Jesus, it was hot in Finn’s attic studio, hotter than it should have been by any reasonable right on any reasonable winter’s day. But Bloody Mary downstairs had cranked up her heating higher than any reasonable person should. He stooped to the floor to listen. Nothing. Where had the skulking crone gone?
How artfully he had sneaked into the Hammersmith house an hour ago to avoid being ambushed by ‘aren’t you just the marvel’ Mary, yet somehow his sex-for-a-studio landlady still knew he’d arrived. Sure, he’d be ‘just the marvel’ if she hadn’t driven Tabia away yesterday with her shrieks and caws. Wasn’t it enough for Mary to have banished his muse without today’s attempt at driving him out with this shitting heat? He went to the window and cracked open the painted hinges. The sharp winter air whacked him in the face.
“Jealous bitch,” he called and then paused to cough out the frost that caught in his throat.
Curvaceous Tabia. Gorgeous Tabia. Oh Tabia. Chilled traffic fumes gritted his eyes.
He turned to his jumble of paints and readied his palette with stripes of alizarin crimson, burnt umber and lamp black. A blotch of turps followed by a swipe of brush through the paint and, tra laa, could that be a smear of optimism? Could be. A glug of turps.
Tabia, his creative soul. So ready to be herself, so simple. What right did studio-for-a-fuck Mary have to interfere?
“Cavorting as though he has no wife,” Bloody Mary had yelled. “For shame!”
Wife? Since when did painting in someone’s attic form a sacred bond? The Devil’s hag, more like. A globule of sweat dripped from his nose.
“What the hell are you burning down there?” Finn yelled. “Your spite?”
The wind whistled and the drub of a pausing cab rose from the street. Thank Christ the breeze was picking up. A crack or was it a cackle? How tickled Mary would be at her ironic twist on freezing an artist from his garret. Ah well, if she insisted on wasting her money on heating the whole fucking universe, so be it.
A fresh sheet of cartridge paper, a newly prepared palate and, as turpentine evaporated through Finn, Tabia’s absence swelled in his bereft core, propelling his hand. How readily the brush’s bristles now bent, curving with the urban breeze. Tendrils flurried across the paper, dispersing like the tributaries from an estuary seeking their ditch sources. A caress of turps et voilà, a set of ruins rose on the shore and a man materialised. More strokes, and luscious Tabia, glorious Tabia, salsa-ed into the scene to join the man who had morphed into a king, a god, no, the one true artist. Astonishing, astounding. How visionary was that!
A louder crack and the turpentine bottle toppled, sparking red. Flames trickled across the floor and up the easel leg, quickening the painting. And lo, out of the paper pirouetted a three-dimensional Tabia, her palms eager to press his face and soothe his pacing guts. This creation was truly phenomenal. Eureka. Bloody eureka!
“Go finger yourself, witch,” he yelled. “You have not won!”
And as the air sirened and tangoed, he and Tabia shimmied onto the floor to writhe in the tranquilising scent of artistic fulfilment.