How You See Me (5 page)

It’s all overgrown now, with great tufts of grass and a hazel sapling clinging bravely to the far bank. What can be seen of the muddy water is iced over and speckled with yellow bubbles, some poor drowned rodent upended with its claws and snout thrust through the ice. You’d never guess the depths. Maybe the fish are still there, slowly revolving in the dark.

I stubbed out my cigarette and roused Dad. Tatty came out again to check on us and I snapped a couple of pictures of them for Mab. Then I sat down and tried to get some conversation going over today’s crossword. But Dad just sat there, staring straight ahead, tugging and tweaking the blankets on his lap. He works his mouth around sounds, but I can’t make out any actual words. I was beginning to wish I hadn’t woken him, and started filling in the blanks with an approximation of his jabber.

‘That’s right, Dad. Seven letters, BASMUNDT. That would make five across WHASTHAYA. Excellent work.

‘By Jove, two down, he’s got it in one. How could I have missed that?’

I got quite a kick out of it. My laughter seemed to catch something and he looked at me. Blankly at first and then he started up gurgling, right down at the back of his throat. His mouth hung open and tears rolled down the side of his flushed face. My father, remembering how to laugh.

I don’t know why he had to be so sad about it?

(Later)

You remind me of Sarah. Of course she never had the advantage of your hair, but there are similarities. I hadn’t wanted to admit it before now. I wanted our memories to be ours, but I keep tangling your image up in events that happened years before I met you. I think that has to be because you look like her.

Picturing your face,

Daniel xx

12th November

The Studio

Dear Mab –

The nurse came today, so Tatty and I took to the road.

She really does hate me, you know. I’m too big to be ordered into place. I find myself seeking out corners when she arrives. I lurk under the slope of the stairs, trying to control my breathing – I take in too much air – and feel my eyes work as I follow her progress around the room. It’s better not to be there.

When we got back from our walk her car was still there. I let Tatty strain her lead as I knocked the butt of my cigarette out on the sole of my shoe and tried to untangle my scarf. The window was open and there was the murmur of conversation. Two voices. My name. Her name. The old story.

They shut up as soon as I opened the door and turned, their lips wet and parted. The pretty nurse made a fuss of Tatty, as Maggie gathered up cups of half-drunk tea. Maggie must have told her I was nothing to be afraid of, or else she was proving something to herself.

Dad dozed in his chair under a layer of fresh bandages. ‘Must be getting on,’ snapped between the two women like conspiratorial kisses. Neither of them met my eye. The nurse was gone and Maggie in the kitchen and I stood there with Tatty’s lead still in my hand, blocking the light.

Still here,

Daniel

15th November

The Studio

Dear Alice –

My sister sent me a mask. Apparently she reads the letters I send her and something I wrote inspired her. It arrived this morning, all the way from Corsica, wrapped in brown paper and plastic with a card. It really is a horrible thing.

It’s a full face of unpainted white clay, tumbled under her hands until it’s smooth as a river stone. The forehead and cheekbones are exaggerated and swell obscenely above the dainty chin, with holes gouged out for eyes and mouth. I propped it up on my father’s desk and let it survey the room.

Mab had fixed it with a leather strap like a thin belt, with a buckle on the back. It is meant to be worn. And worn by me. Mab only makes masks to order, and even then only when she feels something from the people who are ordering. God only knows where she gets the money to be so fussy, but it seems to do nothing to lessen the demand for her work. Quite the contrary, in fact. But from what I remember of her workshop her masks are usually bright – even gaudy – affairs. This is quite a departure for her.

It took me a while to psych myself up to putting the thing on. It sat on the desk while I completed my morning tasks. Dad, of course, didn’t notice it, but I found I was very aware of its blank presence on the desk. In the end I gave in and took it through to the bathroom. I sat down on the toilet to fit it on to my face. I remembered Mab telling an acting coach, for whom she was making a batch of ‘characters’,
how important it was to take the time to inhabit the mask before you look in the mirror.

