Einstein

by Einstein (retail) (epub)

  ‘So what?’ she said brightly. ‘I’ll sit for you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You want to learn to draw from life? I’ll sit for you. There’s nothing to it. I do it all the time at college.’

  ‘You pose in the life class?’ Charlie marvelled. ‘You pose in front of your friends?’

  ‘Friend or foe. It’s all the same to me. It doesn’t hurt.’ Baxter grinned, delighted by his expression of horror.

  Charlie looked for her face through the tangle of thick black hair and tried to read her eyes. He thought she was only mocking him.

  ‘Why should you want to help me?’ he said suspiciously. ‘You think my work is puerile.’

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ Baxter laughed gently. ‘You’ve got a wonderful sense of balance and colour. It’s not how you paint—it’s what you paint that’s wrong.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Charlie said doubtfully. He swung in his chair and squinted at the carrot in clogs. He didn’t want to appear too anxious for fear the girl would doubt his intentions.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ she said briskly and began to gather her drawings into their battered portfolio.

  ‘Do you really think I could master it?’ he said quickly, fearing now he had hurt her pride.

  ‘You’ll love it,’ Baxter promised. She smiled and threw back her head, pulling off the straw hat and combing her fingers through her hair. ‘It will really open your eyes. All that fat and gristle. It’s disgusting. It’s beautiful.’ She looked so excited that, for a moment, Charlie thought she might peel off her cat skins and give him a demonstration.

  ‘I’d have to pay you,’ he said. ‘It would have to be a proper arrangement.’

  ‘I don’t need the money,’ Baxter said scornfully. ‘I’d like to help you.’ She paused and nibbled her lower lip with the cutting edge of her teeth. ‘And if I help you,’ she added cautiously, ‘perhaps you can help me get my work into the gallery. What do you think?’

  22.

  A few days later Baxter Pangloss returned to the Church Street Gallery and Charlie was there to lock the door and take her upstairs to the studio.

  ‘Is this really where you live?’ she asked walking around the crooked rooms. She was wearing a dress she had cut from discarded bathroom curtains and a skullcap of red china beads.

  ‘This is it,’ Charlie said proudly. He'd spent the previous evening scrubbing floors and washing windows. He was pleased and surprised by the transformation.

  ‘What’s that!’ Baxter screeched when they reached the kitchen. She stood and stared in horrified delight at a dirty glass tank that was balanced on top of the fridge. A tiny child’s face stared back at her through its murky world of embalming fluid. Its hands were pressed against the glass and its blue eyes bulged as if it were straining to smash the tank walls and escape.

  ‘It’s a mermaid,’ Charlie said.

  Fat Harry had insisted on bringing his freaks to live with them. The mermaid floated on top of the fridge. The cannibal lived in the bathroom. The cockatrice lurked beneath Harry’s bed. Charlie hadn’t dared to inquire about the fate of the two-headed sheep.

  ‘Would you like a sandwich or something?’ he said nervously. ‘Would you like a drink?’

  Baxter shook her head. ‘It’s time to work,’ she said and grinned.

  She found her way into the sitting room, sat down on the sofa that served as a bed and began to unbutton her dress.

  Charlie had set up his easel beside the chest of drawers. He stood behind the easel, tightened the clamps, adjusted the legs and stared at the blank sheet of paper already pinned to the board. His shirt pocket sagged with pencils, crayons, sticks of charcoal and a Swiss army knife.

  He began to divide the paper into eight equal parts. At the top of the paper, in the first two sections, he drew a balloon to suggest a head. Beneath the balloon he drew something that looked like a wire coathanger from which were suspended a display of curious sausages. Shoulder sausage. Arm sausage. Leg sausage. The sausages dangled the length of the page. But when Charlie stepped back to review his work he could see that something was wrong. The first foot sausage wouldn’t fit the paper. He tried again. This time he divided the paper into sixteen equal parts and reduced the size of the balloon.

  ‘Charlie,’ Baxter called softly. ‘How is it coming along?’ Ten minutes had passed in silence.

