Proof I was Here

by Becky Blake

  I focused on rethreading my needle even though the mending was done.

  “Hey, Jane, how’s it going?” Annika brought over her basket and plopped it down on the table. A clump of dirt fell from a green frond waving above the rim. “Look what I found in the forest at Park Güell!” She started to pull things from the basket. “Wild rhubarb, mint, raspberries and this – ” She held up a large dirty mushroom.

  “Cool,” I said.

  “I know, right?” Her cheeks were flushed.

  I’d gone out with her on foraging expeditions a couple of times, but I could never match her enthusiasm. At first, I’d thought this was the reason Annika and I weren’t connecting. But after a few days, I’d realized the truth: Annika didn’t really want to be friends with me. She’d just been doing her duty – rescuing a stray. It was part of some code she lived by. I was a project, and that project had clear boundaries. Annika was unswerving in her respect of my privacy, and she herself only talked to me about practical things. Maybe moving from place to place had made her like that. She was friendly but detached, as if she wanted me to be as easy to leave behind as a box of belongings beside the bed.

  “I’m going to make some soup,” she said. “Do you want to help?”

  Her question wasn’t really a question; as her assistant, she was expecting me to say yes.

  “Actually, I was thinking of going downstairs and getting started on the mural.”

  “Oh.” Annika switched gears. “I didn’t know you’d found some paint.”

  “I didn’t really – I’m still looking – but there’s a bit of cleaning up and planning I can do.”

  “Okay. That sounds like important work.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. Ever since I’d mentioned to her that I probably wasn’t going to paint a flower garden, she’d been a lot less excited about the project.

  “I’ll come back to help in a bit.” I folded up Pau’s pants and went into the sleeping apartment to put them away.

  Downstairs, I walked across the empty ground-floor room to the pile of materials I’d been collecting in a corner. The building’s owners had left behind a roller, a couple of brushes and some industrial paint: black and a muted yellow that had been used in the stairwells. Pau had brought me a package of markers from the tattoo shop, and I also had some pieces of coloured chalk that I’d found in the garbage. I needed some other colours of paint though, before I could really begin. Some better brushes too. I’d been tempted to steal them, but when I’d tested out the idea on Enzo, he’d been even more disapproving than Annika, giving me a long lecture about how the universe provided everything that people needed. From experience, I knew that wasn’t true – at least not for everybody – but I’d decided to play by the squatters’ rules for a few more days. Now that I was getting luckier, maybe some supplies would turn up. If not, then I’d take things into my own hands and make a set of acrylic paints “magically” appear.

  For today, all I could do was prep-work. I used the paint roller to wash the dirty walls and emptied out bucket after bucket of grimy water into a sink. When I was finished, I stood back a bit, trying to figure out how I was going to use the wall space. It was so much larger than a canvas. Maybe instead of a single piece I’d do several smaller panels.

  In the past, a few of my best ideas had come to me after going ahead and making the first mark. I pried open the can of black paint, then dipped in one of the brushes. After a moment, I drew a stripe up from the floor to as far as I could reach. The brush was crunchy with some kind of old varnish that gave the line a rippled effect – a bit like wood grain. I continued the line across at a right angle above my head, then back to join the floor a couple of feet from where I’d started. A final stripe along the baseboard closed the rectangle. It was a frame of sorts, a big one.

  At the frame store where I’d worked to pay for design school there’d been an endless stream of limited edition prints to press between museum-grade glass for people who could afford it. In a way, it was because of that job that I was in Barcelona.

  I began to paint another rectangle further down the wall, remembering the auction where Peter and I had first met. During the bidding, he’d stared at me from across the room as if I was a piece of art he was trying to guess the value of. He’d assumed I was also a buyer – rather than just some salesgirl sent to hand out business cards – and when we spoke, I hadn’t corrected him. After that, it was a crazy couple of weeks: borrowing fancy clothes to wear on dates with him; not lying exactly, but not telling him the truth either – not until after we’d slept together. Sex was the one part of our relationship where we’d always been equals, the one area where, with me being fifteen years younger, I’d even had an advantage.

  Memories from a weekend morning came back to me while I painted a third frame: the clinging tangle of Peter’s duvet as I climbed out of his bed, his eyes on me as I slipped into one of his dress shirts, the smell of his cologne keeping me company as I poured myself a coffee in his immaculate kitchen – a room where everything was new and functional, and all of the cupboards were full.

  A swell of longing rose up in me, then fell back like a half-hearted hand reaching out toward something too far away. I swirled my brush in a bucket of water, watching as the black paint fanned out in threads that got thinner and thinner, until they were too skinny to see. A list was running through my head now, a scrolling tally of everything I’d lost: Peter’s hands on my body, the art on his walls, the view from his balcony. All of the promises he’d made to me about a future full of so much beauty.

  Our wedding.

