by John Harvey
‘And that never happens?’
‘Hardly ever.’
‘And when it does?’
‘Give ’em the same look you would if they were coming on to you in some club, they get the message. Once, there was this one guy, I had a word with the woman taking the class – just so happened it was a woman – next week she’d moved him, back of the room, out of my eyeline, end of problem.’
She lifted the pot from the stove while Katherine got the milk from the fridge.
‘I’ve told you before, if you’re interested, there’s always people looking for models. Good ones. That drawing class, Wednesdays … Be a shoe-in, figure like yours, all those interesting little curves …’
‘Fuck off!’ Katherine said and laughed.
‘That’s a no, then?’
‘Yes, it’s a no.’
‘Rent’s due end of the month again. Can’t bank on your mum bailing you out for ever.’
‘I’ll get it sorted.’
‘Suit yourself.’
They took their mugs of coffee into the living room. Katherine checked her emails, Facebook, Tumblr. Chrissy seemed to be alternately staring at her toes or out of the window.
‘How much d’you get an hour again?’ Katherine asked.
9
It was an old building, grand at the front, pillars and a decorated arch above the door; far grander than the street it was in: a mini-supermarket at either end, a workman’s café, betting shop, dry cleaner’s, an old-fashioned ironmonger’s that doubled as a locksmith and shoe repairer. Inside the entrance to the building the paint was starting to flake away from the walls; a number of the tiles in the hallway were chipped and in need of being replaced. The lift wobbled and shook a little as it took Katherine up to the topmost floor.
‘It’ll be a doddle,’ Chrissy had said. ‘If you’re going to start somewhere, you can’t do better than this. A drawing class for old biddies and granddads. And the bloke who teaches it, he’s a sweetie.’
The sweetie met her at the door: moleskin trousers, Aran sweater, a mane of white hair.
‘You must be Katherine. It’s lovely to meet you. And every bit as beautiful as Chrissy said.’
Camp, Katherine thought, as Christmas.
She followed him along the corridor and into a wide room with windows on two sides; a dozen or more tables set out in a broad curve around a raised platform where she assumed she would pose. A few of the class had arrived already; a pair of grey-haired ladies chatting amiably, a tall man with a slightly hunched back taking off his coat and draping it carefully over his chair.
‘The changing room’s over here,’ the teacher said, pointing off along another short corridor. ‘Just pop back out when you’re ready. We usually try to start on time.’
Katherine let herself in and closed the door. There was a sink with a skimpy towel pegged alongside, a toilet in a separate cubicle. Table, chair, worn boards, a mirror on the wall. Her face looked pale, the colour bleached away. From outside, she could hear voices raised in greeting as more of the class arrived.
She could leave now, say it was all a mistake, there was still time.
Some kind of robe and something on your feet, Chrissy had said, that’s all you need. Katherine had brought along a silky dressing gown with a design of peacock feathers that had been her mother’s; a pair of scuffed pink trainers. After using the toilet – ‘You don’t want to be jumping up every five minutes to pee’ – she undressed quickly, hanging some of her clothes on the hooks behind the door, folding the rest over the chair.
One last glance in the mirror – she looked terrible, she thought, a waxwork of herself – she stepped out and closed the door.
‘Katherine,’ the teacher said, his voice deliberately louder to attract the class’s attention. ‘This is Katherine, everyone, she’s going to model for us today.’
Amongst murmured greetings, a few calls of ‘Hello, Katherine’, clutching her robe closed, she followed the teacher through the tables and on to the platform, on which there was now a chair.
‘What I like to do is give the students the chance to get their eye in, as it were, so we usually start off making two or three quick drawings and then move on to something more concentrated, detailed, forty minutes or so – a longer pose for you – after which we’ll all take a little break. Then, when we’re refreshed, we’ll finish by asking you to do a longer pose, standing. If that all sounds hunky-dory?’
He smiled, waiting for Katherine to nod agreement.
