding her own elbows in the kitschy armchair, Pearl’s mouth is a tight-furled bud, her stare turned chary. Perhaps she recognises it, savage flash at a darkened window. Has been seeing it – will go on seeing it – her whole life. Fissures through to the grimy interiors of men, curdled redistributionists who feel she ought to compensate for her beauty, her wealth.
She thumbs an opalescent button on the cardigan, until her mouth softens again. It’s him I worry about, she says. It won’t affect me too badly, one way or another – I’m practically bulletproof. She stands, as if to emphasise.
I walk her the five paces to the door. In the hallway she offers her hand, businesslike. I take it and turn it palm up. A network of half-healed cuts. Vertical furrows peeling at the fingertips, exposure to some chemical or other. Constellar burns, disappearing under her cardigan sleeve.
She curls her fingers over her palm and pockets it.
Doesn’t everyone want recognition?
Shaking her head, an unreadable smile. Better no, she says.
What will you give me?
It’s more out of curiosity that I ask this. Any half-entertained grappling already recognised for what it would be: a baser form of proximity to Roli. Brushing up against the microbial microcosm of their shared existence, nothing more.
What do you mean. What will I—?
I realise I might have better asked: what would you have given me. But she has heard it as spoken, heard it as a precursor to extortion.
Oh. She says. It’s like that. She stares at me clearly, disconcertingly amused; a creature returned to her element, while my own blood fizzes with the shift in atmospheric pressure. A mistake. I try to say as much, but nothing cooperates.
Why don’t you tell me what you want?
She will wait – could wait indefinitely, I know – to hear me back down, or to state, apologetically, my meagre terms.
No, worse: she is going to tell me.
You would like – and please forgive me if I’m wrong – you would like to hear him murmur your name while he has his mouth around your cock. No, not wrong? And I’m terribly sorry, but even I can’t make that happen for you. What I can do? I can not make him despise you. For wanting that, and for propositioning me.
I keep my teeth clamped on my tongue, no longer trusting my verbal cortex. The instinct to thank her is excruciating.
Down the hallway the elevator chimes, and a couple stumble giddily to their room. She turns, slowly, and walks towards the open doors, with the calm certainty that they will remain so.
*
It’s years before I see her again. Waiting for a walk signal to cross Oxford Street, hours before the biggest grid failure in the city’s history. (Coincidental, of course, though the mind springs gleefully towards such symbolism). Three weeks till Christmas, and yet another wave of fingernail-lifting heat. December is the new January. January is something else.
“Three weeks till Christmas, and yet another wave of fingernail-lifting heat. December is the new January. January is something else.”
As it turns out, the Australian heat does not turn her. Rather, it’s myself who cannot stomach the name I once had for her.
She, of all people, would have little grounds to complain about the weather. But it seems likewise unconscionable that she should appear so untouched by it, cool and unreachable as she was in Roli’s climate-controlled studio.
Her old man getting set to toss his agate, free the horses, so on – this is public knowledge. Also public knowledge: whatever she does with his funeral will be wrong – she’s set to gain too much by it. They’ll say she’s being insincerely flashy, overcompensating. Or they’ll say she’s skimping, already tight-fisted with her birth-right squillions.
We pass in the centre of the pedestrian crossing, the usual midday tide thinned to a trickle. Even so, she doesn’t see me, or effects not to. I watch her cross the square, floating in infinite layers of pale greys.
They’re saying she’s going to run his whole empire into the ground. The old Andrasko-Lowell not yet cold, and the new Andrasko-Lowell already doing talk-show rounds, making an emphatic if inexplicit case for ethical extraction: a deflective glitterism. At this stage, it is not yet clear who she hopes to not piss off.
They’re saying she’s going to be far worse than her father.
She slips between the stony shoulders of the bank and the Post Office, and for a moment I consider following, having only gleaned the broader strokes.
The media did eventually link her to Roli, some months after the fact. The media did not much care. News born stale – she already in Marseilles, a fling with tennis royalty. Though Stidolph collectors recognised a certain conceptual elegance in those works produced during the Andrasko-Lowell phase.
