She thought of a hundred and one reasons for not going. Convinced herself that she had no obligation, no need; woke at half past four rehearsing what she might say by way of an excuse. Somehow she’d been talked into agreeing to something she didn’t really want to do and if, in the cold light of day, she changed her mind, well, that was fine. Posing naked before one man, one pair of eyes. She flinched at the thought.
‘Kate, you don’t have to do this,’ she said aloud.
She was still saying it as she folded her robe into her shoulder bag, along with a pair of ballet shoes she’d borrowed from Chrissy, and a change of underwear. Make-up, mobile, headphones. The overground from Dalston Kingsland to Kentish Town West and then a fifteen-minute walk.
Coming out of the station, she joined the small queue at The Fields Beneath and bought a latte and a croissant, breakfast on the hoof.
The door to the studio was ajar. Winter was bending down close by the easel, mixing paint. The vase and its flowers had disappeared and the bed now had an oversized white sheet stretched loosely across it, falling in narrow folds towards the floor.
Without looking at her, Winter pointed his brush at a hessian screen standing off to one side. ‘You can change behind there.’
She came out in her robe and shoes and stood in front of the bed, arms folded across her waist, the sides of the robe pulled closed.
‘What is this? Some kind of striptease? We don’t have the time.’
Katherine closed her eyes for the briefest of moments, bit down into her lip and slipped the robe from her shoulders. Slid the ballet shoes from her feet.
‘Okay, now I want you to sit. Just sit. Centre of the bed. That’s it. And hunch forward, just a little. A little more. Good. Head slightly down. Arms resting … yes, that’s it … resting on your thighs. And now move your legs further apart. More. More. Good, good. But keep your head down. I don’t want to see … don’t want to see that much of your face. Just … Yes. Pick out a spot on the floor to focus on. And hold that, hold that there. Can you do that? Hold that?’
After the first thirty minutes or so Katherine’s shoulders were starting to ache due to the position of her arms; after twenty more there was an itch at the back of her left knee she desperately wanted to scratch; close to the hour and she was beginning to feel the frame of the bed biting into the backs of her thighs.
How much longer?
‘Right. Take a break. Stretch, whatever.’
Leaving her to it, he marched outside and she saw him pacing up and down with a cigarette, mobile to one ear. Part of her wanted to step round and look at the canvas, see what he’d done, how she looked, but she knew that, without his express permission, that was prohibited, forbidden.
She peed, drank a glass of water from the tap, did a few rudimentary stretches and, as soon as she heard Winter return, resumed the pose.
At lunchtime there was a delivery from the Vietnamese café close by: noodle soup and prawn summer rolls. Winter ate quickly and, grabbing his phone and his cigarettes, headed for the door. Katherine checked her own phone for messages. Facebook, Instagram. Chrissy: How’s it going? Stelina: Good luck! One of the few girls she’d kept in touch with from athletics had broken her PB for the 400 metres, an indoor meeting in Sheffield. Her mum, nothing special, just wanting to know she was okay. Tomorrow, if she remembered, Katherine thought, she’d bring a book.
‘Okay,’ Winter said, closing the door with a bang. ‘Let’s get back to work.’
On the train going home, busy with people of all ages, bicycles, prams, Katherine found the words of a song slipping through her mind, one of those morose guys Abike would play late at night, when she wasn’t sentencing them to Beethoven or whoever: something about aching in the places where I used to lay, was that it? Used to play?
At Dalston Kingsland she came close to losing her footing as she stepped down from the train, the feeling in her left leg all but gone. Back at the flat, she ran a bath, sneaked some of Stelina’s bath salts, borrowed Abike’s little portable radio, slid down into the warm water and closed her eyes.
The next few days followed the same pattern.
One of the things that had worried her about being so long in Winter’s company, just the two of them, was the need to hold her own in conversation, but she soon realised that now the work had started in earnest there would be precious little conversation at all. Instructions aside, Winter restricted himself to the occasional grudging query, when the pose had been held longer than usual, as to how she was feeling, that and violent imprecations called down upon himself when a mark on the canvas failed to tally with the one he had in mind.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck and fuck again. Call yourself a fucking painter? You can no more render skin tones on fucking canvas than you can flap your fucking wings and fly.’ With a swing of a foot he sent an open paint can skidding wildly, splashing Cadmium Orange across the studio floor. ‘Take a break. Take five, ten, I don’t fucking care.’
