Lucy

I remember the day Lucy bought that poster for me, how we stood at the racks and turned over the heavy binders they were held in, the slapping sound as the pages turned, the same smug noise as a finished portfolio at a school art exhibition. We both loved that sound, the fat, satisfied nature of it. I remember how we discussed it as we stuck down our final pictures on black paper and slotted in the bigger pieces, smoothing the plastic over a year’s work and closing the folders. She hugged hers to her chest, she was so glad it was over, finally it was summer and we were free – I, however, I felt a little sad. Because that was the end of our time in the art rooms. We cleared our workspaces and took away our painting shirts, we set out our portfolios in the clean space left and the next evening we drank Pimms and thanked our teachers, showed our parents, sighed over the beauty of what other people had achieved. Many people approached me that night, just to say they’d looked at my work and they’d loved it. I found myself looking at it too, looking at it differently, suddenly impressed with myself, disbelief that my own hands had painted something so true to life – something that breathed. I’m not sure if people really did love my work though, I think they just loved Lucy. That’s what I painted you see. She was my subject, the title was Lucy, it was all her. I sketched her at the bus stop in the rain, I painted the photo of her laughing at me across the table as we ate our lunch at school, I painted her painting, in her oversized blue shirt, recreating her own canvases in my own. It could have been anyone, I just wanted a natural subject, someone completely normal and grounded. I painted her how she was, that was the point of my project. Strip away the photo shop, the posing, the pouting. She was my human subject.

Charlie was the person who suggested it as my project. He knew I liked doing portraits, pictures of people. I remember the look on his face when he walked into the art gallery the night of the exhibition. He stared at my paintings for a moment, struck still before them, his hands in his pockets. Then his face turned bitter, and he turned away. He looked like he might punch something, that’s when I knew he loved her. But who didn’t love Lucy? I convinced myself that he was just kidding himself again, that he’d change his mind again. They’d had such a long stretch of calm, he couldn’t be tripping up again. He was just like any other guy, that’s what I told myself. Lucy would be too much for him, he wouldn’t want to take that on. I knew Lucy. I’d always known her. And I saw the ruin of her first collision with Charlie. That’s all they’d ever had – collisions. So that day in the art gallery, I caught his eye once he’d wrenched it from my pictures and I shook my head. He knew what I meant.

But the day Lucy bought that poster for me, that was months later. We’d both been at lectures, the stiflingly empty sort, mine for history and hers for English. Neither of us had pursued art in the end, after all those years in the studios, painting sunflowers and elephants, talking about how we’d be the next Van Gogh, cutting off our ears and hurling them at prostitutes. Lucy thought it was ever so romantic, the drama, the torture. She would laugh about it, throwing her head back and pulling faces, tugging on her ears, toppling off her stool. She didn’t like Van Gogh much, it was all too circular she said, too endless – and too flaky was another complaint she would tag on. Truth be told she didn’t like many artists much, she found that side of things quite dull. She yawned her essays onto the page, tapping her pen against the desk in the library, chewing on it emphatically. She said art was too sinister, too dreary, or she’d say the colours clashed, a comical look of horror on her face as she’d stare in alarm at cacophonies of red and yellow and bright green on a canvas. No, she didn’t like art much. She just loved painting itself, slapping it onto the page, carelessly sketching out names and faces, funny little caricatures.

But English suited her much better at degree level. She was a different person when she talked about literature, she even looked different. Her long blonde hair would sit sophisticatedly on her shoulders rather than tumbling childishly out of the low ponytail I always knew. She would use words like incongruous without a flinch, or describe particular concepts as inextricably linked. Characters had psyches and authors were unreliable narrators. She followed our old Snicket doctrine of never trust anyone who hasn’t brought a book with them, always in possession of a novel of some kind and there was a note page on her phone which would scroll down endlessly, a great inventory of words and phrases she’d picked up from reading. She’d talk about people I’d never heard of, like Kathy and Madame Bouvary and Blanche DuBois and she’d confess undying love for men who had never even existed. Yes, English certainly suited her better than art. She’d grown out of art. English was her new fascination, a mature version of storytelling and idle speculation.

I took history at university, a much more sober occupation. But it always frustrated me a little how much Lucy’s course seemed to encompass, for it wasn’t just dumb plays and whimpering poems, like I first thought. She talked about psychology and politics and religion, and history too. A vivid, giggling history with gunshots and gasps. Being Lucy, she picked up and retained all the information with little more than a shrug, and I found myself reading for nights upon end so as to finally find ground out of reach of her extensive range of knowledge. History soon proved dry however. I found myself sketching her again.

