Cathexis

by Clay, Josie

  “I just can't decide what to do, there's too much choice”. Perhaps I'd been too ambitious, dropping them in at the deep end.

  “Tenielle, I'm sorry, this is my fault. Can you help me?”

  She eyed me warily. “How?”

  “Come with me” I said.

  She shrugged, adopting a casual pimp walk.

  “Quick” I said, breaking into a run and she trotted behind me obligingly, quiff bouncing.

  “Rags, have you got clean rags?” I shouted into the perforations at Cooper's Yard. The red door juddered open and Dale emerged with a black plastic sack.

  “Hi” she said on seeing Tenielle, who responded with a beatific , dopey smile.

  “Easy tiger” I said and she shot me a grin.

  “How's it going?” Dale said, handing me the bag.

  “Terribly” I said. “Thanks Dale, you're a life-saver”. I kissed her on the lips and as we jogged away Tenielle grappled the sack from my grasp.

  “Let me take that, Miss”.

  “Call me Minette”.

  “Miss, is she your girlfriend?”

  “Yes Tenielle, she is”.

  “She's proper buff”.

  “Yes, I think so too”.

  One by one I blindfolded them and steered a pencil into their hands, their trust touching. They were to draw themselves without taking the pencil off the paper, otherwise they'd lose their way. Not being able to see made them garrulous. After five minutes, the blindfolds came off. There was much shrieking and hilarity as they witnessed their efforts. For once, I was glad to hear that teenage bray. Bizarrely, their drawings were fairly recognizable. Magdala's was particularly singular.

  “Oh my God” she said, “I look like a alien”.

  My private rituals had evolved of late because they had been a solitary preoccupation and now I was rarely alone. Swimming became a vehicle to mollify my mania. I had to complete eighty lengths in thirty five minutes, maintaining an average of two and a third lengths per minute . I'd glance at the clock with every other breath. This would keep Dale safe, with the added dividend of enhancing my body so she'd still find me attractive. Cycling too provided all kinds of obsessive opportunity. Two cars only were allowed to overtake me on my journeys (motorbikes and mopeds didn't count). This wasn't as difficult as it seemed because I had devised a complex system where if I passed stationary cars at traffic lights for example, I could claim them back from the ones that had passed me. There were other rules which I'd incorporated so that I never lost. This would keep us both safe.

  My most important was performed right under Dale’s nose. Each night before we slept, I had to look directly into her eyes for four seconds, stroke her hair four times and then we had to fall asleep holding hands. This would ensure her love for me.

  As she pulled the covers over us and flexed her warmth next to me, my staggering sense of good fortune was counter pointed with a cold quilt, stitched with fear that I might fuck up or she might change her mind.

  Snaking her right arm around my shoulders, she drew my head down to the drum of her heart, a large hardback book balanced on her left flank. Her fingers gripped the top as if she were inspecting her nails, but her eyes scanned the baffling hooked lines and flourishes.

  “Gosh, can you read that?”

  “Of course, my mum used to read it to me, it's the Arabian Nights”.

  “Can you read it to me?”

  On the right hand page was an illustration, an overbearing genie, his tapering pantaloons still funnelling from the bottle. She began “kan fi saalef a zamaan...”. Her voice took on a rich timbre, deep and lilting, with husky, guttural diphthongs, sibilant and liquid. I was spellbound, astonished that her mouth could even make such sounds. She purred a landscape of dunes and twilight, adopting the imperious tones of the genie (I knew she would be frowning and pouting behind my hair , which she stroked). The lulling cadenza enfolded me. I saw damask and jewels and Dale's eyes ringed with kohl gazing at me from the edge of a sequined veil. My beautiful Arab, my goddess, my mother. Succumbing to the dynamic, I stuck my thumb in my mouth and as I drifted away I felt the waft of the closing book on my face, the puff of parched pages like a sigh.

  “Habibti yaarburnee” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  She kissed my head.

  “My beloved” she whispered, “may you bury me”.

  Chapter 6

  On my forty third birthday, Dale prepared a feast of my favourite food: a dozen oysters (their obstinance dispatched proficiently with an evil paring knife), shepherd's pie (deconstructed), followed by chocolate refrigerator cake. My present, a smooth pale stone, the size of a bar of soap, carved with that buxom heart accommodating the spiky star burst. The B of the bang, our logo. So moved I couldn't speak and I brought it to my lips as if it were a holy relic. After an appropriate hiatus she gave me a special birthday seeing to.

  My girls filed in and I realised I'd grown fond of them, in fact, they broke my heart; I saw myself in all of them. Their natural conviviality, pushed well beneath the plimsoll line by a cruel cargo. It was not within my capacity to unload them, but hopefully I could at least help steer them to port.

  The mirror pictures had turned up some surprising results. The diffident Dolapo's, especially oblique and clever: an impressive, cross-hatched sky, the slabs of buildings, water reflected in glass, the cosy canal boats and a well observed study of a coot, gliding through a V. The only thing missing was Dolapo herself. She waited with a sly smile, for me to fall in. I guessed it must be a 'Where's Wally?' type of joke.

