The artist does not smile as he works. The wife can see only the easel’s rigging, the canvas turned away, the boardwalk flush behind it. Her husband and two girls are farther down the beach, piling sand into useless banks by the sea, laughing as the waves collapse them into dough. It’s getting on for evening, so that everything—sand, water, the backs of necks—takes on the color of rust. Her husband waves at her, the sea like an oyster behind him, reflecting a single, brilliant pearl. The tide is coming in.
“Eyes up,” says the artist, accusingly.
He had appealed to her as they strolled past because of his quintessential look, his adherence to a cliché she had seen many times from artists at the Academy—upturned moustache, sideburn fuzz, half-moon spectacles.
“Caricatura?” he had said, his eyes grey and rheumy.
She tried to convince her family that they should get one together, a keepsake they could hang somewhere unobtrusive (the bathroom, surely) to remind them of this day, but the girls complained.
“This is the last of the sun,” the oldest said, as if it really was, forever and ever. Her little sister nodded, frowning with youngest-child seriousness. The artist sat, politely dejected, awaiting their response with the air of a wounded animal. Their mother sat down in one of the chairs, looked pleadingly to her family.
“Please,” she said. “For me.” She wanted something more tangible than photographs and poorly filmed video—something she could touch, imperfectly rendered and somehow truer. Something she could recognize, at least.
The children dragged her husband, by the arms, back towards the sea. He stared at his wife as he went, wide-eyed, somehow of the mind that if he moved slowly enough, she wouldn’t notice his betrayal.
“Solo yo, por favor,” she said, sighing, but pleased that she could at least prove herself the good kind of tourist.
“Back straight, no fidgeting,” he said, in perfect English.
He has no examples pinned up around his stand like the other (probably better) caricaturists, but she can guess well enough what he will do. Accentuate the teeth, the head, the flat curve of her nose. Maybe fatten her lips as a concession. Here, something for you to aspire to.
A passing Brit watches the artist work, scowls, moves on. The artist’s pen strokes, from what she can see of his arm behind the frame, are broad.
“I hope you’re not too unkind,” she says. “I’m not sure my ego could take it.”
“This is immaterial,” he says, turning his nose back down to the canvas. He tuts as he works, doesn’t seem to find his sketch all that amusing, which should, she expects, be the bare minimum.
“I used to draw, you know,” she says.
“We all used to draw,” he says, shaking his head gravely.
“Properly, I mean. I studied for a long time at an academy. Not caricature, of course. Portraiture, of a fashion.”
“A fashion,” he says, not a question. A flat repetition.
“Experimental work, mostly. Abstract.”
He looks at her like she has just spat in his coffee.
She looks over her shoulder to her husband, maybe twenty yards out, to give him a get a load of this guy look, but he is distracted, digging sand out of a cleft in their youngest’s swimsuit.
“Yes,” says the artist, “that’s good, hold that pose.”
“You take this very seriously, don’t you?” she says, but he doesn’t respond, concentrates instead upon a line of shading. He stays on that spot, the fineliner cutting deep into the paper, hard enough to tear. He leans back from the canvas, takes a sip of the bottled water by his side.
“I don’t understand,” he says, blinking.
“Excuse me?”
“No talking, hold the pose,” he says. He brings the pen forward and back, forward and back, never quite touching the paper. He is starting to sweat.
“Everything okay?”
“It’s not…” he says, then shakes his head, reconsidering. “We can come back from here. We can salvage this.”
“Okay,” she says, wishing her husband would look over. Her family are further away than before—drawing closer to the tide, the tide drawing closer to them, distance and heat overtaking the horizon, blurring them like grease on a lens. She catches the eye of a passing mother, a toddler held against her chest, mulching her bra strap with toothless gums. The mother smiles, waves her son’s arm like a marionette. She seems about to say hello—caught in the sweaty, half-delirium of Britons abroad, where strangers are just friends you haven’t met—when she sees the caricature.