  ‘Fine,’ Charlie said scribbling. ‘You were right. Everything is so much easier when you draw directly from life.’ He had abandoned his pencil in favour of a thick blunt charcoal stick. His fingers were black. There was charcoal dust in his eyes and nose. He scribbled furiously, snapping the charcoal into fragments, smudging the sausages with his thumb. Was it hot in the room or was it his imagination? His collar felt damp against his neck.

  ‘Charlie?’ Baxter said again.

  ‘Yes?’ Charlie said.

  ‘Why haven’t you looked at me?’

  Charlie stopped scribbling. The charcoal fell to the floor. Slowly, very slowly, he tilted his head and peered around the easel.

  Baxter was sprawled in the sofa, naked, grinning, supporting herself on one elbow and hiding her pubic bush with one hand in a rather good imitation, she felt, of Edouard Manet. She was still wearing her little skullcap and was turned, very slightly, at the shoulder so that Charlie might take full advantage of the tilt of her big white breasts. She was surreptitiously feeding herself liquorice allsorts from a bag she had hidden under a cushion and for the rest of his life Charlie would associate the sweet scent of liquorice with this moment and the pleasure Baxter took in teasing him and his own confusion and the way he had kept his eyes cast down, afraid that they might betray him and the shame of his desire.

  ‘You can’t learn anything unless you look at me,’ she said impatiently.

  Charlie blushed and looked at her feet, from the bulbs of her heels to the chipped opalescent lacquer on the nails of her slender toes.

  ‘What have you been doing behind that easel?’ she said, jumping up and walking on tiptoe towards Charlie’s drawing. She peered at the string of sausages and wrinkled her nose in disgust.

  ‘That’s a mess,’ she declared flatly.

  ‘I was just getting the hang of it,’ Charlie blustered. ‘Trying to get the feel of it.’

  She turned to him, lightly touched him on the arm and pulled a pencil from his pocket. ‘There’s no structure,’ she complained.

  ‘I was coming to that,’ Charlie said.

  ‘You start with the structure,’ Baxter said. ‘Watch.’ And she quickly drew a skeleton in a corner of the page.

  Charlie stood beside her and watched. He watched her frown in concentration. He watched the flick of her wrist and the swing of her arm as it pulled and joggled the heavy breast. Skull. Thorax. Arms and legs. A few quick strokes and it was finished. She made it look simple.

  ‘There!’ she grinned, returning the pencil. She walked back to the sofa and arranged herself in the cushions.

  ‘Don’t look at the paper,’ she called to Charlie, who was already retreating behind the easel. ‘Look at me.’

  Charlie emerged from his hiding place, sat down on the carpet and balanced a sketching block on his knees.

  ‘Just try to think of me as a bag of bones,’ she said, tossing him a liquorice allsort.

  ‘Bones,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Two hundred bones,’ Baxter said. ‘When you’ve found them you can start to dress them with fat and muscle.’

  ‘Fat and muscle,’ Charlie repeated.

  ‘And don’t exaggerate my titties,’ she cautioned him. ‘Men always make too much of my titties.’

  By the end of the afternoon she had taught him how the shoulder girdle is connected to the spinal column and the spinal column is connected to the pelvic girdle and the pelvic girdle is connected to the thigh-bone and the thigh-bone is connected to the leg-bone and the leg-bone is connected to the ankle-bone until, when she had finished, he had worn his charcoal sticks into stubs and she was no
thing but a wonderfully articulated skeleton laughing goodbye and pausing to kiss him as they walked downstairs.

  ‘You learn quickly,’ she said, pulling away, leaving him breathless and too shocked to speak.

  Here ended the first lesson.

  23.

  Why had Baxter fallen in love with him? How did she come to lose her heart to this quiet barber’s boy when she could have possessed almost any man she desired? She was so striking, so handsome, that she needed only to snap her fingers to have men running in circles, fawning and throwing flowers. They wrote her atrocious poems and long, anguished declarations of love and begging letters and suicide notes. She tossed aside the poems and letters but kept the suicide notes taped to the glass of her bathroom mirror.

  Baxter was bored with beauty. And Charlie, to her surprise, never once compared her mouth to a bruised rose or her eyes to dark and mysterious pools. He was frightened of her beauty, of course, like all the other men she had encountered in her short but brilliant career. But Charlie, unlike the others, never managed to turn his fear into verse and found, instead, the magic words that she wanted to hear more than anything else in the world.