  Without meaning to I’d been counting down the days until the courthouse ceremony we’d planned, and now there were only two days left. Two more days to wonder what Peter was doing – if he missed me by now, or if he even remembered the date of our wedding at all. He’d promised to take me to Paris for our honeymoon. In two more days, I would finally have been able to visit all the places from the pictures on my old bedroom wall: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the bridge covered in lovers’ padlocks along the Seine.

  I let out a long breath. Now that I’d started thinking about Peter, I probably wouldn’t be able to stop – at least not until the next two days had passed and the countdown was over. After that, I would force myself to start counting up again, slowly climbing away from feeling shitty.

  I wrung out the paintbrush with my fingers, squeezing it hard.

  “Jane!” Annika called. She was coming down the stairs. “The soup is ready. Do you want to try it?”

  “Sure, I’ll be right there!” I hurried to meet her, and our paths intersected on the landing.

  “Are you making any progress down there?” she asked.

  “A little.” I steered her back toward the soup. I didn’t want her to see what I’d been working on – not before I figured out how I was going to fill in the frames.

  15

  By the next afternoon, my thoughts about Peter were stuck in an obsessive loop: wondering where he was, who he was with and what he was thinking and feeling. Annika was at the kitchen sink, rinsing out a long line of jars she was planning to use for jam. I grabbed another overripe strawberry from a gigantic pile on the table and sliced off its top.

  “How’s it going over there?” she asked.

  “Fine.” Like everything Annika wanted my help with, making jam was boring and took forever. Now that I knew she didn’t really want to be friends with me, I was feeling more annoyed each time we hung out, although I was careful to never lose my temper. I didn’t want to end up like the girl who had been at the squat before me, the one whose bed I was sleeping in, and who had apparently “not fit in.”

  “A lot of these strawberries are rotten,” I said. “Is that okay?”

  “No problem. For jam, it doesn’t matter. It’ll just make it sweeter.”

  Rotten jam. The strawberries began to
smell fake, like the sugary filling of a jelly roll. The only reliable food in my mother’s apartment had been baked goods from her factory job: white bread, doughnuts, cakes and pastries. Except on Sundays. That was her one night off when she cooked dinner on the stove and listened to all the things I’d saved up to tell her during the week. Then she’d met Max, and I’d gone weeks without seeing her. Eventually he’d moved in – him and his little boys – and after that, I’d had to watch her taking care of his kids, how she knew more about them than she’d ever known about me: their favourite colours and foods, the names of their friends at school.

  The tips of my fingers were red from the strawberries. I went to the kitchen sink and rinsed off the sticky juice, snagging a packet of rolling papers and a bag of weed from the counter on my way back to the table. It felt like everything bad from my past was mixing together today – too many colours on a palette blending into a muddy brown.

  Annika glanced over a few times as I rolled a joint. I thought she might finally ask me a personal question, but she didn’t.

  “Do you want some of this?” I asked.

  “No thanks.”

  The joint was ready but I didn’t light it, unsure now if it was okay for me to be smoking without her in the middle of the day.

  “Hey, how come you’ve never gone back to the Netherlands?” I asked. Maybe I just had to get the conversation started, show her the kinds of things a friend might wonder about.

  Annika thought for a moment. “Well, I guess I just figure: Hey, I lived there for eighteen years. I don’t want to waste any more time in a place I already know.”

  “That makes sense.” There had to be another reason.

  “Plus, I have a really big family,” Annika explained. “Six brothers and one sister. So there’s not much room in my parents’ house.”

  “Wow. That’s a lot of people. I always wanted to have a sibling.”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty great. Once a year, we all meet up someplace different in the world. This fall it’s my sister’s choice. We’re going to Istanbul.”

  “Nice.” I hadn’t thought it was possible to feel any more annoyed with Annika, but now that I knew her reasons for not returning home, I couldn’t even stand to be in the same room with her. “If you don’t need me, I think I’m going to go downstairs for a while.” I pocketed the joint. “Is that okay?”

  “Sure. What are you painting down there anyway?”

  She’d obviously taken a look. “I’m just playing around,” I said. “I’ll let you know as soon as I figure it out.”

  On my way down the stairs, I tripped on the broken fourth step and scraped my arm as I tried to catch myself. All the things I might have told Annika if she’d asked me – about Max and my mother, about Peter and the wedding, about Manu and the angry man, all of it – came rushing into the centre of my chest like bits of sharp metal to a magnet, and I couldn’t take a full breath with so many cutting edges inside me. I needed to get some paint. I wanted to make something outside of myself, something other people would see and then know things about me that I couldn’t say.

  In the mural room, I sat on the floor and lit the joint. The smoke entered my lungs, and I held it there for as long as I could before exhaling toward the wall. At first, the stream of smoke retained the tight circle of my lips, then the line turned cursive and slowed down, as if backing away from what I’d begun to paint. It wasn’t a row of picture frames after all. It was a long hallway of doors, all of them closed.

  On the night Max had locked me out for missing curfew, I’d banged on the door until my hand hurt, yelling to be let in. Rosa was away visiting one of her sons, and all the other doors on our floor stayed shut. The hallway carpet smelled like wet sneakers and kitty litter as I sat waiting for my mom to come home from her shift. I was happy she was finally going to see what an asshole Max was. I waited almost until dawn before I realized: she was already at home on the other side of the deadbolted door. For once she’d taken a night off – to be with her new family, the one I didn’t belong to.

