Free Changing Heaven by Jane Urquhart Page B

window, towards Arthur, towards the candle, away from Christ, whose vaguely menacing face shines like a partial moon in that company. The colours of all the painted clothing-the hideous turquoises and purples-are deepened, enriched, by the tint of fire. Arthur lights another candle and places it behind the rear window he has cut into the box.
    When the light moves into the room from the rear window the Last Supper amalgamates, becomes an ugly lump, resembles a poorly constructed artificial mountain. Personality disappears. Judas, Peter, John, Jesus, Timothy, Andrew melt into a meaningless mass of flesh and clothing. So much clothing, obscuring everything beneath. Arthur thinks of the canvas sacks on wheels that his father pushes through the humid rooms of his shop, the endlessness of it. He thinks of the bolts of silk that Tintoretto’s father dyed, over and over, during long sixteenth-century workdays, he thinks of the riotous clothing attached to the princess on his wall.
    Arthur lights another candle and places it in front of the grouping just beyond the territory of the box. His own face leaps into startling life, lit from beneath. Above him, still ignored, the round undimpled bellies of rubber dolls shine, orange, in the light.
    When he illuminates the west, the final window, all the disciples come back into amazing focus. Christ’s clumsyplaster-of-Paris hand becomes eloquent, its gesture profound. The unexceptional plaster robes worn by everyone in the room now evolve into something magnificent, something which Arthur knows the great masters referred to as drapery.
    “Drapery,” he mutters, looking around his narrow dark room at the barely discernible bundle of soiled laundry he has crammed into the window and at the trail of shirts and vests he has dropped carelessly across the floor. All these years the clothing that has come into the shop, other people’s laundry, has been drapery; something gentle, boneless, something that falls over, that transforms the frame beneath. “Drapery,” he whispers again, the sound of it suddenly sanctifying his mother’s tablecloths and curtains and pillow slips and coverlets, his own jeans and T-shirts, his father’s profession, the dirty laundry on the floor of his bedroom.
    Arthur runs out of his room and into the front of the shop, gathering silk now (Tintoretto – little dyer of silk): women’s undergarments, the smaller the better, to drape over his dolls. Unconcerned by the sexual significance of these small pieces of cloth, unconcerned by the fact that they are nylon and not silk at all, he drapes the panties over his naked rubber angels and the larger swaths, slips and half-slips, over any object in the room: two chairs, one stool, the cardboard room, his piles of books. He lights the remaining seven candles, positions them dramatically to the left of several draped objects and, reaching for his sketchbook, ink wash, and sanguine Conté crayon, he begins to draw.
    Four hours later, Arthur’s father puts down the sports section of the Saturday paper and leans inquisitively forward in his chair. His eyes dart suspiciously around the room as his nostrils recognize smoke. Following the smell of burningrubber, burning nylon, down the narrow staircase, he moves towards the room at the back of the shop.
    Behind Arthur the reproduction of St. George and the Dragon disengages itself from the lower of the two thumbtacks that fasten it to the wall and curls upward in the heat. First the frantic woman disappears, then the corpse, then the tiny knight and listless dragon. For a few moments, before the complete episode bursts into flames, all that is visible is the turbulent sky.
    But Arthur, facing in the opposite direction, does not see this. He is too busy with the flaming drapery, too busy trying – as his father sees when he opens the door-to put the fire out with his bare hands.

A NN’S MOTHER is brushing out her daughter’s hair, preparing her for the dance in the