A Short Story About Mary Lewis

Most of her fellow art students have already left the studio by now. Three ‘o’ clock on a Wednesday in June and the sun’s shining. Probably smoking a joint on the field next to the college, she thinks, and imagines someone’s dreadful hip-hop – fake concession at open-mindedness and multiculturalism through necessities of fashion, the need to be seen as urban, the need to be seen as anything but white middle class artsy girls - coming tinny and insubstantial from the speakers of a mobile phone. Mary Lewis is halfway through a painting and thinking about this whilst enjoying the relative quiet. She is not, what you would call a typical art student. Her hair has not been dyed blue or red or green, and she doesn’t smoke roll ups or Marlboros; where, she has noticed, reds, not Lights, are de rigeur. She wears the same clothes every day. Basic ordinary jeans –ones that fit, she thinks -, a white shirt with a vest underneath ,boots and her grandmother’s leather jacket. She doesn’t wear t-shirts of long since disbanded eighties bands, she has no badges. She doesn’t She is tall, with dark straight hair that has little done to it. She is not really into music, and prefers to work in silence. She wonders how the other students can concentrate, can get into their work, with iPods or radios blaring, and whenever it’s Mary’s turn to request something to put on the studio CD Player, she always requests, but never gets, the same thing.

“An hour of silence”.

Mary doesn’t use a palette, instead, she has various little wells to hold her acrylic, all mixing is done on a fifteen inch squares of Perspex cut herself, before being washed and dried and reused. Her brushes are always impeccably maintained, her paints never are left open by accident, to dry up and decay. Not for her the classic image of the artist, paint stained clothes and easel at their side, slowly poisoning themselves with the lead from their paint, imbued on their tongue every time they lick their bristles, or chew their fingernails. She plans and sketches with graphite, and uses colour in big thick blocks and lines. The group of Foundation students in the studio usually mix and swap their desks and workspaces at irregular intervals, except Mary’s area. Empty and sleek, lacking the superfluous sketches, toys, plants, that seem to cling to the other students, like barnacles on the hull of a sailboat, as they travel in and out of the workshop.

Mary Lewis, being so obviously apart, and who finds most unplanned and inconsequential social conduct excruciatingly difficult, it leaving her short of breath and with a pain in her side, could easily be excommunicated, be shunned and have things spoken about her in corners and behind her back, - Mary’s fear being more that things would be said to her face, she cared not so much what people said when she couldn’t hear them – Instead, she has sort of been adopted, something quaint and different. Her sterile workspace, hyperorganisation and relative silence and inscrutability being both simultaneously modern and so old fashioned. After an initial few weeks of people; self conscious, too ‘alternative’ and far too loud and with too much hair and so many questions, trying to get Mary Lewis to ‘join in’ with the group, a organic truce and mutual understanding seemed to spread around. Now Mary Lewis works in her corner, getting quiet acknowledgement and comment from her peers, in a ceasefire. They once made her a banner for her birthday, that said ‘Mary’s Space’, on an old bedsheet, with all of their names painted onto the back, hung up on the ceiling to look down over her. And once they had all left, going to the pub in Mary’s ‘honour’, having long since failed to persuade her to join them, even for just one drink, she sat down and looked at it and felt a little sick, like castor oil was forming, coming up through the base of her stomach in pools, settling on top of the acid and irritating her through her sides.

Caitlin, the last other student still working on such a sunny day, now gathers her coat, and pulls up her hair, died in streaks of shiny colour, like petrol on the tarmac of a bus garage. She has tights that are striped red and black. She tells Mary to come outside and sit with everybody.

Mary is famous in her art college for two things, her tidiness, and her prodigious workrate. Where others would spend six weeks and produce, say, ten pieces of work, - including sketches and studies – Mary would come up with twenty. None of Mary’s students or teachers had ever seen Mary not near a paintbrush or an easel.

“It’s as if you’re either working, or you disappear” someone said.

