Night Street (20 page)

Since the storm, her thinking often takes an aquatic turn, as though the drenching had soaked through to her brain. Her mind has become an ocean at low tide, the broad sands of the past exposed. She once attempted such a scene with a rather giddy palette—hot-hearted sunrise colours radiating from the vast mirror of a damp shore. She refused to let Arthur have the painting and he went sullen on her. To make him forgive her, she stroked her favourite part of his head, where his hair was receding. That night, he bit her lip; it could have been an accident, her mouth filling with slick, salty warmth.

The music continues, though no one heeds it but herself.

30

There is a vase of tight roses on the bedside table, not quite the pink of the flowers that accompanied Mum's passing. Father sits in the visitor's chair and of course the parasitic Mrs Marks is with him. Cut flowers fill Clarice with the same moroseness that zoo animals do. There is no light in Father's skin; he does not appear well.

‘Louise was here,' he announces. ‘You were asleep.'

A flaccid silence. When Clarice glances through the door into the hall, she sees a girl pass. The girl's name is Olive; she seems to remember someone introducing them. Olive wears too light a frock and she is twirling, arms spread wide. The zip at the side of the frock is open, offering a glimpse of pale body. She moves rapidly, unsteadily, but languorously too. Clarice is glad to have seen this. Soon after, Olive can be heard thumping into a wall, though she does not cry out.

‘Heavens!' comments Mrs Marks. ‘This place.' She stands fussily at Father's side, scowling with her purplish mouth. The way she has of laying her hand on his back is distinctly proprietorial, wifely. What would Mum have thought?

‘Clarice,' her father says, ‘I warned you something like this would happen.' He mumbles, ‘Going out painting in all weather. It was bound to happen.'

‘Of course it was,' scolds Mrs Marks. ‘Fancy getting caught out in the rain.'

A coughing fit helps to disguise Clarice's hilarity.

Father is repentant. ‘When you get better,' he improvises, ‘when you come home . . .' He fidgets in his chair, his knee probably hurting, a detail in a masterpiece of discomfort. ‘You could paint some flowers.' He nods curtly at the roses he seems to have brought her and concludes, ‘Those might inspire you.' The word
inspire
and the appeasing tone are foreign, unsettling for him.

‘It's almost time for your lunch,' declaims Mrs Marks, speaking to Father. ‘And'—her voice dropping to a whisper befitting a risqué confidence—‘your medicine.'

Their conversations are always this airless and dreary. Clarice strains for a sound beyond the nurse's voice. She wishes Olive would come spinning back down the hall in her party frock. Who introduced them? Thankfully, after a while there is the lopsided noise of a person dragging a bad leg. Much of her entertainment here has been deciphering sounds.

‘Your paintings of floral arrangements were pretty. They were nice.' Father is really extending himself. Perhaps he would not have made a bad art critic. She imagines him saying,
mawkish veils of fog
. ‘The arthritis has been bothering me,' he adds.

He laces his fingers together, illustrating his unease. She thinks of a prestidigitator coolly displaying the result of a magic trick.

She squints and his fingers take on the fuzziness of distance. She tries to bring back Pavlova in
The Dying Swan
, struggling but finally drawing the ballerina into her mind's eye: effort so consummate and finely honed that it was erased; grace.

When she is indifferent enough to speak, she volunteers, to no one in particular, ‘In my first solo exhibition, I hung one hundred and ten paintings in plain frames. I really prefer a plain frame.' Short sentences are easier. ‘Eleven were still lifes of flowers. Only eleven of one hundred and ten—all the rest landscapes.' She does not cough, but when she breathes deeply, there is a little rattle. ‘One hundred and ten minus eleven makes ninety-nine. Ninety-nine landscapes . . . One critic called his review
Flowers and Vases
.'

Coughing from another room, sharp and staccato. She is not the only cougher at the hospital; there is a choir of them. They each follow a different melody, but are made brothers by the same carnal beat.

She giggles. ‘Can't anyone do arithmetic?'