It must sound odd to say it so bluntly like that, sketching Lucy again, as if the existence of great stacks of drawings of one subject is the most normal thing in the world. But to me it was. Drawing Lucy was so easy – I knew the shape of her face, the lines of her smile. I could manipulate her hair into curl, I could make her feet dance, watch her dress flutter in the club. I began to draw her with Charlie, the two of them purposely more beautiful, more striking, more harsh. They were together again you see, for real this time. At the end of the summer they’d slipped out under the eyes of the rest of us and suddenly it was Lucy and Charlie, and we were expected to smile unquestioningly. It happened on that night out when I was on holiday – things always teetered a little on their nights out, and that night things toppled and their well-rehearsed walls of indifference fell after a whole summer of building them up and shutting each other out. If they’d only held a couple more weeks, Lucy and I would have moved away and the story would have ended. It was a story too dangerous to continue, I always knew it would only ever end bad. That was the nature of Lucy. Remember how well I knew her – I think she’d have rather died like Juliet than lived to a grand old age with some man she only loved half as much as Romeo.

The day we bought the posters was bitterly cold, and an uneventful day in many respects. We went for our usual Monday coffee at four o’clock, our weekly meet up set in stone to ensure we always had time for one and other. We had never intended to end up at the same uni but I’m glad it worked out that way in the end. At first we agreed to keep our distance a little, to meet new people and establish some friends on our courses, in our halls. After a few weeks though, we started seeing each other more and more often because I can’t say I made many friends, and neither did she. It wasn’t like we were finding it difficult – oh no, we just agreed that most of the people we’d met were rather dull and we weren’t going to trouble ourselves with them. We had each other. So that Monday we had our coffee and we had a little bitch about some of the people in our seminars, feeling smug and elite in the security of our best friend status. And then we began the trek back to Lucy’s halls, which were slightly off campus, but closer to town and to the bigger clubs. I remember wanting to hurry, because shops would close at half five and I had resolved to buy the dress I’d been in love with for weeks, and I’d gone as far as forcing myself into buying it, because I’d stubbornly only brought tights with me to put on for our night out that evening.

So I was scuttling Lucy along, down the stairs, steering her away from the bookshop, across the gallery to the forum. But naturally her precious little heart couldn’t help but falter at the poster sale. There was a huge one on the wall, a great black and white photograph of a man and a woman, it played right up to Lucy’s ideal of beauty, so romantic in Paris, kissing on a street corner. I resigned myself to not having anything to wear that night, I assumed we’d end up simply not going out at all. Lucy was prone to arranging things like that then being too lazy to carry her plans out. She insisted on trawling through the portfolios, oohing and aahing at every picture of Audrey Hepburn, every London bus, every wave on a beach. I carried the posters she wanted to buy and followed her along the gallery. ‘Oh god, I’m really sorry, I won’t be two minutes, I promise Lou. They’re just so gorgeous and they cost so much less than in normal shops. You really don’t mind, do you? I’m sure we’ll be back in town in time for you, it’s only half four now.’ She was right in the end, of course, we could have made it to the shop if we’d gone that way. But I was stubborn and claimed that we wouldn’t have time, because I didn’t much feel like buying the dress and going out anyway. I didn’t tell her that, I just said I didn’t think we’d have enough time to try it on and deliberate, so we went to the Co-op.

I know she felt bad though, she apologised so many times. I let her feel guilty for wasting time in buying that poster for Charlie, she’d stood there for so long trying to make up her mind if he’d like it, wondering if he’d feel that she was too keen, too clingy. I don’t know where she got such ideas from. Sometimes I think she just said things like that in a kind of patronising way, as if to try and bridge the gap between her perfect little fairy tale and my more mundane day to day drone. Because I knew her life with Charlie was everything she’d always wanted, it was what everyone wants. They had a relationship where you could say he’s more myself than I am, the kind of relationship where they talked every single day, for hours and hours. He always took her to her favourite restaurant and paid for her meal, he played her favourite songs in the car when he picked her up and drove her places, they took photos together, sent cringey Snapchats of themselves on a Sunday morning eating chocolate and leftover pizza. And god, she talked about it all the time, brandishing the bracelet he bought her in my face as if to say ‘I’m the girl he chose.’

‘Look, you can wear this tonight Lou, I’ve hardly worn it at all at uni so no one has to know it’s mine,’ she said, shaking desperately a green dress in front of my face. It was simple and velvet, but expensive, with a cut out back like the kind of leotards she used to wear at ballet class. I sighed and took hold of the dress in defeat, putting on a smile. It was a gorgeous dress. I remember a night she wore it back home, one of the nights which ended on a bench by the river. I remember the way she cried as Charlie turned and walked away. It was the only time I ever saw her cry. It wasn’t a thing she was very good at, she never achieved the heart rendering sobs some girls did. She turned away when she cried and bit back the choking tears in an ungainly way, hunching her shoulders. Then all of a sudden the tears were gone and she was sitting on the bench, legs crossed like primary school kid, pulling her skirt down and laughing, gently wiping the mascara from under her eyes. I don’t know if she was just being strong, or maybe it didn’t mean that much to her after all.

