Free Bad Girls Good Women by Rosie Thomas

little shop in Beak Street, and had brought them triumphantly home. More of his discoveries were dotted about the flat – a tiny still life of oranges in a basket, in an ornate gilt frame, a pair of pewter candlesticks, a batik wall-hanging, contrasting oddly with the battered furniture.
    ‘Dust-collectors,’ muttered Jessie, not that dusting occupied her at all.
    Felix finished his preparations with a twist of black pepper from a wooden peppermill, and carried the tray through to Jessie. He laid the table in front of her, swinging the vodka bottle out of reach. His mother eyed the food.
    ‘You’ve got to eat,’ he told her patiently.
    Jessie ate almost nothing, but her body seemed to grow more bloated and less mobile every day. She could only shuffle round the flat with difficulty now, and she never went outside. She lived for her vodka bottle, for her occasional visitors, who stirred up her already vivid memories, and for Felix. He felt sorry for her, and loved her, and he knew that she kept him prisoner. He watched her like a mother with a child as she spooned up her soup.
    ‘What did you do today?’ she demanded. ‘Tell me all about it.’
    Felix looked out over the plane trees locked inside the railings of the square garden.
    ‘It was life class today.’
    ‘Nude model, does that mean? A woman?’
    ‘That’s right.’
    Jessie chuckled coarsely. ‘Must make it hard for you boys to concentrate.’
    ‘Do you want some bread with your soup?’
    She peered at him. ‘You’re a funny boy, sometimes. Are you all right at that college? Doing well at your drawing?’
    Felix couldn’t have begun to explain to Jessie that he had no idea what he was doing there. The models embarrassed him, but setting that aside, the aridity of life drawing, and the other exercises that the students were required to undertake, seemed to have no relevance at all to the kind of painting that Felix wanted to do. He needed to shout, and to splash himself on to the canvases in violent colours. At the college he didn’t know how to do anything of the kind. He was silent, and he worked in cramped spaces with tiny pencil strokes. He knew that he had been much happier in the year and a half after he had left school, working during the day in an Italian grocer’s in Soho, and going to night class. But after night class, with his teacher’s encouragement, he had won his place at the Slade, and he had wanted to be a painter for as long as he could remember. Only he didn’t think that any of the work he was doing now would help him with that.
    He couldn’t explain any of this to Jessie, who didn’t even understand what painting meant.
    ‘Of course I’m all right,’ he said softly.
    Jessie pushed her food away. ‘Pour me a drop more of the good stuff, there’s a duck.’ Felix filled her glass for her and she sat back with a sigh of relief. ‘That’s better. God, it’s nice to have a talk. I can’t bear the quiet, all day long.’
    ‘You could listen to the wireless.’ The old-fashioned model in a bakelite case stood in a corner of the room.
    ‘All that rubbish? Noisy music. That’s what your dad liked. Loud music, all day and all night. We used to dance, anywhere, any time. God, we used to dance.’
    Felix let her reminisce. That was what Jessie enjoyed. It was almost all she had, he understood that. He had his own memories, too, as he sat watching her. They were mostly of upstairs rooms, with the sound of music and laughter, and sometimes shouting, drifting up to him. Felix used to sit for hours, drawing and waiting. When Jessie had finished work, at all sorts of strange hours, and if she was alone, she would bustle in and sweep him off somewhere to eat. In those days she had a healthy appetite, and the meals were the best of their times together. Usually they went to one of a handful of cafés, where everyone knew her and greeted her.
    ‘Hello, Jess, my love. What’s it to be tonight? Extra portion for that Felix, and