The Real Thing Ch. 02

We started the following morning.

Dinner had been surreal. Kinlay had been his usual expansive self. Holly barely touched her food, and went to bed early. I sat and drank a lot of wine, trying to calm myself down.

We slept side by side in our underwear and we went down to breakfast together without exchanging a word. After tea and bread and butter, we left the kitchen and crossed over to the studio.

We let ourselves in. Kinlay was walking around fiddling with brushes and palettes. He looked at us, but he only glanced offhandedly at Holly. To me, he nodded a hello and actually smiled.

If I hadn't already known that he'd fucked her, that nod would have been enough to give me the hint.

"Let's start," he said, and Holly walked away from me, towards the rumpled bed, stripping off as she went. By the time she reached it she was down to her panties, and she slid them off and threw them in a corner, then knelt naked onto the bed and turned to Kinlay.

He made her lie on her back with her arms folded behind her head, one leg hanging off the bed, her pudenda totally exposed to him. After a moment of hesitation, he revised the pose and made her cross her forearms over her face.

Then he went to work. There was very little left for me to do around the studio so I sat in the corner and watched. Kinlay didn't bother with sketches, he went straight to putting paint on the canvas. That was part of his balls-to-the-wall, gung-ho attitude that Holly and I so much admired.

I had quite different feelings, now, than I'd thought I'd have at this moment. Holly and I had been so excited to come up here and watch Kinlay work, and I don't think either of us expected to become subjects for him quite so quickly. But it wasn't so much that Holly was getting to pose and I wasn't. I envied her that, although I knew he wasn't likely to ask me to pose; he'd painted very few nudes of men. It was that I knew that he'd fucked her. He'd sweet-talked her into letting him fuck her arse, too, which to an old-fashioned mid-20^th-century male like Kinlay was pure Norman Mailer territory, taming a stroppy little intellectual chick by fucking her up her arsehole. From the way he worked in such concentrated silence, much quicker and more surely than he'd worked with the other model, I wondered if Kinlay felt he had to own his models in some way before he painted them. He probably hadn't got near the cute girl musician, but he'd trusted that Holly would let him do what he wanted with her.

I couldn't add up how I felt about it. I felt jealous and shut out, but was it really Kinlay I was jealous of? I was also obscurely sad, as if working with Kinlay would necessarily be much more intense and character-forming for Holly than it was for me. I'd had that feeling before, when I'd been a kid and my friends had gone off on some mildly dangerous adventure like rock-climbing or canoeing, while I'd been too scared and stayed at home; they had come back looking brown and lean and experienced, they'd been through something together and survived, while I was nothing but a miserable little wuss who was afraid of living. Holly was going to come back from this with all sorts of experiences and emotions and memories, not all of them good but all of them fierce and primal, that I would never be able to share. I hated that feeling. I sat and watched the painter and his nude model and simmered in my own misery.

Kinlay worked on through the morning, not letting Holly change her pose. I could see her sweating, although it wasn't warm in the room, and her raised arms were beginning to tremble. The thing about posing is that, no matter how comfortable the position is when you first adopt it, if you have to keep it up for hours it starts to become agony, just like it's okay to be tickled for a few seconds but if the tickler doesn't stop it becomes unbearable pain. Once or twice her arms dipped a little, and the second time he muttered, "Ah, come on now" and she said "Sorry" in a high and slightly cracked voice.

At eleven o'clock he finally put the brush down and said "Take ten minutes, Holly," and then he left the studio and went back to the house. She lowered her arms and let out a huge sigh of relief. I had a bottle of water and I went over to her. She raised herself on her shaky arms I and lifted it to her lips. She drank and said "Thanks" and lay flat on her back on the bed.

"He works hard, doesn't he," I said.

"Yeah," she said, not looking at me, looking up through the plexiglass roof at the clouds scudding across the blue sky. It was a bright and windy day.

"How are you doing," I asked. She glanced at me. I couldn't read her expression at all.

"I'm fine," she said. Abruptly she sat up and got off the bed and walked up and down a bit, swinging her arms and stretching her legs.

