Girl in Profile

by Zillah Bethell

  Moth

  Women’s Work

  I lie in the bath water Roan and Dove have probably pissed in. Plastic toys bob around me and an orange duck laps between my legs like it’s giving me oral sex. I allow myself to think of Adam.

  “This dog’s been rolling in fox shit.” Drew is washing Mr Stinks, as we’re calling him now, under the outside tap. “What the fuck’s wrong with him.”

  BC (before children) I indulged in long luxuriant baths; I might listen to the radio, light a candle, dribble a little aromatherapy oil into the cascading waves. BC I conditioned my hair; BC I prepared honey, strawberry and egg yolk face packs to keep my Miss-Carmarthen-at-twenty-two skin radiating Miss-Carmarthen-at-twenty-two. BC I had beautiful feet. Now, ten years later, I lie tense and crouching in a leaking shower cap and a piss-filled bath waiting for Drew to finish cleaning the fox shit from Mr Stinks, come in, and sit on the toilet seat so that we can get a word in that is not edgeways round the head of a child, the washing up, the Monopoly board, the Wii.

  Tom whistles in the bathroom next door then urinates: a steady stream, a pause, two drops, the flush, the light switch. All the bathrooms in this row are ground floor, flat-roofed extensions. All are cold, all are mouldy. Tom looks like a member of a boy band who’s bedded his mate’s mum. He and his girlfriend have a baby girl called Cherry and, what do you know, grandma lives the other side of us at the ready. She’s a bit of a Rottweiler, but she sure sings some sweet lullabies as she wheels the kid up and down the bleach-fizzing pavement. Tom collects his lunch from her every day – a tin of beans on a plate. Don’t ask me why a grown man gets his lunch off his nan every day – it’s beyond my comprehension. They call each other cunt over our garden gate. It’s some kind of endearment with them. “Hiya, cunt” like you might say “hiya, love”. “Cherry’s a little cunt, innit?” like you might say “Cherry’s a little coughdrop,” and, appreciatively, “Nan, you’re a real cunt…” like you might say, “Nan, you’re a real godsend.” We’re sandwiched between cunts. It can’t get better than this, can it?

  The night is youthful. Ten o’clock, the kids are asleep – this is babyless bliss – an hour of mindless TV and then bed. That’s the plan. I add more hot, try and drive the minutiae out of my head. Roan needs a Fair Trade banana for tomorrow, there’s that ridiculous Victorian homework, a clean cross-country vest for Saturday, the photo he wants to show Jonah because it’s funny and he’s eating an ice cream, dig Dove’s scribble out of recycling because apparently it’s a masterpiece of daddy in an aeroplane, and more fish oil for their IQs and Dove’s skin. This stuff is women’s work, I’ve noticed. Men deal in broad outlines, women fill in the minutiae.

  Drew comes in, dips his fingers in the bath, so I’m swirling in fox shit as well as children’s piss. Thank you, universe.

  “D’you remember Ro’s got to take a Fair Trade banana tomorrow for school?”

  “You what?”

  “You’ve just proved the point I’ve been making to myself. That without me this family would fall apart.”

  “You’re a frigging marvel. I keep telling you.”

  “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “No, not at all. There’s another mess I’ve got to clean up on the step now, else I’ll tread in it in the morning knowing my luck.”

  Off he goes to clean up all manner of shit: dog shit, fox shit, bullshit – he won’t take any of that. He says it like it is, does Drew. He’s a grafter, my mum said when I married him. A real grafter. In no way could you describe him as an intellectual. She breathed the word like it was something special: intellectual. I close my eyes and allow myself to think of Adam. There’s a faint cry somewhere. I squeeze my eyes, hoping it’s a bat, a fox, Cherry.

  “Mummeee.” It’s not.

  “DREW.” The cries become more frantic. “Oh, for fuck’s…” I heave-ho myself out, dripping, freezing, clutching a towel, stomping up to the children’s room. Dove is sitting up in bed, her eyes gleaming in the frigging gloaming at me.

  “What is it, Dove? What’s the matter?”

