Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [105]
When he finished speaking, Anna was sobbing. Saverio, his eyes dry, his hands steady, eased the car back onto the road and drove them back to the house.
It was dusk when they arrived. The party was still in force on the verandah.
‘Have you got my bloody whisky?’ Dawn called out to them.
‘We forgot,’ Anna yelled back. She was looking at her face in the rear-view mirror. She took a compact from her purse and applied powder to her face.
‘How do I look?’
Like a child, he wanted to answer, you look like a child. ‘You look fine.’
He didn’t acknowledge anyone on his way to the bedroom. He closed the door behind him, shutting out the laughter and jokes and talk. On the bed lay a small square canvas. It was of his own children when they were toddlers on the beach. Matty was naked, plonked down in the sand, Adelaide standing next to her brother in pink undies. The colours were intense, garish blues and greens, flaming reds and yellows. His children’s faces were elongated, distorted but recognisable nevertheless. Adelaide looked bored, impatient. Matty’s dough-like baby face stared blankly out at him. Leo had painted them that first year that he and Julian had moved up to the coast. Saverio, Rachel and the kids had spent a week with them over the summer holidays, a week in which Leo had cooked for them every night and had entertained Rachel with his wild stories, the gossip and slander from the past, extravagant narratives of sexual escapades and orgies. During the day Leo and Julian would take the kids swimming or into town while Rachel and Saverio took long walks in the bushland, found near-empty coves to swim in, read books, had sex and did crosswords.
There was a knock on the door and Julian entered.
‘Dawn’s all good. I found a bottle of Jameson’s in one of the kitchen cupboards.’ Julian looked at the canvas in Saverio’s hands. ‘I thought you might want to keep it.’
Saverio wanted to say, I don’t want to talk tomorrow, there is nothing I can say. ‘Thank you.’
‘Come out for a drink. Our bark is worse than our bite.’
Saverio shook his head. ‘Nah, I want to ring Rachel, I want to check on home.’
The service began with a recording of Maria Callas singing an aria from Tosca, and then it was Dawn who first stepped onto the platform. Before she spoke she walked to the back of the dais and took down the Australian flag. There was a burst of applause. Leo wouldn’t have wanted it, she explained to the shocked civil celebrant. This time there were no outlandish stories, no off-colour jokes or declarations. She told the assembled mourners of how she had first met Leo when they were volunteers at the Aboriginal Legal Centre in Fitzroy, of how frightened she had been of the Aboriginal men, of how Leo had never succumbed to white guilt, how one youth had hurled a barrage of abuse at them one afternoon to which Leo had stood his ground and answered, ‘You pay me and you can call me a white cunt—but if I am a volunteer and you insult me then you’re a black cunt.’
Tom Jords spoke next, about Leo’s work and activism in those first terrible years of the AIDS epidemic, Leo’s sense of humour, how his flat in the Cross was always left open in case any of the working girls or boys needed a safe house to escape to. Margaret Cannon got up after Tom and read Leo’s favourite poem, ‘To Posterity’ by Bertolt Brecht.
Then it was Saverio’s turn to speak. He scanned the crowd. Mel was there in the back, in a black dress, a chunky silver crucifix around her neck, holding hands with an Islander woman who wore black jeans and a black T-shirt. His eyes came to rest on Anna. He spoke to her. To her and to Julian. He began by telling them that Leo’s real name was Luigi, how Leo had hated that name because it was yelled at him with such derision and spite by the Aussie boys. ‘Once he started university, Luigi