Hardcore

Keywords: Real, 02, The, Thing, Ch.,

We started the following morning.

Dinner had been surreal. Kinlay had been his usual expansive self. Holly barely touched her food, and went to bed early. I sat and drank a lot of wine, trying to calm myself down.

We slept side by side in our underwear and we went down to breakfast together without exchanging a word. After tea and bread and butter, we left the kitchen and crossed over to the studio.

We let ourselves in. Kinlay was walking around fiddling with brushes and palettes. He looked at us, but he only glanced offhandedly at Holly. To me, he nodded a hello and actually smiled.

If I hadn't already known that he'd fucked her, that nod would have been enough to give me the hint.

"Let's start," he said, and Holly walked away from me, towards the rumpled bed, stripping off as she went. By the time she reached it she was down to her panties, and she slid them off and threw them in a corner, then knelt naked onto the bed and turned to Kinlay.

He made her lie on her back with her arms folded behind her head, one leg hanging off the bed, her pudenda totally exposed to him. After a moment of hesitation, he revised the pose and made her cross her forearms over her face.

Then he went to work. There was very little left for me to do around the studio so I sat in the corner and watched. Kinlay didn't bother with sketches, he went straight to putting paint on the canvas. That was part of his balls-to-the-wall, gung-ho attitude that Holly and I so much admired.

I had quite different feelings, now, than I'd thought I'd have at this moment. Holly and I had been so excited to come up here and watch Kinlay work, and I don't think either of us expected to become subjects for him quite so quickly. But it wasn't so much that Holly was getting to pose and I wasn't. I envied her that, although I knew he wasn't likely to ask me to pose; he'd painted very few nudes of men. It was that I knew that he'd fucked her. He'd sweet-talked her into letting him fuck her arse, too, which to an old-fashioned mid-20th-century male like Kinlay was pure Norman Mailer territory, taming a stroppy little intellectual chick by fucking her up her arsehole. From the way he worked in such concentrated silence, much quicker and more surely than he'd worked with the other model, I wondered if Kinlay felt he had to own his models in some way before he painted them. He probably hadn't got near the cute girl musician, but he'd trusted that Holly would let him do what he wanted with her.

I couldn't add up how I felt about it. I felt jealous and shut out, but was it really Kinlay I was jealous of? I was also obscurely sad, as if working with Kinlay would necessarily be much more intense and character-forming for Holly than it was for me. I'd had that feeling before, when I'd been a kid and my friends had gone off on some mildly dangerous adventure like rock-climbing or canoeing, while I'd been too scared and stayed at home; they had come back looking brown and lean and experienced, they'd been through something together and survived, while I was nothing but a miserable little wuss who was afraid of living. Holly was going to come back from this with all sorts of experiences and emotions and memories, not all of them good but all of them fierce and primal, that I would never be able to share. I hated that feeling. I sat and watched the painter and his nude model and simmered in my own misery.

Kinlay worked on through the morning, not letting Holly change her pose. I could see her sweating, although it wasn't warm in the room, and her raised arms were beginning to tremble. The thing about posing is that, no matter how comfortable the position is when you first adopt it, if you have to keep it up for hours it starts to become agony, just like it's okay to be tickled for a few seconds but if the tickler doesn't stop it becomes unbearable pain. Once or twice her arms dipped a little, and the second time he muttered, "Ah, come on now" and she said "Sorry" in a high and slightly cracked voice.

At eleven o'clock he finally put the brush down and said "Take ten minutes, Holly," and then he left the studio and went back to the house. She lowered her arms and let out a huge sigh of relief. I had a bottle of water and I went over to her. She raised herself on her shaky arms I and lifted it to her lips. She drank and said "Thanks" and lay flat on her back on the bed.

"He works hard, doesn't he," I said.

"Yeah," she said, not looking at me, looking up through the plexiglass roof at the clouds scudding across the blue sky. It was a bright and windy day.

"How are you doing," I asked. She glanced at me. I couldn't read her expression at all.

"I'm fine," she said. Abruptly she sat up and got off the bed and walked up and down a bit, swinging her arms and stretching her legs.

