Free How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall Page A

was occurring. By the time Uncle Marcello and the police arrived, the Bestia and the mysterious woman had disappeared, leaving only a pool of red evidence. Annette suspects that her mother has in fact seen the Bestia, and knows exactly what he looks like. The trauma was extreme and now she is simply too frightened to talk about it.
    Annette wonders whether there is a strict tradition involved when it comes to the Bestia. She wonders whether other people hear flies and feel the red shadow before they die, or whether they hear and feel other things. Perhaps to some people the Bestia might, instead of flies buzzing, sound like Olivetti keys tapping, or a cat hissing, or a firework wailing into the sky. If they were expecting flies how would they know to run? How would they know to kneel and pray to be saved? It is a mystery.
    The market begins to close. Behind her Maurizio steps up and hugs her fiercely. ‘I’ve come back for you, even though you treat me with such contempt.’ He puts his hands over her mouth. ‘No, Mother, no one can hear you scream!’ Elemme laughs and claps at the performance. Annette wriggles free. Her brother smells of musty potting soil and the vinegar solution with which he and Uncle Marcello have been dousing the greenfly.

The Mirror Crisis
     
     
    Other than those strange six months with Dr Dixon and his creepy insects, your childhood was good. You liked being brought up where you were, in the border expanse. It was rural and difficult, and you felt hardy and capable because of that. You and Danny ran wild. The fells were on your doorstep, those brown and red massifs that your dad brought into his studio and undressed and made profitable. You swam in the rivers and waterfalls, made dens, climbed trees. You took over the tumbledown barns, swung off the beams, and reared yourselves among the bleating livestock. It was an exterior childhood, and you and Danny were exterior children. There were gales, floods, hardships, funerals; you were taught that this was nature, and you’d better respect it.
    The north of your youth was practically pre-industrial. You are always amazed when you hear people’s ideas about idylls and pleasure grounds, the myths of the sublime. Back then it was a landscape of filth loosened from fields, ringworm, walls of snow, and long, sickening bus rides to school. It was bad weather, burning carcasses, kids with disabilities, black-eye Fridays and badger baiting; collecting wood off the fell and trying to keep it dry under tarpaulin so the logs didn’t fizzle with sap, hiss and blacken on the grate, because that was how you stayed warm. No Economy 7. No piped gas. Fowl were strung from hooks in the outbuildings by your parents’ cottage. In another shed trout was smoked. The heating range, which was installed by your dad when you were fourteen to run some radiators, was bought from a local farmer, a cut-and-shunt boiler, previously used to incinerate stillborn lambs. Your mother washed all the clothes by hand until that same year, when his paintings started bringing in good money, and a machine was bought and plumbed into the greasy, goose-hung bothy.
    And when your best friend Nicki collapsed with an asthma attack on the moor, she was airlifted to Newcastle Infirmary by helicopter, after forty-five minutes of lying under a witch-hazel bush, her brain bluely solidifying. It was January. The black furrows were frozen and an earthy winter scent radiated from the ground. You ran back from the phone box along the road and wrapped Nicki in your coat and held her hand. It was the first and only time you’ve had to dial the emergency number. You waited for help, so insanely long, it seemed. Then the sky was ripped open by noise. You watched the Sea King buzz down through sleet, and you opened Nicki’s mouth because the wind from the propeller blades seemed strong enough to re-inflate her lungs. The witch-hazel carried pale orange flowers on its bare twigs, the blossoms impossibly