Bequest

Chapter 1

X didn't tolerate fools or people who said breathlessly, 'I love your work.'

'Why?' Leonard once heard X ask a tall girl. This girl was too tall for most men, horse headed, big nosed; she had pretension painted on her fingernails.

'I like the way the light pierces through the painting.'

'But does it move you?' X asked.

'Yes, of course it moves me.'

'Are you uplifted?'

'Of course.'

That tall girl was cut down to size with one swift sweep of X's tongue: 'I don't want it to charm you. Good art disturbs. It agitates.'

Leonard didn't recognise many people anymore. The number of suits at the opening alarmed him. The art appreciators outnumbered the artists. They were people with money; they had houses in Brighton and holiday houses in Sorrento. He knew these types of people, he'd probably taught their children. The women mostly had dyed blonde hair; they were assured of their place in the world and considered themselves 'modern women'. They had sensible jobs as radiologists or account executives, or they were 'kept women', happily supported by their husbands who were bankers or endocrinologists. They'd gone to private schools, like the one where he'd taught. Their parents had money and their parents' parents' had money. They were connected like electricity. They liked art that they had read about in a glossy magazine with 'Collector' in the title. They ran around the Tan on their lunch break, drank black coffee, and minimised sugar; they had season tickets for the Melbourne Theatre Company, even though they loathed half the performances; they holidayed in the Pacific, on islands that are the 'world's best kept secret'; they travelled to Canberra to see blockbuster exhibitions and complained about the queues of common people. They liked hosting dinner parties, but they paid their sixteen-year-old daughter to clean up the kitchen afterwards; they had a library of hardcover cookbooks, with orange spines and thin ribbon bookmarks. Most of the pages were spotless.

They viewed X's pictures hanging on the gallery walls with pleasure, but when they saw Leonard they stared in surprise. His skin was almost completely tattooed by X. He didn't have any tattoos on his face. When X had run out of space on his body, she'd asked him, again, could she do his face. But he'd always said that his face was sacred. His tattoos crept up his neck, ending in a choker necklace of Jesus's crown of thorns.

He wore a white, short-sleeved shirt. It felt as though everyone was looking at him, at his round belly and his colourful arms. He was used to people staring at him. It hadn't been his intention, he'd never been looking for attention, he wasn't a show-off in the ordinary sense.

Gay royalty was there: the ex-Curator of Australian art at the National Gallery of Victoria, now the head of Sotheby's Australia, and his ex-partner, Ian Silvers from Silvers' Gallery was on the other side of the room. The new director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales was even there. It was a success just by having those boys there. How far she had come from those days when no one knew if any more than twenty people would turn up to her launch. He felt happy for her and proud to have her marks all over his body. Surely this made him more precious.

He took a glass of red off the tray that was offered to him by a wide-eyed waitress. 'Good turn out,' he said raising his glass to her. She didn't care. He sipped on his wine, wanting it to help settle him in. It was a good quality drop, broodingly dark and sweetly perfumed. He walked around the exhibition. X's works had doubled in size and tripled in confidence. Her usual motifs were there: guns, skulls, flowers, doves, golliwogs, fire, and golden crowns; her fascination with sex and death, love and hate, continued to be undercurrents in her work. But she'd introduced new things as well. He could see the influence of her recent residency in Iceland: snow-capped mountains and hot springs, a shifting, whiter landscape shooting her ideas into the atmosphere like fireworks.

Many of her pieces had already been sold prior to the opening. The round red stickers and the prices in the catalogue showed that her work was almost unattainable. He heaved his pants up with his free hand, they were always slipping these days; his body shape had become awkward and even a belt couldn't hold his pants up properly. He caught sight of his right arm—a pale blue mushroom cloud of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, surrounded by a swarm of killer bees—and he believed wholeheartedly in the value of his skin.

He floated around the room, hooking eyes everywhere he went. He was a line in X's bio, an artwork with legs. He was more precious than anything on these walls, because he could move. His fully illustrated penis was striped black and yellow and blue. It was a caterpillar extending its body, retreating in the cold, expanding on a hot day. On his body, her work was a living organism; it changed with the temperature and the seasons. He'd given her art life.

A second glass of wine calmed his nerves. Even after all this time, X still intimidated him. He'd spent hours on her tattoo table, over twenty years, half-naked before her, the buzz of her tattoo machine making conversation difficult. He'd slip into a meditative state, fighting pain with will. Afterwards, they often had a drink in her studio, whisky or a gin and tonic if it was summer. She'd show him some concept drawings of a new piece she was working on, or they would discuss ideas for his next tattoo. She did most of the talking and he listened carefully, not wanting to forget anything that she said, because he was living history with an important figure in the art world. He embraced her words with preservation paper, wrapping them up, holding them tight, storing them systematically in his mind. She didn't know it, but afterwards he went home and filled notebooks with quotes of things she'd said.

She was dressed in a stark white dress. Her face was looking older. She wore two long thin plaits; her hair was dyed brown, yet he could see spirals of grey around her ears. Her makeup was thin and dusty and she wore maroon lipstick and black eyeliner in the corners of her eyes.

'Leonard,' she said, her voice dry as autumn leaves.

'X.'

'It's been ages.'

'Great show. I can see a shift in your work.'

'How are you?'

'I'm good, good.'

'How's the body?' She looked him over. He felt the extra kilos he'd put on, as if they were bags of flour on his chest.

'It's great. I didn't want to do this here, but I hadn't heard back from you. You must have been so busy, with the new show and everything, but . . .' He pulled a folded envelope from his pocket. 'There's some more paperwork from the lawyer. Something for you to sign. I'm so sorry to be doing this tonight.'

He held the envelope towards her. He felt people closing in on them, salivating over the chance to speak to X.

'All this red tape. I'm getting so tired of it,' X said, taking the envelope in her hand. 'I don't know. I'll sign it and send it back to you okay? But this is all very time-consuming. And I must say, I've moved on. Tattoos are a thing of my past.'

'But we're so close. What about the documentary we did? Our trip to Japan? I thought you wanted this too?'

'I just didn't think it would be this hard.' He heard pity scratch through her voice and he lost her attention to a plain man in a plain grey suit. Leonard didn't even wait to hear the speeches. He left his empty glass on a windowsill. On the way out he sidled up to a young gallery assistant handing out the catalogues.

'These new works are nothing compared to her old works,' he said. 'They're too sparse. She's lost her nerve.'