Ivory Read online

  “You have made the line-up of youths as a view from the window of a Starbucks’ coffee shop, almost making them background to the foreground characters in the café; children in school uniforms consuming expensive drinks and cakes at a table, and they are flanked by a couple of staff members at work. It could simply be a snap shot of a high-street scene but through the way that you have composed it you are making a commentary on society. One of the workers is black and bringing the children drinks, the other has olive skin and cleaning a table. Both are made to stand out as they are clearly not Caucasian as all the other characters are. In the mid-ground we have a youth carrying out a Starbuck’s coffee in the direction of the job centre.

  “Your picture is asking its viewers to reconsider their perspective of poverty – the unemployed of your picture all with their luxury items and spoils, and despite the vacancy advertised at the edge of our view on the coffee shop’s notice-board the ‘foreigners’ are the only ones willing to work, and they have ended up serving ‘our’ unemployed youth. The children in the café are a warning about breeding yet another generation of consumers conditioned with capitalist expectations, who would rather claim from the state than take on a job offering a minimum wage.”

  Martin applauded and Donnie gave a brief mincing dance on the spot followed by a flourished bow.

  “Well, I love it. It’s a brilliant capturing of a moment. Not just of a scene in a high street but of a moment in history. However, you are not content with that.” Donnie held up a cautioning finger before a serious face. “The teenage girl in the coffee shop with her back to us has an open compact. The looking glass is directed out at us the viewer and you are directly challenging us to take a good long look at our own hypocrisy. Whatever form that might take.”

  Martin nodded again, but a little uncomfortably.

  “Splendid touch, however, only a few of us are modest enough to admit our flaws with any serious contemplation. It is a fantastic picture of the world that leaves us with an uncomfortable view of ourselves. And in answer to your earlier question; yes, art is intended to challenge us but is it too much of a challenge to accuse an audience of hypocrisy and then ask for their favour?”

  Martin thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. It had been the same point Jenny had made when he had unveiled it to her. He knew to trust Jenny’s opinion and had known he was going to lose out on the UDAC. It had been the reason for not wanting Jenny there. She would have been watching him all night waiting for his inevitable disappointment and then been impotent in the face of it. “That’s a fair point. Challenging works like this might hang in the Tate today, but in their own time they struggled to get gallery space.”

  “As one of our students might say it’s like you’re giving the world the finger.”

  Martin laughed. “I suppose.”

  “I know we tend to keep our conversations strictly aesthetic but it has been difficult not to be aware of your melancholy of the last six months. I think a little of this irritation and frustration with yourself and the world has crept into your work.”

  “Good observations all round.” Martin didn’t want this to be an opener onto his personal issues. “I’m also sorry your play didn’t get the accolades it deserved. It was good stuff.”

  Donnie made dramatic jazz-hands in the air. “Ah yes, ‘Rom & Jools: a rom-tradg’ an imaginative re-working of one of the bard’s greats by one of our creative writing students, some outstanding acting, some fabulous direction on my part. Overall a faultless performance…” his hands dropped and his voice soured. “spoiled by the ugliest Juliet I have ever seen.”

  “I didn’t like to say, but she wouldn’t have been my first choice.”

  “She wasn’t mine. Not with that nose; like a shark fin cutting through the balcony scene. Faculty politics. Daughter of a major sponsor.”

  “Was Bea disappointed?” Bea was Donnie’s wife, and she also worked at the university, in the drama department. Bea was short for Beatrice. Martin had suggested to Jenny that it was short for ‘beard’, for Donnie was the gayest straight man he had ever met. Bea was the one and only thing that made people that met Donnie suspend their belief about his sexuality. At one of Bea and Donnie’s dinner parties, all the guests had drunk far too much and had descended in creating porn star names for each other, someone had suggested ‘Phil MacCafferty’ for Donnie and everyone had cried with laughter – even Donnie and Bea, as if they knew why the name was especially funny. Martin had joked with Jenny that if Donnie ever did ‘come out’ Donnie would be the last person to realise it.

