I later discovered that the woman was the Director of the Gallery, Paula Savage. The next day all of us visitor hosts got a memo from our boss, Kate, asking us not to read while on duty. I smiled at her, attempting a welcoming “hope you’re enjoying your gallery experience” kind of look. A few pages in, I became aware of a sturdy woman standing and staring at me.
80s paper cup design inverted full#
Once, upstairs, I stood in a room full of Guy Ngan absorbed in The Catalogue of the Universe by Margaret Mahy. I’d take a novel with me and read while I was meant to be standing at alert. So I’d wallow in the slow pace of my one job which was not to let anyone fuck with the art. More than once I was still drunk when I arrived for work. I was a “visitor host” and had the Sunday morning shift. While I was in my early 20s and studying at Vic I worked at City Gallery. There’s something permissive about old age. Mischievously re-writing all the histories, stamping out all the old fires and arranging the kindling for new ones. Sometimes I picture myself when I’m old, transformed into Gertrude Stein, puffing away on black cigars. Family fires get started, nurtured, left to smoulder through the generations to skew vision and fuel strange stories. That the older cousin was corrupting the younger one just like the older people corrupted the young people all the way through. I think they’d have thought it was funny. “Good,” she said, “they’d all kill me if they found out.” I declined her offer to try a puff for the first time. The smoke streamed out her nostrils and I was mute with jealousy. She pulled a single cigarette and lighter from her jean pocket and sat in the grass like a wolf. My cousin once took me out the back of Grandad’s house where the grass tickled our knees and there was a stream with real frogs living in it. And we all knew about the packets hidden in the cupboard underneath the phone and the notepads and the maps. Lying near the ashtray on the kitchen table. In the bruised handbag of my aunty Eenie.
In the back pocket of my grandad’s faded green pants. I knew where each packet was located on each body. At funerals and Christmases in Pahiatua I’d eye up the packets of Holiday menthols, and Marlboro Lights, and Pall Malls. I have always been fascinated by cigarettes. – Janet Malcolm, from Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers “Cigarettes offer (or used to offer) the writer a great range of metaphoric possibilities. ‘Poignant, vivid and intimate,’ said judge Emma Neale. This essay by Wellington’s beloved Verb festival director just placed second in the annual Landfall competition.
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