Kaleb was not given Life. He was given instead the unpopular, media-starving kindness of an out-of-court settlement, compensating artist and gallery for damages material, financial, reputational. An unreported, no doubt astronomical figure, no doubt settled, at least in part, by Roli. To appearances, it scuttled him. His materials became very modest, afterwards. Ink on paper. Though some thought this the pure and natural progression towards mature subtlety, in the way that older writers turn to poetry, to vignettes that scarcely cover the palm of a hand.
“His materials became very modest, afterwards. Ink on paper. Though some thought this the pure and natural progression towards mature subtlety, in the way that older writers turn to poetry, to vignettes that scarcely cover the palm of a hand.”
*
Just before 3 pm, the entire grid crashes. My midget desk fan ceases purring warm air around my supply-cupboard of an office. A ripple of groans from down the Humanities corridor as overhead fluorescents flicker out and PCs wink off.
She did it, I think, half heat-struck, passing over mundane reality. No, you idiot – five million people praying to their air-conditioners did it.
Trevor from Linguistics charges down the corridor, uncharacteristic confidence bestowed by white hard-hat. Evacuations. I slip my dying laptop into my satchel and make for home through an acrid swelter of rising human panic.
By the time I reach the apartment, it’s a silent hotbox, tropical fish hovering gloomily around their airless pump, little Nostradamuses. I fling the windows open, then climb the dozen flights to the roof, as I have always done – for storms, for stars – to catch what little southerly breeze struggles through the darkening theatre of the city. Torch beams sweep the interiors of neighbouring lives. I mark the first candles flickering into existence, heralding what will prove much more than just a city-wide blackout, one that will exhaust third-drawer stocks of tea-lights and batteries before exhausting more vital reserves of basic good. But this first night it still seems a novelty, a convivial event – an excuse for people to empty their refrigerators and host impromptu barbecues before the meat goes off, popping the champagne they were saving for Good. I neck from the bottle of Piper-Heidsieck I was given to celebrate the book I’ll never finish, and prop myself on a milk-crate, laptop marooned at 6 per cent. The Aldebaran affair is long ossified, mausoleumed in the occasional listicle of infamous art stunts. But from time to time a disciple still crops up – an Antares or IK Pegasus, carrying the fire, so to speak. Most of these don’t make the news. One has to go looking for them. A procrastinatory pastime of mine.
An email draft to Roli, from several months ago. Subject header: New Old Mate. A link to an art gallery in Wangaratta, beset by induced plagues – one week cane toads, the next, hordes of cockroaches or European wasps – presumably in retaliation to their all-white catalogue.
Am I being antagonistic, forwarding him these carbon Kalebs? No, just scrabbling to rouse a reply.
I did consider writing to him about the hotel, that she had come to see me. But the time for honourable telling has long since elapsed, and any betrayal has become squarely mine.
His terse, infrequent replies never say as much. But he has found cause, somewhere, not to trust me. Or perhaps his reticence is not particular to me, but an attempt at greater severance, at last. From all of that, all of us.
I hit send, anyway. The battery lasts just long enough for me to glimpse an alert for a new message as mailer-daemon bats it right back – from where? – Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently, before the screen blacks out.
*
In the coming weeks, I return each evening to the roof, to find a little sleep in the relative cool of the blue hours, after the nightly barrage of shattering glass and skirling sirens has diminished to distant punctuation.
Sometimes I imagine the real Kaleb down there amidst the catalytic heat and the swelling tides of disorder. His private furies, his genius for anarchy aged into the true rebellion of the present age: anonymous decency.
The stars, at least, have been restored to fierce cold glory. Even the more reclusive bodies showing themselves, now that the light pollution has leaked away.
Down here, apart from the odd petrol generator chugging along flimsy electrical light, there is only the sporadic illumination of fires. Benign or otherwise, it is hard to tell from where I stand, naming them as minor constellations strung through surrounding streets.
But these points of light are not constant, not threaded to any firmament. Any stories I might invent attain no higher collective purpose – neither mnemonic of navigation, nor archive of landlines or bloodlines, no crucial lore on time-keeping or the lay of ancient watercourses.
They serve only to make my own universe less lonely, and only for an instant, as most will burn out long before morning. ▼
This story appeared in Island 153 in 2018. Order a print issue here.
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