Cathexis (41 page)

“Recognise it?” she said.

The drawing she'd done as a child of Nancy, me and the strange, horned father. She pointed at the Todor goat thing. “Out of the mouths of babes, eh?”. Shark eyes fervent. The urge to take her over my knee and give her a good hiding almost insurmountable. 

“Sasha, what is all this?” Her head snapped back in comedy puzzlement.

“All what?”

Dale excused herself, climbing the stairs. “Oh Dale” she said, “don't go too far, I've got something to show you!”, retraining her sights on me.

“This isn't the Sasha I know”, shaking my head.

“What do you mean? “Shotgun eyes cocked.

“You seem so brash and, well, presumptuous. That's not like you”.

Frowning, she recalibrated.

“I'm sorry, I'm just excited, remember how I was when I was a kid? Always so pleased to see you. I remember you smelled of cucumber and you always took my side against Nikolai and even mum. That time with the boots when I trod mud everywhere, I thought she was going to kill me, but you took the blame. That's the sweetest thing anyone's ever done for me. You don't forget things like that. It was an indelible moment ...I knew you loved me”.

The strobing sepia of an old film, Sasha's dawning fear, Nancy's rising anger, the little hand in mine.

“Sasha, I was very fond of you”.

Neither pleased or displeased with this statement. “You'll understand” she said
.
“I've brought my folio”. A thin, gold chain around her neck and a walnut sized lump under her t-shirt, she grasped my hand and led me to the living room. “Oh Dale!” she chirped. “It's show time”.

“OK” she said, kneeling on the Persian rug before the folio, tucking some rococo curls behind her ear. “This is something I've been working on for a year, although the source material has been gathered over a number of years, incorporating images I took when I was a child and also found material that I have manipulated in Photoshop to both abstract and enhance, to give the collection cohesion. It is simply called 'Body of Work' “.

I put on my glasses. The heavy cover landed with a woomph, sending cinders in the grate every which way. “OK, the first section consists of pictures I took as a child and contemporary found ones”.

A set of four 8” x 6” prints mounted in a square:

An open Pokémon album.

Nikolai's doleful face and overexposed open hand.

Nancy from a low angle, hair contorted in motion.

An out of focus butterfly on stone paving.

They had a silence about them, compelling. Another flurry of ashes:

Mine and Nancy's legs standing, our jeans facing each other up to her waist and my hips, boots and Birkenstocks toe to toe.

Half of my face, blurred and bleached out, eye caught sapphire, teeth white.

A bowl of Cheerios with a child's hand grasping a spoon.

A small foot in a red sandal, matched next to an empty, giant Blundstone.

Touching and well grouped, even softening Dale.

The page turned with another unsettling gust.

“Part two” Sasha said. The format enlarged to 10” x 8”:

Taken from the living room window, me on all fours, unrolling a length of turf. Beneath it, a picture of Nancy from behind in silhouette, gazing out of the kitchen window, motionless. On the opposing page, me laying on the patio, wracked with laughter, arm clutching my ribs, the photographer standing over me, her ragged shadow falling across my face. Nancy had taken this, an innocent enough snap but not something you would sit down and share with your daughter …the icon fidgeted.

Me in a tatty khaki vest, hair like a boy at the seaside, striking a muscle man pose, fist to forehead, popping out a bicep and frowning gruffly.

“Nice body” Dale mused.

“Crikey Sasha, it's a bit me-centric isn't it?”

“This is the third section” she said, rapt with purpose.

The impact initially the size, now 12” x 10”:

The top of a tree through a window, green on blue, heavily pixelated like pointillism. A synaptic spark behind my eyes, a gentle cascade of panic, escalating to a full-blown landslide on the next picture:

A pair of boots, my boots, foggy in the way crime stills lifted from CCTV are, similar to the image I'd rejected at second selection stage. Dale looked on with interest at the print of Nancy in the doorway, brandishing a bottle and two glasses and the image below it of me, cross - legged on the bed, a silver camcorder in front of my face.

“Where did you get these?” I muttered, Dale double-taking my cornered face. “Sasha” I said, “that's enough”.

“No, but the fourth and final section is the best, I've tidied these up, it took weeks, I virtually repainted them” she said, turning the page:

The black crotch of my pants.

Dale gasped “Jesus”.

My gash, parted by Nancy's thumbs.

“You shouldn't have seen this, it was private”, hiding my face in my hands.

“And finally” Sasha said, turning the page:

Two pictures of me from the same angle, the first with Nancy's three fingers inside me up to her knuckles. The next, Nancy's profile, her serpentine tongue about to penetrate, in pin sharp clarity.

Dale sighed like an exasperated teacher. “What are you trying to prove?”

Sasha tapped her lips, choosing her words.

