Smeared Canvas

 

Smeared Canvas

 

 

He had always envisioned Death as a scarlet-winged creature, a heinous beast with grasping claws and bloodied talons, that swooped down to claim its victims victoriously. Its wings would beat heavily in tempo with the drums pounding in the distance and the victims would either plead for mercy or cry in relief. It would be the latter for him. That winged creature with gnarly fingers was his rescuer, his unwitting angel.

 

That was why he painted them not mottled and hideous as people usually described angels of death, but as reptilian birds with kind, smiling faces. The kind of face you would willingly hand your life over to. They resembled humans and had lovely features, yet they were not quite that. He did not believe that humans could ever look that way. No, humans were ugly. Their hearts were tainted, their souls marred, their minds addled with excess. Death was kinder than them. So in these angels of death, he filled them with violent, almost blinding hues of reds, violets and ochre. He burned shadows in the hollows of their cheeks and contoured their jaw-lines to soften their features. In some pictures, they were waiting before a huge black metal gate, arms akimbo. In others, they were reaching out, as though grasping at something outside the boundaries of the painting.

 

Then came their eyes. He put a lot of effort into getting the eyes right. Eyes revealed the purity of the heart – they almost never lied – and they told you all you needed to know about someone. He remembered the first time he dreamt of those evil-looking ones that kept visiting him subsequently. In the dreams, all they did was peer around, watching, prowling. He imagined a creature biding its time – although for what, he was not sure. Later, he spent hours translating that into his pictures while locked in his room because of yet another transgression that he hardly recalled now. By the time he was finally satisfied with what he had done, the sharp rap on the door ordered him out for dinner.

 

They never knew about his paintings. They must never know.

 

*

 

It probably did not apply to everyone, but she felt like growing old was like graduating from being locked in a cage of bones to a much smaller cage made of steel. Everything was squeezed so much tighter around you that you ached the minute you got up. You waded through tar despite pushing your body the furthest and hardest you could, and everything in you felt like they were on the verge of shutting down any moment.

 

Neil used to say there was nothing that could fight the effects of Time, so we might as well make it our ally, and that it was the driving force of life, and our impetus for living. Of course, it was easy for him to say. He was not the one who had to grow old.

 

Morning light was the best. They cast a soft glow upon everything, and while there was clarity, there was also that sense of not being able to see everything fully, the sense of something being left out, cast into the silhouettes of those we could see clearly. Tone was everything, and she would rip up the paintings where she had messed up the shade of pink behind the trees and redo everything all over.

 

Initially, when they first got married, Neil had voiced his dismay at her insomnia. You’re one of those people who stay up the whole night staring out the window, aren’t you? he had asked. But he always brewed a pot of Earl Grey tea for her before he went to bed.

 

She thought about how ironic it was that she had craved to just be alone all those nights, and now she would give anything to know that someone was sound asleep in bed, after having watched CSI and forgotten – again – to turn off the light in the living room.

 

It was easy to dwell on the past when you were old; it was a symptom and result of being old. After all, you had clocked a lot more years than you had left. What was there to look forward to when you were stuck at home almost everyday, waiting for night to come, nursing your aching joints after standing a minute too long over the stove cooking instant noodles and an egg?

 

She hated the word regret. It made her infinitely sad, if only because it implied that something could never be righted, a life lived wrongly that she had no chance of reliving. People with OCD could go mad just thinking about that. But she truly believed that her biggest regret in all her eighty years of living was to not have any children. At the very least, they filled up that strange vacuum in her home. Dying was probably like this. No fire, no light, no singing, no fanfare. Just a whole lot of nothingness that was enough to drive you nuts. Children would probably delay that effect.

 

That was how she chose to excuse her obsession with that boy living next door. A few years back, maybe ten, she had told Neil how beautiful he was. He was still a toddler then, and there was such radiant light cast upon his face she wanted to paint him. It was better than morning light. This was something special on its own.

 

As he grew older, though, she saw less and less of him. A glimpse of him getting off the school bus, a sliver of him at his study desk in his bedroom. And every time she saw him, he would have lost a little of that lustre she once saw in him all those years ago.

 

It’s a shame, she had bemoaned to Neil one day. I’d like to know what changed him. A bright-looking boy like him can’t have just lost his interest in the world all of a sudden.

