SEVEN DAYS

by Silence Welder

  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.

  Still, she didn't think that they were good enough to submit as examples of her best work.

  Among her sketches, were drawings of accidentally-deformed dogs and cats, a failed landscape or two and an awful, abandoned experiment in abstract painting.

  This wasn't going to work after all.

  Beneath an abundance of useful plastic bags, behind an array of sensible shoes, a First-Aid box contained what she used to refer to as her Emergency Art Kit, consisting of a few sketching pencils and a superb eraser, some charcoal, a palette of watercolour paints and assorted brushes wrapped together in a bamboo holde
r.

  “Hello, old friend,” she said. “Are you going to get me out of trouble or into it?”

  After a three bean salad to keep her going, she spent the rest of the afternoon attempting to breathe life into still life, which had always been her favourite kind of painting. At first, she had worked freely, with her tongue curled at the corner of her mouth, a sign that she was really concentrating, but the longer she worked on the paintings the less they looked like the objects she intended them to represent. They didn't look solid. They were flat and floating.

  She might have enjoyed reclaiming the process of drawing and painting if she hadn't been so tense. The deadline for applications was days away, which meant that she had to get hers in the post tomorrow morning at the latest.

  Barry had always commended her and recommended her for her ability to work under pressure, but that evening she became more stressed than she had been for a long time. The more she worked the harder it got, which was not the outcome she had been expecting. It was not the outcome she was used to at all.

  By the evening, an entire pad of paper lay strewn over the bedroom floor. A second carpet, crunching and cracking beneath her bare feet.

  Frustrated, but unwilling to give in, she removed her white blouse and then removed the paint set from the box.

  An hour later, she was huffing and puffing and feeling tenser than ever. On opening up the wardrobe, she looked at herself in the full-length mirror. It was a good thing that she had stripped down to her bra, because she had a habit of folding her arms while she was thinking and was so engrossed in her ideas that she forgot she was holding a paintbrush. As a result, she was adorned with colourful smears on her arms and sides. She couldn't explain the smudge of blue paint on the end of her nose though. She had no recollection of that one.

  Her mind was only ever this sloppy when she was painting. She had lost all track of time too and was dimly aware that she should be wrapping this up and getting to bed if she was to get up for work tomorrow.

  Now that she had spent so long working on her painting, however, let alone her letter of motivation, she was loathe to go to sleep without having sealed the envelope so it was ready to go in the post first thing in the morning.

  She gazed at her reflection, assessing how many more minutes she had in her. Worry and lack of sleep had made her pale and in this light her hair was an uninspiring shade of brown. In a moment of uncharacteristic poetry, Peter had described her hair as having the colour of autumn leaves. The only resemblance now was that both were dead and dry and drifted about on the whim of every draught.

  The smudge of blue on her nose made her a crying-on-the-outside kind of clown.

  Staring sleepily and miserably at her blue nose, however, gave her an idea.

  In the top drawer of her dressing table, she found an unused mirror, about A4 size, and lay it on the floor, on top of discarded sketches. Kneeling before it, she used a fine, black marker pen to trace her reflection onto the surface, tracing the lines of her face very carefully, knowing that she would only have one chance to get this right.

  Tired eyes.

  Tense, thin lips.

  It looked somewhat like a child's drawing, until she added her wavy, unruly hair.

  She tinkered with it some more, realising that 'tinkering' with a marker pen put her on dangerous ground. She added the slight dimple in her chin, the beauty spot beside her left eye and filled in her pupils so that the image stared directly out of the mirror.

  It was somewhat crude, but some people thought that Cezanne was 'clumsy' and this was a good likeness of her, even if she said so herself. It looked sad. It looked about right.

  As she waited for the ink to dry, she became sure that she had created the most accurate self-portrait she could. The portrait admitted that there wasn't much to see when looking at Judy Knight. She was an outline, with slightly wobbly lines if you looked closely. Aside from that she was empty. There was nothing for anybody to find except for their own face, their own thoughts, their own feelings, reflected back at them. She had become an expert at deflecting questions or interest in herself. She was better than invisible.

  This explained why she had found it so difficult to write her letter of motivation. Writing authentically about herself had been impossible. She had invented or spun every sentence, every word, in an attempt to be the ideal candidate, not herself.

  She'd be stuck if she really did make it onto the course. She'd have to keep up an electrifying act for seven days.

  She dated and initialled the reverse side of the unusual canvas, entitling it: 'Mirror Image'.

