Free Autumn Laing by Alex Miller

become one of their anointed, you had first to be on your knees to them. Well, he would never go to his knees for anyone. It would be they on their knees before he was done with them.
    He picked up the roll of butcher’s paper and undid the string. He laid the sheets flat on the table, their cheesy pallor and faint odour of raw meat reminding him of his mother’s kitchen when she unpacked the shopping and he looked to see what she’d got for their dinner. He stood smoothing the sheets with the palms of his hands, feeling the slight undulations of the table top through them, the way a blind man might know his own work table by the intimacy of touch. Imagining himself to be the blind seer. That’s what he was. Being the voyant of Rimbaud’s youthful intoxications. Alone. Accountable to no one. Inside the fortress of himself. Where he would not be called upon to make common sense of his work. He was remembering riding down the Hume Highway on his bicycle when he was nineteen. Alone with the wind and the hum of his tyres. Sleeping by the roadside at night. It seemed to him now that he had ridden his bicycle the thousand miles to Sydney and back in a dream. His eyes closed. Seeing some other world. A beautiful solitary journey, it had been. And wasn’t he that same man today? To be alone dreaming his dreams. He had forgotten Edith.
    He was drawing quickly on the sheets of butcher’s paper. Freely wielding the narrow brush. He loaded the brush from the bowl of rich black ink, carelessly flicking spots and drips of ink about the place. Flicking some of it on purpose. On himself. To join the spots of blood. Scattering his seed. A warrior. Perhaps it was naked figures he was drawing. Something like that. It was too early to know what he was doing. He didn’t want to know. Wild sweeping lines of disrupted ink that had begun to suggest the outlines of human forms. Limbs and torsos confusingly disproportionate and summary. Perhaps tussling and in some kind of movement against each other. Hecouldn’t draw for nuts. He worked quickly, without hesitation. He could feel it in his balls. The drawing. Tight and hard and thick with intention. An aggression in him. Without stepping back to consider what he did. Without correcting his line. On the battleground of his own choosing. Making it.
    As he covered each sheet he slid it off the table to the floor and started on the next, not bothering about smearing the wet image of the discarded sheet. Did he think he could force a result? Did he imagine he could coerce the ink and the paper into revealing true art to his eye without troubling himself to search for some sort of order in what he did? Without taking care? Without paying his dues to the craft, like everyone else had to? Yes, he did. He was convinced of it. Fuck them and their painstaking fucking everlasting fucking drawing classes. Once that was established in your eye you would never rid yourself of it. You would belong to them and to their tradition for the rest of your days. Like the copperplate trap, he wasn’t falling into this one either. Trying to be like Leonardo! Bloody fools.
    Edith gave an excited yelp and held up her mother’s letter. ‘Guess what? Hilary Trafford at the Argus has invited me to submit some of my illustrations to her.’ She was looking at Pat working at his table, his figure moving against the light from the north-facing window. A slim man, his shoulders almost as narrow as a woman’s, and not tall, but perfectly made, his aura illuminated contre jour . How well Mr Sickert would have rendered him. She stepped across to him and shook the letter at him. ‘Did you hear what I said, darling? Money!’ Her voice had taken on something of the command of her mother’s voice whenever her mother wished not only to be heard but to belistened to by the men of her household. ‘Ten shillings for every illustration she takes. We’ll have some money of our own.’
    ‘You sound like your mother,’ he said, not