  “I’m thirsty.” With an internal sigh I hand her the cup of water that sits next to her silver-painted horse on the bedside table. “I’d have thought that at three-and-a-half you could get your own water at night.”

  “Oh yes, but it’s better when you get it… Mummy, you’re all wet, like a mermaid.”

  “That’s because I was in the bath. I was in the middle of having a bath, trying to get a bit of peace and quiet from you lot.”

  “Did you know,” Roan announces from his bed, his star globe shining Cassiopeia at him, “that in the old days people used to stand on the roof and pee down on you.”

  “Good boy, go to sleep now.”

  I do the obligatory kisses on the heads, the tuckings in once more. I’m halfway to the door.

  “Mummy, are goblins on this earth?”

  “No, sweetheart. Just pretend, just in books.”

  “I thought I saw one. By the window.”

  “No, that’s just your brother’s Fair Trade mobile, remember, the one he made out of bottle tops.”

  “Oh.”

  I’m halfway through the door.

  “Mummy.” It’s Roan’s turn to pipe up again like a frigging Scottish reel. “Mr Sullivan gave me a gold certificate today.”

  “Oh, what was that for?”

  “He found it under the table. He asked if anyone wanted it. I was desperate to get it.”

  “I see. Well, goodnight.”

  “Goodnight, Mummy.”

  I stomp down the stairs, stick my head out of the dog flap, and hiss at Drew. “When I’m in the bath, make sure you’re inside, all right.” Then I stand about morosely in the kitchen. There’s no point going back in the bath now. My shower cap’s still hanging on to my head as if it were Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. The only thing that’ll save me tonight, I mutter, is cheese and crackers. BC I didn’t talk to myself or stuff down cheese and biscuits at ten o’clock at night with the last dill pickle in the jar. Or possibly I won’t, seeing as how it’s mouldy.

  The phone rings. What fucking idiot phones at this hour?

  “DREW… Oh, for fuck’s…” I chew and spit some cheese out as quickly as I can, run for the sitting room, tripping over some pink fluorescent took-two-hours-to-unwrap-and-will-probably-end-up-in-landfill plastic toy and answer the phone in the take-it-easy-Cadbury’s-Caramel-rabbit voice my mum used to use on my dad sometimes. In case it’s Adam. It’s not. It’s Steven, Maggie’s husband. He’s been looking after the kids since Maggie got her brain tumour. He gibbered so much at the doctor that he got six months full pay, six months half pay. He’s way past that now and on statutory sick pay. He sounds like he’s being strangled, which he probably is.

  “Maggie’s coming out next week.”

  “Oh, wonderful, Steve.”

  So could we look after the boys on Saturday so he can tidy up a bit.

  Drew is suddenly behind me, gesticulating. Wildly. No. Absolutely not. Not in infinity years.

  “Yes, of course, no problem. How is Maggie?”

  “All right, I suppose. She’s got no neck.”

  “What?”

  “There’s something wrong with her neck now. And she’s got a limp.”

  “There are probably stretching exercises…”

  “And don’t forget Jamie’s medication has to go in the fridge.”

  “I remember.” Their eldest kid, Jamie, has got ADHD. They get given loads of money to send him on adventure holidays. He’s been white-water rafting, abseiling and potholing, and he’s still as mad as a rat. They even got money for a trampoline.

  “If he does enough roly-polys,” the key worker said, “he’s not going to stab his little brother in the eye, is he?”

  “It’s very kind of you,” Steven apparently replied, “but I’m not quite convinced of the logic of that.”

  I put the phone down, hum a little tune, avoid Drew’s evil eye. I’m not just in his b
ad books, I’m in his Salman Rushdie books, as my mother would say. How soon we become our mum and our dad. He’s not even doing the hundred skips, press-ups and v-sits he does every night before bed to keep his body looking ripped, cut and buff. They sound like characters from a western, don’t they: ripped, cut and buff. There’s only one thing for it – I get up, walk over, let the towel drop just to remind him what he’s got. (Women’s work again.) Then I go into the kitchen, make more cheese and crackers, put the last dill pickle on top, present it on a plate like the head of John the Baptist.

