SEVEN DAYS (9 page)

“It will be here tomorrow,” Barry said. “I promise.”

She noted that he didn't say anything about her job being there too.

* * * *

She almost considered getting off the train a stop early and popping into the William Morris gallery on her way home, but that would have been salting her wounds. It would be a while before she could enter any gallery without thinking of her experience with Mark.

“It's a good thing we didn't go on a date,” she told herself. “I'd be suicidal by now.”

Although she was alone, she found herself moving through the flat as though somebody was asleep. She tip-toed from room to room, afraid of echoes. Echoes reminded her how alone she was.

She flicked on the television for company. There was a nature program about nightingales on BBC1, alongside a history of Mark Twain on BBC2. ITV had a news item about this year's examination marks and Channel 4 seemed safe until it turned out to be a show for young people called On Your Marks.

She flicked to Channel 5. Two lovers were in the midst of a passionate embrace. He was shoving her against the kitchen cabinet and she was rushing to unbutton his shirt, sliding it over his shoulders and her hands over his chest, their lips locked together as though being one person was not enough.

Lucky girl,
Judy thought. She'd have been satisfied to be part of one and a half people right now.

The scene transferred the couple to the bedroom. A close up. First the pillow and then her head hitting it, her blonde hair perfect and wavy beneath her. She was starry-eyed as her beau descended from the top of the shot and they gazed into each other's eyes.

Slowly, her lips parted and she hitched a breath and then they were moving subtly, together, matching rhythm with rhythm. Kissing. In love.

“Isn't it a bit early for this?” she said to the television, but there was no answer aside from groans and gasps and then the hum of the TV going off and the clack of the remote control hitting a wall.

She stood in the middle of the lounge, at a loss without her bag of official-looking papers to busy herself with. There had been evenings when she had spread the papers all over the floor and had spent a couple of hours with a few glasses of white wine and a folder, organising everything into chronological order or alphabetical order or both, the important word being 'order'. She derived pleasure from bringing order to chaos, and that was why there was little housework left to occupy herself with either.

She nudged her coffee table back into the exact middle of the room and straightened the coasters.

There really was nothing to do.

The walls were decorated with a calendar featuring countryside landscapes and she had three paintings, also landscapes, or rather three sections of the same scene, separated by eight inches of eggshell wall paint and bold, matching frames.

At first, she had liked the rustic images in their own right. They depicted a young man beseeching an unknown woman for some favour—money, forgiveness, a second chance?—and rows of gentle trees and a hedgerow, waning light tinting the clouds over the hills and the remains of an old barn, almost silhouetted against the setting sun.

Unlike many of Mark's favourite paintings and installations, these paintings had required skill to execute. People didn't learn to paint with this sensitivity or realism overnight. And the scenes were representations of something. They weren't just ideas thrown onto a wall. You didn't need to read three paragraphs to find out what the hell you were supposed to be feeling. That was why she liked these. They were solid. They were real. Dependable.

And yet, she often found herself wondering what it was that the man was asking for. There was no expression on their faces. Close inspection reminded her that they had no faces. Their heads were bowed and her face in particular was heavily shadowed.

She thought that he was begging her for something, because he was wringing his cap in his hands and looking at the ground, but maybe he had not spoken at all. Maybe she was chastising him.

In that moment, she realised how much the implicit story depended upon the viewer.

In that moment, she saw a man pleading for fairness and a woman as cruel as the approaching winter.

Mark had suggested that the viewer meets the artist halfway. Maybe he was right about that. She felt that she had never really seen these paintings before, even though they had been on her walls for a year. She had bought them in an over-priced gallery near the river, because she wanted to treat herself.

At the time, she had thought that she was lacking the air and open space and associated freedom of the countryside. Her lounge window opened onto a street with a similar tenement opposite and her bedroom window looked down at a yard that didn't belong to her and so had become overgrown with weeds the size of trees and strangling nettles.

Her paintings were intended as a kind of false window, but now they were more windows to the soul than to a real view.

She imagined the artist at work and for some reason imagined it was a man, perhaps because the man in the picture was so defeated-looking and the woman so beautiful, so cold. She wondered if he had painted it to reach out to people or if he had thought only of his need to bring the canvas to life and satisfy his own desires.

The more she thought of the artist, the more she recalled her own childhood desires to create. She'd been a promising art student, or so the teachers had said. Her execution was not bad. She knew which way up to hold a brush and had a grip on most techniques she had been shown. Time, unfortunately, had not been on her side and she'd had to give it up in order to pursue other things. Still, there was a part of her that wondered what might have become of her if she'd been able to continue her practice. Would she really be any different to who she was now?

If so,
she thought,
that could only have been a good thing.

Her purpose in life was to get from one day to the next, preferably without anybody realising that she was empty.

