The lines flowed from Martha's pencil and a head slowly took shape. Hair tumbling over a slender shoulder, a small snub nose set in a sea of freckles, large eyes with long lashes and above all cupid-bow lips hinting at a smile. A beautiful face, but young. A girl, no more than 10, if that. Innocent and open and yet no one she knew.
A face of a young girl marked with a small, white scar running above her left eye that left an interesting small gap in her thin, pale eyebrow. A small blemish perhaps, but one which highlighted her beauty.
It startled Martha to see what had flowed from her hand and on to the paper. She had drawn portraits of many people - older people - over the years but no one this young. More, it wasn't a girl sat in front of her: this child sprang from somewhere within her. It was a face she hadn't seen in the flesh, even if it seemed remarkably familiar to her.
The girl's face was drawn many times, in many places. Martha could at any time simply start to draw and the face would form itself in front of her. Even when Martha was working on a commission and concentrating on capturing the essence of a model or from a photograph, she could simply reach across to another piece of paper and sketch the child in a few moments. It became, in a way, almost like therapy. If her work wasn't going well or she felt tired or merely lonely (and an artists's life can be lonely) the woman could unwind the tension by drawing a portrait of the mysterious girl from within her.
There were times when Martha wondered this girl wasn't imaginary. It occurred to her she might have met this girl sometime in the past and the child had left an indelible impression on her. Someone briefly seen and outwardly forgotten, but who had left quite a mark. However try as she may, Martha could recall no child like that who would look at her with such meaning.
She wondered, as an artist often does, whether this was some primal echo springing from her muse. Martha would wonder whether there is a face which is an archetype of all faces; that there is one face that is simultaneously all faces but still individual. It was similar, she would argue, to the idea of the perfect tree: somewhere in the world Martha would argue there is a perfect tree with a straight trunk, with not a leaf missing and no twisted branches. All trees were corruptions of that perfection. In the same way there was a face that all other faces sprang from, and what she was drawing was that from her mind.
But why a pre-teen girl, and why a girl with a white scar cutting through her eyebrow? If this was a perfect child, then Martha would argue it could just as easily be male (or perhaps androgyne) and he or she or it would have perfect features. There would be no scars, no faults. Yet if Martha closely examined the drawing she did, she could make out that one eye of the girl was a fraction larger than the other, that the girl's hair suffered from a double-crown that made the hair on top of her head stick up awkwardly. Either that or she had just risen from sleep and her hair had been crunched against a pillow all night. Perhaps it had been wet and, uncombed, had dried into an unkempt shape.
There was also another aspect to this that puzzled the artist. The drawing stopped once Martha had drawn the shoulders. There was no neckline of clothes and if she tried to draw this girl in say a shirt or a dress the drawing at once felt wrong. The girl in the drawing looked unreal if there was evidence of clothes on her shoulders or on her young chest. The same was true of the background. Martha might sketch in a room with furniture, or a window looking out on a garden, or a bush or tree but it all looked unnatural no matter how much care she took. The girl was real against a white background but became unreal if there was anything else added.
A real, slightly imperfect but definitely beautiful girl. Young, and with an air of what could only be described as a sense of seduction. An invitation waiting to be accepted.
No wonder then, in her darkest moments, Martha wondered if she was going mad. Here she was, a 42 year old woman whose own personal life had been a trail of disappointments and therefore who had immersed herself in her art, who suddenly was 'seeing' in her mind a young girl whose lips looked ready to kiss and eyes that sought the face of the person who would kiss her.
This, Martha would tell herself, was ridiculous. If it was an unreal person there could be no love. It was simply a sketch of an imaginary person. Martha convinced herself it had been a slip of the pencil the first time she had drawn the girl so that she had appeared to have a scar, that her hair was untidy because that was how it was drawn the first time. Eyes could be different sizes but this was just how she had drawn the face from the beginning. Martha told herself that each drawing she was merely repeating the first time, that having drawn it once and been happy with it she wanted to repeat the image. Like a child's nighttime security blanket, the face had become Martha's refuge. Tired or stressed or lonely, she went back to what was familiar. The girl in the drawing was almost a mantra. You repeated it and could slip into a safe, warm place.
