ISSN 1758-6488
|
Selling Fakes Non-fiction |
print view |
We arrived in Sydney long after midnight and Mark told us there’d be no point checking into a hotel.
‘We’re staying at a mate’s place.’
Mark’s mate and his girlfriend were asleep when we arrived, but Mark’s mate said, ‘No worries,’, got dressed and put the kettle on.
We sat in the living room and smoked bongs.
Mark’s friends had hung beach towels on the wall, air-brushed scenes of dragons, hot cars, and topless women.
I slept on the couch and the boys shared the spare room. Not long after the lights went out, the couple started screwing and then they beat each other up and, until just before sun-rise, their bodies and the bed-head drubbed the wall.
Around mid-afternoon the next day, we checked into a cheap hotel at Bondi Beach.
Not long after we met up at the mini-van.
It was time to sell some paintings.
We drove out to the suburbs and knocked on doors for three hours, but we sold few. It was Saturday, scorching hot, hardly anybody was home.
We did the same thing the next day and the day after that.
We’d been on the road for four days.
On the evening of our fifth and last day in Sydney Mark took us to the pub for dinner.
‘Company’s shout,’ he said.
I asked him how the artist managed to paint so many paintings.
‘Does he have help?’
‘There’s no artist,’ said David. ‘Have you not worked that out yet?’
‘I was just about to tell you,’ said Mark.
The paintings were made by a stamping machine on a conveyer belt in a factory somewhere in Asia.
‘Hong Kong, far as I know,’ said Mark.
‘So what about the fifty percent cut to the artist then?’ I said.
It turned out that with the exception of our cut the proceeds went directly to the company and its two directors, Mark and Anna.
The next day we all met in the hotel foyer around midday.
The bill was small, about $100 each, but I was skint again and pissed off and I didn’t want to pay. I wasn’t the only one.
We agreed to do a runner, hitched our overnight bags over our shoulders and walked out, one at a time.
In the mini-van, we drank beer and took lines of speed and, all the way back to Melbourne, twelve hours of driving in sweltering heat, a few breaks for food and more drink, we laughed about our crime as though our lives depended on it.
