The naked teenager

Young and Jackson Hotel, Melbourne, Australia

I am unsure it is good to see a naked lady before lunchtime and, if you are the lady, I am certain you would be distressed. I could see her from my table in central Melbourne down one end of the room. The Australians call her Chloe, she has become a household feature, and as I gazed at her near-perfect female form a tidal wave of sympathy began to pour from me. Chloe looked so terribly sad.

Her real name was Marie, although even that may have been an invention, as her origin was from deepest Persia, where few ladies have French names. To me she was more a Yasmin. As I stared at her, she looked away. She was standing, her head turned well left, her right wrist folded on her waist, left leg forwards, knee slightly bent, and her left hand rested casually on a turquoise something-or-other garment. There was a band around her left wrist, although I could not tell the metal. Bronze, copper, or might it have been gold? Her hair was short, way above ear and shoulder, and definitely brunette.

Chloe, you see, is a painting, oil on canvas and worth more than a fortune. She was originally painted in Paris more than 140 years ago by the artist Joseph Lefebvre. She won plenty of prizes, was eventually bought by a doctor, ending up near my table in a Melbourne hotel.  The place is called Young and Jackson, right on a busy street corner, and it was where I had chosen to munch a humongous chocolate brownie while studying Chloe’s naked female form. Young and Jackson is a gathering point for the city’s worthies, as well as tourists, soldiers, businessmen, and the occasional lowlife trying to strike a dubious deal. You do not want to visit Melbourne and miss Young and Jackson. If there is one place to see, that is where you go. And be sure to take time to study Chloe, even if she is stark naked and aged barely 19.

The teenager killed herself eventually, by drinking a concoction made from poisonous matches. The white phosphorus in a nineteenth-century firelighter bumped off many in that era, including Chloe. No wonder she looked sad. It was said she had fallen in love with her artist, 20 years her senior, but who promptly married her sister; not a good move, at least not if you were Chloe. Chloe, Marie, Yasmin, call her who you will, was dead a short while later.

And the brownie that I was munching? Oh boy, the brownie, was that good, melt-in-my-mouth and life shortening. You must forget about lifespan when it comes to brownies. I needed it, too, as to reach Young and Jackson and to study Chloe’s form, I had soon realised my life was on the line. A simple walk on the map proved to be longer and more challenging on the city’s pavements than I had estimated. The problem? Dead simple. Melbournians do nothing in slow time.

When I travel, I like to wander. I stop, I gaze, I talk, I chat, and I love to stroll if that is possible. But on my way to Young and Jackson, as I walked beside Melbourne’s Yarra River and kept it on my left, I was so obviously an obstruction to the progress of many Australians. There were joggers by the hundred, cyclists by the seeming thousand and skateboarders by the dozen, each trying to squeeze past me on the narrow, wooden boardwalk beside the river.

“Sorry, mate!” shouted a thirty-something skateboarder, his platform driven by battery, judged from his speed. He clipped my right shoulder, his briefcase swinging wildly, as he headed towards his work.

“Passing on your left!” came another voice. This time it was a woman, no more than mid-twenties, as she played chicken, squeezing through the tiny gap between me and the Yarra River immediately beside us both. The Yarra flows through the centre of Melbourne, finishing its 150-mile journey by emptying into the nearby sea. Like many urban rivers, it looks good on the outside, not so good on the inside and is a favourite spot for dumping rubbish and unneeded bicycles. A magnet fisherman would have a field day with the Yarra. Real fishermen would have a good time, too.

I moved to my right, to give the woman space, and instantly collided with a pair of elderly Australian ladies headed directly at me. They were deep in conversation, oblivious to their surrounding world, while discussing some poor fellow in nearby St Vincent’s Hospital, who had failed to say thank-you for a gifted bowl of fruit. They were tutting and frowning copiously, as if moaning had become an Olympic sport.

“Sorry,” I said, on impact. There was near-zero reaction from the pair. The two ladies barely looked in my direction as they strode onwards, gossiping for Australia.

Young and Jackson, that unmissable hotel, took another 30 minutes of playing dodgems with the locals. It seemed that everyone, bar me, was in a hurry. A shame, I thought, as art takes time, needs thought and definitely requires relaxation. Painting Chloe could not have been quick. Melbournians are a talented lot, despite their obsession with speed. They also have a penchant for graffiti, so I presume there is a species of Melbournian that knows how to slow down and relax. It is simply that I have never met one. Top end street art is not done in a hurry. Take a look at the city’s Hosier Lane, decorated from one end to the other with graffiti. None of it looks painted at speed. All of it looks to have taken time.

My worry about street art is that I have never seen an artist painting it. Somehow, it appears by morning, yet never once have I seen a paintbrush resting on the street. Like crop circles, graffiti appears as if by magic. It has meaning, too. There is a story in every image, some obvious, plenty not. Melbourne, for sure, is a city of stories and definitely of emotion. In plenty of its streets, not just Hosier, I found graffiti, each image telling a tale - protest, acceptance, love, hate, beauty, ugliness and peril.

By the time I made it to Young and Jackson, and took my seat before Chloe, I felt I had collided with much of Australia. My pilgrimage to see the naked teenager was now almost complete. Melbourne may have been in a hurry, but I was not. I reached for the chocolate brownie, slobbering it down as if I was a vacuum cleaner. The thing disappeared in an instant.

What did not disappear was Chloe. For a moment I thought she glanced at me disapprovingly. “Slow down,” she was saying with flashing eyes. “I know this is Melbourne, but for you there is no need to hurry.”