Blasted (39 page)

“Sure, do you need me unclothed?”

“What?” Brendan yelled in his studio, as if he thought he was working in a high wind.

“Should I change?”

“Why the hell would you do that? I need to see the light on your tongue.”

I clambered up on the platform, eyeing him on his ladder lest he and it come crashing down on me. “Where do you want me?”

“There… there,” he said, flapping a hand. I had no idea where “there” was, so I stood in the middle while Brendan continued to struggle with his light, swearing under his breath. At last he seemed satisfied, and looked at me to angle the beam. “Tongue, tongue!” Carefully, I stuck it out. Brendan fiddled with the light, then clucked at me. “More, more!”

“Like this, this?” I stuck it out as far and as rudely as I could.

“Yes, beautiful!” I widened my eyes to convey sarcastic disbelief, but he was back at his light. “Open your mouth wider… good.” Then he threw himself off the ladder and seized another light. I started to feel shaky and sick, and before I knew it my tongue was back in my mouth, cold and dry, thick. “Brendan. I can't do this.”

“What?”

I looked at him, one hand on my throat. “I feel like I'm strangling.” My eyes filled with tears, and I sat down. The professional gleam in his eyes softened. “What is it, Ruby?”

“I don't know. It's hard, you know!”

“All right. Why?”

“I don't know why!”

He patted me on the shoulder, then muttered to himself. “Maybe I could work from slides…”

I tried to pull myself together. “No way. You hired me, I'll do it.”

It took some doing. I sat in front of the dirty, cracked, charcoal-streaked mirror and stuck my tongue out again and again, and drank most of the tea in my thermos, before I could even think of getting back up. Brendan paced around like a panther, trying not to rush me.

“Don't tense your lips…” he started.

“I'm
trying.
”

“Sorry, alright.” Silenced for a while, he paced around some more.

Then, unable to restrain himself, he rumbled, “Just pretend you've got that Japanese lantern in front of you.”

“Shut
up
.” I sounded like a child. I swigged another mouthful of tea. “Okay, coach, I'm going in there.”

He dropped all pretense of patience and practically ran to his easel, which, my heart sank to note, was burdened by a canvas stretched over a frame two metres in height and a metre wide. “You're not painting my tongue
that
big, are you?

“No, no, for the whole figure,” he said as he rummaged through his toolbox full of paintbrushes and jars. Then he looked up. “You're not undressed!”

I thumped behind the shabby Victorian screen he kept in a corner, bathrobe in hand, and started undressing. “I guess you won't need my tongue out the
whole
time… maybe just for the first bit, to get the light right? I'll practice at home,” I joked. Brendan didn't answer. “Brendan?” All sounds of movement from outside the screen had ceased. I stuck my head around the screen. “Brendan?” There he was, frozen, his back to me.

I'd forgotten. He did nude figures all the time, and he'd paint nipples or pubic hair with ferocious intensity, but the two moments of transformation – getting undressed, and then getting dressed again – sent him into stiff, gentleman-like discomfort. He refused to look or speak while you became, in essence, a model, and my habit of chatting away as I disrobed always upset him. I babbled into the air until I was naked and in my robe, then emerged. He was all business again. It took some time to light me to his satisfaction – something about wanting the tongue and skin to glisten without “that damn
painterly
effect – damn shadows.” Then he dragged his easel around for a while, threw gobs of paint on a board with a knife, drank a litre of milk from the carton, stared at me for a minute straight, and then, suddenly, lines of paint sketched the outlines of my body, the tongue a blue-red spiral of savagely applied pigment, my eyes dark hollows. He had me simply standing, feet planted, arms bony and stretched by my sides, and that hilarious tongue stuck straight out, like a mockery of Da Vinci's Renaissance man.

I didn't have to keep my tongue out for too long, and gradually the feeling of misery declined. He was, as always, all courtesy about breaks (I called them) which, as always, had the effect of making me work even harder. I'd stand until the soles of my feet went numb, or my nerves started playing tricks on me and I felt like cold water was dripping down the back of my leg. There's no pose that doesn't become excruciating in time. We worked for three hours that first session, and again later that week. And again.

A month later, in September, there I still was. No tongue now, he'd moved on to fingernails; but always that nakedness confronted me from the giant canvasses, three by this time, one of them looking ready to leap.

My life, my days, used to be punctuated – even defined by – sudden alarms and disasters, heartbreaks, wild drunks. Now they strung along, one following the other, all the same, a line of white sheets hung to dry.

Standing for Brendan I let my mind drift. He was seeing something or someone else through me, I thought; he painted my hair dark and wild, a tangled nimbus around my skull, red light a bloody halo. My bones grew longer and thinner, pale light on my belly, the undersides of my arms. Once he got me to leave my bathrobe on, open, and as he painted that it took on the appearance of a cloak made of some fantastic material, light as feathers. My skin was thin, sliding over the bones and organs. “Brendan, my skin looks so strange,” I burst out one day during a break, wrapped in my robe and sucking back a cup of tea.

“It's not a portrait,” he growled, slashing away at the thigh with more reddish pigment.

“I know, I know.”

He worked for a moment, then without ceasing painting, continued, “I'm after the blood under the skin,
and
the surface light at the same time… the muscle, tendons, the bones. Solidity and translucency.”

I looked and the figure shifted again, and I saw
her
there. The one I'd been searching for ever since she'd shown herself to me. “It's like someone from another world,” I said.

He actually stopped painting, looked at me, then back at his work.

“That's it,” he said. “A world under this one, touching on it here and there, as bone touches skin.”

“The dead people,” I said.

He stared. “No. It's something I see in you.”

