Read Online Stealing Picasso by Anson Cameron - Free Book Online Page B

promises Marcel a time will come when it’s wanted. It will hang in a children’s ward, he says. Or the foyer of Sony. Your portrait, in the palatial foyer of Sony Corporation headquarters.
    Turton hugs him as he leaves the studio and whispers, ‘Acquittal.’ He nods wisely at him as if it’s a done deal. Sometimes on the way home after these torturous sessions Marcel is surprised to find a dance step creeping back into his walk. And though the portrait is not one of his better efforts, Turton looks at it for a long time after Marcel is gone, smiling.

    On the suburban fringe, a place of woodyards and used-car lots and scrap-metal recyclers, in a vast metal shed chirping under the hammer of a wind that carries the fecal stench of dairy farms, Marcel Leech is watching Turton Pym paint a fangedskunk onto the Harley Davidson of a Stinking Pariah named Larry Skunk Monk. Turton is the artist of choice of the Stinking Pariahs MC and has leased this shed in outer Pakenham in order to go about his business quietly, undiscovered by the art world.
    Marcel often accompanies Turton into the wilds to this shed and his airbrush operation. Feeling comfortable in the cathedral darkness and the company of his friend, he dresses again as Michael Jackson and talks gently in his falsetto while he watches Turton work. He sits in an armchair Turton has reclaimed from a dumpster, his schoolgirl voice barely audible over the chug of the compressor.
    â€˜The day I left school, I was fourteen, expelled. Father O’Brien gave me a ride down to the local Safeways. Said he’d talk to a man he knew. I waited in the car, watching the front of Safeways, people in and out like flies, all of them dull-faced – shopping, you know. Toothpaste, cantaloupes, Tim-damn-Tams. I started to feel real sick. Father O’Brien came outside with the man and introduced me and we shook hands and the man said because of Father O’Brien I had a job and if I worked hard and was reliable then la-de-da one day I’d be … I don’t even know what. I was crying, whole place swimming in front of me, the Safeways man too. Next day when I started I couldn’t even recognise which one he was to report to.’
    Marcel sips his coffee. Turton is kneeling before the Harley blowing softly to dry the angry skunk he is painting.
    â€˜They had me hauling trolleys of groceries from out back in the storage area into the store itself. “Pick up any cabbage leaf you drop.” “Customers have right of way.” That first day I started dreaming that Michael was going to come into my Safeways wearing his black Fedora, a bodyguard either side of him, three abreast down the aisle, and hold out his hand to me, and say, “Come with me, Marcel.” It was a vision. I keptit up for about a year. Him walking in there, all the shoppers with their mouths open. In the last months I really had to screw up my face and concentrate to get it to play. Till one day there I was, rice and pasta aisle, my face screwed up, trying to get Michael to appear, and this old biddy tapped me on the arm with a bag of linguini and asked me if I was all right. Told me to sit on the floor so I didn’t fall. That was the last time I ever had a vision of Michael coming for me.’
    Marcel, looking at Turton kneeling there, says, ‘You must think I’m pretty weird.’
    Turton puckers his lips in judgement. ‘No. Everyone hates Safeways.’
    Two motorbikes pull up outside and their engines rev high before dying. Wal Wolverine Symonds and Larry Skunk Monk enjoy their footsteps echoing as they walk through the dark of the warehouse. Listening to the approaching steps, Marcel wraps his arms about himself.
    â€˜It’s only the Stinking Pariahs,’ Turton tells him. Marcel’s eyes widen and his throat clicks.
    â€˜I’m painting this skunk for one of them.’ Turton tries to calm him.
    They step into the light, denim and