Painting

"I would fall in love with you," he told me, "You would be the one I dream of if I didn't have that perfect blond teenage girl to fall into bed with."

He said this whilst he was concentrating on the canvas. I had constructed a kind of easel for him made out of furniture, an old wooden chair frame and a second chair wired in place to rest the canvass against. Bored old chair, legs in the air like a seasoned prostitute. His canvass was large and dark and there was an angry angular figure glaring out at me in shades of grey.

I was painting a hunched figure, white headed, sad-eyed. I was cheering the whole thing up with flowers, sweat peas, bright red against a white fence. My hands were coated in acrylics and a sticky layer of Estapol. I had a headache. I was allergic to Estapol or perhaps it was the reek of turps in a tub beside my mat board.

"I am Jesus." he told me suddenly, pulling up from a screeching flurry of black lines.

"I don't believe in you then."

"No, it is true. Hard to believe. But true." He explained it all to me as I added little green leaves to the sweet peas. I sat back on my heels and rubbed paint into my neck and wondered if my headaches came from the way I leaned over the work, inhaling the fumes, ingesting them through my pores, craning my neck down and across the painting.

I rolled a smoke and lit it and my brown fingerprints crackled when they touched the flame. The tally-ho sparked up and I sucked in tobacco and paint and a host of other toxins. My headache eased a little with each inhalation.

"Do you believe that I am Jesus?"

I nodded. It made sense, the way he looked at it. "Yes," I told him. "You are Jesus."

I lay down on my mattress and watched while he filled all the grey spaces up with black, a black canvass. The figure was completely obliterated, but I knew that he had been there at some stage, perfect, peering. Now he was just a few stray lines under all that sharp-edged fury. He lay down on the bed and wrapped his charcoal hands around me and I would have rocked back onto the hard shape of his penis if I didn't have a fierce burn on for someone else.

"You know I'd go for you," he sighed into my hair, my mad friend, my midnight painter friend, "I'd really have you right now, if it wasn't for that perfect blond angel."

"You're mad." I told him, "You know there's no such thing as Jesus."

He groaned and rubbed himself against me for a moment before rolling onto his back and lighting a rollie for me and then one for himself.

"Why do I have that Angel? Why can't we just go for it?"

"Because you're mad as fuck and we both love someone else."

He looked at my painting, the one with the sexless hunchback and the floral fence.

"That's a picture of you."

It was of course, a picture of me.

"You feel like you are outside of everything and everyone else is part of a club that you're not invited to."

This was a month before he stabbed himself in the chest sixteen times. Before his casual heroin use overtook his painting and his carving and his whole flat and his life. Before his blond angel stole all my Kate Bush CDs. Before he killed his best friend's pet rat. I put my hand on his chest and felt his heart and it would have been so easy to slip my fingers into his jeans and find some comfort there, but I was not his blond angel, and he was not the other crazy man that I thought I was in love with and tomorrow we would be painting again, together and we would fall asleep holding hands and bemoaning the fact that we couldn't bring ourselves to make love to each other.

"You are a better person than my blond angel," he said, "you are not as mean, not as pretty, but infinitely more beautiful on the inside."

I thanked him for his honesty, his almost compliment.

"And you're not alone on that side of the fence." We rolled back into our contained desire for each other, settled instead for body heat and the scent of nicotine on each other's fingers.