After helping Lucy to cook tea and having eaten it, she sent me into her room whilst she was washing up. She said she didn’t mind doing it by herself, and she knew I liked to dress by myself anyway, to battle with my hair in privacy. So I conceded and then I was standing alone in her room, putting on her green dress. Suddenly I was the girl in my paintings, the ideal I had been aspiring to for such a long time. I was looking down from the pedestal Charlie had put me on, I was dancing with him at Becky’s party in that dress, I was remembering things I hadn’t seen or done. I looked around my room, at the posters on the wall. It was different to Lou’s room, smaller because Lucy’s parents were richer and she had the private school girl’s privilege of a tiny student loan. There were snippets of Charlie everywhere, the scratch cards they bought, we bought, together, train tickets from all the visits he’d made here, a voucher they’d used to get pizza 50% off… I sat down on Lucy’s bed, my bed, and imagined for a moment that this really was my life, just for a second. And god, I hated myself. I hated Lucy too, the perfect girl in my paintings with the fair hair and the baby blue eyes.

She came in the room and clapped her hands together. ‘You look gorgeous! Do you want a drink babe?’ If there was ever a time in the world that I wanted a drink, it was then. And in any case, I was being Lucy that night, I’d resigned myself to it. And Lucy always responded positively to the suggestion of a drink. She poured two glasses of Malibu and lemonade and then turned away from me as she undressed and slipped on the outfit she was wearing that night. Black, tight and lacy. It was a little understated, a little careless. I knew she was giving me the limelight tonight. She laughed into the mirror: ‘What do I care I look like anyway? I have Charlie.’ She was always saying things like that. Or if she didn’t say it, she’d absent-mindedly touch the bracelet on her wrist and look dreamy. But I ignored it, I didn’t rise to it.

We went out at half ten with two other girls from Lucy’s flat. I remember the edge on the air, the taste of the cold biting through the darkness. It hit us like a wall after our tumbling run down the stairs, plummeting down as if we were taking two floors at a time. Lucy had caught her bag on some guy as we flew past, shrieking to a halt and apologising to him, standing very close as he untangled her clutch from his shopping. She skipped down the hall to catch up with the rest of us, as if nothing had happened. Well, I guess it’s not like anything really had. I noticed though.

In the club there wasn’t much to do but dance, squeezing through the student night crowds and finding ourselves an island on the floor. Lucy was always looking over her shoulder when we danced, always looking for something, or somebody. The alcohol in my mind starting to write a story, much the same way as Lucy’s would, imagining the extremes, imagining some dramatic event unfurling that night on the dance floor. We got another drink. We did two shots of Sambuca. She rolled her eyes at me as I insisted on the second. I thought she’d say something like ‘Charlie’d kill me if he knew I was this smashed in such a busy club’, but clearly Charlie wasn’t on her mind. I began to get hopeful, I drew her back to the guys on the dance floor. I nodded at one of them as he approached her. I remember her laughing – that was her response to everything. She laughed when her friend was sick as they were visiting him in hospital, she laughed when her Dad fell down the stairs. It was her go-to response, and so I laughed too, and all these guys were dancing with us and laughing. I let them put their hands on my waist, but Lucy squirmed away, shaking her head. But I nodded at them, she didn’t see, she just covered her face, embarrassed, laughing. The guy pulled her away, pulling her off the dance floor and she let him, but all the while shaking her head. She was so bashful when it came to guys, acting so flattered, leading them on as if it were only shyness that stopped them getting any closer to what they wanted. I made the pretence of going to the toilet, but instead I clumsily snuck round a pillar and watched her from there, pulling away from the guy and shaking her head. And then I took the photo.

He leans towards her, her face in his neck, his arms on her waist, the darkness of the club obscuring the truth, you can’t see her expression. Little steps backwards, then turning around and taking great strides, I bought myself a shot of vodka, downed it and sent the photo to Charlie. In all honestly, I never believed it would work. I didn’t think Charlie would respond the way he did. I guess I caught him off his guard though. I knew they never quite believed their own happiness, they were both just waiting for something to snatch it away from them again, too quick to believe its fragility. He was on a night out too, and he called her then and there.

The funny thing is, I really thought she deserved it. I really thought she had everything, and I didn’t see how she’d earned that, she was no better than the rest of us, Lucy Hart with her loosely curled hair and heart shaped face. I remember watching her cry, sitting on the floor outside Mega Kebab. I remember wanting to paint it. That’s the only thing I felt. The cold, and the desire to paint one last picture of Lucy before I took a step back and ran.