Black Chalk by Albert Alla Read Free Book Online Page B

perfect. The satisfaction! Seeing my mother come back from a shop with it framed! When it became clear that my brother wouldn’t follow in my footsteps, my parents invoked equity and took most of my work down. I still kept at it, at least until puberty drove me to new distractions.
    There were still three of my more elaborate pieces hanging in the kitchen. One was of our home bathed in a halcyon light. Another was after a picture of Hornsbury’s Market Street. And the third was of my mother reading in an armchair. They were clichéd, simple, lifeless. That never stopped my mother from showing them off to my friends. How many times I cringed when she did that! I’d wait for my friends to leave, and then I would run her through my embarrassment, I would highlight the drawings’ flaws, but my entreaties had no effect. Friends on their first visit still had to endure her beaming eulogies.
    Four years after putting down my last sketch, two years after giving away my old kit, I sat in a hospital bed, pencil in hand, looking at the old man in front of me. He was sitting on a chair to the right of his bed, wearing a white and blue hospital robe, his brown legs naked, white slippers hanging off his feet, his head drooping towards the nurses’ station.
    Immobile. My subject.
    I started with the head, with the curly white hair, short and barely receding. I moved to the neck and shoulders. The shoulders were key: they stooped but their strength was obvious. Dejected yet able. Atrophy settling in. Pencil in hand, I could understand the man in an instant. I ignored his loose torso and worked on the arms, smudging his right forearm around his tattoo, darkening sinews and bulges. His hands came together into a single fist. My touch lightened as I moved towards his legs. I didn’t need his feet to ground him. He was a picture of stability.
    ***
    My brother looked back towards my mother. He stopped at the foot of my bed, his smile mirroring mine. A hand on his shoulder, words in his ear, she guided him closer.
    â€˜I like to see the two of you spending time together. In times like this, all we’ve got is family.’ She looked at her watch: ‘James, I have to make a few phone calls.’
    We watched her leave and turned to each other. I reached for the controls of my bed and raised my torso so our eyes could be level. He seemed changed beyond the week we’d spent apart. He reminded me of the last time we’d come to blows, when I was twelve and he was eight. In Avoriaz, on the Thursday of a week-long ski trip, after three days of lessons, when I’d petitioned my parents to let me go and ski alone, on the slopes of course, and she’d told me that I could as long as I took my brother. I tried to negotiate a compromise – he wants to spend time with the two of you, not with me – but she didn’t budge. James couldn’t do a parallel turn, but he thought himself as good a skier as me. Whatever I went down, he could go down. Shutting his mouth, an obstinate look in his eyes, he pointed his skis right down the slope, and off he went, always trying to beat me to the bottom.
    â€˜Did you see that lady?’ I told him. ‘You made her fall. Look. Look!’ I grabbed him by the shoulder and forced him to look a hundred yards up the slope. Dazed from her fall, one ski ten yards back, she slipped back on the other every time she tried to get up. ‘Be careful!’ I slapped him on the shoulder.
    He pushed me back.
    â€˜It wasn’t me,’ he said, and he jumped down the slope, his thin skis trembling under him.
    I rushed after him, howling as I overtook him. If he was going to be that way, I’d show him.
    â€˜We’re not going up this chair this time. We’re going up the big one. Are you scared?’ I said.
    He shook his head and followed me up to the top of the expert zone. There, looking at the first drop, he seemed a little hesitant.
    â€˜So