This Picture of You

by Sarah Hopkins

  There was shouting again, but Martin couldn’t make out what was being said, the footsteps behind just the patter of a drum. Walking past a house, he looked into the dark window and saw a curtain tied in a knot and next to the curtain, reflected in the glass, an ageing man who did not belong here. He was familiar, but not remembered. Something was happening to him; that was his thought as the wave of warm blood rushed into his chest. For a moment he felt light, suspended, the air around him like liquid. But next came the assault, the clamp of cold tendrils around the left side of his body. It was brutal, but not painful. It was a takeover, and he was willing to let go. He looked up at the man in the window. The face was a gargoyle; he raised his hand to it, and fell to his knees, the same question in his eyes, only now he knew the answer.

  It had begun.

  Part

  Two

  Chapter 7

  The girl is standing in the doorway.

  Martin holds his head in his hands and asks the question: ‘Where’s the fire?’

  Even before he hears the accent, he knows who it is. ‘Sorry, God, shit,’ she says. ‘I was banging away. I’ve woken you up.’ He waits for her to complete the thought: I’ll go, and come back later, or not; I’ll go and I’ll never see you again. But she doesn’t move.

  ‘You are Maggie,’ he says.

  The moment is fixed, a still shot: Maggie stands in the doorway, and pushing and pulling in the three-foot space between them are all the reasons he wants her to go, and the fact the longer he looks at her the more he wouldn’t mind if she stayed. She was right; she woke him up and he hadn’t got in until four.

  ‘I did call,’ she says. ‘I left messages.’

  He knows that; he has heard them all: ‘Martin, this is Maggie Varga. I’m in New York’; ‘Maggie again. It would be great to meet up . . .’ Then a note under the door: she’d dropped by because she didn’t have a number he could phone her back on. Dave waved it around and called her the Aussie stalker girl, then stood on a chair when Martin tried to snatch it back. Sure, he didn’t want to see her—he didn’t want anyone taking a status report home right now—but he didn’t want to turn her into the butt of any joke . . . He’d thought if he just ignored the first message, she would stop.

  But now bang, bang and stalker girl is here at his door.

  ‘I know. I got the messages. It’s just been crazy around here. Mad, you know . . .’

  ‘Oh sure,’ she says, and she smiles. This time it isn’t polite or nervous. It absolves him and permits him to admire, and when he does, when he lets himself take a good look at the girl who is standing there, he is reminded of when he was a kid and he dreamt of opening the front door to find a labrador puppy in a basket with a bow tied around its fluffy little neck.

  ‘Your mum said I should call you,’ she says again, which he already knew. It had come at the tail end of his mother’s last phone call.

  ‘What is happening over there? What do you mean you’re taking a break? You shouldn’t be out of work too long. It won’t look good . . .’

  ‘To who?’ he asked. She knew the plan: he was going to be a barrister when he got back and that meant no employer; he would be his own boss. What his mother was worried about was not having an impressive update for her friends.

  ‘Are you trying to find yourself or something?’ she asked, and behind her he could hear his dad: ‘He’s almost thirty years old, for Christ’s sake! He’d better hurry up. The world won’t wait.’ That was the way they thought, like he was stepping off the planet somehow and not tapping into the inner core, the centre of the universe . . . Sydney, the Lower North Shore, dinner parties with the same pent-up people in the same decked-out houses every weekend: that was stepping off. If anyone was ignoring the predicament, letting the world slip by . . . But he didn’t put up an argument. He said he was thinking about taking the bar exams in a few months.

  Then: ‘Maggie Varga will call when she is in town, such a nice girl. You remember her mother, Lili—she used to cook those dinners at the house; she’s become a dear friend to me.’ He remembered the mother; she was a cool woman, some kind of chef, wrote ethnic cookbooks. But he wasn’t in New York to babysit her daughter, and with how things had been going in the loft, he’d only be doing everyone a favour by ignoring her calls.

  Except now here she is, Maggie Varga, at his door, and all her good bits are giving him a hard-on. Without looking down at his shorts he tells her to come in, says he’ll just grab some jeans.

