Another World Read Online Free PDF Page B

he makes himself eat two slices before he gives up. Gareth goes back to the wall, leaving his pizza uneaten. A second later Miranda follows him.
    ‘I’ll start over there,’ Fran says. ‘I think we should spread out.’
    Wiping sweat from his upper lip, Nick says, ‘Let’s have a window open, shall we? Gareth?’
    They’ve kept the windows closed, in spite of the heat, because there are no curtains. Gareth sees his own white face reflected in the window, surrounded by clouds of pale moths with fat furry bodies fumbling at the glass, trying to get in. As soon as he opens it they flicker past him, and begin dancing round the lamps. One finds its way on to the hot bulb and dies in a sizzle of scorched wings.
    Gradually, the portrait’s revealed. A red-haired woman emerges from under Fran’s scraper, with the sour expression of someone who’s driven a hard bargain and is not contented with the result. Behind her stands a girl with thin ringlets dangling round a frail-looking neck. Huge eyes – her father’s eyes – the underlids so prominent it’s like one of those trick drawings where the face still looks normal upside-down. This effect isn’t, as it would be on most young faces, pathetic, but faintly sinister.
    Behind Fanshawe stands a boy, slightly taller than the girl. Dark eyes, a strained expression that Nick recognizes, yet can’t identify. One hand rests on his father’s shoulder, though only because he’s been told to put it there. His fingertips cringe from the enforced contact. The boy painted this: there’s no way of proving it, but Nick knows. That expression is the inward-directed gaze of the self-portraitist. And my God, what a talent. The faces leap out of the wall.
    Nick begins working his way down over Fanshawe’s waistcoat, leaning over Miranda, who’s kneeling between his feet.
    ‘Oh, look –’ she says.
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    He can hear in her voice that she does. He bends down and peers into the space she’s created. An erect penis springs from the unbuttoned flies, as thick and pale as the decaying cabbage stalks in the kitchen garden. Gareth looks across and sniggers.
    ‘Well,’ says Nick.
    Fran says, ‘It’s horrible.’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know…’
    ‘No, I mean the whole thing’s horrible.’
    Nick’s begun to feel that too. His early excitement’s giving way to dismay, as it becomes clearer, minute by minute, that the portrait’s an exercise in hate.
    Gareth’s scraping away at the bodice of the seated woman. ‘Boobs,’ he announces triumphantly.
    The woman’s breasts are great lard-white footballs, covered by a canal system of blue veins.
    Fran winces. ‘I wonder what other surprises he’s got in store?’
    At the centre of the group, uncovered last, is a small, fair-haired boy, whose outstretched arms, one podgy fist resting on the knee of either parent, forms the base-line of the composition. Patches of wallpaper still cling to the painting like scabs of chicken pox, but even so its power is clear. Victorian paterfamilias, wife and children: two sons, a daughter. Pinned out, exhibited. Even without the exposed penis, the meticulously delineated and hated breasts, you’d have sensed the tension in this family, with the golden-haired toddler at its dark centre.
    Their shadows half obscure the figures on the wall.
    ‘Come back behind the lamps,’ Nick says.
    They move back, until only the flickering moths move across the surface, casting shadows as big as birds.
    ‘Who do you suppose did it?’ Fran asks.
    ‘The boy,’ says Nick.
    ‘It could’ve been one of the workmen,’ Fran says, sounding defensive. But why defensive? ‘I don’t suppose they’d be doing their own decorating.’
    ‘No, it’s the boy,’ Nick insists. ‘Look at his eyes. He’s the only one who knows he’s in a painting.’
    Fran stares from face to face. ‘Yes,’ she says at last.
    Silence. The living stand and gaze at the dead. Probably the same thought