Free Autumn Laing by Alex Miller Page A

pausing in the work. ‘I’ve got a better idea.’ Sheet after sheet. Nothing to stop him. Travelling his wild ink trail. On the train. It was, he often observed to himself with a pleasurable detachment, as if some weirdo inside him believed the application of a consuming impatience to create would force paper and ink to yield their astonishing perfections to him. A weirdo. Yes. Himself. His other self. He wasn’t going to ask him to stop or to slow up. Without the liberty of untutored energy that weirdo’s life would not be worth living. Without his liberty, Pat knew he would drown in the sorrows of self-loathing. He had not been offered a choice. It had been born in him. To lay it down would be to lay himself down. Life was good only so long as the genie had his freedom. He had no idea what he could expect from his genie. And that was the way he wanted it to be. In the dark with the fear till the new light struck him. No guarantees. No commercial opportunities sidelining him.
    Edith was shouting at him that he was being unbending and too filled with pride for his own good. ‘There’s a limit!’ she shouted again, her voice rising, leaning to look into his face. ‘We need the money!’
    No doubt she was right and there was a limit. And wasn’t he intent on finding that limit? And then going beyond it? Wasn’t he already beyond it? Wasn’t that just what he was doing? Liberating himself from her limits. Not just being unbending. Unbending wasn’t it at all. Wasn’t he repudiating the confines of a dead tradition by the shortest cut? He had not reasoned his way out of it. He chanted Rimbaud loudly overthe sound of her angry voice. ‘ Where are we going? To battle? I am weak! The others advance. Tools, weapons … time! … Fire! Fire on me! Here! Or I surrender.—Cowards!—I’ll kill myself! I’ll throw myself … ’ He couldn’t remember the next line. But if Rimbaud could do it, then so could he. They were both men. Both human beings. Both young. So why not? Who was to stop him? He had the energy.
    At the edge of his vision he was aware of Edith leaving the studio. The gentle loving part of him wanting to catch up with her and give her a cuddle and be nice to her and make things fine and glorious between them. But the weirdo wasn’t having any of that. The berserker Egil Skallagrimsson swept his brush across the large sheet of paper in which meat was supposed to have been wrapped by Mr Creedy, or by his assistant, his big dark-complexioned daughter with the eyes of black glass. Jet, wasn’t it, that he was thinking of? The black jewel of women’s mourning. So was it her figure he was after here? The rounding of her ample thighs and arms, her weighty breasts? And here she was, found for a line, then lost again. A figure in the torment of lust. Elusive and not to be invoked by artifice or technique. She had smiled a smile of womanly welcome at him with those jet-black eyes of hers when he went into the shop. He had asked if she could please let him have some of her paper. Without a word, as if she had been expecting his request for years, as if it was her destiny to know his need, she turned her back and rolled up this generous bundle, her eyes catching at his in the mirror with the arch conspiracy of it, dimples in her elbows as well as in her cheeks, lifting her bare arm and tying the roll of paper with the twine her father used to tie the rolled roasts with, snapping it with an expert jerk of her chubbywrist, then turning back from the mirror and presenting him with the paper, her understanding of what she did swimming in the generous Gulf Stream of her gaze, her offering to the artist for the work he was to undertake. And would there be something else the artist might be wanting from her? Body and soul would it be that he wanted from her? Is that all then? He had tied the paper on the back of his bike and ridden home with his booty. And as he rode he daydreamed that big motherly girl waiting in her