The Naked Drinking Club Read Free

paintings together. ‘Hence enabling him to paint all of the countryside before him that he loved so much.’
    This was surely the limit, I thought. Who could buy this stuff? I turned to Jim with a look of disbelief but he was already nodding at me, confirming all that Greg was saying to be true.
    ‘The trick with the trip is to slowly tease the customer with the background to it.’
    ‘Are you joking? Are we both looking at the same background?’ I couldn’t resist and said it without meaning to. Jim laughed immediately, then Scotty, then the Danish, but the English didn’t really go with it. Anaya and Greg looked at each other again and Anaya took a long slow inhale on her cigarette.
    ‘Very good,’ she said, as I imagined her in an SS uniform. ‘I think you’re going to do well.’
    I tried not to start really laughing and felt told off. Greg went back into relaxed teacher mode.
    ‘Yeah, like it. Sorry, didn’t get your name?’
    ‘Kerry.’
    ‘Kerry. Well, when I say background, I mean, of course, the story I told you that led to the creating of two other paintings to join this one. And the beauty of it is, Kerry’ I wanted him to stop using my name and for Anaya to ease off on the staring ‘the beauty is, that if you get it right, nine times out of ten they buy three and not one, which means you can buy us all a drink afterwards.’
    Without instruction this time, Scotty took away the landscapes and brought out another two paintings. Greg clicked his fingers, prompting Anaya to go to the fridge to get him a refill.
    ‘Got two beauties for you now, folks.’ He held two paintings facing away from us. ‘This one,’ he said, turning the one in his left hand round, ‘is a bit bland for me but a lot of older people like it. Two ladies in the field.’
    We stared at a canvas made up of largely two shades of green and two small white figures with what I thought were brown hats on.
    ‘And this one, which some of you might be familiar with already.’ He proudly revealed the painting in his right hand. ‘Australia’s very own Blue Mountains, everyone.’ He showed us a purple blur that could have been painted with a potato. ‘For those of you who have not been in our fair land very long, the Blue Mountains are a big tourist haunt a couple of hours north from here. They’re a large range of mountains and are remarkably blue in appearance, caused, of course, by the foliage covering them.’ I looked over for Jim’s response, but he was already adopting the fake ‘Oh really, is that so?’ look for my benefit.
    ‘And a big favourite with the oldies,’ added Greg.
    Jesus. I panicked for a moment. I hadn’t thought about conning old people, and thought immediately about my grandfather, the one family member I cared about, and the one reason for returning home once my search here was complete. I wouldn’t rip off old people on any account, no matter how desperate I was. Greg’s comment threw me as I’d imagined all the people in the suburbs to be rich and annoying. Scotty did his bit again, giving Greg a chance to get a few good gulps in. He could feel us all looking at him enviously.
    ‘Sorry, thirsty work all this talking,’ he said, lighting up in addition to drinking. I was desperate for a beer and couldn’t wait for the lesson to finish. ‘Now, a portfolio wouldn’t be complete without a couple of experimental pieces of art thrown in.’ He seemed half cut by now, not noticing that some ash had fallen on to a blue mountain.
    ‘This is abstract. The Chinese favour this stuff, they like it ’cos it’s modern and clean, and they like all that minimalist stuff. Last year I hit a Chinese area, and they just bought in bulk, mate, they just can’t get enough of those bloody abstracts. I sold out the whole bloody car, and some others. And if you can get a Chinese family that have just moved in … bloody gold mine, mate, I’m telling you.’
    We all stared in silence at the three abstract