 

And he had just told her to mind her own business. He never understood the point of gossip. But it was more than just gossip to her. She had felt a connection to that boy the moment she saw him. He had the eyes of an artist. Children like him did not come along so often, and she could spot the talent residing in him like a lamp. In a way, she felt responsible towards him, towards his well-being. He went home after school, lugging his bulging school bag up to the door, rang the bell and waited to be restored into the rightful hands of his mother. He would have a peanut butter sandwich and an apple, and head upstairs to do his homework. In the evening, he would play football with his father before dinner, and after dinner, he would be in his room again, studying. It seemed healthy enough, but she always felt as though the boy operated more like clockwork than a person.

 

She had never quite dared to speak with him, much as she longed to. Find out what he did in his spare time other than study and play football or basketball with his father, who his friends were, what he planned to do when he grew up, where he most desired to travel. She told herself it was because she did not know how he would take to her, an old lady next to whom he had lived his whole life suddenly plying him with questions. So she stuck to watching him from the safety of her house – watching him, watching over him.

 

*

 

“I hope you realise how much trouble you are in.”

 

He must not sigh, or roll his eyes, or do anything that any teenage boy would do when his parents said that.

 

“Haven’t we been through this enough? You are to come straight home after school if you don’t have practice.”

 

“The bus broke down along the way. It wasn’t my fault,” he ventured, and immediately recoiled. Blame-shifting was not tolerated in any way. The first time he did that was when he was five, and his jeans were soiled from wandering off alone in the muddy field. The ground was wet, he had said, and received a tongue-lashing for retaliating and offering a pitiable excuse for a mistake he should have known better than to make. He was later denied dinner, and locked in his room until morning so he could not sneak food from the fridge at night.

 

Her tone was frigid, a blade of ice drawing blood from his skin. “We’ll see what your father thinks about that.”

 

They played basketball before dinner. He was thankful for this brief moment of normalcy, for he knew what would come at dinner. Dinner was the most important meal of the day – it was when everyone was together and behaved like how a family should. He had begun to tire of these compulsory dinners with the family. It was not like he had anywhere to go, but for some reason, he always left the dinner table exhausted. It was worse that lately, his list of transgressions had grown longer. One strike for acting out, another for arguing, another for defying orders, and another for not responding when being spoken to and speaking without permission.

 

Most boys, he knew, would pack up their bags and just leave. They would get into a huge row with their parents, trying to assert their status, and go off in search of their identity and purpose in this world. But that was not the way it worked with him and his parents.

 

Drying his hair as he stepped out of the bathroom, he braced himself for what was coming. Already he could hear his mother reporting his offence to his father.

 

*

 

She sipped the broth to make sure it was tasty enough, and added more soy sauce. It did not quite matter what she had for dinner these days. Food had been sidelined over time by other more relevant issues. Like when she was actually, finally, going to die.

 

A door slammed, jolting her so that soup splashed down her front. Cursing, she peered out of the window while drying herself. There was someone squatting at the front porch, and another speaking quietly to him. Soon, the squatting figure was hopping down around the perimeter of the house while the other watched on. She was only reminded of what she was supposed to be doing by the urgent sizzle of boiling soup spilling over the rim of the pot. Hurriedly, she turned off the fire and went back to watching. Later, she wondered why it had not occurred to her to stop what he was doing. But right then, she kept on watching until the hopping figure finally stopped. She had lost count of how many rounds he had hopped around the house. The figure wobbled as he got up and went into the house.

 

She sat before her now-cold bowl of noodles, surprised to find a tear splash into it.

 

*

 

He had done it now. Now he would pay for it. It was not just the squat hops or the seizure of television and phone privileges. Those he could still live with. The worst punishment was the possibility of them discovering his tools, his works. He felt that familiar sense of fear grip him as it did every time they searched his room, determined to find something – anything – contraband. He had wondered, several times now, why he always felt himself at their mercy. He was bigger than his mother and almost as strong as his father – there was no need to fear them. But it was only today, at the supply store, that he realised what exactly was at stake. They will never understand his need to paint – that outlet for everything that was stewing inside him. When he was four and woke them up in the middle of the night because of that thing under his bed, his father made him sleep under his bed until he came to learn there was nothing there. Real men challenge their fears, he had told him, not cry and moan about it. They toughen themselves up so they can fight it, not just talk about how scary it is. By his logic, then, painting fell into the activities of weaklings because painting was not a way to toughen himself up to face his fears. How could they ever understand?

 

They began with the drawers. It was a methodical affair – his father would check his clothes drawer while his mother searched everything else, bookracks, study desk and bedside table.

 

His mother frowned, bending over to scrutinise a spot of yellow paint on the floor. “What’s this?” She scrapped it with her a ruler from his study desk.

 

“I don’t know.”

 

She looked up at him, and an interminable silence stretched into the night as he waited for it to be over. “Well, how did it get here, then?”

