Free In the Frame by Dick Francis Page B

chequebook. She wrote out and gave me the slip of paper which was far more than enough for my journey.
    ‘If you’re so fussed, dear,’ she said across my protests, ‘you can give me back what you don’t spend.’ She gazed at me earnestly with grey-blue eyes. ‘You will be careful dear, won’t you?’
    ‘Yes, Maisie.’
    ‘Because of course, dear, you might turn out to be a nuisance to some really
nasty
people.’
    I landed at Mascot airport at noon five days later, wheeling in over Sydney and seeing the harbour bridge and the opera house down below, looking like postcards.
    Jik met me on the other side of Customs with a huge grin and a waving bottle of champagne.
    ‘Todd the sod,’ he said. ‘Who’d have thought it?’ His voice soared easily over the din. ‘Come to paint Australia red!’
    He slapped me on the back with an enthusiastic horny hand, not knowing his own strength. Jik Cassavetes, longtime friend, my opposite in almost everything.
    Bearded, which I was not. Exuberant, noisy, extravagant, unpredictable; qualities I envied. Blue eyes and sun-blond hair. Muscles which left mine gasping. An outrageous way with girls. An abrasive tongue; and a wholehearted contempt for the things I painted.
    We had met at Art School, drawn together by mutualtruancy on racetrains. Jik compulsively went racing, but strictly to gamble, never to admire the contestants, and certainly not to paint them. Horse-painters, to him, were the lower orders. No
serious
artist, he frequently said, would be seen dead painting horses.
    Jik’s paintings, mostly abstract, were the dark reverse of the bright mind: fruits of depression, full of despair at the hatred and pollution destroying the fair world.
    Living with Jik was like a toboggan run, downhill, dangerous, and exhilarating. We’d spent the last two years at Art School sharing a studio flat and kicking each other out for passing girls. They would have chucked him out of school except for his prodigious talent, because he’d missed weeks in the summer for his other love, which was sailing.
    I’d been out with him, deep sea, several times in the years afterwards. I reckoned he’d taken us on several occasions a bit nearer death than was strictly necessary, but it had been a nice change from the office. He was a great sailor, efficient, neat, quick and strong, with an instinctive feeling for wind and waves. I had been sorry when one day he had said he was setting off singlehanded round the world. We’d had a paralytic farewell party on his last night ashore; and the next day, when he’d gone, I’d given the estate agent my notice.
    He had brought a car to fetch me: his car, it turned out. A British M.G. Sports, dark blue. Both sides of him right there, extrovert and introvert, the flamboyant statement in a sombre colour.
    ‘Are there many of these here?’ I asked, surprised, loading suitcase and satchel into the back. ‘It’s a long way from the birth pangs.’
    He grinned. ‘A few. They’re not popular now because petrol passes through them like salts.’ The engine roared to life, agreeing with him, and he switched on the windscreenwiper against a starting shower. ‘Welcome to sunny Australia. It rains all the time here. Puts Manchester in the sun.’
    ‘But you like it?’
    ‘Love it, mate. Sydney’s like rugger, all guts and go and a bit of grace in the line-out.’
    ‘And how’s business?’
    ‘There are thousands of painters in Australia. It’s a flourishing cottage industry.’ He glanced at me sideways. ‘A hell of a lot of competition.’
    ‘I haven’t come to seek fame and fortune.’
    ‘But I scent a purpose,’ he said.
    ‘How would you feel about harnessing your brawn?’
    ‘To your brain? As in the old days?’
    ‘Those were pastimes.’
    His eyebrows rose. ‘What are the risks?’
    ‘Arson and murder, to date.’
    ‘Jesus.’
    The blue car swept gracefully into the centre of the city. Skyscrapers grew like beanstalks.
    ‘I live right