She specialises in producing bigger and bigger paintings, growing with each as if to her, art is almost as much about the size of the canvas as the paint put onto it. To Mary Lewis, a giant Rothko or Yves Klein is worth a million postage stamp size Mona Lisa’s. Anish Kapoor’s trumpet was spectacular, Henry Moore’s giant bronzes, irreplaceable. All of Michelangelo’s giant Italian frescoes worth his reputation.

Cast in Reds and Blacks, big streaky cross hatched lines and strokes, her pictures were always impeccably constructed, abstract and impermeable. Full of, and created by, little details that could be anything you wanted. As someone who hated decisions, it was hard to look at Mary Lewis’s paintings, again and again giant etched and chiselled, melding strong colours with impeccable control and brushwork, and decide whether she was expressing unfathomable depths or reflecting a soul that was essentially empty. Whether her work and herself were equally inscrutable because what lay beneath was either raw, complex and knotted, bleeding and beating. Or already dead and gone, executed and turned to glaciers and carpets, giant and all covering, but with no centre or limb or nerve. Games to catch out her audience, or distress signals in fog.

Mary leaves the studio at five, and heads home to her mother’s three bed terrace outside of town, and, not knowing what waits her at home, stopping to buy provisions; two bottles of mineral water and some fresh vegetables for a possible supper. Everyone in the shop though, is buying lottery tickets for a draw - having gone ten weeks unclaimed - rolling over to be worth seventy million pounds. Mary pushes past the queue at the customer service desk, where they sell the lottery tickets, to get to the fruit and vegetables, pushing past the people crossing off numbers on their tickets, leaning on counters and walls and eachother, leaning on any flat surface they can find.

Her mother is having one of her dark days, and by the time Mary gets home, she’s already sellotaped sheets of cardboard across the living room and kitchen windows. When Mary asks why, her Mother, who is trying to glue together a broken mug that is designed to look like the front cover of a penguin classic book, says “To save energy. Got to keep the heat in”.

Mary listens to her mother talk about energy loss and the gulf stream. She hears about wind farms and the tiny deep sea creatures that died millions of years ago to make oil. She nods and listens to her mother cry when she talks about Palestine and Kuwait and Iraq and Nigeria and Saudi Arabia and all the wars and conflicts about oil and gas. Mary promises her Mother that tomorrow, she will indeed, as requested, put an advert in the local paper to sell the family car. Mary listens and doesn’t say much, she’s been through this before and knows well the only thing to do is to let her mother talk herself out. It takes about forty five minutes, but eventually, after she hears about Kyoto and financial imperatives, Mary puts an arm on her Mother’s shoulder and persuades her to put on her dressing gown and go to bed, that the world will still exist in the morning, and that Mary will bring up her water and pills and fix them both a vegetable stir fry.

Going back into the kitchen to unpack the shopping, Mary finds the fridge has been emptied and filled with rolled up newspaper. She makes dinner and takes her mother her medicine. Later, in the bath, she reads travel books, and looks at the scar on her right breast. Wondering, visualising, what’s going on beneath. Half remembered science textbooks and diagrams of red and white blood cells moving through veins and arteries like smarties in a tube. She tries to remember some of the things her doctor told her before they let her out of the hospital.

She thinks she should feel more annoyed. She should feel beholden and should feel picked on. She should be so world weary and so cross with god for her family and her genealogy. For the wilful self destruction, cancer and illness and catastrophe that is as much in her family as her dark hair – that never seems to grow as fast as anyone else’s – or her ability to roll her tongue. She imagines the blood cell smarties next to electron microscoped images of cancer cells, dark and spiky, floating around, duplicating and consuming. Something out of a David Attenborough documentary or a videogame. The red and white slowly going off and mouldy, turning dark and dying and turning on eachother. She runs a finger over the scar, and feeling the marks where the stitches once were, knows she should be incandescent and righteous, and should take that energy and swallow it hole and be allowed not to care and to no longer to be subject to any laws of physics or gravity. For she would be surely and truly justified.

But Mary Lewis is genuinely happy. She thinks to herself, that worrying about uncontrollable factors in her own life would be as useful as to rage at the weatherman for correctly predicting rain.

