Picture Imperfect Read online

  Picture Imperfect

  Nicola Yeager

  © Nicola Yeager 2013

  Nicola Yeager has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Friday 13th

  Saturday 14th

  Sunday 15th

  Monday 16th

  Tuesday 17th

  Wednesday 18th

  Thursday 19th

  Friday 20th

  One Year Later

  Yes Chef No Chef

  Friday 13th

  Wouldn’t it be handy if men could be genetically engineered to have their personality types grafted onto their foreheads in some way or other? A small disk, maybe. Nothing too obtrusive or freaky. I was thinking of maybe something like traffic light colours. It would go something like this:

  Red – Self-obsessed, unhinged, narcissistic, psychopathic and serially unfaithful. A bastard. Good for one night stands if fit looking.

  Amber – Passable, OK body, OK job, OK looking and borderline boring. Never overdrawn. Likes football and other tedious man stuff.

  Green – Witty, caring, handsome, intelligent, great ass, ingenious lover, loves life but loves you more. Takes you to Paris on Valentine’s Day.

  I’m sure there are lots of other things you could stick in each colour category if you could be bothered (I certainly can’t), but I think that’ll do for the moment to give you the basic idea.

  Yes, I realise that some of them would grow a long fringe to avoid their coloured disk being seen, but if you were that interested, you could always gently sweep away their hair without it seeming like some sort of eccentric sensual/sexual come-on. Of course, someone with a red disk would think it was exactly that and would start groping your bottom.

  The only problem with this idea is that men would probably want us girls to have something similar, so that’s where it all falls down. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want my potential as a prospective mate to be available for the bloke in the off license to peruse. Let alone the window cleaner. Or my parents.

  Now take Mark. Mark is my boyfriend/partner thing. We’ve been living together for two years and it seems to be going OK. Mark, though, would definitely have the amber disk on his forehead. He’s a nice enough guy, he’s not morbidly obese, he talks vaguely about having a family one day (but not yet, obviously), and he looks alright.

  He does, however, have few features that bug me, and he certainly isn’t perfect. He’s a little bit of a control freak, I suppose. Or maybe it’s anally retentive. I’m not sure which. I’m not a psychiatrist. He doesn’t like mess. He doesn’t like wasting money. He doesn’t like spending money. He likes things to be exactly as he wants them to be, which can get a little annoying sometimes. I’m trying to think of an example, but they’re all so petty that it’s quite difficult.

  Ah yes. The shopping. He makes a list about once a week. Usually it’s me that goes and gets it. If there’s something he wants and it has to be a definite make, flavour, price deal or whatever, then he… let me give you an example. Here’s a bit of a made-up Mark list I’ve prepared specially for you:

  Bread (not some weird posh bread)

  Milk, semi-skimmed (Chloe – not the organic stuff, please!)

  Spaghetti (supermarket’s own make, Chloe, please)

  Shampoo (My one not yours. You still have a little bit left)

  Mince (low fat – remember we had to take the last lot back??)

  Tinned Tomatoes (if v.cheap)

  Get the picture? It’s the small things, isn’t it?

  I start thinking about things like this when I’m painting. I don’t mean the decorating the flat sort of painting, I mean painting painting. Even though I haven’t been making a great deal of money from it recently and I have to temp as a secretary two days a week, I’m actually a real, proper artist.

  At least that’s how I think of myself. Not that it means very much sometimes, but I went to Art College for four years and studied Fine Art. I’ve actually got a degree in it, for what it’s worth.

  Now what this usually means in the real world is that you’re going to be an art teacher. It’s like some terrible pre-destined prison sentence of the soul. Most people who study Fine Art (as opposed to graphic design, where there are comparatively loads of jobs when you qualify) end up either teaching or doing something that’s nothing at all to do with art, like working in a fish gutting factory, being a chiropodist, worming dogs or flogging insurance. Or, worse than all of those put together (if you can imagine such a job), temping.

