How to Be Luminous

by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

  “Did he just…” asks Niko, her mouth dropping open.

  “What a load of Jackson Pollocks!” declares Emmy-Kate.

  I’m the first to crack up. Next, Niko lets fly a huge goose honk of laughter. She squawks away, doubled over with hysteria, flapping her hands. Emmy-Kate joins in with her Tinker Bell giggle, click-clacking on the too-big heels until we are together, wheezing and giddy and leaning on each other for support.

  The three of us have our arms spaghettied together, Emmy-Kate’s va-va-voom body wriggling between both our skinny ones. I catch a whiff of Em’s cherry-vanilla scent layered beneath Mum’s perfume; see the sunlight play through Niko’s bare eyelashes—it’s strange seeing her without the cat’s-eye black liner—feel like I’m in my own skin for the first time in ages. We’re a six-legged, three-headed, sad-happy girl who’s laughing and crying and mourning and rediscovering her sisters: all at the same time.

  * * *

  The dust of this strange day settles. Afternoon light is leaking from the clouds when Niko finds me in the Chaos Cave. I’m sitting at my desk with Mum’s laptop, trying to drum up the courage to go online, google this peculiar brain of mine. See if there’s a solution. I’ve got as far as switching the computer on. Current status: staring at the screensaver, a painting by Vanessa Bell called A Conversation. Three red-haired women with their heads together, exchanging secrets.

  Niko barges in, both hands occupied by mugs of tea. “Sorry,” she says, not seeming it, as the door ricochets off the wall. Her pajamas have been replaced with a green Vauxhall City Farm T-shirt and jeans adorned with Biro scribbles, her hair in two ribboned horns.

  I’m still in my graffiti-stained dress. Wearing this multitude of colors against my skin makes me feel as though I’m channeling the best parts of Mum, instead of bearing the weight of her body the way I have been.

  We settle on the bed, mugs on the windowsill, Salvador Dalí stretched out between us, and Niko signs, “I want to ask you something.”

  “Okay…” I know what’s coming, grab my tea for moral support, take a sip, and dribble it back out. Yuck—herbal.

  Niko gives a curt nod, drumming her fingers as she takes in the rare tidiness of my room, examining everything in it but me.

  “I know you know I like Ash.” Her cheeks revolve through the full spectrum of reds—crimson, carmine, cerise—and if it were any other topic I’d revel in the colors. “I want to ask him out.”

  I blow ripples in the surface of the pond-water tea, unsure what to reply.

  “Not that I need your permission,” she adds waspishly.

  Perhaps Ash and Niko always made more sense than Ash and Minnie: They’re closer in age, neither of them cares that much about art, they’ve always had something of a simpatico. I can picture Ash studiously learning sign language; somehow teaching her the guitar—after all, Beethoven was deaf. It would sting, though, if he said yes to her so quickly after me. But if he says no, Niko gets hurt.

  Maybe she intends to. All I know is this: You don’t always get a neat ending to your own story. You can’t control the outcome, however much you relive a moment. I can go back to the National Gallery and Bonfire Night in my mind over and over again, but I can’t change the past—or stop the future getting messy.

  “Yes, of course, go for it,” I tell her, privately thinking, Ick, ew, second-hand tongue.

  Next thing I know she’s wrapping me in a boa constrictor hug, spilling tea across the duvet. My sister smells like a cathedral, all incense and essential oils. It’s as comforting as home, as Mum’s cloud of amber and glycerin. Or the way Felix smells of cedarwood …

  Niko reads my mind and pulls back to sign, “What about you and Felix?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t think he wants anything to do with me.”

  “Don’t believe it. You two were like…” Niko whistles, eyes wide, and makes kissy noises. Then she rearranges the pillows, gets comfortable, cradling her mug in one palm. The old imperiousness makes a return as she issues sweeping, one-handed commands: “Talk to the boy. With words, not graffiti—something legal, Min. Tell him you like him.”

  I give up on the lukewarm tea, tipping it out of the window. A small, outraged shriek tells me Emmy-Kate is hanging off the trellis below.