I am blinkered by the mismatch of my eyes and the holes in the mask. I am forced to stare straight ahead to find light. The mask is heavy, pulling my head forward and my shoulders up. I am being reshaped. Unbidden, my tongue creeps out through the crevice of the mouth and explores its edges. The clay snatches the moisture from my tongue and I taste dust and the sweat from my sister’s fingers. I cannot resist the mirror. I lumber towards it on bent knees. Two steps that are not my own.

You cannot see a mask until you’re inside it. I am the jelly behind the hard clay, but it’s the clay that breathes. Damp stains around the hole Mab has plucked for his mouth are all that is left of me. That, and a wet glister of life in the shadow of the eyes. I am swallowing the taste of him along with the look. The dust and the sweat and the tweak of the piggy nose and the troughs and peaks of that horrible face are in my body; in my stomach; in the shift of my feet.

And I recognise him. That monster in the mirror. Just as she said I would. That’s what she wrote on the back of the postcard.

Dad was shifting about in the other room and Tatty took up barking to alert me. I slipped off the mask and stood for a moment, startled by my own face in the mirror, before I went to settle Dad back into his chair. I watched my hands as I brewed tea. I am altogether too pink and pliable; my edges are ill-defined.

I’d left the mask face-down on the toilet seat, a harmless curve of clay with its leather strap unbuckled. I had to move
it when I brought Dad through. I thought about smashing it. I thought about sending it back to Mab. I thought about smashing it and then sending it back. But I hung it above my bed instead. There was a nail there, waiting for a picture, or a crucifix.

Mab’s card went in the wood burner. I don’t keep her postcards any more.

Daniel xx

17th November

The Studio

Dear Aubrey –

There is no need to worry about me. Please. I am not one of your pathetic patients; I do not need to be examined. Trust you to overreact to that letter. It’s stuff and nonsense. An old story about an old man who couldn’t cope with life – not much of a Miracle to my mind. I just thought it might amuse you.

Not to say I was exactly laughing, but I have no need to call you into action. Things have changed, Aubrey. You are no longer in control of my life; it’s time to accept that.

And stop the threats to contact my sister. We do not need your input. And anyway, she can’t stand you.

Daniel

17th November

The Studio

Dear Alice –

Why did you ever come to Aubrey? That’s a question I would be too afraid to ask you to your face. I know you will feel you explained yourself in session, but you’d be surprised how elusive the answers are in the notes I receive from Aubrey. He does his best, but they miss so much of the body language, nuance and mode of expression. Is it really possible to ever understand someone from words on a page? I suppose that is what I am fated to be for you, for the time being at least.

Oh, Alice, there were so many women I met on pages in Aubrey’s short cribbed hand. So many tales of woe, of disappointment and regret. But only one of those women I fell in love with. There is no need to be jealous. You are the only one who sang from the page. To think of me, typing up the first session. Such a routine task, conducted in the corner of Aubrey’s living room, in the dusty alcove he laughingly called my study. It was there then, that magic. It was as if life was being breathed into me again after long absence. After long abstinence. I was in love again.

I met Aubrey through my sister. Did I ever tell you that? It had been a dark time for me and I’d escaped to Mab’s island to recuperate. Strange to think of that summer in Corsica, while sitting here now in the place I had escaped from. From the smell of oils and turpentine to the wet earth of Mab’s studio, all seemingly in a moment. The long glare of light which was that summer.

For the first weeks I lay in a darkened bedroom, twisting in the slight breeze through cotton curtains; listening to Freya’s laughter and games in the garden below, her hushed whispers at my door. The strange gloomy uncle who appeared in the night, to be met by a bright young niece. A niece he’d never heard so much as a whisper of from his secretive sister. Later, they limped me out to a chair in that garden, dry dust and sun; Freya bringing me insects and oddities to discover, dropping them in my shrouded lap and then scampering away. Later again, a boat trip. Casting off from a sun-drenched city, peopled by tourists and the silent houses of the dead. The cliffs wept water and Freya took my hand. Mab took photographs and I grinned for the camera, all gums.

