How to Be Both (15 page)

Who made your blue? he says.

I did, I say.

He does a shrug like he doesn’t care who made that blue : he lifts his eyes and looks back at the picture again : he sighs : he gives a little disapproving shake of the head and then he disappears again through the opening in the airy walls.

2 nights later the painting went : I came out in the morning, the workshop was wrecked and ruined as usual but cause I knew my brothers liked their fun I always stored the tools and things that mattered well away : I went down to my mother’s storeroom : the overgrown grass on the path down
the field had been stamped back by more feet than mine : its door was open : the painting was gone and the roll of sketches too (though my father had taken everything else with him to the palace where no one had had the time to see him so he’d brought it all back home again : it was safe in the house, in my mother’s bedroom up on top of the cupboards out of the reach of the mouths of the goat and her babies).

Who knows where it went? The river? A fire? A back room, cut, rolled and squeezed into the gaps between the wall and the window or the door and the floor or hammered into the cracks in the wood or the brick to block out the damp?

(Shining Cosmo, favoured court painter who’ll oust the court painters favoured before you then be ousted in turn by my own beloved apprentice pickpocket (ha!) : bright bejewelled Cosmo old and ill, writing to the last of your Dukes a letter for money cause you’re too ill now for painting and the bishop and the clerk who owe you for the altarpiece and the saint panel are both ignoring your invoices : them so rich and you so poor : green forgotten Cosmo, old then dead, though quite some time after me, of poverty, yes,

but not of the cold,

cause I take my unfinished working of an old old story and unroll it over you, spread it all your
length, tuck you in beneath it and fold its end down under your chin to keep you that bit warmer in the winters of being old –

I forgive you.
)

The girl has a friend.

The friend has a look of my Isotta, very fine, and has arrived in here like a burst of air as if a new door opened itself in a wall where no door was suspected : there’s a kin between them and their hearts are high with it : they are sharp and bright together as the skins of 2 new lemons.

The girl is holding up to her friend the wall she’s made from the many small pictures : her friend is admiring and nodding : she takes a piece and looks closely at a single picture and then at how the picture has been made to become a brick.

One girl takes one end of it and the other takes the other and they measure its length by stretching it across the room : it
is
long, the wall : then into the room like a mischievous small dog comes the little brother who ducks down below the stretch of picture-wall in the middle then knocks into it with his head like a goat or a ram : both girls squeal : they gather it and swing it carefully away from him, drape it in its fragility on the table and place its ends on either side on the floor with no twists in it so it will stay whole : when this is done the girl turns and yells at the brother : he is abashed : he
leaves the room : the girls go back to fussing at the long picture-wall : moments later the brother comes in again carrying 2 cups with something hot in them, steam coming off : a truce, an offering : sure enough, there is a kind of accord : he is to be let to sit in the room with them for bringing them these drinks : he sits good and quiet on the bed as if he has never been anything other.

The girls go back to examining their wall : as soon as they forget he’s there the brother dips his head and his hands into the bag the friend has brought with her : he has found something to eat in there and is ripping at its wrap : both girls hear him and turn and see and shout at him at once, then both stand up and chase him out of the room.

But when they get back –

ruination !

They have put their too-hot cups on the surface of the picture-wall and the cups have spilled a bit when the table got knocked : these cups are stuck to some of the pictures of – what are they of, again? –so much so that to pick a cup up by a handle is also to pick up the whole wall.

Both girls peel the picture-wall off the cups : the studies the cups stuck to are marked from the heat and the spill with 2 perfect circles from the shapes of the bases of the cups.

The girl looks appalled.

She holds up the bit of the wall : she unsticks
with a little knife the 2 studies marked with the circles : she waves the studies in the air as if to dry them.

But the friend takes them out of her hands : she laughs : she holds them both up in front of her eyes like they’re eyes.

Ha ha!

The girl looks astonished : her mouth opens : then it breaks into a smile : then laughter from them both : then both girls take one end of the long wall of pictures each, like they did before but now with its cut-out bricks gone from the middle and they stretch it out across the room again : this time rather than treating it with such care the girl, when the wall is at full stretch, wraps her end of it round her shoulder and tucks it under her arms like a collar or a scarf.

When she sees the girl do this the friend does the same : next moment both girls are shawling themselves in it : they twist themselves round inside the swath of wall until they are both a bristle of pictures like armour over their chests and stomachs and arms and up to their necks : then they twist towards each other as if it is the wall that is bringing them together : they meet wrapped like caterpillars in the middle of the room : but they don’t just meet, they collide : at which the paper wall breaks and as it comes apart its brick-shapes fly off like rooftiles and the girls hit the floor
together in each other’s arms in the mess of the pictures littered round them.