  When he gets back the girl is perched on the edge of the bathtub that sits in the middle of the kitchen.

  ‘There’s a bath in your kitchen,’ she says.

  ‘That is observant of you.’

  ‘How cool!’ She turns the tap, seems startled when it spurts water out.

  He explains that somehow it was the only place it would work with the plumbing. ‘You can have one if you want. I won’t look. Promise.’

  She smiles and tells him she hasn’t had a bath in six months. ‘But I’m going home tomorrow. I can make do with showers one more day.’

  All the more reason to relax: she is going home tomorrow. ‘You want a coffee?’

  She screws up her face, says she’s been on a bottomless cup of coffee all morning. ‘I sort of forgot to budget for the last day.’

  It’s then he notices she is eyeing the loaf of bread. So he makes her toast and she sits up on the kitchen bench and when she finishes he asks if she wants more. By the time she is onto her third piece he is smoking a cigarette and watching the crumb in the corner of her mouth, wondering to himself, How did she get in here? and already he doesn’t just mean his loft, he means his life, at least this day in his life. Already there is something about Maggie Varga that has smothered the last remaining urge to get her out.

  He catches himself staring, asks her how old she is. Twenty-one, she says, as she slides off the bench and sits down on the beanbag to look around at the walls of the loft. At the kitchen end is Dave’s mural then Linda’s scrawled poetry, on the other side a wall of Martin’s photos, and the rest an art brut collaboration of friends and strangers who have come and got high and channelled Dubuffet in the dark. Once or twice when no one had been over the night before, Dave and Linda stood in the morning looking at a new painting on the wall, trying to remember how it got there. The mystery man was here. That was the best of it, they agreed: the stuff that got there by itself.

  ‘This is so amazing,’ she says. ‘I can’t believe you live here.’

  He doesn’t reply to that. The truth is, he still feels like a tourist himself, an observer. But hearing the girl gush, seeing it through her eyes, makes his place here feel legitimate. She makes him feel like this is home. ‘I mean, you must love it. Do you love it?’

  Yes, he loves it; he loves the grid of bars on the fifteen-foot ceilings and the chaos on the walls and the fact that every piece of furniture was found on the street. He loves that in the corner above his bed is a boarded-up window that bears his name; he loves that he left a one-bedroom apartment and a humdrum job and found a way to live on the other side of the world with people like Dave and Linda.

  ‘It wasn’t so amazing when Dave got it,’ he says. ‘It was pretty much condemned, like all the buildings around here. He fixed it up. Half the floorboards had to be pulled up and replaced. I helped out.’ He points to a patchwork of boards and the gaps still in between. ‘It isn’t perfect, obviously. But it’s livable. And now the fuckwit wants to charge us mad rent. Suddenly SoHo is hip . . .’

  ‘Where did you get all the plants?’

  ‘That’s Dave. He’s into his triffids . . . He reckons buildings should be covered in leaves and rooftops should be made into gardens.’

  ‘That’s cool.’

  ‘Yeah. Dave is cool.’

  ‘Are they his posters?’ She is pointing to the Gilligan’s Island posters that wallpaper the bathroom door.

  ‘Yeah, he loves it.’

  She looks around. ‘You don’t have a TV
.’

  Martin shrugs. ‘I’m not sure he’s ever actually watched an episode. He just likes the idea of it.’

  ‘So how about you . . . You’re a lawyer, right?’

  ‘I’m not working as one right now. I was on a secondment, but I’m taking a break.’

  ‘Lil said you’re doing your bar exams.’

  ‘You call your mother Lil?’

  ‘Yeah, since I was little. It just stuck.’

  ‘Yeah, well, the exams, that was the plan. Or I said that was the plan. I’m working in a diner; I’ve been focusing on the photographs.’

  She points at the wall. ‘Did you take them?’ He nods and she walks closer. ‘Jesus, they’re amazing. It’s so wild that you just up and left and now all this. I mean, it’s incredible!’

  Apart from his mother’s observations, it is the first commentary he has had outside his own head in twelve months, and though usually he’d object to the blast of adjectives, it is nice to hear something new.

