The Picture

Katherine went to a long defunct free school founded by the sylvan son-in law of an American bootlegger cum philanthrope and a valetudinarian Indian philosopher.

It is easy to guess at what kind of kids schooled there.

Years later she met Ben, a classmate who hung out on the shores of the London art scene when I had money to burn. We went to his flat on Belsize road not far from the Beatle's crossing. The traffic rattled the window. His stuff was Ok.
Half hidden I saw it for 1000 pounds.

Now it is plain framed, stored in a loft in Hove I suppose.

Imagine an unlit curtained room. The space matt dark yet the figure too. She lies across the foreground. You first look and are annoyed by her invisibility. Move away, take your time. I had to spend long hours drawing her out during my exile at home. She will steal over you, the fugitive light revealing; the flat abdomen most tenable. You can fix it nearly, so that the flawed neat umbilicus with its charming tiny bump from a botched piercing at 11 o'clock, orientates your eye. The background recedes, her legs meld into the world they walk. The neck is the next optic prize, displaying its delicate tendon cords. But you will have to wrestle long for her face though I have never won. Like a junk hologram she alternates profile, full gaze. I had remembered her nose as Greek but I am not sure now, thinking perhaps the diminutive bridge Asiatic. Her breasts are the trompe oeuil in full flood. That upper torso giveing up last, defending a boy?s pectorals. Then they appear, minutely shifting across her chest as she rolls to attend you; one?s fall arrested by youthful collagen and the other shyly occupying the lower foreground. The nipples are erect, though they will not be so if you look. Or she disdains you, flat on her back, they become understated asymmetrical mounds delineated against an inexistent terrain. The sex, unsurprisingly, can never be seen.

Three days ago, when art leapt to life across time, my balcony was tremoring from a quake in Sulawesi.

We had fought on the telephone and met to screw up. She was standing with the sun behind her, outside the shop which marks half-way on The Cowboy, sipping cheap bottled water through a straw.  Pristine white micro-shorts and dirty hair scattering my conceits like confetti.

Insouciant among her tears.

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