TURBINE | KAPOHAU

‘What does your mum do?’ Elena heard the boy ask Theo. His name was Jordan. Aidan. Something that ended in Dan.  

 

‘She works in an art gallery. She’s an artist.’

 

‘No, she’s not,’ Christo said. ‘Dad’s an artist.’

 

‘She is so, idiot. Why do you think she has a studio in the back garden?’

 

‘But she doesn’t go in it.’

 

She. They were sitting less than a metre away, in the back seat of the car, while she drove them home from a basketball game. Perhaps they thought she couldn’t hear because the radio was on, but this was something she’d noticed before. They seemed to think that driving a car made you deaf.  

 

It had its uses. She’d learned that Evan often took Theo and his friends to get fish and chips after football on Saturday mornings, even though they’d agreed they would avoid junk food. She’d learned that Susanna liked a boy in the class above her, but her friends thought he was a ‘douche’. And she’d learned that Christo had developed a game of jumping off the picnic table on his pogo stick, and was wondering if he could make it off the roof of the garden shed.

 

It jangled, that ‘no, she’s not’.  

 

 

The studio smelled musty. At some point something damp must have been put in there. The wall near the entrance was crowded with things that had needed a quick place to be banished to. That suitcase with the jammed handle, Theo’s Year 7 science project, the dead pot plant that Susanna thought she could resurrect, the bent and buckled wheel off Christo’s bike.  

 

Their family needed to learn when to walk away from broken things.

 

She stood in the doorway and took it all in. The windows were covered in a thin film of brownish dust and in the evening light, everything seem sepia-toned. The bench along the back wall was bare, apart from a broken mirror and a garden trowel, and the stack of blank canvases were long gone. Pilfered by Evan or Theo. The easel was there, untouched. It still looked brand new despite the thread of an old cobweb sagging from the apex of the A-frame.

 

Elena hadn’t come out there intending to look inside the studio. She’d stepped out into the garden for a momentary reprieve. There was nothing restful about evenings in their house. Susanna was in tears about algebra, Theo had finished his homework and had dismantled something complicated Christo had done with Lego. He’d done it on purpose. He never touched the Lego these days. And Christo, quietly and without drama, had ripped the last page out of Theo’s new Harry Potter book and hidden it. Everyone had retreated to their respective corners, but the house still pulsed with outrage and a sense that everyone had been hard done by.

 

It was easier when Evan was home. Things were calmer. There was less of an edge. Less of a sense that something unstable was about to ignite. He took charge in a way that she couldn’t. She didn’t know how to be across all the daily minutiae, to have solutions to all the little problems, to facilitate and peace make. Elena thought they sensed sometimes that she stopped listening, that after a while she wanted them all to go away.  

 

Evan had been out three nights that week. Everyone wanted to talk to him. Winning an international award and having a piece bought by the Tate had given him a sudden celebrity. She was proud. Perhaps a little envious. It was hard to name what she was. Somewhere in the world a language might have a word for it. All the things she felt for him – proud, excited, glad – shadowed by all the things she felt for herself. Diminished, frustrated, on the edges.    

 

Elena switched on the light and took a step inside, skirting around the pile of broken things, to reach the bench. The day that Mama had died she’d been arranging the drawers. They were organised, curated, in a way that she knew she would never be able to maintain. Once she got started on a work, she didn’t stop to tidy up. Brushes, jars, rags, tubes of paint, palette knives, all ended up fighting for space on the nearest flat surface. It was why Evan had built her the bench.  

 

Everything was still in place inside the drawers. She opened each one, mildly shocked that she’d taken the time to set out all the paints like a colour wheel. She didn’t remember being that painstaking. She lifted a tube of viridian and unscrewed the lid, breathing in the mild linseed scent, remembering the alchemy of that deep green. Without really thinking, she dusted off the old office chair by the easel and rolled it over to the bench. She pulled out a sketch pad and a pencil and let it touch the page.    

 

 

‘Mum, are we having dinner?’ It was Theo.  

 

‘Have you stopped fighting with your brother?’ Elena didn’t turn around, but she could see his reflection in the broken mirror. He was standing in the doorway, those straight, dark brows of his lowered over his eyes. He was already taller than her, angular, his childhood thinning out on his frame.

 

‘He’s sellotaping the page back into the book.’

 

‘Did you make him?’

 

‘No, he just did it.’  That sounded right. Christo never stayed angry for long. Theo, on the other hand, could hold a grudge forever.

 

‘Well, have you fixed his Lego?’

 

‘No.’

 

‘Perhaps you should.’ 

 

‘OK. But are we having dinner?’

