Free Autumn Laing by Alex Miller Page B

father’s shop all her life to render this service to him when he came by, knowing through some primitive instinct in the welcoming warmth of her bowels that he, the warrior artist and poet, would surely be coming one day, her destiny to become his accomplice. It was a nice little daydream that he played with as he pedalled hard up the hill, the chain creaking, the tyres spitting stones. He had no idea then what he would do with the daydream, but here it was. She was a fitting mistress for a warrior poet … Black ink staining the paper now instead of the carmine blood of the slaughtered sheep and cattle and the screaming pigs. She was his satanic apprentice. He didn’t know her name. He would not ask it of her next time he went into the shop. He might have called her his muse for this enterprise, but muse was a notion he had rejected along with all the other old nonsense from the Gallery School masters. Satanic apprentice had more energy in it. More possibility. More concealment and uncertainty. More brutality. What, after all, did he mean by it? He knew, and he didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. He was not after understanding. He just wanted to enjoy the feel of it on him. In his sweat. In his balls. That was the way he liked it. Fuck their understandings. Perhaps over time the richness of itsmeanings would unfold to him: his satanic mistress. He liked the sound of it, carrying her generous body with it. That was enough. The glow of possibility in her black eyes. It was a story. A poem. Her plump fingers gripping his cock. That would do. Who gave a fuck what it meant? It was private. It didn’t have to have a meaning. It was just for himself. It was a story that hadn’t been told yet. They wouldn’t be hearing about it. His own private truth in it. They wouldn’t be getting the chance to tell him it wasn’t any good and would have to be improved. He was done with them. They’d hear from him when he was ready for them to hear from him.
    He had forgotten for a minute or two why he was doing this. His idea for getting away overseas. That was it. A folio of drawings of the butcher’s daughter, then, to impress the great man. It was a liberating discovery to know whose body it was he was drawing. A confirmation to know who the subject of all this was. The particularity of it giving the enterprise a new force of its own, as if it was coming from outside himself. From some authentic and mysterious source. The weirdo in touch with the ocean of the unconscious. Was that it? He had been sure he was drawing someone or other and was very glad to discover it was her. The big girl in the butcher’s shop. The need for such generous volumes of flesh was beginning to make sense to him. He would never have thought of it himself. She couldn’t have been much more than seventeen and already had a young child of her own. Her maternally noble manner, that she was surely not aware of. Just as statues are not aware of the thoughts they kindle in poets who stand and gaze at them in the moonlight. A young woman conceived bythe generous hands of the sculptor Aristide Maillol, and not simply the splendid daughter of Mr Creedy, the Ocean Grove butcher. A treasure waiting here for him. And him not knowing it till he had the idea of going in and asking for some paper. Our triumph must be our own secret. Triumph belongs to the interior life of the artist, not out in the street. Such things wither when exposed to the sceptical gaze of social realities. So it was for himself. All this, it was just for himself.
    Later, after he had sobered up a bit and he and Edith had made up, he told her his plan. When they had eaten their sardines on toast and Edith had gone to sleep, murmuring an apology to him for a last fishy burp (she had complained during their lovemaking about the distraction of the rats in the ceiling cantering back and forth above their heads. He told her the rats were having a polo match up there and made her laugh), he got up and