He gives me a nod, then crouches facing Harrison and says, ‘Dad’s home.’

  Harrison hits pause, says, ‘Hello,’ and sniffs.

  He watches his father. I wonder what he sees when he does that, today and other days.

  Phil rocks forward on his feet a little, still in the crouch. He reaches out to the arm of the sofa to steady himself. His nails are neatly clipped, his hands pale and scrupulously clean. He has short fingers, the fingers of the stocky man he is, and thick black forearm hair so organised it always looks as if he’s just run a comb through it.

  ‘How was your day?’ he says. His eyes open wider and the furrows on his forehead reach as far as the muscle goes, all the way to smooth scalp. It’s a questioning face, as deliberate as an emoji.

  ‘Good.’ ‘Fun with Uncle Ryan?’ ‘Yes.’ Phil nods, his smile holding, hoping for

  more. There’s no more. Harrison’s face is aligned with his procedural answers, good for a hand of poker. His pyjama collar is buckled and his curls are sitting heavily on his head, still damp since he won’t let me dry them properly. That’s not my fight to have.

  ‘Good, then,’ Phil says, for the sake of saying something.

  His first appointment was at eight this morning and it’s now close to seven at night. That’s a lot of mouths, a lot of hours under fluoro lights. His face is sallow and jowly. He has managed a day full of small talk and precise work on dozens of teeth.

  ‘What’s the game you’re playing?’ He steps around the arm of the sofa, towards Harrison.

  ‘Just a game.’ Harrison unpauses, and there’s a rush of beeps and pings. ‘WALL-E.’

  ‘Right.’

  Phil moves closer and turns side-on to watch the screen. He puts his hand on Harrison’s head, then lifts it away, checks his palm and presses it against his shirt to dry it. He turns to me, his hand still on his shirtfront.

  ‘It’s from a Pixar movie,’ I tell him. ‘Disney or Pixar.’

  He looks at me blankly.

  ‘The game. WALL-E. It comes from a movie. It’s the name of the central character.’

  ‘Oh.’ He nods. ‘Good. Where’s Nat?’ He leans over towards the window and peers into the night. ‘Still at it.’ He straightens up. ‘Might get some wine.’ The thought seems to make him happy, as though it’s turned him into a host declaring a start to an evening. ‘To go with...’ He wiggles a finger in the direction of the oven.

  The man in the nineties casserole ad also came in without the scope for full sentences, but he was beaten down by sleet on the heath. Then he cupped the bowl in his hands, inhaled the steam and all was well.

  Phil runs his eyes along the shelves of his two wine fridges, then notices the open bottle on the counter.

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘You’ve already started.’

  ‘It’s for the dinner.’ There’s no question that I’m expected to explain myself. ‘It’s a casserole.’

  ‘Oh, right, I...Good.’

  He thinks I am drinking in the daytime. Which I did, though it’s not daytime now. And it was barely more than a taste. The mug is in the sink, its telltale red-wine stain rinsed away.

  He picks up the bottle, and turns it to look at the label.

  ‘Oh, right, great,’ he says thinly, willing the label to turn into something else. ‘The last of the ’08.’ He holds it to his nose and sniffs. ‘Should be a great casserole.’

  I am using his wine in cooking. That’s his point. He sniffs the bottle again and blinks a couple of times, staring at the cupboard door in front of him. For a moment, while this settles in his brain, he is alone with his wine fridges, his breached bottle and his thoughts.

  I got Natalie to choose the wine. I showed her the recipe and she took it from the cabinet and gave it to me.

  I lift the lid of the pot and stir the casserole. I am not going to account for myself, not about a sixth of a bottle of wine. If I had my wallet in my pocket, I would pull it out now and offer him cash. I sweep the spoon around the pot one more time, then tap it on the side. The man in the casserole ad was gracious, glad to be out of the sleet, in the warmth and fed.

  The door downstairs slams before either of us can make a next move.

  ‘Sorry,’ Natalie calls out. ‘Wind blew it out of my hands. It’s just Mummy, Harrison. Just noisy Mummy.’

  ‘Glasses,’ Phil says, snapping out of his stare and into a different, brighter version of himself. He opens the cupboard door and picks up

  three Riedel wine glasses.