  “She was a little disappointed. You know how she likes to relive her glory days through her students and productions.”

  In her youth Bea had made quite a name for herself on the west end circuit. That was when Donnie and Bea had first met. Donnie had showed Martin a photograph of her from those days, dressed in what little costume there was amongst the plumes feathers and rhinestones she was all legs and cleavage, quite something to behold. That was some time ago now though and he had never known her as lithe and proportioned. She had gained the weight of three other chorus girls and attempted to disguise her broad frame rather flamboyantly with floor length dresses and heavy poncho’s. With the end result being that she looked like she had the body of a hippo draped in a stage safety curtain. Martin thought it ironic that this straight man trapped in a gay body had fallen in love with an actress and ended up married to a theatre.

  “It was clear that the girl playing Juliet was more than capable of acting her way out of a paper bag, so we didn’t have to worry about her talent it’s just that we would have all preferred she actually act from within a paper bag. All that money in her family and not a touch of cosmetic surgery in sight.”

  “Maybe you should do a modern re-take of a Greek tragedy next year.”

  Donnie pointed at Martin and squealed a laugh. “Yes! Masks all round. I could get all the funding I need from investors with ugly offspring.” He nearly lost the pastel orange sweater that had been draped over his shoulders by its arms, and he quickly clawed it back into place. “Bea and I wondered if you might like to join ourselves and a select number of the other faculty members who didn’t get the recognition of a UDAC, and commiserate in good company with some fine food and wine this Saturday night?”

  Jenny would love the opportunity to get out and be normal, and Bea and Donnie’s dinner parties were usually good fun, but Martin couldn’t stand the thought of being around other people at the moment. It was draining enough making the effort with Jenny and the boys let alone a whole room full of people in a party mood. “We’re between babysitters at the moment, and I’m not much fun at the moment.” Bit of a lie and a bit of the truth, it was usually a good combination. Like art.

  “‘Pass me another babysitter I’ve torn this one’, eh?” Donnie laughed and nudged Martin. “Well, if you change your mind about the diner party let me know. It’s never the same without you kids there. I’m off to the faculty ‘VIP lounge’ for a break. Coming?”

  Martin shook his head and said he had some work to do. They both commiserated each others losses again and with a wave Donnie minced out of the room. Martin watched him leave then returned to the large room at the back of the classroom that served as a storage area. He passed between the metal storage units stacked with art equipment that dissected the room into narrow walkways. He reached the back of the room and dragged a stool out from between some boxes to a cupboard, he unlocked and opened the doors wide, and sat before the easel set up inside on the middle shelf. The shelves below were crammed with his personal art materials. This was his space tucked away at work where he could snatch moments to create. Both his one-to-one tutorial students had cancelled and left him the whole afternoon to work. He reached down to the shelves below and pulled out a large sketch pad and some pencils.

  He closed his eyes and held the graphite to the page. Now he would wait for his hand to move and see what it would create. This was what Jenny called his ‘f
ree associating’, where he would allow his mind to wonder across a page and create lines and shapes free of his conscious control. After a time he would allow himself to open his eyes and frame and block sections of his work and search for inspiration. His hand moved across the page.

  Martin’s thoughts scattered as a soft laughter broke the quiet. He sprung from his stool and pretended to be checking the shelves for something. He slid his small wire-framed spectacles down his nose and peered over them as Richard Hadleigh stumbled backwards into the store room, propelled by a youthful lad with peroxide yellowed hair. Hadleigh slammed into one of the shelving units with his arms pinned outstretched, and there was mischief in the boy’s eyes as he stared into Hadleigh’s face. The blonde’s hands fell to the waist of Hadleigh’s jeans and with a twist he popped the buttons of the fly open. Hadleigh offered a faltering unconvincing protest which the boy ignored and dropped promptly to his knees. He knelt there, poised, daring Hadleigh.

  “We shouldn’t. Not here,” Hadleigh breathed.

