‘I’m not an artist. My
father
is an artist. I just sharpen pencils.’
‘Now that cannot be true. I see you have your still life assembled here. A sensible place to begin. Let me see your canvas.’
The encylopaedia salesman slid past her.
‘Ah, I see,’ he said, registering the blankness. ‘Perhaps I can help.’
He took up a palette and oozed several bright worms of paint onto its smeared surface. He handed it to her, placed a brush in her hand.
‘Paint.’
‘I can’t — this is ridiculous.’
‘Paint!’
‘I can’t just …
paint
.’
‘Paint. Just paint what you see.’
She stood before her easel, and lifted the brush.
‘I can’t. I can’t do this.’
‘I think you’ll find that you can.’
And then the brush, seemingly of its own accord, plunged towards the palette. And Eve began to paint. Slowly at first, as if the air around her was too thick. Then faster, the brush moving between canvas and palette, seeming to pick and mix colours all by itself. It carried her hand behind its hovering point, touching deftly to the canvas, tracking in perfect arcs with this colour, then that. So subtle. Appearing before her was her own vision. What she saw in her mind’s eye was transporting itself to the canvas through the conduit of the brush. No sooner did the paint touch the canvas than it was dry and ready to receive the next layer. The brush picked up yet more speed, towing streaks of paint away from the centre in broad, brave strokes. Apples filled out and ripened on the canvas before her. The flow of the paint was positively ecstatic. She painted and painted, and oh! painted. And then the brush stopped, stalling in her hand, its tip just millimetres from the surface. The painting, Eve could see, was one leaf-green brushstroke from finished. But the brush would not move. Even though completion was so close. She was so on the brink. It was unbearable. It could not possibly. Stop.
‘
Cherie
, one thing first. Sign here.’
In place of the brush, he placed a pen, and she dashed off her signature before grabbing back the brush, which applied itself, with a final flourish, to the dainty, curling leaf. And then Eve felt herself fainting. She was falling, falling. And the last thing she saw before the blackness was his smile, its colossal white teeth and, between them, flicking quick as whiplash, a forked tongue.
‘
Au revoir, cherie
,’ said the encyclopaedia salesman to the unconscious Eve, who had fallen — her hair streaked carmine, viridian, sulphurous yellow — across the table next to her fruits. Which were almost undisturbed. Only the pear had rolled onto its knobbled side.
When she came to, Eve found her house empty of the seller of the
Encyclopaedia Atlantica
and other fine publications. But her painting — her painting! — was still there. And it was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever painted. It was a painting of dream apples, and it was perfect. Except for one small thing. She looked at the Cox’s Orange Pippin in the painting. On the skin of its curving edge there was a mark. She looked at its model, the apple upon the table. But it was untouched. She moved closer to the canvas, peering into the structure of the paint itself. Adjusting her focus she saw it, in the striped skin of the painted apple: a set of teeth marks surrounding a sickle of sweet, white flesh.
The wolf has legs.
A
nd these were the parts of him that I saw first. I was standing at the bottom of a backstage staircase and he was standing at the top, his hairy shins and Blundstone boots sticking out from beneath the hem of a taffeta ballgown in an alarming shade of yellow, his hair cropped close for a soldier’s part.
‘You must be Reporter Rosie,’ he said, and I liked the sound of his voice.
‘Is now a good time?’
‘Rehearsals start again at two, so we could do it over lunch, if you like,’ he said.
‘Only if you leave that dress on. And promise not to say “eclectic”.’
‘What?’
‘Eclectic. If you say the word eclectic then I shall be forced to hate you and write evil things about your play,’ I said, brandishing notebook and pen.
‘In which case, I forswear all words beginning with “e”. From now until we have finished our fish and chips.’
At least, I think that is what we said. We were, after all, of an age when first conversations are frequently blurred by the static of the subtext. I was twenty-two and only just beginning to acknowledge my transformation from painfully skinny to quite acceptably thin. However, I was yet to discover that the girls I went to school with — the ones who had been so enamoured of their various swellings — were now beginning to worry that their bodies’ expansionist programs knew no bounds.
