Free The White Body of Evening by A L McCann Page B

happened next, but the image of the mannequins and the tension he felt would often resurface, luminous with its promise and possibility, through all the dark times that subsequently crowded around it. It was a moment that never left him, even though he knew, in the years that followed, how delusional it had been. The celestial shopfront of naked female forms, the glassy mystery of the arcade, flooded with light, yet still harbouring a darkness that had been gathering for decades, might have been what he was searching out on his many walks through the city. Whenever he returned to the arcade it was heavy with the memory of those mannequins. Even though the place had fallen into disrepair, he still imagined that, amidst the flaking paint, the cracked walls and the broken windows, he could hear the song – pure, primal sound, calling him away from the profane shimmer of electric lights and the din of motor car traffic into some watery Rhineland dream.
    After this visit to the arcade Paul returned to his pencils with a head brimful of imagery. He was almost frantic as he sat down, dangling over the clean, white page before him, anxious about the appearance of the first line. Ondine sat opposite him on the floor, moving a toy spindle around her hand, occasionally glancing up at her brother. The two children looked alike at a fundamental level. Both were pale and slender, both had delicate hands and faintly freckled skin, but Ondine’s flaxen hair was a stark contrast to Paul’s jet black. Nevertheless they barely noticed this difference, instinctively dwelling on the sameness between them as a source of enormous comfort and security.
    Paul looked at his sister, who was careless of his attention, and then looked down at the paper again. The arcade, he thought, was like a cathedral, or a cavern, or a vast grave site, a catacomb full of aloof figures ghosting up and down its length. He imagined crosses and candles. If he drew the arcade it would be a place that had a large crucifix at one end, that was lined with candles and bathed in a weird, orange light. He drew the smooth, hairless pudendum of the mannequin in the shop window with long lines curving around the pristine whiteness of the page. Then, on another sheet, he tried to draw the arcade itself, using straighter lines and angles. But he found the control and the economy of these drawings tiresome and soon his hand began to move faster and more erratically as he jerked the pencil in short, sharp movements across the page, drawing the shopfront as a chaotic ensemble of lines and limbs and hastily composed objects. He tried to capture the effects of the light, starting with simply drawn rays emanating from a lamp and then, unsatisfied, tried to shade in parts of the window with heavier, more densely concentrated pencil lines until the whole composition seemed far darker and more crowded than he had wanted it to be.
    The drawing turned out much like his picture of midnight in the city of Melbourne, entirely destroying the sense of light and glass he had wanted to capture, turning the mannequins into fearful things of terror, leering out of the thickly drawn darkness like ghouls. Realising his error he decided to finish the picture by adding more extreme and grotesque features to the figures, giving them bulbous red eyes and exaggerated, gaping mouths. In the space around the window he drew a mass of tiny objects hovering in the air like a cloud of insects. Diamonds, coins, combs, scissors, a dagger dripping with blood, a crucifix on a chain, a gun, a glove, a little doll with its hair sticking up erect, a spider, a snake, a pair of bloodshot eyes, a coffin, a skull, a saucer and cup, could all be made out of the frantically drawn minutiae encircling the harpies in the shop window like a halo of detritus. The picture finally nauseated him. It was as if something had gripped him and his hand, quite mechanically, had run out of his control. He had wanted calm, and instead he’d