 

“I don’t remember.”

 

She stood up and stared at him. He tried to blink naturally. “When you’re ready to, let us know.”

 

 

*

 

It was probably all her fault; she had brought that unnecessarily unkind punishment upon him. She had seen that he was in a hurry, so why on earth did she stop him for a chat? Of all days to do so!

 

Still, she could not shake away that gamut of emotions she had experienced when she spoke to him today. There was delight and pity and so much else. That boy who caught the light every time he smiled was lost, driven deep into the mire of frosty glares and barked orders. His parents are strange, she always remarked to Neil. They never let him speak to anyone – not even me! As if there might even be any chance of me hurting him.

 

In the supply store, the boy had rushed in, headed straight to Aisle 5, the paintbrushes aisle, and clicked his tongue as he searched for the ones he needed. She had considered briefly if it was a good time to approach him, and decided now was as good a time as any if she were ever going to start.

 

“So, you paint?” It sounded like a stupid thing to say even to her, and he caught her in a grimace. Maybe he knew she already knew.

 

He nodded slowly.

 

“What sort?”

 

He shrugged. “The usual watercolour sort. I just do it for fun.”

 

“I paint too, but I deal with oil ones. So what do you usually paint?” She had sensed there was something he did not wish to tell her, so she went on, “I prefer painting people. People – they’re always changing, you know? The way the light hits them, the set of their jaw and the slant of their eyelids – nothing’s always the same. I used to like to paint my husband, until he got so tired of seeing his face on every inch of our house.”

 

“Don’t you sell them?”

 

She was delighted at him having posed a question. “Oh, never. It seems weird to put your work out there for people to see, you know, much less trade for money? It’s like selling part of your soul away.”

 

He nodded. She could tell he wanted to hear more, but was really pressed for time. So she stuck out her wrinkled hand and simply said, “Well, I’m Beatrice.”

 

He took it. His hand was warm, strong. “Sam.” For all the life she felt in those confident hands, she should have seen some of that in his eyes too. But she found none, not a spark.

 

“It’s been nice talking to you, Sam.”

 

“You too, Beatrice.”

 

As she watched him leave the store, after grabbing a flat brush and a pointed wash brush, she wondered if he knew she had been his neighbour for seventeen years.

 

*

 

It felt almost liberating. The idea of his parents not knowing a fraction – just that one fraction – of his life made him drunk. Finally, there was some part of him that they could not claim. Finally, there was some part of him that they had no say over, if only because they knew nothing about it.

 

That was probably the reason why he told them he had joined the school’s debating team and had to stay in school for meetings on Wednesdays. He loved the idea of being just next door at Beatrice’s house, exchanging pointers on stroke technique and texture, and his mother being oblivious to his activities. He loved sitting in her attic, watching the sunlight streaming in, as he and Beatrice painted away at their respective easels.

 

Beatrice, too, was strangely enthusiastic about him coming over. She prepared an elaborate tea for the both of them whenever he came over, and never failed to extend an invitation for dinner even though he always declined. Her concern for him puzzled him, and he wondered – more than once – how he could have missed her presence all these years. All he knew about her was that she lost her husband a year ago, and sometimes still spoke of him in the present tense, as though expecting him to come through the front door with baguettes in his arms like he always did. He knew he always bought supplies for her whenever he saw that she was running low on them, and that she would paint out the feast he cooked them for dinner, just for the hell of it.

 

He was sorry he could not tell her more stories about his life – not because his parents did not allow him to, but because there was nothing much to tell. As he racked his brain for something remotely interesting to regale her with, he realised how unquestioningly he had fallen into the routine set up for him ever since he was a boy. Who wanted to know what he was studying for Geography in school now, or when his next soccer competition was coming up?

 

But it seemed like she really did. She would pause midway through her painting and lay her brush down on the easel when he talked about his longing to backpack through Europe, Scandinavia, Asia – visit the Louvre Museum and the Colosseum, witness the grandeur of the Taj Mahal and the splendour of the Swiss Alps. She would stop painting and stare at him intensely while he spoke of how he saw those demons in his dreams, the angel-faced creatures that he actually looked forward to meeting at the end of everything, as though she had just discovered something so earth-shattering it pained her to not have anyone else to share it with. That was when he would stop.

 

Lately, he had been debating over whether or not to tell her of his master plan. The one where he would leave the house the minute he turned eighteen. His exams would be over, so it was not like he was being irresponsible or anything. He would steal out into the night and book it out of the country by daybreak. The mere thought of it made him quiver all over with quiet excitement.