Father and his nurse are looking perturbed. They find her incomprehensible. How long did it take Mrs Marks to perfect that inhuman look? Could she have been born with it? The two of them are not unlike art critics, secretly pleased to witness how landscape painting has overcome her; they are colourblind to her victory. Clarice's tolerance for talk has evaporated. She longs for her own nurse, a reassuring robust redhead, to come and drive them away, and is tempted to summon her with the bell. We each have a nurse now, Father, she thinks—how comical. The redhead has become her defence, the monarch of the country of her illness, just as Father is ruled by his hard-mouthed queen, Mrs Marks. Clarice must have become weak; she never required anyone's protection before. And yet she is feeling quite feisty.

‘Father, go home and rest,' she tells him in a stranger's voice. The white ceiling hovers above her bed. ‘You must be tired. Thank you for coming.' She makes small circles with her wrists beneath the wool blanket. ‘And for the flowers.' Her chest is a little sore, but she rolls over till she is facing the door. ‘Incidentally, I haven't painted flowers for a long time,' she says. ‘And I have no plans to. Ever again. You should know that.'

The redhead, finally, as though wishing for her had caused her to materialise. She touches Clarice's forehead knowingly; it is like the cold, salty ocean on sun-provoked skin. Clarice wants more of that touch, wants sleep, her visitors gone.

The redhead leaves her frame of vision to speak to Father and his queen. Mrs Marks' voice is withering, the redhead's matter-of-fact, low, as she enunciates the queerly cushioned words
double pneumonia
. A twinge of alarm in Clarice's chest. She is missing the Doctor.

31

She is a prolific dreamer at the hospital. One night, or perhaps day—the line dividing these states is no longer quite fixable—Clarice is lying between two men in a rather grand four-poster bed. The bed has a canopy whose drapes seem to be filmy, restless pieces of the sky itself, a breeze lifting and subtly rearranging them. The sheets they lie on have an extraordinarily fine texture, impossibly smooth. As for the men, they are familiar, though she cannot definitively place them and they are therefore somewhat, but not altogether, menacing. The three of them are cocooned like triplets in the delectable sheets, floating drapes and balmy breeze. The sea is not far away.

She struggles to keep her thoughts in order, get things straight. Difficult to decide what she prefers: the never-ending circular caresses low on her back with the heel of a palm or the halting journey of a slightly ragged fingernail over her inner thigh. One of the men gives moist, enveloping kisses that form a timeless continuum; it would be simpler to just hibernate inside his mouth. The other's kisses are noncommittal, taunting little jabs that infuriate Clarice, especially as she has to stay passive to show no favouritism. While the outside of her is inert, there is hot, cataclysmic activity within her, in the unseen realm beneath her skin. Her poor skin bears the heavy task of concealment. But her belly is going warm, all of her turning as soft as the sheets.

Soon there is no hiding anything and she finds herself rolling from side to side like a fidgety insomniac. She is in a mounting torment of indecision. Who to turn to? Which touch to receive? It is too much, in the manner of a relentless savage tickling; she is beyond her own control.

Who is she trying to fool? One of the men has kept his hat on, but still, she has never been able to keep track of which is which; the one without a hat looks a little as Paul might have looked, had he grown up. Their caresses flow together, the two sets of hands complementing one another, touching, overlapping, behaving as a single pair of ubiquitous hands. She has never been touched like this, with no way out.

It is stuffy and hard to see from under her hair, which winds around her face. She is breathing roughly through her mouth, her legs slackening and falling further apart; this is probably shameful. The men are beginning to smile, as if unable to resist a joke much longer. She is ready to say,
enough
, or,
wait a minute
, but the two of them—him on the left and him on the right—are so well synchronised, like a ventriloquist and his dummy.

If the men complete one another so perfectly, what is her role? Not knowing makes her anxious. Is she superfluous? The sea breeze lifts, the drapes, those airy slabs of sky, twitching violently.

Clarice comes back to her senses in a sweat, but the tension of the dream leaks quickly away. Her real bed is small, narrow, unembellished and very tightly tucked. She briefly thrashes her legs to loosen the constrained feeling; no luck for now, but she will try again later.

A couple of painters came once to speak to Meldrum's class about Asian art. They were a vivid pair, married but childless and just returned from a year in Japan that had made passionate Japanophiles of them. It was rumoured that they engaged in secret ceremonies they had learned over there, wearing just kimonos.