  He told her she was talented.

  No one had ever told her she was talented because it wasn’t true. She was beautiful, yes, and so confident in her manner that she might have been accused of conceit. Her talent, however, was small. But Charlie, who had taught himself to paint, was overwhelmed by her easy, professional manner and casual draughtsmanship. She was the most accomplished artist, in fact the only artist, he’d had the good fortune to meet.

  When she returned the following afternoon she was wearing a black silk dress, salvaged from a charity shop, white ankle socks and bright green shoes. She had tied her hair into bunches.

  Charlie stood by the easel pretending to sharpen pencils already sliced down to hypodermics and peeping at her while she undressed and dropped her clothes on the floor. He tried to imagine her in a classroom, naked on a little stage, while students jostled to gawp at her beauty. He wondered if it was any easier for them, sitting handcuffed to drawing boards, while Baxter Pangloss challenged them to draw the maps of their desires. He supposed that true artists, real artists, with their fine and lofty views, must be immune to the fever that infected him. Did they walk their rooms at night, unable to sleep, pricked awake by wild dreams?

  ‘Are you ready. Charlie?’ Baxter said, waiting for him to look up and meet her gaze.

  She was standing in a pair of black silk panties, tied at the waist with lengths of red ribbon. She had bought them that morning. The price tag still dangled from one of the legs.

  ‘I’m ready,’ Charlie said

  Baxter pulled the ribbons. The confection fell apart and drifted smoothly to her feet, springing a wonderful bramble patch of gleaming pubic hair.

  ‘They’re new!’ she said, bending down to scoop the panties into her hand. She grinned and waved them at Charlie.

  ‘They’re pretty,’ Charlie said carelessly, as if such trifles were hardly worth his attention.

  ‘They cost a fortune!’ Baxter said with immense satisfaction. She clambered aboard the sofa, wriggled coquettishly into the cushions, sighed once or twice and fell asleep.

  Charlie set to work on his drawing and his concentration was so ferocious that soon he was settled into a trance. The world was the size of the room, the sunlight slanting over the sofa, the enchanted girl, the magic marks he scratched on the paper that grew like a kind of spell as if, by catching her likeness, he might possess her body and soul.

  These were some of the happiest moments in Charlie’s life. But he didn’t know it at the time. It was a shame. If he’d known that the world was going to end and that he’d find himself pleading for mercy from an eight foot monster with a head like a pumpkin, he might have taken the trouble to snatch a few more of these brief days of pleasure.

  Baxter stirred and opened her eyes. She stretched her spine and yawned like a cat.

  ‘Charlie,’ she called. ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘I’m here,’ Charlie murmured softly.

  ‘Take off your clothes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to make some drawings of you.’

  Charlie peered anxiously at his own drawing and chewed the end of his pencil.

  ‘I’m still working…’ he said in alarm. Everything? Did she want him to take off everything?

  ‘I’m bored,’ Baxter complained, standing up and walking to the window.

  She found her shoes and performed a little hopping dance as she struggled to spear them with her toes. She made no attempt to recover the rest of her clothes. The forgotten silk dress remained a shadow on the floor.

  ‘I’ve nearly finished,’ Charlie said.

  ‘You can finish me another time.’ Baxter said. ‘I must have been sitting for hours. You sit down while I do some work.’

  So, behind the shelter of his easel Charlie reluctantly pulled off his clothes, gulped at the air and hoped to smother his excitement. He moved forward like a man creeping over wet shingle into a freezing sea. But somehow, between Charlie stepping towards the sofa and Baxter moving towards the easel, their hands touched, their arms entwined and they fell, hopelessly entangled, onto the carpet and she was shrieking obscenities and biting him and pushing his face between her legs.

  Here ended the second lesson.

  24.

