Samantha Harvey - Dear Thief

I wake up when I have these dreams and usually get up, and Nicolas’ rosary clinks against the metal bedstead where he hangs it. I associate this sound with him being in my house. This is when I want to write to you most, after the rat dreams, and I often do. Much of this letter has been written in those odd hours of the night, where the darkness is thick and airless and like soil.

So what is this rat? Why, in my dreams, are you always cowering from it? See how many pages it has taken me to tell you that Nicolas comes over from time to time, and has been doing so for the last year, on and off — this is because I feel ashamed to say it. I think you will mock our cowardice at breaking away but not breaking away. Or you will think we are feeding on your scraps. You who perpetually gamble everything on a whim, just to be free. You who hear the bear in the woods and open your door to let it in. You who can so little stand the scenery staying the same that you have to run through it. To keep running. But Yannis said something the other day, when I asked him about his wife — he said it is the cowards who keep running, and I wonder if he is right. The bravest people are those who are not afraid of things staying the same.

You didn’t analyse personalities in the way I am analysing yours. Your strategy was to go to war with people first and ask questions later.

You sit at our table in the cottage in Morda, by the back window, dealing out cards for Solitaire. You take up position here for the best part of a year or two with your Go-Cat playing cards, which you picked up at a church sale in the village. Green-backed with a sinister picture of a tabby. A Square Meal for Bored Cats . You never meant to stay so long, certainly you never meant to live with us, but time bleeds. There is nowhere else you have to be, it is good for me to have an adult presence in the house when Nicolas is away, Teddy loves you for reasons nobody can quite identify, and anyway, time bleeds. You arrive, and before you know it six months have passed and then six more, and your money comes in useful and the back window would be empty without your silhouette.

Some days you are as plain and pale as the northerly light coming through the window behind and we leave you alone in the veil of smoke that makes you look like a sullen bride, bored at her own wedding table. Other days, like this particular and arbitrary day, your eyelids will be painted in heavy purples or oranges right up to the brow and sweeping wide towards your temples, lashes almost unliftably black and heavy. This particular and arbitrary day it is orange and Teddy touches the paint with his finger to see if it is hot. When you raise your eyes from the cards there appears to be an effort; already wide-spaced, these eyes look like they are trying to take off from your face like a weighty bird that needs something to launch itself from but is finally graceful in flight, an albatross, something that means to travel far.

Only your eyes are made-up, in contrast your face is naked and your lips as pale, plump and bare as a bottom, as breasts; I imagine this is what Nicolas is thinking when he says you are disconcerting to look at, like somebody undressed from the waist down. Some days you will be done up like this, some days not. For a time, when you are going most frequently back and forth to London, it is more often than not. You are too much for Morda, but then you always were. You hardly ever go out and when you do I am sure people comment between themselves on sighting you in a lane, as if you were exotica escaped from the zoo.

Instead you play our old table like a veteran croupier, sweeping up the Solitaire hand when I come along and transforming it in seconds into a Poker hand; you just want somebody to do light battle with. The combat zone, we call the table, and a ring forms in the oak grain where your ashtray sits, next to your right hand. You push half the matchsticks you have towards the centre to stay in the game, nails tapping while you wait for me to have a go, head resting languid in a cupped hand. Head surely heavy with the weight of your eyes. ‘Your hair is alive,’ you tell Nicolas when he sits with Teddy in his arms. The crown of his head touches the ceiling, which is lower in the alcove by the window, and his hair rises and waves with static like some plant on the riverbed. ‘You could sell that electricity back to the grid,’ I say. ‘We will be rich at last.’

I push my last few matchsticks in and you murmur, with a smile, Hallelujah! and astonish Nicolas by folding; you had nothing in your hand. I knew you had nothing, you knew I knew, I knew you knew I knew. It is like this with us, no explaining it. Just that games are more interesting between us when we pretend not to know what the other is up to. Teddy stands on Nicolas’ lap and pushes the static out of his hair, cackling with mirth. ‘There go our riches,’ you say, and gather the cards up as swift as a thief.

About four months ago, back in October or early November, Ruth mentioned that there was a shortage of life models at the drawing school she goes to, and two weeks later I found myself lying, as if shot, on crusted mustard velvet on an improvised bed in an old chapel with fan heaters turned on me, slightly aggressively I thought, like muskets. I didn’t think long about this decision and I can’t even say it really was a decision so much as a thing I found myself doing, and then doing again. The first time I went to meet the tutor for an interview her eyes lit up. Five foot ten of barely contained dilapidation! An elegance so surface that a pencil nib will scratch it away in no time and find the disaster beneath. This is all art wants, to scratch at the surface and find disaster beneath. You will be a perfect model, she said, and there was no interview, and now I am their emergency on-call nude body who has no regular class but goes when they need me and when work allows. After every class she says, ‘You were so perfect’ (like a bombed temple, she means), and gives me £20, which ought to be £21 for my three-hour sacrifice, but she never has the extra pound in change.

Is this one last act of vanity, I wonder? Yes, I’m sure. Vanity, and also its unlikely partner, surrender. It makes me feel like a piece of fruit in your photograph. I lie or sit (always on this mustard velvet drape that I think used to be a curtain back in its day and now has almost no velvet qualities at all, is more like the grit of a newly fired brick) and I can feel time acting on me, and I have the odd sensation that they can see me ageing as they draw. In some ways this is a tragic feeling, and in some ways wonderful. It’s too late, I think. The days of being desired and being burdened by desire and competing for it, these days are over and now I am what’s left. I give myself over as a sorry offering, I put the twenty-pound note in my pocket at the end and go and buy a book and some cigarettes and some ink, and feel cheap and free and taken from in some small way that I can’t afford. Give what you can’t afford, you used to say; give more than you have. Live in divine debt, it’s the only way to get any return from life. I think in many ways you were right about this. I ache all over and I have shown my bare, pale groin to strangers, and that £20 is the sorriest amount of money I ever make. And it is wonderful really, to be so open at last about this rigged deal we make with life. It is wonderful in its own way.

‘It’s sordid,’ Nicolas said when I asked him what he thought of your Still Life with Irascible Hole . He laughed at the title and said, with exaggerated purr, ‘irr-ascible’. And with exaggerated pout, ‘hole’. His mouth surrounded the word and closed it down. He is a man who has always leant a little towards darkness, and for him to call it sordid was no criticism. For him, back then at least, the world was too light, yet also never light enough. Even in the most literal of ways he craved darkness just so that he might shine light into it, and then resented the light for banishing the dark; but we are all paradoxical, aren’t we? We all give ourselves over to these internal battles that we’ll never resolve.