Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [68]
“Like this?”
He could only nod.
He sat with his back against the wall, the bricks cool and coarse against his skin, and propped the drawing board against his knees.
His first lines were weak, uncertain. How could they not be? His hand and breathing were unsteady, and he could only bear to look at her in quick, furtive glances.
He erased the effort.
“I can’t do it.”
“Oh, Clem. Please.” She drew the word out childishly. “You can’t give up already. Try again.”
He stared down at the paper.
She said, “It’s because you’re not looking at me.”
“’Course I am.”
“No, you’re not. Not properly.”
So he raised his head. His imagination was so hectic with goatish schoolboy lust that he could not see her. Her seriousness, her concentrated stillness, both aroused and frightened him. Eventually, it was only the fear of disappointing her that forced him to see her as what she was, rather than as something he urgently wanted.
In the strong low light from the little window, she was an almost abstract arrangement of pallor and shade. One half of her hair shone above the pale descending curve of her arm. A bright cheekbone, one bright eye. An unutterably beautiful track of light that was her left shoulder, arm, thigh. Her breasts, two soft, almost luminous, crescents.
“Draw the shadows,” Jiffy always said. “Start from the dark and work inward.” Clem found a 4B pencil and, using it at an angle to the paper, blocked in the darknesses of Frankie’s body, smudging and shaping the lines with his forefinger, cleaning their edges with the eraser. She emerged, ghostly at first, then solidified. Every time he looked up, the light had reduced her. He worked faster, brightening her with chalk.
“My arm’s going to sleep,” Frankie said, not moving her head.
“Hang on. Nearly finished.”
He bluffed the folds of the sleeping bag and leaned back from the drawing, slumping against the brickwork.
No; it hadn’t worked. It was weak. It contained nothing of what he really felt about her.
He scrabbled in the pencil box for the fat 6B pencil and used it to obliterate the tentative lines he’d used to suggest the background. Working quickly, he used his fingertips to press the graphite into the surface of the paper, forming dark clouds that became intensely black where they met the luster of her body. He did the same with the foreground, casting heavy shadows over the nervous cross-hatching meant to suggest straw. He deepened the shading of her lower leg, belly, and left breast.
Yes; he had her now. Or something like her. The old sleeping bag was like an opening in a night sky. She floated in it, burnished by moonlight, not daylight. Dressed in shadows, she seemed utterly naked, confident, expectant.
He had drawn his dream of a night with her.
“Okay,” he said, “you can move now. If you like.”
She sat up, cross-legged, tossed her hair back, massaged her right arm with her left hand. She saw his gaze shift to her bosom. It was a different kind of looking now. She shivered, pretending it was because she was cold, and pulled the sleeping bag around her.
“Well? Are you going to show me or not, Picasso?”
He set the pad down in front of her and rummaged in the pockets of his discarded jeans for the cigarettes and matches. He lit up a Woodbine and went to stare out of the window, not willing to watch her face.
“Gosh.”
He waited.
“It’s nothing like your other drawings. It’s sort of . . . spooky.”
“I told you I wasn’t any good at —”
“Shut up, you idiot. It’s absolutely fabulous. I had no idea.”
“You don’t hev to be nice about it. It don’t even look like you.”
“It doesn’t have to look like me. It is me. It’s beautiful, actually.”
She said it so coolly, so matter-of-factly, that he could not