Dejected, she slumped on the sofa and accidentally laid her hand on the book she had bought for Peter.

She cringed as she thought of buying it and of being in such a frenzy of emotion that she forgot half of her belongings in the process.

Yuk.

She didn't want this reminder of her stupidity in the flat. Better to admit defeat and be done with it, unlike the man in the painting whose head was forever bowed for all to see. Better to erase all trace of that stupid evening.

She considered returning the book to the gallery and getting her money back, but she couldn't face being in there again, certainly not while the erotic exhibition remained. So what to do?

It gave her a jolt of pleasure to throw the little book into the bin. It sailed silently through air and crashed into the wastepaper bin, which had always been more for show than for practical purposes, but now rocked satisfactorily and served very well as the glorified pamphlet's final resting place. All it lacked was the swish of a basketball hoop and the cheers of a crowd going wild.

A page appeared to have come loose in mid-air and was now resting on the floor.

“No escape for you,” she said and crossed the room to dispose of it, only to discover that it wasn't a page but a flyer. She read it on the way to the bin, drawn by the image on the front, which was similar to that of the landscape on her wall.

The flyer advertised a seven-day residential art workshop taking place the following month. Thanks to Mark, she recognised some of the images used on the flyer, particularly Cezanne's Bathers, which he had described as clumsy—arrogant!—and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which he had suggested was unfinished—presumptuous!

The references to French paintings were on account of the art course taking place in the South of France, and figures because there would be an emphasis on life-drawing.

She returned to the sofa and read the flyer in full, an idea forming as she did so.

Mark had stirred old passions and they didn't need to go back to sleep just because it hadn't worked out between them. She could go to the workshop and see if she could regain some of the creativity she had assumed lost.

Barry demanded that she take some holiday and take some holiday she would, getting away from the city for a much needed week in the countryside.

The blurb claimed that the course leader’s unique approach involved meditation and relaxation techniques to unlock 'the unlimited power of the unconscious'.

It sounded a little pretentious to her, but she had to admit that it had piqued her interest.

The relaxation sounded good.

The flyer said that study of nudes would be one of the components of the course. Although that would probably entail a female nude, she held hopes that there might be a beautiful male body to look at too. All in the name of art and expression, of course.

She laughed to herself and was about to mark the dates in her diary when she realised that getting on the course wasn't only a matter of registering her interest on time and paying the very reasonable fee. There were hoops to jump through.

All applicants, the flyer said, must submit a letter of motivation and an original work, preferably a self-portrait, in any style.

Judy's shoulders sagged and she was about to send the flyer to rest with the book she had discarded earlier, but as she made moves to do so, she felt the emptiness of the flat yawn that bit further.

Even if she didn't get on the course, it was true that writing a letter of motivation would fill the void suggested by the rest of the afternoon. Regarding the original artwork, she could raid the box in the wardrobe in the bedroom and submit something that she had done when she had been hot, admittedly several years ago.

Reminding herself of her talent wouldn't be such a bad thing. It would be a welcome pick-me-up to an otherwise bummer of a day. If her submission led to getting on the course, that would make her year and she might even be able to forgive Barry for sending her home in front of the rest of the office.

* * * *

Three cups of coffee later, she was three pages into her application, realising that it wasn't so much a letter of motivation as her life story. She read it back with disappointment, ripped it up and started again, leaving out anything that she thought made her sound like a wimp. She wanted to appear to be bold and dynamic and witty and sexy and cool and in complete control of her life.

She soon got the hang of spinning the events of her life to reflect well on her. She had no longer dropped out of university, but rather had decided to travel and explore vocational options. She no longer worked as an office manager for a car parts factoring service. Rather, she was involved in marketing 'in the fast lane'—she actually wrote that—of the auto industry. She was no longer desperate to get away from the country, her job, her life, herself. She was ambitious, self-motivated and seeking a challenge.

Nobody believes these letters, she reassured herself, adding a few paragraphs on how she naturally saw the beauty in all things and wanted to share her vision with the wider world.

The original artwork proved to be more difficult to source than she had expected. The art box that contained her best work was not in the flat after all. It must have been at Peter's, because he had a dry basement and had stored a bunch of stuff for her when she moved from Wood Green to Walthamstow. Gradually, she had unburdened his basement of her belongings, but there were still a few boxes that lived there. She had liked that there was a part of her life in his home.

She didn't like it so much now. And she'd forgotten that he had her main art portfolios.

Well, she wasn't prepared to ask for them back this evening, so she had to make do with what she had.

She found a folder of still lifes. They were not bad. Arrangements of fruit mostly, sketched and painted at a time when she was mastering light and shadow and playing with how each surface reflected on the surfaces around it, one of the most useful things she'd learnt to observe.