by Anna Hope
She takes her bag and walks down the corridor to the women’s toilets. There are high shelves on either side, the smell of paint and clay and turps. She locks herself in one of the stalls and takes off her coat and T-shirt and bra, her jeans and her knickers. She folds her clothes and puts them back in her bag, then puts on her kimono, keeping on her socks, as the floor is chilly. She pees quickly. The last thing she wants is to need a pee before the first break. The first break is not for forty-five minutes.
She makes her way back down the corridor, and pushes open the heavy door of the studio. The students are here already, busy preparing their easels. A thin, clear light falls from high windows. She makes her way over to a raised platform in the middle of the room.
‘OK, Lisa,’ says the teacher.
‘Lissa,’ says Lissa.
‘Right, Lissa. So – when you’re ready, just take whatever pose you like. We’ll do some short ten-minute sketches, and then move on to the longer poses later in the morning.’
Her toes are already cold, but there are a couple of heaters, which are on. She slips out of her kimono and sits down.
The teacher looks at her for a moment, then: ‘Actually – what about we begin standing?’
She stands, finds a pose, one foot in front of the other, arms behind her back.
‘Right,’ says the teacher to his students. ‘Charcoal or pencil. Ten minutes. Let’s go.’
There is the scribble of charcoal and pencil on paper.
So, thinks Lissa, here she is again.
She has managed to eke out her savings from Uncle Vanya by living on soup mix and porridge, rarely going out, spending her days watching old films on her computer, feeding her melancholy, and now she is down to the last two hundred pounds in her account.
She always thinks that somehow she won’t be back here. She’s always wrong.
For a long time she waited, bracing herself for Hannah’s fury, but when weeks had passed and she heard nothing she wrote her a single message – I’m sorry. I’m here if you ever want to talk. It was weak at best, craven at worst.
Nothing from Nathan. Not since New Year’s Day. Not since the scene in her flat. She wrote him a letter, then burned it. Wrote him another, then burned that too.
In the break she goes out to use the loo, and on the way back she casts a look at some of the students’ sketches. Her haunches. The rise of her breasts. The shortness of her hair.
In the early spring, she took herself to the hairdresser and told him to cut her hair. He approached her warily – an inch? he asked. More, she said. He cut off two. More, she said. And then he capitulated, sliced it, sheared it, and they both watched the locks fall silently to the floor. And she cried when she saw herself in the mirror, for she did not know herself any more, and he looked at her in horror. I’m sorry, he said. I thought it was what you wanted. It is, she said. It was.
‘OK, Lissa.’ The teacher comes over to her. ‘So, now we’re going to do a longer pose.’
‘I know.’
‘So, just make sure it’s something simple – something you can hold for forty-five minutes.’
She sits down on the raised platform, still in her kimono, and finds a pose, one knee up, the other leg bent beside her. She clasps her knee in her arms to brace against. She has a small repertoire of longer poses. There are some people who can sit for hours in the most contorted of positions – dancers usually, acrobats. She is not one of their number.
After a few minutes the room settles down. They are painting now – there is the sound of brush on canvas, the teacher’s footsteps as he moves quietly from easel to easel. Sometimes he says nothing, sometimes he leans in – Good, he murmurs, or See this – the line here? He traces his hand on the paper, lifts it, moves it through the air.
She looks down at herself – her lower legs, the stubbled hair which she forgot to shave this morning. The heat in here is patchy – part of her lower calf is turning mottled and red. She can smell the scent of herself.
She is aware that she has lost much, so much that she cannot quite comprehend its scale: she has lost Nathan, she has lost Hannah. She has lost Cate, who will not return her calls.
But she has lost much more than that, as though loss were a black hole, pulling all the potential futures, all the things you might have been, all the successes, the loves, the children, the self-respect you might have had, down into it.
‘We want to capture something,’ the teacher is saying. ‘Some essence. It is not our job to interpret. We want to transmit.’
Her left buttock is already growing numb. There are pins and needles starting in her foot. She shifts slightly, hears a tut from the teacher.
‘Lissa,’ he says. ‘Please try to keep still.’
There is a cough and she looks up into the eyes of a young woman. She is twenty or so. Beautiful in a precise way. She looks like a serious little doll.
She imagines the young woman’s body beneath her clothes, smooth like alabaster. What does she think when she looks at her?
Does she think of why she is doing this job still, at her age?
Does she look at the curve of her belly? Does she wonder if she has had children?
She looks back at the young woman, who is staring now at her thighs, making larger strokes with her charcoal. Her doll-like, impassive face.
All I am, thinks Lissa, is a collection of lines. There is nothing real inside. Like those bodies her mother drew, all those years ago on the pavements of Tufnell Park. As though it were prophecy – this hollowness. There is only the outline left. She feels dizzy suddenly, and she moves again. There is an audible groan from the other side of the room.
‘Excuse me,’ she says. ‘I don’t feel well.’
She stands up, wraps herself in her robe, goes out into the corridor and lays her cheek against the cool, hard surface of the wall.
Hannah
Gatwick, early morning, and she is an oyster, newly shucked. The wide world presses upon her; the women in their heels and coats, the people who walk quickly because they have somewhere better to be. She feels at once invisible and far too visible in her waterproof jacket and walking boots.
