Life Drawing for Beginners (21 page)

Michael glared at her. “Will you stop going on about it? I’m not going to decide something that hasn’t happened yet.”

Silence. She looked away.

“Right?”

“Yeah.” Quietly.

After a minute she picked up a fork and began eating again. He felt the room full of all the things that had been left unsaid.

Post a photo
, the website urged.
Clients who post a photo are far more likely to receive attention.

“Clients” sounded so official. And “receive attention”—how horribly clinical. When had looking for romance become such a business? When you resorted to the Internet, Audrey supposed, and paid
€
100 a year to become a member of a site that just might help you to find what you were looking for.

She regarded her almost-completed membership form on the screen. All that remained was to input her credit card details, and off she could go in search of love. She’d decided against a photo, knowing that her size could put off a lot of possible suitors. Better that they get to know her first, better that they connect mentally, and then it mightn’t matter that she didn’t have the perfect figure.

She took her credit card from her wallet and began entering the numbers in the box on the screen. Halfway through, she stopped.

What if nobody made contact, and what if any messages she sent were ignored? Did she really want to pay
€
100 to discover, maybe, that nobody at all was interested in getting to know her?

And was this really the way she wanted to find him, by filling in a form that asked for her hobbies and interests, by ticking a box to indicate her age group, and another for her gender preferences, by doing her best to sound normal, and desirable, and not a bit desperate? Had it really come to this?

No. She closed the screen and shut down her computer. Internet dating might suit others, but it wasn’t for her; she wasn’t comfortable in cyberspace.

“I’ll stick to more old-fashioned methods,” she told Dolly. “He’s out there somewhere and I’ll find him, or he’ll find me. It’s not too late.”

She picked up the TV remote control and switched on the news, and turned her attention to the latest banking crisis.

Z
arek indicated his sketch pad. “Is okay I draw you?”

Anton nodded, eyes half closed as he plucked the guitar strings and hummed gently.

Zarek sat opposite his flat mate and began to stroke the charcoal onto the page. He echoed the curve of Anton’s shoulder, the angle of his elbow, the folds of his shirtsleeve. He drew the lock of shiny dark hair that tumbled over Anton’s right eye, the long narrow nose, the full bottom lip, the square chin. The shadow of dark chest hair at the open V of his shirt.

Eventually Anton laid the guitar aside. “Time to check ze dinner,” he said. He crossed the room and regarded the drawing, one hand resting lightly on Zarek’s shoulder.

“Is good,” he said. “You ’ave ze talent.”

Zarek blew the loose charcoal off the page. “I like to draw,” he said.

Anton turned and left the room, and Zarek remained sitting for some minutes as he regarded the image he had created.

Dolly trotted off the path and made purposefully towards a group of teenagers who were clustered around a drinking fountain.

“No—” Audrey pulled firmly on the leash, and Dolly veered back onto the path and nosed into an approaching child’s crotch.

“
Dolly!
” Audrey yanked on the leash again. “Sorry about that,” she added to the boy, who scuttled out of Dolly’s reach, “she’s just being friendly.” She wondered, as they walked on, if the ongoing struggle to keep her pet’s behavior within the limits of social acceptance would ever be over.

They came to a bench and Audrey opened the bag of licorice allsorts she’d treated herself to on the way to the park. She ate contentedly, telling herself that by the time they’d walked home she’d have worked up a fresh appetite for the wedge of deli-bought lasagne she was planning to reheat for dinner.

As she rummaged for her favorite sweet—the coconut wheel with a licorice hub—a young woman and a small towheaded boy approached and sat on the other end of the bench. This was the third time Audrey had seen them in a handful of days, but neither of them showed any sign of recognition.

She caught the eye of the little boy and smiled. He regarded her impassively, his gaze drifting to the licorice allsorts. She extended the bag towards him. “Would you like a sweet?”

He darted a look at his companion, who nodded. He dipped his hand into the bag and took out Audrey’s least favorite, the jelly circle covered in tiny licorice bubbles.

“Say thank you,” the woman told him, and he murmured his thanks before cramming the sweet into his mouth.

