The Brush-Off by Shane Maloney

The pose was blush-makingly provocative, anatomically explicit. The artist just had to be bonking her teenage ears off.
    I did some quick mental arithmetic. At the time he painted the picture, Victor Szabo must have been at least sixty-five. The old goat.
    Five minutes later I was back at the Botanical with four dollars eighty worth of Dutch courage in my hand, making eye contact with Salina Fleet.
    She waved me over, making space at the table. ‘What did you say your name was, again?’ she demanded, her way of being smart. I didn’t doubt I was already tucked away in Sal’s mental Filofax, cross-referenced against future contingency. Everyone was talking at once, bellowing into the general din. Art scene party time. ‘Saw you at the CMA,’ she half-shouted. ‘Thought you were gone.’
    â€˜So did I,’ I said. ‘When that guy landed on me.’
    She laughed and bit her lip at the same time, a cornered look in her eyes. I rapidly changed the subject to the only other thing I could think of. ‘Got sidetracked by Fiona Lambert.’
    She relaxed. ‘The Black Widow, we call her.’ I bent closer, the better to hear her, and the bare skin of our forearms touched. A little spark of static electricity shot between us. ‘Better watch yourself there.’
    â€˜Why?’
    She was even tighter than me. Not that we were drunk. And so what if we were? The waiter came and stuck a menu in front of my face. It was the sort you read right to left. Everything on offer was either char-grilled, stir-fried, snow-pead, or came with sheep’s cheese. What I really wanted to taste was the waxy fruit of Salina’s apricot lips.
    â€˜Go on,’ I urged. ‘Tell me.’ Keep her talking until we found some common ground, that was the strategy. ‘Why do you call Fiona Lambert the Black Widow?’
    A thin-lipped, imperious-beaked bloke was squeezed in on the other side of Salina. I’d met him at the CMA but his name escaped me. When he heard Fiona Lambert’s name, he pricked up his ears and leaned over. ‘They call her that,’ he whispered in an accent that sounded like it came from the same place as my beer, ‘because of the rumour that Victor Szabo died, shall we say, on the job with her.’
    He had a bracket like a Borgia pontiff in a Titian portrait. To hear him properly, I had to lean even closer to Salina, so I kept up the questions. ‘They were lovers, were they?’
    â€˜She modelled for him, slept with him, buried him, wrote the book on him, is curating his retrospective,’ said Salina with what sounded suspiciously like envy. ‘She practically invented him.’
    â€˜And now he’s about to be the next big thing, eh?’ I said.
    â€˜Bigger than Sir Ned Kelly himself, if the Black Widow has anything to do with it,’ confirmed the Pope’s nose.
    By that stage, I could’ve eaten a nun’s bum through a cane chair. We moved on to the Koonunga Hill cabernet shiraz. Food arrived, cross-hatched from the grill, and I sawed into my fillet of salmon.
    â€˜A brutal deconstruction of mordant reality,’ declaimed Salina.
    â€˜Beg pardon?’ I chewed.
    â€˜A sundering of the constituent components of antipodean materiality.’ She sucked in her cheeks and tried to look severe and authoritative.
    â€˜Eh?’ I popped a french fry into my mouth.
    â€˜The insertion into a distinctively Australian sensibility of the universalising impulse of an internationalist form.’
    At last I got it. She was doing a Fiona Lambert impression. Quoting, I took it, catchphrases from her book on Victor Szabo.
    â€˜An unflinching critic of the mundane,’ piped up the schnoz, getting in on the act.
    â€˜ A Fierce Vision ,’ we all chortled in chorus.
    Holding it up with the best of them, I was. Who’d’ve known that three hours ago I’d never heard of this Szabo bloke. This art business