Shanghai Ink

By Rashida Nashe

Artist Dian Brennan has just escaped an abusive, grim marriage. Just as Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, and Prague are all reinventing themselves after times of great turmoil, Dian’s life shifts dramatically as she emerges from darkness and enters into a happy second marriage that takes her overseas.

Her life as a mother, wife, and “expat” is interpreted through her paintings, which also reflect her love for new places, new people, and new cultures—but ultimately foretell far more than she imagines.

Shanghai Ink is an epic work that spans three world cities while exploring themes of reinvention, relationships, identity, passion and independence. In this imaginative and unflinching exploration of the human spirit, Dian discovers who she really is with the cathartic help of art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Jul 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9781504318662

Rashida Nashe

Rashida Nashe was born in Canada and migrated to Australia as a child. She now spends her time between Australia and an island in the Pacific.

Book preview

1

Scalpel Knife

The scalpel knife is old but will do the job. I make an incision into the blistering masking tape coated in sooty grit. It gives away, more easily than expected. The cardboard is tougher to hack through.

Three sinewed coffee skinned young men heft the large wooden crates from the mud-sprayed truck. They’ve trucked them from the container ship at the Port. They haul them out of the torrential rain undercover. They laugh, wipe their faces and shake their matted hair free of water, gleefully prizing apart the crates with scythes and crowbars, one eyeing the crate of beer I’ll give them along with their pay when they finish.

With concentrated precision I fillet through and between the layers until I strike opaque bubble- wrap branded with a black and red world globe logo blaring: ‘Around the World, Around the Corner’.

All up there are six international moving company logos featuring dragons, eagles and phoenixes on crates and boxes strewn around me. This is the seventh.

Down to the final plastic layer and like a forensic surgeon I am close to exposing the glistening coloured nerve endings of paint beneath.

I peel it away down to the wads of butcher’s paper acting as a buffer but bearing prints of large men’s work boots.

The cement floor is now awash with packing material hard to navigate around. The men and I hurl the cardboard out the sliding barn door of the corrugated iron shed. The rain can turn it into porridge before the men can pulp it, dry it out and burn it.

I’d dislodge my paintings one after the other from their international ‘body bags’ and stack twenty of them along the shed wall, relieved to have them back as if amputated limbs have been restored. The men are not sure what to make of them but are happy to critique them over beer.

The paintings, like explorer Zheng He, have been revolving around the world. They mean a great deal to me although have no astounding monetary value. Their value is as my witnesses to my life and the cities of the world as I saw them and the love that took me there.

2

Lars

Let’s not kid ourselves. Lars was hardly my first love but I fell for him at 26, amusingly enough when he played an aristocratic husband and wife on stage which silently segued behind the scenes.

Lars, with his gentle lisp, his boundless energy, his elongated hands, Dutch pale, pale, hairless, almost translucent skin. Lars whose boyish shock of fine fair hair fell over his face as he squatted to line up camera shots and direct actors. Lars, to whom I’d been unofficially engaged after meeting him two years before when I’d edited a segment of one of his films for a university film-editing exercise.

Already a noted film-maker, he lectured in film-making, played jazz piano and composed scores for several instruments. He married an Australian painter, Suzette, who already had a child of her own when they met. He’d adopted her son and they had two children together, little fairy-tale moppets with golden hair and Arctic-Delft blue eyes who I could picture in miniature clogs and bonnets on a windswept Zuider Zee coast in a Vermeer painting. They’d lived in Europe but had set up house since in Woollahra, Sydney.

No longer his student, we met up again on the coastal set of one of his own films for which I’d auditioned. This time I starred alongside an actor called Brent who played my husband conducting-yawn-an affair with a ‘younger woman’, played by an actual schoolgirl.. I was all of 23 at the time and recall a fair bit of sashaying in my grandmother’s blue embroidered silk dressing-gown, sitting grimly on the edge of a bed when my husband delivers the happy news and I ‘Lady Macbethed’ the fate of his girlfriend…

Lars and I circled each other for some time in plays and films before being cast as a Countess and Count in a play about a Shakespearian actor, Kean -played by my wonderful stage brother-in-arms, Leon.

An affair between Suzette and another artist left Lars shell-shocked . Needing a bolt-hole, he moved into my rented Glebe terrace as a boarder during rehearsals for Kean. He brought a Jeep-load of film canisters, books from existentialism to slave song-lyrics, a Roland stage piano, a black cat and a carmine red IKEA table with screw-in legs- revolutionary at the time. We became confidants.

He began to hold jazz jam sessions with several friends downstairs in a poky living room with boarded up fireplace, my 80’s faux-velvet dark chocolate sofa and press photo of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton arriving in Australia with a fake autograph addressed to myself… I’d sing the likes of ‘Lover Man’ with them occasionally when I mustered up enough courage. Read ‘wine’…

Lars lectured at university while I taught part-time at an inner city school. Otherwise I’d paint in what had been the front ‘parlour’ -mainly ink and brush sketches of entwined Brett Whiteleyish lovers or eroticized native flowers- while Lars edited scripts upstairs and typed the beginnings of a PHD dissertation with his Olivetti Lettera 35. The sound of his typing reminded me of my journalist Dad typing into the night as I fell asleep and it was comforting- even if Lars’s thoughts on semiotics were sometimes too abstruse for me, try as I did to keep up. I supplied some sparkling insights though, and at least give myself credit for convincing him that Stevie Wonder-whom he’d dismissed- was a genius.

Our affair began during the play and was fuelled by its secrecy. We seduced each other one bleak winter’s eve with the aid of tawny port, myself on the rebound from a doomed fling with an interstate theatre director -Roman- who timed his thoughtful announcement that he was having an affair as I was driving with him beside me over the Harbour Bridge in peak hour traffic.

Lars became my muse and baby. I cherished his swollen lips, his long flyaway scarves and sweeping Dracula trench-coat. He took to wearing one of my rings with three black stones set in silver. I nursed him through a weighty book on Foucault, matched wits with him quite convincingly, but not without a struggle -and introduced him to Sylvia Plath.

I picture him still exaggeratedly hunched over his electric piano like some expressionist Kafkesque figure and with unseeing, scrunched eyes delivering himself up to jazz and classical pieces.

