Free Black Mirror by Gail Jones

pirouetted like a ballerina, but she was old and frail, and mostly confined to the couch.
    She indicated a screen to her left which was punctured with star shapes and covered with curling, streamer-like lines.
    Cocteau, she said, and swung away again, pointing with both arms now, as though she had become a compass fixed on its invisible magnet, to a painting of her own, Waves With Wings, Illimitable. It was an image of orange-coloured waves, neither desert nor sea, or perhaps both desert and sea, which buoyed floating trinkets: champagne glasses, an open fan, a perambulator in which lay a sleeping black baby, a childish crown-of-gold from a fairy-tale storybook, two eyes released from a somewhere face, a tiny shape of Australia, brilliantly scarlet, and, at the very centre, a human foetus,translucent and striated with patterns of veins. Above the orange sea hung two very large dark wings, slightly indistinct, suggesting they were in fact a shadow of unseen wings, somewhere much higher, nearer the sun.
    This was not a painting Anna remembered seeing before.
    Then Victoria swung again, redirecting Anna’s gaze. She leant sideways to embrace a shop mannequin of a man, life-sized and draped with kewpie dolls hanging from ribbons.
    Jewels! she exclaimed. Meet Monsieur Jules!
    She kissed the face of the mannequin and flicked at a doll, setting it swinging.
    Mwah! a kiss of cocktail-hostess artifice.
    And can I get you a cocktail? Tea? Cakes?
    Victoria looked arch and ironical, but stood poised, her feathers shaking, fixed by a spotlight of her own imagining. The room hung around her like a gigantic decoration. Appliquéd shapes on bronze-coloured curtains. New Guinea carvings arranged in a circle. A series of bicycle wheels and machinery strung randomly from the ceiling, by different lengths of wire. In this room Victoria was large and impressive, and in the face of such display, of such habitual exhibitionism, Anna felt as if she was composed of water, leaking in slow puddles into the Persian carpet. Her saturated shoes swam at her feet. Her umbrella dangled.
    You look like the wreck of the Hesperus, Victoria declared. Something the bloody cat dragged in!

    Of those early meetings Anna remembers their per-formative aspect. Now, accustomed to this peculiar room, she can better disentangle the impression of circumambient screens and images from the woman who circles slowly and arthritically within them. Her head-dress of swan’s feathers makes her appear tall and archaic, like some excavated goddess. And though fatigued, Victoria is also restless. Anna scrutinises the details of the old woman’s body, her thin blue wrists, the folds of her neck: she has a slow but firm and definite energy. She will go on for ever , Anna thinks.
    Â 
    After the London exhibition, Victoria continued, Leonora Carrington and I went together to hear public lectures on Surrealism. She too had been at the New Burlington opening: her eyes were glossy with what she had seen. We were girlish and silly. We laughed at our own artistic inebriation, tilted our heads backwards and roared in chorus. Leonora Carrington’s throat was pearl. Her long black hair swept like waves. In a teahouse, I remember, she raised up her teacup, summoned the waitress with an air of magisterial complaint, and announced in comical French-accented English:
    But zis teacup, ma petit bon-bon; she is not covered with fur?
    She held the object aloft seriously, just for a minute, in order to suspend the waitress in miserable confusion. Then she roared with her horsey, aristocratic laugh.
    The first lecture we went to was Herbert Read’s. He stood awkwardly on a spring sofa as he talked on Art and the Unconscious . Dreams. Automatism. The rich latency of things. Later we heard Breton, Eluard and Hugh Sykes, all proclaiming.
    But it is the Dali story I want to tell you.
    It was early July and still very hot. Dali entered the gallery wearing a deep-sea diving suit