Free Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind by Anne Charnock

is. He wants Toni to think to herself: I did such and such after I went to China. Instead of: I did such and such after Mum died.

    He lies in a deep bath with his wine-soaked thoughts, imagining himself laid out on a slab. He takes another mouthful of wine and reaches up to place his glass on the marble sink. He’s afraid that if he closes his eyes he’ll see Connie’s trauma wound, the cleaned-up aftermath from being impaled on, what? A timber pole? He didn’t ask the mortuary assistant what exactly had skewered her. He’ll never tell Toni, or anyone else, about the injury. He doesn’t want anyone living with the mental image of her impalement, the blunt-force trauma , as stated without elaboration and printed in plain Helvetica in the autopsy report. He simply says that she died from internal injuries.
    He peers down at his own body—unscathed, unmarked by any past injuries. Connie once commented that men could exit this world with their bodies perfectly intact, pure as snow almost, having none of the damage that women routinely incur in childbirth. She didn’t say it with any edge of bitterness. Toni’s birth had been reasonably straightforward. He’d only said that once, though, in Connie’s company. She’d replied, “Not from where I was looking.”

CHAPTER SIX
    Florence, 1469
    Paolo sits at the plain, paper-strewn table in his study and assesses his previous day’s work—a half-finished pen drawing of a small garden urn. He placed the urn on a low wall in the courtyard so that when he sat down to start his sketch, his eye level was close to the centre point of the urn. In addition, he positioned the urn on the shaded side of the courtyard to avoid the visual distractions of flickering and static cast shadows. This allowed him to focus on a searingly complex mental task—namely, to imagine the walls of the urn as a series of hollow building blocks. His drawing thus comprises the penned outlines of all these tiny blocks; the blocks that form the back of the urn can be seen through the hollow blocks that form the front.
    By embarking on this some-would-say foolhardy project, he hopes to reveal how a symmetrical object manifests within a perspective drawing. How much distortion has to occur to make the urn look rea l ? It’s a painstaking task, but if he doesn’t do it, he asks himself, who will?
    His patrons and admirers appreciate this eccentricity—his love of perspective—which everyone can see in his work. But he knows that for some people, his style is seen as intrusive, cold, too clever by half.
    There’s a second eccentricity that is not universally admired. It arises from his early training as a sculptor in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s workshop. He can’t help it—he sees the world with a sculptor’s eye. So when he applies paint to his panel or canvas, and imagines a strong light raking across his scene, he paints abrupt edges to the shadows. Most of his contemporaries would blend into shadow to suggest the subtle change of curvature in a horse’s neck or a man’s naked torso. Uccello paints badly chiselled sculptures rather than flesh-and-blood people. Paolo closes his eyes and grinds his teeth. That fool of a silk merchant—whose comment reached Paolo through a mutual friend.
    He does admit one professional regret. He wishes he’d made more work, more paintings, because he has experienced no better feeling in his life, no other comparable sense of euphoria, than the feeling at the start of a grand commission, when he conjured a vision, or at least some premonition, of the final outcome.
    He has never been daunted by the size of an undertaking. He methodically planned his preparatory sketches, dozens of them for each commission. Many were drawn from observation—the flaring nostrils of a startled and rearing horse, a soldier’s helmet lying on the ground, a hand gripping a sword, a woman shielding her face. Other sketches emerged from his imagination—a dragon’s head, a lashing, spiked