Pat Barker - Another World

‘What?’ Nick asks.

‘A foot. Drawing of.’

‘Can’t be.’ Nick bends down, and scrapes away another inch of paper. ‘Do you know, I think he’s right?’

‘Thank you.’

‘I wonder if there’s any more?’

Miranda forgets about feeling ill. Everybody forgets about the pizzas. They angle the lamps more closely and start scraping again, revealing a whole shoe, the draping of cloth across a flexed knee, a hand clasping the arm of a chair.

Once he’s got an idea of the scale, Nick splashes stripper on to the wall where he thinks the head must be, becoming more excited as he works, for what’s emerging is no stick drawing, no crude approximation of a man, but a strongly individual face. The eyes keenly alert, he seems to lean out of the wall. A glitter of intelligence, almost too keen, rapacious even. Instinctively, Nick looks to the mouth for confirmation, but the walrus moustache, drooping over the upper lip, makes its expression difficult to read. Ruthless, perhaps? At any rate, the impression is one of power.

‘Fanshawe,’ Nick says. ‘Has to be.’

‘The clothes are right,’ says Fran, coming to stand beside him. ‘I mean, he looks Victorian.’

Just behind Fanshawe’s shoulder is a button belonging to somebody else’s jacket. A toddler’s dimpled fist rests on his left knee.

‘It’s a family portrait,’ Nick says slowly.

The doorbell chimes. Fran goes to answer it and comes back carrying a stack of white cartons. ‘Pizzas.’

They break off and eat, gazing all the time at the wall. Miranda’s whiter than ever, but when Nick asks if she wants to lie down she simply shakes her head. Fran’s got two distinct spots of colour in her cheeks. Nick can hardly force the food down, though he makes himself eat two slices before he gives up. Gareth goes back to the wall, leaving his pizza uneaten. A second later Miranda follows him.

‘I’ll start over there,’ Fran says. ‘I think we should spread out.’

Wiping sweat from his upper lip, Nick says, ‘Let’s have a window open, shall we? Gareth?’

They’ve kept the windows closed, in spite of the heat, because there are no curtains. Gareth sees his own white face reflected in the window, surrounded by clouds of pale moths with fat furry bodies fumbling at the glass, trying to get in. As soon as he opens it they flicker past him, and begin dancing round the lamps. One finds its way on to the hot bulb and dies in a sizzle of scorched wings.

Gradually, the portrait’s revealed. A red-haired woman emerges from under Fran’s scraper, with the sour expression of someone who’s driven a hard bargain and is not contented with the result. Behind her stands a girl with thin ringlets dangling round a frail-looking neck. Huge eyes — her father’s eyes — the underlids so prominent it’s like one of those trick drawings where the face still looks normal upside-down. This effect isn’t, as it would be on most young faces, pathetic, but faintly sinister.

Behind Fanshawe stands a boy, slightly taller than the girl. Dark eyes, a strained expression that Nick recognizes, yet can’t identify. One hand rests on his father’s shoulder, though only because he’s been told to put it there. His fingertips cringe from the enforced contact. The boy painted this: there’s no way of proving it, but Nick knows. That expression is the inward-directed gaze of the self-portraitist. And my God, what a talent. The faces leap out of the wall.

Nick begins working his way down over Fanshawe’s waistcoat, leaning over Miranda, who’s kneeling between his feet.

‘Oh, look —’ she says.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know.’

He can hear in her voice that she does. He bends down and peers into the space she’s created. An erect penis springs from the unbuttoned flies, as thick and pale as the decaying cabbage stalks in the kitchen garden. Gareth looks across and sniggers.

‘Well,’ says Nick.

Fran says, ‘It’s horrible.’

‘Oh, I don’t know…’

‘No, I mean the whole thing’s horrible.’

Nick’s begun to feel that too. His early excitement’s giving way to dismay, as it becomes clearer, minute by minute, that the portrait’s an exercise in hate.

Gareth’s scraping away at the bodice of the seated woman. ‘Boobs,’ he announces triumphantly.

The woman’s breasts are great lard-white footballs, covered by a canal system of blue veins.

Fran winces. ‘I wonder what other surprises he’s got in store?’

At the centre of the group, uncovered last, is a small, fair-haired boy, whose outstretched arms, one podgy fist resting on the knee of either parent, forms the base-line of the composition. Patches of wallpaper still cling to the painting like scabs of chicken pox, but even so its power is clear. Victorian paterfamilias, wife and children: two sons, a daughter. Pinned out, exhibited. Even without the exposed penis, the meticulously delineated and hated breasts, you’d have sensed the tension in this family, with the golden-haired toddler at its dark centre.

Their shadows half obscure the figures on the wall.

‘Come back behind the lamps,’ Nick says.

They move back, until only the flickering moths move across the surface, casting shadows as big as birds.

‘Who do you suppose did it?’ Fran asks.

‘The boy,’ says Nick.

‘It could’ve been one of the workmen,’ Fran says, sounding defensive. But why defensive? ‘I don’t suppose they’d be doing their own decorating.’

‘No, it’s the boy,’ Nick insists. ‘Look at his eyes. He’s the only one who knows he’s in a painting.’

Fran stares from face to face. ‘Yes,’ she says at last.

Silence. The living stand and gaze at the dead. Probably the same thought occurs to all of them, but it’s Miranda, her voice edging up into hysteria, who finally says what they’re all thinking. ‘It’s us.’

Nick opens his mouth to contradict her, but no words come out.

‘No, it isn’t,’ Fran says gratingly, in a voice she scarcely recognizes as hers.’ She’s not pregnant.’

Upstairs Fran drops a nightdress over her head, and takes off her bra and pants under the cover of its folds. She doesn’t want Nick to see her naked, can’t bear her reflection in the mirror even, and all because of that obscene thing downstairs. She saw how Gareth stared at the breasts and then at her. The penis wasn’t so bad somehow. There was nothing satyr-like about it, nothing comic or sensual or friendly. Phallus as weapon, pure and simple, but she didn’t think Nick had felt attacked by the portrait. Not the way she had. She’d been wounded by those breasts.

She lies on the edge of the bed, her hands cradling the bag of drowning kittens her stomach’s become. ‘We’ve got to cover that thing up.’

‘Can’t be tomorrow. I’ve got to see Geordie.’

‘Can’t you leave it another day?’

‘No, he’ll be conscious tomorrow.’

Silence. He waits for her to try again.

‘Did you see how upset Miranda was?’

Yes, he’d also seen how upset Fran was. He gets into bed and touches her shoulder. ‘We could have a cuddle.’

‘I’m too tired. Sorry.’

A pause. ‘All right.’ He turns away and lies on his back in the darkness. ‘I did mean a cuddle.’

No reply. After a few minutes he can tell from her breathing that she’s asleep.

Monday he’ll start getting the rest of the paper off. Make that the first job. Fran’s right, it can’t be left like that, but tomorrow he has to see Geordie.

His hands throb. The extraordinary thing is that although every inch of the paper had been a struggle to remove — and he has blisters on the palms of his hands to prove it — his last impression, before he drifts off to sleep, is that the portrait had risen to the surface of its own volition, that it would have been impossible to keep it hidden any longer, rather as a mass of rotting vegetation, long submerged, will rise suddenly to the surface of a pond.