‘Lovely. Well, seated first then. Back quite straight and sort of half-turned away, the body at an interesting angle.’
Stepping back, he smiled again, encouragingly.
‘Whenever you’re ready.’
Katherine would say, telling her friends later, it was the longest moment of her life, but, in fact, it was a matter of seconds: an awareness, blurred, of faces looking up at her expectantly, and then, kicking off her shoes, she let the robe slide over her shoulders, down her back and to the floor.
After the first time it was easy. Well, no, but easier, certainly. Aside from those few occasions when one of the students directed a remark to her directly, Katherine contrived to keep herself apart; as if she’d been able to erect some kind of shield, invisible, between the class and herself. Compartmentalisation, she’d learned to be good at that. Had to be. Thinking her own thoughts, projecting herself back and forwards in time, anything and everything from the name of the girl who’d been mean to her in the first year of primary school to the mental shopping list to take with her to Tesco’s on the way home. Thoughts interrupted by the slight pain that was spreading from her hip down along her thigh, caused by being in the same position for too long; the desire to scratch that itch on the left side of her cheek; the need, despite adhering to Chrissy’s advice, to pee. When she glanced, almost accidentally, at the drawing tables as she passed, it was as if those nicely contoured lines in ink or charcoal, those limbs, belonged to someone else, not her.
After just a month, the same teacher asked her if she would model for a class he taught over in Chelsea, beginners, a longer session but he could afford to pay a little more per hour.
Katherine agreed.
Soon, if things continued this way, she might be able to give up bar work altogether. Have a few more early nights. Spend more time in the gym. Start to think again seriously about what she wanted to do with her life, longer term. Take after Stelina and study: another degree, maybe. Something more useful this time.
Chrissy woke her at seven, sitting on the edge of the bed, pained, blotchy-faced, a hot-water bottle pressed against her tummy.
‘What? What is it?’
‘You’ve got to go in for me. The art school. I’ve got my period.’
‘That’s okay, surely. You can always …’
‘I feel like shit. This bastard hurts like hell and I can’t face four and a half hours of lying on my side with swollen tits, worrying if the string from my tampon’s showing.’
‘Then cancel.’
‘I can’t. It’s too late. And besides …’ The thought got lost in a gasp of pain. ‘Kate, please. Just this once. I won’t ask you again, I promise.’
Katherine was careful to arrive in plenty of time; Chrissy had messaged the tutor who took the class, explained, apologised, introduced. She was around her mother’s age, Katherine thought, the tutor, dark hair cut almost savagely short, a white shirt under paint-smirched dungarees, sitting cross-legged on the wall outside the studio, assiduously working on a roll-up as Katherine approached.
‘I’m Vida,’ she said, holding out a hand. ‘Stupid name. Call me V.’
The tips of her fingers were calloused and hard, the palms fleshy and soft.
‘Classic pose this morning. You on a nice length of purple velvet, arse cheeks outwards, hip raised. Rokeby Venus, that kind of thing. And let’s see’ – reaching round, she bunched Katherine’s hair in her hand and raised it higher – ‘if we can’t clip this up somehow, see
what they can do with this neck of yours.’
Was it any more strange, twenty pairs of eyes fixed on your back view as opposed to your front? At least, Katherine thought, she still exercised enough that her rear didn’t sag; there was firm flesh and muscle in her thighs and running had left her with well-defined triceps.
‘How was that?’ Vida asked at the lunch break.
‘Okay, thanks. Fine.’
‘We’ve got a visitor this afternoon. Anthony Winter. Heard of him?’
Katherine nodded. ‘Yes, I think so.’ She didn’t say, he almost knocked me flying once, not looking where he was going.
‘Won’t affect you particularly. Just means there might be a bit more chat than usual. Students getting nervous. Oh, and we’ll do the thing with the mirror.’
‘The mirror?’
Vida slid a postcard from the pocket of her dungarees.
‘The lady herself.’