I caught myself thinking how vulnerable she was, with her lean and skinny narrow-hipped body that never seemed to put on any weight. Holly was so indifferent about what she ate, sometimes going for days on frozen pizza and cold baked beans, and yet her body burned up whatever she consumed and left no excess fat. The only visible traces of her junk food diet were recurring illnesses (when we first met there was nearly always something wrong with her, if not a cold then a violent stomach ache or a migraine or anaemia or thrush) and her intermittently bad skin. She regarded her bad health as being just one of the many bullshit things life throws at you. A serious person, in her view, took the rough with the smooth and if that meant that every so often she would be laid up for a weekend with one of her migraines, lying in a darkened room and throwing up every hour into a bucket, then that was just her tough shit. After I'd taken over the cooking nearly all her illnesses either went away or lessened dramatically in virulence, and she'd never thanked me. I think she missed being ill.

She walked around the studio, naked, bending and stretching her limbs and neck. Her white hip rubbed against the sharp corner of a broken table, and she stopped and muttered "Ow," twisting her head round to peer over her shoulder and down her bare back, looking for the scratch. Satisfied that it wasn't serious, she came around in front of the easel and examined the picture carefully, hugging her arms to herself over her bare chest to keep warm.

"Cold?" I said.

"No," she said absently, then looked around. "Um. A bit."

I got off the bed, took off my shirt – I was wearing a t-shirt underneath – and walked over to her and put it round her shoulders. My fingertips brushed against hers and she made the briefest movement of her index finger, a sign of recognition.

"Fuck, he's good," she muttered, looking at the painting.

"Yeah," I said. I had to admit, Kinlay's eye, and his control of paint even at this early stage, were nothing short of virtuoso. He had done little except touch in parts of Holly's hips and stomach, but already it was possible to see the infinitely delicate, painful texture he achieved in his best work. And he would probably paint over what he had done today. We knew it would take years for us to get to this level of understanding and technique, a level where it's hard to tell one from the other because the eye, the heart, the mind and the hand are all working in perfect sympathy.

Fuck him, I thought. I was really angry, suddenly. Kinlay went through life taking what he wanted. I could imagine how he'd done it; he'd walked into our room, surprising Holly, and told her that he really wanted her to model for him because she was so beautiful, and she would have been so flattered that as he had started to touch her and kiss her and open her clothes she would have given into him, nodding dumbly and remaining silent when he'd said to her that he had to possess her, that it was the only way he could work, and Holly would have obediently let him take off her clothes and sit her down on the chair, facing away from him, and as he'd talked on, softly, encouraging her, he had worked his cock up into her arsehole and as she started to cry from the pain, he'd told her that her tears, and the agony of him inside her, were good for her. And she would have believed him. How could you not believe him, when the man could paint like this? Holly and I knew how good Kinlay was, while that stupid slapper Joanne had no idea. Joanne had flirted with his eye, tried to make herself sexy, tried to look good. Kinlay's work wasn't about making his subjects "look good", it was about catching them at their most vulnerable, so that you saw with a fresh eye how fragile our bodies are, what a risk we run in inhabiting them. And to do that, Kinlay clearly looked for occasions to catch his models at their moments of maximum helplessness.

And in the case of Holly, he had manufactured one. It seemed to me, then, that he must have started to feel like he was losing something. I wasn't sure what – his confidence, or his eye. But there must have been a time when he was able simply to look at people and see them in his way, the way that made Holly and I respect him so much. And maybe, over the years, that vision had faded. Maybe he'd become too big, too famous, too comfortable, less forgiving of people. Now, he had wanted a new model and he had chosen Holly and he had deliberately violated her, hurt her, to see in her as soon as possible what he had once had the patience to wait for.

The door opened and he came back in.

"Are you rested," he grunted.

"Yeah," said Holly, taking my shirt from off her shoulders and handing it back to me. She walked naked over to the bed.

"Right. Same position please," he said, and Holly climbed onto the bed and got herself into the same pose, her eyes watching Kinlay as he indicated with his hands a little more in one direction or another. Her expression, as she looked to him to tell her what to do, haunted me in a funny way. I only got it what it was later, when I had been sitting watching them for some time, and Holly's arms were once again folded, hiding her face.