 

‘Soon.’  

 

His shoulders lifted and fell in a sigh, and when she looked up again, he was gone.  

 

The outline of a head was appearing on the page. She pulled the mirror over so she could see herself. The crack in the glass ran diagonally from her ear, through the plane of her cheek, splitting her top lip, and dislocating her jaw. Once she could have turned that reflection into some clever, Cubist drawing, but after so long she didn’t really know where to start.

 

It was still echoing. The ‘no, she’s not’ from the back seat.

 

 

‘Mum, the boys are hungry.’

 

‘OK. Aren’t there some crackers?  They can have a snack. I’ll be there soon.’

 

The evening light had deepened and the garden behind Susanna was navy, the edges slowly falling into darkness.  

 

‘You said you were going to make nachos.’  

 

‘Yes. I will.’  It was one of the three meals Elena could pull together. She could assemble things – open a packet, pile in beans, grate cheese. After Mama died, she had attempted to do more, but everyone was grateful when she gave up trying to find her mother in the preparation of ribollita and ragu.

 

‘It’s nearly seven-thirty.’

 

‘Is it?’

 

‘Theo took Christo’s birthday money and said he had to buy him a new book.’

 

‘I thought Christo had fixed the book.’

 

‘He did, but Theo said there are words missing.’

 

‘Well, he can’t just take Christo’s money. I’ll be there in a minute.’

 

Elena looked back at the drawing. The face was still featureless. While she’d been figuring out how to do it, she’d filled in the space around the head with mindless, random doodles. The kowhai tree by the back fence, the kitchen window, a stand of irises, the fat, waxy leaves of the pukanui. Her hand was remembering shape and shade and proportion.

 

There was a sigh behind her. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll do it.’

 

She glanced in the mirror, but Susanna was already gone. She should have asked her about the algebra homework.

 

 

‘How long have you been out here?’

 

Evan’s voice startled her. She had to unfurl myself from the bench, let her vertebrae drop back into line down her back, her hand unwrap from the pencil.

 

‘I don’t know. What time is it?’

 

‘Nearly nine-thirty.’

 

‘I’ve been here a little while, I guess.’  Much longer than she’d thought. Elena hated this feeling of coming back into herself. Orienting herself back into the real world. She was never sure if she was glad to be back. She’d forgotten how jarring it was and she wondered if it was how black out drunks felt. Like they’d lost time. Afraid something important had happened and they’d ignored it. She hadn’t been aware of it until she had the children. ‘How was your meeting?’ 

 

‘It was a speech. At that conference. I told you about it.’

 

‘Right. Sorry. How did it go?’

 

Evan leaned in the doorway, watching her as he loosened his tie. The suit should have reminded her of where he’d been. He’d had to buy it when he won the award. He’d never owned one before and he only wore it if he absolutely had to.

 

‘It was OK. Formal, stuffy. They sat me at a table with all the dignitaries. Aren’t you cold?’

 

‘Not really,’ she lied. 

 

‘Theo said Susanna made them nachos for dinner.’

 

‘Yes,’ she said.  

 

‘Did you eat?’

 

‘Not yet. I’ll come now. It must be past Christo’s bedtime.’

 

‘He’s already in bed.’ 

 

She didn’t know if she could hear a note of accusation in his voice, or if she was applying it herself.  

 

‘That’s – out of character,’ she said. Christo would still be going at midnight if they let him.

 

‘It sounds like they’ve had a bit of a dust-up. Something about a book, and Theo cutting up Christo’s birthday money. Susanna wasn’t very clear. She’s crying over her homework.’

 

‘Oh, for god’s sake.’  Elena stood up from the chair. ‘Why does Theo always have to escalate everything?  This all started over Lego.’  

 

Evan moved around the pile in the doorway and came to stand by her at the bench. She waited for him to touch her back or rub her neck, but he just stood and looked down at the sketch.  

 

‘What are you working on?’

 

‘It’s nothing. Just a doodle.’  The drawing looked awkward when she saw it through his eyes. A jumble of random plants and household objects, floating around a face that was featureless apart from a jagged fracture line.  

 

‘It’s … enigmatic,’ he said. ‘A little bit disturbing. Is it a self-portrait?  The shape of the face is yours.’

 

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

 

He nodded, silent, and she realised that she needed him to say something. Not about the drawing – she knew that was just a practice run – but about the fact that she was drawing again at all. A welcome back.  

 

‘I’d better go and help Susanna sort out that algebra,’ Evan said. 

 

‘OK.’ Elena began putting the pencils away, one eye on the portrait. It was hard to tell if it looked like she was being pulled apart or put back together.