Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [48]
Lin had persuaded Mr. Motley to let her work in the attic of his Bonetown base. It was the only place with natural light in the whole building, she had discovered. It was not only painters or heliotypists who needed light: the textures and tactility of surfaces that she evoked so assiduously in her gland-art was invisible by candlelight, and exaggerated in gasjets. So she had wrangled with him nervously until he had accepted her expertise. From then on, she was greeted at the door by the cactus valet and led to the top floor, where a wooden ladder dangled from a trapdoor in the ceiling.
She came and went into the attic alone. Whenever Lin arrived she would find Mr. Motley waiting. He would stand in the enormous space a few feet from where she pulled herself into his view. The triangular cavity seemed to stretch at least a third the length of the terrace, a study in perspective, with the chaotic agglutination of flesh that was Mr. Motley poised at its centre.
There were no furnishings. There was one door leading to some little corridor outside, but she never saw it open. The attic air was dry. Lin trod over loose boards, risking splinters with every step. But the dirt on the large dormer windows seemed translucent, admitting light and diffusing it. Lin would gently sign for Mr. Motley to position himself below the wash of sun, or cloudlight. Then she would pace around him, reorienting herself, before continuing with her sculpture.
Once she had asked him where he would put a life-size representation of himself.
“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” he had answered with a gentle smile.
She stood before him and watched the lukewarm grey light pick out his features. Every session before she started she would spend some minutes making herself familiar with him again.
The first couple of times she had come here, she had been sure that he changed overnight, that the shards of physiognomy that made up his whole reorganized when no one was looking. She became frightened of her commission. She wondered hysterically if it was like a task in a moral children’s tale, if she was to be punished for some nebulous sin by striving to freeze in time a body in flux, forever too afraid to say anything, starting each day from the beginning all over again.
But it was not long before she learnt to impose order on his chaos. It felt absurdly prosaic to count the razor-sharp shards of chitin that jutted from a scrap of pachyderm skin, just to make sure she had not missed one in her sculpture. It felt almost vulgar, as if his anarchic form should defy accounting. And yet, as soon as she looked at him with such an eye, the work of sculpture took shape.
Lin would stand and stare at him, switching focus rapidly from visual cell to cell, her concentration fleeting across her eyes, gauging the aggregate that was Mr. Motley through the minutely changing parts. She carried dense white sticks of the organic paste she would metabolize to make her art. She had already eaten several before arriving, and as she took the visual measure of him, she would chew rapidly on another, stolidly ignoring the dull, unpleasant taste, and rapidly passing it through her headbody to the sac inside the hindpart of her headthorax. Her headbelly would swell visibly as she stored up her mulch.
She would turn and pick up the beginnings of the work, the three-toed reptile claw that was one of Mr. Motley’s feet, and she would tie it into place on a low bracket. Then she would turn back and kneel, facing her subject, opening the little chitin case protecting her gland and fastening the nether lips at the rear of her headbody with a gentle slup onto the edge of the sculpture behind her.
First, Lin would gently spit a little of the enzyme that broke down the integrity of the already hardened khepri-spit, returning the edge of her work-in-progress to a thick sticky mucus. Then she would focus hard on the section of the leg she was working on, taking in what she could see and remembering