  The boy’s face became mockingly serious and he gave an exaggerated shake of his head. The smirk returned and he yanked Hadleigh’s jeans open and lunged forward.

  “You are right, Hadleigh. You shouldn’t,” Martin stated with a stentorian voice.

  The younger boy jumped up and stumbled over some of the equipment surrounding them. Martin watched with a merciless grin as Hadleigh doubled up to fasten his jeans. He smiled at his perfect timing. “Canvases are expensive enough without having them dashed with your Greek love.”

  The two boys bundled through the door. Hadleigh tried to recover himself, whilst dragging the boy after him, who after the initial scare didn’t seem worried at being discovered. “I’m sorry you didn’t win last night,” he stated. He paused in the doorway his face a deep red and pained by his own words. “I mean – I thought your piece was very good…”

  The peroxide boy sniggered at Hadleigh’s fuel on the fire apology and earned a flash of genuine anger from Hadleigh as he shrugged him off.

  Martin smiled as genuinely as he could against the dead feeling he had when he looked upon Richard. “Thank you. I should never have entered it. It wasn’t a contender. A wasted opportunity.”

  Richard tucked strands of his jaw length hair behind his ear, straightened his back and puffed out his broad chest as he began to recover himself after his embarrassment. “It was a contender.”

  Martin nodded curtly. “Congratulations on your achievement.” He smiled in an attempt to relieve the tension of the moment, but he felt it twist into something cruel that altered the intended lightness of his tone. “Now will you kindly take the love that dare not speak its name from my art rooms and find a more appropriate venue.”

  Hadleigh looked awkward then frustrated and then disappeared through the door. Martin heard Hadleigh’s angry tone but not the words that Hadleigh used to chastise his boy.

  Martin experienced a confusion of emotions; satisfaction at having seen Hadleigh embarrassed, the resurfacing of anger toward him for changing his medium, guilt at having such feelings for someone he had admired and liked for such a long time, and mournful for the breakdown of their relationship. The feelings pulled him in too many directions so he ignored them and returned to his sketch pad. He sat back down took up his pencil and closed his eyes once again.

  It was no use. He felt dirty inside his body and his mind was busy. He slouched over his belly and stared at the white page and the single charcoal grey line he had managed to produce before he had been interrupted. The line was around seven or eight inches long, started and ended with a distinct curve and wavered in between. It was the side of a face and the curve of a forehead, the depression of an eye socket, the swell of a cheek bone, the gradual decent of a jaw into the curl of a chin.

  Martin blocked the image in his mind and worked the pencil across the page, with a few fluid lines the face was framed by a fall of long hair, a couple of quick flicks of his pencil and he had the suggestion of a mouth and a nose, and with some careful touches the face was given eyes. He applied shading to the face and gave her flesh and texture. He pressed harder as he began to detail the eyes, and that was when he recognised who he was channelling. It was Ivory.

  He expanded the dark of the pupils and the sketch began to look increasingly unnatural. The eyes played such an important role in any portrait, the compliment of light and detail had to be right, and their gaze had to have the appropriate character. If there were too much detail the eyes would dominate, while too little attention would cause the face to change and the focus for the portrait would be lost. Likenesses were made with the eyes and if there were any detail missing a portrait would lose something of it’s identity and it would become a doppelganger staring back with an unnerving tell of it’s deception.

  He filled one whole eye with graphite, relieving his pressure on the pencil when he required a softer shade of grey to suggest the change of light on the curve of the eye, leaving spots of paper completely to create glittering dapples of white light. It didn’t look right.

  Martin flipped the sheet to the back of the pad and started again. Almost immediately his pencil took the wrong path and he was unable to capture the contour of the face that he had created earlier. After several false starts he decided to work on the eyes alone, being able to create solid black eyes that looked natural was a unique challenge. He had hoped that by recreating her eyes they might lead him into recreating the rest of her face, but no matter how much reflected light he put in them they always left his attempts at her face looking like hollow masks. Creating eyeless beauties or vamps that might best dominate the cover of a pulp horror novel. The more he worked the pencil the further she seemed to fade from his memory and became more difficult to capture on the page.

