My neck and shoulders were stiff from sitting in the same position all day, watching my life model from across the room. I rolled my head, feeling the bones in my neck crack, and I was glad of the dark, almost velvet glow of the bar. It was comforting after the stark glow of the lights in the room today. I passed my hand over my eyes.
Nigel was slopping beer as he pushed through the gentle crowd of swaying bodies towards our table, and he stumbled slightly as he set the pint glasses on the table, froth bubbling over the rims and starting a little race down the sides and over his stained fingers.
It was the one thing – probably the only thing – that we had in common. We were both failed artists. Our fingers were always stained with something, whether it was pastel powder, charcoal, oils or nicotine. But we had been friends forever, since art college and then university, our love of art a picture we had been filling in since the day we met, our passion creating our own exhibition as we secretly hung our work across our world.
“Another long day?” Nigel asked, taking a long swig of his cold beer and inspecting the contents of his glass.
I nodded.
“Was she looking as beautiful as ever?”
I nodded again.
“Any closer to the end?”
I nodded slowly. Tomorrow was the last day – it would be the day of reckoning for us.
Nigel took a minute to think. He always did that. It was irritating sometimes, but tonight I didn’t mind the silence. He kind of knew I had fallen a little bit in love with my life model. It wasn’t really acceptable behaviour, but he wasn’t going to judge me. We were, or used to be anyway, bohemians at work, filled with light, colour and perspective which had been clouded by the real world. Nigel wasn’t even working in the field he had chosen. He was stacking books in a warehouse, driving a fork lift truck, grateful for the peace and quiet of the night and the low hum of his machine. His work reflected his mood mostly. As did mine. Deep, dark and filled with half dead ambition, life slowly draining out of it as time marched boldly forward, starting to stride towards our twilight years. Where did it all go wrong, I often thought? How did I get to this place, drawing from memory what I always thought were inanimate objects, always in the same room, with the same light, and usually the same old faces. Until she came along. It had just been another ordinary day when I turned up. I had left my paper and pencils, a chunk of charcoal, a small tray of pastels and my sponge in the car, ready to start work on them.
The first thing I noticed about her was the mist straying across the crystal clear blue of her eyes – like gentle fog rolling across the ocean when dawn breaks, clouding the view across the horizon but promising a landscape which opens up in front of you to reveal the world.
She was shy, I think. That’s why she kept those blue eyes lowered slightly, focusing on something on the floor, or maybe the tips of her shapely toes. She didn’t say much as I scrutinised her from top to bottom, sitting like one of those real-life statues on the plain, wooden chair at the front of the room. It was as if all eyes were upon her. She never looked up. Not really. Had never even looked in my direction. I was used to that.
She didn’t say much so she was easy to draw, my charcoal filling and shading the gentle curve of her chin and the plump arch of her top lip, streaking along the contours of her cheeks and angular nose, sweeping across her brow and to her hairline, her red curls tied up away from her face with some kind of flowery hairband that made her hair look like a burnished garden of wild roses.
Her frame was slight, but she sat up straight, patiently staring off into oblivion at the point on the floor, her hands resting peacefully in her lap. Filling out her shape as I drew diligently late into the night, I felt as if I knew my life model inside out. I knew every curve, every crease in her skin, every fold and angle of her limbs, the turn of her ankle and the almost ethereal glow of her flesh. I glanced down to the page where the sketch of her was coming to life slowly as my fingers glided across the rough white sheet of paper, her outline being born again in the darkness of my room as I concentrated hard on capturing the essence of the woman who sat in front of me every day. I looked up through narrowed eyes and remembered how she moved slightly in the chair, raised her head slightly as if to meet my gaze, before lowering her chin back to the usual position. I found shades in her that she probably never knew she had, and somewhere deep inside the pit of my stomach, I felt like I knew what it might feel like to hold her in my arms and make love to her. I would know every inch of her and the woman I had created in my head would come alive beneath my chalky fingertips, I would draw her near to me and feel the sweet hotness of her breath against my cheek as she fell against me. I explored my fantasies as I continued to draw, blotting out the rest of the world as I had taught myself to do in art college, so that I could concentrate on shape and form, wondering how her lips might feel against mine, telling myself it wasn’t unusual for an artist to fall for a muse.
I was used to the chatter around us during the day, coming from somewhere, but it was rare that she spoke. It was quite nice to hear her voice. It wasn’t what I had imagined, it was gentle, and she had a slight accent, I’m not sure from where. I wasn’t great with identifying where people came from. I was an artist. It didn’t matter what things sounded like, it was what they looked like, what inspired me, what drove me. Night after night I created preliminary sketch after sketch of her, until it looked like I had become obsessed, and I think I was really. I wondered about her. It wasn’t really acceptable. But I think I had fallen in love with her.
Nigel was peering at me from behind his beer glass and his eyes looked enormous. He drained the last of his beer and stood up, reaching for his coat.
“I’ll see you tomorrow?”
I nodded.
It seemed busier than usual on my way in to work. There were TV cameras and journalists hanging around the front door of the office building like smart, cultured vultures. They didn’t take any notice of me, huddled in my overcoat, my thinning hair combed over my head to cover my ever increasing bald spot, my work filed in my art folder in my car.
Once inside, it was quiet. There was the usual hush as people bustled into position and then she was called to the front and I settled to capture today’s thoughts and feelings as they skipped across her beautiful face. She stood up and her hand strayed nervously to her hair where it looked like she was about to pluck out a rose and thread it between her teeth in a post-Raphaelite pose that almost took my breath away.
“Madi Pilgrim,” a voice said from somewhere to the left of me. Even her name was poetic. He rambled on in low, dulcet tones for a while and I blotted his voice out, concentrating on capturing the wide eyed innocence of her face as she looked at a faraway spot above my head. I don’t think she was listening either, although all of a sudden, a tear squeezed from the corner of her eye, quickly followed by another one, and then another one, until two rivers were coursing down her cheeks and dripping off the end of her chin.
I stopped thinking for a second – not sure how to capture such raw emotion on paper. How could I draw grief and desperation? I wasn’t that great an artist. I had failed in my pursuit of a career in the art world and this was now my daily routine. Reproduction I called it. I drank every night at home as I drew from memory all of the day’s events, and the unused creativity in my head coiled up into a stinking mess of regret and bitterness. She looked at me then. For the first time in weeks since this personal trial of mine had begun. She looked through me to another world behind me as the judge summed up.
“The jury has found you guilty of the charge of murder. Not only did you kill your husband and children in cold blood, you have shown no signs of repentance or regret since this trial began and I have no choice but to sentence you to life in prison which equates to a minimum of 30 years.”
The gavel echoed against the sounding block as the judge stood up and mayhem broke out around us. I watched as she turned her back, being led away, the red mist of her hair disappearing down steps as I looked around, the life that had begun to spark in me suddenly extinguished. Just like my failed ambition.
My phone buzzed into action. Press clamouring for my court room drawings. Judging by the outcome, this trial would prove to be a big earner for me, but somehow my own life sentence stretched before me, the memory of her face etched in my mind, when I realised I was also guilty as charged. I wasn’t going to prison. I was already there.
The End
Mags Winthrop Blog 