Cautious, a Boat Adrift by Tommy Sissons

Author:Tommy Sissons [Sissons, Tommy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781914420689
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2023-07-14T22:00:00+00:00

June 2017 (II)

Mam had painted every day — once, no longer. Landscapes mostly. The Skegness coastal shelf. Sherwood Forest. The River Trent from the perspective of Trent Bridge — the lock, the football stadium and the waterfront flats skittering away into the distance, becoming brushstrokes. The floor of our front room had looked as if it were a painting itself. Electric pink, calypso blue and buttermilk white, like miniature archipelagos, had dried on the wooden floorboards, never to be wiped up.

When I was a teenager, she had painted, at request, one of our neighbours, then her daughter. The portraits were grotesque, unintentionally, I’m sure. Even on a good day, our neighbour’s face was throddy, hanging like a lump of beef, and so difficult to depict majestically. In paint, she came out a haggard Queen Victoria, her chin buried in her hands, diamanté tracksuit bottoms clinging to her elephantine thighs.

Our neighbour’s daughter did not want to be painted. She pulled faces throughout the sitting and dribbled ice cream down her chin. Mam painted the little girl as she was, impish, with her tongue out, fingers pulling at the sides of her mouth, chocolate sauce smeared across her cheeks. Her mother was disappointed she didn’t look more cherubic. She didn’t ask for any more paintings. Mam happily returned to landscapes.

She had not painted as much recently. She was chasing her school’s upcoming Head of Art vacancy, and so had taken on as many additional responsibilities as she could to endear herself to the cold head teacher. On Tuesdays, she ran a sewing club, a still-life club on Thursdays. She orchestrated school trips once a term to local galleries, and marked her students’ work long into the evenings, planning lessons through the weekends until she was forced to stop. She had always been a workaholic but now even more so. When she found time, she hibernated and slept loudly, and dreamt that the horses of age were running through her head.

“Of course, they all died young in those days”, Mam said, pointing to the watercolour. She had found it in the attic, in a tattered folder she had kept as a child. She had thought it lost years ago, and, having uncovered it in Norman’s spare room, had been sat, leafing through the pages for a while before I joined her.

Dating from the early Seventies, the watercolour rendered the Hunslet Grange Flats in pale, washed greys and browns. Mam had stood on her toes to paint it, peeping over the wall of a second-floor walkway. The work of a child, the pebbledash concrete panels of the building looked as if melting. The colours hung like stalactites in the air. Further down the walkway, a dim salmon-coloured oval, a lady’s face, hovered at the door of a flat. A poorly painted hand beckoned the artist in for dripping bread.

“They must have been in their early sixties”, I said.

Mam nodded. “She was always very lively. She took a lot of pride in that flat. Redecorated it all the time.

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