by Guy Burt
‘Right,’ Anna says, when we’re at the bottom and surveying the car. ‘We’d better get started. Pull off branches and we’ll put them over. We ought to cover the shiny things, like the lights and the radiator bit, first.’
‘OK,’ I say.
The bushes are tough and gnarled, and pulling a branch off one of them is a laborious task. You have to bend the wood back and forth over and over until its fibres part and tear. It takes time, but eventually Anna has got one free; and a few seconds later I manage my first as well.
‘There!’ she says, pleased.
We throw the branches onto the body of the wreck and bend back down to the bushes again.
‘Ready?’ she says.
‘Yeah,’ I say.
‘How are the sketches?’
‘They’re good.’ I take one last look at the drawings and then turn them face down on the bed. ‘A good day’s work.’
‘Good for you. You deserve an evening out, then.’
‘If you say so.’
The streets are starting to fill with the evening crowds, and there are entertainers and musicians on many of the corners as we cut up through the city towards the university quarter. There is cheaper accommodation here, like the rooms Jamie and I were staying in on the school trip where we met Anna, some seven years ago.
It’s as if the thought passes straight to her. She says, ‘Remember before?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I was just thinking about it, in fact.’
‘I enjoyed all that. It was good fun.’
‘You were impressive,’ I say. ‘It’s a shame you haven’t gone for a career where your acting skills could be put to better use.’
‘What acting skills?’ she says.
‘You know. Boyfriend and girlfriend and all that.’
‘Oh, right. Well, don’t be so sure,’ she says. ‘There’s a lot of use for acting in politics. And in academia, too.’
‘Yeah, well,’ I say, not sure if she’s kidding or not, ‘not the kind of acting you managed that time.’
She giggles. ‘I made a pretty good femme fatale, didn’t I?’
‘It wasn’t fair. None of us could see properly through our hormones. Teenage boys are easy targets.’
‘“None of us”?’ she says. ‘You don’t mean you were letching too?’
‘Well—’ I hesitate, not knowing quite what to say.
‘Alex!’ She sounds shocked, and it takes me a second to realize she’s only feigning it. ‘I thought you were above that kind of thing. You’re supposed to be my friend.’
‘I try,’ I say, uncomfortable.
‘Besides, you’re an artist. You’re used to the female form.’ She grins. ‘I didn’t shock you or anything did I?’
‘Well—’ I say, smiling, a little embarrassed. ‘What did you expect?’
She’s quiet for a moment; then the grin catches the corner of her mouth again. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Maybe it wasn’t all acting.’
‘Why?’
She’s quiet for longer this time. ‘I’m not sure,’ she says at last, and the kidding has gone from her voice now. She sounds thoughtful, introspective; it’s unlike her. She says, ‘It’s just – I think I’d got so used to you looking at me like a friend. You and Jamie. I think I wanted you to see me in a different way for once, that’s all.’
‘Well, you certainly managed that,’ I say.
‘You really were shocked, weren’t you?’ The amusement’s back again now.
‘Well – it was a surprise, I’ll give you that much,’ I say, managing to keep a note of detachment in my voice. An idea comes to me. ‘But it wasn’t like it was anything new.’
‘Oh, really? Were all your life-models seventeen, then?’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ I say. I have to watch the street ahead, not look at her, to keep from laughing and spoiling it. It isn’t often that I’m one step ahead of Anna in anything. I go on, ‘What I meant was – well, you were only topless, after all. I’ve – um – seen more than that, in the past.’
‘I bet. Who? Tell me about it. Or do you just mean porno mags and stuff like that?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I mean you.’
‘What?’ She is genuinely puzzled.
‘I’ve seen you,’ I say. ‘Naked. As in, no clothes? You know?’
‘When?’ she says, slapping my arm. ‘Come on, tell all. Were you watching at my keyhole or something?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘It was an accident.’
‘When?’ she says, impatient.
‘You were very pretty,’ I add, stalling, enjoying teasing her.