I absorbed his painful divorce from artist Suzette- about whom I felt jealous pangs, because he insisted she would ‘claim a place in Australian art history’. I listening attentively to Lars’s gauzy reminiscences of their meeting, of her leaving her husband for him, of Lars adopting her child and then having two of their own, and of her affair which shattered the marriage.

One day I found him banging his head against the wall and bleeding.

When he went out I snaffled his diaries interspersed with amusing sketches by Suzette and allowed them to drill needle holes in my heart.

Saturday mornings Lars would set our early and return with hot croissants and serve them up for us both with enough ‘lashings of jam and cream’ to drown Enid Blyton. He also made a mean ‘kartofflepuffer’ which we’d devour with apple sauce accompanied by hand-roled cigs- watching arthaus movies like Bergman’s ‘Scenes from a Marriage’ he’d screen from a projector.

We admired and appreciated each other’s work. He was quietly charming, thoughtful and as driven as I -and he’d converted my terrace into a suave continental coffee house cinematic Cotton Club.

I shared an exhibition in Woollahra with a lesbian girlfriend, Mandy, who painted enormous photo-realistic oils disembodied clothes behind doors. Five of mine sold. Mandy meanwhile sold work behind the gallery’s back. It didn’t bother me but the Gallery was tipped off and rewarded my honesty with a solo show.

Lars found me an unpaid job reviewing books on FM radio. I took the taped reviews to commercial radio stations who said ‘Terrific. You sound like Margaret Throsby!’ but never called back.

It was Lars who licked my wounds when he found me sobbing on a footpath in Kensington the day Nida rejected me after two ‘call backs’. He breathed life back into me with music, more croissants, jam and cream, wonderful coffee and newspapers.

I ran art classes part-time at a local community centre for dismal pay and spent more time washing brushes, scraping palettes and scrubbing floors than teaching. I made more money behind the canvas as an art-school model for a month but Lars found it demeaning and talked me out of it. I auditioned for film parts which went to better-knowns.

A call came. A director was on the lookout for an ‘unknown’ to play the lead in a film based on a Christina Stead novel. I cannibalised the book and the part. I auditioned and came close but not close enough…

I had wanted that part badly if only to make Nida feel as shortsighted as the authors of those ‘Could do better/Will never amount to much’ school reports of the Einsteins of the world….

Years later I saw the film advertised on TV. Chagrined but prepared for my moment of truth I turned it on and crumbled: the part had gone to a girl no more talented than I who’d could have been my double at the time: gamin- faced and petite and with a similar mix of wilfulness, determination, independence and insecurity-whose career I gather sunk without a trace.

Another call came.. from the Education Department.

In a bout of desperation I’d applied for a full-time State School teaching job, praying for rejection. I would then feel less guilty about pursuing my two hopeless causes: painting and acting. The aging press photo of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton my father had snaffled from work and given me surveyed me from the wall above the phone as I asked where on earth was Bay Heights High School.

The unimpressed Placements Officer told me it was in the southern suburbs and that the job was a permanent appointment and a ‘very good one’. In brackets, ‘count your blessings dear’. I accepted it for want of nothing better but only on the private understanding with myself that it was a stop-gap, a temporary one. I was not ‘selling out’ that easily.

Lars was fully ensconced in my house. His overloaded ‘nascent-Ikea’ bookcases walls, castles of film spools, his electric piano and thesis material had taken over. I had no objection to this but felt a pall of doom descend after hours of his thesis writing while I soundlessly kept house like a slave girl. He did however dedicate his thesis to me.

Our love-making would best be described as compassionate. It had less to do with the raging torrent I craved than two slashed lambs sheltering from a storm.

His beautiful actress sister, Ineke, and her bar owner husband, Jansen, came to stay from Holland before hiring a houseboat on the Hawkesbury River. Two days later her husband died from a massive coronary.

Days of weeping and hysterical laughter engulfed the house.

Lars’s wife Suzette came to comfort Lars and Ineke. I’d never met her and felt awkward and lost in a maelstrom beyond my control in my own house. Relegated to ‘hostess’ I offered Suzette a drink. She surveyed me as if I were sub- moronic and said, ‘I’d say so! Make it a whisky for starters!’ and then ignored me.

At some stage Ineke crawled out from under the dining table and with tears coursing down her face laughed bitterly, ‘What am I doing playing with a cat… My husband is dead.’

I loved Lars but although now 27 distinguished between this and ‘being in love’. I’d begun to think ‘something is wrong with this picture’. His northern angst and divorce woes begun to leech me dry. His films were bleak and haunted. All that was missing was Max Schell as the Grim Reaper.

During band rehearsals, the musos drank more and played less and the flautist ex-wife of a jazz musician had her sights set on Lars. I was finding his religious leanings irritating. He tried to persuade me to go to church with him, she who’d stalked out of church at 15 in mini skirt and knee-high boots and declared religion to be ‘the opiate of the masses’ as if she’d thought this up. My image of the jazz musician film-maker with the vivisectionist mind and the church organist refused to gel.

His beautiful, bewitched and bewildered children came to stay on weekends. He’d whisk them to the guest room where he no longer slept, would close the door, exclude me and read them stories on the bed, one tucked under each arm. I was not part of this tableaux.

He took my hand and explained he was not shutting me out but needed time alone with them. The cherubs would emerge happily enough but would glance at me with limpid eyes and needed coaching to say goodbye.

He would drive them home and, after what seemed an unnecessarily long time at Suzette’s, returned to take a long bath alone.

The play’s run commenced and there was a certain childish relish in driving to the Seymour Centre together- Lars wearing his trademark scarf and ring- and playing a married couple on stage while we acted out our clandestine romance off it during his actual divorce.

On-stage my ‘Countess’ was seduced by Leon’s Shakespearian actor and Leon, with his signature nasal- velvet voice, ate the part- ‘darkly inhabiting’ the egotistical, grandiose, insecure, sensitive, adulterous, alcoholic nineteenth century star with breathtaking allure.

For Leon this was hardly a stretch. He was virtually playing himself and, like Edmund Kean, would hammer those deliciously villainous roles of Iago, Macbeth and Richard 111 for which his forebear was renowned.

Off-stage Leon life was full-blown opera. His marriage was rent by a ferocious, ill-advised affair (as if any affair were not..) with an intelligent but waif-like aging hippy called Mistralle with a whiny, feathery voice none of our cast could stand and who’d haunted the shadows like a noxious vapour in her paisley-print cheesecloth skirts during rehearsals.