  The problem is that most people don’t spend their spare money on original art. It’s the luxury item’s luxury item, if such a thing can be said to exist. And I’ll bet most people can’t name ten famous UK contemporary artists. And famous is really what you have to be if you want to make a living from it. Famous or notorious; either will do if you want to be able to take expensive holidays abroad, live in a big house and drive around in a flash sports car.

  Not that a proper artist like me would be interested in any of those things, of course, unless they were forced upon me at gunpoint.

  And I’ve made it worse for myself in a way. There is a fair living to be made if, for example, you paint people’s portraits. There are always wealthy egomaniacs around who want to be immortalised in oil (An oil painting, that is. Not Waitrose Ground Nut oil or similar.), and even though that kind of art is not going to change the world or reflect the artist’s inner turmoil, I’m sure it can still be lucrative and pretty satisfying in some way that I can’t bring myself to appreciate.

  But abstract art is another thing altogether. I’m not very good at describing my own work, so I’ll use Mark’s words (which he thinks are original and funny): ‘Huge blobs and slashes of paint that don’t make sense at all and aren’t about anything at all and that a five year old could probably replicate when it was asleep.’

  Does that give you the idea? About my painting style, that is, not Mark. Though it probably gives you some idea about Mark, as well. To be fair to Mark, though, I don’t really appreciate what he does, either. He lectures in banking at a sixth form college. Now, that may sound like the sort of job that would have you trying to chainsaw your body in half after five minutes, but it’s not bad pay and I believe that he gets some sort of satisfaction out of it. I don’t mind him doing it at all, just as long as he doesn’t talk about it for even a millisecond when he gets home in the evening, though even that would be slightly too long.

  Anyway, the crux of the matter is that I do actually sell my paintings. I think I should put that another way: I have actually sold paintings in the past. I haven’t sold any recently. Perhaps I should use another word that isn’t ‘recently’. ‘Recently’ sounds like I might not have sold any for, say, seven weeks. I think that’s about the period of time that ‘recently’ refers to. ‘Have you seen Julie?’ ‘Not recently.’ ‘Ah. That means you haven’t seen her for about seven weeks!’ ‘That’s right! How did you know that??’ ‘Because that’s what recently means!’

  See?

  The truth is, I haven’t sold a painting for eight months and am wholly reliant on my two days temping a week for what I jokingly refer to as ‘money’. I’m also, as you might have surmised, not a little reliant on Mark at the moment.

  Part of the problem is that I’m a girl painter and girl painters don’t have a really big reputation in abstract art, which many folk don’t want to buy anyway. The other problem is that I have an agent, whose job, she keeps insisting, is to sell my art to willing and/or gullible buyers. She takes a commission and she wants that commission to be large so she can pay for expen
sive Patek Philippe watches for her toy boys. To get that large commission, she has to charge a lot for my paintings and when people hear the phrase ‘a lot’ it can often put them off. It would certainly put me off. ‘A lot.’ There. You see? Put me off immediately.

  Whenever I do get paid, though, it can seem like quite a lot of money. Mark always said I should invest it (after I’ve paid him back for my share of the rent, gas, electricity, phone bill, shopping, petrol etc etc), but what he fails to realise (and him a lecturer in banking, too!) is that I have to make it last for ages, maybe months and months, and buy art equipment with it (and bottles of wine, rose and violet crèmes, tarty perfume, batteries and other essentials). I tried to make him think of it as a normal yearly salary that you get in big erratic, unpredictable (bad word for Mark) amounts instead of at the end of each month or week, but he just stared at me. His banker’s stare, I call it. You heard me correctly. I said ‘banker’s stare’ and not what you were thinking.

  For Mark, the very idea of doing any work that you may never be paid for seems like unbridled insanity. I tell him that’s how great things are done and he just snorts.