‘Oh, balls, Alex. Come on. Tell me.’
‘All right,’ I say, giving in. ‘It was the first time you came to Altesa. I was eight, you were ten, I think. We went swimming and there was a place for diving from, on the cliff – remember?’
She nods. ‘Oh, that,’ she says, and there’s a faint note of relief in her voice. ‘That doesn’t count. What’s there to see at that age? Besides, we kept our pants on.’
‘Not afterwards,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘You know. You went back. You said you’d dropped your watch, and then you went back and dived from the ledge higher up. We’d all agreed it was too high, but you did it anyway.’
She’s frowning a little. ‘Yeah? I don’t remember.’
‘You did,’ I say. ‘And you took off all your clothes that time.’
‘Are you sure?’ she says. ‘We were all doing it, I thought. Jumping off that little ridge place. Then we went back home.’
‘No,’ I say, starting to be puzzled. ‘You went back again. I remembered something and I followed you and then there you were, up on the cliff. I wanted to stop you, but I didn’t know how.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Well. I can’t remember that.’
I don’t understand how she can not remember. I say, ‘There must have been a reason. I mean, you really wanted to do it. You waited till we’d gone along the cliff path a way and then you went back. You told me to go on. I mean, you didn’t want me to see you or anything.’
‘It must’ve been a spur of the moment thing, then,’ she says. ‘I don’t remember it. Sounds a bit stupid, really.’
‘I always wondered why you did it,’ I say. ‘I wanted to ask you. And now I finally can, you don’t remember?’
‘Don’t get upset,’ she says. ‘It was probably just some kid thing. You know how kids are – they do weird things for no reason. Probably something like that.’
I can hardly believe it is Anna saying this. ‘Don’t you remember?’ I say. ‘None of us were kids, and none of us were weird.’
‘Yes we were,’ she says. ‘We were all kids, and you were really weird sometimes. And if I did what you say, then so was I. So yes we were kids, and yes we were weird.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Whatever. So,’ she says. ‘You were watching this, yeah? There’s me with no clothes on, halfway up a cliff, about to do something really stupid and dangerous, and there’s you watching me. What next?’
‘Well, you dived,’ I say. ‘I thought you might never come up. And then you surfaced but you were screaming. And I thought maybe you were hurt, but then I realized you were shouting because you’d done it. Managed to do it. And then you came out and got dry in the sun.’
‘Cool,’ she says. ‘Did you get a good look?’
‘Um … yes.’
‘Was I any good?’
I don’t know what to say to that. ‘You were ten,’ I say. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you must have felt something. You know. Did it turn you on?’
She’s grinning again. I say, ‘Well – kind of, I suppose. It didn’t feel like that, though. I just thought you looked – nice.’
‘Nice,’ she says, sounding disgusted. ‘God. How awful. Nice.’
‘Well, that’s what I thought.’
�
��What about later?’ she says. ‘In your room in the hostel. Did you think I was nice then?’
‘I thought you were even nicer,’ I say.
Anna laughs aloud, and pushes me away from her. ‘You’re useless,’ she says. ‘The things I do for you, and look what gratitude I get.’
‘Nobody asked you to do anything,’ I say.
‘Oh, come on. You desperately needed the kudos. I bet you were the talk of the town when you got back to England.’
‘You could say that.’
There must be something in my voice. She stops, turning to look at me. ‘What is it?’
I can feel the struggle to pretend it’s nothing going on inside me. But perhaps it’s something about the night, and the feel of the city around us, and how good she looks right now. I say, ‘Don’t you get it?’
‘Get what?’
‘I always fancied you,’ I say. I feel like I could stammer into silence at any moment, so I plunge on anyway. ‘Right from back then when – when I saw you on the cliff. I didn’t know it then, but I think it was – that. Seeing you then was – I don’t know. It changed things in me.’ I can feel other memories scraping at my mind, and I force them away. ‘It was important, you know? And now I tell you, and you can’t even remember it.’