  “Yum.” Drew grins. Mr Stinks wags his tail. He’s a passion for dill pickle, that dog.

  It’s all in the details, I’m telling you. The minutiae.

  Elizabeth

  Wishbones

  Wendy’s all sympathetic foliage. Sometimes I wish she was deciduous, I have to say.

  “You did the right thing.” She pats the air above my arm. If our bones should meet they’d surely break. Two pinkies could pull our legs apart like wishbones. “He was, after all, starving himself to death. It’s what Eleanor would have done.”

  I bet. The meddling old witch.

  “She always did the right thing, whatever the cost to herself, to others… They’ve been feeding him up on milk for premature babies, jelly beans, chicken broth, marrowbone.”

  I groan. Where’s my book?

  “I barely recognised him, spilling out of his wheelchair he was. A little piano,I suppose, as Eleanor would say. A little dishevelled. He said, ‘Do I dare eat a peach, Wendy. Do I dare eat a peach?’ And I said, ‘Oh, do dare, Peter, do. It’ll put roses in your cheeks.’ His wife died of an eating disorder, apparently. All the good things he cooked for her she spewed back up in his face.”

  The print is blurry.

  “Nurse said he could go on for years, now that he’s eating properly.”

  Fucking cunt. It’s all I am, all I ever have been. Please forgive me, Peter, if you can.

  “Of course, one wonders how long one wants to go on for. Doesn’t seem much point without Eleanor. All I have left of her is a few knick-knacks. Good of her to leave me anything really – after all, I’m not family. Just the dog’s bowl, a fox print I once sent her.”

  “I thought she was very rich.”

  “Yes. Yes, she was.”

  I can hear the tick-tock of a melancholy heart. Sad, faltering, slow. Satie floats through from the Blue Room, pages turning in a restless mind. What is life after all but the tick-tock of melancholy hearts, pages turning in a restless mind. Hurly-burly, wind driven. I need to be forgiven.

  Gwen

  The Narrative Gone Elsewhere

  I wake to find L’Homme Femme stroking my arm, checking me for goosebumps so she says. I’ve dozed off in the middle of another interminable sitting for Madonna in Repose. Like the tramps from my childhood who fell asleep on top of lime kilns, sank, were asphyxiated, ashes by morning.

  She takes a gulp from the glass of Pernod she normally cleans her brushes in, hides her hieroglyph eyes.

  “I would, actually,” I tell her, “if Rodin wanted to watch. I’ve done it before.” And I have. A spectator joined in once when we collaborated on the floor.

  Her eyes betray nothing as she scrabbles in her dressing-up box for a hat and scarf. It is snowing outside. “I’m taking you to Les Deux Magots. I can’t paint you this thin.”

  I yawn, get dressed, flaunting my modesty yet protecting it, gauche yet faux naïf, vulnerable yet omnipotent. Does she see what Rodin sees? All the ways in which a body aches against mortality. My belt is loose; I am too thin. My money goes on paints, canvases, outfits for Rodin to see me in, undress me in.

  We step out into the snowflakes, each of them unique, each of them talented. And there are so many of them. I allow one to melt on the blue veins in my hand and think of my work, my painting, the empty canvases in my room. I run to escape the thought and L’Homme Femme lollops beside me in her purple velvet trousers, faithful as a dog.

  Les Deux Magots is steaming with cocoa, aromatics and tobacco. I see him straightaway, in a corner of the room with a red-haired young woman. Henna or a wig. Sleek as a fox. The sort of woman I’ve tried to be for him. She places a finger on his lips as though delivering a kiss or stopping his speech. He’s wearing a greatcoat, his hair and beard fizzily damp. He reminds me of Cadwallader, the giant from Tenby who strode silently through the town in oilskins, holding a shrimp net. All the little shrimps Rodin catches in his net.

  “Cocoa and syllabub?” L’Homme Femme has to repeat it. I nod and cry – there is a snowflake in my eye. Pretending to look at the jonque, the second-hand goods on display. Books, pictures, old dolls, a musical box, a dandelion paperweight. Time suspended, interrupted, me in the shadows absent yet present. The ordinary girl. The invisible girl. Am I so absorbed into my surroundings that he doesn’t even notice me?

