The next day the three friends met in Bee's studio space. This was a temporary room that had been constructed in the workshops by the technicians. It had been made by simply building an open topped particle-board box in the corner of the metal working area, complete with lockable door. As the boards were only a couple of meters tall, and the workshop had an eight-metre open, lattice-work warehouse roof, complete with skylights, this seemed a little redundant, but Bee loved the ability to seclude herself away from the rest of the college. Her work was mostly watercolours and strange, flimsy, multi-media hangings, so she'd roofed her space with heavy duty plastic to keep out dust. As to the noise of the workshops (including the weekly subterranean rumble of the bronze furnace), a set of noise cancelling earphones and an iPod cranked up to max kept interruptions to a minimum. In fact, so good was her sound reduction system that the only way Cat could summon her for coffee was to hammer on her door for at least five minutes or get Bev to give her a leg up so she could poke her head under the plastic and throw things at her friend.
"I like that," said B2, squinting at a wispy collection of transparent planes and lines hanging in the center of the space. She raised her hand to touch it and Bee quickly stopped her.
"Don't touch!" She moved between Bev and her sculpture. "Microfilm. Super thin balsa wood. Silk. Remember last time?"
Bev did, indeed, remember last time. Bursting into Bee's space she'd gone headfirst into a hanging sculpture whilst talking and ended with it stuck across her face (microfilm tended to adhere to warm surfaces). She'd inhaled some of the film and several small pieces of splinter-thin balsa wood and almost choked before the others pounded her back to get the wood up. She moved to the edge of the room and waited whilst Bee began the intricate steps needed to prepare 'proper' coffee.
Her studio space was the envy of all of the students in the school. Not only was it full of light, due to the lack of a roof, but it had a coffee machine of such unsurpassed complication, chrome plating and important-looking gauges, that the studio technicians sometimes came in to watch Bee use it (and beg a coffee). It had a barista, Bee, Melbourne trained, and so knowledgeable, sophisticated and superior in manner that she would only ever make black coffee, served in white china demitasse cups, no milk, no sugar. She crushed any other requests with the disdainful raising of one eyebrow and a demeanour fit to freeze water.
Best of all, it had only one student, due to the school enrolling too many students one year and being forced to build a 'temporary' space. Enter bottom of the list Beatrice Zebrowski, who'd moved in and made the space her own, steadfastly refusing to give in to pressure to move into another crowded studio space. Support from her personal tutor ("a major and solitary talent"), and the fact that there really was no space meant that Bee was here for the foreseeable future.
"Still don't see why you won't let me move in with you," muttered B2.
There was silence, then Bee made her raised-eyebrow, freezing water expression, glanced at her friend's hands (covered in paint), her shoes (covered in mud) and her overalls (covered in something-or-other), then at her pristine space. After a few moments Cat opened her mouth to add her request, then stopped when Bee looked at her and laughed, not even needing the eyebrow. She handed out three exquisite coffees in the considered pause, and everyone stopped to enjoy their drink.
"Okay, okay, point taken, let's see what everyone's done," said Bev, pulling out her art folder and spreading a couple of brightly coloured acrylic sketches on the floor. Bee added a single finely detailed pencil sketch and Cat slid a couple of heavy charcoal workings of Golem.
"Nice sense of movement there," said Bev, touching a charcoal sketch with her toe. "When did you do these?"
"Last night," said Cat, a little vaguely.
"After doing an all-nighter with that sculpture and chatting to your drunken friends?" continued Bev.
"Not to mention putting away all those easels and benches before you went home," added Bee. "Don't you ever sleep?"
Embarrassed, Cat picked up her pictures and changed subjects. "Any more news about the intruder?"
There were denials from both of her friends, and a suggestion that the prowler was, in fact a spurned, boy-obsessed, second year student mid-breakdown and well on the way to failing. Speculating on the identity of this love-sick female, they began to pack up their folios and head towards the lecture theatre.
................
The lecturer that day was one of the tribe of 'black clothed conceptual art-tossers from Melbourne', according to Bev. The artist, who made short films, hired others to make 'culturally important artefact-copies' for her, or hand-made coffee cups to the uninitiated. These she then placed half concealed in each shot and claimed they 'activated her practice'. Both Bev and Bee were unrelenting in their loathing of the work, while Cat, trying to be more sympathetic, merely found the films boring.