In the painting, the woman lay in the same position Katherine had adopted, but with the addition of some kind of winged cherub holding a mirror which reflected her face. ‘That’s what we’ve got for you this afternoon, a nice framed mirror. But only resting against the wall, I’m afraid, no cherub.’
Did she feel any more nervous that afternoon, knowing that Winter was there? Not at all, why should she? What was Winter to her? She couldn’t help but be aware of his presence, nonetheless. Sense him as he moved amongst the students, pausing to look at their work, pontificating, cajoling, occasionally laughing, his laugh a rough-edged kind of sound, akin to growling. The voice resonant and deep; the voice of a man well used to being listened to, expecting attention.
Staring, as she had to, at her own face in the mirror, she was less able to drift off into a world of her own, as she sometimes did when posing; consequently, time passed more slowly and she felt herself becoming increasingly conscious of the tiredness that came from being restricted to the same position, the dull ache in the arm on which she was leaning.
At last, she heard Vida thanking Winter on her students’ behalf for giving over so much of his time to look at their work and for all the encouragement he had given, the expertise he’d passed on.
‘Nothing, nothing. A pleasure, a pleasure.’
And she thought he had gone. Until, glancing back into the mirror, she saw him standing, perfectly still, his eyes staring into hers.
10
‘He wants you.’
‘What?’
‘He wants you – Winter. To model for him.’
‘What? No way.’
‘Why ever not?’
They were sitting on a low wall overlooking the canal, Katherine with a salted caramel ice cream from Ruby Violet, Vida smoking a particularly evil-looking black roll-up. Lunch break the following day, Chrissy still indisposed.
‘I don’t know,’ Katherine said. ‘It’s different. Just one person, it wouldn’t feel … it just wouldn’t feel right.’
‘You know it’s a big deal, though, right? Anthony Winter. He doesn’t just ask anybody. I know girls’d give their eye teeth for the chance. I mean, he’s not Damien Hirst or anything. But up there. Getting to be. Couple of paintings sold recently at close to six figures.’
Katherine swore beneath her breath as a piece of ice cream rolled off the edge of the cone and down on to her jeans.
‘I’m happy doing what I’d doing. Just the odd class here and there, filling in.’ She smiled. ‘I don’t exactly see it as a career.’
‘What is?’
‘My choice of career? I’m still not sure. I thought I did, but now …’
‘You went to uni, right?’
‘Uh-huh. Sheffield. Sports management.’ A small laugh. ‘Seemed a good idea at the time.’
‘And have you thought what you might really want to do?’
‘I’m afraid not, no.’
Vida looked at her watch. ‘We should be getting back.’
Katherine dabbed again at her jeans and dropped the napkin into a convenient bin; licked the stickiness from her fingers as they walked back inside.
‘So what do you want me to tell Winter when he calls?’
‘Tell him no. I’m sorry, but no. No way.’
A week or so later, after spending the best part of an hour burrowing through the maze of clothes that is TK Maxx, hunting down that elusive bargain, Katherine found herself crossing the street towards Foyles bookshop, the art department right there on the ground floor, monographs on the shelves in alphabetical order. She had to bend low to slide the book she was looking for out and into her hands. Anthony Winter: Paintings 2004 – 2016, published to coincide with his show at the Serpentine Gallery.
The first group of paintings were of street scenes, rows of anonymous-looking houses, at night for the most part, sombre, dark: always a single light somewhere burning, a street lamp or bedroom window; and then, as you looked longer, more carefully, something else came into view – something that had been there all along, but had somehow remained unseen – the silhouette on an animal sneaking along beside the wall, a cat, perhaps, or fox; someone in deep shadow behind a curtain, a downstairs window; a couple pressed together in a furtive embrace by the corner wall.
Then, fewer these, paintings of fields, barren, bare, speckled here and there, some of them, with snow. A skeleton of trees piercing the fierce blue of the horizon. A car at the end of a lane that seemed to have petered out in the middle of nowhere; dusk, a lowering sky, the car facing away, the red of its tail lights burning brightly, the contours of two people, just visible through the rear window.