“Could you give Minette and I some space please?”

Dale took my hands, my face an inferno of wrath and humiliation.

“Do it now” she said. “I'll be in the kitchen if you need me”.

Unable to draw my eyes from the travesty, her boots rubbed across the floorboards.

“How did you get this?”

“I was twelve” she said. “Everyone was out so I poked around Mum's room, you know how you do when you're a kid. I thought I might find a vibrator or something. Anyway, right at the back of the wardrobe on the top shelf, I had to stand on a chair and remember which order I took everything out in, I found mum's 'you' box. It was like finding treasure again. All pictures of you, music tapes you made, I love Astrid Apple by the way thanks to you, and a camcorder and all the cables. So I put everything back, took the shoe box to my room and charged the camera”. She drained her glass and rocked in recollection.

“At first I was scared, I thought she was torturing you or something because you were screaming. But as I watched and listened to the dirty stuff she was saying, I understood it was a game and that you liked it. God, I was so turned on I thought I was dying and I couldn't stop watching it, slow-mo, still pause. I know you intimately, Minette”. Her florid countenance leered on the outskirts. “Something made me find it so I'd know what to do”. Her blonde chaos edged nearer. Taking off my glasses, I closed my eyes, I'd seen enough. “Minette, I'm in love with you”
she said, “and Dale won't want you now, will she?”

A cloud of hot ferment and her lips brushed mine. On my feet in an eye blink “No!”

“Oh please” she said, wrapping her arms around my buttocks, pressing her face to my crotch.

“Let go of me”.

“Don't be like that, I know I'm young, but I know what to do”, forcing her hand between my legs.

“Get off me!” Pushing her away, she fell, hand splayed on my eight inch gash and I winced at the violation. “It's not right” I said.

“Why isn't it? We love each other”. Her face the phantom of a child.

“Sasha, listen to me. I don't love you and I don't want to have sex with you. You should never have seen that film, it was private and now you've concocted this fantasy. It's not real, no matter how you feel”.

Back on her knees, hands laced, pleading. “It’s just a shock that's all, I didn't mean to shock you, just Dale. You'll get used to the idea, you'll see. Think about it” she said optimistically.

“I think you should go home and talk to your mother”, aware that I was livid with Nancy.

“No please, Minette, just give me a chance”. She began to cry, big disastrous sobs that despite everything almost moved me to comfort her. Dale from nowhere, down beside her.

“Come on” she said gently “Get up, I'll take you home”.

Sasha, sullen under stormy eyebrows. “I'm not going with you”.

Dale zipped the folio, dragging her to her feet. “Yes you are”.

I watched through the window as Dale slung the folio in the flat bed and grappled her into the cab of the Hilux, like a mother and her busted teenager. A passer- by would have thought so.

In the kitchen, lifting tea towels and oven gloves in search of my ‘phone, while swigging whisky from the bottle. Nancy answered on the first ring.

“Minette, how did it go?”

“Really, really badly, Dale's bringing her home now”

“What happened?”

“It's worse than we could have imagined, you need to see her folio”

“Why?”

I didn't want to pull the punch of it; she would have to suffer the assault as I had.

“Just look at it”.

“Minette, you sound angry”.

“I am and when you look at the fucking folio, you'll know why”.

A pause.

“Minette, I'm very sorry about this”.

“Me too, I can't be involved with her any more, but I don't think it's over. She needs help”.

“I don't understand why this has happened”.

She barely had an accent any more. The squeak of the Hilux's brakes down the ‘phone.

“I think they're here, I'd better go”.

“Call me when you've looked at the pictures”.

“Yes OK I will, take care Minette”.

“How do you feel?” said Dale, face to face across the kitchen table.

“Oh well, it was a slow enough crash” I said, “I had time to brace”.

Dale, on the other hand, had a torrential data stream she was keen to analyse; expecting to feel repulsion but she didn't, angry with herself for being jealous of Nancy and angrier still that she was a little turned on. It hurt of course, to see the hard copy of the past, which should have remained confined to the soft focus of fleeting and suppositional imaginings. The two dimensional woman whose breakfast bar we'd sat at only yesterday, now at large and 3D in our present. As for
Sasha, pity and empathy. Recalling what it was like at that age – the crushes, the rage of frustration and longing, usually projected at aloof figures.

“But think about it” she said, “fixating on someone who is nice to you, it must be sweet torture, not to mention the fact this person has always had a sexual connotation. Who knows what weird drives that would awaken? Did you tell Nancy about the pictures?”

I explained why I hadn't. “She's in for a shock” she said, with more than a hint of Schadenfreude.

“Dale?”

“Yes, Minky”.

“I'm worried those images are burnt into my brain and they'll pop up when we're doing it”.