  After an hour and eight pages of abandoned sketches he had something reminiscent of the face he could picture in his mind. It was one face among many others that had ended up being strangers. He tore the quarter of the page from the pad and pinned it to the corner of the large easel set in the cupboard.

  He turned the pencil on the canvas and began to create an enlarged version of her face. A sense of proportion and scale for copying enlarging and reducing images came naturally to him, but was strangely evading him in this task and actually became something he had to work at. After what felt like a frustrating return to being a student learning his art again he had managed to reproduce a sketch of the face on his canvas. It still wasn’t an entirely convincing likeness of the face that haunted him from his memory. He hoped that the fluidity and forgiving nature of paint might make it easier for him to recreate Ivory’s face.

  He pulled out a tub of acrylic paints from the bottom of the cupboard. Oils would take too long to dry and would impede the frenetic channelling of creativity that would be taking place as he tried to conjure her into being. He added a retarder agent to some water to slow down the drying process of the acrylics so that he could continually mix, layer and sculpt the paint alla primer on the canvas.

  He lined up tubes of Golden paints, a variety of colours that he was sure he would need and selected a range of Kolinsky sable-hair brushes to be close at hand. He closed his eyes. Slowed his breathing and remembered. He remembered the glittering rain. The chalk and charcoal sketch of the road drawn from the darkness by his car’s headlights. The only visual memory of hitting Ivory was one smeary frame of her, overexposed in his lights with her arms raised in defence, blurred into angel wings with the motion. His hand trembled with the memory of the accident but his desire to see that face again steadied him. His brush went to work and he quickly layered a dark brown background around the crudely sketched face, automatically bringing her stark contrast with the world into being.

  Ivory had been in his mind for much of the day, not surprising considering the shock of the car accident, but despite her distinction the exact details of her face were frustratingly out of reach to him. He had caught the bus to university that morning, but had broken his jou
rney with a visit to the garage to inspect the damage to his car. It was a write-off. It was an old banger of a runabout so he hadn’t taken out full comprehensive insurance. Now they would either have to dip into their savings or have to get by with the one car for a while. More stress.

  In the clarity of daylight the damage was frightening. The thick metal of the bonnet was creased like tin-foil around the impact point. The whole front of the car was an inverted curve as if he had slammed into a wide pillar of granite and not the fragile frame of a girl. The damage puzzled Martin. Ivory should have been a contorted bloody mess of twisted shattered limbs, not a sleeping beauty tipped from a glass case. He frowned dismissively at himself, but could feel the tension of his uncertainty affecting the ease of his movement and the grace of his brush.

  His brush paused.

  He thought of their parting moment at the hospital and that smile, and tried to conjure her face from the shades of memory that seemed to dissolve under the light of his concentration. In his memory she emerged from the cubicle with Ebony and the purpled blotches and the thin cut were gone. His memory was losing detail or he was being impatient and skipping details to get to the smile that would follow. Yet with this moment replayed he was sure her healed appearance was a fact he was only now realising.

  Martin shook his head dismissively and countered the momentary doubt with confident strokes of his brush. Yesterday had been a long and tough day: a full day of lecturing, organising the department for the scrutiny of the campus during the open evening and the stress of the awards party. Then the accident. It was hardly surprising that his memory was playing tricks on him.

  Martin walked up the path to his home with his head cowed against the fall of the rain, and keyed open the front door. He shed the rain from his green wax jacket with a few shrugs of his shoulders and shakes of his arms and deadlocked the door behind him. He placed his keys upon the balustrade, took off his coat and kicked off his shoes wearily. He had walked more today with his public transport commute than he had done in some time. His aching feet took comfort in his cushioned slippers as he weaved his way through the boy’s school bags, gym packs and lunchboxes that had been cast off on their way through to the family room. He stopped in at the kitchen and leaned in. Jenny had her back to him doing some hand-washing at the sink with the dishwasher burbling away and the tumble dryer rumbling in the background.