Free Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls by Danielle Wood Page B

who came in once or twice a week from their shacks in the hills. It had no bank or post office, but it did have a café that made reasonable chai, and an op shop. Eve calculated that she could be back home inside an hour and a half.
    ‘Swednesday,’ said some passing dreadlocks to Eve on the street outside the op shop.
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘It’s …Wednesday.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘Doesn’t open till two on Wednesdays.’
    Eve looked at her watch. It was only noon.
    ‘Oh. Two ? Thanks.’
    So Eve sat on a lumpy leather couch by the café’s blue velvet curtains, drinking chai, reading old copies of Wellbeing magazine and watching the op shop’s door. It was not entirely unproductive time, however. She also thought some bitchy thoughts about the abstract paintings on the café walls; an activity that certainly counted towards artistic practice.
    The op shop opened a little after two and smelled like a silverfish’s banquet of polyester armpits, mould and inner soles. But on a rack in the back room, Eve found what she was looking for. It was the perfect painter’s shirt: striped and collarless, the fabric worn through at the folded edges of the cuffs. Someone had already worn it for painting. Probably they had thrown it out because of its smattering of small, hardened circles of paint. These paint spots were mostly in earth colours, and in reds and yellows, which was a good sign, since these were the colours with which Eve herself felt most comfortable. In general she stayed away from the violets and the deeper, more aggressive of the blues.
    At home, in front of the bathroom mirror, Eve tried on her purchases. She admired how the shirt fell off her shoulders but clung just nicely to the sides of her breasts. The timber handle of a fine brush speared her hair just above her ponytail, which was tied off with a purple scarf she had found in a basket by the op shop’s cash register. The trousers were loose and navy blue, the clogs leather and well worn. She felt pleased. Her canvas was blank and Adam would be home in half an hour, but she looked every bit the artist, and that wasn’t a bad start.
    On the third day, Eve slept in. She woke to the digital clock binking 10.37am and knew that she would have to begin without breakfast. She lumbered her easel out through the narrow kitchen door to the veranda and assembled all her paints and brushes on a conveniently deep windowsill. This is what she had imagined, the first time she had stood on this veranda: herself painting while her hens clucked encouragingly from the lawn below. She was only there a few moments, however, before it became quite clear that she would soon be too cold in her striped painter’s shirt.
    She took her easel back inside and set it down in the living room at an angle to the window that looked out over the orchard and some distant hills. Not that she was going to look at the view. But if she did happen to pause for a moment and look around, there would be a calming vista just over her shoulder. The window also delivered good natural light to the canvas she now placed on the easel, and to the spot on the table where she was about to set up a still life scene.
    Eve had been envisaging the composition for weeks, collecting gradually the component parts. For the backdrop, a square of chocolate velvet, scrunched into soft mountains to draw the eye up valleys and along ridges to the centre of the picture. Slightly to the left of centre would be a pewter pitcher, dull and bulbous as an atom bomb against the fabric. Clustering at the pitcher’s base would be the fruit. There would be three apples, the first of them pinkish-red, a colossal Fuji, perfect and round as a Japanese valentine; the second, golden-skinned and tapered like a tooth. The third would bring the other two together, marry them in its bright stripes of red, orange and yellow. Called a Cox’s Orange Pippin and collected as a windfall from the neighbouring orchard, it was a low, squat apple with a