Dadie was the woman's name. She had long dark hair, stylish and possibly dyed, and you could tell that the time in Japan had made life seem enigmatic and precious to her; she was living in some trance. You could see her in a kimono. Clarice had forgotten the husband's name. He had had an allure similar to his wife's—a reserved enthralment—but was more austere and let her do the talking.

Dadie insisted on the importance of a Japanese word:
ma
. ‘Loosely translated, it means something such as “pause” or “gap”,' she elaborated, speaking as if gazing spellbound at a vista only recently revealed to her.

Someone had loudly interjected that
ma
meant
but
in Italian.

‘Oh?' responded Dadie pleasantly, though she was on a path she could not be distracted from. ‘Perhaps that's not unfitting.'
Ma
, she had gone on to explain, was employed to describe the use of empty space in the design of a garden— garden design being an art in its own right in Japan. ‘The Japanese know the value of empty space.' Dadie paused to allow her words to shine through a bubble of emptiness. ‘They recognise it as a crucial element of composition.'

Arthur was in that classroom, out of Clarice's view but not her sense of the moment. Remembering in her small, tight bed, ruffled by the dream, though gradually more serene, she thinks that it takes time to weigh this notion of
ma
, to give your blessing to its starkness. But of course empty space is sparkling, heartbreaking, sensual. It can be turned to your advantage.

32

There is a poor dear sitting on the far side of the solarium. She is nicely witchy, with noble, sloping bones and skin like creased silk. Someone has wrapped her in a sad, grey shawl. Red might have lifted her mood; a bit of red will do it. The old girl appears to be taken with the clouds, high and neat, that the windows frame.

Those clouds are white innocence. No intimation of rain. It is not that clouds are malicious or that they bluff; their intentions are changeable because their ideas are so transient. Over and over, they embody the slightest whim.

If Clarice were feeling a little stronger, she would talk to the woman, who looks old but could even be her own age. Forty-eight! Already getting on in years. She is not often at ease with strangers. Solitude is the artist's luxury, valuable currency— but as with any wealth, it is unadvisable to hoard. She is not uncomfortable in the old woman's presence, though. Maybe it is her air of not having long to go; a slackness around the mouth that could be the softening of fatigue or the start of a grin.

The redhead bustles in, paying no attention to the old girl. This is a restful thing about age, she supposes, the way it ushers you into invisibility, as though into the plush recess of a theatre booth.

The nurse asks, ‘A piece of toast?'

While the redhead is certainly tough, she is not mean like Father's nurse. Really not persecutory at all. She has forgiven Clarice for rejecting lunch.

The redhead lowers her voice. ‘
Raisin
toast? Don't tell the others.'

Clarice is sorry to have no use for the secret.

‘Soup? Cook made potato soup. You'll want something.'

She would not mind a cup of tea, actually. Good strong tea, milky. A generous dissolving cloud of milk—farm milk. It would take such an effort to ask.

‘Just a slice of bread? I'll sprinkle sugar on it.'

‘Not hungry.' Her voice comes and goes; you cannot always be polite and good—it is much easier once you have accepted this. The nurse's hand drops to Clarice's shoulder, like a travel-spent bird landing. That hand has a satisfying volume and an agreeably androgynous, bulky shape lit by shades of peach and mottled plum on the underside. She feels her own frailty beneath it and does not like it.

‘Not even an apple?' the nurse whispers seductively. ‘I'll cut it into pieces.'

Shaking her head causes a prickling in her rib cage. The redhead's face is still asking about the apple. Clarice attempts to assemble the components of a smile. This makes her cough and there is the sound: a chesty vibration, a faint whistling in the tree branches of her lungs; a thin, eerie wind. The muscles between her ribs feel bruised, overly human. An interesting way to cough, low, fundamental, the whole body a casualty. She leans back against the chair. It addles her that repose can be as tranquillising as work.

The hand on Clarice's shoulder moves back and forth, the bird anxious. ‘You know, you'll come through this, the doc says. He's a great believer in mind over matter.'