  “There you are” I said, pointing to the window of a crazily be-flowered barge. The tiny face wreathed in a grin, something I'd never seen on the big Dolapo. “What's your thinking behind this picture?” Pointing at the boat in the picture, she looked at the real one outside.

  “I'd be happy living there” she said.

  “You're gonna need a bigger boat” Tenielle sniggered. We all fixed her reprovingly. After ten seconds her defiance trailed to the floor.

  “Well?”

  “Sorry Dolapo” she said.

  “Not good enough”.

  “I'm sorry I disrespected you, Dolapo” she sighed, “and your picture is wicked”.

  “s'OK” Dolapo mumbled.

  For the first part of the session, they were to draw each other. I put Dolapo and Tenielle together, keeping an eye on Tenielle's gravity defying cock-comb.

  As usual, I'd left my homework until the last minute, papers and notes all over the bed. I worked on my lesson plans, squinting at a small picture of Frida Kahlo on the laptop, or it may have been Madonna, I was having difficulty telling. Dale's brain had something to say, perhaps an endearment, and I looked up as she regarded me affectionately.

  “Minky” she said, “I think you need glasses”.

  Gasps and giggles and then silence as the woman removed her pink towelling dressing gown.

  “This is Jolanta” I announced. “She'll be your life model for the next part of the session”. She sunk onto the wooden chair and I positioned her arms so that one hand was on her hip and the other braced against the top of the back of the chair supporting her head.

  “Is that OK for you?”

  She nodded. “Perhaps twenty minutes” she said in a long-suffering Lithuanian accent.

  As the girls straddled their donkeys, I tilted a small convector heater at her and she gave me the thumbs up. The usual spiel about not just looking at the figure but the shapes around it, the triangular spaces formed between her arms and torso, not starting at the top and finishing at the bottom, how you would interpret the figure and the skeleton, the way the whole body links together. I moved around the group like a border collie and sitting behind them, thought I'd have a go myself, but imagined drawing Dale and my mind raced away with the prospect. I forced my focus back to Jolanta's flesh while charcoal wisped on paper.

  She must have been in her mid-fifties, once a handsome woman, good cheekbones and intelli
gent, azure eyes. Hair bleached, showing dark grey roots and teased so it stuck up on top but straight at the back and sides, like a mini mullet. Her crucifix earrings dragged her lobes pendulous. She looked at her best when smiling, but in repose her face was jowly and baggy. Large bosoms rested on the rolls of her stomach, which in turn sat on her thighs, obscuring her privates. Not fat exactly, more deflated. Heavy thighs and arse sagging over the seat of the chair and purple, lumpy circuitry networked her legs. The skin of her buttocks and hips, corrugated and crepey. I noticed she'd taken the time to paint her toenails coral pink. Despite her obvious secondary sexual characteristics, she seemed oddly mannish.

  The fact I would degrade depressed me, the process in action already. Not that I was vain, but it just seemed unfair your body should throw in the towel just as you were warming up. Of course, I didn't care if Dale went to seed, I'd still love her. But so far I'd seen no evidence of that (except for when she shouted from the bathroom, 'Minky! Have you seen the tweezers, I'm getting a tache', snorting with amusement).

  Only when Jolanta flexed her arm and shook out her hand did I realise I'd spent the last fifteen minutes wool gathering. She donned her dressing gown and hobbled about stiffly. The girls still fiddling with their drawings and some looked up surprised to see her gone.

  “Some of you are not looking at the model enough” I said . “OK Jolanta?”

  “Yes” she said. “Maybe next time I lay down”.

  I arranged an old green velvet curtain on the floor and strategically positioned some plain red cushions.

  “We’ll do one more and have tea” I said, refusing to use the term 'comfort break'.

  Jolanta, lowering herself towards the curtain, got so far and then kind of dropped, unbalanced . She did a small roll. My eyes shot to Tenielle, suppressing a smirk behind her hand.

  “Are you alright there, Jolanta?”, trying not to sound patronising.

  “Yes, sank you” she said. “My knees, they are bad”.

  The girls swivelled their pads to landscape.

  “Let's try and make you comfy”. She reclined her left side on a line of cushions, one leg angled in front, the other crooked up with her knee bent and her foot on the velvet. She raised herself up on her arm and I padded some cushions behind her for extra support. Her left hand disappearing under her body, cupping a bulge where her hip bone used to be, she settled her right arm across her stomach. Standing back, I looked at what the girls would see. Jolanta, strangely transformed, a provocative pose, livid genitalia exposed, bosoms like bread dough set aside to prove, she looked ...well, sexy; an experienced Odalisque. A far more interesting challenge for the girls.

  “Don't forget to look at the spaces”, gesturing at Jolanta's raised knee. “There's a great opportunity for a hand study and look at this neck, visualise that arc from the head, sweeping right through the body. She had a small bird tattooed on her right buttock.