Backstage during the play’s run, Lars would visit at interval and help me demolish a thermos of rum and lemon purportedly intended to stave off flu and laryngitis ….and with a straight face give me suggestive moth-like touches in the dressing room as I retouched my Lake foundation and eye-liner.

Leon and I went out for a drinks one night after the show. The bar was crowded and normally a fitting backdrop for our post-production euphoric high, but Leon was anxious and dour.

‘What ails thee, oh Prince of Darkness?’

‘I’m in a fix, Beatrice.’ (one of his his pet names for me after we’d starred in The Changeling)

‘Oh? With...Mistralle?’ (I could barely utter her name)

‘You know about her then?’

‘Blind Freddy knows about her Leon. We’ve all known for months. For a brilliant actor-you’re hopeless.’

He knocked back his beer.

‘She’s pregnant.’

‘What!’

‘She had an abortion but wants to keep this one. There’s a new Aqua Birthing Centre and she wants me to be there….’

‘Oh god, Max (one of my pet names for him from our first play together) Why do you self-sabotage!..Does Miranda know?’

‘Not yet..’

This news from the Rialto hit me like a Bridge pylon. I’d close to Miranda for years. She had home-birthed their three children and the youngest was only ten months old. In their Newtown cottage with its hardwood floors, diaphanous Indian silk curtains and wonky multicoloured tiled BBQ near a old lemon tree she had always welcomed me. This news now put me on the grassy knoll and I knew one stray look would give me away to Miranda. She might wonder why but I would have to cut a swathe around her until-and if -she needed me.

I was furious with Leon and felt oddly betrayed myself. I was flabbergasted that he could look sideways at Mistralle when he had Miranda. But who reaches for stars when the gutter’s closer…

Mistralle, perhaps miscalculating her centrality to the plotline, took matters into her own hands. After a mystical birthing ceremony attended by Leon, and with new baby in tow, she fronted up alone to Miranda and Leon’s front door. Miranda was home with her and Leon’s baby son.

Mistralle ‘introduced’ herself and the baby as if this would clear the air and proceeded to explain that she and Leon were ‘soul mates’ and although she wished Miranda no ill, Leon would be spending most of his life with her from now on.

I doubt Miranda served up a Hallmark film’s betrayed wife. She was the epitome of gentleness and measured control in both her manner and rich and calm intonation. Years of yoga had honed her delicate beauty, poise and inner strength. In short she might have looked Pre-Raphaelite, but was no pushover. That said there was no denying the Bolshe reality of Mistralle’s baby with Leon in her face.

According to Leon, all hell broke loose and Miranda had a ‘revenge affair’ herself. Leon admitted that on learning this he perversely flew into a drink-enabled rage, smashed a large glass ashtray on a kitchen counter and slashed his hand.

Neither affair survived. Miranda channelled her grief into a degree in counselling. She and Leon divorced-a shocking waste of what had been a great marriage. I know little of became of Mistralle but her son was always made welcome by Miranda and spent time playing with her own children.

This turmoil was the backdrop to our play. Lars meanwhile was in the midst of divorce and at the end of the run went back to Holland for a break. He brought me a present which must have weighed a ton: a clay sculpture of a bulbous woman in a knitted bathing suit and cap, a cross between a Niki de Sainte Phalle sculpture and a cabbage-patch doll. It was loathsome.

I’d made dinner one winter’s night and called Lars to come and eat.. He didn’t answer. I called out with mock joviality, ‘Are you ok, honey? No need to re-tile the bathroom!.’ I opened the door. I found him curled foetally beneath the now cold bath water, his fine hair floating across his face, his body an oystered model for Freud’s ‘Man with Rat’. I stood magnetised to a black hole in the floor-tiles, sucked of air and movement, thinking he was dead. He stirred, his eyes flickered and he shuddered back to life. He heaved himself out of the bath, sank to his knees and hugged my legs, crying.

I abandoned my quit- smoking efforts that week. It was all becoming overwhelming. When Lars found me later smoking and sobbing on the loungeroom floor he knelt down and cradled me and said ‘I think we should get married’.

Not a filmic proposal. Not one you’d reminisce about years later. One that sounded both like a noble Arthurian gesture and a foregone conclusion. As if it were a sensible idea to line an underground burrow, bandage our wounds and hibernate. He added ‘I know it didn’t begin the ideal way but when does it? Maybe it’s not enough for you…’

Maybe it should have been.

He still beat his head against the wall but less often. I was happier but oddly deflated.

I kept the news from my parents who were still under the impression Lars was my ‘lodger’. More to the point I didn’t know my own mind. I loved Lars but his divorce increasingly ate into me and now my thirst for grand passion outbid tenderness or consideration. Soul-searching was one thing, morbidity another and I could have done without Suzette phoning Lars with news of her art successes, news of their children and requests for babysitting.

At an after work drinks session in a local pub I’d been introduced by chance to a translator who lived further down the coast. He held the floor effortlessly with tales of translation bloopers and travel escapades and had everyone laughing. A woman near me mentioned he spoke fluent French, German and Italian. He looked tanned, earthbound and Alpha, and his eyes were quite violently blue.

His name was Axel.

At the same pub the following Friday my colleagues kindly produced a surprise cake to celebrate my engagement to Lars. And there was Axel- worldly, open, adventurous, engaging and red blooded paying close attention to this announcement. Caught unawares, I found myself irritated by the public mention of my engagement, my first indication he had sparked my interest.

Axel invited me to his rented house on a bushland cliff-top overlooking a point where a river met the sea. I followed his Fiat in my own car with the tantalising but unspoken suggestion this might lead to more than a house viewing.

An expanse of glass overlooked a deck canterlevered over the water with its sliding shavings of moonlight. It was a soundless place without traffic noise or sirens but for a faint tidal sucking, the growl of a ring-tailed possum and the cry of a baby bird disturbed in its nest.

Axel produced some wine and seemed mesmerised by me as we sat on the deck. I stretched out what I thought of as my summer legs as he told me more tales of travel. He told me his German grandfather had inspired his love of languages and showed me photos of trips to Europe and more recently, Asia. He told me he’d built the house brick by brick his wife and children now lived in without him. Hardly fair he told me because his wife had caused the rift and now he was the one being punished. I was touched by his stories and felt sad for him. I had a strong urge to reach out and touch his face but took it no further. I drank too much and left dazed -and squirm to think what excuse I gave Lars for being late home.