She steps back. Her expression is singular—pleading, curious— as if she has just seen, for the very first time, a heart beating open in its chest, is appreciating the craftsmanship of a muscle such as this, recognizing its impossibility, its mirror-image churning pint after pint of blood beneath her own ribs—as if a meteorite has fallen precisely into the center of her coffee table, awash with strange and alien matter, a culture or mold, breaking out from the cooling rock and into her living room, spreading soft like butter up the cracks in her upholstery, up the ankles of her socks—as if color has suddenly stopped, just stopped, decided against itself and taken a leave of absence. She holds a hand to her throat, lets her son drop to the ground, the bra strap pinging out of his mouth. She walks lopsidedly away, shaking her head, gravely disappointed. The child bawls on the ground, knees scraped below his patterned shorts, until he too sees the caricature and stops, mid-howl, to follow his mother in silence.
“Did you see that?” the wife says, casting her head around, waiting for the world around her to react, to snap back on its elastic and acknowledge the wrongness of the scene. To tut and admonish and sigh. The boardwalk is busier than before, more people making their way back from the beach, milling around her. No one flinches, not even the artist, whose cheeks have taken on a yellowish hue.
“This is not the time for such things,” he says. He is stained now up to the elbows with ink, the pen by his side, hands scooping at the paper as if trying to stop the image itself—still hidden—from sliding off.
“If you need to start again, it’s okay. Mistakes happen,” she says, but the artist claps his hands to his ears, staining his sideburns black.
“Mistakes? Mistakes?” he says, and coughs. “Mistakes? You are speaking something I don’t know. You are speaking like in tongues. Mistakes? I need you to stay calm, to stop being hysterical. Am I clear? Am I so clear to you now?”
She nods, unnerved by him, by the color of this evening light—much too vascular, much too from within. She tries to peek around the easel to see just what he has created, what sort of caricature this is. The artist glares, raises a finger in warning.
There are a great many people on the boardwalk now. As if they are hanging around, watching something. Watching her.
Her family, when she looks over her shoulder, are wading into the sea. Or the sea is wading into them. They are muted—vague pen strokes to fill out the backdrop.
“I think my family are going to drown in the ocean,” she says.
“Stop being a child,” says the artist, and she agrees. She is being foolish, she expects. Around her, more people gather, bringing with them the smell of sweat and factor 30.
“I would like to get back into it one day,” she says. “Drawing, I mean. But I had to stop. There was an issue at the Academy, you see. There were complaints. It seems so stupid, but people, they disliked how I saw them. Do you ever get that?”
“Am I ever appalled by the abstract shape of things?” says the artist, looking up for the first time.
“What? No. That’s not what I said.”
“Whatever.”
“I’m trying to say something. Will you just listen?” she says, exasperated. “It’s like I saw something truer. Like I was a blacklight, exposing them. Does that make sense?”
“No.”
“Exactly. And I was proud of how I saw them. Proud of myself for seeing them as they were. But when I showed them what I’d made, they’d go quiet and small. They’d make excuses. Become irrational. They’d cry, for goodness’ sake, when all I was doing was showing them what was there. ‘Look,’ I was saying, ‘this is you, these are your curled, pendulum arms, this is your mouth, full of moonlight, this is-‘”
“Enough,” he says, glancing about him, fearful. Little by little, a crowd is forming behind the artist. A family, the children coddled with floats and armbands. A group of men in cargo shorts. An elderly couple with eyes the color of guano. All of them tourists, all of them watching the canvas with hungry eyes.
“What are they doing?” she says.
“Waiting,” says the artist. He looks tired, beaten down. His face is spattered, his shirt too, the picture bleeding out from the paper and onto him. He has returned to wider strokes, but they are steadily narrowing inward—a spiral, a decaying orbit. Something is coalescing in the center of the image. Something tidal. The crowd, growing by the minute, occasionally glance at her, as if she is somehow to blame for all this. A woman goes down to her knees, weeping, whispering a quiet prayer. Dogs lurk nearby, lithe and cautious. The wife feels at her face, searching for some strange contour, some cause or central truth. She imagines herself canvassed there, unreal parts of her bulging outwards, grinning with enormous teeth. She feels inside her mouth, pokes her inner ear, worms her fingers through great clumps of her hair.
“Yes!” says a man, the father of the inflatable children. “That’s it, stay exactly like that.”
He claps a hand onto the shoulder of the artist, who flinches, but does not stop. Other men lean in now, give him pointers, frown at her if she moves an inch. But she cannot stop moving, will not stop moving. She needs to get out of this chair. Yet when she tries to stand, a gamut of hands pushes her back down—a family are standing guard behind her, forsaking their view of the caricature to keep her seated. Others nod solemnly at the family, hands on their hearts, thanking them for their sacrifice.
