"The Muse"

The moon was high through the window, diffused in the fog. The wind slapped.

The gate creaked as someone closed it behind them.

I rose quietly from the bed.

The window was blown wide, and the wind whipped in. I stooped to pick up the papers on the floor, page after page of scrawled poems. I stuffed them back under a paperweight, struck a match and lit a pipe.

The wind flapped at a piece of paper that had been placed in the middle of the desk, held down beneath the edge of a book.

Tarn. Midnight. Meet you there.

A fancy little scrawl—he liked theatre. He thought he was an artist, but he was more of an actor. Anyone else would have knocked at the window and delivered the message directly.

I pulled on the too-large shirt and trousers at the foot of the bed and swept my hair back into a bun. I sat there for a moment in my brother’s shirt and brother’s trousers, smoking my brother’s pipe. I watched the smoke curl up and meet the window frost. There was a poem in that, but I wasn’t willing to put any more thought into it.

I put my notebook in my pocket. I climbed out the window onto the lower roof, crawled along it, dropped onto the curling overhang, slid down that and dropped into the garden like a cat.

I strolled out the back gate.

The hills had fog creeping right down them, bracken red, the stars hazy over it. A witching night. I felt like a witch, just now. A bit like anything might happen. Like I didn’t care if it did.

I walked up the fog-slicked rocks to the cool, silvery tarn.

He had set up his easel and canvas amongst the reeds at the side of the water, his paints already spread out, his coat arranged to block the wind, two lamps dangling for light. He didn’t look up.

“What took you so long? I’ve done five sketches of the tarn already.”

“I told you I wasn’t doing this anymore.”

But he wasn’t listening. His eyes were a little red, feverish, fixed on his brushes. Alcohol, or perhaps something else, whatever the students had got hold of these days.

“Look at it, look at the fog. Perfect. Almost perfect. Come over to those rocks, into the light.”

When I didn’t move, he looked up, finally.

“You didn’t bring a dress? The whole point is the interaction between the fabric and—oh, never mind. You could at least have brought the nightdress.” He woke up a little, rubbed his eyes and considered me for a moment. “Sorry about your brother.”

“Well. He was an ass.”

Now I’d made him uncomfortable. I was fine with that.

I took my coat off and walked closer to the water, stepped from rock to rock over the still surface.

“Good, yes, that’s good. Can you take your hair down? You’ll just look like a boy otherwise. No, leave the shoulder bare.”

He readjusted the lamps, scratched at the canvas. I stood.

Anything might happen.

The fog might charge down the slope with its freezing fingers stretched. Perhaps something would crawl out of the water and drag him screaming up the heather.

“There’s actually—that’s an interesting effect, with you in the man’s clothing. Move a little more into the moonlight—no, facing up a little—”

He wasn’t a bad artist. I was being unfair. He was better than average—not nearly as good as he thought he was, but still.

“After a brother. No. Too obvious. Can you undo the top couple buttons?”

I did. The wind was cold.

“Has your uncle said anything about my poems?” I said.

“Don’t speak—you’ve ruined—I just had the lips, there.”

“Has he?”

“What? No. I said not to expect anything yet.”

Time dissolved. I stood in the blaze of moonlight and watched the moon’s reflection in the water. I felt his eyes moving, studying.

I didn’t mind being looked at. A gaze, lingering, even if it meant nothing. Even if it were all a game.

“Can you go into the water?”

“It’s freezing.”

“Just for a moment. I need to see how the water comes off the cloth. Just quickly and then come up again.”

I looked at him.

“Please,” he said.

I took my boots off and tossed them back to the shore, walked a few feet in. Mud and rocks curled around my feet.

“All the way?”

“Please.”

I submerged myself and came up dripping. I knew the shirt was transparent. It clung and stuck. It smelled of man-smells: tobacco and cheap alcohol and horses. The smell of the pond water gathered over it all.

“Perfect. Yes. That’s perfect. I should have had you do that from the beginning.”

His brush flickered; he murmured to himself.

I knew a girl who was asked to take something to make her skin whiter so she could pose for a corpse. Half her hair fell out. Someone else sedated their cat to make it hold still and it died.

Whatever. I was bored, and here we were.

“Did you actually send the poems?”

“I said I would, didn’t I?”

“So you haven’t sent them.”

“I’ll do it tomorrow. I will.”

My hair dried slowly against my face. I curled stiff fingers back and forth.

Anything might happen. I was desperate for it. I was desperate to not crawl stinking and soaked back into my bed and wake the next morning and go down for breakfast and start it all over again.

An acrid, sulphurous smell wafted over from where he mixed his paints.

“Are you sure you’ve done that right?”

“I know what I’m doing. No, don’t look at the water, look over it. Can’t you look a little more melancholy?”

I wasn’t feeling melancholy. I was feeling witchy. Witchy and vaguely hypothermic.

I stared up at the stars.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said.

He was a bit drunk. Or perhaps it was the fumes.

“You never meant to show him the poems, did you.”

He was silent.

“That was the agreement,” I said. “You swore.”

Silence. The moon was cold and the fog thickened.

There was a low thump, then a crash.

I looked over, but I couldn’t see him. I climbed up off the rocks and went closer. He had slumped over in the grass with his brush still in his hands and taken the easel down with him. The oils smelled appalling. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d grabbed the wrong bottles in the dark and got something that wasn’t paints at all.

I held my wet shirt over my nose.

Or maybe he’d had more alcohol than I’d thought. Either way.

I moved the paints further away from him. He lay there, breathing softly. Even unconscious he had the appearance of something arranged, arm thrown over his head, as if in the moment of slipping he’d thought to move it that way to make it look more dramatic.

If I was being honest, I really had expected him to at least pass along the poems. It stung. He’d seemed different from the others; something earnest, under the arrogance. Or at least something pliable.

His painting stared back at me from where it had fallen. A small canvas, delicate against the shroud of his coat, sinking into the mud.

It was good, even unfinished.

A girl in a clinging man’s shirt looking out over fog-soaked water, very small in the landscape. Moonlight illuminating the creases of the shirt, the upturned face. Shining smears of silver-white paint, blue-black, spots of gold.

I hated it.

It didn’t look anything like me. He had painted someone wildly unhappy. The scene was pathetic; even I felt sorry for her. But I knew it was good. It was the sort of thing sentimental people would love to look at. The poor girl, they would say. Wearing her brother’s clothes.

It looked like I was walking into a lake.

Disgusting to think that in twenty years people might describe him as brilliant, the genius who had thought of really painting in the peaks at midnight, painting a freezing girl whose brother was dead.

I thought about throwing the painting into the water.

I looked at him, looked at the painting.

Perhaps he would freeze that way, lying on his side like a baby. The tarn would freeze, and the paints would curdle and harden, and the painting would dry stiff against the shroud of his coat, sunk down into the mud. Perhaps his friends would go looking for him, would look around, too, for the painting.

It would be an artistic way to go; they would weep with envy.

At my feet he breathed deep, alcohol-scented breaths.

After a moment, I spread his coat over him and tucked him in.

I opened up his bag and found his little address book, sat there in front of his lamps and copied out the address of his uncle’s house into my notebook. I took a bit of the cheese and bread that he had wrapped up in a handkerchief, just in case.

After a moment, I took the painting, too. That seemed fair.

I put my feet back into my brother’s boots and started walking.