The lecture hall was half full, not bad for a Tuesday morning, and held the usual motley crew of keen first years, bored-looking second and third years and the occasional post-grad student, looking around condescendingly from their superior position, art-wise. There was also the political/conceptual art crew (or 'young wankers', as Bev called them), mainly black-clad, but carefully avoiding any hint of emo. Their loathing of Cat, and by extension Bee and Bev, dated from one of her first larger pieces on the parliament lawns, when she'd spelled out the word 'GRASS' five meters high in liquid fertilizer (she'd been deeply into naming things at that point in her art practice). Unfortunately, Cat's handwriting hadn't been up to par, and, four weeks later, the word 'CRASS' had appeared in big letters in the lush green grass in front of the parliament buildings. The young wankers had praised this as cutting-edge political criticism and claimed a world class revolutionary artist was concealed amongst their ranks, until Cat had quietly let the truth be known. Her subsequent interview with the Dean, following a letter from a 'concerned political activist', had cemented the dislike felt by the entire Addams Family felt for the conceptualist crew.
"Hang on," said Bee, cutting into their pleasant Tuesday morning reverie. "New blood!"
They looked where Bee was pointing, at the back of the lecture hall, where a middle-aged, middle height man was sitting, looking around the lecture hall with interest. His clothing, too, was nondescript: jeans, white tee shirt, shoulder bag, short black hair. Dark eyes and a medium-sized nose rounded off the figure.
"New post-grad," said Bee emphatically.
"Nah," said B2, "he's not sitting with any of the others. Too smart or not smart enough. Also, no logo on his shirt."
The others nodded with approval at Bev's analysis. A new post-grad would either be super smart and wearing a cool message on his shirt, or scruffy and unconcerned. The third possibility – that he was one of the smaller group of post grads suffering from a crippling fringe mental illness – seemed patently untrue.
"Mature Age Student?" suggested Cat. A real possibility. They came in all shapes and sizes, from deeply committed, through to pleasant but dreamy and out of touch, to genuinely unskilled (but paying through the nose for their place at the school).
"Too late in the year," pronounced Bee. "And they'd have at least been sniffing around my place for space."
"Cop?" mused Bev. Another possibility, what with the break-ins and the moderately high soft drug use at the school. As no-one really had any knowledge of the police (other than from inside a rubbish skip behind Banjo's), they all passed this suggestion over.
Cat began sketching the man, an almost reflex action for her.
"New tutor?" came from Bev. The school was one lecturer down, a painter, and she was always looking for someone to teach her new things.
"Nah," said Bee, "see previous answer re post-grads. Though I suppose he could be someone so good that he didn't need to play the Art School game. Anyone recognize him?"
All three turned their attention on the man, and he must have felt their regard, for he looked back at them with a frown and began muttering under his breath, before getting up and leaving the lecture hall.
"I know," said Cat with a grin. "The prowler!"
.....
True to Bee's predictions, the lecture was tedious in the extreme. At one point, Bev claimed that the short films shown as finished work were so boring that they were in fact interesting and tried to sit up and watch them wide-eyed and fascinated, but she ended up slumped and stupefied like all the other students, whispering and texting.
Leaving the lecture hall, the three couldn't contain their disgust at the work they'd seen. "Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap!" said Bee.
"Crappy crap crappola!" added Cat in a louder voice.
"Just crap," finished Bev, obviously exhausted by her effort to be interested.
At that moment the Young Wankers appeared out of another door, chattering excitedly. They stopped when they saw Bev and company, obviously bored.
"Too difficult for you Zebrowski?" asked Kimi, a tall, svelte girl with striking blue eyes and an artfully tousled asymmetric bob.
"Nah, just too boring," replied Bee over her shoulder as they walked towards her space.
"It's just 'cos you can't get your hands dirty with film," added Ben, in the black tee and jeans uniform of the YW. The three friends considered Ben to be almost as gorgeous as Guy DeVereaux, and he was a talented painter too ('Shame he's such a tosser', Bev had added)
The two groups continued towards the workshops where Bee worked, bickering and insulting each other. At one point Bev had pulled up her hoody and turned to the young wankers to reveal a white tee shirt with 'PAINT THESE!' daubed across her chest in thick red paint.
"Classy!" had been the reply.
"At least they're not conceptual!" Cat had pointed out.
"Unlike some," responded Ben, glancing at Cat and raising his eyebrows. Kimi high-fived him with a grin.
Bev had to restrain Cat, who waved her hands around and clicked her fingers at the two, shouting random insults. One good thing about the Young Wankers (besides Ben), was that they were always up for a bit of a verbal fracas, which they seemed to enjoy as much as Bev and co. Unfortunately, after their first sortie, they didn't seem to be up to scratch today, staring over her shoulder, concern on their faces.
Cat turned, and saw the door of Bee's studio open, splintered wood evident around the lock. She moved to the doorway, and saw folios open, pictures scattered about the place, charcoal trodden into them. Bee's filmy sculpture was lying on the floor, crushed underfoot, books pulled out of cupboards and flung about, pages ripped and left lying open and creased. Coffee tins had been emptied out, containers discarded, ground coffee trodden into the floor. Even her bin had been upended and its contents scattered about.
.....
