my father's chair by padraig moran
Her smile hello is barely noticed, he dodges past with the briefest nod. But he falters soon enough, moving down the room. He hears the door swing to behind him, shutting out the sea air that had inched its way in from the harbour. It feels like he climbed through the keyhole. Fed himself through, sinew by gristle. He shoves this aside and picks a wall. He moves slowly, aching his way through the art of administrators. His stomach twists at every syllable, unfamiliar names that pinch like fingers. Something inside him is begging to leave, to come back tomorrow, or never again. He has almost turned, pushed his way out of the gallery's still air, and rejoined the easy indifference of the street outside, when he sees it. Her name in small print, white card, white wall. 1992, states the four inch by three, Oil on Canvas. 'My Father's Chair'. Air and time turn solid. The seconds tick by, like lego bricks hitting the floor. He steps back, to breathe or whisper, staring at this brother, this adolescent. '1992. I was already a man.' The painting saw nothing of him. Or the movement of the shadows as the hours passed around him. It simply hung as it always had, waiting for the next brushstroke. A brushstroke that would now never come. But the painting still stood, oblivious to the idle conjecture that flowed past it. The blind and searching eyes. It held its turmoil to itself and waited. The seconds pass, skittering, one by one across the floorboards. The man sits and stands and paces. He tries every angle, every distance. The light moves across the floor, and piles itself up in the corner. He takes in colour, form and composition. A discarded brochure tells him she was a genius who burnt all her sketchbooks. He sighs, knowing her, as he does, only as Helen. He stays and stares until a life outside calls him away. The next day the man seems different. He strains at tiny details, in an ever more despairing search. But he's blind to anything below the surface. He can recognise colours, make shapes, no more. The name on the door has also started to irk him, but no more than the paintings it titles. He moves among them, some short respite, blinking in a light he cannot see. To rest his eyes he sits again, a simple bench in the middle of the room. He looks out through the gallery's simple glass front towards the harbour. The sun by now seems beach ball sized above the water, but its dying amber floats easily towards him. The light hits the painted letters on the glass, and scatters, casting shadows at his feet. He reads the title upside down, rippled across his shoes. Art is what you leave behind. He scorns how pretentious it is, how pointless. And echoing through his mind, it's only paint, ­it's only paint, ­it's only paint,­ Somewhere in the back of the man's mind, a boy is falling out of a tree. He has been falling now for almost twenty years, but most days the man paid little heed, only noticing him at the oddest of moments. Today though, the rushing ground filled his ears, and all around him, the boy was screaming. 'You must be a fan.' The scream falls away and the man turns. 'I'm sorry?' There's a slow fizzing of recognition as the silhouette becomes a person. A smiling face, a smile hello, it's the woman from the door. 'I said you must be a fan,' his eyes adjust to meet her own, screened as they are by rimless, pointless glasses. 'I mean, (the words trip from her mouth,) you've been here every day this week, (as he takes her in) just standing there (black dress, small jewelry, not thin, not dumpy) staring at that same painting.' She wears dark hair in curls. 'Eh, yeah,­ yeah I guess I must be,' he turns back to his subject, vain hopes she'd go away. But she took this for an invitation to discussion, a chance for human contact in a room where nothing moves. She steps in beside him, elbowing her way between him and the painting, demonstratively shunting one thought from another. 'It's quite a piece.' She smiles. He sighs. 'Mmm' is all he will manage, as a slow thrum begins in his skull. 'The way she does it, makes it look so easy.' He coughs a reply, but all he can hear is a child's cry, echoing through leaves long decayed. 'Have you seen any of her other work?' She won't stop; he thinks, then out loud, 'No.' To himself he decides to ignore her. Then he suddenly leans in, forgetting her. In a patch of red he thought he saw something, a mark from a hand that might have held,­ 'Do you see something?' She snaps him out and he's left to dismiss it. 'No,­ I thought I did.­' 'Oh it can be like that. Very densely layered, and she was so reclusive, the theories 'round her work are endless.' 'I thought it was supposed to be a chair.' She giggles, mistakes an innocence for banter. 'No, I don't think so.' She faces the painting. 'I've always thought it was about desire. Just very simple needs, or wants. Like comfort to a child. But what do you see?' 