A Likeness

She pressed a finger to her eye and observed the dark spot that appeared in the opposite corner. A boy had once tried to explain the phenomenon to her. “It’s inversion. If you press too long,” he said, “the cells in your retina suffocate.” After a few seconds, the spot began to radiate a kind of verdigris; it stained the way bright light stains after you look away. Then she realised that this was a silly thing to do, pretentious even, and dropped the finger. 

A light patter on the window outside had betrayed the onset of rain. The shower was difficult to see against the fresh dark in the courtyard, the moon being a smudge of chalk dust only. Elizabeth opened the window. She felt there was no air in her lungs; still, she was breathing. The night had crept up on her again. 

The worktop which spanned half of one side of her dorm room was busy, though arranged neatly enough. A cheap watercolour canvas was pinned down by an A7-size notebook and a few brushes she had stolen from class. The front cover of the notebook displayed a gentle crown of tulips painted red and blue. Beside the canvas lay nine small rectangles of eggshell paper, laid portrait, and ordered in an almost-square. The pages were blank, save for the three which formed the bottom-left corner. Across these were sketched, in fine gray pencil, the outline of an ear, clothed in dark strokes of hair; the side of a cheek which came down steeply before shallowing to the soft point of a chin; and, above, a mouth formed of deep lips and flanked by quiet dimples.

Elizabeth saw that the mirror above the worktop looked filthy; the light of a few sparse candles on the worktop was enough to throw up the cloud of blemishes and fingerprints. She took her handkerchief to the glass and wiped, to little reward. As she wiped, one of the postcards wedged behind the mirror slipped down the wall and fell to the worktop. She replaced the handkerchief in her pocket then the postcard behind the mirror, making sure to cover the half of the card which showed a bright red barn and expose only the roll of pleasant green fields to the room. It was the kind of scene she used to paint in watercolour when she was young, in the lane behind her grandma’s house. Her fingers weren’t calloused then, and she had more the cartographer’s eye than the artist’s. She used to think herself a shrewd and studious captor of unsuspecting landscapes. But really, she painted because she loved the plush bleeding life of colour, warped and curved in some places, in others solid as the sky. She loved to play that game of smudging beauty. She loved the smell of the binder. It had been a long time since she had painted watercolours. 

 Sitting down again, Elizabeth took the pencil and levelled its shaft against her finger. It would be best, she thought, to continue the trace of the jaw up the other side. No, easier to find the cheek’s curve coming down. Not that it mattered. The nose then. She looked at her nose in the mirror. The ring was skewed – dull silver descended only one nostril. Or the hairline to the drawn ear, that would work. But a half-face might make it harder to capture the depths of the cheek and nose. That’s all obvious, she thought. More obvious that it was dumb to start at the ear. The eyes would probably come last, but it was dumb to start at the ear. But it didn’t matter. She set the pencil down, looked a while at her own face in the mirror, then took the notebook and pulled carefully from its spine nine fresh pages. 

…

It was one of those cold, early winter mornings where no one was very much inclined to do anything besides arrive on time. No appeal, no enjoinder was needed to begin the class. “This semester we have been searching too high,” said the tutor. “We’ve been on too great a scale.” Her voice was harsh in the stony air. “And I gave you all too much praise on the Frost and the Hoyland, benevolent as I am; I’m sure it’s already gone halfway to your heads.” She was a tall, solid woman, dressed severely in a crimson bow blouse and blazer. Presently she skittered around the low table which held the centre of the tutorial room. 

Elizabeth still had trouble with the accent. The tutor spoke quickly, prone as she was to conduct her teaching in somewhat choleric outbursts. Still, she was sweet – often she would sign off emails with a little phrase or flourish like, “Thinking of you all,” – and Elizabeth savoured her commendation (received not infrequently) more than that of the rest of the faculty.

“So this week, we’re doing self-portraits – keep looking at me like that, Russell, and you'll have a fine one. This is always a useful exercise. You can do it however you like, no prescription. None of you are good enough to be pretentious about it, I don’t want to see The Artist in His Studio; just find yourself as you are. Don’t try and paint as you used to be, brushes and pens are too discerning for that. And don’t try to paint how you will be either, in twenty years’ time when you’ve tried and failed decisively to surpass my talents. Just as you are. Starter for ten: you’re art students, in a cold, shitey little classroom. And don’t worry, this won’t be graded. I mean, don’t bother lifting a finger and I’ll fail you for the module. But, otherwise, no grades – I’m just curious, that’s all.”

…

Elizabeth had planned on painting a watercolour that week. She had ready a small half-pan set of six colours, bound in gum arabic and honey: titanium white, French vermilion, a light ultramarine, burnt umber, forest green and a primary yellow.  The set was bought last month in an old-fashioned Kunstwinkel – the word was still funny to her – just off the Museumplein in Amsterdam. Her jumper and long coat wrestled to the chest, she slinked around the carpeted alcoves for half an hour or more, just looking. She knew exactly what she wanted and where to find it, but she always liked to look around. The attendant on the front desk, an elderly man with a green cord cap and features rather closed-up but not unseemly, smiled and muttered something to her each time she passed. Elizabeth, knowing no Dutch, could only smile back plainly, feeling ridiculous for doing so. After buying the set, she stood outside in the doorway of the store reading over the names of the colours, which were written in English. It hadn’t been cheap, but she was pleased with the purchase.

