Picture Imperfect (6 page)

‘It’s David
Hockney
.’

‘Who?’

My mind races back to the moment before I let the
holiday slip out. I’m going to take a brief mental holiday in that moment.
Things were alright in that moment. I love that moment and want to stay there
forever. Maybe buy a rambling old house there and do it up. OK – mental holiday
over.

‘If your father told me that he was going on a lovely
expensive holiday without me, I’d leave him. I’d have packed my bags before he
bought the plane ticket. Couples are meant to do things together. You’ve been
living together for ages now. Why do you think you’re not married yet? Has he
asked you? This is all
your
doing. We didn’t put you through university for your boyfriend to go off to
Greece.’

Even though it was a student loan (which I’m still
paying off) that put me through university, not to mention my holiday jobs, I
can’t imagine the circumstances that would lead to your parents saying ‘We’ll
pay for you to go to university, but there’s one condition. We’re not going to
pay for it if you think there’ll ever be a time when you’ll have a boyfriend who
will go off to Greece. If that happens, don’t think we won’t bring it up later
on and make you feel really bad about it.’

She rants on and on. She even manages to drag Hamish
into it, who I split up with years ago and whom she never met. I can imagine
being found dead here, still listening to this conversation. The police will
find a skeleton dressed in knickers and t-shirt with a phone clamped to its
ear. I feel slightly nauseous now and I’m going to have to curtail her inane
ramblings before I throw the phone out of the window and possibly jump after
it.

‘Well anyway, mum, thanks for calling.
Lovely to hear from you.
I really have to get back to work
now. Hope you feel better soon. Love to dad. See you later!’

And slam the phone down now.

I open the kitchen window, make a coffee and have
another ciggy. Damn you Mark. That whole conversation was your fault and now
I’m having a cigarette and that’s your fault, too.

After a couple of minutes, I take several deep breaths
and get back to work. If the canvas was a lover, it would be saying ‘Please,
darling! Not so rough!’ I do so much work on it that I have to go into my paint
cupboard and get some more paint.

When I’ve had lunch (coffee, cheese on toast, Aero,
fag), I stroll out to the hallway and take a look at my frenzied efforts.
Actually not too bad.
Pretty good, in
fact.
I decide to point up all the red streaks with black while the
whole thing is still wet. This will give it an in-your-face chaotic dripping
quality. It’ll stop being
floaty
and vague and become
focussed and aggressive. That’s the plan, anyway.

I’m sure this all sounds quite mad and is incredibly
difficult to visualise. The truth is
,
I’ve been
fiddling around with this canvas for so long that I don’t know if what I’m
doing is good, bad or indifferent. Maybe that’s what proper artists feel. Who
knows? I don’t know any proper artists to ask.

So, then, it’s my fault that Mark has gone on holiday
with his friend and the girls. If I had taken a different path in life, this
would not have happened. I’m trying hard to put the whole thing out of my mind,
but now it’s nagging at me even more.
My bloody mother.
What on earth is wrong with her? She shouldn’t be taking Mark’s side in this,
if indeed there is a side to take. All the things she hates about the things I
do and the choices I’ve made have now, as far as she’s concerned,
 
culminated in my boyfriend, or partner or
whatever he is going away on holiday for five days. It’s insane. Is he my
partner? I hadn’t really thought about it.

I’m not even sure why we moved in together. I think
he’d seen the flat, liked it, but it was a little too expensive for one person
to rent. As we’d spent so much time around each other’s places, he suggested
that two could live as cheaply as one. And they say romance is dead!

Is there something about my mother I don’t know? Did
something happen to her years ago which made her like this? Is it a
pathological need for grandchildren that has warped her mind or something? And
anyway, all she’s ever done is
be
a housewife. It’s not
that difficult to sit on your arse, clean the house and reproduce. What a
disturbing image.

The last time she rang up, it ended up with me having
to listen to up-to-date life achievement fables about five of my friends from
school, none of whom I’d had any contact with for about fifteen years or so.
I’d actually forgotten two of them even existed.

What follows are brief summaries of what these friends
were up to, or had been up to.

1. Hilary
Spinks
. Got married
at nineteen to some man seventeen years her senior called Ryan or Brian who
owns two successful fruit and veg shops. He bought her some flash car/jeep/tank
thing for her 21st. Had four children by the time she was twenty-five. All kids
are now being privately educated.

2. Paige Gordon. Studied journalism but dropped out
after two college terms.
Married Aiden or Adrian who is a
builder.
They live in a huge house with a swimming pool. The house is
conveniently near a
CenterParc
.
Two
children who both wear glasses.
Aiden or Adrian had an operation on his
inner ear three years ago.
Paige now very religious,
apparently.

3. Trinity Addison.
Now Trinity
Addison-
Copely
.
A teacher.
Married to Dominic, an art teacher (ha ha!). Dominic won some teacher award six
years ago. They live in a beautiful flat which Dominic’s dad bought for them
after they got married. Trinity’s hair is now auburn. No children but trying.
Trinity had a mole removed from her face privately and it cost a fortune.

4. Alicia Scott. Has put on a lot of weight, but it
looks good on her as she’s tall.
Divorced.
No
children. New man in her life is called Brody (!) and is a high-flying
executive in a pharmaceutical company which makes sugar substitutes. They spent
two years living is Strasbourg and have a place there which is a listed
building (or its Strasbourg equivalent).

5. Jocelyn
Loveguard
. Still
single, but is the mistress of some wealthy provincial bank manager somewhere.
He’s bought her a two bedroom luxury
flatlet
over a
Thai restaurant in Slough and took her to Florence last year when his wife was
in rehab.
Had a boob job which he paid for.
Her
surname still sounds like a primitive contraceptive.

In case you were wondering, and it was causing you not
a little anxiety, the two I’d totally forgotten about were Paige and Alicia.