  Their profiles, giggling ivory cameos against the ochre-hued wall. The glass is smooth, heavy. It could hurt someone.

  “There you are. Anything quaint?”

  I point out the shrimp catcher and his trawl. “Imagine that wild gentian head between his knees. It’d probably come off the same time he does. Kiss me now, if you dare.”

  She does, vehemently, spilling the tray of cocoa and syllabub. Rodin notices as I intended. Gets up.

  “You are part illusion.” Her lidless eyes, the scalded arm accuse me.

  “How’s my starling?” The wet lapels of his coat, the thickening waist beneath, the hands that rub, smooth, caress new clay.

  “Cold. Lonely. Miserable without you.”

  He peers fixedly at me. His eyes are the colour of the veins in my hand. What does he see? The ordinary girl? Can he distinguish me from my surroundings, the second-hand goods on display?

  “Do you remember this body? How you used to say it was like the sun breaking through the clouds?”

  “I remember.”

  “Promise then. Promise you’ll visit soon.”

  “I promise.” Hollow. Hollow as a tree where fairies dine, blow dandelion clocks. This paperweight could hurt someone if I let it. I imagine it splintering off his heavy skull, startling the henna-haired woman. Time released, recontinued.

  I watch them all wave away. From now on I shall paint pale women in pale rooms, their hands left holding the dead weight of some object: a book, a letter, the body of a cat. The story told. The narrative gone elsewhere.

  Elizabeth

  Augustus Gloop

  Time treads water in the Blue Room, nearly drowns. Light comes up, blinds go down, we endure. A talk on dog breeding with Daniel and his bitches, Debbie gets crafty with crochet, and cinematography of the early twentieth century by somebody from Gower.

  “And what did you think of that?” Nurse Tinkerbell always asks, after ushering the visitors out; but most of us have lost consciousness by then and don’t know where to find it again. Peter Pan stays away. I caught sight of him once in the corridor. He was fat as a buttery bollock. He looked like Augustus Gloop. I smiled, he turned, went back into his room. My heart descended a scale in A minor and when the G came it cut sharp. Surprisingly sharp. What is life, after all, but scales in contrary motion, one hand going up, the other going down?

  Gwen

  Drafts

  First draft.

  Mon Maître,

  My heart stopped yesterday at two o’clock in Les Deux Magots. If you do not keep your promise you will be responsible for the death of this artist. If you are sincere when you say that I can produce great work it is your duty to the world to keep your promise. I have it on good authority from the horloger on Boulevard St. Germain that if a clock is stopped for more than twenty-four hours it will never keep true time again. It jolts, sticks, gets ahead or behind. It slowly begins to rust. A pendule must be kept well-oiled and in use to stay true.

  Your starling.

  Second draft.

  Dear Rodin,

  You say I am wild, childish, barely civilised. Would you draw
me just this side of the fence, the way Augustus draws Dorelia? Or would you draw me outside the parameters of respectability, looking in? You say I take your energy, your teeth, your nails. Well, I can give them back to you. I keep them in a little box by the side of my bed. You say the winter fills you with chills and gloom. Come and see the sun breaking through the clouds as I undress. Come and hold spring in your arms.

  Third draft.

  Rilke says you lie down on the floor and listen to the gramophone with that woman. If you do not keep your promise I shall make a scene. I shall follow you to Notre Dame and I shall make a scene. Before God I shall make a scene. Edgar has just jumped in from the moonlight, left muddy pawprints on this letter to show his displeasure at you too.

  Gwen John.

  Moth

  God

  Drew tries to make love to me. I refuse for the first time in seven years of marriage. The guilt makes me angry.

  “Fuck off and leave me alone. I’m exhausted. I’m thirty-two and I feel like forty-two and we haven’t got any decent contraception. If I got pregnant now I’d have to consider a termination. And I don’t want you coming off on the sheets either. Nothing dries in this weather.”

  I get up, look at the night sky. The stars have vanished like God’s run out of sparklers. What are we all but little animals in his great big black magician’s hat, pretending to appear, pretending to disappear.