When she wakes, her Mother is still asleep, and Mary quietly takes down all the pieces of cardboard and puts them all in a black binliner together with all of the scrunched up newspaper. And whilst making tea, Mary imagines a tidal wave, a giant darkening cloud of steam, rushing like a cloud, like the dust when a building comes down, like some lethal gas dropped by thousands of warplanes on a foreign city, seeping and flowing through streets and buildings, quickly and silently invading every open window and space, every hole and gap and filtering through totally. Except the steam won’t be dust and smoke, acrid and filled with asbestos. And it won’t be poison gas, nerve gas, sarin or mustard gas. It’ll be superheated water, hitting the ground and turning to steam, covering everything instantaneously turning all the surfaces to polished chrome as it goes, stripping flesh and muscle and blood and skin from skeletons in a freeze frame haze. And in the middle of all this boiling pressure and steam, and no-one will feel anything, no one will be surprised, just calm as they slip off their bones and flake into pieces, taken all away in the cloud, mixed together and leaving everything clean and bare and absolute. Then there’s a feeling, that inside, something has given way, and warm, soothing liquid is flowing, as if from a leaking tap, and collecting, pooling into a reservoir in her side, and Mary falls over onto the kitchen parquet.

The next thing, Mary Lewis is sitting bolt upright in an ambulance, shuddering and rocking like a fishing trawler in the north sea. All she can smell is vomit and petrol. Her mother, next to her, holds her hand. Everything happens staccato, like a zoetrope, rotating hundreds of thousands of still images in front of eyes to form the illusion of something that’s alive and moving.

“We’re going to hospital” says Mary’s mother. “It’s ok.”

The ambulance, a tin shack, bumps and thuds some more, and she can hear from inside, the muffled sound of the siren. A paramedic is crouched next to her, dressed in yellow and fiddling with medicines and switches.

“I found you on the floor” says Mary’s mother.

For a moment they are picture postcard, they are perfect and cutout Mother and Daughter. Mother hunched over daughter, holding her hand, stroking her hair. Wiping her brow. Then her mother leans back and squirts a plastic bottle of eyedrops into each eye. She blinks and knocks back her head like she’s doing tequila, before looking back at Mary with eyedrop watery irises. She’s still ‘on’ Mary thinks.

“We’ll be there soon” says Mary’s mother.

Then the ambulance wheels right, and Mary can feel stabbing in the reservoir in her left side. She can’t help herself, and gasps, and the yellow paramedic adjusts one of the monitors Mary is hooked up to. She once watched a programme where they simulated how the world looks to a dog, where all the smells an odours were like visual glowing neon snakes. Like jet engine trails winding through the air. Mary feels like her pain is one of those, and every time she breathes too hard, or moves too much, little triangles and dots appear; multicoloured and burned into her retina, for a split second.

Mary’s mother asks the paramedic if the ambulance runs on diesel or super unleaded.

They’re not too different, Hospitals and Art Galleries, thinks Mary. Both giant and cavernous, filled with lots of rooms painted white. Full of hushed visitors, cowed into submission by portentous occupants, obtuse staff, and the horrible dread feeling – like a ceiling with a leaking pipe above, damp and rotten and beginning to bulge and sag, cave-like, in all drooping cones of water – of seriousness and fragility.

Then Mary’s mother is telling the paramedic how Mary vomited all over her new shoes. She’s saying how she found Mary face down in the kitchen, and turned her into the recovery position and began to administer CPR like she’d seen them do on ER. She’s saying how she rung 999, and how she waited until she saw flashing flights.

The personal pronouns hit Mary like little punches. She wants her mother to stop, wants to be allowed to face this, but the words are like darts pricking skin. Like when she was nine years old, and her fourteen year old sister used to pin her down on the rough rocky soil of their back garden, putting one knee each on one of mary’s elbows, thus rendering her defenceless. Sitting atop her, Mary’s sister could do as she wished, knowing her superior weight and position meant Mary’s defences consisted solely of trying, vainly, to shift body position. So followed a series of gentle tiny slaps on which ever cheek Mary exposed, and whilst none of them really ‘hurt’ in the sense of physical pain, the sheer fact that she was so entirely defenceless, meant every tiny open handed contact felt like a gunshot. Her mother is talking to the yellow suited paramedic about how she’s always had to watch Mary since she was a child. ‘In case something happened. You know?’ Her mother says “Especially with a child like her”. Her mother says “In her condition” Her mother says “with her history”. Her mother is talking about funerals of family members. Her mother is calling Mary ‘precious’. Her mother is talking about carbon neutral lifestyles and future forests.