  ‘So, any updates?’ he says over his shoulder as Natalie reaches the top of the stairs. ‘Venice?’ She raises her hands in mock horror. ‘Don’t

  mention the V word.’ ‘Sorry, sorry.’ He straightens the glasses on

  the counter, organising them needlessly into a line. ‘I suppose the B word’s out then, too? Biennale?’ He pretends to brace himself for the onslaught.

  ‘Argh.’ She clamps her hands on her head. ‘Don’t jinx it.’

  She walks over to the far side of the counter and stands opposite the glasses.

  ‘The call I got this afternoon...’ she says to me. ‘From the Australia Council. They’ll choose the artist for the next Venice Biennale this week. The call was one of the admin people, wanting to get proof of citizenship but not telling me why.’

  ‘Well that sounds...’

  She holds up a hand to stop me. ‘Don’t say it. Don’t say anything, either of you. It might be nothing. I don’t even want to think...Change of subject.’

  Venice. Patricia Piccinini rose to a new level after Venice. She was chosen in 2003 and, instantly, even people who were clueless about art knew about her.

  Phil is watching Natalie for clues about what his next move should be. There’s a buzz and a whir from Harrison’s computer, then a muffled planetary fact. WALL-E is still at work.

  ‘Who’s doing stories?’ Phil says.

  ‘I did them last night,’ Natalie picks up the wine bottle and pours herself a glass. ‘So...’

  ‘Right.’ Phil looks at the back of Harrison’s head. ‘Right.’ He claps his hands in a show of enthusiasm and rubs them together. He’s manning up to the prospect of stories. ‘Okay,

  Harrison, looks like it’s that time. Let’s go pick a couple of books.’

  ‘What?’ Harrison turns around. Only his hair, eyes and the bridge of his nose show over the back of the sofa. His eyelids are creased with tiredness.

  ‘Bedtime,’ Phil says, making it sound like a cheery announcement at a holiday camp.

  ‘But no one’s cleaned my teeth.’

  Phil turns to Natalie. ‘I thought that was part of the bath plan.’

  She gets a more adult-to-adult tone from him. He can dial back the cheer quickly when it suits him. His face is all grey end-of-day pastiness.

  ‘I did the bath.’ I find myself lifting a hand when I say it, as if I’m in class and owning up to something. ‘The shower. I didn’t know teeth cleaning was part of the plan.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Phil recalibrates, not for the first time since getting home. ‘No problem. Let’s get to it. Come on, Harrison.’

  Harrison slides from the sofa and pads towards the hall. Natalie intercepts him with a hug.

  ‘Mummy loves you,’ she says into his hair, which is starting to dry and uncoil from his head. ‘I love you,’ he says faintly into her sleeve as

  he absorbs the hug. It occurs to me that I’m the only adult in the

  house who doesn’t refer to themselves in the third person. When does that stop, I wonder? Why does it start?

  When the hug is done, Phil puts his hand on Harrison’s shoulder and starts to lead him down the hall.

  Just before they’re out of sight, he turns, nods in the direction of the wine and says, ‘Don’t drink all that before I get back.’ One side of his mouth makes a move towards a smile.

  ‘I’m drinking some of it,’ Natalie says, but quietly, so it might be to herself. She pours a glass, says, ‘Cheers,’ and toasts in my direction.

  She pulls up a bar stool, sits and flexes the fingers on her right hand in and out. She studies the hand, as if it should display clear signs of effort or overuse, then rubs the cuff marks on her wrist.

  ‘This feels like I’m now supposed to be the friendly bartender who lends a listening ear.’ I pick up a tea towel and fold it over my forearm.

  ‘Ha.’ She checks my pose. ‘Nice. Bit formal. More butlerish. But thanks, barkeep.’ She toasts me again, and frowns. ‘Why are you not...’ She puts her wine down, and stretches across the counter for one of the other glasses. ‘Have some. Don’t wait to be invited. Mi vino è su vino.’ She sets the glass in front of me and reaches for her own again. ‘Same applies to Phil’s vino, if he thinks this is his.’ She takes a mouthful, leans one elbow on the counter and lets her shoulders drop. ‘He’s very busy at work this week. Someone’s sick. Thanks for sorting everything out.’