 

He used his thumb to blend the navy-blue hues into the cerulean ones. The backdrops of his dreams were not golden and fiery-red these days – they had become blue, sometimes green. He recognised those colours; he understood what his subconscious was telling him. Those were not the colours of anger and hate. Those were the colours of freedom, the colours he had never quite dared to use.

 

*

 

He always stayed up till two in the morning, pored over his paintings in the corner of his room, aided only by the weak lamp at his study desk. It was shocking how much that boy could feel, could see, could dream. She had always known he was special, but not like this. Neil would have loved the boy. He always liked people who loved to travel, for he was quite a traveller himself before his knees put a stop to that.

 

If that was what having children was like, then to hell with living life without regrets – she wished she had been able to conceive. At least, she would not be left behind. Again. The boy was leaving tomorrow night. She thought she would have grown used to the cycle of having and losing by now, but the hurt was always fresh. How ironic was it that after seventeen years, when she had finally started to know the boy, he was setting out on his own voyage into the wilderness while she was left behind waiting for the night to claim her?

 

A flash of light made her snap back to the boy. He scrambled up from his chair, his fingers still stained with paint. They had found them. All his works. She was willing to bet his parents had stayed up to find out what he was up to. They had stepped up their inspection of him and kept a sharper eye fixed on him ever since they found that speck of paint on the floor. She understood then why he wanted to leave so badly. The boy was almost eighteen, for crying out loud! If his plan really succeeded, she would not feel sorry for his parents at all.

 

But that seemed unlikely at the moment. They were rummaging through his portfolio, pulling out each one, staring at them in outrage and disappointment, and then flinging them halfway across the room, making exclamations with flailing hands and mottled faces. It was the most agitated she had ever witnessed of them.

 

She did not think of herself as a particularly sentimental person, but what made her start crying was the look on his face. It was the look of a boy with his last shred of dream crushed, his only form of escape denied. He made no move to stop his father as he pulled out a lighter, held out the stack of paintings and set them on fire. His face was set in stone, his eyes shadowed with helplessness as a tear bled down his face.

 

As the flame curled the papers into frail black bits that crumbled eventually, she forgot how sad she had been just a moment ago. She just wished he would take off as soon as he possibly could.

 

*

 

He intended to travel light. And it was a lot lighter now that all his paintings were gone. He just wished he had managed to save at least one for Beatrice.

 

The door was locked, so he slipped the half-finished drawing under the door. I’ll come back to finish this with you, he had written on the back. They would fill it up with the colours they had learnt to use, fill it up with the morning light she had taught him to see, and watch as the sun lit up the dust in her attic. Some day, he will come back for that. Promises were better than goodbyes, anyway.

 

*

 

It was the first night in a long time that she had actually fallen asleep. When she woke up and blinked blearily around, she thought it had to be a mistake.

 

Everything felt different. Yes, she was at the kitchen table where she always sat. She must have fallen asleep there. And yes, it was morning and it was bright out. But there was something still about the air, as though everything was holding its breath. She got up from the chair, and found that her bones were not giving her the usual problems. In fact, she could almost swear she was floating, drifting along the floor.

 

There was the drawing of the house lying on her kitchen table, held in place with the bowl of instant noodles she had for dinner last night. The drawing was raw, but pure and beautiful nonetheless. She had read the message on the back so many times that she could remember the way his letters curved and arched and leaned against each other. It was a good thing he had not come to say goodbye – she would have fallen apart. Besides, promises were a hell lot better than goodbyes.

 

Footfalls pattered towards her. She could recognise them anywhere. Could it be?

 

She turned to look.

 

“Oh, Neil.” And there he was, in those ratty pyjamas that he loved to wear everywhere even though she bought him new pants every month.

 

“You arty types, always taking your time.” He glanced over at her still vessel lying asleep – forever – at the kitchen table, and then beamed at her, stretching out his arms. “It’s been a long while, Bea.”

 

“Hasn’t it.” As she rested again him, she turned to stare at the pink light that glowed behind the trees, willing the tears not to fall.

Reviews

[Dave "Doc" Rogers]

Raven,
This was a pretty good story. I liked it. It may not be the cup of tea for mass market but it was full and carried some depth. The character dev and insight was good. I liked the way it built. I also liked how you created environments and personality ... depth to your characters.

My one critique [beyond 'again' should be 'against' in the last sentence] is the transitions between the points of view narratives. Those could have been cleaner. I found myseld having to re-read in a couple of spots to see who was narrating, Bea or Sam.

All in all, a good write and a good story. Thanks for sharing this. We story writers need to stick together. Wot?

Cheers!
Doc.