My dark, deep European Lars registered my confusion but was patient with me. I was teary and impatient with him. I ducked and weaved and finally told him I’d met and liked Axel and didn’t know what to do.

It hit home I was at a proverbial crossroads. At some point though one makes a decision even if we tell ourselves we’re unable to turn the tide.

‘Please promise me one thing though,’ implored Lars, ‘that you’ll stay with Sandra [a distinguished radio journalist friend of his] for a week before you make up your mind and heart. I do love you.’

I agreed to this although wondered vaguely why Lars couldn’t have moved out temporarily and why I was the one to leave my own house.

Sandra was a mature woman who lived on her own. She was welcoming without being unctuous and gave me room to think. One morning before work I was startled to see her sitting in streaming sunlight on a deck, unaware of me and self-contained, naked with her eyes closed, legs crossed and hands resting on her knees turned upwards. She had a gash-like scar from her right shoulder to her abdomen, as if she were once mauled by a shark. We spoke however of inane things and the only time she referred to Lars she said, ‘It’s your decision but Lars is a unique human being.’

She was right. On her way to work the woman handed me a badge saying, ‘Women Live Longer!’.

Lars was unique but I’d had months of second-hand trauma and felt like a Bergman extra. I was tired of his brooding presence when he was not playing music and felt as if I’d been endlessly shovelling snow when he curled up in the bathtub, or cocooned alone with his children or grappled with his thesis in a tomblike house.

I also questioned myself and why my lovers, for the most part, were in a sense, satellites of Leon. Were they partly an excuse of staying within his orbit? Wasn’t it time I broke the mold? I’d had enough of dour and high octane off-stage drama. I craved adventure, travel, romance, laughter, sunlight, a lightness of being.

With Lars I was Persephone condemned to some cerebral shadowland. In Axel I was choosing Summer over Winter, Irish jokes over lugubriousness, action over Hamlet, poetry over Foucault and someone who could change a light bulb. In Axel I saw Life!

I chose Axel.

Years later I wondered if I’d needed Lars to fight for me and not bow out so gracefully. Couldn’t he have pleaded with me? Instead he cried, hung his head, packed most of his clothes and film canisters into the Jeep and moved out, leaving a few boxes of books.

3

Axel. A Heavenly Kingdom

If Lars and I had been a slow burn, Axel and I were volcanic. He may not have been the brainstrust that others had been but he had his own intelligence and I revelled in him. He was ten years older than me and his earthy, easy sophistication was as enticing as his golden- boy looks.

Three days after our magnetic attraction took hold, Axel asked me to marry him.

I was thrilled. I saw nothing peculiar about this. I saw a man who saw me and knew what he wanted and was not about to lose me by dithering around.

If most of my loves had been ‘self-made’ men I gave him more credit for this because he’d come so far from so little. He avoided his parents but when I finally persuaded him to introduce me I understood why. They were true blue alright but not in any ‘salt of the earth’ sense that engendered much warmth or instilled any great national pride.

They were Laurel and Hardy physical opposites, the father, Stan, a doppelganger for Steptoe, the mother, Eunice, an over-stuffed sausage with a perm -and eyes like pin heads in a pin-cushion. The father was charming to me but abusive to his wife. Conversation between were sneering skirmishes mined with swearing, in which one would cut the other off by shouting ‘shut-up!’ Eunice would then reprimand Stan for disrespecting their ‘North Shore’ visitor since ‘Dian wouldn’t be used to language like that.’

Stan however paid no heed and commented for instance that a neighbour was ‘as ugly as a hat-full of arseholes.’

This Punch and Judy Reality Show played out in an outer Western Suburb with its featureless fibro shack, it’s backyard outpost ‘dunny’ and a cracked cement path that sliced vertical and vicious from the back fly-screen door though an treeless expanse of yellowing beetle-ridden grass to that mandala: that icon of ‘white Australia’, the Hills Hoist, festooned with singlets, shorts and greying women’s slips.

Although she typecast me-and I her house- I felt some sympathy for Eunice whose attempts to make the place a bit homely amounted to a lace table-cloth over the green-swirl Formica table, orange ceramic salt n’ pepper shakers masquerading as slinky cats and a family of ceramic and crocheted ornamental owls.

Before we left, she said, ‘Well, nice to meet you love, but I want you to know that I have no quarrel with Margaret [Axel’s soon to be ex-wife and mother of Debbie and Colin]. We’re good friends and I won’t be taking sides.’

Although this made a slightly unpleasant impression, I took it in my stride.

We were soon engaged, although we still lived in our respective homes. My parents had barely met Axel but arranged a lovely engagement party for us: a BBQ surrounding their floodlit pool and garden they both maintained beautifully. My sisters Lorna and Sascha were excited for me and thought Axel was a charmer. We invited Stan and Eunice, Axel’s sister, Gayle and husband and Axel’ brother Frank.

I took to Gayle but the verdict was out on Frank, who, as I stood beside Axel pointed his beer bottle a little too close to his face and snarled, ‘I don’t like the way you’ve behaved, but I have nothing against Dian.’

The evening lost more of its gloss when Eunice, after a slew of sherries, watched giggling as her plate of steak, sausage and salad slid off her lap and onto Dad’s newly mown lawn.

I was with Axel at his rented house when his wife, Margaret, phoned. I had not sighted her but had met Debbie and Colin a couple of times and liked them both, although Colin barely spoke. I could hear Margaret asking Axel to mind the children over the weekend because her work shift had changed and she would from now on be working weekends.

How convenient I thought -and assumed this was payback.

Axel rather nastily told her he had plans for the weekend so she’d need to organise a minder.

‘Well’ she shouted, ‘so much for for the children being so important! This one’s certainly got you by the short and curlies!’

At this he hung up on her. I was ‘this one’ -a new girlfriend- which begged the question how many others there’d been..

Axel’s lease was nearly up so we decided he would move in with me. He brought little with him apart from bunk beds for the children when they came to stay and a fishing rod he was making for Colin.

‘You didn’t bring much!’ I remarked.

‘Nah, well I left it all there. In the house I built myself with Dad’s help. And the rockery I spent months hauling rocks uphill for. Just walked out after I came home early from work and heard the bitch on the phone to her lover.’