“Do you want some?” Audrey asked the woman.

She shook her head. “I don’t like them sweets.”

The boy sucked his licorice noisily, his attention caught now by Dolly, who was sniffing at his feet.

“What’s your name?” Audrey asked him.

“Bawwy.” So quietly she nearly missed it, his eyes on Dolly as she nosed at his shoe.

“She won’t hurt you,” Audrey assured him. “She’s very nice and doesn’t bite at all. She’s just curious, she wants to sniff everything.”

“What’s she’s name?” he asked timidly.

“Dolly. You can pat her head if you like. She’ll probably try to lick your hand, but she definitely won’t bite it.”

But he made no attempt to pat her, watching her warily as she continued to nose into his shoes.

Throughout his exchange with Audrey the young woman he was with sat quietly, seeming detached although she continued to hold the little boy by the hand. Audrey wondered if she was the mother, or maybe a big sister charged with his care. Her face was pale and drawn, her hair caught at the back of her head by a rubber band. Whether by nature or through circumstance, she gave the impression of someone who didn’t smile easily.

It was hard to know if they were in need. The woman’s clothes looked clean enough, if a little shabby, and the boy was decently clothed too, but there was something about them, some suggestion of neglect in their peaky faces that made Audrey wonder.

She held out the bag again, and the boy put in his hand. “Take a few,” Audrey urged, and he pulled out two and stuffed them both into his mouth. Was he hungry, or was that just a normal childish greed for confectionery?

“They’re nice, aren’t they?” Audrey asked, helping herself to another wheel. “This one is my favorite,” she said.

He looked at it, his cheeks bulging.

The woman turned to Audrey. “Have you got the time?”

Audrey pulled up her sleeve and looked at her man’s watch. Anything feminine looked ridiculous on her wrist. “Twenty past five,” she told the girl, who nodded her thanks.

Audrey regarded the half-empty bag of sweets. “Oh dear, I’m too full to finish these now,” she said aloud. “I wonder if I could find anyone to give them to.” She looked at Dolly, pattering around at their feet. “What do you think?”

Dolly yapped, as she did every time Audrey spoke directly to her.

“Who? Really? You think so?”

Another yap.

“Hang on, I’ll ask him.”

She glanced at the woman.
Okay?
she mouthed.

A silent nod, the suggestion of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

Audrey offered the bag to the boy, whose gaze was fixed on Dolly. “Would you like these?” she asked. “Dolly says you might.”

He threw another look in his companion’s direction. “Say thank you to the lady,” she ordered.

“Thank you,” he breathed, more to Dolly than to Audrey.

“You’re very welcome,” Audrey told him, getting to her feet. “Well, it was nice to meet you. Bye.”

“Keep them for later,” the girl was saying as Audrey left. “Granddad will have dinner ready soon. You can have some after.”

So there was a granddad on the scene. Audrey remembered the man from the pet shop buying clothes the other day for what she’d presumed was a grandchild. She felt a brief familiar stab of longing for a family of her own, for a child or two she could dress in miniature colorful clothes. A scenario, she had to admit, that became less likely with every year that passed.

She tugged Dolly away from a little girl’s choc ice and walked towards the park exit.

Although his attempts were hopeless, completely without artistic merit, this didn’t take in the least from his enjoyment. It was the act of drawing that he found satisfying, however ham-fisted the images that he produced.

He balanced his sketch pad on his knee and observed his sleeping daughter, and compared her with the girl he’d attempted to draw on the page. No resemblance whosoever; but it didn’t matter. Audrey wouldn’t have the real thing to hold up against his drawing—and anyway, Audrey didn’t judge a work by its accuracy, she set much more store by the artist’s enthusiasm. James wasn’t sure it was the best criterion, but it was certainly the kindest for non-artists like himself.

He went back through his sketch pad, trying to see any improvement in his drawings as the classes had gone on. His first few attempts were disastrous, hardly recognizable as human at all, and the later ones really weren’t much better. Jackie would not be impressed if she could see what a mess he’d made of her, he was sure.

