Ava Marchette
Ava Marchette was everywhere: in his bed – figuratively speaking – and in his head. Her presence was enough to keep John awake for the second night running. Not only that. Tonight he was thinking about scone dough and cookie cutters. What the hell? He needed to call off the portrait before things got any weirder, if only to save his sanity, which was clearly at risk, as evidenced by his cookie-cutter meltdown in the kitchen.
With no official offer and acceptance, and no money changing hands to make the contract binding, it wasn’t too late to renege on the agreement. And why hadn’t he talked about his fee? That was how taken aback he’d been with the unexpected arrival of the woman he couldn’t stop thinking about. He’d been remiss not to discuss the cost of a commissioned work: he needed every cent he could get, these days, especially with the bank circling. His father’s affair with racing form, along with too many careless financial decisions, had taken a decade to undo. Making matters worse, Katie had handed over a property to Blair whose wife, with her fancy ideas, had left Blair with a debt so serious he’d had to ask John for help. So, yeah, some extra money never went astray.
This portrait idea was madness and yet, from the moment he’d clapped eyes on the woman at his front door, John felt like he’d been sucker-punched. Before he knew it she was in his house, smiling and charming him, wanting to strike up conversations and bake scones. Basically cracking the anti-social shell John existed in these days.
Evenings had never been John’s friend, not since his brain had mysteriously shifted into artistic overdrive while he’d slept in a hospital bed. Whereas the soft stillness of a country evening once serenaded him to sleep after a day working the land, his nights had become a frustrating form of exhaustion as he tried turning off the creative chaos that cluttered his mind. Over the years, doctors had prescribed antidepressants, not that John ever took one: no pill was capable of curing his melancholy. The only remedy for that was getting his old life back. While that hadn’t happened, at least he no longer closed his eyes at night wishing he’d never woken up from the coma.
He knew he’d left for a weekend away, capable and fit. He’d returned to Ivy-May confused, feeling like a stranger in his own home. Life went on around him. He became a father in his twenty-first year. But rather than the key to the door, his family had locked him out, excluding him from discussions and decision-making as if they considered him no longer able to contribute. He witnessed arguments he didn’t understand between a family that remained guarded and wary around him.
Like John, they’d struggled to grasp his reality. He’d become an outsider in his own home, the guy who arrives halfway through a movie. The burst aneurysm had not only flipped the world John loved on its head, he was constantly torn between two passions. When art emerged the winner, John accepted the outcome. His family did not. He moved on and learned to cope with their disappointment in him by hiding, until the world found him and the headlines began. John Tate: accidental artist.
It was not unusual for John to start the day in bed, awake and thinking about painting. But to be in bed, awake and thinking about painting Ava Marchette? Now that was different. John was eagerly replaying snapshots from their time together and conjuring up a never-ending loop of Ava in various poses for the portrait. He placed her in different settings around the property and pondered ways to tease out that strong spirit, her smile, her seriousness. She was reigniting his passion and setting his imagination on fire – and that wasn’t the only thing when he pictured a young version of Ava in his mind: a blaze of red hair, a complexion flushed with freckles, a figure sylphlike but fit. His imagination had her astride a horse, then by the creek, lying on a picnic blanket. He even saw her curled up on a bed reading a book, riding the ridgeline to exercise the dogs, and making sausages in the old meat house. Sausages? That’s weird.
The woman joked about being old, but John didn’t see Ava in that way, either in his mind or in real life. Mature? Yes. Worldly? Yes. Graceful, like Grace Kelly? Yes! So, John mate, how hard could she be to paint?
Picasso’s opinion of the sitting process had made John wonder what lay behind Ava’s attractive outer layer. At one minute she seemed so poised and determined, but at the next she was self-conscious about the tiny scar above her left eyebrow. John could only assume the significance was in its origin, rather than its appearance. Ava Marchette was a woman of many expressions, perhaps with as many life stories, and John hoped his growing fascination and inexplicable need to know more about her would be satisfied during the sitting. So, too, he hoped, his hankering for more scones.
In anticipation of applying that first brushstroke to canvas, he grabbed the alarm clock from his side table to set it. Maybe while he waited for Ava to arrive he’d tidy the front path and weed the herb garden at the back door. He glanced at the clock, looking forward to morning, and saw it was already five.
Close enough, Tate, and nothing wrong with leftover scones for breakfast, either.
*
As his knife scooped out the remnants from the jam jar, John made a mental note to restock. If not for the early hour he might have nipped over to see Blair – his son always had homemade preserves. He’d also have a freezer full of meat, the carcass of a misbehaving heifer. Those that failed to conform took a bullet, but only when their heads were down and focused on the feed. John never enjoyed the kill, but that was the way of the country and fresh meat was like nothing else. None of that cling-wrapped supermarket meat that he had been forced to buy during his brief stint in the city. Maybe he could whip up something for dinner and have Blair over.
He missed his family – his son – and what Ava Marchette had said about the kitchen table being the heart of any home had been true until something years ago had turned the Tates’ table into a time bomb. His earliest memories were of a dinner table like every other family’s at mealtime, everyone speaking with their mouths full, spluttering over town gossip or discussing business. Then someone, usually John’s father, would make a comment and whoosh!
Often, Colin would be cut out of conversations and constantly shooed away from Blair. Whether it was to feed his grandson or cuddle him, it was as if Marjorie didn’t trust her husband with a small child. John assumed it was a hangover from Peter’s death. His brother had been five at the time. Did that explain why Marjorie stopped her husband mid-sentence so often, and Katie barely spoke to him at all?
Women had worn the pants in the Tate household. Colin held no power, his views talked over by an opinionated wife. The only thing his parents had agreed on was the hiring of cooks, as their son’s future was not in the kitchen. His affable, salt-of-the-earth father had changed more than anyone else after John’s illness. He’d seemed to grow older, quieter, his appearance that of a man without influence in his own home: shoulders hunched, head down, muttering to himself. He could leave a room mid-conversation and no one would notice. Eventually someone would ask, ‘Where’s Colin?’ but within seconds they’d be back to what they were saying or doing.
Following Colin’s departure from the dinner table each night, Marjorie would break the awkward silence by asking the same question: ‘And how was your day, John, dear?’ Why she asked, he didn’t know. His answer never changed. By then John’s days were all the same and the family wasn’t interested in the particulars of his life any more than they were in the detail of each painting he laboured over. Dinner conversation inevitably shifted from his art to cattle or the B-and-B business Katie and Marjorie were growing together. Katie was never short of news from town, especially after she’d established the Candlebark Creek Progress Association, and a growing Blair continued to amuse everyone with his antics. No matter what his age, that boy reined in everyone’s bad moods. The three Tate men were all very different.
Thinking about Blair prompted John to head over to him to say g’day. His son was keen to secure some tourist-bus business and he’d been after John to brainstorm ideas, which he quite enjoyed, but he worried about his son investing too much too quickly. Blair wasn’t careless with his finances. He understood that to make money he had to spend some.
Yes, he’d definitely go over and see Blair, check out the new addition to the wedding marquee. If nothing else, his son would have scones. Thanks to Ava Marchette, John had developed a hankering for the things. Maybe he’d try baking some of his own. Three, two, one. He remembered that much.