The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

boy sitting round a table, the other of the same man and woman, her looking in a mirror, him behind her, lying on the bed. Her face was visible only in the glass, reflected; her gaze seemed to taunt me, and I turned away. Against the drab wallpaper, Mary’s paintings stood out, vibrant and mesmerising, like diamonds shining out from a bed of sludge. The sight jarred; these pictures looked wrong here, violently out of kilter, yet without them the house would have had nothing. I had a powerful sense-one of the strangest feelings I’ve ever had-that 15 Megson Crescent needed Mary’s paintings.

‘I know-you wouldn’t want them on your wall,’ she said, mistaking my awe for distaste. ‘A pretty scabby family, all things considered, but that’s life on the Winstanley estate. You’re brave to risk a visit. That lot don’t live here any more, but there are more of the same, and even worse.’

‘I’m not brave,’ I told her. Couldn’t she see I was petrified? Was she mocking me?

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘I owe you an apology for what happened last June. I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

Talk about something else. Please, change the subject. I’d clamped my mouth shut and my jaw was starting to ache.

‘I was frightened. Selfishly, I didn’t think…’ She left the sentence unfinished. ‘It still bothers you, doesn’t it? What happened at the gallery.’

How dared she expect confirmation from me? Rage began to blister inside me, but I tried to nod as if I felt fine. My natural reaction to anger: bury it before it’s used against me. Deny it an outlet. It was practically the first thing I learned as a child in my parents’ house: I wasn’t entitled to my natural responses, especially the more ‘un-Christian’ ones. I was allowed to manifest only those states of mind that would please my mother and father, make them proud of me. Anger, particularly anger directed at them, didn’t qualify.

‘Why does it still bother you?’ Mary waited for an answer I had no intention of giving her. ‘Do you blame yourself, is that it? Why do we do that? Human beings, I mean. Why do we take each mishap that strikes us, and twist it until it loses its randomness and becomes a big black arrow pointing at us, proving our worthlessness?’

Her words, so unexpected, went all the way through me. I knew I wouldn’t forget them for a long time.

‘When I lost it with you, it reminded you of something else, didn’t it? You’ve been attacked before. I’m right, aren’t I? Your reaction that day was pretty extreme-I can’t believe that was all down to me. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.’

I stood rooted to the spot, my eyes fixed on the smear of blood on my shirt.

‘The way I behaved that day had nothing to do with you, what you said or did,’ said Mary. ‘No attack is ever really an attack on the victim. It’s the perpetrator attacking an aspect of himself that he loathes. He or she.’

Try telling that to the victim, I thought.

‘I don’t sell my work. I never do. I don’t even like people seeing it, unless they’re people I trust, and I trust nobody. I’m a coward. You were a strange woman demanding to buy my painting-I felt threatened. Exposed.’ She lit a cigarette.

‘Why?’ I asked. My turn to wait for an answer.

Mary didn’t seem bothered by the long silence. It was a while before she said, ‘Is there anything in your life that’s… in your past, I mean, anything that’s too painful to talk about?’

How could she know? I told myself she couldn’t.

‘I think there is.’ She pointed to my stomach. ‘The scar. The story that goes with it. It’s all right, I’m not asking you to tell me.’

The moment for denial came and went. I’d as good as admitted she was right.

‘Has it ever occurred to you to write it down? Your story, I mean. I saw a therapist for years. I stopped when I realised there was no fixing the broken bits. That’s okay-I can live with it, if you can call my half-life in this shit-hole living. Because that’s what it’s like, isn’t it? I know you know, Ruth. When your world falls apart and everything’s ruined, you lose part of yourself. Not all, inconveniently. One half, the best half, dies. The other half lives.’

I tried hard to hide the effect her words were having on me.

‘This therapist-she said I wouldn’t be able to move on for as long as I was determined to apportion blame. She told me to write it like a story in the third person, describe how all the characters felt, not only me. It’s a way of showing that everyone involved has a point of view, or some such crap.’ Mary stubbed her cigarette out on the wall. Immediately, she lit another. ‘I didn’t do it. Didn’t want to see anything from anyone else’s point of view. You know?’

I watched the pain rampaging across her face as she spoke, and wondered if my face sometimes looked like that.

Mary laughed quietly. ‘I digress,’ she said. ‘That’s what happens when you don’t talk to a soul from one week to the next. Can I paint you?’

‘No,’ I said, hating the idea, not sure if she was serious.

‘Why not? Your face is perfect-like a fairy’s or an angel’s. Not that I’ve seen either.’ A cunning look came into her eyes. ‘I won’t forget what you look like. You can’t stop me painting you if I want to.’

‘Please don’t.’

‘Some people get no say in the matter.’ She gestured at the pictures on the walls.

‘I don’t want to be painted,’ I told her. ‘If I did, you’d be the person I’d choose to paint me.’ I was pleased with this answer: firm but generous. She couldn’t fault me.

‘Why’s that, then?’ she asked.

‘Of all the artists whose work I’ve seen, you’re the best.’

She rattled off a list of names in a bored voice. ‘Rembrandt, Picasso, Klimt, Kandinsky, Hockney, Hirst-better than all of them?’

‘I’ve never seen their work,’ I said. ‘Only pictures of it.’

Some emotion-triumph?-flared in Mary’s eyes. When she next spoke, her voice was hoarse. ‘Ruth,’ she said. I looked up in time to see her mouthing my name several more times, soundlessly. ‘Wait.’ She stood up.

I was waiting already, to see what she would say next. She’d said my name for the sake of saying it, it seemed, not as the precursor to anything. She went upstairs again. When she came down she was holding Abberton. My heart started to race when I saw it. In my mind, all this time, it had represented that terrible day at Saul’s gallery; I tried not to think about it, but when I did it made me feel disorientated, out of control. Now that I had faced Mary, now that she’d apologised to me, it was different. Something had shifted.

‘If you still want it, it’s yours,’ said Mary. ‘Gratis.’

‘What? But…’

‘I didn’t trust you before. I do now.’ She looked embarrassed, tried to smile. ‘Anyone who knows they haven’t seen a painting unless they’ve seen the original is all right in my book. You’d be amazed how many people put a poster of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus on their wall and imagine they’ve got Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus on their wall.’

I felt terrible, as if I was cheating her somehow. I’d come here to get Abberton for Aidan, not for myself. His proof: Mary’s name and the date at the bottom. She knew nothing of my ulterior motive. I tried to persuade myself I was doing nothing wrong, imagined opening my mouth and saying Aidan’s name to see how she would react. Impossible.

I didn’t want her to know his name, or that he was my boyfriend. I wanted her to know nothing about us. I despised myself, knowing that no matter what Mary said or did, I would never trust her.

She held up her hands and made a frame shape in front of my face with her fingers and thumbs. ‘What’s your story, Ruth Bussey? Before I paint a person, I need to know their story. What happened to you? How did you get that scar?’ This time she didn’t say that I didn’t have to tell her if I didn’t want to, so I said it to myself. ‘You think it makes you strong, suffering in silence, bearing the burden alone? So what if it does? What’s the advantage of being strong? Do you know what happens to strong people? I do. Weak people attack them. Why do you think I went for you in the gallery that day?’

I stiffened. How long before I could escape?

‘You seemed so strong, and I felt so weak. Weak people always attack strong people-it’s safer. It’s weak people who are dangerous, who lash out uncontrollably and hurt you back. Strong people can walk away-no