  The oven beeps. It’s up to bread-warming temperature. I have a loaf of ciabatta waiting on a tray.

  Over dinner Natalie mostly talks about her work—the work underway, not the prospect of Venice, which remains a banned topic. She has been building bodies today, shaping her latest kind of creature, for an exhibition in Los Angeles in October. She talks as if Phil and I are both already in on the grand plan. I have no idea how to picture what she’s talking about, but Phil mmms in the right places.

  They’re sitting opposite each other, and he scrunches his eyes up, blinks and refocuses on her, as if his view of her is clouded by teeth, by the day’s mouths, his head stuffed with the tinnitus of drills and suckers. He is spooning the casserole in as if it’s fuel.

  Natalie tells us it’s been a day about angles, and some angles are more intimate than others. ‘There can be a few degrees between intimate and, what...’ She searches for the word. ‘Aloof, yeah. It can be no more than ten degrees between them. Maybe not even that.’ She puts her spoon in her bowl and shows us with her hand, as if she’s signalling stop, then tilting her fingers forward in a row. ‘This one you’re paying attention, avidly, to something close by.’ She lifts her fingers so that they’re almost straight again. ‘Now it’s dead to you. It’s in the foreground but not a threat, not interesting. You’re all about the horizon, something out there.’

  ‘It could be vigilant rather than aloof.’

  Phil twitches a look my way when I say it, as if input wasn’t expected at that point and could only have been beamed in from somewhere odd and far away. He had been set to keep listening, mmming.

  ‘It could be,’ Natalie says, rotating her hand like someone who has just lost their sock puppet and whose palm is now blindly scanning for it. ‘Yes.’ Her palm turns to look her in the eye. ‘Or this way. Different plane, still a matter of a few degrees. It could be disregard or regard...’ She tilts her palm away and then back. ‘Disdain or protectiveness.’

  In an instant, she has moved from considering the concept to drafting the catalogue notes. What Natalie says about her art has always been one of her strengths. It’s now her turn to mmm, until she realises she’s mmming to her own hand, claps her fingers down and pulls her hand away.

  She picks up her spoon, and can’t resist holding it upright and tilting it up and down and side to side, checking its moves and what they might mean. Regard for her wine glass, or disregard.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, and sets the spoon in her bowl, its non-spoon powers all gone. ‘Could you...’ She looks my way. ‘Could you pick something up for me the day after tomorrow?’

  ‘And that way you can spend the day with Harrison?’ Phil says to her.

  ‘Actually, I was thinking Ryan could take Harrison with him. A bit of a road trip. Harrison’d like that. It’s out of town.’

  A road trip. Harrison is the least likely road trip enthusiast I can imagine. As long as he has his tablet, he’s as happy in a car seat as on his home sofa, but there’s no hint of wanderlust in that. It is a work of more than art to imagine him gazing from a window at a passing landscape, thinking a traveller’s thoughts.

  ‘We could read Kerouac,’ I suggest to her. ‘Or maybe Harrison’s got the app already.’

  ‘Very funny.’ She smiles, maybe at the thought of me, or the tablet, inflicting stories of late-forties jazz dives, drug-taking and ill- advised encounters on her wide-eyed boy, who would settle for a disjointed fact or two about the universe any day. ‘He’d be fine with it. The road trip, not Kerouac.’

  ‘I didn’t say no.’

  There is nothing in my diary, close to nothing. I am here to help, until the mining support industry rises from its knees—from its face plant—or until I find other feet to stand on. I am looking. It isn’t that I’m not.

  ‘Okay,’ she says. Her attention seems focussed on the table, somewhere near my wine glass. She shifts her spoon a centimetre or two in her bowl. ‘It’s for the thing I’m working on, the LA project.’ She lifts her gaze to my chin. ‘It’s some animal parts. Horses’ heads. It’d be great if you could pick them up and then take them to a guy who’ll process them for me. It’s the skulls I’ll be using.’

  ‘Okay.’

  There is, I’m sure, some good artistic reason for it to be actual skulls, actual horses’ skulls. One day, somewhere, it’ll all be in the catalogue notes.

  Phil watches the two of us, spoon hovering over his bowl with a chunk of carrot in it. He’s waiting for what’s next. He probably thinks our day is full of conversations like this, while he’s across town methodically working on teeth.