I caught myself thinking how vulnerable she was, with her lean and skinny narrow-hipped body that never seemed to put on any weight. Holly was so indifferent about what she ate, sometimes going for days on frozen pizza and cold baked beans, and yet her body burned up whatever she consumed and left no excess fat. The only visible traces of her junk food diet were recurring illnesses (when we first met there was nearly always something wrong with her, if not a cold then a violent stomach ache or a migraine or anaemia or thrush) and her intermittently bad skin. She regarded her bad health as being just one of the many bullshit things life throws at you. A serious person, in her view, took the rough with the smooth and if that meant that every so often she would be laid up for a weekend with one of her migraines, lying in a darkened room and throwing up every hour into a bucket, then that was just her tough shit. After I'd taken over the cooking nearly all her illnesses either went away or lessened dramatically in virulence, and she'd never thanked me. I think she missed being ill.

She walked around the studio, naked, bending and stretching her limbs and neck. Her white hip rubbed against the sharp corner of a broken table, and she stopped and muttered "Ow," twisting her head round to peer over her shoulder and down her bare back, looking for the scratch. Satisfied that it wasn't serious, she came around in front of the easel and examined the picture carefully, hugging her arms to herself over her bare chest to keep warm.

"Cold?" I said.

"No," she said absently, then looked around. "Um. A bit."

I got off the bed, took off my shirt – I was wearing a t-shirt underneath – and walked over to her and put it round her shoulders. My fingertips brushed against hers and she made the briefest movement of her index finger, a sign of recognition.

"Fuck, he's good," she muttered, looking at the painting.

"Yeah," I said. I had to admit, Kinlay's eye, and his control of paint even at this early stage, were nothing short of virtuoso. He had done little except touch in parts of Holly's hips and stomach, but already it was possible to see the infinitely delicate, painful texture he achieved in his best work. And he would probably paint over what he had done today. We knew it would take years for us to get to this level of understanding and technique, a level where it's hard to tell one from the other because the eye, the heart, the mind and the hand are all working in perfect sympathy.

Fuck him, I thought. I was really angry, suddenly. Kinlay went through life taking what he wanted. I could imagine how he'd done it; he'd walked into our room, surprising Holly, and told her that he really wanted her to model for him because she was so beautiful, and she would have been so flattered that as he had started to touch her and kiss her and open her clothes she would have given into him, nodding dumbly and remaining silent when he'd said to her that he had to possess her, that it was the only way he could work, and Holly would have obediently let him take off her clothes and sit her down on the chair, facing away from him, and as he'd talked on, softly, encouraging her, he had worked his cock up into her arsehole and as she started to cry from the pain, he'd told her that her tears, and the agony of him inside her, were good for her. And she would have believed him. How could you not believe him, when the man could paint like this? Holly and I knew how good Kinlay was, while that stupid slapper Joanne had no idea. Joanne had flirted with his eye, tried to make herself sexy, tried to look good. Kinlay's work wasn't about making his subjects "look good", it was about catching them at their most vulnerable, so that you saw with a fresh eye how fragile our bodies are, what a risk we run in inhabiting them. And to do that, Kinlay clearly looked for occasions to catch his models at their moments of maximum helplessness.

And in the case of Holly, he had manufactured one. It seemed to me, then, that he must have started to feel like he was losing something. I wasn't sure what – his confidence, or his eye. But there must have been a time when he was able simply to look at people and see them in his way, the way that made Holly and I respect him so much. And maybe, over the years, that vision had faded. Maybe he'd become too big, too famous, too comfortable, less forgiving of people. Now, he had wanted a new model and he had chosen Holly and he had deliberately violated her, hurt her, to see in her as soon as possible what he had once had the patience to wait for.

The door opened and he came back in.

"Are you rested," he grunted.

"Yeah," said Holly, taking my shirt from off her shoulders and handing it back to me. She walked naked over to the bed.

"Right. Same position please," he said, and Holly climbed onto the bed and got herself into the same pose, her eyes watching Kinlay as he indicated with his hands a little more in one direction or another. Her expression, as she looked to him to tell her what to do, haunted me in a funny way. I only got it what it was later, when I had been sitting watching them for some time, and Holly's arms were once again folded, hiding her face.

Keywords: Real, 02, The, Thing, Ch.,

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