Girl in Profile

by Zillah Bethell

  Contents

  Also by this author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Quotes

  Gwen – Beyond The Pale Of Myself

  Moth – Adam

  Elizabeth – Death Row

  Gwen – Rodin

  Elizabeth – Autobahn

  Gwen – An Eroticised Terrain

  Moth – Swallows

  Elizabeth – Orgasms/Fairy Knickers/The Language of

  Gwen – Ordinary Colours

  Elizabeth – Sweating

  Gwen – Gates of Hell

  Moth – Bounce and Rhyme

  Elizabeth – Pathos and Bathos

  Gwen – Bousculé par le Monde

  Elizabeth – Cuckoo’s Nest

  Gwen – Rape

  Moth – Women’s Work

  Elizabeth – Wishbones

  Gwen – The Narrative Gone Elsewhere

  Elizabeth – Augustus Gloop

  Gwen – Drafts

  Moth – God

  Elizabeth – Westerns

  Gwen – Preparing the Canvas

  Ida’s Death

  Elizabeth – Colonising Mars

  Gwen – Notebook Entry

  Letter From Rodin

  Moth – Pot Noodles

  Elizabeth – Skinny Minnie/Eton Mess

  Gwen – Sex and Sinkholes

  Elizabeth – Letter To Death Row

  Gwen – The Little Interior

  Moth – Cunts and Flying Saucers

  Elizabeth – Moonlight

  Gwen – Note to Self

  Letter to Augustus John

  Elizabeth – Perfect Turd

  Gwen – My Despair Over the Inexorable Nature of Ti

  Moth – Foxes

  Elizabeth – A Ceaseless Rumba

  Gwen – Letter to Rodin

  Elizabeth – The Weight of Words

  Gwen – Young Nun

  Moth – Rope and the RSPCA

  Elizabeth – How’s a Marriage Like a Hurricane?

  Gwen – Me

  I Attempt to Justify the Choices I’ve Made

  Moth – The Vet’s

  Elizabeth – Regrets/Shade/Old Apples

  Gwen – Working

  Girl in Profile

  Moth – Monopoly

  Elizabeth – Wendy Dies

  Gwen – Met a Man

  Met a Woman

  Met a Man and a Woman

  Moth – Maggie

  Elizabeth – Death

  Gwen – My Property

  Elizabeth – What are Days For?

  Gwen – The Strange Form

  Technique

  Moth – That Argument Carousel

  Elizabeth – The Truth

  Gwen – Regrets

  My Garden

  Moth – Not Deep Enough for Snow Angels

  Elizabeth – Cigarettes are Cool

  Gwen – Gloria

  Moth – Punching Air

  Gwen – Spinsterhood

  Moth – First Day

  Elizabeth – Meds

  Gwen – Flowers and Cats

  Elizabeth – The Truth

  Gwen – Fuck Off

  Moth – Just Because I Can

  Elizabeth – Maximilian

  Gwen – Pale Quiet Songs

  Elizabeth – Horseshoe and Cocoa

  Gwen – Mama Pussy

  Moth – Tomorrow

  Elizabeth – Minnie Again

  Gwen – Part of the Painting

  Elizabeth – The Objects on my Shelf

  Gwen – Girl in a Mulberry Dress

  Moth – Four Weeks Later

  Elizabeth – Adam Again

  Gwen – My Death

  Moth – My So-called Death

  Elizabeth – My Death

  Zillah Bethell on writing GIRL IN PROFILE

  About the Author

  ABOUT HONNO

  Copyright

  Also by this author

  Seahorses are Real

  Le Temps des Cerises

  Forthcoming for children;

