Hand-drawn
by Ruth Hatfield (Cambridge, UK)
When he works, it’s his hands that he looks at most. Not the paper, not the pencils, not even the designs that pour with joyful chaos onto the sheets in front of him. Sometimes, he’s so busy looking at his hands that he doesn’t see what colour he’s picked up and a skirt that was intended in his mind’s eye as peach or emerald green will curl blue and icy onto the page, its soft lines at odds with the harsher colour. If he notices this, he usually crumples up the design immediately, or occasionally puts it in his file if it’s happened by some slight chance to be interesting.
But sometimes he doesn’t see the mistake for hours, because he’s still looking at his hands.
They make him think, those hands. Or rather, they make him aware of how numb his thought process has become: a matter of deflection and turning blindly away. What they do for him now – such strange, angular artistry – and what they’ve done before, through all those years of painstaking learning – none of these actions are enough to blunt the sharpness of that one moment, a lifetime ago.
And no-one knows. None of these faces, none of the clapping, smiling people who now wait beyond the edge of the stage flat.
Only he knows, him and his terrible hands.
They know what he can create, which is why he’s here. Behind him, when he walks out onto the stage, there’ll be a screen showing films of models wearing the clothes that he’s pulled from his dreams.
Such dreams, he thinks, as he hears the rumble of the announcer’s voice proclaiming the accolade he’s about to receive.
And then he looks around him. It’s a habit, nothing more. It’s the look you learn to cast behind you on a prison landing when a certain feeling trembles the air: a photograph taken of the location of every possible threat. He grew well used to holding this snapshot in his head, to studying it and picking out the warning signs in an instant. Those pictures of crooked arms, inching hands and fingers reaching around doorways have saved him from many fates.
This time, however, he isn’t in a familiar enough place to hold the scene in his mind. It leaves him caught by a passing gust of panic that lifts his feet from the floor and carries him, before he’s even aware of having moved, several paces onto the swirling-lit stage.
Huge mountains of applause rise from the ranked foothills of the audience and he is skating across the craggy peaks like the nimblest goat, born to these pastures. He wants to speak but the noise closes off his ears. It’s a kind of sealing, of oblivion inside his head, of joy into the outside world.
For a few moments all he can do is smile and wave, and smile again at the next few patches of black auditorium, and wave at them so they know he has seen them too, and smile again at the podium where a pointy-eared man in a cream and pink suit waits for him to finish his royal progress.
And then, as he reaches the cream and pink man and the applause begins to die down, he half-turns and hears a tiny shriek from between the storms of beating hands, roaring like a mouse among so many lions.
“Murderer!”
The woman chants the word in threes, repeating it each time as though a gross, spiny fruit is trying to force its way up her windpipe and out through her mouth.
“Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!”
Some people in the audience don’t know what she’s saying. But anyone who is close enough to see those hard eyes knows immediately that this woman is nothing to do with animal rights or campaigns against sweatshops. She is there because she knows, somehow, that this man they adore is hiding something from them all. She is there to force him to admit it.
It is the end of a road along which she has variously sprinted, stumbled, crawled and crept. Her fingernails are black with dirt, her elbows are bleeding from the gravel, and finally she is rising from her knees.
When all the applause has gone, there remains only this woman shouting over a sea of silence. And all the eyes are on him, waiting to see what he will do.
“He murdered my brother!” she shouts. “My little brother! Only eight years old! Have you all forgotten my brother?”
She cries a name into the aching roof, howls it up to the soaring vengeance that hovers in the rafters.
The audience know the name. A boy killed by another boy, by a small, anonymous creature of eleven. The man standing before them doesn’t have his name, nor his blonde hair, nor the weak, sly smile that was once wheeled out for a school photograph. But beneath his stage make-up lies something familiar.
He stands on the platform, and looks at his hands.
The security guards begin to inch up the aisle. Their heavy bodies lumber with starched intention towards their quarry. But they can’t gather this woman up into their thick arms and bundle her off, not without knowing.
He’s given up thinking that life can revolve around single moments. If ever that happened, it would have happened to him. And yet whenever he tries to pin down that moment, to recall exactly what he did, the images in his head are blurred. If he keeps looking, all he ever sees are the same two shapes – his hands. Never as they would have been then, immature and slender, but always as they are now, ink-stained and pin-scratched and nail-bitten.
What was then is now, the hands tell him. And whatever he chooses to do, nothing more will ever happen than that the going on will just go on, and on, and on, and on.
He forces his mouth into a bewildered smile.
“What’s she on about?” Cream-and-pink asks him.
“No idea,” he shrugs. “What’s she shouting?”
“Something about her brother?”
“Oh… yeah, I know her face, from the papers. She’s got me confused, I guess.”
“Yeah? Oh yeah, I get you. That kid who killed that other kid. Got released years ago, didn’t he? And she’s his sister? Poor girl.”
“Yeah. Poor girl.”
He knows he might have jumped in too quickly, not for the first time, but cream-and-pink just lets his eyes linger for a second on the woman before he turns back to his guest.
“Security’ll deal with it. Poor girl.”
The woman has evaded the fumbling hands of the security guards. She steps forward, forward and forward, pulling away the thick space between her and her target. She shouts as she comes.
“Murderer!”
Between shouts, she is clambering up onto the stage. A gleam of fanaticism shines around her tight hair and hard skin. Thin-jawed and scrawny; her shoulders slice at the wool of her cardigan.
He cannot help but look at her, but then it is natural, is it not, to keep a close eye on any advancing creature? And she crosses the stage quickly, until she is standing right before him and they are nose to nose, like Eskimos.
For a moment cream-and-pink wonders if they are actually going to rub their noses together. They are much of a height.
They hesitate, inclining inwards.
“Murderer!” the woman hisses, inaudible to all but the man she is facing. “Murderer!”
She reaches out. The security men twitch.
He smiles and shakes his head.
“I’m not the man you’re looking for,” he says.
Somehow she is holding his hand. The pressure from her ice-sweat fingers is uneven. She is trying to capture his gaze, to force him to look directly into her eyes, but he is obsessed with the sight of her hand clutching at his.
“It’s not me,” he says. “Whoever you’re looking for, I don’t know him.” He brings his other hand up to cover hers. “Come on, these nice men will take you home.”
Then he holds out this moth he has trapped between the caves of his palms, careful not to let it escape. Sensing darkness, it folds its wings and waits motionless. When he passes it to the security guard, it flutters once in a leaping start, and then crouches low as the brief light disappears, wings unbroken.
Cream-and-pink says “Poor girl. That was a terrible case. I’d forgotten all about it. Well, not forgotten, really, but… poor girl. Poor thing.”
His guest looks for traces of moth-silver on his palms. But he sees only the faint outline of the dress she was wearing underneath her cardigan. Red, he recalls, red, below-the-knee, with a line – just so – falling close here, giving out there. It could have made her beautiful, if only it had been cut a little better.
And his hands begin to tremble.