Cairo by Chris Womersley

that of Pablo Picasso’s lurid
Weeping Woman
, a painting much in the press lately on account of the National Gallery of Victoria’s decision to purchase it.
    Canvases both painted and bare were stacked on the floor against the wall, and there were at least a dozen others under the bench. For an impressionable country boy like me — who had for so long dreamed of an urban, bohemian life — such a studio was utterly compelling: its smell, the spring-loaded energy, a sense that things were created right here. The wonder I felt could not have been more exquisite than that of a surgeon’s upon encountering his first wildly beating heart. The pug sidled into the room and began snuffling about my ankles like sea water around an outcrop of rocks.
    I was preparing to leave when a painting lying flat on the end of the bench caught my eye. It was a rectangular canvas, taller than it was wide. It was a portrait of a woman seated in front of a wavering blue background with her arms crossed on her stomach. Her hands were lumpen against a dark dress and her face was misshapen, as if hewn from a difficult clay. Her brown hair was an indistinct bob. The woman’s pose was defensive and in her eyes there nestled a challenge, as if she had sat for the portrait under sufferance. The paint was thickly applied. I peered at it, then back to the unfinished work on the easel. It was unlikely they were the work of the same hand. Neither was signed, as far as I could see.
    A cough at my back startled me, and I wheeled around to find Gertrude hovering in the doorway. I had the overwhelming feeling that she had been observing me for several minutes. She was not even five feet tall, flat-chested, her body like that of a child’s. Adding to this impression of girlishness was her habit of grasping the sleeves of her white top in her fists. She had worried at them somuch that the sleeves were frayed.
    She crouched to pick up the dog and held it to her cheek, whispering to it in a language that sounded alien to my ears. The creature was so fat, it was tricky for her to hold. Its hind legs dangled against her stomach.
    I began to apologise, but she waved my words away with a bony hand. ‘Did you meet my precious Buster?’ she asked, scratching the pug beneath its chin.
    The dog’s yellow eyes half closed in ecstasy, and its growl became an insistent throb. It fell asleep. Gertrude looked from me back to the painting I had been inspecting.
    â€˜Max told me Edward was a painter,’ I said to explain my intrusion.
    She hoisted the dog. ‘Yes, he is.’
    I gestured around me at the paint-spattered bench, the walls covered in pictures. ‘It’s wonderful. This studio.’
    She laughed, somewhat derisively, I thought. ‘This is where it all happens.’
    I indicated the portrait lying on the bench. ‘Is that one of Edward’s?’
    As if on cue, from the far side of the warehouse drifted the raised voices of Edward and Max.
    â€˜No, no, no,’ Max was saying. ‘That’s where you are wrong, my friend. Oswald was set up all the way.’
    â€˜They’re always arguing, those two,’ said Gertrude.
‘Men
. Always trying to prove they’re right. As if they don’t have enough already.’
    She pointed at the colourful abstract painting on the easel. ‘That one is Edward’s.’
    I hmmed in a manner intended to sound both perplexed and appreciative, a vocal equivalent of tilting one’s head while touching a finger to one’s chin.
    â€˜Tell me, Tom. Do you know much about art?’
    â€˜No. I mean, I studied it a bit at high school, but that’s all.’I thought of old Mr Johnson in his tweed jacket (staring dreamily through a classroom window, as if willing it to transform into those of the Chartres Cathedral), trying to infuse sweaty schoolchildren with admiration for the Renaissance.
    â€˜Which of the two do you prefer? Which do