I had graduated from university and begun work. Cured of my adolescent desire for Latin terms, I embarked on my career ready to treat words with the no-nonsense discipline they deserved. I had read my George Orwell. And so, on the day I went down the coast to the city to begin my cadetship at the slightly less well regarded of the two metropolitan daily newspapers, I knew that I wouldn’t be the type to write ‘commence’ when what I really meant to say was ‘start’. I would not let Latinate terms fall on the facts like snow. No, my words would be as blunt as clubs made from the timber of good, solid Anglo-Saxon tree trunks.
I became the arts reporter. But you should not imagine that my job was glamorous. Those just ahead of me had progressed to more prestigious rounds such as Special Correspondent for Chrysanthemum Shows or Chief Animal Story Reporter. And believe me, those on the animal beat got a lot more front pages than I did. Many of the early days of my working life were spent interviewing earnest young musicians who wore black and said ‘eclectic’.
‘Our style is really, um, eclectic. We don’t like to categorise ourselves,’ they said. They ALL said, five minutes before they lay down on the ground and were photographed from above with their heads in daisy formation, and a few hours before they taped their set lists to their amps and launched into a night of tuneless covers. For a while, I put a dollar in a tin on my desk every time I heard the word eclectic. Within a couple of years, I was fairly certain, I’d be able to buy a car with the proceeds. Trade in the Mini on something with more cachet: a little old Triumph Spitfire or a Fiat Bambino. But about three weeks later, when the tin contained twenty-seven dollar coins, I bought a pair of strappy red velvet heels that were on sale, but which I never could wear because when I stood up in them my toenails went black from the pressure (the Shoe Goddess, presumably, was on leave).
But all of this is to one side of the point, which is, as I’m sure you’ve divined, that I did interview the actor in his yellow ballgown, over a lunch of fish and chips, during which he only once slipped up on his solemn oath (an ‘emotion’ sneaking into one of his sentences), and by the end (he would have said ‘conclusion’) of which, I was almost certainly in love.
The wolf has a tongue.
At the party on the opening night of the play, he licked my ear.
‘You smell of raspberries,’ he said.
‘Strawberries,’ I corrected.
It was the perfume I always wore.
‘Whatever. It’s definitely edible.’
‘Careful. That’s an “e” word.’
But when he took me home to his bed in his Boys’ Own Adventure share house, there were no more words. In that den-smelling room, licking turned into nipping turned into sucking and biting. We were young and playful animals, rough and tumbling. We were roly-poly cubs. Afterwards, we had a shower together in the dark. Hot water stung on grazed and tingling skin, and I remember breathing steam into which, it seemed, had been dissolved the very essence of him.
We returned to his bed and stayed there all through the heat of the day, listless as midday lions for the most part, but rousing ourselves occasionally for the purpose of consuming food, or each other. In the evening, I walked with him to the theatre and, at the stage door, offered up my tongue for him to swallow.
‘Good luck for the show,’ I said when we pulled ourselves apart, just before I remembered that this was not the thing to say at all.
A Word from Rosie Little on:
Theatrical Traditions
W
histling backstage, the naming of the Scottish play, the wishing of good luck: all these things are forbidden in the theatre. Instead of ‘good luck’, one might of course say ‘break a leg’, a saying that may or may not, once upon a time, have referred to the hope that an actor’s performance would be so good that when it was over, s/he would have to ‘break’ the line of his/her leg in the action of bowing, or in bending down to pick up coins from the stage. Alternatively, it may or may not refer back to the actual leg of John Wilkes Booth, which was
literally
fractured in 1865 when Booth leapt up onto a stage while attempting to escape after having assassinated Abe Lincoln.
But there is another traditional alternative to ‘good luck’; one that I have recently learned, and one that would — in hindsight at least — have been eerily apt in the circumstances in which I found myself outside the stage door that evening.
In bocca
al lupo
, I might have said.
Into
the mouth of the wolf.
It’s an Italian phrase that is meant to bestow luck and instil courage, and it is properly answered
crepi
il lupo: I shall eat the wolf.