  When I look back, Niko is staring at the SCAD motto on the wall. The letters are bubble-written in Junior Minnie’s green felt-tip penmanship:

  We believe art and design can change minds and move worlds. Immersive, imaginative, and hands-on—because theory without practice is like learning to swim without water. Let’s get messy.

  “You’re still planning to go?” she asks.

  “Oh, that.” I peel the note from the wall, rereading the words that have watched over my sleeping body for hundreds of nights. Art can change minds … It changed mine; it changed Mum’s. “I don’t need to go to art school; I’m messy enough. Anyway, don’t you hate it there?”

  Niko exhales, stretching out on the bed. I lie down beside her. The sun is sinking low and the room glows gold. This bed could be a flying carpet. It makes me think of days spent at Meadow Park’s pool together, staring up at the sky while Emmy-Kate swam, the clouds moving so fast we could feel the earth spinning beneath us, time rolling forward the way it does.

  “I don’t hate it. I hate the students who ask me about her, and that there’s not a big Deaf community the way there is at some other unis. And…” She takes my hand, switches to spelling: “I W-A-N-T T-O W-R-I-T-E.” She smiles. “I don’t think I’m an artist. Not the way Emmy-Kate is, or you.”

  “Me?” I roll over onto my side, goggling.

  Theory: Is it possible that everyone sees everyone else differently from the way we see ourselves? That we’re all walking around misinterpreting each other and having no clue what our family and friends are even thinking? People definitely should come with art gallery captions, subtitles for the soul.

  “I don’t even know what it is I want to do,” I tell her.

  “That’s what art school is for, you moron,” she signs. “You’ve always done a bit of everything—you’re multidisciplinary. That’s what it’s like, your first year. You dive in, try things out, learn.”

  She waves at the windowsill, at our empty mugs, gilded by the evening. That’s what I made the first day Mum took me to the studio. The stripes look like a jaunty sunset, but they lack the mystical pizzazz of the Rainbow Series I or the peculiar melancholy of The White Album. They’re not world-shaking-genius-ambitious-wow. They’re mugs.

  I always thought you made the portfolio to get into art school, then once you were there, you specialized. But what if I could go to learn? To work out what kind of artist I’d be if I wasn’t Rachael Sloe’s daughter. I don’t think I’d choose clay. It’s too close to the edge of the cliff. But an idea is taking shape: a life more ordinary. Calm, not loopy. Moving at my own speed, trying to determine who I’ll be, not racing to get there the way she did. Oddly, this doesn’t feel like failure. It feels like a fresh path emerging on the map, pushing aside trees and buildings as it wends its way somewhere altogether new.

  “Hey, Min.” Niko nudges me. “What are you thinking?”

  “I would like to go to SCAD…” I confess. As soon as I sign it I know it’s true. “But not ceramics. Fine art. No special focus yet.” The words are coming out of my hands faster than my brain can keep up. “And maybe not SCAD, but some other art school…” I add, thinking of the brochures in Niko’s desk drawer; dozens of possible outcomes on their glossy pages …

  “Oh!” I say it, then turn to Niko. “You were planning to leave SCAD and go away this year, weren’t you?”

  She nods. “Edinburgh uni has a sign-language society. Durham is supposed to be amazing for English literature. A friend from Poets Corner High is at Newcastle; she signs. A few people at SCAD do, but it’s not great.”

  “But then Mum … and you became Emmy-Kate’s guardian…”

  Niko nods again. “I can’t go anywhere.”
<
br />   This is huge. And it means I can’t leave either, but it doesn’t matter: I can’t picture any other me than the one who loves south London. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be than here, now, for as long as my sisters are. Conclusion: “Or, actually, yes, SCAD.”

  Niko’s beaming at me, might even fall off the bed with pleasure. I hide my face in my hair. “This is good, Min,” she signs. “So what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is I don’t have a portfolio. I used up all my paints on that stupid graffiti, everything else of mine I smashed, none of my drawings are finished…” Of course they’re not, I think, finally understanding. Completing something would have meant admitting to myself that I want this. Can’t fail if you don’t even try.

  “Better get organized, then.” Niko is stroking Salvador Dalí’s fur with her toes.

