‘Titanium White’ by Holly Singlehurst
and it must be that she doesn’t shit or
have blood
she must be a cloud, friend, the way she floats past us.
– Charles Bukowski
‘If you could just move your left hand a little higher, yes, like that, higher.’ Max put the brush back between his teeth, picked up the titanium white, the cadmium yellow. The sun was coming through the slatted blinds richer than expected, bending over her body like melting wax, and straightening against the back wall. That would make a nice feature, he thought. He looked for the orange.
She did what she was told to do. She was being paid for it, of course, but these models could be notoriously difficult. It tends to attract those types of women, the ones who have hated their bodies for so long that they suddenly decide to love them with an almost political ferocity. They often neglect their underarms. They celebrate pubic hair. They enjoy gaining weight. ‘It’s a statement, I take up more space,’ he remembered a fellow art student telling him back at college, ‘an honour usually afforded to men, men with their arms around ...’ He had switched off then. She was quoting some feminist by heart. She kept talking about ‘reclaiming the word fat, beautiful fat women,’ attempting to eat a banana whilst taking her clothes off. He couldn’t remember what she did with the skin. Perhaps she was a model and not a student, since she had stripped. The memory remained, all the same. At nineteen, he had never seen such a large woman unclothed before, or many women, for that matter. She folded in places she definitely shouldn’t fold. Her back had fat. She didn’t appear to shave.
This model had shaved like he had asked her to, which pleased him. She didn’t have any rash from it either, or red pores. He looked close, as good painters are inclined to do. She must have moisturised too, which was generous. He wondered how long he could use her. She was smooth from head to toe, excluding her eyebrows, of course, which would have looked unnatural. And her hair, which was shoulder length and just the right thickness – a burnt umber, Van Dyke brown. Her slender fingers uncurled like ferns on her left hand, placed where her hip bone met the couch. Her navel was perfectly round, delicately shallow. A full stop. Not like those women with a deep crease across their width. Or Lucian Freud’s Sue Tilley, whose abdomen dipped like a thumbprint in dough. Her skin was almost translucent, blue where the veins were exposed on the turned left wrist. He debated whether he should use them in the painting. He might call the painting: ‘Nude Model Reclining’, or ‘Venus Reclining’, or ‘A Study of Venus’. He hadn’t decided. He had decided, however, that her nipples were too dark, her breasts too large. Their brown would have to be diluted, their fullness lessened. Such is the power of the artist, Max smiled; their licence. He sipped his chamomile tea, which was almost cold. It had small, yellow flowers in it which blossomed underwater. He asked her if she would like a drink.
‘Lavender, please.’ He went to put the kettle on. The teabags smelled like perfume and strangely medicinal. They were expensive, the sort with a waxy plastic net, and even the best painters don’t earn money until they’re dead. He hoped he could use the bag for another cup that evening.
‘And anything to eat?’ She shook her head. Right answer. Max told her she could walk around for a bit if she wanted to stretch, but it would be best if she kept her clothes off, if she was comfortable. He told her he was grappling with the colour of her skin.
‘It’s difficult for me, you see.’ He strained the bag, placed it on a metal dish. ‘Because you’re so deliciously pale.’ Delicious – that could have been a mistake. He watched how her eyes moved. She was picking thick paint off the Roberts radio on the counter. It was British racing green. The ‘o’ was missing, so it read ‘R berts’. Max thought this gave it character. She didn’t seem to notice his ‘delicious’ or the missing ‘o’. She explained that both of her parents were pale, which made her pale, which didn’t make much sense. Max didn’t care. He blew on the tea and handed it to her. They drank in silence, standing up, until they had finished. He motioned for her to lie back down.
Max bit cobalt blue from beneath his fingernails while rolling a cigarette. He licked the paper, scrapped the filter, and twisted the end into a nub. He imagined what she would taste like as he inhaled, blew the smoke away from the canvas. He wondered if he could change the composition at this late stage, ask her to sit up and face him, to spread her legs. But he was nearly finished, so that would have to wait for another painting. Anyway, the opened legs might be a little too much, and he was beginning to feel uneasy about the way her left thigh dimpled when it pressed against the other, near its stem. He would go for a slimmer one next time. Yes, slimmer and younger. He might stop being generous with the tea. He would offer them water.
‘If you could just move your left hand a little lower this time, yes, like that, a little lower.’ Max dabbed titanium white with a small brush, he was highlighting her pelvic bones. With twice the opacity of pure lead white, the bottle read, titanium white has excellent hiding power, and is useful for painting out mistakes. Max waited for her to settle after a shallow cough, an unwelcome body spasm, and watched until her breathing became almost invisible. He should open a window in future, he thought, and continued to paint.
From issue #6: spring/summer 2018
About the Author
Holly Singlehurst graduated from Birmingham University with a Master’s in Creative Writing in 2016, having studied Music and English Literature for her undergraduate degree. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Bridport Prize, and was commended in the 2016 National Poetry Competition for her poem ‘Hiroshima, 1961’. Follow her: @HJSinglehurst.
