Cathexis (24 page)

At two o'clock the girls filed in like an obedient flock of sheep, not shrieking and chattering like most teenage girls in groups I'd encountered.

“Hello ladies, I'm Minette”, counting heads. “I'm glad you could all make it”, trying to sound warm and approachable. “OK, first I need to learn your names, so I'd like you to introduce yourselves”.

They all had lanyards
; it seemed everyone did these days, even school kids.

My eyes settled on a Muslim girl, the first for shearing. Consumed by a hot blush, she shrunk into her hijab and stared at the floor. I'd made my first mistake. Had I not been warned that these girls would be apprehensive and self-conscious?

“Hi Bazlah” I said, squinting at her name tag. She smiled painfully.

“Hi” she said, still favouring the floor. Magdala's eyes also glued to my boots
,
but flitting up momentarily. Choi winced benignly.

“And Antoinette”.

“Toni, I'm Toni” she said and I recognised myself in that exhausted, gaunt face. “Toni, I'll try and remember that”.

“Dolapo” mumbled the next girl. She clearly had a different kind of eating disorder.

“More like Dollop” sniggered Tenielle, establishing herself as the black sheep. Dolapo's shoulders sagged.

“Hello Tenielle” I said, placing my open hand in front of her mouth. Her afro teased and straightened into a prodigious pompadour, the sides and back buzz-cut with lightning bolts. She looked at me, undecided.

“Spit it out” I said.

“Spit what out?

“That trouble gum you're chewing on”.

A bleat of giggles.

“Take the shame” Toni hissed.

Tenielle gamely brought her thumb and forefinger to her mouth, plucked out the imaginary gum and dropped it into my palm with a defiant smile.

“Thank you” I said. “Teneille has drawn my attention to something very important - we must all respect one another, does everyone understand?” Six nodding heads: the 'respect' word always got them.

The first thing I'd planned was self portraits. Seating them at the bench in front of the window, I handed out six mirror tiles.

“I'd like you not only to draw your own faces” I said, pacing up and down, “but also to look at what else you can see around the mirror and outside the window and incorporate that into your composition”. Their eyes moved to the clouds. “It doesn't have to be a straightforward landscape, although you can do that if you want”. I was loathe to suggest birds, for example, because they'd all draw birds, either through laziness or in an effort to please me. “Does everyone understand what I mean?” Hesitant nodding.

“So we do like, the mirror in the middle with other stuff around it?” Toni said.

“Yes, that's it, but whatever you choose to draw is entirely up to you”. They took up their graphite pencils. “Don't forget the scene will be changing - we have movement here, it's not a static landscape”.

Not wanting to crowd them, I took an inventory of materials, interested to see if they focused on themselves or on the landscape. Teneille coloured in her fingernails with a blue felt-tip. After a few minutes, I meandered over to Bazlah. Her hand froze on the paper and dropped to her lap.

“It's gone a bit wrong” she stammered.

“Why do you think that?”

“Because it's like, all small at the top and then my mouth goes all big and that”.

“Did you start with your eyes?”

“Yeah, and my hijab”.

“Well, you started cautiously so you drew small, but as you got into the swing of it, your confidence grew and your drawing got bigger”.

“Yeah, I did that too” said Magdala.

“Sometimes, it's worth just looking at what you're going to draw for a few minutes. Decide how you're going to translate it onto the paper. Try not to start at one end and finish at the other”. I could feel them struggling to understand.

“Can I start again?” Bazlah said.

A chorus of 'me too'.

“Of course, this isn't an exam, this is your time to express yourself freely with no pressure”.

The mirrors began to rattle as if vibrated by a passing freight train. The girls looked at me, with the exception of Tenielle who was systematically kicking the leg of the bench.

“Is there a problem, Tenielle?” I sensed a nascent earthquake. She continued her attention-seeking punt.

“This is wack, man, I ain't got time for this, trust me”.

For me, her cocksure demeanour hid nothing of her disposition. She was a self-loather like me, plus we had something else in common. I put my hand on her shoulder and she stiffened as if to say something deeply insulting. Increasing my grip, I felt her submission.

“Please step outside with me, Tenielle. Carry on” I said to the room, “I won't be long”.

The further from the classroom, the more out of my depth I felt. She slouched on the wall and put much effort into maintaining a scowl, an empty storm ...teenage weather changeable. I didn't have to wait long.

“Whatever I do is shit” she said. “The drawing will be shit”.

“But I know you've got skill, otherwise you wouldn't have been put up for this course. No-one wants to set you up to fail”.

“I just can't decide what to do, there's too much choice”. Perhaps I'd been too ambitious, dropping them in at the deep end.

“Tenielle, I'm sorry, this is my fault. Can you help me?”

She eyed me warily. “How?”

“Come with me” I said.

She shrugged, adopting a casual pimp walk.

“Quick” I said, breaking into a run and she trotted behind me obligingly, quiff bouncing.