  A Whisper of Horses

  Girl in Profile

  by

  Zillah Bethell

  HONNO MODERN FICTION

  For Loveday

  For if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

  G. K. Chesterton

  The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

  T. S. Eliot

  Gwen

  Beyond The Pale Of Myself

  I creep along the edge of amethyst cliffs, palely certain he will come. My room is immaculate – only a hair of Edgar’s out of place on the bed and a fish bone licked to China white (from Tenby of the Fishes I fled). He says to paint while I wait, but my jar of brushes remains on the mantelpiece beside the primroses just plucked. A work of art is a little beating heart, a little beating, palpitating heart, and I have no palpitations, no beats to spare, not while Rodin is alive. Though if I were to paint, I would paint this room, pretty and clean, awaiting his arrival – thrilling, expectant, anticipatory space. The lace curtains billowing, allowing the light to pick out each object – the barley sugar leg table, an open book, my hat and parasol, Edgar on the wicker chair perhaps – yet joining them all in one atmosphere. Mysterious, oblique. Time suspended, interrupted, me in the shadows, absent yet present. I hear his tread on the stairs. Quick. The lucky heathers peep, palely certain of the sun. The glass reflects an oval, that unruly strand of hair, the proud mouth still there, the cameo at my throat. We will enact The Kiss, I think, my skin a gleaming marble, my right leg over his lap. My wet clay. Sometimes he spits to moisten it. The delicate cathedral of his hands. I worship beneath.

  Greetings next door. It is someone else. The sea mocks me with her cruel, cerulean smile. The sea is the very last thing to go dark. I’m almost tempted to throw myself in but I can do nothing. I should eat something. There is an egg, somewhere. If I get too thin I shan’t be able to model for him. He likes his girls to be dévelopée (measured me with a compass the first time we met). Moonlight arrives with the fireflies and nightingales. I put on my nightdress and try to sing, but the noise of lovemaking through the walls is too loud. I am dumb like Hans Anderson’s little mermaid (from Tenby of the Fishes I fled). Collecting cowries with my father and bluebells by the river Cleddau. Now he sits amidst mahogany and stuffed doves under glass, his foot firmly pressed on the sostenutopedal of grief. My mother always a wave away from death – her life gone into her hats – travelling from one health spa to another for the rheumatism in her limbs. Augustus and I on the beach near Haverfordwest, drawing gulls and crabs in the sand and watching the neophytes plunge into baptism and then resurface, their selkie heads breaking the sea’s caul in rebirth. As I am reborn in his hands. Prometheus. Mon maître. I lie between the sheets and do what only Rodin should. Edgar snores on top of the wardrobe. A cameo moon – goddess of invention – sieves her golden sand through the billowing lace curtains and onto the barley sugar leg table, the primroses just plucked, the egg gone cold. I lie awake and wait for the dawn, beyond the pale of Minerva, beyond the pale of myself.

  Moth

  Adam

  He’s wearing a white shirt and blue jeans, same as me. No visible tattoos. He’s not the kind of guy to have a tattoo. Drew’s got “Moth” on his chest and “Roan” and “Dove” on either wrist. Looks plain dirty if you ask me, and imagine when you’re old. I drew the line, with a full stop at pierci
ngs. We’re his heart and arms, he says. Load of crap. It’s just his tribalistic, sadomasochistic, look-at-me way of displaying us. Branding. Establishing ownership rights. If you name it, you own it, isn’t that how it works? Maybe that’s why our rescue puppy doesn’t come to command – we haven’t named him yet. At the moment he’s Treacle; only because he licked up a whole tin of golden syrup that fell out the cupboard when we were making Roan’s school fête ginger cake.

  His eyes are licking me up right this minute. I’m sugar-frosted all right. Cornflakes on my boyfriend jeans (and they really were my boyfriend’s); snot from Dove’s retroussé nose on my minging-as-Tracy-Emin’s-bed grandad top (and it really was my grandad’s); and an old-as-Stonehenge spunk stain (and it really was Drew’s, whatever you may think) on my pants – from the time we attempted to do the swamp thang in a ten-minute slot. (Lesson number one: don’t attempt to do the swamp thang in a ten-minute slot when you’re sex deprived, sleep deprived and think your children have just nodded off – they probably haven’t. Creak creak thump thump and that’s not the bedsprings, let me tell you, that’s a little body climbing out, creeping across and suddenly appearing like frigging Caspar on the landing. Oh God, not now. Gearing up to full throttle. Mummee Daddee. Jesus Christ, get your kecks on, you’ll scar him for life. Bad dream, honey? Why the fuck can’t your mother have them overnight for a change instead of coming over here with sweets and violent computer games? No wonder he’s having bad dreams. And come to think of it, why’s it me has to remember her birthday when she’s not even my mother, ditto sister, brother, Grandpa Jo, Aunty Jean and your Uncle Tobermory in Nairobi?) He’s still licking over little old sugar-frosted me. (His retinas must be hypoglycaemic.) Pixie crop gone long and a body, well, a few more sit-ups and I’d be drop-dead beat.