  ‘What about you, Maggie Varga? Where’ve you been?’

  Back on the beanbag, plane by train she marks the map in the air with her finger. ‘First I went to Hungary and found the house in Budapest where my mother was born . . .’ When she gets to the art her eyes light up like a firecracker. She is busting to tell him the best of it: El Greco’s house in Toledo; Goya’s Black Paintings in Madrid. ‘They are like my gods. Goya painted on the walls of his house, like you guys, like this, but no one was meant to see it except him. He couldn’t hear anymore; he just had this ringing in his ears . . . Have you seen them, his paintings? The faces, the expressions—oh my God! That was what it was all about for Goya, these inner demons. And then he just got up and left it all there—he said if you couldn’t extinguish the fire in a house you had to move away . . .’ She stops there, her eyes lock on to his. ‘That is good, isn’t it? I thought about that a lot, about why he had to leave that place.’ Shifting her lips around like she is weighing something up, she looks over his shoulder to his photos. ‘Is that why you left?’

  ‘A fire?’ He shrugs. ‘I’m going back. I’m here for a while, I don’t know how long. There wasn’t any fire. Maybe that was the problem.’

  ‘You don’t like being a lawyer?’

  ‘I didn’t like my job.’

  ‘What sort of law?’

  ‘Bit of this and that, commercial litigation. I was there four years. It was a place you go to die, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Sure, I mean it’s a little dark, but yeah, I get it. You hated it. And you’re going back to do it again?’

  ‘Well, a lawyer, just a different type.’

  She walks over to the photos again, stands up close to the wall and studies each image. He gets up and stands behind her, looking at them too, these pictures tacked and taped to the wall that link him to this place, this city. They are not in rows or in any sort of order; some overlap, some stand apart: a montage in black and white.

  At the centre there are the boys in the subway.

  The Scream.

  He’d asked them if he could take their photo; they agreed, then, like he was attacking them, they started to scream . . .

  There in the memory of Martin Field are the photographs on the wall of his loft in Hudson Street, New York City. There was another sequence from the subway, and from the tunnel, then up on the street, faces and fire escapes, skylines, bridges, body parts. Some of the faces had been drawn over in texta-colour tattoos, dragons on cheeks, hearts on foreheads. That wasn’t him. That was Dave; on a couple he even stooped to John Lennon glasses and red-devil horns, then looked to Martin for a reaction. ‘Don’t get too precious,’ he’d once said when Martin had framed a shot that he sold to the SoHo Weekly News for ten bucks. ‘That’ll just fuck everything up.’

  When later Martin saw his first Goya at the Metropolitan, he didn’t think of Maggie. The painting was of two old men. The first, with a long white beard, was leaning on his staff in a gesture of contemplation. Hovering too close behind him was the second, with a face part-human, part-ghoul, the mouth stretched open at the first man’s ear. He was shouting at him, or he was poised to devour. Martin had recognised him at once. It was Dave telling him not to be precious. It was his friend warning him not to care.

  ‘This one, the one where the boy is holding his face, it’s like The Scream; the graffiti is the red sky. Did you mean to do that?’ And in reply to his blank look: ‘The Munch painting, do you know the one?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘So you are tapping into the great artistic unconscious . . .’

  ‘Hah! I doubt that. I’m just messing around. I don’t really know what the fuck I’m doing.’

  But she’s onto the next thing: ‘I’ve gotta get a job when I get back,’ she says. ‘I am in crazy debt . . . But I’m going to do night classes to finish art school. That’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to paint.’

  She has turned away from the photos and is looking around at the other walls. There is a certainty in the way she announces her plans that rubs the wrong way; she is so comfortable in her own skin that it makes him want to wriggle out of his own, or at least find a way to make a dent in hers.

  ‘So you’re going to live with your mother?’

  She nods, slowly, like she can see it coming.

  ‘I’m just not sure I get it.’

  ‘Get what?’

  He hesitates.

  She persists: ‘What don’t you get?’