  ‘Well,’ he says. ‘I’ll be interested to see where this ends up.’

  Art is a mystery to him. It’s something he can’t anticipate. Opaque, magical. That’s the pedestal Natalie’s on in this house. Yet he constructs teeth, perfect ceramic teeth with a computer, and makes them fit and locks them in place. In another time that would have had all the weight of a miracle.

  The casserole seems to me like the real thing, even if it hasn’t drawn a comment. It’s at least moderately hearty. Natalie’s head is still in her process, the stooping and gazing of her planned people-creatures, how the face of one might address the face of another. These are tiny humanoid nuances with everything riding on them. She has long forgotten that she ever asked for a casserole, that she was quite specific about it.

  ‘Oh, wait,’ she says as she carries the bowls to the counter. ‘Money. I’ve got to give you some for the ingredients. I’ve got cash.’

  The bowls clatter as she puts them down quickly and picks up her bag. She rummages through it and lifts out crumpled receipts and a hairbrush.

  ‘Shit, yeah,’ Phil says, shuffling in his seat and pulling his wallet from his pocket. ‘Can’t have you...yeah.’

  Natalie finds her purse, flicks it open and slides out a handful of banknotes. She fans them out, takes two fifties and slips the others back. Phil meanwhile is extracting cash from his wallet, too, another two fifties.

  ‘There,’ Natalie says as she slaps her two on the table near me. She’s already turning away, back towards the kitchen.

  Phil’s hand, which had been reaching in my direction, steers itself to her notes and adds his. Two hundred dollars. The top bill is askew and he tidies it.

  ‘Is that...’ he says in the direction of the notes. He shrugs, pulls another twenty from his wallet and sets it on the pile.

  It was a casserole, the kind of meal celebrity chefs regularly spruik in supermarket ads as costing under five dollars a head. We’ve all seen those ads. In this case, I bought good beef and the cost was closer to ten. Thirty dollars all up.

  They’re both waiting, eyes on the cash and on me. Phil is smiling. His teeth gleam like a dentist’s should, white but not crazy white. He told me at a family barbecue that they’re three shades whiter than they once were. Who counts these things? They look natural though. They’re a good advertisement for his work, or the work of one of his colleagues.

  It’s up to me to speak. To Natalie and Phil, to the pile of cash that has barged in and is staring me down.

  ‘This’d all feel a bit more normal if there was poker involved.’

  ‘Well...’ Phil folds his wallet shut and makes a show of it going back in his pocket.

  He’s giving me the wide-eyed look, forehead furrowed like a small ploughed field. He smiles, shows me again with his sausagey fingers that the money is on the table, waiting, mine. If I don’t take it soon he will tell me to take it. And when I do take it, he will feel better about himself and about being rich in the company of someone without prospects.

  ‘Right.’ I pick up the money in both hands, fold it and put it in my pocket. ‘Good. Glad you liked it.’

  ‘Great,’ he says, though nothing is.

  He glances at Natalie, who nods and smiles back. Phil looks pleased with himself, keeps that look on his face. Some time today, while I’ve been scanning employment sites or plodding through the making of an unremarkable casserole, or getting brilliant ideas about clearing a few leaves from the pool, they have talked. They have been working out how to give me money.

  On the street, the cash in my pocket is just money again, no different from any other notes but for the specifics of the serial numbers. That’s what I tell myself. That it isn’t marked in some way that would signal dire straits or entrenched failure the moment I go to spend it.

  I am thirty-two and might be anyone, anything.

  Two students pass me speaking Mandarin or Cantonese, the blue-white glow of phone light on their shirts as they both work on text messages or check a map app.

  I would have settled for acknowledgment of the casserole. Not some false remark about it being brilliant—just something to note it as a decent normal act, a guest making a contribution.

  A guy a few years older than me walks by, head down, with takeaway containers stacked in a plastic bag. At a window table in the Indian restaurant, a woman with a ponytail and a blunt black fringe throws her head back and laughs. She has a Corona in one hand, wedge of lime in the top. Next door, the drycleaner is folding up her street signs and taking them in for the night. In the window there are rows of garments bagged in plastic and awaiting collection— featureless dark suits, one after another, one wedding dress.

 

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