“Don’t, Norah. I need to get this. I need to get this right. Please.”
His face was grey, the words croaking through a dry throat. In my opinion he shouldn’t have been working at all, he was exhausted, but still – he pleaded with me to leave him alone. At least he didn’t make a thing of me breaking into his study.
Screw him, I thought, and headed downstairs to look for Nut. She trilled when she saw me, and bounded over to rub her cheeks against my calves. I didn’t want her to see me at such a loss. Here I was, depending on Art for entertainment when really I should have my own, right? Unfortunately, though the garden had started as a hobby it had become a manacle, a fight I couldn’t win. I needed something else.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t think of anything to do; the world was full of things that would be fun to try, in theory. I just didn’t want to be alone. Without a friend to point out the colours, I couldn’t see them.
Paints. I’d paint it out.
The birthday art equipment was still in the kitchen cupboard. I dug them out and made my own “aviary” in the corner of the living room, setting the easel in front of our floral armchair. That’s how my mum used to paint, by sinking into an armchair, with drinks, snacks, cigarettes, and all her comforts within arm’s reach. Not that she touched them. When she painted, it was the only time she didn’t need her vices. And now those pictures were hanging in hundreds of homes around the world, all alive.
My skin prickling, I pulled the patchwork blanket from the top of the bedroom wardrobe and wrapped it around my shoulders. Seeking grounding, I poured myself a scotch from a dusty bottle in the cupboard – my mum’s favourite drink – and downed the entire glass in one blistering swallow. After settling in the chair, I began splashing the watercolour onto the page in wet flourishes, filling the paper with swooning blues, skin-pinks, and merry yellows. But I wasn’t painting anything in particular, I was just covering up the blank space.
I dropped the brush into the water jar and noticed that I’d already managed to get paint on the patchwork blanket. My stomach lurched and I rubbed it between my fingers, adding a splash of water to dilute it and then cursing, because that water wasn’t clean either. It was just typical of me to ruin it, within seconds of being independent. I took another swig of the scotch and tried to deaden the strange ticking that echoed in the back of my head.
I cast my painting on the floor and set up a new piece of paper, and with a pencil in my hand started to sketch the outline of my shape. Mum always sketched the top of the head then the feet, filling in the middle and then the background. But where could I be, in this imaginary space? I drew myself standing, but it could’ve been anyone. I sketched in a mane of curls down the front of the body so the figurative me could be looking at something in the distance. But what? Should I draw Art beside me, or Nut?
Before I put pencil back on paper the phone rang, a sound it took me a few seconds to recognise, muffled beneath a pile of unopened and unread post.
“Hello, lovely,” Rosa said, her voice breathy and thin. “How... how are you?” She sounded quiet and far away. A stranger.
A sudden wave of guilt flushed up my neck. “I’m OK, y-you know how it is.” I couldn’t even get those few words out without stammering and I squeezed my eyes shut to hide from myself. I needed to hold it together. She needed to think that I hadn’t been alone all this time since New Year. That I was happy. That everything was perfect.
Rosa jabbered on for a few minutes about her day at the university and I listened as best as I could, but the flood of words was overwhelming, and all the while I pressed my hand hard over my mouth to hold in the fireworks. By the time she stopped talking, it became even more awkward as it was now blindingly obvious to both of us that I hadn’t even been listening. The silence fizzled. If she was waiting for a reply I wouldn’t be able to help her there, so I desperately tried to think of something perky to say. But it’d been so long since New Year. It was almost winter again, and my world had changed as much as the seasons. Why had Rosa stayed away? In all this time she hadn’t even called to ask about Nut.
Rosa went on to tell me that she and Eleanor were going for dinner that Friday night, and “if I wanted to come” we could make it a bit of a belated birthday night. Very belated. She said it in that same breathy whisper she’d greeted me with, and as we talked, I kept my ear open for clues to her detachment. She’d already made it seem so easy for me to say no, to wheedle out of it, even though she’d been the one to mention my birthday so many months earlier as a reason to join them. I would never have had to have a reason before, but I supposed everything was different now. This was the new world – split, some of us on one side and some of us on the other. Something