He realized that hers was the only female adult body he had seen in the flesh, so to speak, apart from Frances’s—if you didn’t count the bare-breasted women on French beaches that they’d seen on their honeymoon. “Don’t look,” Frances would order, shielding his eyes as they’d walked by. “No comparing.”

The model’s shape was very different from Frances’s. Her breasts were smaller, her hips more rounded, her thighs heavier than his wife’s. Of course, after having Charlie, Frances’s body had changed, but James had loved the evidence of their daughter’s birth in the new soft fleshiness of her stomach, the fuller breasts.

He groaned quietly, the sadness reaching out at him. He gave in to it, he recalled his wife’s smell, the texture of her skin and hair, the sounds of her pleasure. He pictured them entwined—and despite his sorrow he felt a minute twitch of arousal.

He closed the sketch pad and got abruptly to his feet and walked quickly from his sleeping child’s bedroom.

“You’ve some body,” he said, running his fingers lightly across the ridges of her rib cage. “Not an ounce of fat on you. You must spend your life in that gym.”

Irene lay with eyes closed, wishing he’d shut up. She hadn’t come here for a conversation. She concentrated on the feel of his hand as it traveled over her body, as his fingertips explored her. The sex had been gratifying, it had filled its own space, but this was what she had come for, to be touched and stroked by a man’s hand. This was what she yearned for.

He bent and put his mouth to her throat. “You smell really good,” he murmured, and she felt his tongue in the hollow of her clavicle as his fingers found a nipple and began to play with it, and as it grew stiff her desire returned and she ran her nails lightly along his spine, traveling down to the curve of his buttocks, arching up towards him and pushing his head down to her breast.

And as their movements became more urgent, as her breath quickened and her skin grew damp, Irene blotted out the grubby blanket and equally grubby cushions he’d laid on the lino-covered ground, the fly-spattered lamp shade on the dim ceiling bulb, the smell of grease and the cobwebs in the corners and the scatter of rusting screws in the battered tin lid by the door.

She closed her eyes and pictured Martin’s face above hers, Martin’s hands, Martin’s touch on her skin, Martin whispering that he loved her, wanted her, would never leave her.

And from beneath her closed eyelids the tears trickled.

C
an you believe this weather?” Pauline stood by her back door, shading her eyes against the sun. “The middle of October.”

“I know. It’s wonderful.” Audrey tightened the belt of her dressing gown as she approached the dividing hedge. “I’m a disgrace, not dressed yet. Any news?”

“Not really, things have been quiet. You?”

“Nothing much. Looking forward to the midterm break in a couple of weeks. Not that I’ve any big plans, but I’ve two rooms that need painting, and I was thinking of bringing Dolly out to the lake at some stage, see what she’s like in the water.”

“Oh, we’re going there tomorrow. Kevin has been pestering me, and the forecast is good. Why don’t you and Dolly come with us?”

Audrey shook her head. “Thanks, but I’ve earmarked tomorrow to stain the shed. I’ve been putting it off long enough, and the weather mightn’t hold.”

They both turned to regard the shed at the bottom of Audrey’s garden, and Pauline tactfully didn’t comment.

“Well, I’d better see what that fellow is up to,” she said, turning towards her house. “Talk to you later, Audrey. Enjoy the sunshine.”

In the kitchen Audrey wrote her shopping list:
wood stain, dog food, milk, custard, chicken, steak and kidney pies, veg, toothpaste, eggs, bath oil
. She tore the page from her notebook and tucked it into her purse, then pulled it out again and added
chocolate
.

Her biscuit jar had a supply of little Kit Kats and Penguin bars to have with a cup of coffee, but it wasn’t Saturday night without some proper chocolate.

“I did the first bit,” she said, handing over the form. “I put in my name.”

Her name, he read, was Carmel Ryan. Her writing was childish, the letters carefully but unevenly formed, the
C
of Carmel not quite large enough. Michael scanned the rest of the form.

“Date of birth,” he said, unscrewing his fountain pen, and she told him. Her birthday was in September, a couple of weeks before his, and she was just gone twenty-two. He wrote
Irish
after
Nationality
and ticked the small box beside
Female
.