“Rags, have you got clean rags?” I shouted into the perforations at Cooper's Yard. The red door juddered open and Dale emerged with a black plastic sack.

“Hi” she said on seeing Tenielle, who responded with a beatific
,
dopey smile.

“Easy tiger” I said and she shot me a grin.

“How's it going?” Dale said, handing me the bag.

“Terribly” I said. “Thanks Dale, you're a life-saver”. I kissed her on the lips and as we jogged away Tenielle grappled the sack from my grasp.

“Let me take that, Miss”.

“Call me Minette”.

“Miss, is she your girlfriend?”

“Yes Tenielle, she is”.

“She's proper buff”.

“Yes, I think so too”.

One by one I blindfolded them and steered a pencil into their hands, their trust touching. They were to draw themselves without taking the pencil off the paper, otherwise they'd lose their way. Not being able to see made them garrulous. After five minutes, the blindfolds came off. There was much shrieking and hilarity as they witnessed their efforts. For once, I was glad to hear that teenage bray. Bizarrely, their drawings were fairly recognizable. Magdala's was particularly singular.

“Oh my God” she said, “I look like a alien”.

My private rituals had evolved of late because they had been a solitary preoccupation and now
I was rarely alone. Swimming became a vehicle to mollify my mania. I had to complete eighty lengths in thirty five minutes, maintaining an average of two and a third lengths per minute
.
I'd glance at the clock with every other breath. This would keep Dale safe, with the added dividend of enhancing my body so she'd still find me attractive. Cycling too provided all kinds of obsessive opportunity. Two cars only were allowed to overtake me on my journeys (motorbikes and mopeds didn't count). This wasn't as difficult as it seemed because I had devised a complex system where if I passed stationary cars at traffic lights for example, I could claim them back from the ones that had passed me. There were other rules which I'd incorporated so that I never lost. This would keep us both safe.

My most important was performed right under Dale’s nose. Each night before we slept, I had to look directly into her eyes for four seconds, stroke her hair four times and then we had to fall asleep holding hands. This would ensure her love for me.

As she pulled the covers over us and flexed her warmth next to me, my staggering sense of good fortune was counter pointed with a cold quilt, stitched with fear that I might fuck up or she might change her mind.

Snaking her right arm around my shoulders, she drew my head down to the drum of her heart, a large hardback book balanced on her left flank. Her fingers gripped the top as if she were inspecting her nails, but her eyes scanned the baffling hooked lines and flourishes.

“Gosh, can you read that?”

“Of course, my mum used to read it to me, it's the Arabian Nights”.

“Can you read it to me?”

On the right hand page was an illustration, an overbearing genie, his tapering pantaloons still funnelling from the bottle. She began “kan fi saalef a zamaan...”. Her voice took on a rich timbre, deep and lilting, with husky, guttural
diphthongs, sibilant and liquid. I was spellbound, astonished that her mouth could even make such sounds. She purred a landscape of dunes and twilight, adopting the imperious tones of the genie (I knew she would be frowning and pouting behind my hair
,
which she stroked). The lulling cadenza enfolded me. I saw damask and jewels and Dale's eyes ringed with kohl gazing at me from the edge of a sequined veil. My beautiful Arab, my goddess, my mother. Succumbing to the dynamic, I stuck my thumb in my mouth and as I drifted away I felt the waft of the closing book on my face, the puff of parched pages like a sigh.

“Habibti yaarburnee” she said.

“What does that mean?”

She kissed my head.

“My beloved” she whispered, “may you bury me”.

Chapter 6

On my forty third birthday, Dale prepared a feast of my favourite food: a dozen oysters (their obstinance dispatched proficiently with an evil paring knife), shepherd's pie (deconstructed), followed by chocolate refrigerator cake. My present, a smooth pale stone, the size of a bar of soap, carved with that buxom heart accommodating the spiky star burst. The B of the bang, our logo. So moved I couldn't speak and I brought it to my lips as if it were a holy relic. After an appropriate hiatus she gave me a special birthday seeing to.

My girls filed in and I realised I'd grown fond of them, in fact, they broke my heart; I saw myself in all of them. Their natural conviviality, pushed well beneath the plimsoll line by a cruel cargo. It was not within my capacity to unload them, but hopefully I could at least help steer them to port.

The mirror pictures had turned up some surprising results. The diffident Dolapo's, especially oblique and clever: an impressive, cross-hatched sky, the slabs of buildings, water reflected in glass, the cosy canal boats and a well observed study of a coot, gliding through a V.  The only thing missing was Dolapo herself. She waited with a sly smile, for me to fall in. I guessed it must be a 'Where's Wally?' type of joke.

“There you are” I said, pointing to the window of a crazily be-flowered barge. The tiny face wreathed in a grin, something I'd never seen on the big Dolapo. “What's your thinking behind this picture?” Pointing at the boat in the picture, she looked at the real one outside.

“I'd be happy living there” she said.