Visionaries, or The Cello of Katerina Valentine - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 23: Essentially Creative
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Helen Barnes-Bulley
MAIN STREET. MIDDAY. THE TOWN THRIVES ON THE INVASION. Residents are spruced up like the workers at the dairy, just in case. Teenage girls lolled about in the main street along the beachfront wearing as little as possible, dreaming of Hollywood Boulevard and Venice Beach.
‘I saw a couple of potentials today – a blonde girl and her friend the redhead ... found them in the shopping mall in the main street. I think they have real ... vividness, you know, real ... freshness and organic kind of talent ... nothing too forced, or trained. I think they make the best film actors – like de Sica and Rossellini, they used real people you know, not actors. These girls, well, they're just really fresh and they just happen to look real good on the camera. It helps, but it's not the main thing, you know, I want to stress that, it's the real-ness I'm after.'
‘I have a hearing problem,' Sylvia explains when Larissa joins her one afternoon at the water's edge. Max is throwing bits of driftwood for the dog.
‘Can you hear me now?'
Larissa raises her voice, emphasising each word. Sylvia smiles.
‘Yes, I can hear you.'
Larissa stretches out her arms as if she might embrace the sea.
‘I love it at this time of the day. The water is the colour of fish scales, almost no colour really, but it gleams, don't you think?'
Later his mother says, ‘I like her. I think she likes you.'
‘She's the kind of girl who likes most people.'
‘I think she's more discriminating.'
Max is afraid to think anything too much.
FUNNY HOW WE USE THE WORD 'BOMB' IN OUR LANGUAGE. I'd like to put a bomb under the government, people say. Or the film made a bomb at the box office, or the film bombed at the box office – two different meanings – or that dress must have cost a bomb. We should bomb the whole bloody lot of them was his mother's verdict on the local council when the news came out about the dairy.
It was Larissa who inadvertently let Max know about it.
‘Your mother said you organised a protest last year when it looked like the dairy might be sold.'
‘Oh ... it wasn't just me. I got it started, sort of. If the dairy closed the town would die. There's nothing else except logging.'
‘What, up in those forests?'
She turned away from the sea to look at the mountains.
‘They stopped logging a couple of years ago. But some people want it opened up again ... people have to earn a living.'
The sea was like streaky blue milk. The moon coming up, a thin slice of silver foil.
‘It seems like a better way to earn a living, producing butter, than chopping down trees, doesn't it?'
The thoughtful earnest look on her face is irresistible but he tries to look cool. Like Javez.
‘Going to the dairy every day watching the women in their caps, and the men with the milk vats and the machines – it's so new for me. That's why I'm upset about them closing it down.'
Max decides to make a bomb. A bomb is power, after all. He's had experience with explosives. He worked on a mining site after Josie died. He tried to forget her by doing the usual things – taking off into the desert, getting jobs in odd places where nobody knew him, drinking hard, sleeping out under the stars. After a few months he decided the coast was his place. Better supervising bricks of butter than ripping apart mountains and gouging out their insides with machines.
At least the cows gave their milk willingly. Well, here they did. Hideously inflated super cows hadn't reached the Baranda Valley yet.
It made a moral difference to Max.
Max was a moral man.
The thing is: he doesn't want to actually blow anybody up. He's too soft-hearted for that.
The bomb has to be pure. It can't be contaminated by causing actual pain.
Its metaphorical impact must be absolute.
JAVEZ IS GOING OVER THE DAY'S RUSHES. ‘It's great, isn't it, this kind of stuff, the way you can put these things in words and then wham! You find a guy – or sometimes a girl, too – who can turn these words into their visual equivalent, yeah, that's what ... find the images to match the vocab, man. Like that guy did with the film that won the Booker prize ... or maybe it was the book that won the prize but the film won prizes too – I mean, lots of them, with the desert and the plane and the woman in the white scarf. Wow, that thing had so many metaphors I just lost count.'
Max lit the fuse and began running. That was when he saw Larissa, coming in the side gate and heading for the bomb.
‘Don't go in there!'
He wondered how much time he had left to defuse it.
Larissa stopped and stared at him. His eyes were wild. She hadn't seen this before. She liked it. His dark hair was tousled, little bleached hairs on his chest exposed above his shirt buttons.
‘I'm looking for the stone out of my ring.'
Max stared at the tiny silver casing on her finger.
He looked at his watch. A minute. He felt around beneath the steps.
Half a minute.
There it was: the tiny red stone. Perhaps there was still time to race in and – but no. He closed his hand over the stone and then the bomb exploded, knocking him across the yard, tearing apart the skin and bone on his index finger of his right hand as it did so. Larissa screamed once and then she was silent. She watched the flames leap into the air, glass shattering, machinery twisting and shivering.
Max held out the stone to her in his ribboned finger.
‘Oh Max,' she said.
‘I'd better go,' he said. There were sirens.
‘Javez will be so upset that he didn't get it on film.'
Max grinned.
He kissed her then. She kissed him back. The crowd was about to overtake them.
Will I hear from you?'
‘Somehow,' he said and was gone, wrapping his finger in the cuff of his shirt.
So here we are where we started, with mad Max, an exploded finger, an old truck and a worried dog.
‘You know, so we're back to where we started and we've got this real circularity thing going, you know, this kind of interconnectedness-of-all-things sort of Buddhist feel ... this mandala-like endless wheel-of-life events kind of thing where you realise the end is in the beginning and the beginning is reflected in the end and the middle is where you put the narrative and the character development and the bombs and the action and stuff.'
'WHY DID YOU LEAVE TOWN?' THE LOCAL CONSTABLE PUSHED AROUND SOME PAPERS HIS DESK.
‘Think I planted the bomb?'
The constable smiled, a little uncertainly.
‘Well, you could have ... but then, so could anybody.'
He looked down at Max's hand.
‘Better get that looked at,' he said. ‘Did that cutting wood, did ya?'
‘No.'
The constable held Max's gaze for a few moments and then went back to his papers.
Larissa was sitting on the veranda of the blue house with Max's mother. The dog jumped out of the back of the truck and headed for the water. Larissa stood up. A small explosion inside Max. A small bomb.
‘It's the shock,' Larissa said. ‘It's just a reaction after watching that bomb go off.'
‘Yeah, that's what it is,' he said.
It was the first lie he'd told for a long time. ♦