The Girl in the Painting by Caleb Crowe

Author:Caleb Crowe [Crowe, Caleb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

26

True to his word, the following weekend Michael takes Seline to look for a car. Like last time, Michael and Seline sit in the front of Michael’s limo, while Robbie is confined to the back seat, like the child of the family. His surly body language and petulant silence make it clear he’s not happy with the arrangement, but he doesn’t explicitly resist anything where Michael is concerned. If Seline stares ahead and doesn’t look round, she can almost imagine he doesn’t exist.

THE GARAGE IS A COMPLETELY unfamiliar environment to her. It’s a relatively small place, just off a main road, with several cars packed together on the forecourt and on the grass verge in front, all glistening and shiny from a recent rain shower. This was clearly a fuel station at one point, with a covered area over the tarmac at the front of the building, but the pumps have all been removed and the signage changed to make it clear it is now a second-hand car dealership, including a tall, bright red tube-dancer writhing in a manic dance as it inflates and deflates.

The office itself is small and has a burnt dust smell from a bank of electric bar fires. The back of the office opens into a mechanics’ workspace, with cars in various states of repair, on ground level or up on hydraulic lifts. Several men in blue overalls, smeared black with oil and grease, move between the vehicles and a large wall of tools on one side. A pair of legs poke out from beneath the nearest car, and a faceless mechanic reaches out and sightlessly lands his hand perfectly into a box of spanners, finding precisely what he’s after by touch alone.

Michael goes through an adjoining office door, presumably to where he’ll find his friend, the owner. Robbie drifts through into the garage, chatting to a mechanic he clearly knows from somewhere. Everyone knows everyone here. Seline sits in a tatty vinyl chair and keeps watching the mechanic under the car, his arm appearing and disappearing like a snake’s tongue. She notices his bare arm, an extraordinarily intricate dragon tattoo with a burning jet of fire wrapping around his wrist, its scaly body entwining his forearm and disappearing at the elbow beneath his overalls. Other than this flash of beauty, it’s a decidedly male environment.

Michael emerges with some keys and leads Seline back out front to a blue four-door hatchback. He opens the driver’s door and pulls out the array of cardboard resting on the dashboard.

“Ignore the price.”

Seline gets in behind the wheel. She instinctively flashes her eyes towards Robbie, assuming he’ll want to come too. But Michael passes her the keys.

“Take her for a spin.”

Michael closes the door, standing next to Robbie, who’s now firmly excluded, on the forecourt outside.

SELINE DRIVES the car along the sweeping country roads. She tries to remember the last time she felt like this, in control, in charge of where she’s heading and what she’s doing, and alone – properly alone.

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