'I thought I saw a thumbprint.' She looks puzzled, like he asked her what time it was in China. 'Sorry, did you say you'd seen any of her other work?' 'No,' he sighs heavily, with a renewed wish she'd go away, a scream that left him years ago. 'Well, her public work is rare I suppose...' please leave leave me leave me alone '...­because of her methods.' shut up shut up shut up 'I met her once...' The scream stops. The man stops. Everything stops. '...before she died.' 'What?' 'Oh yes, she died some time ago.' 'I know that, before...' 'Sorry... ­oh, yes, I met her, but it was only in passing.' 'Would you like to go for coffee?' The sea is playing its own stubborn game as he descends into the cove, with an ebb and flow that matched his breath. He settles against stone, a bench cut deep in the pier side. As the waters swell before him, his eyes pick their way out to the horizon. He looks along the waves, and through the spaces in between, wondering if he can do this. Coffee. When they close. She couldn't come earlier, the new girl was sick. But he'd hung around and he'd meet her soon. He'd wandered shops, bought only deodorant. He'd binned it soon after, finding himself without a bag and not wanting her to see it. In the end, he'd gone for coffee while waiting for coffee. And now here he was, a spec by the edge of the sea. A girl walks down past, with slung bag and homemade clothes. She steps unevenly down to the sea shore, the pulls out some chalk from her bag. He sits there and kicks the pebbles within reach. Through the squawk and spray he eyes her suspiciously. Balancing on the tips of sunken rocks, she leans to a dark stone and begins to draw. Vivid chalk lines appear, trailing from her quick hands. Orange and yellow squiggles, bright against the marine blues, the dried birdshit. He imagines her pout, then watches the back of her head as she takes a photo and moves down the shore. He looks at the stone, the landscape she has altered. Within a few seconds it's all he can see, a taunting swirl of colour. He gets up in annoyance, heads in the opposite direction. Away from yet more pointless colour, away from useless art. His mother had died two months ago. His father six years earlier. He buried them with his mother's two stillborn girls. His older sisters. His friends were there, his business associates, but grief is more time consuming than condolences, and pretty soon he was alone. Left to clear out their house. To fold away her things. To find adoption papers in a small box at the back of the wardrobe. To sit at the end of his mother's bed, with the grain of the floor boards at odds with his fingers. To look around the half packed up room, and wonder what the hell was going on. When he woke up the next day he decided to find out where he came from. The papers gave an agency, and the agency gave a name. Anonymity not requested. A googled name gave up an image. Not a face, but a painting. She gave him away, and left nothing behind. Nothing but a painting he didn't understand. All it was was colour, mingling now, through memory. His own memories had changed because of her. Been blurred and jolted. The boy falling out of the tree no longer had anyone to catch him. A few hundred yards down the shore, as he's walking, still not thinking, the reeds aside him shiver. Stepping closer, the tall grass sounds one more violent warning, before a dark shape cuts an escape through the water. He peers after it, and in between the reeds he finds a coot's nest, torn asunder. Three of four eggs have been cracked and devoured, but whatever slunk away has left the fourth. The man disturbed its meal, and the egg now sits in the midst of its broken siblings, serene in unhatched ruin. 'Oh.' He takes it in and thinks. Remembers. He's nine years old in a nature class. He's ten and sobbing at the kitchen table, explaining he just wanted to see the nest, he wasn't going to touch it. His mother wipes the dirt from his cut knees, soothes the blood from his hands. 'You should never touch a nest, the mother won't return.' It echoes now around him. Guides his sleeve up his arm, then reaches to the nest. He shoves the slaughter down, down deep among the reeds. The single egg, survived this far and stubborn, it slips through his fingers and bobs back up, defiantly regaining the surface. He crushes the nest about a foot below the surface, where it stays, then closes his fist around the single egg. Debris of shell and mucus flood the surface, he wipes his hand and walks away. 'The mother won't return.' he tells himself, as he heads back up the shore. He'll stand her up. He'll get back on with his life. As he reaches the steps that lead to higher ground, he glances contemptuously at the artist's rock. The sea has risen slowly, the bright lines she scratched in granite, are being washed away.