  Fat Harry knew that something was wrong as soon as he entered the gallery. He had come home with a bellyful of beer and a big commission from the Best of British Hotels™ Group who wanted forty oil paintings to decorate some of their restaurants. Romantic views of manicured English country gardens that would give Best of British™ customers an appetite for the roast pork dinners and frosted pineapple puddings. He’d also persuaded the men of the Universal Rubber Corporation™ that Charlie should paint twelve of their fifteen factories. Harry had brought home photographs of the rubber plants: identical concrete fortresses surrounded by razor wire and towers of tractor tyres.

  It was long past midnight when he unlocked the door and crept into the gallery but even by the light of the street lamps he could see that something was wrong.

  The French vineyard, the Spanish harbour and the Portuguese storm clouds were missing and in their place hung a set of mysterious pencil drawings. They were meticulous studies of bird and animal carcasses and some kind of queer fruit that looked, to Harry’s bleary eye, like rows of old men’s penises. What was happening here? This didn’t look like Charlie’s work.

  He switched on the gallery lights. The pencil drawings ran the length of one wall. The other walls were covered in large, square canvases of brightly coloured nudes.

  Fat Harry hauled himself upstairs to the attic, threw open the door and knocked Baxter Pangloss to the floor.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded, glaring down on the terrified girl he found sprawling at his feet.

  Baxter kicked out her legs and screamed. She had just emerged from the bathroom and had been attacked on her way back to Charlie's bed. She was wearing a lot of lipstick and a lick of novelty underwear.

  ‘Charlie!’ Baxter shouted.

  ‘Harry!’ Charlie shouted. He came running from the bedroom, looking startled and trying to keep his pyjamas closed.

  ‘Calm down, it’s all right!’ he said, turning to Baxter. ‘It’s Harry. It’s only Harry.’ He managed a smile and bent down to help the fallen girl recover her modesty. But Baxter shrank away from his touch, sobbing and chewing her first.

  ‘Oh, my Gawd!’ Harry bellowed when he’d snapped on the light. He tottered forward and peered at the picture on the easel. His face was purple with indignation. ‘That’s disgusting! What are you trying to do to me, Charlie? You want to break my heart?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Charlie demanded.

  ‘Nude women!’ Fat Harry roared. ‘You’ve been painting nude women behind my back!’

  ‘He’s drunk!’ Baxter said from the safety of the do
or. She watched the intruder grasp the easel, clinging to it for support while his legs performed a rubbery dance.

  ‘They won’t buy paintings of nude women!’ Fat Harry raged. ‘You’re wasting your time with this kind of rubbish. People don’t want to stare at a lot of women’s arses while they’re trying to eat and drink in sophisticated surroundings. It’s enough to turn their stomachs.’

  ‘Get out!’ Baxter shouted. ‘Charlie, tell him to get out!’ She stamped her bare feet like a sulky child.

  ‘He lives here,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Who are you?’ Harry wheeled, turning on Baxter as if he were looking at her for the first time.

  ‘This is Baxter.’ Charlie said. ‘She’s a painter. We’ve been working together—I thought you’d be away until the end of the week.’ He hadn’t expected this confrontation. He tried to wave Baxter into the sanctuary of the bedroom but Baxter refused to meet his eye.

  ‘So that’s it!’ Harry said bitterly. He moved away from the easel and began to sail the room like a stricken galleon. ‘I travel the length of the country trying to find you honest work, and when I come home you’ve forgotten me and taken up with a fancy woman!’ He sounded like a wounded wife, betrayed by a lecherous husband.

  ‘I finished a couple of Snow Drifts in the Apple Orchard. I didn’t neglect the business.’

  ‘It looks like it,’ Harry said mournfully, shaking his arm at the evidence on the easel.

  ‘I’m tired of painting pictures from postcards,’ Charlie blurted, glancing at the half-finished canvas. A pale ghost of Baxter stared back at him, a nearly naked nympholept, flaunting her legs in a faintly sketched chair. ‘It’s not enough. I can’t waste my life painting views of windmills and ruined castles, I’d rather be a barber.’

  ‘You haven’t got the talent to be a barber!’ Harry roared. ‘Your haircuts were horrible.’ He chopped at his scalp with the flat of his hand and nearly knocked himself to the floor.

  ‘My paintings are horrible!’ Charlie shouted, moving between the easel and Harry, instinctively protecting his work.