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him close. ‘We’ll sell the campervan, Lee. We’ll buy a painting.’ She has seen him dying and reached out to save him. That’s what mothers are for.
    But even as he watches, Chloe, shorter by a half head than usual because she’s stooped in supplication, nods at something the pale-skinned woman is saying, then catches Michael’s eye and points a finger at BeachHead . He rushes forwards and sticks a red spot to its frame. They wander, Chloe Gwyther and the woman, Harry following at a distance behind. Michael, a scampering monkey now, finds ever more theatrical ways to lay on the red spots.
    The woman buying his paintings is the woman who assured him she wouldn’t. Bright eyed beneath shoulder-length hair striped with silver. Chloe Gwyther is thought attractive, but she looks like a broiled crawfish standing next to this woman, who nods now at Big Red Bite . Chloe semaphores to Michael and he goes to the painting, bends his knees, lowers his headand lays on the red spot with the solemnity of a general pinning on a medal.
    The tolling of the bell has stopped, St Paul’s Cathedral having told the town it is 9 pm. In the silence a lie has also stopped. Harry Broome has sold a painting and the lie of art school is behind him. The lie he and his friends have told each other a thousand times: they are artists because they say they are artists and they paint; it has nothing to do with any judgement the world can confer. What the world says doesn’t matter because the world is peopled by tiny, retreating souls whose approval is no validation of their art. This is the lie they tell out loud while silently, desperately, wanting the world to buy their paintings.
    Every one of them knows it is a lie. Harry often thinks this is what it must have been like to be part of a Communist regime or a Church: all secretly aware of the inherent fallacy of the faith, all secretly aware of the awareness of others of the inherent fallacy of the faith, yet spruiking the faith, morning, noon and night.
    Harry has sold a painting. He looks around at his works. They have become strong again, their colours beautiful and their cast profound.
    A journalist from The Age in an aqua cashmere cardigan takes him into Chloe Gwyther’s office and sits cross-legged on Chloe’s desk while he struggles to tell her his influences, motivations, aspirations. Where does he get his ideas from? He holds back from telling her Picasso and Freud. It is a secret, and would make him sound derivative and maybe an obvious plagiarist. ‘Who can say where ideas come from?’ He stares at her, shaking his head while he lifts his open hands towards the ceiling. ‘I think them up.’
    His sister, Amelia, turns up in fancy stitched rodeo boots. She stands in front of Fun with Shoes twirling her fingers in herhair with her eyes squinted. ‘The boots with the purple hearts. Whatever happened to them?’
    â€˜Mum gave them to the Salvos.’
    â€˜The Salvos? What do bag ladies want with four-inch heels?’ She makes no mention of what the purple hearts are being used for in the painting. Did she know all along he was in that wardrobe?
    A group surrounds him and Chloe Gwyther unrolls a hand towards him and says, ‘This is the young man we’re all so excited about.’ Three people congratulate him simultaneously, but he only hears the silver-striped woman say, ‘Ah, the anonymous kid. Hello.’
    Harry feels wildly beholden to her. She has saved him and he feels a surge of gratitude. To express this gratitude he looks her up and down, slowly, showily, with a lecher’s cocked lip, as a compliment to her beauty, her unfaded sexuality. Those brightly sad eyes behind wire-rimmed, square-lensed glasses. She blinks, waiting until he has completed his gaudy perusal, and says, ‘Oh, kid.’ A reproach that reddens his face.
    â€˜Harry … Mireille.’ Chloe shows each to the other with