  Adam makes us sit on children’s seats. (Lesson number two: if you’re over twenty-five you won’t be able to sit on a child’s seat without looking like you’ve got haemorrhoids or worms. I’ve got both courtesy of childbirth, and a dog that eats snails and slugs out of molehills then unbeknownst to me licks my BLT.) There’s a lump of brown clay in front of us – it looks like a massive dog shit – and we have to do something with it. A pooper scooper comes to mind, or one of those wonderfully environmentally friendly plastic bags people hang their dog shite up in trees in like Christmas baubles, so instead of stepping on dog shit you’re more likely to have a bag of it fall on your head. Oh, happy days, sing the squirrels, scampering down the branch of a stately old oak, a bag of nuts. Before skidding to a stop. What the fuck? A bag of shit. Since when did dogs start climbing trees, crapping on our park bench?

  A little girl sat next to us is glaring at her lump of clay. She’s in the charge of her grandmother, who’s glaring at a knitting pattern. “A fairy,” I suggest and they turn to glare at me. I know how the knitting pattern and the lump of clay feel. Roan is already working on a stegosaurus. He’s studying dinosaurs at school. He knows pretty much everything about them from the fastest (velociraptor) to the largest (diplodocus). A group on the far side of the room are painting the clay sculptures they made last week. A few girls are looking over at Roan (like mother like son). Even at eight he’s got stars sketched all over him. I keep his dark hair short to show off the bones in his face – which are perfect – and his huge green eyes. (You can smell the grass being mown looking at those eyes.) Sometimes I wonder what Drew and I did to deserve such incredible kids. Our son, strong and clear as the daylight. Our daughter, deep and mysterious as an ocean.

  “Black and white are tones,” Adam says to the group on the far side of the room. “Repeat after me, black and white are tones not colours.”

  The parents look arty, sophisticated, pretentious. Brings out the rebel in me, to be honest. I start rolling up balls of dinosaur poop to go with Roan’s steg. I wish I hadn’t come, wish I’d gone to the shopping centre with Dove and Drew, picked out a tasteful card for his mother.

  “Cool dinosaur.” Adam snowdrifts over, pulls up a little chair between us. He smells of fireworks and clothes that have dried on a high washing line in a long thin garden at the back of a terraced house in a Swansea valley. Much like our own. I remember one winter Drew and I stood halfway up our washing line, the snow was so high and the air so quiet and still it was like the earth had wrapped its own heartbeat up in a scarf. We walked on top of muffled hedgerows and made angels on the roof of an Alfa Romeo.

  “You could do a monster face, a dragon, a treasure chest.”

  “Ooh yes.” Roan’s the cat with the Cadbury’s Cream Egg on his lap. He’s forever collecting feathers and stones and little bits of rubbish in old shoeboxes. What is it with boxes? We live in them, are buried in them, keep our precious little things in them.

  “That’s settled then.”

  I flick my pixie crop gone wrong and caress the clay with my long delicate fingers. This is the way I’ll caress your face, my fingers are telling him. Adulterous little piggies that want some roasty roast beef before they go to market. I’m hurtling towards death and middle age just being a mother, and in ten years’ time a man like Adam won’t be looking at me like his retinas need a double-shot espresso and glycogen boost. I’ll be a bitter old horse pill by then, the sugar licked right off me. Lick me now for real, my fingers are screaming. His leg is six inches away from mine – still squirming courtesy of worms, haemorrhoids and a plastic orange child’s seat. I want to cry, but Roan is beaming at me. This is fun. A magic box, a box that morphs into a dog, a boat, a collapsing toadstool.

  “It needs reinforcing, see, at the corners.” Adam smoothes over the cracks, strengthens the frail edges, covers holes with strips of clay. His hands are long and fine like mine. No wedding ring. I keep mine in a tiny box in a jewellery box in a drawer of my dressing table in a corner of my bedroom (like mother, like son). His fingers are curious, intense, teasing, tormenting. We’re in bed already, there’s no preamble, no date, no candlelight, nothing to say. We’re making love in an art class under a naked bulb in front of my son and a bunch of pretentious still-life grapes. It’s not decent, not civilised. What’s wrong with me?