It was the same expression she'd had that night when we'd first had sex, and she had urged me to come in her arse rather than get her pregnant. Looking, intent, determined to face it, whatever it was, but also scared, and painfully young.

* * * * *

That was how it went on for two weeks. We got up in the morning and went to the studio. Holly stripped off and posed for hours, while I watched, gnawing at my own unhappiness and jealousy. She never again asked me to pose for her; I didn't so much as see her look at a pencil. Needless to say, she was too tired each evening to want to pose for me, even if I'd asked her to, which I didn't. I was so full of envy for her closeness to Kinlay, the completeness with which she offered herself to him (she'd never offered it to me), that we barely exchanged words. We were regarded as a "couple", Holly'n'Sean, so that we were placed together at dinner and we slept in the same bed together. But that was the end of the intimacy between Holly and me. She kept herself entirely for Kinlay.

I never again caught Kinlay in our room, but on more than one occasion I woke up during the night to find Holly missing from the bed. The third time it happened I was sure that she and Kinlay were together somewhere, but I wanted to be sure.

It was four o'clock in the morning. I dressed in my trousers and sneakers and crept down through the house. I was pretty sure they wouldn't be in any of the rooms. I let myself into the darkened kitchen. Looking out of the window, I could see that there was a light on in the studio.

I quietly left the house and moved down the path. I'm good at moving silently. I'd learned it growing up in a house with angry parents who were light sleepers.

The studio door was shut. I bent down and saw that the key was in the lock. But I could hear them.

Holly was panting and moaning with sharp, rapid, painful breaths. Sometimes they were coherent, a choked "No!", but mostly they weren't. Kinlay was grunting and muttering.

I couldn't see through the keyhole and the studio had no side windows. But there was a huge old oak tree near one end of it, some branches of which overlooked the studio roof. I moved across the damp grass and hauled myself up onto the thick lower boughs of the tree.

Carefully, I climbed up and up, then outwards, inching along the slowly narrowing limbs of the tree, until slowly the interior of the studio came into view; the table with the photos, the easel, a gas heater, a corner of the bed, then an outstretched, twitching hand, and then the black rag of Holly's discarded panties, then an arm, and then...

Holly was underneath Kinlay, naked on her stomach, a pillow beneath her crotch to get her hips at the right angle, and Kinlay was mounted on her, rooting in her arse. Holly was struggling, her limbs moving, her hands clutching the sheet, and her head was thrashing from side to side, her face red and twisted with pain. Kinlay was in a grey t-shirt, with his boxer shorts halfway down his thighs, revealing his broad and flabby buttocks.

Kinlay grabbed Holly's arms and held her tight, burying his face in her neck, and she lifted her face up, weeping, and I saw her lips form what looked like No, please, and then he stopped moving. I heard his muffled roar of pleasure, even outside the studio. His great body sagged on top of her for a few moments, then he got off her and pulled up his shorts. Holly was lying on the bed, her body shaking with sobs. She curled up into the foetal position, hugging the pillow, pressing her face into it.

Kinlay stood by the bed, his back to me. He was saying something to her, but she didn't respond. He waited a moment, then walked towards the door of the studio and let himself out.

I shrank back against the tree branch in case he looked up at me, but the tree was in the opposite direction than the house. He walked to the kitchen door and let himself in.

I looked down at Holly, curled up naked, crying miserably on the bed. My heart was pounding and my throat aching. Why didn't I go down to her and tell her I saw what happened? Why didn't I try to console her?

Because I was selfish. I knew that she would never forgive me for having witnessed this. I would lose her for good, she would either leave the house or find some way to get me out. I had lost her already, that was clear. But at least I could still be with her for a while, until our time here was over.

I looked down at her. She showed no signs of moving, she was still clutching the pillow to herself and weeping. I climbed down the tree and walked quietly and cautiously towards the kitchen door. I peered in the kitchen window, but there didn't seem to be anyone inside. I eased open the door and let myself in.

I made my way through the kitchen and up the stairs. On the first floor, I felt the need for a drink of water. I found my way to the small bathroom on the landing and slipped inside.

I poured water over my head and dried myself with a towel, then drank from the tap. The water was cold and tasted of tank water. Probably I had ingested a few interesting nematodes. Fuck it.