Those are the sort of things that I have to aspire to.
Those are what my mother thinks of as success stories. What’s a little strange
is how my mother actually knew what these young women were doing in the first
place, as if she’d followed their lives with the help of a private detective or
had been stalking them for the last fourteen years. Surely those
sort
of details wouldn’t have been in the local paper, would
they?
Trinity Addison-
Copely
to have mole removed expensively, claims proud mother.

As far as I know, she had no contact with any of their
parents when I was in school with them (none of them lived near us) and would
only have heard of them if I’d mentioned them in some context or other. Maybe
after a few years, all mums form some sort of club where they can brag to each
other about their offspring’s success in this world. I can just imagine what it
must be like:

‘How’s your Chloe doing?’

‘Very well, I suppose. She’s in university somewhere.’

‘Ooh. What is she studying?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Has she had a boyfriend who’s gone off to Greece yet?’

‘Not yet, but it’s pretty inevitable, we think.’

‘That’s what happened to Grace Copper’s daughter. She
had a nervous breakdown, you know.’

‘What – Grace did?’

‘No.
Her daughter.’

I wonder how Mark and the gang are doing. Will they
have got on the plane yet?
Probably.
Mark told me the
time they’d be arriving in Greece, but I’ve forgotten it. It doesn’t really
matter to me what time they get there. Just as I’m about to go back to work,
the bloody phone goes again.
Right.
That’s it. I’ve
just about had all I can take from my mother today.

‘Yes?!’

‘Don’t take it out on me, dear, whatever it is.’

‘Oh. Sorry. Hi.’

It’s Rhoda, my agent. I squint at my watch. She never
rings me up this late. Her working day starts, I believe, at ten in the morning
on a good day. She has lunch at about midday, finishes it just before three,
and then usually visits one of her young men. It must be something important.

‘Yes, yes. Anyway, I was wondering if I could pop
‘round and see you tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow?
I’m working
tomorrow.’

‘It won’t take long. You won’t even have to put your
brush down.’

‘No, I mean I’m working at the office. In the job I
have to do two days a week. Remember?’

I try to keep a bitchy, bitter tone out of my voice
when I tell her this.
A sort of ‘if you were a better agent
and sold my stuff, I wouldn’t have to work in some bloody office two days a
bloody week’ tone.
Bloody.

‘Oh yes. That.
How about Wednesday?’

‘Yes. Wednesday will be fine.
Any
particular time?’

‘Morning?’
She says the word
like she’s not exactly sure what it means.

‘OK, Rhoda. I’ll see you then.’

‘Lovely.’

Well what the hell was that all about? She rarely, if
ever, visits me at home. Am I going to be dumped by her agency? Is she coming
to tell me personally rather than over the phone? I try to think back to what
she said and reinterpret it in a paranoid, unbalanced way. ‘It won’t take
long.’ That was one of the things she said. Is it a ‘sorry, we’re going to have
to let you go’ sort of ‘won’t take long’ situation? That would really, really
be all I’d need right now.

I decide that that would be one too many things to
worry about, put it out of my mind and get back to the painting. After spending
over twenty-four hours with my own angry thoughts, plus a couple of unsettling
telephone calls I didn’t particularly need, it’ll almost be a relief to get
back to the bloody office.

Tuesday 17
^th

As I get off the tube and walk to the bloody office, I
start thinking about Mark and his holiday again. Try as I might, it’s really
hard to keep it out of my head. I mean, are we a couple or not? Couples don’t
do things like that to each other, do they? Aren’t couples meant to be nice to
each other and be considerate of each other’s feelings or something? Do nice
things together? It’s not like Mark and I are involved in some grand,
passionate affair where we can’t keep our hands off each other and can’t live
without each other and all that stuff, but not that many people I know are.

I’ve only had one outside opinion about the whole thing
so far and that was my mother’s, which was about as useful as an ashtray on a
motorbike. For her, it was just another thing which proves that all her
opinions about me are right, so it’s really not worth worrying about.

The place where I work is on the first floor of a large
building off
Wigmore
Street in the West End. It’s
quite handy for the shops in Oxford Street which are only a few minutes’ walk
away, but that’s really all it’s got going for it. Sorry – did I sound
unenthusiastic just then?

I’ve been working there part-time for almost eight
months now. I’m a sort of permanent temp. The whole building, which is pretty
old, must have been home to some incredibly rich family at one point, but now
it’s full of companies like the one I work for, which is called Melton’s
Graduate Recruitment. It’s an agency which gets jobs for female graduates, who
usually find themselves doing PA or secretarial jobs instead of running
television production companies and the like. I feel that I have quite a lot in
common with many of them.

Luckily, my job doesn’t entail actually meeting or
talking to any of the clients. They tend to be sour-looking girls in their
early twenties who are all very bright and bubbly when they arrive and downtrodden
and depressed when they leave. I feel sorry for some of them. They’re only just
realising that their degrees in English Lit or geography or whatever aren’t
going to get them some fantastic job after all. I bet they all wish they’d
partied harder while they were at
uni.

By the way, even though I just said ‘
uni
’ a second ago, I can’t stand hearing other people use
it. It’s like they badly want you to know that they went to university, but at
the same time
are
trying to make light of it so it
doesn’t seem like they’re showing off that much. There.
Got
that off my chest.
Uni.
Uni
,
uni
,
uni.

When I get there, the girl that I share an office with,
Kristin,
is on the phone and waves at me without
looking up. Kristin is from Tauranga in New Zealand. Whenever she talks to
clients on the phone, they always ask her if she’s from South Africa. This
annoys her terribly and I’ve seen her slam the phone down on some hapless
client on more than one occasion. She points to my in-tray where there is a
large stack of letters waiting to be typed up.