‘Margaret was having an affair?’

‘Yep and I was the last to know. The bastard works with her and they both have their ‘weekends’ during the week so they can get it on while my kids are at school. She also works nights which I’ve only just found out about and she found a child minder with anorexia- great role model!-who screamed at me to get lost when I went to see my own children!’

‘I’m sorry about the affair….’

‘No-one deserves that…And you have no idea what it’s like to see their faces at the window when I take them home. Both of them crying….It makes me sick.’

‘I can understand…’

‘No you can’t can’t. Because you don’t have kids.’

Axel soon made up for that by bringing the children to stay on weekends. I had no objection to Debbie or Colin but felt my house and downtime had been a bit hijacked. Our weekend outings had to be child-friendly and I found it exhausting and none too romantic. It almost a relief to return to work on Mondays.

Axel had not long moved in when I had to take a day off work with a bad headache. Axel seemed unsympathetic.

I heard the front door opening a few hours later. I thought Axel had returned early to see how I was. I got out of bed and as I was coming down the stairs, there was Lars staring back at me. We both felt shaken and awkward.

He’d come back to collect his remaining things and had not expected to see me. We hadn’t spoken since he’d originally moved out and he looked defeated. I felt so guilt-ridden that without thinking I started to help him pack boxes with books and take them to his car. We talked a little and felt more at ease with each other. I hoped we could remain friends so thought there’d be no harm in helping him with the boxes at his new shared house.

We drove the few blocks to his place and I helped him unload the car. Afterwards we sat in the kitchen and talked over a cup of coffee. I said how sorry I was for hurting him and started crying. He teared up also and we wished each other well with our future lives. He leaned in and kissed me goodbye on the forehead and said that should I ever need him, he’d be there. He cautioned me to be careful with Axel because he thought he was ‘violent’ although I had no idea why he’d said that.

Lars was about to drive me back home when I heard a hammering on the window pane and saw Axel’s face flash out of sight. I tore out the kitchen door and ran down the driveway calling him.

Axel had reached his car. He pulled off an expensive cashmere sweater I had bought him as a present and began clawing it to shreds in a blind rage. I was dumbfounded and tried to explain the situation but he hurled the sweater with disgust on the road, called me a cunt, leapt into the car, slammed the door and sped off. I rescued the sweater and stood crying on the road.

Lars drove me home and offered to wait and make sure I was alright. I asked him to leave in case his being there inflamed the situation even more.

I called out to Axel but he had locked himself in the spare bedroom and refused to answer.

I realised now what Axel had thought he’d seen-a rekindling of my relationship with Lars, except that is not what happened. I knew I’d been short-sighted about going with Lars to his house but I was also unnerved that Axel must have seen me leave with Lars, followed me to his house, watched as we unloaded the car and as we sat in the kitchen.

My emotions ran riot. I felt a peculiar sense of guilt. I felt Axel had unjustly put me in the Dock and yet knew how my behaviour must have appeared. I was also scared that he’d had jumped to conclusions so quickly and presumably had followed me expecting to see some transgression. I was upset that he’d ruined the sweater and despairing that he was now refusing to speak to me. I had chosen this man over Lars. I had to retrieve this situation.

He refused to speak to me. The next day we went in our own cars to our respective jobs. I returned home before him and went into the spare room where he’d spent the night and found newspaper rental listings-from a paper bought when?- angrily circled in red.

By now I was frantic. He was actually going to leave! When he finally returned I tried again to explain what had happened and apologised for what he thought he’d seen. He accused me of planning my ‘headache’ but later on begrudgingly accepted my remorseful apology.

For my 21st birthday my parents had given me a choice: party or overseas trip. I didn’t have to weight up options. Trip it was and a terrific one at that, essentially a whirlwind world trip from Sydney to Paris, Italy, London, Paris again and then to the west coast, USA. I felt very spoilt-and sophisticated, especially after fending off a sex-pest in the Colosseum. Since then I’d been nowhere but had at least built up my art ‘career’ if it could be dubbed that.

With his language skills it made sense that Axel was so well travelled. In fact he’d travelled for the first ten years of his marriage to Margaret and seemed extremely put out when he told me that when her mother became seriously ill-and died soon after- Margaret insisted they return home.

Axel’s divorce had been a dirty business but finally he came to a private arrangement with Margaret to continue paying off the mortgage with his child-support payments. For her part she continued to work weekends while we had the children.

Once it was through we decided on a holiday and Axel pitched for Sri Lanka. My images of Ceylon started at tea plantations and ended with a movie starring Liz Taylor in which elephants stampeded through a mansion built near their ancestral burial ground.

My new passport photo made me look deliriously drunk or drugged. I was in fact consumed with love for this man. What resistance I’d put up was ineffective. He had won me over. And it had been a ‘whirlwind’ romance.

Deliriously happy we landed in Colombo with no bookings at all in pre-Tamil Tiger days and were accosted at the airport by a swarm of taxi-touts. The most persistent was also the most friendly so we cut a deal with ‘Ram’ : $300 in those days for a month’s complete island tour-with the exception of the far north-east all food and accommodation. We made a pit-stop at his boss’s office to sign a contract and receive our itinerary, a map glued inside a green folded piece of paper. The ‘bossman’ liked the look of me and asked Axel with a wink and head waggle whether I was ‘good in bed!’.

We stayed in Colombo in a breezeblock duplex on Mt Lavinia beach which had a traintrack running through it. The sunset was psychedelic orange and mauve and we had the first of many brilliant ‘deeshes’ of ‘rice and curry’ at a local restaurant which had seen better days before Independence. The uniformed waiters with gold epaulettes -a British hangover- stood transfixed against the side walls scrutinising our every mouthful. Our wine glasses were adorned with pink linen napkins, the ends of which protruded like bunny ears upwards-until they wilted in the heat. The alarmed waiters ran to set the napkins to rights and raise the ears until we could no longer contain ourselves. Not only was this laughable but there was no wine to be had. All up it could have been a skit from the Two Ronnies.

We headed inland to a cultural triangle defined by Kandy, Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa.. Despite my world trip I had never encountered such haunting, dazzling places. Although littered with UNESCO sites there was little sign of restoration-or commercialism. It was eerie to wander the ruins of Anuradhapura and trip over carved Buddha body parts and apsaras scattered randomly across green fields roamed by goats and young boys in lungies- as if looters had suddenly ditched their weighty treasures and bolted.

