The Dark Corner
The room has been emptied apart from a child’s wooden chair and two rusty tins of emulsion. My toes tap as I walk across the wooden floor to view, for the last time, the painting on my bedroom wall. I look at the corner of the room and remember the small table where we used to place the tray of homemade cakes and orange squash. No one could ever replicate the powdery taste of my mother’s pastry which clogged the mouth in a delicious satisfying way. Now at 80 she has moved into a home where she is given cakes in foil wrappers and tepid watery tea.
Soon the house will be invaded by strangers. I had come to paint over my wall
Julie had painted the mural 36 years ago, when we had both been 16 and still believed we could be famous and whatever we did, mattered.
With breathless excitement we had both stared at the blank wall, conjuring in our imaginations the masterpiece which would emerge from her talent with a paintbrush and my visionary inspiration.
At the time I knew very little about art although Blake’s ‘Newton’ had been on the school assembly wall along with Salvador Dali’s ‘Crucifixion’, separated by a wooden panel embossed with the school’s motto ‘Dare to Do Right’ This was a secondary modern school on a rough council estate in the early seventies and they were trying hard to inspire its recalcitrant pupils.
I had the spirit of Blake within me and I wanted my wall to be a vision of hope. I imagined an outstretched omniscient hand shedding white light onto a new world, there would be Isadora Duncan figures dancing and celebrating the joy of this first dawn, dipping perfect hands into crystal waters.
Yet there could not be perfection without its counterpart and in the corner I envisaged a representation of Satan, a sick despicable figure with rank weeds for hair and a slime green body, barred from the light, biding his time.
My parents were kind and generous; giving Julie a wall to experiment with and paying for all the material. It was something her parents would never have dreamt of. She shared a bedroom with her two younger sisters and in their small council house there was very little free wall space amongst the David Cassidy and Osmond’s posters for Julie to shine or even glimmer as an artist. She had difficulty persuading them to let her spend evenings round our house with her pots of paints; they expected her help with child minding and dish washing.
I never realised at the time what a peaceful haven Julie must have found our house where there was just me, mum, dad and an older brother who occasionally returned from a university in the North. I did not go round to Julie’s very often but when I did I always returned with a headache and a gratitude for a house not littered with tumbling, squabbling bodies.
I loved my room; retreat, refuge, a sanctuary from a world where self consciousness blazed within me.
My face constantly betrayed me. Every time an adult spoke to me on even the most mundane topics I would blush, though blush is too delicate, gentle a word to describe the fiery scarlet rash which in seconds would stain my cheeks and spatter down my neck and chest. At its worse even my eyes filled with tears and my nose became blocked with mucus.
I tried to convince myself that perhaps I didn’t look as red and awful as I felt but then, once, I came into the classroom 10 minutes late after a dental appointment, only to hear, Dave Cheshunt, the good looking bully of the class, say to his mate in a loud voice,
‘Here she comes, Bessie Beetroot. You could burn yer chips on that face!’
Everyone, even the teacher, laughed.
The only adult who understood was Mrs Simons, my English teacher; I gave my work to her in secret after class had finished and she would return it with copious notes in the margins.
I would savour and learn from her wise words of praise and advice, safe in my bedroom, away from the punishing arena.
Julie was my ‘best’ friend, a term which denoted a fierce loyalty, love and comradeship no one else would ever come close to. She had short mousey hair and doleful mud brown eyes. When she concentrated she would stroke her tongue over her full rose lips. We shared the same humour, laughing at things duller mortals would not find remotely funny. Neither of us had boyfriends and the nearest we’d come to intimacy with a boy was a quick snog in the corner of the school disco hall. We talked a lot about boys and waited for them to discover us.
We lived opposite ends of Chantry Estate but most weekends were spent together after she had completed her chores. We went on walks in the nearby countryside round Belsted Brook both of us armed with notebooks, Julie for her drawing, me for my poetry. Evening time whilst my parents were visiting relatives we would listen to folk, classical and Tubular Bells on the polished teak radiogram. Julie would talk a lot about John Ashton, her art teacher and what he had said about her work.
