Girl in Profile by Zillah Bethell Read Free Book Online Page A

sit in a fairy ring of champignons with Edgar by my side. I shall work for L’Homme Femme, sit for her every day, maybe find a model of my own and put the energy of loving into drawing. I will paint her in this room, emaciated, etiolated by spiritual anguish and love, and I will present it to him with the words: This is what you did to me, Monsieur Rodin, this is what you did to me.

Elizabeth
    Cuckoo’s Nest
    Doctor Kharana looks at me like butter wouldn’t sizzle, but I know better, the randy bastard. Saw him pinching Nurse Tinkerbell’s bottom in the corridor only this morning. They think I don’t notice, they think I’m just a dot-to-dot old bint reading my book about Italy and the vineyard and the skeleton of the whale they’ve just found beneath the vines and poor old Chiara, whose husband is a philanderer. She’s a common little darter, Nurse Tinkerbell; Peter Pan’s read up on her in his dragonfly book. He knows the language of dragonflies. And crickets. And toadstools. My son is a globe skimmer apparently, and I’m a banded demoiselle – that’s right, a banded demoiselle. I’ve lived most of my life underwater as a nympho from what I can gather.
    â€œAre you happy here, Elizabeth, at High View House?”
    Hell yes, wouldn’t you be? Three meals a day, shit when I need to, stephanotis who’s swallowed a clock, and an emaciated stink for company. Pen pal on death row for murdering his girlfriend, husband who fucked off down the autobahn just sitting in his chair, children who behave like Icarus without the scorch marks and the downward descent, and a granddaughter in some old Etonian mess and a view of Caldey Island and the sea. Yippee. Lucky me. Lucky old effervescent-vitamin-C-to-perk-you-up-a-bit me.
    â€œDo you get confused sometimes between what is real and what is not?”
    Heavens, yes, of course I do. I don’t even know where I lived my life. Was it out there in the streets and the suburbs, in the rain, in little rooms? Or was it here in the hippocampus of my head complete with safari tent and gear? Does it really matter anymore? My life still goes on like a television set, I take my KitKat tea breaks in the synapses of my brain.
    â€œIt’s quite normal at your age to get confused, to have one or two aches and pains,” he smiles, though his eyes are cold as Dairylea straight from the fridge, and even though it’s spreadable it still rucks up the bread. “Now that you’re in your twilight years.”
    Twilight, yes, when you can barely see or be seen. When you flit home from one lit window to the next until you reach your very own. When we’re not quite light yet not quite dark, not quite lit yet not quite extinguished. Crepuscular, in fact, like Nurse Tinkerbell’s face at the exit door as Doctor Kharana shakes his head and announces for the benefit of my twilight ears, “She hasn’t said a word.”
    I shout suddenly, red and blustering as a bare-cheeked gale, “I’m fine, Doctor Kharana, absolutely fine. Why don’t you check on Peter and his calorific intake instead. Have you seen him recently? He’s shrivelled as a pea.”
    Nobody says a word. The birds outside are louder than us. They have a bit of song left in them. I slump, and guilt engulfs me with my pillow. Oh, to be smothered by Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , to follow him out, out through the broken window, the open window, the hippo decamped for good.

Gwen
    Rape
    I paint Fenella in my room. She’s vulnerable in the waning light like a fawn that lingers too long by the edge of the lake, like Leda half dreading, half anticipating her rape. I start with slow smudges of curl, delicate feathery strokes from mid-air, building up skin, pigment, flesh on canvas. Her shoulders are bare, sloping, angular. My paintbrush undresses her further, unties the black sash from about her waist, lets the pretty white