Later that week, Aubrey arrived. He wore his three-piece suit to the studio – of course – and sweated and fretted about the transfer of muck and dust, constantly wiping his hands and forehead with a white handkerchief. They fed me the idea that he had some plan for the use of masks in therapy. I wasn’t to know he had been invited.

Aubrey is an old ‘friend’ of Mab’s mother, Eleanor Laird. For ‘friend’ read ex-lover. He’s one of the few men I’ve ever seen Mab make time for. Though I can’t understand why. Oh, he was all smiles and self-deprecating wiles to Freya and me. But, when someone’s in the business of making masks, they see through them quickly enough, and Mab made short shrift of his bluster. I’m sure she splattered that expensive suit with wet clay on purpose – she certainly didn’t apologise – but her laugh didn’t have the cruel edge I was expecting. Maybe I’m underestimating her. Maybe she was really just desperate to see me gone.
Still, when Aubrey emerged spattered and stained from her studio, Mab announced he would be staying for a few days. By the time we sat down in the garden with cold glasses of champagne and nothing to toast, the plot was afoot.

‘Your sister tells me you have an interest in my field.’

‘I’ve never really thought about it.’

‘Oh, it’s fascinating. Constant challenge. Constant diversity. Constant change.’ He beat out his points, manicured nails on a tailored thigh. ‘And the things you learn. Remarkable what people will tell you. How much they are willing to invest in the process.’

‘Don’t you have to have training?’

‘Well, yes, of course. But at my advanced age it would be helpful to have some fresh perspective.’ He leant towards me. Maybe he was already a little drunk. ‘And in return I can show you my work. I’m talking about serious work within the interpretative process. A way of gaining true understanding.’

We sat for a moment, watching Mab and Freya play in the dry shrub and listening to the bubbles crack against the surface of the wine.

‘Women are my field really. I mean that I don’t take any male clients. It’s all about women for me. Mab told me you were interested in women?’

Well, how did he expect a boy of barely sixteen to answer that question? Of course I was interested in women! Well, it has always been one woman at a time for me, my darling, as you know.

Oh, Alice, I was so vulnerable and Aubrey was so clever. It was then that he sold me his grand idea. As if,
spontaneously, it had struck him, there in the garden. I was to return to Manchester and work with him. He even flattered me that my last name, with its ‘artistic associations’, would be of use to him.

I suppose – and I know this may sound like more psychological claptrap – I was in need of a father. Mine had so rudely cast me from his life. So violently. And here was this avuncular chap, round and neatly cut as one of Mab’s characters. He was perfect. And I was weak.

And so, I let myself become his toy son. His private patient and glorified secretary, who added a name of note to his flyer, and was on hand to type up the sorrows of the poor wretches who couldn’t resist him.

Not that you were anything like the rest of them, my darling. You were, and are, remarkable.

I’ve noticed that things with Aubrey have changed since arriving here. Or maybe they’ve changed since I met and fell in love with you? I am no longer the child to be taken care of. You have taught me how to be an adult.

Your Daniel x

20th November

The Studio

Dear Mab –

Strange how what I’ve been taking for activity can so easily be pointed out to be idleness. I’d just got back from the supermarket and was hauling bags into the kitchen where I found Maggie waiting for me.

‘You took your time.’

‘And hello to you. Thanks for watching Dad; how’s he been?’

‘It’s no good, this, Daniel. You need to sort the place out. I can’t be here every hour of the day cleaning up after the pair of you. I’ve my own family to take care of.’ ‘I’m sorry. Look, I got Dad some new trousers. They’re jogging bottoms, so we can pull them on and off more easily, and they were cheap so we don’t need to worry about accidents. Where did these flowers come from? What are they, lilies? We always seem to have fresh flowers and I’m not buying them. Don’t give me that look, Maggie, I’m really sorry. Maybe I should have brought you some flowers?’

‘Oh, don’t you come it with the hugs and kisses. You’re not a little boy any more. You need to get this house right for your dad. You’ve got no work to go to and nothing else to do, as far as I can see. It’s not right, a grown man sat about the house smoking all day. You need to make yourself useful.