At the restaurant, on the night of Rosa’s opening, Mr Parish drank a lot of alcohol again—he drank so much that, when it was time to depart for the gallery, he couldn’t get his arms in his coat properly and Kitten had to help him. Mother parsimoniously finished her single glass of white wine and placed her empty glass on the table. Only I knew it wasn’t her only glass of wine for the day.

Outside, Papa hailed two taxis, one for us, and one for Kitten and Mr Parish, and we got to the gallery seconds before Rosa’s patience ran out.

‘Hello, my friends!’ she said, relieved when we arrived. She stood just inside the gallery door, in a red suit and black shoes and her hair dyed so dark black it was almost purple. She had makeup on too: red lipstick and blue eyeshadow. Makeup did not suit her; she looked like a puppet version of herself. Florence Oakey swept up to us and kissed us coolly on both cheeks. Papa presented Rosa with a bunch of wilting flowers that had spent all day in a bucket in the restaurant kitchen. I took a photocopied catalogue from a lady wearing large black-rimmed glasses like Nana Mouskouri and went inside to look at the paintings.

I told you afterwards, didn’t I, Ornella, about the paintings? I can’t remember what you said: ‘Stupid, stupid’. Or ‘Smart, smart’. Depended how much money Rosa would ultimately make from it: your main point of reference for aesthetic value. ‘I don’t get it,’ you said once to me, ‘What makes one picture worth millions and another picture worth nothing? Who gets to choose?’ In 1974, when the National Gallery of Victoria bought Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles painting for four million dollars, you screwed up the newspaper in disgust.

Rosa’s catalogue had the big black word ‘ERASURE’ on the front, and then (in brackets) ‘CANCELLAZIONE’ which I knew how to say because I could read and pronounce Italian words even though I rarely understood what they meant. It was funny how the same words had different feelings in different languages. ‘Erasure’ sounded heavy and final; ‘Cancellazione’ sounded like a dance. I would ask you about this, I thought, folding the catalogue into my back pocket, but I never did. You would probably think it was silly: that a word could be like a dance. Mother would understand it though. Why didn’t I ask Mother about it?

This is how I remember Rosa’s exhibition:

Twenty-six paintings, all of which were white. Twenty-six white paintings on white walls with white lights shining upon them. Some people laughed nervously; others proceeded around the gallery a little hushed, as though all that white had erased their ability to think, or at least to put their thoughts in smart words the way people usually did at an exhibition. I’d been to enough openings at Works on Paper, I knew how it went: people stood around and said things that sounded smart, and then wandered off to get drunk. They didn’t really care, but it made the artist feel good, to have all those people there, looking smart, saying smart things.