  A woman wants to know if Adam could kindly take a look at the colour of her daughter’s serpent, someone wants more clay, the little girl sat next to us is glaring at her grandmother’s knitting pattern, her fairy still deep in dog shit. I’m in deep dog shit and I want to be seen. I want to cry and then be consoled by this man, this man I’ve never met before, the first man in creation. Transformed by him into something I’ve always been and never known. Until now.

  Two days later the box hardens and goes brittle. Four days later a side falls off. Four and a half days later the rescue puppy licks it into oblivion. We’re calling him Clay these days.

  Elizabeth

  Death Row

  “Elizabeth, did you manage a log this morning?”

  The swallows had flown from the eaves of Castle Banfi and the grapes were turning a slow vermilion. Chiara thought –

  “Did you pass a motion this morning, Elizabeth? The doctor wants to know.”

  I can’t hear you. I’m deaf, remember, and in any case I’m trying to read my book if it’s not too much to ask. I don’t have many pleasures left. It’s about an old woman in Italy whose personal details have been deleted from the municipal database. She has officially ceased to exist. Don’t I just know how she feels. Old and mouldy, losing my marbles apparently. Two left on the solitaire board. My eyes. Pick ’n’ mix. Shit, pop, spit out the gumball machine. I’ve eaten them. Orange, blueberry, spinach.

  “With difficulty.” It’s best to be honest.

  Tinkerbell waves her magic wand like this and prescribes melon for my pudding tonight and, if necessary, a firework laxative. “That should do the trick.”

  “The tits…” Peter Pan is wheeling away to the window in a thundercloud of Imperial Leather and last night’s sardines. “The tits on those balls. I’ve never seen so many.” Peter Pan is a dragonfly. At least he knows the lan
guage of dragonflies. And birds. And poems. Nurse Tinkerbell, for example, is a common darter and exhibits some seriously crepuscular behaviour. Like now for instance.

  “Ten minutes, the Blue Room, we shall have the opportunity to write to some poor unfortunates on death row in America.”

  How ironic. Aren’t we all dead already? They just ain’t thrown the dirt on us yet. Look at me losing my whataretheyagain? Dragooned, euphemismed, metaphored in here by my own children (my son has three houses; you’d think I’d fit in one of them). What a view of Caldey Island and the sea. Yippee. And Wendy over there, photosynthesising in her chair. Wendy is a stephanotis. She was given a cutting from her dear friend Eleanor ten years ago and now she obscures her own light. I think I shall go back to my book if it’s not too much to ask.

  Chiara thought that the tragedy of old age was that at last one knew what to do with the youth one no longer had.

  Oh, how poignant and true. I know what I’d be doing now if I weren’t so fucking moribund. Constrained in every decade I’ve been. Stoned in my teens; pregnant and insecure in my twenties; husband, two children and a springer spaniel in my thirties; midlife crisis in my forties; age-defying creams and faradic machines in my fifties; and now in my sixties losing my marbles. Shit pop spit a cormorant pecked them out on the beach. What a view of Caldey Island and the sea. Lucky me. Where the monkeys live. They do a good chocolate fudge and ice cream. God, I wish Minnie would visit.

  “Oh, my son.” Peter Pan is twirling around in a cirrus of soap and sardine. “You should be on a bottle of cider, my son.”

  “What is it?”

  “A green woodpecker.”

  “Oh.” I told you he knew the language of birds.

  Nurse Tinkerbell hands out the photographs. Mine is James C Smith number 1240668, Potosi Correctional Centre. Aged forty-two. Killed his girlfriend three years ago. Dear Lord. On his second appeal. Orange overalls, shaved head, very blue eyes. Like butter wouldn’t sizzle. Wants to correspond with a woman between thirty and forty. I can do that. I remember it well. Still a stunner to be honest. 36, 24, 36 even after one husband, two children and that dreadful Freckles. On the verge of an affair. Sometimes I wish I had, though my late husband was a dear—