Ram took us to the Abhayagiri Dagoba, once a monastery of 5000 and one of the most remarkable structures of the ancient world, close in scale to the pyramids of Giza. He excitedly told us that buried beneath this magnificent stupa was a statue of a golden bull housing relics of Buddha. A new McGuffin! The DNA results on those relics, if ever unearthed, could indeed be Enlightening- considering the overdose of monuments boasted Buddha relics. Ram pointed out a bas-relief of an elephant uprooting a tree, a sizable Buddha footprint and the ‘moonstones’ -the first of many we saw throughout the country -decorating the eastern and western steps.

We often had these places to ourselves. There were no tour buses, no hordes, no flags, and very few stalls but more steps than I ever care to count or climb again-and frankly couldn’t.

The Dambulla caves were a good example. This extraordinary temple complex perched high above sea level with magnificent views of surrounding jungle-and only reached by curtains of steps- comprised five caves strung with 150 Buddhas emerging from the rock itself. The paintwork was quite lurid-all a bit Japanese games parlour- and accented by dingy light from dusty globes dangling from suspect wiring.

The story goes that when King Valagamba regained his throne-after being deposed, driven out of Anuradhapura and hiding out in the caves- paid tribute to Buddha by sculpting them. Imagine a sculpted Jenolan Caves. Typically, later Kings left their own mark, one of whom, indulging in a spot of hubristic one-upmanship, had the cave’s interiors gilded, hence the name, Ran Giri or Golden Rock.

We were the only worshippers there that day and possibly for some time because the Temple monkeys, at first lurking and darting became more aggressive and insidious, baring their nicotine-yellow teeth and trying to snatch our camera and sunglasses. Ram found them amusing but kept them at bay with a large palm leaf.

I’ve been told there is now a ghastly concrete Buddha and a vast carpark at the entrance but there was no evidence of these then.

In Anuradhapura Ram showed us the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi, said to be the world’s oldest planted tree produced from a 2300-year-old cutting from a pipal tree under which Lord Buddha is said to have found Enlightenment in Bodh Gaya, India. This would become a painting of mine.

Planted on a terrace it is circumnambulated by the supplicants as part of a ritual involving offering flowers, food, incense and the attachment to its branches- many of which were supported by Daliesque poles-of colourful and haunting little pennant prayer flags, symbolising their hopes and prayers. This too became a painting.

These people were so poor and so permanently trapped there there it was hurtful to watch them delivering themselves up to the former Prince Siddhartha who until 29 was materially indulged and shielded from the world’s pain and misery….. Axel bought a tiny home-made spirit lamp from a local stall to remind us of this poverty.

Ram stumped us one day trying to explain his favourite metaphor. Pointing towards a lotus ‘tank’ -large irrigation pond- he said ‘You cannot see bottom of tank because it made of mud. But out of mud grow lotus and sawn!’

‘Sawn?’

‘Yes!’

‘Sawn??’

‘Yes! Beautiful white sawn!’

‘Do…. you mean swan?’

‘Yes, beautiful white sawn!’ He waggled his head and grinned exposing gleaming coconut-scraper teeth.

Other metaphors were supplied by the ‘Eighth Wonder of The World’ -Sigiriya or Lion Rock.

Imagine Uluru rearing not from desert but from lush jungle and topped by a royal palace accessed by precipitous stairs carved into the rock. Halfway up this enormous plateau, formed by the magma of an extinct volcano, was a gargantuan carved- rock lion/celestial guardian whose paws straddled the Palace gateway. Now its paws are all that remain.

The ‘rock palace’ was originally the Versailles of 5th century self-proclaimed King [Kasyapa] who murdered his father and deposed his brother [Moggallana], the rightful heir to the throne-although this was more involved than Ram’s account of it.

Apparently Kasyapa’s father [Dhatusena] had abandoned his training to become a Buddhist monk and took up the revolutionary cause of freeing his people of twenty eight years of foreign rule. During his ten year battle, he fathered Kasyapa with a woman of low cast. Once victorious, he married a woman of royal blood and fathered Moggallana, recognising him as the heir apparent, although accepted Kasyapa at court.

Meanwhile, Dhatusena’s army chief, Migara, was enraged-as well he might be- when Dhatusena murdered Migara’s mother-and Dhatusena’s own sister. Kasyapa, who resented being overlooked as the heir by his father was egged on by Migara to overthrow Dhatusena and order his murder. Migara obliged by burying him alive in a wall under construction…

The Buddhist clergy and people were, not surprisingly, horrified. Despite Kasyapa’s torment about his actions and his many attempts at atonement, he was rejected by the people and abandoned the capitol Anuradhapura to set up shop in the north-east.

Since Kasyapa had been spurned by Buddhist clergy which would normally have forbidden self-indulgence especially in the form of architectural works commemorating oneself, Kasyapa was no longer constrained by their precepts. He spent a fortune creating his fortifications and vast pleasure gardens-water gardens, cave and boulder gardens, terraced gardens- serviced by irrigation tanks [ponds] and an ingenious hydraulic system all meticulously and symmetrically laid out below him as he gazed from his Berchtesgaden, his own Mount Meru with himself as its supreme god.

Mt. Meru was the crux of both Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. It was seen as a sacred golden mountain at the centre of the universe, the various levels above earth corresponding to different levels of Heaven and the various deities which lived there, the subterranean levels corresponding to different levels of Hell. Kasyapa, fancying himself the supreme god-king even added a highly polished ‘Mirror Wall’- all the better to reflect himself…..

Sigiriya (Lion Rock) was Kasyapa’s ‘party central’. Although said to have been deeply troubled by his hellish deeds he revelled more in the heavenly aspects of his cloud kingdom, entertaining visiting dignitaries and keeping a harem of hundreds of concubines from near and far-flung countries possibly sent as ‘tribute brides’.

Five hundred of these beauties were depicted in stunning frescoes, only 21 of which survive. Shown with golden skin, large made-up eyes, elaborate jewellery, cinched Barbie-doll waists and voluminous Hustler breasts, possibly in the guise of ‘goddesses’, they constitute the soft porn of 1,5000 years ago.

I confess to buying a batik version of one beauty as a wall-hanging, one of the few souvenirs available.