CHAPTER 27

It was wine time, a golden, tired day, late summer in Little Italy. I'd had an afternoon of modeling and was walking slowly home. The gutters ran with grape juice, the air fragrant, sharp with its scent. I stopped at a grocer's to buy red grapes, crushing the cool, firm orbs between my teeth and spitting the slimy seeds as I walked. Wooden grape boxes lined the curbs in toppling piles. On side streets, chestnuts crushed by cars crumbled white and red on the dark pavement, their thick, green husks split and prickly on the sidewalks. The sun was bright against my eyes, the colours alternately too intense or bleached out in the brightness.

The cool green of a park drew me, the shade of trees. Children played around a fountain, casually watched by chatting mothers; a small group of musicians sat in a ring, playing guitars and hand drums, the beating of the drums vibrating like heat. I veered away, looking for solitude. A path wound away, dipping down over a small hill. The park went on farther than I'd thought; from the street it had seemed a small square of green. The sounds faded behind me, but I could still hear the children's voices, or rather, what sounded like a child's voice, wailing faintly, fading, coming back. It tugged at me, made my heart beat faster. Such a terrible, lonely sound. It was somewhere ahead of me; I quickened my pace. Nothing plucks at the heart like a lost child. I stopped, straining my ears. No, it was gone. A large tree forced the path to curve, and I hurried past it. There, leaning on the other side of the massive trunk, was a woman.

I jumped, then to cover my fright, said, “Did you hear a child?”

“A child?” she said. She was very tall, much taller than I. Dark hair hung in braids on either side of her face; she wore a necklace made of something light that drifted, like feathers. “A child.”

The necklace rose and fell in the breeze. She was very beautiful. There was no sound now; it was fine, now. No one was hurt or lost.

“Maybe I heard a girl from back there,” I pointed the way I'd come, “at the fountain. Maybe the sound carried on the wind.”

“Maybe.” She pushed herself away from the tree and seemed to shrink, stepping toward me until we came face to face and, really, she was no taller than I. I wanted to give her something, make her stay.

“Would you like a grape? They're very good.”

She looked amused. “You're offering?” She stressed the
you're
slightly, as if she had expected to be feeding
me
, but she had no food with her.

“If you like.”

“I eat, you eat,” she said.

“Sure.” I took a grape and ate it, holding the bunch out in my hand for her to take what she wanted. She reached out and plucked a grape from the green stem and put it in her mouth, sucking it experimentally. Then she bit down. Her eyes widened with pleasure; I could almost feel the cool sweetness of the juice bursting under my own tongue. “Help yourself,” I said, but she was already taking another grape, and another, grabbing at the bunch until, laughing, I handed it over to her. “Here, here, take them all!” She stuffed them into her mouth, juice running from her lips. “I'm Ruby,” I said, but she ate and ate, even trying out a stem before spitting it onto the ground. The grapes were gone. She carefully licked the juice from her fingers, traced her tongue across her wrists and down to her elbows where juice had dripped, the skin of her inner arms pale, almost translucent. She wasn't from here, I thought. She was from another country. Her braids glittered in the shifting light under the trees – my hand reached out to them, drawn by the sleekness.

“You have pretty hair,” she said. My hand flew back to my own tangles. “Oh, come on.”

“Let me braid,” she commanded. She took hold of my hair and gently, dexterously, worked her fingers through the tangles, turning me so my back was to her. Her long, thin fingers combed through, stroking my head, pulling my hair straight. I closed my eyes. Fingers stroking my temples, the back of my neck. Fingers around my neck, meeting in the hollow place at the base of my throat. I swallowed, my eyes flew open. Faster than I could have imagined she had my hair in two perfect braids, grasses tying the ends. I turned to thank her but she was gone.

I stood beneath the sign for Honest Ed's, on the spot where Blue had invited me to live with him. I stood, stopped dead in the night-empty street. The last thing I could remember was walking, running along the path. It had gone on and on, the path was long and stopped in an impenetrable tangle of brush. When I'd tried to go back the way I'd come, the trail was so faint I kept getting lost, winding up and down banks, around trees. I didn't remember it getting dark. The pavement was wet and drops fell from the sign above; it had rained, but I was dry. I couldn't remember arriving here, under the electricity of the sign.

But the racing lights were stilled; the red and yellow and black coiled above my head like a painted dragon. Upon it perched a pigeon, and it was this that had stopped me: the bird, and the fact that the store window beneath it had a paper sign filling it, reading in foot-high letters – “SUICIDE.”

The bird raised itself up. It ruffled the feathers around its neck like a cat puffing fur to menace opponents; it flapped its wings three times, snapping in the stillness of the night, then launched itself into the air, diving at me. I ducked. When I stood, the bird was gone and the sign read “SPECIAL.”

I backed away. There was no one on the street, not a soul; meeting that woman was the first real thing that had happened to me in weeks, maybe my whole life, and I'd lost her. Grief moved me. Too much weighed down, too much, and it all gyrated through me. My freeloading off Blue; Jason; my grandfather who hated me; my grandmother, gone; my parents… My mind frayed at the edges, shied away from that. I had no place in the world. Something snapped down on my heart, my mind. The way was clear. I had despised suicide all my life: a girl in my high school had killed herself when she'd gotten pregnant, stupid girl, I'd survived, hadn't I? Yet now, I saw I simply hadn't understood. Sometimes going on is a burden to everyone. Everyone must face this sooner or later, I thought. This was my time.

I had no pills. I was too much of a coward to slash my wrists. I didn't want to fling myself under a bus or a subway… There was the Bloor Street Viaduct. They'd put those barriers up, but maybe there was a way. It was tacky; everyone did it there, a suicide note to the city. But there'd be little traffic now. I'd be unlikely to hurt anyone. It appealed to me – falling through the air like flying. To fall through the air and die.