When she turns around, she sees something she does not understand. A trick of the light, maybe, or a trick of something else, the light an unwilling accomplice. She sees the horizon line undone, sea and sky together, obscurely, the world rendered as scene, as setting, beachgoers silhouetted in shadows, charcoals fingerprinted, smudged, arms and legs thrashing, merging, a magnificent collage of body, sea, sky, image. A family, her family, somewhere from within that collage.
“Come on,” says a Glaswegian, dressed poorly for the weather, almost drooling. The artist looks like he might burst into tears, but he keeps going, shaking from the effort. Couples embrace each other, their breathing shallow, and someone has started to sing. It is not a song anyone knows.
“We’re almost there,” the artist says, quietly, only to her. Their eyes meet, and there is something like companionship there, and there is something like grief. She feels desperately put on the spot, as if everyone is waiting for her to speak.
“It’s funny,” she says—shouts, really, “but I didn’t see what was so wrong with the way I drew them! I didn’t see what the big deal was! Matchstick teeth. Cameras for heads. Fat dog smiles. That was what they had. I was happy when I drew them. Astounded even. Astounded by the abstract shape of them. Oh! Oh!”
Her breath catches in her throat, and she looks to the artist again for what they so briefly shared, but he won’t acknowledge her.
“Their river fingers, their corridor tongues, their millipede veins, their eyes that were just cubes on cubes on cubes, run through with black. What’s so wrong with that, hmm? What’s so very wrong with that?”
“Shh!” says a shirtless man, rubbing a hand over his chest. The crowd nods in agreement, their depth of expression and feeling making them seem almost invented—animated and colored before her eyes.
The artist puts his pen down, smiles at her hopelessly.
“It is finished,” he says.
A shudder runs through the crowd, carried on the wind. They stare, awestruck, and wait for what comes next.
“Jesus,” they say.
“You wouldn’t believe it.”
“And all in black.”
“And all in black.”
A publican, still dressed in his apron, steps towards the artist and thrusts a wallet at him.
“Is it enough?” he says.
The artist doesn’t look up. A pair of Londoners, a Mancunian, the shirtless man, all come forward, proffering euros and checkbooks. Before long, bids are being shouted, children hoisted up on shoulders to give them better reach. All the while, the artist stares at his knees, refusing to see this thing he has done, refusing to turn it around for her to see, to finally see her own face. A child, a girl, sent through the legs of the crowd by her parents, tugs on the artist’s trouser leg, eyes wet and wide. He looks down and regards her, something passing between them. The crowd quietens a moment, as if to hear. Without a word, she snatches the caricature from its frame and darts back through the jumble of limbs.
The crowd turns inward, ripples like an anemone in deep tide, scrambling to find the thief. The wife can see nothing, but there is a surge, something loud like a whipcrack, and the crowd is away, chasing after the child, the caricature clutched in her little hands. The image recedes along with the girl. The wife rises to follow, but already they seem so far away. The boardwalk empties, the screaming crowd vanished into evening haze.
She turns around, expecting a world made static behind her—flat, dark, somehow truer. But there is nothing. The tide moves in as it always has, calm and baleful. People filter out and away, and the beach breathes its last for the night, ready to be reborn come morning. Ready to forget what it has done.
“What happened?” she says. The artist blinks, his eyes distant. She collapses back in her chair, shaking him out of his stupor. Desperation creeps into her voice. “Why did you do that? What the hell did you do?”
“I drew what I saw,” he says. “Just what I saw.”
Slowly, he folds up his chair, dismantles the easel. He packs away his pens, his empty water bottle, a few scrap bits of paper, into a loose plastic bag, finds a pocket for his glasses. He tries to carry the easel under-arm but loses his grip, lets it drop to the ground. He looks to her, chewing his bottom lip. After a time, she stands, takes the easel, and carries it for him down the lonely boardwalk.
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J.G. Lynas writes weird and speculative fiction. His work has been published in Strange Horizons, Recommended Reading, Visual Verse, and the North American Review, for which it was selected as an honorable mention for the Kurt Vonnegut Prize. He lives in Leamington Spa, where he works as a PhD student, Wolfson Scholar, and sessional teacher at the University of Warwick. Twitter/X: @jg_lynas |
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