Andrea Höst: And All the Stars

"Don’t worry about us: we’re all tucked up. Even got the animals in. Listen, you’re going to have to sit tight there, at least till it rains. Don’t go out while that stuff’s still all over the ground. And drink bottled water."

"Lucky there’s a coffee shop here." Madeleine muted the television, hoping her father hadn’t picked up on the noise, then poked at laptop keys, trying to bring the screen to life. "How long till they know what the dust does?"

"That’s anyone’s guess. I doubt a visual examination will tell us anything – unless it’s bacterial and already known. Smaller animals would react to it first, but of course not necessarily in the same way as humans." Her father, a devoted vet, sighed. "I have a great view of the Nguyen’s retriever. Racing up and down, showing no signs of anything yet. It’s nothing like so bad out here though – you can only see the dust on dark surfaces."

"But it blew all the way to Leumeah." Her family currently lived in an outlying Sydney suburb, more than fifty kilometres from the city centre. "Dad…I’m sorry. I–"

"All that matters is that you’re safe inside." Her father’s voice had thickened. "Though once this is all over, you’re grounded till you’re twenty."

Madeleine kept him on the phone, asking questions he didn’t have answers to, then talked to her mother, making up more lies about the Art Gallery, and conversations she hadn’t had with Gallery staff. She’d been lying to her mother too often lately, and usually felt quietly guilty about needing to, but was glad for the moment to concoct a reassuring fiction about a highly militant curator holding back any threat of dust with ingenuity and sheer force of will. She was privately sure the Art Gallery of New South Wales would be full of dusty people – it was too close to Hyde Park, and every jogger and lunchtime soccer player in The Domain would have run for it as soon as the dust started drifting down.

As Madeleine finally ended the call, the television switched from something about the Olympics which weren’t likely to happen, to a diagram of Sydney, of the cloud spreading south and west, leaving much of the far northern and north-western suburbs untouched. But by then she’d opened her email, and was flipping through a dozen photographs sent by someone called Michael. Tyler Vaughn in a Hunter green shirtdress and black jeans, his long auburn hair gleaming, makeup subdued, lips berry-dark and perfect, giving the photographer a Mona Lisa smile.

Even against a backdrop of airplane seats he looked both inviting and untouchable, rich with mystery. It was Tyler’s public face, and nothing like the image Madeleine had wanted to create. But there was a last picture, one obviously captured earlier, of Tyler seated by an airplane window, lipstick chewed to traces, strands of hair caught by the weave of the seat’s cover. He must have been staring out the window at the dust, toying with a long topaz necklace, and just turned his head toward the person seated next to him. The green eyes which came from Madeleine’s father’s family were tired, lids drooping, and his mouth was stern.

And Madeleine was lost to anything but the fragile skin beneath his eyes, the tangled hair, the chips in the polish on his nails. This was just what she’d wanted, and she began sketching furiously, small compositions at first, and then a more detailed piece, before transferring the lines to one of the pre-prepared canvas stretchers.

The Archibald Prize, the focus of all Madeleine’s recent ambition, required that portraits be painted from life. Even if that wasn’t a rule, Madeleine would normally never consider painting from a flattened image on a computer screen, and she would have aimed for four or more sittings. But this wasn’t about proving a point any more, was not about prize money, schools or careers.

It was just the rest of her life.

Tyler had a few thousand litres of hair product. What he lacked was anything resembling food. The refrigerator was empty, unplugged. Every shelf of the tall pantry cupboard was packed solid with boxes of the same brand of shampoo, along with neatly-labelled boxes of junk Tyler had collected over the years: clippings, ticket stubs, even a box dutifully inscribed "Dirty Pictures".

At other times Madeleine would have stopped to look, or at least smiled, but she only bit back a growl of frustration and turned to fling open the doors beneath the kitchen cabinets. The hunger had hit her as an absolute imperative. Not you-haven’t-eaten-since-breakfast pangs, but shooting pain, a frightening urgency which left room for nothing but the need to fill her stomach. The cabinets offered only a token collection of saucepans and more boxes of hair product, all of it the brand Tyler had done a commercial for last year.

The upper cabinets. Plates, mugs, glasses, half a jar of instant coffee. And sugar. A kaleidoscope of paper tube packets advertising different cafes, scattered any-which-way across the shelf. Madeleine grabbed a handful, roughly aligned, and tore them open, pouring the contents into her mouth. Again. Again. Struggling to swallow the grainy bounty as discarded packets dropped to the floor, and then there were no more, and she was scratching among the fallen paper, hunting out fragments she’d dropped before fully emptying.

The kitchen floor was a black slate tile, and specked across it were granules of white and brown, lost to her haste. Madeleine, on her hands and knees, contemplated the tiny crystals, then levered herself shakily to her feet and ran a glass of water, then another, drinking until her breathing had slowed.

A few dozen packets of sugar weren’t nearly enough, but now that the keenest edge of her hunger had been dulled it occurred to Madeleine to pull out several of the boxes of shampoo, revealing a small supply of packets and tins at the back of the pantry cupboard. It seemed Tyler didn’t live completely on take-out.

"Thank you for not making me lick the floor," Madeleine muttered, and wondered how many planeloads of people were arguing over their last packet of peanuts.

She ate a tin of pineapple chunks while heating pumpkin soup, and drank the soup lukewarm while heating a second can. It had stopped hurting by then, so she poured the second serving into her mug to sip at a less frantic pace.

The still-muted television was showing a smothered road, cars creeping along, and one racing as if it could outpace the air itself. Slow or fast, they lifted a trail of dust. Madeleine had deliberately angled her canvas away from the screen, not willing to either watch it or turn it off. Finding that feeling had not changed she unlocked the sliding door to the balcony and stepped out into cool autumn sunset, the city skyline outlined against crimson. The air itself occasionally caught alight, motes of glitter blazing fiery warning of their presence. She drank her soup and watched them drift.

Shutting the hushed world back outside, Madeleine scrupulously cleaned up the mess she’d made in the kitchen, then hesitated between canvas and TV. She would have chosen canvas, but the presenter was holding up his wrist, his face stiff with suppressed emotion as he unbuttoned his cuff and pulled it back, displaying what looked like an old bruise, a flush of green beneath the skin. Then there were other people, men and women who usually stayed behind the camera, leaning forward to show more wrists, green and blue, and their faces were the same as the presenter’s – tight with distress and determination.

" …in our Sydney studio at the time of the Spire’s arrival. We could not have been quicker sealing the doors, and the Building Manager shut down the air-conditioning plant as a matter of priority, and closed every vent possible. It made no difference. Every single person in the building has begun exhibiting the symptoms observed in the heavy-exposure group broadcasting from Seoul. We can only repeat the medical advisory. Do not travel. If you are infected, do not attempt to reach a hospital. Even if you are indoors, cover both mouth and nose with multiple layers of damp… "