From there onwards the focus shifted: interior replaced exterior; people no longer in shadow but in furious close-up; people laid bare, the paint thicker than before, more extreme. A man’s face, mouth wide, screaming silently from the canvas, his eyes dark and drained of colour; a child in ragged clothing pressed back against a brick wall, crying, wrought by tears; an elderly woman with her shoulders bent, one withered hand reaching towards the viewer – the artist – as if pleading to be released.
In contrast, the first of the nudes was gentle, soft, a blurring of the light; the model young, Katherine thought, no more than fourteen or fifteen, breasts barely formed, eyes closed as if sleeping. Then several paintings in which parts of the body were shown in close-up: pendulous breasts, riven by purple veins; a partly engorged penis above a tangle of pubic hair. No face. No mercy shown.
The book opened out into a double-page: on either side of the fold a young woman, naked, strikingly beautiful, dark hair that fell towards her shoulders, lipsticked mouth, standing in front of a floor-length mirror; the identical pose in both, save that on the left her hands hung down empty, relaxed, and in the other her right hand held what Katherine knew from her brief early passion with horses to be a riding crop, its narrow shaft ending in a leather tongue known as the keeper.
In the first painting, the model’s back, reflected in the mirror, was smooth and bare; in the second, the upper half, across and below the shoulders, was scored with red, narrow lines, biting into the skin and edged with blood.
Katherine shut the book firmly closed.
An image in her mind, hooking her back: Adam Keach, the stink of slowly rotting fish, the cry of gulls, his hands on her skin.
Standing, she was dizzy, needing air.
Out on the pavement, she steadied herself against the glass of the shopfront, waited until passing traffic, passers-by, had come into focus, then made her way slowly, steadily towards the Tube.
That night and nights after, the usual dreams. The ones that had been haunting her since she was sixteen. She went to the GP, who prescribed pills to help her sleep. Bought more pills of her own. She contacted the therapist she’d seen previously and made an appointment, cancelling it at the last moment. A week or so later, she picked up another session with the same teacher, this in the upstairs room above an old Victorian pub in Walthamstow. Almost enough to pay her share of the rent but still not quite. She put off calling her mum until it w
as well overdue. With a sigh and a warning that this would have to be the last time, Joanne transferred the money into her account. A little extra on top so you can go out and treat yourself.
Katherine bought herself a black velvet dress from Zara and wore it to the party she and Chrissy had been invited to in Soho, Vida and Justine celebrating the fifth anniversary of their civil partnership.
The party was in a private club, a DJ on one floor, live music on another, just bass and guitar; everywhere crowded, couples sitting on the stairs. Katherine found herself squashed up into a corner with a couple of gay men animatedly trying to remember the names of all the characters from The Magic Roundabout. Florence? Dylan?
Edging narrowly between them, she extricated herself back into the twenty-first century.
Chrissy seemed to have disappeared.
Picking up a glass of wine, she made her way cautiously down the stairs and out into the street.
It was late, later than she’d thought. A straggle of people, cars, the glare of lights.
‘You know what they say about parties?’
She recognised the voice before turning her head. Unstructured suit, blue shirt, brown shoes.
‘No, what do they say?’
‘Arrive late, leave early.’
‘How about just don’t go?’
‘There is always that, of course. The denial school of orthodoxy.’ Winter reached into his pocket for cigarettes; offered one to Katherine and when she refused, lit one for himself and leaned back against the wall.
Katherine drank a little more wine.
‘You’re refusing to model for me, V says.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Any particular reason?’
Katherine shrugged.
‘You don’t like my work, perhaps?’
‘I don’t know your work.’
‘You don’t like me then?’
‘I don’t know you either.’
‘Shame.’
The lights from the restaurant across the street reflected green and red across his face, deflecting the blue of his eyes.