  “OK, let's get some colour into this”, breaking open brand new sets of chalk pastels. “And don't just use pink, look really closely at the skin tones, look at the shadows. What colour are they?”

  The girls woke up in response as I moved behind them, pointing out potential improvements and acknowledging good work. They were coming along well. When they filed out for their break, I proudly sealed the drawings with fixative.

  Chapter 7

  Dale's forty third birthday fell on a Monday. I cooked her favourite things: scallops with chorizo, my special chicken and ginger with cashews and a hill of profiteroles. My presents, a chunky silver star on a string of leather and a book on Anthony Gormley. After a short hiatus, I gave her a good birthday seeing to.

  “I think you're overdoing it with this exercise malarkey” she said as we cuddled in bed, sipping whisky. “You look knackered”.

  “Do I?” anxiously. “But don't you think my body's improving?”

  “It doesn't need improving” she said. “I just worry it's some kind of displacement activity”.

  “For what?”

  “Oh I don't know, perhaps you're putting off coming home”.

  “Are you serious?”. Horrified she would think this. “I can't wait to come home to you. If I didn't have this stupid council job I'd be glued to your face ninety per cent of the time”.

  “What would you do in the other ten per cent?”

  “Dunno ...eat lotus flowers. Anyway, it really pisses me off that I have to spend my days doing something I don't want to do”.

  “Give it up then”, she shrugged.

  “If only I could”.

  “You can, rent out your place and come and live with me”.

  “With my mortgage it wouldn't be enough to live on”.

  “Minky” she said, her eyes burning patiently. “You're not hearing me, I'm asking you to move in with me”.

  In my negativity, I'd overlooked this.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, come and be with me and we'll sort it out”.

  “What about Cath?” I said, relentless.

  “She can live at yours, instant tenant, job done”. Pleased with herself.

  “Thank you”.

  “My pleasure”.

  “But I insist on paying rent”.

  “Unnecessary” she said, stopping my mouth with hers. “Minky, there's something you should know”.

  “What?”

  “I'm rich”.

  “Oh” I said, “excellent”.

  The next morning I composed my resignation email to Lionel Beresford. The month I was supposed to serve out, only a week due to unclaimed annual leave ...I hurriedly booked a free council eye test.

  Humming to myself, I taped six human sized sheets of paper to the wall. The girls against them, I followed their contours with a marker pen, as close as was decent. Until now, I'd been parsimonious with materials, but today, everything was up for grabs: paints, magazines for collage, chalk, oil pastels, coloured paper – the works. It was up to them how they fleshed out their own silhouette. It was our last session. Dale had baked a cake. The finished pieces, insane and brilliant. I'd put it to Rosamund we should exhibit them in Gallery 3.

  Rosamund bustled in to remind me there was a life drawing class at seven and we hastily packed up. Dolapo was the first to hug me, followed by Choi and Magdala. Bazlah shook my hand, as did Toni. Tenielle boxed my fist with hers.

  “Minette” Rosamund said, “I'd like a word with you if you could stay for five minutes. Girls, girls, before you go would you be so kind as to fill in these evaluation sheets? Sorry Minette, could you wait in the canteen”.

  One of the canteen doors swung open and there it stayed, stopped by Rosamund's hand while she talked to someone in the corridor. Having basically bullshat my way through this, I was pretty sure my luck had run out. Oh well, it was good while it lasted. A whinnying laugh and she hurried in, a folder under her arm.

  “So sorry to keep you waiting” she said, sliding the file towards me. “You can take these if you like, I've scanned them in. All positive and I have to say, I'm very impressed - they were a tricky bunch”.

  “Not at all” I said. “I've really enjoyed it and it's so satisfying to see their skills develop”.

  “Quite, that is why I'd like to ask you if you'd be interested in increasing your sessions to five a week, starting September with a class of eight”.

  I coolly agreed, but with the stipulation the class size was no more than six. I would be unable, I felt, to devote enough individual time if there were more.

  “Hmmm, agreed” she said, amending her notes. “We're also putting together an exhibition and I wondered if you would be interested in sitting on the selection committee?”

  “I'd love to”.

  “Excellent” she said. ”I knew you'd work out for us, Minette”.

  She stood and pushed the chair under the table. Her ‘phone beeped. “Sorry, I must dash” she said. “Flora's playing up and Nigel can't cope; you know what men are like, it's as if I've got two children sometimes”. He
r expression of collusion unravelling slightly as she reminded herself that I probably didn't know what men were like. “Anyway, enough of that” she said. “Must dash! And well done you” she shouted as the double doors flapped back into position, wafting Chanel no. 5 at me. I guess I'll have to put the lotus eating on hold.

  At five o'clock on the dot, Todd, Maisie and I nudged into the Duke of Wellington, eyes recalibrating from bright street to Dickensian dim. The tree boys, already at their beer stations, gave a whoop and stood, firtling for fivers earnestly; buying a round these days, a serious business.