One hundred years after Kasyapa’s reign -477-495 AD- when the royal court operated as a monastery, a ‘graffiti wall’ appeared. Many men of various occupations and some woman left comments, curses, declarations of love, laments, prose and poetry.

One man had written:

‘Hail. I am Vina Videssa Bato. I wrote this.

Wet with cool dew drops

fragrant with perfume from the flowers

came the gentle breeze. Jasmine and water lily

dance in the spring sunshine

side long glances of the golden hued ladies stab into my thoughts

heaven itself cannot take my mind

as it has been captivated by one lass

among the 500 I have seen here.’

Another man had written:

‘The girl with the golden skin enticed the mind and eyes

Ladies like you make men pour out their hearts

And you also have thrilled the body

Making it stiffen with desire.’

Ram had memorised these pieces and looked highly embarrassed for my sake when he fumblingly recited the last line.

When we finally reached the palace ruins on the summit Axel took a shot of me in my orange jersey shoe-stringed strapped dress [what was I thinking! Just what you’d wear to climb 5000 perilous steps!] seated like a queen surveying her lands with my hair flying about my face.

Like many before and after him Kasyapa overreached himself. While he played, his brother Moggallana, who had fled to India, had been enticed back by none other than Migara who had now secretly switched allegiance to him- after Kasyapa had refused to allow Migara to run…. a religious festival!

Here the story differs a little. One says that when Kasyapa discovered that Moggallana had returned, he decided to head him off at the pass, assuming he had the unwavering support of his Army Chief, Migara. Soothsayers warned him against this-in less ambiguous terms than the Delphic Oracle who predicted King Croesus would destroy a great empire should he ride into battle-but he ignored them and rode into battle atop his glorious war elephant.

Another tale has it that Moggallana attacked Kasyapa’s citadel from below effectively cutting him off his supply line so that Kasyapa was forced to meet him on ‘level ground’.

There are also at least two versions of the story’s ending. Ram’s version is that the warring brothers, both atop their elephants, ended up in a swamp and mortally wounding each other fell off their elephants and drowned there.

Another is that when Kaspaya rode out he detected a swamp ahead and turned his elephant towards firmer ground. At that point Migara ordered the army to retreat and it fled, abandoning Kasyapa and leaving isolated and defenceless. He then unsheathed his bejewelled sword and slit his own throat.

‘So,’ laughed Axel that night over a few Lion Lagers, ‘They fought over a giant rock with heavenly views from the clouds but which, with no planes, cranes or lifts, had to be serviced from base camp below and if that fell apart, they’d all starve to death-but be closer to God when they did.. All up, an exercise in complete fucking futility.’

‘Maybe, but there was once a palace.. And you could say the same about..well…Camelot or The Garden of Eden. And even if they didn’t exist it’s nice to imagine they did, isn’t it?’

Regardless, Sigiriya has haunted me ever since and its endless rock staircases, its lion’s paws, its frescoes, its exquisite gardens, perilous drops, zig-jag metal gantries and decrepit wire railings worked their way into three paintings-one very large- and infused others.

If Shakespeare had heard this tale it’s doubtful he could have let it go- and it might have outranked the Scottish Play…

After visiting Kandy’s Temple of the Tooth, Axel and I asked Ram to take us to a reputable gem dealer. In monumental heat he lead us up a dusty street to a shop-front door guarded by a khaki uniformed soldier with a rifle. Ram spoke to the man who expressionlessly stepped aside to allow us in and resumed his position.

Sinhalese sapphires kept in envelopes were tipped onto a velvet tray by one man as his business partner surveyed the street through the window. We chose a beautiful cornflower blue rectangular cut piece and I sketched the setting I wanted for my engagement ring. As we bargained the price I felt a sharp attack of diarrhea and asked them to point me to the toilet.

Down a filthy tiled corridor the world’s most arguably disgusting toilet lay in wait for me. Reaching the cracked bowl and grimy broken cistern involved wading in rubber thongs through vile smelling seepage swimming with unidentified nematodes on the floor. Between relieving myself one end and vomiting the other, I was in no mood to celebrate our commissioned ring.

The diarrhea grew worse and Ram and Axel found me a local concoction for it. It worked too well. For the next few days I was painfully constipated and Axel was irritated, as if I’d brought it on myself and deliberately derailed our trip.

Ram felt embarrassed about the gem merchant’s ‘watercloset’ but I reassured him that it was another example of the ‘no mud, means no lotus, no sawn’. He waggled his head sagely. Eventually I came good, enough to convince a friendly and extremely curious group of local men that Axel was Dennis Lilly-very popular at the time- and I was his wife, ‘Valley Lilly’ (inspired by a brand of talcum powder).

At a lunch-stop restaurant, which like many Dutch and British colonial buildings was a crumbling pile replete with dodgy wiring and plumbing, we ordered coconut lassies and egg sandwiches-an innovative switch-up from the ‘rice and curry’ we’d been eating every day. Tired, hot and listless we took in the faded, dustball glamour of the dining room but doubted Queen Elizabeth 2 had stayed here as we’d been informed. The sandwiches were unimpressive but the bill made up for this, not in expense, but in bureaucracy gone mad.

A hangover from colonial days but ramped up to laughable proportions, the bill was narrow but pages long and listed every possible variation on the menu in Sinhalese, English, German Dutch and French. We ticked boxes beside bread, egg, butter and lassies and saw a space for a signature. Axel did the honours and signed ‘Phil and Betty Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.’

The next time around I signed for us both, ‘Jack and Jill Ripper’. With immobile faces we handed the bill and rupees to the cashiers. One did a double-take but trying not to laugh, pointed it out as inconspicuously as possible to his colleague. He smirked and they both glanced at us to check if we were in on the joke. Straight-faced we paid and they decided we didn’t realise what ridiculous names we had, waiting politely until we were out of sight before laughing hysterically-as we did ourselves.

We had consistently invited Ram to join us for meals but he declined, adhering to class distinctions-meaningless to us- and probably to work regulations.

I overstepped some sort of mark myself when, at a roadside stall, I ordered not ‘rice and curry’ but ‘curry and rice’. The waiter, beside himself with mirth ran to to tell the chef and staff who all emerged to look at the mad madam who had ordered this ludicrous dish.