  “Says the neat freak.”

  “Which is why I’m not suited to art school—let’s get messy, remember? Also, if you want to get in anywhere at all, you should probably go to school at some point … Today is a one-off,” she warns.

  I nod, staring out of the window at the fierce sun, clouds rearranging the red-orange-purple into streaky bacon. The Rainbow Series I must look beyond wow right now, what with this epic sky-bonfire. My hands itch to sketch it.

  Niko moves her toes from the rabbit to me. She foot-drums on my leg, her toenails a shiny aubergine purple.

  “What?” I swat her away.

  “You have your art pout on,” she signs. “Whatever it is you want to draw: go.”

  Clementine

  (An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost Found)

  My hair, a solid Pantone ginger. An early series of Mum’s, Terracotta Tigers. The line of the London Overground on the Tube map, from Poets Corner to her studio. International Minnie Sloe Orange. This sunset, this moment, here, now.

  CHAPTER 32

  Metallic Gold Marker Pen

  Color intoxicates me as I jump from the kitchen step, wanting simultaneously to run to the Rainbow Series I and to pause the Earth’s spin right here, right now, and soak it in. The roses a cloud of apricot-orange-amber; the back garden burning up beneath all. This. Sunset.

  “What a night!” she would say to this moment. “Minnie, what a life.”

  Yeah, and you let it all go.

  I think of this, and I invite the hurt to come roaring in.

  This blazing sky is the very same one she stepped into. Same city she left behind, same sun, same moon, same clouds. It’s only me who’s changed—who’ll keep changing, moment after moment, growing and flourishing where she stopped. This is the same stupid world where suicide exists and it is seven years before you can commit a missing person to the grave.

  Then again, seven years is nothing; it’s the blink of an eye. And it doesn’t matter how many minutes-hours-days I grow older, how much I change … there will still always be a little piece of Minnie buried here in the past. I know this now: I will spend my life peering over my shoulder, jumping when the phone rings, forever wondering if one day she will reappear and grab my hand, saying, “C’mon, Minnie—around the corner there are dinosaurs!”

  This hope will last a lifetime, because that’s how a fully functioning heart works.

  You don’t have to feel terrible the whole damn time. But a lot of the time, you won’t be able to escape it. That’s how it goes. And if it’s only sometimes, well. That’s bearable. Because it has to be.

  The grass is sodden and I grab the last, lone daisy from it, start stripping it of petals. They fall from my fingers as I head along the road, past my graffiti and the Full Moon Inn.

  And there on the table outside is an addition to my poem. Where I’ve spray-painted our names in blood orange, Felix has added, in charcoal:… ARE TO BE CONTINUED (MAYBE). Huh. I smile as I walk on, entering Meadow Park and climbing up the hill.

  Step by step, petal by petal, Mum’s heels click on the path beside me. Blond hair blows in the breeze. A Beatles song hums in the air: “She Loves You.” She loves you not?

  When I reach the walled garden, I pause outside, take a deep breath, prepare to conjure her one last time. This is it. On Monday I will go back to school, start completing my portfolio and my SCAD application, see the school counselor, make a doctor’s appointment, perhaps bring the shoebox with me, open the lid on the truth.

  But for now, I turn to her. She leans against the stone wall, smock splattered in clay. One arm is wrapped around her waist, the other holds a cigarette aloft. She looks … not peaceful, exactly, but quiet. Neither sunk nor starlit. Like she’s finally okay.

  “Ah, Min, again?” she says. “I’m on a break here.”

  “Kind of a forever one…”

  Mum blows smoke, smiles in a way that crushes my bones. She drops the cigarette, stomps it beneath the toe of her pink snakeskin stiletto. “So, what do you think? Ready to let me go?”

  Never. There’s so much I want to talk to her about. But if this moment is all I get, there is one thing in particular nagging at me. “Did you mean what you said, on the bus? That I would only get into SCAD because you’re famous?”

  She comes to stand in front of me. We search each other’s faces, committing them to memory. There are tiny lines around her eyes, skin starting to soften at her jaw. She’s getting older. She’ll never get older.