She found it difficult, hearing him berate himself, not to feel, in some way she couldn’t properly articulate, responsible. A good model, she remembered him saying, was the one who knew how to give the artist what was needed without having to be told. She would try harder, if only she knew how.
When she arrived on the fifth day, the bed had been turned at right angles, pointing towards the easel, and the sheet removed, leaving just the blue-and-grey striped mattress. Winter told her to lie back with her legs hooked over the end of the bed, a pillow behind her head.
‘My eyes,’ Katherine said. ‘Open or closed?’
‘I can’t see your eyes.’
At least, in that particular pose, exposed as she was, she couldn’t see his eyes either, could only feel but not see his gaze.
He worked in silence, just the sounds, faint, of brush against canvas, the scrape of a palette knife, the rise and fall of his breathing merging occasionally with hers.
‘Wait,’ he said abruptly and she realised she’d been drifting towards sleep. ‘Something not quite right. Those shoes, trainers, whatever you were wearing earlier. Where are they?’
Sitting up, she pointed. A pair of faded green Converse she’d come close several times to throwing away.
‘Here …’ He threw them, one by one, for her to catch. ‘Put them on, then let’s see. Now lay back. No, that’s still not … the laces, lose the laces, that’s it. Now pull back the sides. Open. Good. Fine. Try that.’
Katherine lowered herself back down and closed her eyes. Outside, the wind was getting up and she could hear it rolling around the top of the building, causing the windows to shift in their frames.
At the end of the session, she plucked up courage for the first time to ask if she could see what he’d done.
‘’Course fucking not! Some other time, maybe. When I’m further along. Just don’t ask. I’ll tell you when.’
‘So,’ Chrissy said some days later, Stelina off at lectures, Abike at a movie, the pair of them on the sofa watching TV, ‘is it as bad as you thought it was going to be?’
‘I didn’t think it was going to be bad, exactly. More awkward, I suppose. You know, one pair of eyes.’
‘And is it?’
‘No, not really. I mean it was. It was. But, no, not so much. Not any more. You sort of forget about it, don’t you?’
‘Zone out, you mean?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
Chrissy smiled. ‘After all the fuss you made, you sound as if you’re almost enjoying it.’
‘Yes,’ Katherine said hesitantly. ‘In a way I suppose I am.’
And it was true. Winter no longer swore at himself as frequently when he was working and, during their breaks, if he wasn’t talking on his phone, he’d chat to her about seemingly trivial incidents, tell her anecdotes involving other artists she thought she might have heard of but she wasn’t sure. He’d started to look at her differently, too: watch her in a different way as she moved around the studio, following her reflection, window to window, in the glass. Look at her and, just occasionally, smile. She came to cherish that smile. And the more it happened, the more willing she was to do as he asked, the more eager she became to please, hold herself in this uncomfortable pose or that until she was almost enjoying the discomfort, the lower levels of pain.
‘Good news,’ Winter said one morning. ‘That show I mentioned, new gallery, looks as if it might be happening after all. Could be as much as nine months, a year off, but it means upping the ante, even so. Working a whole lot harder. Tomorrow we’d better try something new.’
The new pose had Katherine standing side on, the upper half of the body angled back towards the artist, the viewer, at the waist, both arms raised high above the head.
‘Your arms. You think you can hold them in that position?’
‘I’ll try.’
It wasn’t long before the muscles at the backs of her calves, her thighs, were tight and there was a pain like a stitch, but not a stitch, in the small of her back where she was forced to turn. Her arms were starting to shake and drift apart.
‘Here, look. Maybe this will help.’
Winter looped one of the pieces of rag he’d been using to clean his brushes around her wrists and tied them loosely together in a knot.
‘There.’
When he stepped away, his arm accidentally brushed against her breast.
After another thirty minutes she started to sway and then, without further warning, her knees gave way and she collapsed to the floor.
In the moments between consciousness and waking that followed, she was back in another place, a place she’d taught herself to keep shut away; the shape leaning over hers another shape, the voice another voice. ‘Sit up, can’t you? Come on, sit up straight.’ As she opened her eyes, Adam Keach’s words came tumbling from Anthony Winter’s mouth.
Katherine vomited.
Choked. Bile stuck in the back of her throat.
Winter plucked another piece of rag from the ground and gave it to her to wipe her mouth; when she moved the rag away it had left a gash of paint across her cheek.
‘You all right?’
She blinked, nodded, blinked again.
Something about the way he was looking at her was different now, something about his look, his gaze; looking at her as if she were naked not nude.
‘All right?’ he asked again and smiled.
She thought that he must touch her now, but no.
That was later …