Mary sits forward and says “Could you stop it please?”. Except the words come out like buckshot and like flares sent off by sinking ships. They – the words - bounce off the inside of the ambulance – a giant bouncing rolling metal tin, a can of beans on wheels – and reflect back laser guided onto both Mary’s mother and the paramedic like a cricket stroke; like being told off by your most feared teacher, like a universal hold switch. And Mary can see it in their eyes as they pause, stunned momentarily, to look back at Mary, thinking where did all that authority and stopping power come from?

All the wards are named after wealthy benefactors with strange names, Mary sits in the ‘Ethel Barrow’ ward, and all the nurses she asks do not know who Ethel Barrow is. Her bed is giant and clunky, full of metal and switches, that threatens to chop off a finger every time she tries to adjust them. Mary finds the pain and the headaches ease if she regularly changes her sitting or sleeping position, a complex manoeuvre of changes of pillows and centres of gravity and involving pulling levers, whilst taking care to not catch her drip, tying her umblilically to the plastic bag on the hat stand at the end of her bed, on anything outstretched or grasping. Mary’s mother is sitting on a chair by the side of her bed, and asks ‘Do you want the curtains pulled to’. Mary says yes, and her mother, struggling, pulls the curtains round the bed as far as they will go, obscuring her like a shower cubicle, from the boy on her left who broke his leg in his motorcycle wheel, and the girl to her right who is fed through a tube. She can feel her breasts and her skin and the stitches on the inside of the hospital gown. Backless and supported only with a few loose ties she has had to knot, one handed behind her back. Mary is uncomfortable and exposed. She feels that sometime, she will stand, to struggle to the toilet in the night, or into her wheelchair to be taken down to X-ray, everything will give way, and she will spill out, naked with muscle and blood from beneath her gown, and the blood is a mix of cancer and not, a mixture dark red and thick and bright, vibrant sanguine, like where rivers – dark and silty with soil – flow into clear, salty, meridian seas.

Mary’s mother has a bag and she’s brought the things Mary’s asked, books, pens, mirrors, and postcards. Mary’s mother asks dutiful questions about how Mary feels and how she’s doing, and Mary answers truthfully in the main, skimming over the most gruesome or dark details, self censoring the words and things she’s afraid to say and her mother is afraid to hear. Her mother brings cards and letters from her friends from college, and some of them have painted little things, or done little drawings.

Mary shifts up in bed to read them, and feels the vibrations and pins and needles flutter up and down her spine and her blood vessels like cramp, like electrical wires dipped in treacle.

Mary’s mother says that in the lobby of the hospital, there’s a gallery of sorts, with pictures and sculptures. Mary’s mother says she has asked about the hospital buying some of Mary’s pictures to hang there, and Mary smile and feels warmth. She imagines her giant canvasses on white hospital walls. Her mother carries on, making small talk, about her work, and about friends and family and pets. And this normality, this banality in the events Mary’s mother is retelling, is perfect and wonderful. Mary wants to drink it like soup, this elegiac power of the non vital, this stuff that isn’t death and life and illness and means none of those things. But throughout the conversation, Mary sees her mother check, -every few minutes – the windows behind her. Then Mary sees the second bag her mother has brought, full of crushed and broken down cardboard boxes and sheets, probably, thinks Mary, the same ones, rescued from the rubbish bags that Mary herself took down from the windows in their house. And Mary should be downcast, but she can see her Mother is trying so hard, not to say or do anything, trying hard, and has not yet tried to tape the cardboard to the windows and tell her about aggregate temperatures.