You can’t blame the man, I say. It was her nipples! I imitate his conciliatory wails as he was cast out, both loving and loathing my nipples for his undoing.
You do have great nipples, she says, her eyes fleeting down briefly to my chest.
It’s a compliment. She’s seen her fair share of tits.
I move behind the screen and remove my clothes. The floor is ice cold and goosebumps rise on my skin. I’ll need to get warmer for the sitting, though they’ll appreciate the hardened nipples and areola. They don’t go for beauty, they want detail. Character. I massage oil onto my skin, wanting to glow. I’m not excessively vain but there are certain standards I set myself and dry skin, sock marks and goosebumps aren’t it. Not the details I want to give them. Genevieve prefers for me to take my seat on the small podium after everybody has arrived. She says there’s no point in me freezing my tits off for other people’s tardiness. I don’t actually disrobe until I’m seated but I know what she means. A little bit of respect for this slab of meat please.
Finally everyone has taken their places, just one stool is missing a bottom but Genevieve waits for no one and we begin. I don’t look at their faces until after I’ve removed the robe and I’m comfortable in a position. The patterned silk robe hangs down the wooden chair I sit on, art deco in style, hard on my ass but at least the silk softens it a little. I survey the audience. Some familiar faces, some eyes meet mine in acknowledgement, others run over me as though I’m a fruit bowl. Looking for shadows and angles. Creases and blemishes. Detail and character.
The new eyes run their gazes across the obvious place on my body that attracts attention. My left arm. Still scarred from my adolescence of scratching constellations into my skin, connecting freckle to freckle. I think this is why Genevieve keeps asking me back. An interesting feature, apparent self-harm. A real task for the student; do they ignore it or tackle it. Some appear to make it more obvious than it is, garish and ugly, deep trenches in my skin, while making the rest of me appear as this injured frail bird. Others paint or draw them as mere traces, scratches, or there are those who paint me as a brave warrior. Nobody sees them as constellations. Of course there are those who don’t see them at all, and spend longer highlighting freckles and moles, or dimples in my thighs. I find that though I am the person naked in the centre of a room, the artists reveal so much more about themselves than I do. I’m detached, in my own zone. But at the same time feeling a little bit special beneath their gaze. I am a puzzle they have to solve. They are painting my shell, while their insides are oozing out on to the canvas, tattle-tales to their secrets. Artist incontinence. I may be naked but they’re revealing their souls. That’s what I like most about posing nude for artists, the fact that while they think I’m on show, I’m watching them.
That and the fifteen euro an hour that I receive in cash.
The door opens softly and somebody steps inside. I’m not so poised that I don’t break my position to look. Somebody tuts at my movement. They can fuck right off.
Sorry, the tardy young man says.
He’s tall and lean, wears a denim shirt with jeans, Converse, looks studenty. His face blushes at disturbing the session.
Okay okay, Genevieve says, irritated. James, is it, start time is one p.m., okay, you won’t be late next time, if there is a next time. You can sit over there.
There’s never truly any comfortable position while posing nude, something will always start to hurt at some point but at the beginning of the session I’d chosen to angle my body in the direction of the empty stool James is heading to, my legs parted ever so slightly, not because I’m shy of the others seeing but because I found the thought of a tardy artist being faced with an eye full of vagina amusing. I have to get my kicks somehow.
James crosses the room, the tilted floor creaking with his every step and he sits on the stool, gets his equipment ready, knocking things over in a cringing Hugh Grant way as he self-consciously sets up. This could be the opening scene of a romantic comedy, this could be the beginning of a new relationship for me. Well grandchildren, I met your granddad when he painted me nude. He thought he was saving me but it was really I who saved him and look at us now, all this time later. I’m laughing on the inside. He looks up at my body, and quickly away again. I wait for him to look at my face. He doesn’t. He continues his prep. Genevieve explains some housekeeping rules and he steals glances at my body while he listens, scratching his nose, fidgeting.
After the two-hour class, the paintings, sketches, whatever material they’ve used, are revealed.
James has focused entirely on my sex. Enormous erect brown nipples, exaggerated areolae, and a raging crimson fleshiness between my legs. I’m a compilation of interlapping pigments on his canvas; burnt sienna, dark yellow ochre, carbon black smoke. There are no distinguishable features on my face, just a blur of sketches, criss-crossing. I try not to laugh. He, with the clearest view of the scars linking my freckles, has chosen not to include this peculiarity in his painting at all. I don’t think he has omitted them out of kindness, and I don’t think he ran out of time to paint my face. My take on James is that no matter what woman he looks at, all he sees is sex.
Some men. Not all men. Tut tut.
But babysitting is off tonight and I’ve nothing else to do, so I sleep with him anyway. Maybe we’re more erotique noire than romantic comedy. But the idea of our dalliance as being anything remotely romantic at least makes me laugh.
Seven
Monday morning. Wake at 6.58. Up at 7.00. Dress in grey and high-vis. Pass the dapper suited businessman with headphones. The leaning tower jogging woman. The Great Dane dog walker. The old man with the wheelie walking frame and the younger version of him. Good morning he says, good morning says he, good morning I say to them both. I reach the Village Bakery at 7.45. Spanner looks up quickly as the bell rings and straight back to his work again.
Howya, Freckles. The usual.
He turns his back to me to first pour batter into the waffle machine and then operate the coffee machine. Broad back to me, white T-shirt, muscular shoulders and tattoos down his arms. I’ve never tried to figure out what’s on them, there are so many, blue in colour, and all running into each other. He operates the coffee machine, arms everywhere, as it hisses and slurps and he twists and bangs, like an old nutty professor. He turns to me with my coffee in his hand. It didn’t go quite to plan, Freckles, he says, placing the coffee cup on the counter and seeing to the waffle.
I think at first he’s messed up my coffee but it’s grand, so I look back up at him. There’s a fine black ring around his right eye that’s slightly closed.
Turns out Chloe has a new fella and if she thinks this fella is going to live with my little Ariana and see her whenever the feck he wants to, when I’m the da, then she has another thing comin and I told her so. Simple as that.
He hands me the waffle. He’s forgotten the icing sugar.
Freckles, he says, he was a skinny little muppet, with the flat head on him, five years younger than her. He could be a paedo for all I know, all I asked was for him to be Garda vetted. He could be preying on Chloe because she has a little one, a da has to be careful, mindful of perverts. Paedos are everywhere. Manky bastards, the lot of them.
You said all this to her, I ask, while pouring sugar into my tea. Two sachets. I wonder if I can sprinkle some over my waffle while he’s not looking. It’s not the same as icing sugar though. If he’d stop talking about his woes, I’d have my icing sugar. I care about his life, but not to the detriment of my day.