  At the moment, I’m working on two big pieces (very cool, arty term for ‘pictures’) that are causing me a lot of trouble. That’s a lie, actually. I said two big pieces. What I mean is that my agent (whose name is Rhoda) gave me two huge canvases as a birthday present about three months ago (I’d have preferred some DVDs or a leather jacket) and I’m meant to turn them into two big pieces that she can sell. She thought it might encourage me to produce something fantastic. I think she felt sorry for me.

  So far, I’m trying to fill just one of them with something exciting, violent, thrillingly sexual, doomy and masochistic that Rhoda can flog to whomever. It’s not going well. I’ve already obliterated six weeks of work with another two weeks of work and I’m still not happy. ‘Take your time’, she said. ‘Let it flow. Put yourself into it. Go with your emotions and something fab will come out, I just know it.’

  Mark is, of course, very interested in how much money I’m spending on paint, which, of course, is the semi-skimmed, low fat, non-organic type which I can only buy if it’s cheap.

  Both canvases, one in a state of crisis and one blank, are currently residing in what I laughingly refer to as my studio. Let me give you the layout of our flat first. There’s a kitchen, a small bathroom, a toilet (this is immediately next door to the bathroom, for those of you who are interested in such things), a living room and two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms, the one we don’t sleep in, is filled up with Mark’s man stuff, which seems to consist mainly of various magazines dating back to the early nineteen nineties and bits of old computer game hardware that he can’t bring himself to throw away, a broken exercise bike and other stuff that I can’t identify.

  ‘A spare bedroom!’ I can hear you thinking. ‘What a good but cramped and inconvenient location for an artist’s studio!’ Well, you’d be right, but it’s never worked out that way.

  When you come in through the front door of the flat, on your immediate left is the spare bedroom and on your next left is the toilet. It is in that narrow, ill-lit, entrance-hall type area that my studio resides.

  It’s a bit of a major pain in the first place, but on top of that, I have to clear everything up every day and make it look as if I’d never been there. Mark doesn’t like mess, as I’ve already mentioned. Among other tedious things, this involves putting a B&Q plastic tarpaulin thingy on the floor to avoid paint getting on the carpet. I can hear it when I walk on it and it drives me crazy. I’ve never got used to that awful crinkling sound. I’m sure Picasso never had to put up with this sort of thing.

  It could be worse, of course. I could be one of those crazy old-style abstract artists who chuck entire buckets of paint at the canvas, but this would be a difficult thing to do when you don’t have room to swing a cat, and believe me, I would swing one if I could. They give me terrible sneezing fits whenever I’m near them and I was once lightly scrammed on the back of the leg as a child, if you can still be classified as a child when you’re nineteen.

  As it happens, I’m in the process of tidying up at the moment as Mark is due back from work soon and doesn’t like to see the mess. He doesn’t like the smell of oil paint, either, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I’ve got one of those smelly things with sticks poking out of the top that you get in the supermarket (Magnolia and vanilla flavour, I think) and that’s as far as I’m going. Besides, I’ve always like the smell of oil paint. It’s got a faint odour of bohemian living about it mixed up with a pleasing whiff of a dissolute, mis-spent life in nineteenth century Paris.

  As it’s Friday, I give all my brushes an extra-special clean and actually dry them off properly using extra soft Velvet tissues and the hairdryer. I never work at the weekends. Mark doesn’t like it.

  Half an hour later, I hear Mark’s key in the lock and, as usual, he opens the door really quickly, as if he’s trying to catch me out in the middle of some unsuitable activity with a well-muscled artist’s model (chance would be a fine thing). But he doesn’t have to worry about that because a) I don’t use artist’s models, b) I couldn’t afford one even if I did and c) If I was going to bonk one, I’d probably book both of us into a posh hotel for an obscene weekend. Does that sound like I’ve been fantasising?

  Mark is a little later than usual, which is unusual for him. He is a creature of habit, which is a good thing and a bad thing. Don’t ask me to elaborate.