  Behind the wall of the mural room, the pipes gurgled, as if swallowing up the last bits of my inspiration; the room no longer felt like a place I wanted to be. I yelled up the stairs to Annika that I was going out for a bit, and she came down so she could lock the door behind me.

  “Here.” She’d brought me the phone card.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I memorized the number.”

  I walked over to the tattoo shop to see Pau. I’d been hanging out there a lot because I liked to watch his clients. They were always so determined and spoke their ideas with conviction: I want a butterfly, a Gaelic band, an Aztec sun, they’d say, as if they really believed they wanted that – would always want that. They never seemed to think about the future, or to worry about regretting their decision. Maybe a tattoo was a sort of fuck you to the fact that everything changed, a single stationary point in the otherwise chaotic swirl of a person’s life.

  In the back of the shop, Pau was working on a lizard design for an upcoming appointment. I watched as he drew two versions for his client to choose from.

  “Can I try one?” I asked.

  Pau handed me his sketchbook and I flipped to the next page. When I was satisfied with the outline, I added some shading, then a pattern of spots along the lizard’s back.

  “Hey, that’s good,” Pau said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you want to draw on her body when she comes? For me, it would be better. She is very beautiful, and she wants to have it here.” He pointed at the inner crease of his thigh and rolled his eyes. “I am a professional, of course. But I am also a man.”

  I smiled. People who spoke romance languages always sounded so dramatic in English. “Let’s see how it goes.”

  When the girl arrived, she looked at the designs, taking a moment to trace each one with her finger.

  “This one,” she finally said, pointing at my design. “It looks like the lizards in Ibiza. Best summer of my life.”

  Pau pulled a paper sheet down over the length of the table. The girl took off her jeans and lay down. She was wearing tiny hot-pink shorts and had a matching jewel winking from her navel. Pau looked at me across her body and handed over the red marker. The skin of her inner thigh was soft and cool, an unsuspecting canvas.

  “Here?” I asked.

  “Here.” She pointed higher.

  I slowly copied my drawing onto her skin. Every mark I made would soon be permanent. When I finished, she stood up to have a look.

  “Perfect,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” Pau asked.

  “One hundred percent.”

  Her certainty was like a car crash; I couldn’t look away.

  Pau began preparing the ink and sterilizing the tools. The girl lay down again. Then the stylus in Pau’s hand was buzzing. I watched as it touched down and he cut the first deep inky groove into her leg. A bright spot of red appeared on each of her cheeks and her pupils were large.

  I went and sat in a chair by the door and drew some more sketches: the three-legged dog, a wild parrot, the tall sculpture of rusty cubes from down at the beach. I tried to imagine each image transposed onto my body for all time, but I couldn’t. The only thing I was sure of these days was that everything disappeared. I couldn’t think of any way to draw that.

  After a while, the buzzing stopped. “Time for a break.” Pau set down the stylus and massaged his fingers.

  The girl sat up and fished in her bag for a cigarette. The outline of the lizard was done. It was crawling toward her crotch, just the way she wanted.

  Pau came over and I folded my page of sketches in half.

  He grabbed it and opened it to have a look. “Ha! You want a tattoo.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  He stabbed his finger at the parrot. “That would look good.”

  I
shook my head.

  Across the room, the girl tilted her leg, so I could see the progress. “Cool, right?”

  “Cool.”

  “I already want another one.” She looked high and happy.

  “I think you should wait at least until tomorrow,” Pau told her.

  The girl laughed, then gave him a flirty smile. It was probably a natural reaction: to be attracted to the guy who’d spent an hour with his hand between her legs and left an indelible mark there.

  “I’ll see you later,” I said to Pau. He gave me a desperate look, but I ignored him.

  Back at the squat, Annika had gone out and it was John who came downstairs to let me in. I was relieved to see he was the only person home. He barely spoke to me, and I was fine with that. Living with a group of people was exhausting. There were so many different personalities to deal with, so many conversations involved in making even the simplest decisions.

  I lay down to take a nap. It was Big Garbage Night – the day of the week when people could set out larger items like furniture for collection – and Pau had reminded me that we’d all be going out late. We were planning to create some “outdoor homes” to protest the lack of affordable housing in the city. After a long discussion at dinner the previous night, it had been decided we would all participate – that it was safe to leave the squat vacant for a few hours since there hadn’t been any sign of the Mossos for over two weeks.

  When I woke up, it was already dark. From the other apartment, I heard the squatters arguing about various injustices, their voices climbing up on top of each other, building toward a wobbly pyramid of outrage. I went in to join them at the table.

  Pau scowled at me. “Deserter.”

  “Sorry. Did you get her tattoo finished?”

  “Yes. But now she’s addicted.”

  “Oh, poor you. You might have to see her again. You might even have to sleep with her.”