Address
. He filled in his own, aware of her watching as the words flowed across the page.
Telephone
. He looked up.

“I take it you don’t have a mobile phone.”

“No.”

He filled in his number.

Qualifications
. He left it blank. Nothing he could make up there.

Previous Employment
. He paused, and then wrote
Housekeeper
, and put his own name and the shop address under
References
.

Additional Information
. He looked up again. “Anything you were good at in school?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t mind art.”

He wrote
Hobbies: painting, walking
. For all the good that particular piece of information would do, but it was something to fill an inch of space.

“I like children,” she said then, her color rising. “I like bein’ with them, I mean.”

“Have you any experience of being with them, apart from Barry?”

“I minded another boy, in the squat. When his mother was—” She broke off abruptly, and then added, “sick.”

Michael wrote
Childcare experience
, aware of the inadequacy of the claim. Keeping an eye on an addict’s child now and again when the mother was high on whatever substance she pumped into herself hardly qualified as childcare in the proper sense of the word. But the girl had also raised her own son for three years in difficult circumstances, which must count for something.

To be sure, Barry was overly quiet and not exactly bursting with energy, but with so much stacked against him it was probably a minor miracle that the lad was still breathing.

“Anything else?” he asked, without much hope. “Any holiday jobs when you were younger? Waitressing, shop work?”
Before you went near drugs, and left the real world behind
.

She shook her head.

Michael scanned the form, well aware of how pitifully sparse the information was. It would have to do; they had nothing else.

“Bring me the other ones,” he told her. “Put your name on the top again and I’ll fill in the rest.”

“Thanks,” she said, getting up quickly and leaving the kitchen.

Michael felt—what? Pity, he supposed. If she was to be believed—​and the more he got to know her, the more he felt that she might be—the odds had surely been stacked against her from the start. A dysfunctional family, an abusive father, and an education system that had failed her. If she was to be believed.

But she was drug-free now, that much of her story at least was true. Michael would know if she wasn’t; he’d had painful firsthand experience of what being high looked and sounded like, and since her arrival here she’d exhibited none of the signs he’d seen in Ethan.

And he had to acknowledge that she looked after her son as far as she was able; he had to give her that. The way she looked at the boy across the kitchen table sometimes reminded Michael poignantly of how Ruth had looked at Ethan. She might be wincingly rough around the edges, but she wasn’t incapable of tenderness.

Maybe, after all, she’d done the best she could with the hand she’d been dealt.

When the interval between popping sounds began to stretch, Zarek took the saucepan off the heat. He tipped the pile of warm popcorn into the large blue bowl that normally held their fruit supply, and sprinkled it with salt. In the living room he placed the bowl on the couch, between Anton and himself.

“
Merci
.”

Anton dipped his hand into the bowl as Zarek inserted the DVD and pressed
play
. After the usual preliminaries, the opening credits of
The Remains of the Day
began scrolling up the screen.

On the Saturday nights when Zarek wasn’t working, the two men’s routine of DVD and popcorn rarely varied. They took turns to choose and rent the DVDs, but Zarek consistently popped the corn, it being tacitly agreed that Anton, after cooking dinners all week, deserved a break.

Now and again Pilar joined them, but tonight she’d gone for a drink with a fellow Lithuanian, much to Zarek’s, and he was pretty sure Anton’s, quiet relief. Pilar seemed unfamiliar with the concept of silent watching, preferring to keep up a steady, full-volume commentary anytime she sat in front of a screen.

Zarek stretched an arm along the back of the couch and watched the butler interacting with the recently arrived housekeeper. The subtitles they’d selected were in French, Polish not having been among the offered languages, so Zarek did his best with the spoken word.

At first the nuances of their exchanges were largely lost to him—he generally aimed for the bigger picture when he watched a film in English—but as the film progressed, by studying the body language and facial expressions he slowly became aware of the butler’s unspoken feelings for the housekeeper, and of the man’s tragic inability, or unwillingness, to recognize until too late that his feelings were reciprocated.

And as the closing credits rolled, Zarek Olszewski could appreciate the exquisite irony of watching that particular film with Anton.