Prochownik's Dream by Alex Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

have.’
    â€˜You can’t let this opportunity go by, Toni. I can’t believe you won’t think of something.’ She walked back and stood beside him. ‘Robert and I don’t want someone else doing this show with us.’
    They looked out the narrow window together. Two magpies walking about stabbing at the leaf litter.
    â€˜I hated Melbourne our first day back,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d made a terrible mistake. I panicked. I went to your show that day to reassure myself that you were still here doing the things you do.’ She looked at him quickly. ‘I needed to know there was some sort of continuity. In my life, I suppose. I was being selfish. But when I stepped through the door at Andy’s and saw what you’d done I almost turned around and went straight out again. That awful napthalene smell of those old clothes. The way you’d set up those racks, like a crowd of forlorn refugees standing there waiting for something impossible to turn their fortunes around and make them whole and happy again. But you could see that theirs was a lost cause. They were like someone’s memory of people. People from a dream. It was almost too personal to be on display. I thought, no wonder no one’s here. I wanted to leave at once.’
    He liked the way she talked about his work, vehement, angry. As if it had meant something to her. ‘So why didn’t you?’
    â€˜I forced myself to stay half an hour, then I fled. I didn’t tell you, but I went back again the next day. But you’d already dismantled it and they were hanging Geoff Haine’s pictures. Geoff’s pictures were a relief. I was glad your empty people were gone. I had to make an effort to believe I’d actually seen them. And then, of course, they began to haunt me and I couldn’t get them out of my head. That was when I began to realise you’d done something impressive.’ She stood looking out at the encompassing bush. ‘I know just how you’re feeling. I know what it’s like. When you can’t work, life stops.’
    The warbling of the two magpies. The birds peering curiously through the glass, or perhaps looking at their own reflections.
    â€˜Let’s go and have our picnic,’ she said with decision. ‘I don’t have the right energy for this.’
    He picked up the basket and they went out of the building into the sunlight.
    She slipped her arm through his and they walked together through the crackling bush, as if they were strolling down Brunswick Street among the crowds. ‘You were always observing us,’ she said. ‘Drawing and watching, that’s what you used to do. You never stopped drawing and looking. You were so certain of your gift. So sure of what you were doing. You had no curiosity about the world. We couldn’t believe it when you wrote and told us you’d given up drawing and painting. You turned everything into drawings in those days. Everything can be drawn, you used to say.’
    â€˜I was quoting my dad. I only drew people. Nothing else.’
    They walked on in silence.
    â€˜Dad always said drawing is superior to painting. He never drew people. He never drew us, his sons or his wife. I think we were too precious for him to risk our likenesses.’
    The magpies stood looking after them, heads on one side then on the other, considering, making a judgement.
    â€¢ He was sitting with his back against the trunk of a gum tree. She was drawing the group of pale gums in front of them, seated cross-legged in the shade of a wattle, her drawing block on her lap. She checked her subject, then touched her pencil to the paper. Beside her a half-empty glass of wine. The remains of the salad and chicken and the last of the bread were spread on the blue and white tea towel between them, the empty wine bottle on its side on the grass. She eased her back and set the pad and the pencil aside on the grass and