The Magpie
Kerry’s breasts were large, their weight drawing silver filigree lines around their nipples. I loved them even more because my own breasts are so unremarkable. Kerry always smiled when she felt my eyes trace her curves and brush the ostrich egg shapes of her breasts onto the canvas under my hands. When the sun moved below the window behind her, I always wanted to paint the darkness in her new hollows, but because I could feel the air’s chill, I always said, “Let’s take a break.”
Kerry always said, “No, I want to see what you see.”
I was about to reply on the day the magpie flew in, but I stopped, surprised by the way he stood big and bawdy on the window sill, snapping his beak. When Kerry turned to look, a hand on each nipple, I laughed and said, “Lucky you took your studs out. Magpies steal shiny things.”
It was our laughing that held us together like Siamese twins, the skin tightening as we snorted like hogs in the Spanish coach because a beautiful girl sitting next to us had tufts of black hair growing out of her ears. Or like the time when we were thrown out of the amateur opera for laughing because Carman’s aria sounded like my mother orgasming. Our love was grounded in moments like these, the laughing and the silence after, so I thanked the magpie and ignored Kerry when she said I was following an ancient pagan tradition and she’d always suspected I was a witch. Then we kissed and went to bed.
Strangely, I always thought of the magpie as he. I still do. In my women’s world, where men are only allowed in on special terms, he should have she, but just two days later, I named him the Boy. “ Looks like the Boy is here to stay,” I said.
Now, too late, I remember how Kerry didn’t reply. Perhaps the quality of our silence had already begun to change, or perhaps I wasn’t listening.
The Boy moved in, sitting on the backs of chairs, tilting his head, and pointing a black eye at the brush in my hand. “If he wants to be a painter, I could teach him,” I said.
“He’d probably earn more,” Kerry replied.
In the past, before the Boy, I would have laughed, but he’d taken over, his raking laugh mine, but clearer.
I was working on a big commission, big enough to pay off our flat and maybe stretch to a car. For once, being gay was an advantage because the man said only another woman, who loves women, would know how to capture his wife’s beauty. Then he lifted her off the chair and laid out her amputated-above-the-knee legs bare on the floor, their fleshy ends spilling as soft as cream cheese over the swathe of silk I had put there.
“Silk for the reflections,” I told her. “Do you mind if I move this leg?” She shrugged, still angry with her husband. Is this what he wanted to see of her?
The Boy watched, one spiny toe scratching the other.
The next morning when I asked Kerry to help me put the hurting woman at ease so that I could work unseen behind the canvas, she said she had things to do and would be late getting back, so it was just the Boy and I.
“Is he tame?” the woman asked, looking over to where he was sitting on the back of a chair. Another reason for her to be tense and not want to be in my studio in the middle of the floor where I told her the light from a skylight above fell best.
“Tame enough,” I said, smiling back in a way I hoped was reassuring. “He wants to be a painter too.”
The Boy clapped his beak and flew over to sit on my shoulder, then leant forward to watch as my brush looped light through the folds in her skin.
“He’s following everything you do,” the woman said, “and then looking at me as if he’s checking to make sure you’ve got it right,”
“You’ve got a better view of him than I have,” I replied.
Ellie, the woman, came every day for ten weeks and did what I asked because she saw how the silk was so important, how it told a story in its rumpled and gleaming shapes and why that story couldn’t end with her legs. Every day, the Boy beak-tapped the uneven rhythm of her steps coming up the stairs.
Every morning Kerry drained her cup of coffee before I had even started mine. “You don’t need me here. I’ll finish my research in the library.”
On the last day of painting, I put my hand on hers, wanting to push it down into the table so that she could never leave because I’d already sensed she would, but instead, I let my fingers trail like feathers over her white knuckles. “Please stay.”
“What for?”
“To see what her husband says. Ellie hasn’t let him see what I’ve done yet.”
“And then?”
The silence dripped between us, blood-soft and as dark. When I called in the evening, Kerry said she was having a drink with some colleagues. When she didn’t come home, I wasn’t surprised. In the morning, I looked at the Boy and hated him.
The Boy sits on my shoulder, watching me search my phone for the digital images of our love that is dead in the flesh. Kerry has gone. Every trace, even the smell of her, I know because I’ve tried to find it, sniffing into the corners of the cupboard where she used to hang her clothes, at the edge of the bed where she always slept, curled like a kitten, when her periods were bad. I need our silence, but the Boy has taken it, whistling at the back of his throat the way Kerry used to do when I got out of the shower, snoring like me when I’ve got a cold.
Night after night, I lie on our bed, playing our past in my head. The day we first met, both of us blobby and gauche, passing a spliff between us that we didn’t know how to smoke. Then again, all those years later, when she’d finished her PhD and told me I had to call her Doctor. I refused and said she was too beautiful to be boring. She was beautiful by then, especially her breasts.
“What have breasts got to do with intellect?” she asked, sticking them out at me like two tongues. I laughed, and we always laughed together after that, in a way I thought would be forever. When Kerry moved in with me, she wrote in chalk on the blackboard I used for shopping lists, Laughing and silence, the inseparable twins. I coloured in the curves of her letters, yellow and red.
After she left, during the first weeks alone, I drew her all the time, holding onto her in the only way I could, the parts I remembered most, her eyes and the fold under her chin, but when I’d done that, there was nothing left, so I told the Boy I was going, and he would have to look after himself. He laughed with her voice, but when I got to the bottom of the stairs, I had to go back up to check that he was gone. The window was closed, the sill outside empty, the Boy gone and Kerry too, perhaps one because of the other, but mainly because of me.
When I paint now, I paint spaces, the white between the black I remember from the Boy’s feathers, the silences between two people who think they are talking. When I see a magpie, I always nod and say thank you.