The wolf has a stomach.
Only weeks later, we moved in together, renting a small flat behind a pizza shop, although this did not prevent us from ringing up to order home deliveries. In those early months, we played house like newlyweds, learning to make apricot chicken from the recipe on the back of the French onion soup packet and buying white goods from garage sales. Each payday we got something new from the supermarket: a peeler, a potato masher or a whisk. Once the kitchen cupboards and drawers were full, we were at a loss, so we made ourselves into a nuclear family with a tabby from the cat shelter. We called her Gelfling and smiled, indulgent as fond parents, while she frayed our furniture and tortured lizards on the front step.
The wolf has eyes.
They were big and green and sad — set deeply in the kind of strong-boned face Laurence Olivier wore to play Heathcliff — and when I met his mother, I found out where they were from. Hers, however, seemed even bigger and sadder because they lived in a tiny heart-shaped face that looked as if it were crafted from some sort of flesh-coloured putty. The jaw and the brow, it seemed, had come from his father: a priest with a limp.
His parents, he told me, had come together out of childhoods full of alcohol and violence. Through good works, he said, they were determined to repair the damage. They didn’t approve of us living together, but since they were proper Christians and did not judge, we were invited as a couple to the family home for dinner. I wore a nice blouse and my hair neatly brushed and took my place at a table that was extended and set with plastic salt and pepper shakers which, when set together, formed a pair of hands in prayer. There were wineglasses on the table and his father filled them from a carafe of diluted orange juice. We bowed our heads while one of the foster children said a simple grace. The other — little more than a toddler, I was told — was in a bedroom beating his head against a wall that he had already smeared with his own shit. Through two closed doors we could hear the banging as well as a noise that sounded like the screaming of a trapped rabbit.
‘I don’t know if I’ll ever crack that one,’ said his mother, looking sad.
The wolf has claws.
But I didn’t see them for quite a long time. There were too many diversions. Often, he did the housework as Jesus, wrapped in a white sheet and singing Sunday school hymns over the top of the howling industrial vacuum cleaner that we borrowed once a fortnight or so from the pizza shop. He was ecumenical, though. Sometimes the sheet was orange and he chanted faux-Buddhist mantras as he scrubbed the shower and the loo. Once, when I was sick with a cold, he borrowed a nurse’s outfit from the theatre’s costume hire shop, and ministered to me in a lispy falsetto until I laughed myself better.
In the name of cheap fun, we sprayed our hair silver and bought old-people’s clothes from the Salvos. He in a stinky, crumpled suit, and me in a lavender print frock and fake pearls, staggered theatrically on walking sticks through the car yards of the city asking to test drive the motors of any salesmen we judged to be too inexperienced or too superstitious to tell us to get lost. For the winter solstice we took blankets and candles to the local cemetery and read vampire stories to each other while the concrete cold of the graves seeped into our bones through our bums.
More and more often, though, we stayed home at night on the weekends and watched old movies on video. We told ourselves that we were compiling a history of our culture. We stopped cooking and lived on Hawaiian pizzas and on the rolls of garlic bread that would otherwise have been chucked in the pizza shop’s bin. We slept late, always on the weekends and often on weekdays too, Gelfling purring between us. I brought home two copies of the newspaper each evening to avoid fights over who got to do the crossword puzzle. We folded into each other like a pair of socks.
I remember the night of his birthday in colours. There was the beetle-green glitter in Cleopatra-tapers on the eyelids of one of the girls from the theatre crowd, and the peacock silk shirt of a guy with a mass of salty-white hair. There was the red of my brief tartan skirt, beneath which my knickers showed each time I leaned over the pool table to take a shot, and the swirls and layers of bright liquor that were poured into shot glasses as we competed to drink more, and in stranger combinations, from the top shelf. The music was loud and silly, but with an irresistible dance-about beat. I got drunk. We all did. I was heady, giggly and high. And then, suddenly, alone.
‘Oh yeah,’ said the Cleopatra girl, lining up the black. ‘He went home.’