Now the set rested idly somewhere in the back of the wardrobe. The assignment didn’t matter, but Elizabeth figured it wasn’t worth failing over either. She once read about self-portraits done across a few scraps of paper in the journal of a Die Brücke artist and had wanted to try it herself at some point – it might as well be now. Two hours was all the time it took to cover the nine notebook pages with her pencilled face; it would have been half the time if she hadn’t been an ass and started at the ear. The portrait done, she thought it would be amusing to paste the pages over her own reflection – that would be something to do. Taking care to get none on her nails, she rolled together eighteen tiny balls of Blue-Tac and pressed them, two apiece, to the back of each page. 

She was judiciously pinning the pages to the mirror when she heard her phone buzzing behind her on the bed. “Incoming call: Grandma, Mom”. Elizabeth folded herself on the bed against the wall and answered.

            “We were just talking about you,” said her mother. The earnestness of their faces came through a little comically on the bright screen. Her grandma asked if Elizabeth had received her last postcard, which she had. It stirred her grandma’s sense of humour to write postcards in her own pen, from her own bedside – she sent one a month. Her mother had her face pressed close to the camera and her voice rang through the room with a static fuzz. 

            “How do they look?”

            “How do what look?” replied Elizabeth. “Oh, your lips?”

            “Yes, my lips! I was almost offended. I got such a good deal, the man from the cruise line fixed it all up.” It was true; the mouth was no longer the sole even-tempered feature on her mother’s face; her new lips were an overlay of two large rose petals, now much closer to Elizabeth’s own, which she had taken from her father.

            “And who’s gonna fix you now?” snorted her grandma. Her mother laughed this off rather miserably. Elizabeth told them a little about her assignments and the trip to Amsterdam. She talked about how pretty the tulips were – “Just like those pictures you used to have on your wall,” smiled her grandma – and how easy it was to get around. Her mother confirmed finally that her flight out would be on the third of next month, and to clear the whole weekend because she wanted to really see the place. Elizabeth warned her how cold it would be by then, but her mother shrugged, “Don’t baby me, Elizabeth.” Then they both told her that they loved her and hung up and the screen went black.

Elizabeth slumped down onto the pillow. She felt tired. Really, she knew that she was tired with all the accommodations she was forced to make for her mother; tired with all the words she was at ease saying to her grandma but which she could only scrape together feebly, without meaning. But it wasn’t clear that, if she had stomach enough to stop contorting herself, or should she find a way to say things properly, she would feel better. None of that would make her honest. She hadn’t been honest a day in her life.  

She lay on the bed a while longer not wanting to get up. She could hear the voices of her flat mates in the hallway, deep and ribald; they were drunk, probably. The rain was louder against the window now. It sounded like the cicadas back home. She thought she might sleep but sleep did not come, so she got up and made some coffee in the kitchen.

Returning to the bedroom, she placed the coffee on the worktop and looked at the nine pages fastened neatly to the mirror. It was a good likeness. The hairline parted too promptly from the forehead, an eyelid lazed slightly in a grimace, and the cheeks were fat and stubborn as lard. But these were problems with her real face, not the version in pencil. The dark gray rested very gently on the eggshell. 

Gingerly, Elizabeth unstuck a corner page and let it drift out towards the mirror’s edge, then slid the centrepiece a little into the gap. She did the same with other pages, and then the reverse. She dropped her nose, raised one ear, and then the other. A mouth became a hairline, and vice versa. She decided that she liked these nine pages that made up her new face. She liked them because they had nothing behind them. They hadn’t left any shitshow to clean up. This was a face she could play with; she could abstract as others abstracted. She wondered, if she could split apart her real cheeks, what heavy liquid would spill out over the worktop? What colour would it burn and bubble? Would it subdue a brush, or bid it glide through? She could mop it up with her chin. Then, she could remove the crown of her head like the lid of a teapot, suspend it in barely-circulating air, and drop her memories out upon the floor like wooden spoons.

Elizabeth’s expression – whatever it had been – fell. Pink oblongs of her reflection split through the pages. This was the dumbest thing she had ever done in her life. Why did she have to bother with shit like this? One by one she lifted the pages from the mirror, and piled them on the worktop. She placed the tulip notebook in the small bookcase mounted on the wall and gathered the brushes and watercolour canvas away into the wardrobe. She would paint next week, if she found time. And if she wasn’t so lazy. She spat a little into her handkerchief and rubbed harshly at the Blue-Tac stains spotting the mirror, which came off easily. Elizabeth realised suddenly how cold it was in the room – she had left the window open. The air smelled clean, at least. She closed the window, finished her coffee, and went to bed feeling quite awake.