At some point we underwent a pseudo ‘wedding ceremony’. I wore a rather stunning sari and my hands and forehead were hennaed. Axel, fuelled by local Arak which could have run a power plant- wore a silk suit with Nehru collar and turban. We exchanged rings of gold cigarette box paper and the little fingers on my right and Axel’s left were ceremonially joined with a strand of red cotton wound several times over. My memory is grainy here but I think I had to circle him-and then he me before we were garlanded, pronounced married, signed a hotel ‘wedding register’ and had our photo taken under a gaudy canopy.

We relinquished the heat for the hill-station of Nuwara Eliya, the ‘Little Britain’ time capsule founded in 1846 by Samual Baker who discovered Lake Albert and explored the Nile. It became the exclusive reserve of British tea plantation owners and civil servants who transplanted their love of polo and fox hunting to this rarefied climate but could now add elephant hunting to their repertoire.

We actually revelled in its borderline seedy nostalgia and after took long heady hikes past waterfalls through misty glens returning to our dilapidated hunting lodge for enormous battered pots of tea, ‘rice and curry’ dinners and desserts of gulab jamun, banana fritters, tapioca pudding and sticky rice with mango -and Lion Lagers. I twisted my ankle on one of these expeditions but a lathering of a local white version of Tiger Balm proved effective.

Just as well because Adam’s Peak- a celebrated Buddhist place of pilgrimage- awaited us. We began the ascent to this towering and curious summit sometime after dark in order to reach its peak by dawn. Initially lulled by a pleasant stroll through a temperate tea plantation the climb became cold and gruelling and walking by torchlight exacerbated this. Some relief was provided by tea-house pit-stops along the way where at least we could sit on wooden benches and warm our hands with glasses of tea close to charcoal stoves. At one tea shop we struck a drunk and boorish group of older Germans in khaki safari suits regaling each other with anti-Semitic jokes. Cold as it was we hastily cleared off. Otherwise there were few tourists. We pushed on and somehow endured gazing skyward at the pinpricks of wavering torchlight much higher up. Light-headed and with shiny windblown cheeks and breath preceding us we arrived pre-dawn tried to grab some sleep in a concrete bunker affair built on the summit for pilgrims who, historically included Fa-Hsien, Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo and Robert Knox.

The unexplained concave shape on the summit was said by Buddhists to be Buddha’s footprint, by Muslims to be Adam’s footprint, by Hindu’s to be Siva’s footprint, by Christian Portuguese to be St Thomas’s footprint, so take your pick.

More intriguing to us was the ‘shadow’ cast by the mountainous rock in the banks of clouds beyond it as dawn bled in. It formed a distinct triangle, its contour much sharper than one might expect from a lumpy mountain, as if it were a hologram or painted by a mathematician with zilch artistic ability. We took a pre-digital shot of it and I fancy if we hadn’t caught it but this may have been be false memory. But I later painted it. The hike back was horrendous and my knees threatened to buckle. What kept me going was knowing Axel was watching me with a kind of fascination and I delighted in that.

Our trip was running out. Next stop Galle Face Fort. Until then I doubt I’d seen a fortress and was deeply effected by it. This had as much to do with its masculine, heavy handed symmetrical vision bombast slammed onto an undulating innocuous blanket of green near a bay and after it was fought over and won and expanded and laid out like a township and and refortified and moated and lighthoused and refortified it succumbed once again to innocuous greenery. It was now a peaceful and cooler place at dusk for locals to amble along its once brutish walls, dogs to scratch themselves and cheeky laughing boys to play cricket on its paths with shy giggling girls looking on and older boys to sneak a beer.

A further irony is that a Christian church, a Muslim mosque, Portuguese, Dutch and British architecture all contentedly share the same space.

We stayed in what had been a Dutch merchant’s house, a two story, lofty ceilinged teak mansion with a commanding central staircase and numerous bedrooms. A sprawling columned loungeroom featured a huge chandelier festooned with cobwebs and dead light bulbs. A mangy stuffed bear with marble eyes on its hind legs held a serving tray. An elephant’s foot held umbrellas and badminton racquets. A motheaten tiger skin lay at the feet of cracked leather studded club armchairs whose springs rebelled against their upholstery.

Our room was ready for Miss Havisham. A small ‘double bed’ consisted of a cumbersome bedhead carved with a cornucopia of fruit and a sprung base barely supporting a horsehair mattress and sheathed in dank and pitted mosquito curtains. The sheets however were spotless and the overhead fan worked. An open window allowed in a salty tang and the sound of surf.

The room at some stage had been ‘modernised’ with the addition of a ‘watercloset’ and handbasin built behind a partitioned -off section of the room. The garden had barely been tended in years but its woozy tangle of palms, hibiscus, frangipani and bloated roses purring with bees scattered with battered rattan chairs and white painted rocks marking what had been garden beds made it delicious.

The house smelt dank and musty but we fell in love with its shabby bygone glory and I mentally came to its rescue.

It is no doubt now an exquisite ‘boutique hotel’, pared down to its essential historical features melded with contemporary wiring, plumbing, service kitchen and bathrooms, refurbished and repro furniture, tasteful, locally sourced, ethically-farmed woven and batiked fabrics, ceramics, wood carvings and glassware and culled of its animal cruelty faux-pas, by two charming and educated gay guys whose crisply uniformed staff serve nouveau-Arak toddies by the lotus pool on silver trays with monogrammed linen napkins.

A beach near Matara was our last stop before Colombo. We backtracked slightly so that Ram could visit his parents and invite us to a homemade dinner. The dinner was marvellous-except that it was customary for the women to eat separately from the men in the kitchen after the men had eaten the food the women had made…. so, as the only woman at the table, I felt particularly awkward around the men.

We soon realised though that Ram’s purpose in inviting us here was that he wanted us to buy a block of beach land with him. As in a 90% investment from us. We strolled down to see it. It was idyllic and we thought about it, but couldn’t afford it. A blessing in disguise because it might as well have been the setting for the final scene in Michelle De Kretser’s ‘Questions of Travel’ -devastated by the tsunami twenty two years later.

We stayed that night pondering the land purchase in a basic concrete cabin on the beach of Ram’s parent’s property with chickens stepping balletically through a little garden. The next morning Axel went for a beach stroll careful to avoid sunrise ‘turd’ offerings. I locked the door of the wet-room to have a cold sluice shower with a bucket from a tap in the wall. I heard Axel knock and as I went to unlock the door slipped on the