After a bit of swearing and crying by Bee, milling around by various tutors and technicians, someone called security. About an hour later, a short, uniformed guard turned up, walkie talkie in hand. He spoke to one of the lecturers and took the three girls' names. After a quick look around the room, he walked away up the corridor talking into his walkie-talkie, returning about ten minutes later with a young-looking police constable in tow.
The PC introduced himself as Gary, and gave Bee's trashed space a quick once-over, moving books and broken art works to look underneath.
"What about fingerprints?" asked Bev, sitting against the wall with her two friends in the corridor.
"I know they trashed your place but was anything taken?" asked the constable in a sympathetic voice.
Bee shrugged, too upset to talk, and Cat shook her head for her.
"So, nothing stolen, just a bit of nastiness. Not really CIB stuff, is it? Any clue who it could have been?"
There were head shakes all round. A suggestion that it could have been the Young Wankers was shot down by Bev on the grounds that they'd been in the lecture theatre with them.
("Perhaps it was conceptual breaking and entering," muttered Cat, but shut up when she saw Bee's face)
"What about the New Blood?" asked Bev.
They quickly explained about the unknown man in the lecture theatre that morning.
"And he left just before the talk started!" added Bee, brightening a little. "All the students would be at the lecture, and even the technicians sneak out for a fag on a Tuesday morning."
"Could have been a member of the public," suggested Gary. "Aren't the lectures supposed to be open to everyone? Lots of people are interested in art."
"Right." Cat dug in her dungarees pocket then held up a flyer for that morning's talk, titled 'Sexism, squalor and post-modern studio practice; a diatribe in four parts' and smiled brightly.
There was an answering grin from Gary, "Yes, well. Probably not your average Joe-Public then. Any clue who he was?"
They went through their previous discussion of who or what the man could have been.
Gary began ticking off fingers. "So, not a new student, not a post-grad, not a new lecturer. Any clue what he looked like?"
The three friends began describing the man, correcting each other in a rush; average hair, average height, average clothes, before Bev said "Cat drew him! Come on get it out." She turned to Gary and added, "She's really good. You'll recognize him straight away."
Cat dug out her sketch book, and Bev tried to snatch it out of her hands.
There was a brief tug-of-war which Cat won, but when she looked at her sketch book, she was astounded. Instead of her normal detailed pencil sketch, there was a smudged, face-shaped oval with hair and features obscured by smeared pencil lines and what might have been the neck of a t shirt.
Bee poked her head over Cat's shoulder and stared. "You sure that's the sketch you were doing? You must have been drawing for five minutes. You've got the wrong one." She reached for Cat's sketch book but stopped when Cat pointed out a date and time below the drawing.
Not a mistake. One of the consequences of Cat's obsession with classification and order was that she date-stamped just about everything she did. (Bee and Bev speculated that this was so that, when she was old, senile, and living alone with lots of smelly animals she could classify, collate and order her life's work until she died, smelling of cat's pee. They never told Cat this). This was definitely the picture she'd drawn; she could almost feel the pencil in her hand as she'd drawn it. She tried to recreate the face in her head: eyes, hair, nose, anything.
And drew a blank. "There's nothing," she said out loud. The others looked at her curiously. "There's nothing. I can't remember his face!" She looked at Bev. "Tell me what he looked like," she ordered.
Bev looked a little taken-aback, then said almost without thinking "Dark hair, dark eyes, medium height ..."
Cat interrupted. "Yeah, but what about his features? His nose? Dark hair, but what shade? You're the painter, I've seen you obsess for hours about an exact shade." As Bev was thinking, Cat turned and looked at Bee inquiringly.
This was something all three friends were good at, something they did every day. Cat watched as Bee's face turned inward and slowly clouded over. She turned to Bev and saw the same thing happening.
Gary-the-policeman looked on curiously as Bee and Bev looked at each other and said, almost like a chorus "I can't remember!"
He shrugged. "It's okay. We're always finding witnesses who can't remember faces. Or even remember different ones. There's CCTV at the main entrance. I'll check that. No big deal. It's probably not him anyway"
Long after the friendly policeman had gone, they remained in the wrecked studio. It was a big deal, and the three friends knew it. They'd spent two years at university just drawing what they saw, taking formal drawing classes. ('Draw a chair', 'draw a flower', 'draw a cabbage'. And not just any old cabbage or flower or chair. That cabbage. That flower. That chair, looking for oddities and differences and idiosyncrasies that made the object distinct and individual). Even before University, none of them had gone more than a couple of days without a pencil and pad in their hands. It was a big deal, and they were all troubled by it.
Cat got up slowly, not meeting her friends' eyes. She began to tidy Bee's room, all the time worrying at the missing image in her mind's eye, like a newly lost tooth, evident by its absence. Around her, her friends were doing the same, moving slowly, thinking deeply. When they'd finished none of them spoke, just hugged briefly, and left, troubled.