‘Really?’ she says. ‘You fancied me? Like – childhood sweethearts, that kind of thing?’
I shrug. I feel helpless. I know she’s finding this funny – that she’s laughing at me. It’s no use. I say, ‘I loved you, I think.’
‘Oh, God, Alex,’ she says. ‘You are just too heavy, sometimes. You didn’t, you know. I bet I was the only girl you really got to know, that’s all. Is that true?’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘Balls. Of course it was.’
I know I have to try, because I know this isn’t going to happen again. I won’t be able to say any of this a second time. I say, ‘What about – now? Don’t you ever feel like—’
She breaks in. ‘Alex, you know something? You’re sweet. I really like you. Back then, you were – you and Jamie were – pretty much my only friends, you know that? I liked you a lot. I still do. And I’m really pleased – and flattered – to have been your childhood sweetheart. I think it’s sweet. If I’d had a sweetheart it probably would have been you. But that was when we were – what, ten? I’m a bit old for carving love hearts in tree trunks and buying each other sweets and all that.’
I just stare at her. It’s more painful than I’ve imagined, even though I’ve known it was coming.
She points across the street suddenly. ‘There it is. We need to cross here.’
I see the doorway to the club as we dodge the traffic. It’s a basement place, a neon sign with an arrow pointing down some steps. On the pavement is a sandwich-board with the names of bands on it. A young couple are just starting down the steps when we get close, the girl hanging on the boy’s arm, laughing. Far away through the city I can hear a siren, and then a bell chiming. At the far end of the street, I catch a glimpse of someone – a young woman with reddish streaks in her hair – looking our way before she turns the corner.
We reach the pavement and Anna says, ‘What do you think?’
‘It looks fine,’ I say. It does. It looks familiar, too, though I’ve never been here before. It’s the shadows of other clubs at other times, that’s all. Still, something is too familiar for comfort.
‘Alex – don’t look like that. I’m still your friend.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I know. Thanks.’
‘You OK?’
I shrug. ‘Yeah. Sure. Let’s see what’s playing.’
We start down the steps, and as we go she puts her hand on my arm and gives it a squeeze, for all the world as though we’re a couple like the one I’ve seen a second before. Then there is a black door, and through it noise and laughter and smoke and lights. We duck inside and look around us: the place is getting full. On stage, a couple of band members are checking their instruments, tuning up. The pain of what she’s said – and what she’s left unsaid – is muted now. I’m caught up with looking around me, at this place that I’ve never seen before but which is already familiar. It even smells the same. I know I should feel something – should have some reaction – and I wait for it to happen, to grip me suddenly and unexpectedly. I even try to imagine him here, grinning at me through the crowd, waiting for his turn to get up on the low stage and play. I should feel something.
I wait to feel, but nothing comes. It’s as if there’s nothing here that means anything to me. Still, while Anna pushes through to the bar and buys us drinks, I keep waiting.
Chapter Fourteen
The walls are lined with pictures. Some of the prints are speckled with paint or bits of plaster, or scratched a little, or creased with handling. It doesn’t matter. I can see through the snapshots to the originals – big squares and rectangles of canvas hundreds of miles away. Tomorrow – I think it is tomorrow; I’m fairly sure it is – the doors will open, and people will walk in and look at these pieces. They will see them in the wrong order, laid out from first to last. They’ll think they’re my work, too, and they’re not. The whole exhibition is a huge fraud, a smokescreen, and the reality of it is hidden somewhere behind the surfaces of these images, and perhaps in that single painting that is growing and spreading on the wall.
I feel like I’m right on the edge of working out what it is I’ve done. All I know right now is that these paintings aren’t my own; that what I’ve thought I was painting, year by year, isn’t what is actually on the canvas. I have painted something different to what I had thought. I have fooled myself – or been fooled – and none of my work is really what I had thought it to be. The eyes are wrong. They aren’t the eyes of the people in the pictures at all. The eyes are all the same.