So she wasn't mad, and that made her feel relieved. Martha understood it was nothing but her inner self exercising itself through her arm and hand and pencil. See what I can do? Martha was sure the voice of her inner self was telling her. Look, I can create too.
It wasn't something that Martha even felt she could share with her one friend, Eleanor. The woman was athletic and fun and no artist at all, so she wouldn't understand the madness of artists or their compulsions. Oh, she had seen a drawing of Drew and said the girl was cute, but it was just a drawing to her. Lines on a piece of paper and nothing more.
But they were lines that kept coming back for Martha, kept flowing from her inner self. Over the next few weeks Martha even gave the child in her drawing a name. She called her Drew, as if her name was short for say Andrea or perhaps a corruption of Dew. A fairy name, Martha told herself. Dew, or Drew as she preferred, was one of the sisterhood of fairies. Lovely and ethereal but unreal, and thus no danger at all.
After all, if she had secretly fallen for a ten year old girl wouldn't there be complications and issues? The world took a dim view of love between a child and an adult. Society may have been ill-informed about the nature of love but there was far, far more of the world than there was of Martha. The world's view had to count more, so Martha shut any thoughts of love out of her mind. She tried not to love the girl she was drawing, because she understood that this way lay madness. Artists could gain a form of madness that prompted them to deface their work, or just as likely, deface themselves. They would do rash things with what was most precious too them, which was their work. How many artists had suddenly burned their canvasses or renounced art in a terrible, self-inflicted death of the soul?
No, Martha would not go down that path. She was sane, and would stay that way. Drew was a dream in a way, and dreams evaporated no matter how powerful they seemed in the early moments of waking. Drew was merely lines of a paper, and even if as a mark of respect Martha would press her own lips to the lips of the girl on the paper, it was only as a gesture of appreciation. It wasn't an act of love. It couldn't be, even if Martha cried quietly alone in her bed at night.
---
The open-air swimming pool was crowded and Martha was unsure, but Eleanor had insisted Martha took time out from her studio. No pencils, no paper, no paints, no canvasses, she had said. Come with me and come outside, just be amazed at what the ordinary world did. Eleanor laughed as she said it. Be alive, she added. Come out with me and meet people, see people having fun. Share it with them. Or maybe just laze and read or stare and perhaps swim and feel the sun on your back. Marvel at the surge of water round you, the way it lifted and carried and sparkled.
Martha had been reluctant to go. She had a canvas she wanted to finish, a portrait that would mean a sale. But she had relented in the face of Eleanor's enthusiasm, and in a way she was glad to get out of her loft. Come down to the world, share something and feel there was no pressure, no compulsion to draw. She would even leave Drew behind for today.
Martha has swum and laughed and felt the sun on her and began to feel alive. She had no paint of her hands now, had no brushes to clean, bore no anxiety that a line was right, had avoided the fear a shade was too dark. She was free for a day and she loved it more than she would admit. 'All work and play,' Eleanor had taunted, but it was true. Martha had been too wrapped up in herself and too reliant on Drew for comfort.
The afternoon wore on, the pool grew less crowded, the sun slid down the bright, clear sky. Martha knew it would end soon and had one last long, leisurely swim. As she hauled herself out of the water Martha looked up at a child standing in front of a plain white wall a few feet in front of her. A freckled child with naked shoulders above a strapless bikini-like top and hair that had dried in the sun and who smiled at her with full lips and lifted her eyebrow with its thin white scar through it, above an eye that was a fraction smaller than her other one.
"Hello," said the girl as she looked at Martha, whose heart missed a beat. "Who are you?"
Martha stared, water running down her and pooling round her feet, the late afternoon sun on her back. "I'm Martha," she said, and then she smiled herself. "But I know your name."
The girl, who was no more than ten, laughed and wrinkled her pretty snub nose as she did so. "I know," she said and stepped forward to take Martha's hand. She smiled more when Martha said she was going to draw the girl, but this time the lines would go down all her body, especially if she was lying on a crumpled white sheet in the studio.
Naked, with lips ready to kiss for real and not just on paper.
Ends