Thirty-six. She is almost middle-aged. Is it worse if men look at her, or not? The tip of her thumb nudges the space left by her wedding ring, a small groove, a ridge of callused skin, and then an absence. The callus has almost disappeared now, although her thumb still returns to it, like a tongue to the gap where a tooth used to be.
At Aberdeen, she has a wait of an hour before the connecting flight. The airport is full of men. Men with the look of squaddies – although less fit, many of them are huge, red-faced, balding, tucking into breakfast and pints at the bar. She avoids them, browsing the stands at Smiths, thinking to buy a magazine, but they all seem faintly ridiculous, so she moves to the book stands. She has read nothing for months. What used to be an innocuous activity is now trip-wired; she wants nothing about love, nothing about children, nothing about infidelity. She lifts guidebooks and puts them back again. She does not need a guidebook. She is capable of navigating by instinct. She is capable of spontaneity. In the end she buys a copy of Emma and a bottle of water. She has read it before. She is pretty sure there are no babies in the book.
The Orkney plane is tiny. Rain laces the window panes. She stows her bag beneath the seat. People greet each other as old friends. Just as the door is about to close, one of the men from the bar climbs aboard, breathing quickly, as though he has been running. He says hello to an older lady on the other side of the aisle from Hannah, before taking his seat a couple of rows in front. His hair is short and neat. He moves with the exaggerated precision of someone who knows it is still morning, and that he is drunk. The first glimpse of the islands is through a break in the cloud – choppy sea and then the low-lying grey-brown of the land. As the plane banks she sees rain, and almost-empty roads.
It is not yet midday – too early to check into the hotel – and so she collects her hire car and decides to drive up t
he island. The sky has lifted a little. She knows the main concentration of sites is forty minutes or so away; burial chambers, standing stones. She might as well see them while the rain holds off.
She passes through the town: a large red-bricked cathedral, stone-fronted houses, a huge Tesco on the route out to the north. The landscape is sodden, unpromising. The radio in the car is tuned to Radio 2 – some inane chatter, some cheesy songs. She tries for something else but gets only static, and so turns it off. This was not what she expected, when she booked this holiday, in the quiet of her flat. She expected something craggy, magnificent, some sort of scale to dwarf her interior landscape, but there is barely a hill or a tree to be seen, only tussocky grass and pebble-dashed bungalows. It is, if she is honest, all quite bleak.
She parks at a set of three huge standing stones and climbs out of the car. A large sheep with a broad face stands in the middle of them, cropping the grass. The sheep is remarkably ugly. So are the stones. They look like a piece of Brutalist civic architecture – something an overeager county council might have thought was a good idea some time in the 1970s. She walks around them dutifully. She stands in the middle. The sheep eyes her suspiciously. She waits to feel something but feels nothing other than mildly self-conscious.
At the far north of the island is a Neolithic village. Her internet searches have told her it is five thousand years old. As she climbs out of the car, the clouds are feathered overhead. She can smell the sea. The track towards the village is studded with stones, each one marking an event: a man on the moon, the French Revolution, the fall of Rome, leading all the way back to when the village was built, at the same time as the pyramids of Egypt. The gift shop is stocked with Viking hats, the sort made from hard plastic with two plaits of synthetic hair hanging down on either side, with Fair Isle sweaters and stuffed puffin toys.
A pleasant man behind the desk in the gift shop sells Hannah a ticket, and tells her she must watch a short film first before visiting the site, which she duly does, sitting behind an older couple in matching waterproofs. She is then funnelled through a small exhibition, each one of whose cases she reads diligently, learning about the food the villagers would have eaten (fish and deer and berries), the pots they made, the strange, lovely balls they carved; and it is not without interest, this exhibition, if you are a schoolchild, or a historian. Or someone with nothing better to do. Outside the museum is a replica house – she ducks inside, sees two beds, a dresser made from stones, a stone-bordered hearth.
When she comes out and goes to explore the village proper, it starts to rain again. She walks around the houses, peering down into their interiors, and they are impressive, moving even, and yes, it is easy to imagine these people going about their lives, inhabiting their houses, with their beds for children and their beds for adults and their stone dressers, as though from an episode of The Flintstones, carving their jewellery, eating their trout and deer and berries, and loving and fighting and fucking around the hearth. She turns away from the houses and looks out at the sea, a wide, gently shelving bay along which the rain is coming in hard now. She feels a fresh wave of anger and pain. What is she doing here? What was she thinking, coming to the edge of things, to stare at hearths and homes and places where families lived and loved, and only feel more of what she does not, will not, have?
She wanted something wild, something that exists only unto itself – nature without audience. Must everything be made human-size? She does not want the domestic. The domestic is what she came here to escape.
Tesco is the size of a large aircraft hangar and she is grateful it exists.
She wanders the aisles, letting the supermarket’s white noise wash over her.
She buys a bottle of Rioja and some cheese crackers and crisps.