  To her horror, she realised that she had created conceptual art.

  Mark would have been amused or proud. She didn't know which. She pretended not to be bothered.

  She wrapped the mirror in paper and then some leftover bubble wrap, which was neatly organised and labelled in her stationary cupboard, and then wrapped that in some more paper before sliding the lot into a large, padded envelope, which she marked: “Fragile. Please handle with care.”

  Before inserting her letter of motivation, she added a line to the bottom of the last page.

  “None of this is true,” she wrote.

  She was such a neat freak that a neatly-addressed envelope and a strong adhesive strip made opening the envelope seem almost impossible. She didn't yet know that sealing that envelope had sealed her fate.

  Chapter Four: Clocking Off

  Auguste Renoir: “One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one's capacity.”

  “That's...er...sweet,” Barry said and Judy wished that she hadn't mentioned the art retreat to him after all. It was done now though and couldn't be taken back, like her application in the post box outside the building. “Somewhat unusual,” Barry went on, “but, it might make a nice change.”

  “Why unusual?” Judy demanded, peaked.

  Barry raised an eyebrow. Why did people keep doing that to her?

  “I'm used to you punching numbers into a computer. I've never seen you show any interest in art.”

  You've never seen me, she thought, but that's my fault, not yours.

  “I like art,” she said.

  “You'd better. You'll have a week of it if you get on the course.”

  “Which I'm unlikely to do, right?”

  “I didn't say that, but...is the competition high?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, feeling foolish for having got her hopes up. “Yes, I think so.”

  “Well, if you don't get on the course, you can just go somewhere else, right?”

  She felt like he was trying to let her down gently, preparing her for the inevitable. She wanted to shout him down, but he was right that her application was a long-shot and somewhere between the idea and sealing the envelope, she had started to believe it was a real possibility rather than a way to pass one of many lonely evenings.

  She didn't dare tell Barry that she had had to submit an original work of art too. Unfortunately, however, she let it slip to Jules, the IT guy who came to upgrade her machine that morning.

  “That's...er...sweet,” said Jules, waving the mouse around, clicking and closing all her windows.

  “Why is everyone saying that?” Judy asked. “It's not sweet. I can be artistic.”

  “At times, I think you can be autistic. Artistic? I don't know.”

  “That's not funny.”

  “I'm not joking.”

  He said no more for a few minutes and then asked: “So, did you enjoy your rest yesterday?”

  “Does everybody know about that?” Judy snapped.

  “You really do need a holiday,” said Jules. “Chill out, will you? Why wait for an art course? Just go for a massage or something.”

  “I don't need a massage,” she said. “I need a computer that does what I tell it to do.”

  “That is why I'm here,” Jules agreed, “but I could throw in a massage for free.”

  “Just make it work, Jules.”

  “You're th
e boss.”

  She admired the way he just let things slide, whereas she let things get to her. Jules never gave the impression of vulnerability. He was the most relaxed person she had ever met.

  He worked out at the gym several times a week, where he also took a course in a martial art of one sort or another. She had heard him say from time to time that he was an artist, though she didn't see what was so beautiful about kicking people in the head.

  Still, it was working for him.

  “Have you ever meditated?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “Curious.”

  “Free the mind,” he said, “and the rest will follow.”

  “The rest of what?”

  “I could show you?”

  “Just fix my machine.”

  Jules had a gorgeous body. She always said that she didn't like muscles, but even now her eyes flitted to his strong arms and she felt flutters in her stomach as his T-shirt rode up over his biceps. Just twitching the mouse made great cords stand out in his arms and she imagined him holding her.

  They had flirted with each other for weeks when he first started work. Things might have moved more quickly between them, but she had kept putting on the brakes. She couldn’t believe that someone like him was so into her. Eventually, she had had to believe it. She’d open her inbox and there’d be a message from him under a subject like ‘Primal Action Items’, ‘Unscheduled Upskirt’ or, her personal favourite, ‘In/Out Procedures’ and upon clicking on the link she’d be confronted with a suggestive or downright dirty email.

  One such email had been a memo outlining the plan for an upcoming meeting, but he had edited all the information, changing the location to his place, making the attendees just the two of them and adding a dress code: stockings, suspenders, high heels.

  He was relentlessly persistent, which had creeped her out at first, but ultimately, at a low ebb, had made her feel wanted, and she had finally taken him up on one of his offers. He had been trying it on with her for so long that his outrageous flirting had become a routine part of their meetings and her acceptance rendered him speechless.