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.Put him down, put on a dressing-gown, back to the dining room, eat dinner then put on a load of washing.And then, finally, find thirty minutes or so to slip into the spare room to do the second thing she’s been aching to do all day: log on to the net-banking site and see if she can do some figuring out.Play around with the mortgage recalculator.Check the interest against the principal.For this moment, in this pocket of breathing space, she lets that tearing sensation go all the way down until it hits inviolable rock bottom; somewhere to push off from, back to the surface.Then she opens her eyes.She’s in full command of her hands again now.She eases the left one from the back of Daniel’s heavy head, and carefully, expertly, slips off her watch.White SpiritThe woman artist, Mandy, tells me on the Tuesday they need another day to finish the clothing in the foreground of the mural.She’s leaning against the table telling me this, rolling a cigarette.She’s got a look I would call high-maintenance: hair with lots of startling colour, stiff with gel and arranged to slope here and there, multiple earrings up her ear, lace-up combat boots.It’s a look designed to suggest she’s impoverished yet bohemian and individualistic, and nobody round here wears anything like what she’s got on.She and her boyfriend, the other artist, drive in each morning from another part of town, a suburb where you can get a double-shot latte early in the morning sitting on an upturned milk crate outside a cafe.The residents of this estate took a few surreptitious looks at this pair when they first arrived, and have chosen to stay out of their way since.We’ll have to invite some in specially, over the next couple of days, for the photo documentation we need.Some casual shots of the artists chatting and interacting with residents, facilitating important interchange.Community ownership.An appreciation of process.It’s all there in the grant evaluation forms.Mandy flips open some of the books she’s brought and taps an illustration.It’s of a couple of women in Turkey, standing at some festival in regional costumes, the embroidery on their blouses and hats and vests achingly bright.‘That’s what we’re after,’ she says, dragging on her rollie.‘We’re focusing on getting that design right.All the details and colours.See the women there?’She gestures to the mural, where her partner’s painting in the figures of three women.They’re prominent, next to the four laughing Eritrean children, who are posing with a basketball.‘Should that be a soccer ball?’ I say, half to myself.‘Sorry?’‘Should those kids be holding a soccer ball instead? They’ve actually formed a whole team; they play on the oval on a Sunday afternoon.I think soccer’s more their thing.’I might be wrong.That might be the Somalis.But a furrow of concern appears on her brow.‘Do they? That wasn’t in our brief.But we’ll change it, don’t worry.We’ll just paint over the orange and make it black and white.’‘I don’t want to put you out, or start telling you how to do your job.’‘Not at all,’ she says, grinning.‘That’s what we’re here for.Cultural appropriateness.’ She exhales smoke and calls.‘Jake! The African kids — it’s soccer, not basketball.’He stops painting, stands up and stretches, and frowns at the mural.‘Do you reckon we’ll have to change their singlets then?’They both stand silently for a few moments, considering the image before them.‘Nah,’ she says finally.‘Leave the singlets.Nobody’ll notice that.’They’d said in their interview, these two, that meeting the local community was their chief interest in applying for the job.They’d done similar things elsewhere — one at the Koori health centre, one at the credit cooperative, a portfolio of photos from a wall mural at a community market up in Queensland — and they said what kept them doing it was the rich sense of connection you achieved working alongside the very people you were depicting in your mural, and the growing sense of community ownership through collaboration.When they talked about the celebration of diversity, and how excited they were about all the different cultural groups represented on the estate, I’d felt the centre director, on the interview panel beside me, mentally checking boxes.Now I look in sometimes, on my way to teaching a class or driving the community bus somewhere, and I don’t want to hang around.They don’t seem too excited now.There’s nobody there but the two of them, with their big paint-splattered tarps and their ghetto-blaster, music echoing round the empty basketball court as the mural gradually takes shape.Even the kids who usually come in here to shoot baskets after school are giving them a wide berth [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]