The hotel has been billed as one of Orkney’s finest. It is tired, and has not been decorated for years. There are queasy swirls of colour on the carpet, and a smell of fried food and burnt coffee seeps from the restaurant. Her room is pleasant enough, despite the pictures of lurid purple flowers on the walls. The bed is huge but uncomfortable – two beds pushed together. The pillows are unspeakable. She twists off the top of her wine and pours a third of a bottle into her tooth mug.
By six o’clock she is hungry and has almost finished the wine. There is no answer at room service and so she goes downstairs to the restaurant. ‘Can I order food here?’
‘Aye,’ says the young woman behind the bar. She has a small, heart-shaped face, make-up, a pretty mouth.
‘Can you deliver it to my room?’
‘I’m the only one on right now. Do you mind waiting? You can take it up yourself?’
Hannah looks around her at the near-empty restaurant. She is alone apart from an older couple who look as though they are on a business trip, their heads bent over a computer screen. ‘OK.’
‘You can have a drink on the house,’ says the young woman with a wink, ‘seeing as I’m in charge.’
‘OK,’ says Hannah. She looks over the menu. ‘I’ll have fish and chips,’ she says.
‘Perfect,’ says the young woman.
‘And a glass of wine. What wines do you have by the glass?’
‘Just the Merlot.’
‘A glass of that then.’
‘Perfect,’ the young woman says again, taking a large glass and filling it almost to the rim. ‘There you go.’
Perfect?
She takes it to a seat in the window. A vase of plastic flowers stands on the table before her. Outside, the harbour is rain-washed. Shafts of fading sunlight pierce the drizzle, then disappear again, leaving steely grey light in their wake.
‘Tomorrow’s better. Weather-wise.’
She turns and sees a man beside her. It is a moment before she recognizes him from the airport, from the plane. She nods in response. He looks as though he has sobered up, whereas she is on her way to being drunk. He takes a seat at the next table, diagonally opposite her, and she feels a vague sense of annoyance. Now she will either have to make conversation or ignore him. She looks in her bag, finds the paperback she bought at the airport, slides it out on to the table. She takes a sip of her wine, opens the book. Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich—
The young woman comes over, puts a pint down in front of the man. ‘There you go.’
‘Thanks.’
The murmur of the couple in the corner – something about a meeting. Something about figures. The world of work. The man lifts his pint and drinks. ‘That good then?’
She looks up. The man is large, but not overweight; her age, or a little older. He looks ruddy, as though he has recently showered. The hair at the back of his neck is damp.
‘Your book?’ He gestures towards it. ‘Is it good?’
She holds it up to him. ‘I’m on page one.’
‘Ah,’ he says.
‘But I’ve read it before.’
‘Right.’
‘They all learn lessons. And live happily ever after.’
‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Right enough.’
She looks back down at the page, but the words are dancing now.
‘You up here on holidays then?’
‘I suppose.’
‘You suppose?’ He gestures to the chair in front of her. ‘Do you mind if I join you?’
‘I’m just waiting for my food. I’ll be gone soon.’
‘Then you won’t get bored of me.’ He lifts his pint and takes the seat opposite her, his back to the woman behind the bar.
‘Cheers.’ The man lifts his pint and drinks. His fingers are thick, the skin chapped and red. There is a wedding ring on his hand. His phone is beside him on the table. She sees a picture of a woman and a child on the screen. ‘So what is it then? If it’s not holidays? You here on work?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Not work.’
‘Mystery,’ he says.
‘Something like that.’
‘I’m from here,’ he says, as though in answer to a question she has not asked. ‘Grew up he
re. I work on the rigs. Off Aberdeen. Two weeks on, three weeks off. I stay up on Papa Westray when I come off. Work a farm up there.’
She has a vision of a cottage. A view of wind farms and the sea. A wife and child. The woman on his phone. Managing alone while he is gone.
‘You?’ he says to her. ‘Where are you from?’
‘London. Manchester. London.’
‘That’s a lot of places.’
‘Manchester.’
He nods. ‘There’s some lads from Manchester on the rig.’
‘Oh?’
‘They don’t sound like you.’
‘Well. I’ve lived in London for years.’
He leans towards her. ‘What’s that like then?’ he says. ‘London?’ There is something about him, his energy, something untethered. Something hungry in his eyes.
She leans back. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘You know.’
‘I don’t get on with cities,’ he says.
‘No.’
They fall silent. He turns his phone over on the table, so the blank back faces upwards and the picture of the woman and the child has gone. ‘What have you seen then, today?’
She shrugs. ‘I saw the main sights. Apart from that burial chamber. Maeshowe. I suppose I’ll go there tomorrow.’
‘Did you like the main sights then?’
‘Not really. I thought Orkney was … something else. I thought it would be wilder. It’s all a bit … polite.’
‘Polite!’ He throws back his head and laughs.
The diners at the next table look up, then down again at their food.
‘You should go south,’ he says.
For a moment she thinks he means the South: the hot South. Sun and sea and warmth on the skin.
‘Go down to Ronaldsay,’ he says, ‘see the tomb there. The Tomb of the Eagles. On the cliffs there. That’s wild. That’s a good one to see before you go.’
She looks down at her hand, fiddles with her ring, but her ring is not there. The man looks at her finger, then back up at Hannah’s face.