She grinned and clicked off the lid of her board pen. ‘So,’ she continued, ‘what I might draw for that memory could be the line of trees on the country road. People are hard, so if you’re looking to finish the painting today, I’d steer clear of people, but then I might have the sunlight come through the leaves of the trees.’ She sketched all of this out on the board as she talked, and even though it was just a whiteboard drawing, it still looked good.
‘Or,’ Pippa said, ‘if you’re more interested in object studies, the handle of our old dog’s lead, perhaps with the back of his head, might be good.’ She did another sketch beside the first, with a hand holding a handle and the back of a dog’s head with fluffy ears. I felt cheated. Her sketches were so good that mine would never even come close.
‘I’ve made us a CD for this week’s theme,’ she said, as she pressed play on her CD player. Judy Garland singing ‘C’mon get happy’ crossed the boundaries of space and time to enter our ears.
I felt a heat rise in my chest as everyone around me began drawing.
Walter had picked up one of the pencils and started sketching. He definitely has gardener’s hands. There was a flap of skin coming loose on the knuckle of his first finger. And green stains under his nails. His brow was wrinkled as he pressed hard with his pencil onto the canvas. I wondered what he was drawing for his happiest memory. Perhaps it was the day that he made a wish and turned from a garden gnome into a human. Else was painting long strips of black paint onto her canvas. And Margot was holding her pencil and pulling it across the canvas so lightly that the marks it left behind were like the ghost of a drawing.
My canvas stayed white. I didn’t know what to draw. Being aware of everyone around you successfully getting on with the task at hand is the worst feeling. It’s just like school and it’s itchy.
The first eye was impossibly real as Margot sketched out her happiest memory. It was clear and yet somehow shining. Instead of feeling angry at her for being so good at drawing, I was fascinated. She was capturing something, someone, who in eighty-three years of living she had been the happiest to see.
The tiny hands came next, one curled into a small fist and the other open and stretching out, reaching for us.
The blanket covered the little tummy and there were wisps of hair that stuck out from underneath a yellow hat. The button nose was so real that I couldn’t quite believe she was drawing this from memory. All the while, Margot’s face was soft, as though the baby she was drawing were lying on the table in front of her and she was watching it gurgle and kick and stare up at her with big, learning eyes.
When she was done, it was perfect. Just coloured pencils on canvas; she’d shaded the warmth in the cheeks and the soft blue blanket.
Then she put down the pencil and I saw her, though I don’t think she knew, wipe a tear from her bottom set of eyelashes.
‘Is it a boy?’ I asked.
She nodded.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Davey.’
As Pharrell Williams’s ‘Happy’ forced its way into the room, I picked up a paintbrush. That was a key mistake, I learned later – starting to paint before sketching it out in pencil first. But I didn’t care. I’d remembered something happy and I had to get it down.
While I was painting the memory I could see, I told Margot the story.
?rebro, Sweden, 11th January 1998
Lenni Pettersson is One Year Old
It’s a memory I visit a lot.
It’s my first birthday. My mother has plaited my baby hair wisps on top of my head and secured them with a Minnie Mouse clip. I don’t watch it through my own eyes, but from the perspective of the video camera that frames my face in the shot as I point my finger at things and people, and make incomprehensible noises that are not yet words.
I’m sitting on my father’s lap and looking up at him like he’s the moon. He’s talking to whoever’s holding the camera and as he does, he sways me left and right on his knee and my cackle of delight makes him laugh. He turns to me and says something I’ve never been able to hear on the videotape that makes me point at the table and shout, ‘Da!’
Though daylight is still streaming in through the windows, someone turns off the lights and the cake, with its single candle, glows its way from the kitchen into the living room, my mother’s face illuminated. She places the cake on the table in front of me and kisses me on the top of my head. Then she steps back, standing behind me and my father as though she’s not quite sure what to do with herself. I see her mouth ‘Happy birthday, Lenni’ in English to me, which she never spoke unless absolutely necessary. My father takes hold of my hands so I don’t reach out and touch the flame.