Eighteen
Tuesday evening live art class. My heart’s not in it. Probably sounds stupid to suggest that you can put your heart into sitting naked for a bunch of strangers who paid twelve euro to capture you, but you can. I think you can put your heart into almost anything. And you can take it out too.
The student guy that I slept with before Easter, James, is here again. Or is it Henry. He looks like a Henry. He’s all eager beaver, but there’s only one in the room this evening. I’m not in the mood for sex, which is odd for me. I feel tired. Pops called me at 3 a.m. to say the mice were dodging the new traps in the piano. He’d fecked out Gerry’s after he’d betrayed him by telling me about Majella. First thing this morning I’d checked with Posie, our neighbour, Pops hadn’t left the house since I left. I don’t know where he got the new mousetraps and he must have run out of food by now. Posie says she’ll drop some food around and I’ll transfer money into her account. Pops has money of course, or at least I think he does, unless he has more secrets, but if it was his decision, he’d refuse the help.
Posie is the woman who minded me when I was a baby. She took me at four weeks old while Pops worked. She ran an unofficial childcare service from her home that got rumbled when the new laws came in and now has a doggy day-care service instead. She smells of dog biscuits and wet grass. And now I’m asking her to take care of Pops. Funny how the world works. Not haha funny.
Anyway I’m in Monty’s Gallery, sitting on the chair, naked, or nude, or whatever, with no clothes on, my tits out, feeling colder than usual. Legs closed. Doors shut. Do not disturb sign. I didn’t say anything about the heat but Genevieve disappeared from the room and returned with a small heater. It’s facing me now and as I feel the chill leave my bones somebody actually tuts. Maybe it’s because they’ve made a mistake or maybe it’s because they’ve spent most of the session working on almost blue skin, or erect nipples, or goosebumps which have now disappeared. Henry or James is scribbling frantically with charcoal, his tongue hanging out of his mouth like a dog in need of water. I don’t want to think of what he’s drawing but I’m guessing it’s less of what he’s seeing here and more of what he’s fantasising about. Or remembering. I remember a skinny dick. Long pencil dick. He could sketch his picture of me with that. In a way, he does.
The artists pick up on my doom and gloom. Their finished products all have something in common. A pervading sense of sadness. In my face, in my hunched shoulders, my knees pressed together, shut tight, as if to say no one’s coming in, no one’s allowed in. I don’t want to be looked at. Seeing my feelings reflected back to me just makes me feel worse.
Genevieve senses something is up, kindly asks me if I’d fancy going for a drink. I do. At first it’s just me, her, and Jasper but after a while a few people trickle in and the rosé takes effect, loosening my mind and my tongue. I tell them about Rooster, about the five people theory and for the next few hours I listen to them both going through their five people, which takes a long time as they decide anecdote after anecdote who has been more influential than others. As the hours go on and our conversation intensifies and after too much rosé, everything is better than it’s ever been. It’s past midnight by the time we leave. We, being me and a fella whose name and face I can barely remember. I don’t know how we got from the gallery to his place but I remember leaving a cottage in Stoneybatter at 4 a.m., while he’s asleep, so I don’t have to wake up in his bed, and walking the strange streets for a taxi. The dawn journey costs what I earned for posing nude, which I’m not happy about. I stumble from the taxi to the gym in the back of the garden, I think I even bump into the wheelie bins at one point. I remember an alarm sounding, and Donnacha’s arms around me, pulling me up from the ground, while I try to explain to him that I should be left there for the next collection day. But when I wake a few hours later in my bed I wonder what was true and wasn’t. My head is pounding, unbelievable throbbing from all sides, and as soon as I sit up and open my eyes to the April sunlight, I have to run to the toilet to throw up.
I throw up so violently I’m left lying on the floor, my cheek to the tiles in an effort to cool down and steady myself. I feel sick from the alcohol but also with myself, a kind of guilty fear that I’ve done something terribly wrong, that my life has changed forever and something bad is about to happen. The fear. I keep getting flashes of last night. Snippets of conversations, of touches, of glances, or moments entwined. Recollections of things I shouldn’t have said, not aloud, not ever. I heave, over and over again in the shower, barely able to stand up, wanting to get it all out, the alcohol and my thoughts and memories.