  “That’s not what I meant at all. Oh, my orange girl.” She tucks a stray piece of my hair behind my ear, but it flies straight back. “You’re my daughter, which makes you belong to me, and you’re clever, and funny, and hardworking. And yes, you’re a Sloe, but it has nothing at all to do with fame. It means I’m your embarrassingly proud mother. Do you understand?”

  She doesn’t wait for an answer. She moves past, leaving the Rainbow Series I and me behind, a puff of Noix de Tubéreuse against my cheek as she whispers: “She loves you. No doubt about it.”

  I don’t know if it’s her, or the breeze, but then she’s gone.

  The sun is rapidly sliding down the sky. Bare trees raise their skeleton branches and, spread out below, London is alive. The remains of my poem glow against the dark sidewalk. I want to eat all the colors in the city.

  I step into the walled garden and sit down on a bench, not a flower bed for once, taking out my sketchbook and a pencil—all I have left to draw with. Stroke by stroke, I sketch a portrait of Mum in soft gray lines. The world is in color and her memory is monochrome, the way it should be. I’m drawing slowly and carefully, not fast and furious the way Felix does: but this is more me, more Minnie.

  What works for him doesn’t work for me. And another thing—I’m going to need the funeral. It’s going to suck, but I want one anyway. Rachael Sloe: The Retrospective. I want us to choose a sequin-drizzled party dress—or better yet, a clay-covered smock—to bury in an empty coffin. We’ll ask the Professor for theological advice on how to have a ceremony without a body. I want there to be a gravestone with her name on it among tall green grass. Even if she’s never found, it will be a place we can point to and say: she is here.

  By the time I get close to finishing the portrait, it’s night. A damp scent tells me winter is on its way. But the night is not black. The shadows are too rich, too textured. Then there’s that pink-silver-yellow London sky, which Emmy-Kate calls romantic and Niko calls light pollution and I call COLOR.

  I decide to leave the portrait unfinished. I might find a way to make my incomplete portfolio paintings seem deliberate: Call it Unfinished Stories. I prop the sketch pad on top of the memorial flowers. The pile is smaller than it was; her story gradually being forgotten by everyone but us. Then I lie back on the bench, thinking about Felix Waters and that TO BE CONTINUED (MAYBE).

  If I wanted him to be my boyfriend, I could invite him to climb inside one of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. Buy him every single pastry in the Bluebird Bakery. Take him to see some knockout art. But am I ready for him? Something tells me things with Felix would go Roadrunner fast: wham, bam, kiss, love, sex, the whole kit and
caboodle.

  I have no idea who I am, and I think I need to get to know me for a while, alone, whoever Minnie Sloe is, whoever I am:

  Ginger. A sister. A non-girlfriend. An artist? Almost eighteen. Possibly batcrap-bananas-nutso-insane.

  Rachael Sloe’s daughter and her own person.

  Not so much a story with a different ending, but one that doesn’t have an ending yet—

  Citrine

  (An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost Found)

  Montana Gold Acrylic Spray Paint in shade G1040 Asia, a yellow-gold that dries drip-free and water-resistant and doesn’t fade from the lampposts of Poets Corner for many, many months.

  CHAPTER 33

  Let’s Fill This Town with Artists

  Here’s how you hold a funeral for someone who isn’t dead. Here’s how you paint it black—and every other color. The whole effing spectrum.

  My sisters and I are standing on the very edge of the pool, about to jump.

  The whole way here Emmy-Kate has been bombastic, claiming it won’t be as cold as we think, but even she’s shivering beneath the winter sun. No one else is here. It’s as if all of Poets Corner instinctively understands that this isn’t about Rachael Sloe, Famous Artist. This is for us. Okay, and it’s freezing. Penguins would have second thoughts.

  Surrounded by emptiness and damp gray concrete, she should seem more missing than ever. Yet she’s here in Emmy-Kate’s shocking-pink lipstick, in the decisive movement of Niko’s hands, in the three of us teetering on the brink of hysteria, double-daring each other to dive-bomb; procrastinating with endless silent talking, talking, talking. About anything but her. Yet.