I felt a slight pique when she told me that she had discussed ‘our wall’ with him and had sought his advice about colours etc. This was our creation; nothing to do with him.
June 14th 1970 was the start date for the painting; it was never finished, never signed by the artist as it should have been.
Our first night was so exciting. As she opened the new bright tins of paint, anticipation tingled inside me, new worlds quivered into being.
While Julie painted I read to her, to us. I trusted Julie absolutely but I was still nervous at hearing my own voice for the first time in the stillness of the room where there was only the gentle slap of paint on plaster or, in the very quiet moments, just the sound of Julie’s concentrated breathing as she filled in the detail on her dancing figures.
I read from Dylan Thomas’ Collected works, the rich cloth of his language wrapping itself round our exposed adolescent spirits, we hugged his words in all their triumph and tragedy and they warmed our very soul.
‘From loves first fever to her plague, from the soft second
And to the hollow minute of the womb
From the unfolding to the scissored caul’.
Years later as an undergraduate I learnt to dissect, decipher and write clever essays on such things as the intentional fallacy of ‘Do not go gentle’ and analyse the poem as a cathartic exercise but then it was of no consequence that I didn’t understand every word or recite his poetry with the correct intonation with all the right pauses.
Gradually the picture began to take shape, a vibrant palette of colours emerged from the gloom.
One dancer wore blue robes of the deepest night and the lightest of mornings. Another’s robe was like the orange of a child’s party balloon or the vitamin C tablets my mum gave me every morning.
The nearest most prominent dancer was modelled on me, or the beauty I might have become; her corn field hair flowing in the gentle breeze, slim white arms reaching into the pool of life, the secret of eternity at her fingertips.
My grey bedroom wall was transformed into a celebration of life, a bursting forth of creation.
For her A Level art project Julie was doing a painting based on the idea of cogs, wheels and machinery which stretched almost the length of the art classroom. She was getting special tuition from Mr. Ashton and although I knew it was immature I could not help feeling a jealousy towards him and the painting she was doing for him, not me. It seemed increasingly to consume more of her thoughts than our creation.
Perhaps she sensed my upset as one Thursday she suggested she came round for an extra evening after she had given in her art portfolio.
I waited for ages at the gates and I thought she must have forgotten or else I’d missed her and she was already at my house.
The art building was deserted apart from the cleaner with her trailing noisy vacuum.
Julie’s wall display was complete; the paint still glistened. I walked towards the open door of the store cupboard and the first thing I saw was a white leg which looked as though it had become detached and was suspended in the air. As I moved closer I realised it was Julie’s leg and Mr Ashton was pressed between her parted thighs; his trousers round his ankles; his hands cupping her small pale breasts.
I looked into Julie’s eyes and saw not shame or surprise but anger and contempt. I was the unwelcome intruder who had stolen her secret, violated her privacy.
Her betrayal thumped me in the pit of my stomach. Quickly I turned and walked away, swallowing the vomit rising in my throat.
Julie didn’t call that night and when my mum asked why she hadn’t been to finish the painting; I said she had been off sick from school.
Apart from English lessons I wasn’t in the same classes as Julie and therefore we didn’t have to see very much of each other. Most of her breaks were spent in the art rooms rather than the common room.
The next day was Saturday and when I heard the doorbell; my legs were shaking as I answered.
She looked and spoke the same and yet a stranger had walked through the door.
I started to read Thomas’ short story ‘Extraordinary Little Cough’ but all I could hear was my own voice, self conscious, squeaky and ridiculous; Julie painted for ten minutes and then put her brush down. The dark figure in the corner was only half finished.
She made some excuse about having a headache and coming back next week to finish the rest off.
We avoided each others eyes. As she passed me sitting on my chair she handed me her painting shirt covered with the myriad daubs of colour from our wall.
For a long while after she left I held the cloth close to my face breathing in its scent of dry paint, cotton fibres and Julie’s beautiful skin.
I have returned now to paint over my wall. The paintbrush, thick with emulsion, lies heavy in my hand.
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