  ‘You go out and travel the world, and when you’re done you go home to live with your mother and spend your nights at art class sitting in a room full of wankers. You know the type I’m talking about . . . It’s a backward step, that’s all I’m saying.’ He falls down next to where she is sitting on the beanbag and faces her. ‘If you are looking for any sort of freedom, I mean.’

  The words slap, he sees that, but it passes. Leaning forwards, she narrows her eyes and cocks her head like she is giving the comment meaning-of-the-universe consideration, then she straightens back up to answer each part of it in turn. ‘I am broke. I like my mother and I like living with her. And I need to learn. I don’t know what sort of people will be in the class but I’m not there to make friends. I want to draw people. I want to paint.’ At the end of the spiel, she nods, more to herself than to him. There is no doubt: he has made no dent.

  ‘So draw, paint.’ He stands up and walks over to the table by the kitchen, picks up a bowl filled with sticks of charcoal. He points at a spot on the wall. ‘Draw.’

  She doesn’t move. ‘I don’t want to mess up your wall.’

  ‘You kidding? Look at this shit. It’ll be a masterpiece.’

  So she stands up and takes a stick from the bowl.

  ‘What should I draw?’

  ‘You draw people? Draw me.’

  At that she scrunches up her face then covers it with her hands. ‘This is weird,’ she says. When she takes her hands away and looks at him again she is still shaking her head in bemusement.

  ‘What is so weird?’

  ‘Sorry, nothing, no reason . . . I will draw you, Martin.’

  ‘It’s Marty here. People call me Marty.’

  ‘Okay, Marty. So grab a stool.’

  When he comes back she is staring at him, sheepish. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘but I have to ask. Do you remember me? Do you remember me coming to your place when I was little?’

  He nods. ‘Sure I do, yeah.’ Barely, but anyway . . .

  ‘What do you remember?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answers. ‘I remember you were there in the kitchen with Lili, when she used to cook those dinners.’

  She nods. ‘I used to sit on the floor at the kitchen door.’ She waits to see if that jogs a memory; when his face is a blank she continues, ‘I saw you a few times.’ She is studying him. ‘Your face is so different now.’

  ‘Come on, you really remember what my face looked like?’

  She hesitates. ‘We had a photo of you—of
you and your mother. It was on our fridge.’ Seeing he is perplexed, she explains that this was later, when their mothers had become friends. ‘Lil has always been so grateful to your mum, for the catering jobs, and then for the friendship. She says there were women in your mum’s circle who didn’t approve.’

  But he isn’t interested in delving into family history. ‘Okay,’ he says, bringing it back to the here and now. ‘So what has changed so much about my face?’

  She tells him it is the shape. ‘Shame, you were such a handsome boy.’

  ‘Yeah, okay, I got it . . . So how do you want me to sit, funny girl? Clothes on or off?’

  ‘Careful what you offer,’ she says. ‘Men are always disappointed with what ends up on the page.’ Then she smiles that smile, and begins. As her eyes move down from his forehead to his chest and across his face from ear to ear, the smile fades. She blinks like she is taking a snapshot then turns to the smeared, off-white wall and draws an oval in a series of faint lines and through the middle, a vertical and a horizontal, scribbling and smudging as she goes. But still the angles are too strong. It is nothing like the shape of his face.

  ‘I’m sensing you’re more into the abstract school.’

  She tells him to fuck off and shut up. ‘You asked me to do this.’

  He drops the smile, not wanting her to stop. He watches her brow furrow in concentration and feels the urge to reach out and touch it. Any which way, it is a beautiful face.

  And the one on the wall: now the line of the nose, the nostrils . . . She is dividing it again just beneath the bottom lip. It looks too big to be his lip. It looks like a slug, and then another layer of slug on top. Better. They are good lips, just not his. And the chin is too big to start with, but then she smudges around the socket with the tip of her finger and it starts to make sense. There is something to recognise. It isn’t bad. And she isn’t squinting or screwing up her face anymore. She has zoned out, tuned in, her eyes a little ablaze but the rest of her face fixed, serene. She’s done the ears and is onto the zigzag parting of his hair. Then she is scribbling; the neck and shoulders are on the wall in a few careless lines before she stops and stands back and squints again, shakes her head.