I take them down from the walls, and I put them back up, and change the configuration of them again. There is a puzzle here I can solve if I can fit its pieces together in the right order.
My exhibition opens tomorrow, and the paintings on its walls are not my paintings. They’re not the paintings I thought they were, anyway.
Anna’s finger traces the empty cavities in the lining of the case. ‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘There’s three missing.’
Jamie says, ‘So maybe he shot three people.’
‘I thought maybe there might be one still in the gun,’ I say. We all stare at the pieces of the gun apprehensively.
Anna says, ‘We covered the car up. At least we don’t have to worry about that.’
‘Can’t you see it at all?’ Jamie asks.
‘Well, a bit. But not as much as before. I don’t think anyone goes down that road anyway.’
‘Yeah.’
‘How’s he been?’ she adds.
Jamie glances at the floor as if looking through it, down to the sleeping hermit. ‘He’s still really hot,’ he says. ‘I put a cloth on his forehead – a wet cloth, I mean. But it doesn’t seem to do much good.’
‘It’s been ages,’ Anna says. ‘He hasn’t eaten anything, either.’
‘But you don’t eat when you’re feeling really ill. I don’t, anyway.’
‘I suppose,’ she says. ‘But he’s got to start getting better soon, don’t you think?’
‘Well – probably,’ Jamie says. He doesn’t sound sure, though.
‘He asked me for water,’ I remind them. ‘Maybe that shows he’s feeling better.’ I try not to think about the way he grabbed me, and the strange look in his eyes, as if he wasn’t quite seeing what was around him. Anna nods.
‘Yeah, exactly.’ She gets up, looks out one of the windows for a moment and then turns back to us both. ‘We’d better go and check on him.’
Outside, the sunshine is heating the valley floor and the lizards are warmed up and moving. There are plenty of lizards around the chapel, living in the tumbles of masonry and piles of timber. Jamie and I sit with our backs to the chapel wall, feet in the sun, bodies in the shade. Anna is inside
, looking after the hermit for the moment. Blue bees drone purposefully past us, examining the walls briefly for likely looking holes to crawl into, and then zoom off.
‘Jamie?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I like it when Anna’s here.’
‘Mm.’
‘What if she has to go home before the hermit’s better?’
He tenses beside me. ‘What?’
‘What if the holidays finish and Anna has to go home, and the hermit’s not better? How do we take care of him then?’
Jamie shakes his head. ‘There’s weeks yet. He’ll get better before that,’ he says.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Pretty sure. Don’t worry about it, Alex.’
‘OK.’
There’s the crunch of footsteps on the grit and Anna rounds the end of the chapel. She has a peculiar expression on her face; half amused, half worried.
‘What is it?’ Jamie says.
‘It’s the hermit,’ she says. ‘He’s awake again.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘Well – kind of,’ she says. Her mouth twists slightly, accentuating the weird look on her face.
‘What?’ Jamie says, curious.
Anna rubs one foot in the dirt for a while. Then she says, ‘He needs to pee.’
‘What?’ Jamie says again, though I’m sure he’s heard perfectly well.
‘He needs to pee,’ Anna says again, and then suddenly she is overcome with giggles. Her hand flies to her mouth and she tries to hold them in. ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ she says, breathless. ‘You’ll have to help him.’
‘Why us?’ Jamie says, which I think is stupid of him.
‘Cos you’re boys. Anyway, it’s all Alex’s fault. If you hadn’t given him the water, maybe he wouldn’t need to.’ Another burst of giggles come over her until she has to stop, coughing, to get her breath back.
‘I’m not helping him,’ Jamie says, sounding faintly horrified. ‘I mean – what do you mean, help him?’
‘I don’t know,’ Anna says. ‘Boys do it standing up, don’t they? You’ll have to help him stand.’ She looks at us, and our expressions start her laughing again. She manages to gasp, ‘Maybe you’ll have to get his thing out for him.’ Jamie’s expression of distaste deepens.