I like a good skilful friend.

I like a good opened-up wall.

I’m doing a portrait now of my brown-eyed friend : what’s his name? I forget his name : you know who I mean, I mean what’s-his-name : his father has died which means he is the official head of his family : he owns all the land and all the ships and has come into all the money : it is an unofficial portrait though cause his wife will not have me paint him officially so to placate me he has asked me to do him too, since official versions are never true, is what he says when I ask him why

(can’t remember his name but I remember pretty clearly my annoyance at his wife)

and I’ve sketched some ships in the far background and come back to the shape of his head again : but my friend, sitting in front of me, is even more restless today than usual : I work on the fold in the undershirt where it prettily tops his collar but with my eye on him today he can hardly sit still.

I know his frustration : I’ve always known it : it is almost as old as our friendship : the walled-up power, the dismay in the air round him like when a storm is unable to break.

But as ever out of kindness he pretends to me to be feeling something else.

He
says he has been infuriated by a story.

It haunts him, he says : he can’t stop thinking about it.

What story? I say.

All stories, he says, really. They’re never the story I need or really want.

I ready the picture : I am quiet : I let the time pass : after a bit he speaks into this silence and tells me the bones of the story.

It’s about a magic helmet which allows its bearer to turn into anything, transform into any shape he likes, all he has to do is put the helmet on his head.

But that’s not the part that maddens him : he likes that part of the story : there’s this other part of the story and it’s about 3 maidens, guardians of a store of gold, and whoever wins the gold from them and forges it into a ring will have power over everything, over the land, the sea, the world and all its peoples : but there’s a snag : there’s a condition : he’ll have all the power, the man who forges the ring, but to keep this power he’ll have to renounce love.

My friend looks at me : he shifts about on the stool : his eyes are blunt and aimed : the everything that he can’t say to me makes him even finer to my eye.

I mark behind where his shoulder will end the curve of the line for the rock where I’ll put the fisherman : over here I’ll put the 2 children with the
fish-spear under the high rock overhang : I mark where his hand will come over the frame at the front : I mark out in rough the little circle shape for the ring his hand will hold.

I just don’t see why, he is saying. Why whoever is brave or lucky enough to win the gold and make it into the ring can’t have both the ring
and
the love.

I nod that I agree and that I understand.

I know now what to make of the rest of the landscape behind him.

Here I am again : me, 2 eyes and a wall.

We are outside a house, have I been here before? There are 2 girls kneeling on the paving.

An old woman, I think I

do I know her? no

has come out and is sitting on the wall watching them : they’re painting, eggs? No, eyes : they’re painting 2 eyes on to a wall : they take an eye each : they begin with the black for the hole through which we see : then they ring the colour round it in segments (blue) : then the white : then the black outline.

An old woman is telling them something : a girl (who is she?) bends down to a pot with white in it, reaches forward, adds a small square of white the size of the end of her fingertip then does the same in the same place to the other eye cause an eye with
no light is an eye that can’t see, I think is what the old woman sitting on a wall is telling

hardly able to hear though cause there’s

            something

                        God knows what

                                            drawing me

                                 skin of my father?

                     the eyes of my mother?

       down to

that thin-looking line

      made of nothing

            ground and grit and the

                    gather of dirt and earth and

                        the grains of stone

                            there at the very foot of this

                                (really badly made just saying)

                     wall at the place where the crumble of

          the brickbase meets the paving

    look

          the line where

                one thing meets another

    the little green almost not-there weeds

                        take root in it

                    by enchantment

              cause it’s an enchanted line

    the line drawn between planes

place of green possibles

    cause whatever they’re doing up there

               eyes painted on a wall

                   it’s
nothing

                       to the tiny and the many

                          variations of colours invisible

            till the eye’s so close it

      becomes the place

where a horizontal line meets a

             vertical and a surface meets a surface and a

                          structure meets another which looks to

                      be 2 dimensions only but is deeper than

              sea should you dare to enter or

     deep as a sky and goes as deep into the

earth (the flower folds its petals down

                    the head droops on the stem)

                          through layered clay on stone

                                mixed by the

                    worms through whose mouths

       everything passes

paddled by the many legs of

       spores so small they’re much

               much finer than an eyelash and

                         are colours only darkness can

                                  make

                              veins like tracery

                                      look

                                         the treebranch thick with

                                            all its leaves before even the

                                   thought of the arrow

                              how

                                    the root in the dark makes its

                                            way
under the ground

                                                   before there’s

                                                        any sign of the tree

                                                  the seed still unbroken

                                          the star still unburnt

                                     the curve of the eyebone

                               of the not yet born

                     hello all the new bones

                  hello all the old

          hello all the everything

  to be

       made and

                  unmade

                                both