  ‘Hello, gorgeous!’ He walks over and kisses me on the cheek and then, as if suddenly remembering that I’m meant to be his girlfriend and that we sometimes have sex, on the mouth. He seems in an unusually good mood and I’m wondering if he’s been promoted or something. What could you get promoted to if you lecture in banking? Not having to lecture in banking ever again under any conceivable circumstances for as long as you lived would seem like a pretty good promotion to me.

  He walks past me while reaching into his briefcase and pulling out a bottle of wine. Obviously there is something to celebrate, then. He places it on the kitchen surface and nods at it. ‘Thought we could have that with dinner tonight! Have you made anything yet?’

  ‘Not really. I’ve been working.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Of course. D’you want to get a takeaway tonight, then?’

  A takeaway! It must be a promotion. Mark would never fork out for something that could be made more cheaply at home. It would be an act of insanity. What would be the point? Maybe he’s been asked to lecture in banking and accountancy.

  An hour and a bit later, we’ve polished off the wine along with a Murgh Shakoti, a tiger prawn Jalfrezi, a vegetable Sagwalla, two Pilau rices and a Keema nan. I’m so full I can hardly speak. Luckily, Mark doesn’t find speaking quite as hard.

  ‘So how’s the painting been going today? Any progress?’

  I try and think about what I’ve been doing on that damn canvas. I go into such a trance when I’m painting that I often can’t immediately bring to mind any specifics.

  ‘It’s been OK. Um. I’ve painted over some bits I wasn’t happy with and…’

  ‘You’ll never guess who I bumped into today?’

  I do a quick mental check. It’s difficult. I can’t imagine Mark bumping into anyone. The very idea of Mark bumping into someone smacks of the unexpected, the unpredictable. Randomly bumping into someone is definitely not a Mark thing. He sounds so excited that I have to assume it was some major celebrity. I try to think of who might be hanging around at a loose end in the area between Mark’s college and the tube station.

  Kate Moss? George Clooney? Monica Bellucci? Bonio from U2?

  ‘I don’t know. Who did you bump into?’

  Catherine Zeta Jones? Benedict Cumberbatch? Lady Gaga? Rachel Weisz?

  ‘Only Danny Crump!’

  Danny Crump. I knew it had to be someone big, but I hadn’t been expecting Danny Crump.

  ‘Who’s Danny Crump?’

  Mark looks
at me as if I’ve just said ‘Who is Tom Cruise?’ or ‘Who were The Beatles?’ or ‘What is The Queen?’

  ‘Danny! I must have mentioned Danny. We were at college together. We used to go out drinking quite a lot. He was a real laugh. Top bloke. He wasn’t on my course, though. He did town planning.’

  Well that’s a relief. Two young students of banking hitting the town at the same time - it’d definitely be overtime for the local police. Mark continues to enthuse about The Crump. I notice he’s not making eye contact with me.

  ‘I’m sure I must have mentioned him to you. We used to have a great time together. Mind you, I haven’t seen him for maybe six or seven years now, so he’d have been before your time. Old Danny. Old Danny Crump.’

  ‘What does he do now?’

  ‘He’s in town planning.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Anyway, we just bumped into each other in the street and went and had a couple of jars. Just had a chat about the old days and so on. Funny thing is, it was really good luck for him that he bumped into me. He’s had a little bother with something and wondered if I could help him out. He needs this big favour and I said I’d talk to you about it.’

  I can’t imagine what this could be. It certainly can’t be money. I remember being at a wedding reception about eighteen months ago with Mark. This friend of his – Alan, I think it was – asked Mark if Mark could lend him five pounds, as he didn’t have quite enough money left for a mini cab. Mark must have spent half an hour trying to work out some other solution for his friend to get home that didn’t involve him lending him the five pounds. I’d never seen Mark look so glum. Eventually, he relented, and I saw him drag the fiver out of his wallet like it had been fixed in there with some treacle/superglue/quicksand hybrid.

  ‘So what is it? What’s Danny Crump’s problem?’ I laugh. ‘Apart from being called Danny Crump, of course.’