I left the bathroom and shut the door. A voice said quietly, "You're up late."

I stopped and looked around.

Anna Kinlay was standing in the doorway of her darkened bedroom, with just moonlight illuminating her from behind. I could only make out her silhouette and a little light on her face, trickling down from the skylight in the roof that illuminated the whole stairwell.

"I needed some water," I said.

"I know where you were," she said softly. "It's okay."

"I wasn't anywhere," I said, "I was just getting a drink."



"Sean – don't worry about it," she said. "Come in here for a second."

She stood back and held the door open. I went in. She shut the door behind me and walked past me to the rumpled bed. She switched on a bedside light.

She was wearing a large man's shirt in faded check. Her long black hair was tousled. Her legs were bare. She sat on the bed and smiled at me sleepily.

"I heard the water," she said. "I know what goes on in this house. Believe me."

"I dunno what you mean," I said.

"Come on, Sean, don't be naïve," she said. "I know Holly has been meeting Jack. You think I don't know my own dad? I've seen this happen so many times."

I didn't know what to say. I was getting angry with them all, once again. I wanted to tell them that they were all a bunch of sick fucking users, and then grab Holly by the arm and get her out of here, back to somewhere where it would just be the two of us. I stood on the worn rug in the middle of Anna's bedroom, feeling furious and neglected.

"Jack always falls in love with his models," Anna said quietly, lighting a cigarette. "You know his work. He's used us all up, one by one."

"You too," I said.

"Oh sure," she said, swinging her legs up onto the bed and sitting back against the pillows. "Not since forever. When we were younger it was okay. Then as soon as we became women and the changes kicked in, bam, he's off. He did me when I was eighteen."

"And since then?"

"Now and again. When he gets a grá to paint me. For old times' sake, as he likes to say. He's a fucker." She sounded faintly amused at his foibles, and a little contemptuous of me for not realising them sooner.

"So what do you think about that, Sean," she said levelly. "What do you think about what he's doing to your girlfriend."

"She's not my fucking girlfriend, all right?" I said. "We hang out together and we draw each other."

"How very bohemian," she chuckled.

"And we have sex sometimes. But she's not my fucking girlfriend. She's her own woman."



"She's a girl, not a woman. Just like you're a boy." She took a drag on her cigarette and eyed me.

"Fuck off, okay?"



"But a very beautiful boy, all the same," she said. "And a good artist. Or you could be, some day. I know Jack thinks so."

I was breathing heavily. Anna was watching me steadily.

"It all depends," she said, "on how much you want to go for it."

I looked back at her. I held her gaze as I kicked off my runners, pulled my t-shirt over my head, and ripped down my black jeans with my boxers inside. I stepped out of them and nudged them hard with my foot so that they slid across the bare boards. I stood naked, feeling myself blush, staring at her.

Anna studied me, puffing on her cigarette. Abruptly she stubbed it out in the ashtray next to her bed.

"C'mere to me," she murmured, and turned out the light.

As I moved over to the bed, my eyes adjusting to the sudden darkness, I saw the outline of her against the moonlit window as she took off the shirt she was wearing. I saw her hair tumbling onto her bare shoulders, and when I reached the bed I saw her arms reaching out to me. I leaned in and our naked bodies came into contact.

* * * * *

I woke up alone in Anna's bed. The sun was already up and the bedside clock said it was nearly a quarter to ten. Fuck! I was late.

I pulled on my clothes and ran down to the kitchen. Hilary Kinlay was sitting at the table reading a magazine, and Anna was chopping vegetables for soup at the counter. She turned and gave me the same cool, distant, appraising smile she had always given me.

"You're a bit late," said Hilary. "But he's in a good mood. They've been in for a while now."

"I'll take some water," I mumbled, and I filled a jug from the tap and took three glasses across to the studio.

I let myself in. Kinlay was at the easel. Holly was nude, on the bed, in a new pose, one he hadn't put her in before.

I felt a pain in my heart when I recognised it as the pose she had adopted when she'd first posed for me. Lying on her stomach, her arms folded under her head, her face buried in her arms. It was an abject, passive, receptive pose. Her left leg was straight and her right leg was a little bent. Kinlay was working intently. He barely glanced up when I entered.