of the boots on the canvas. My hand and my arm ached but I kept on pounding frantically, finding the ugly creases and the lacklustre holes where laces didn’t even want to go through, until eventually I had to stop and sit on the floor.
When Ki left she took a huge part of myself with her, the part that made me believe I could be anyone or do anything, Jean Michel took away a bit more and what was on the canvas was the part that had stayed with me.
As I hoisted myself up to go and knock the boots off the table, a shaft of light reflected back from them, wanting to tell me something else.
I stared at the boots in this light. They had walked for miles and miles and had been bought at a time when people saved up to buy things for special occasions. Maybe a man had saved up for weeks to buy them for his wedding and had proudly walked down the aisle. He’d also kicked a football in them with his son. When they had been chucked out years later, he searched all over the house and every subsequent pair he bought was in a vain attempt to replicate those cherished boots.
Perhaps a woman in a charity shop had picked them out just before they were put on display for the customers. She felt that they would fit her husband and had bought new laces that matched. Polishing and wrapping them up in newspaper, she had handed the boots to her husband, swearing it was a stroke of luck that she had found them as it wasn’t her turn to empty the bags that day. Shortly after that he was promoted. He would have wanted to be buried in his boots when he died but his son hadn’t known that and they were discarded along with the rest of his belongings.
Finally, a tramp had come across the boots quite recently after rummaging through some bin liners. He had also come across a decent suit. In a drunken state, he had taken them off and forgotten where they were. It became his mission to find them and every day he would search a different street.
Putting the canvas I had been working on to the side, along with the dirty black brush, I cleaned my hands, took a new brush and another canvas. Without mixing the colours I thinned paint with water and washed the canvas in a sea of cerulean blue. While I waited for the paint to dry, I put on the tape Gina had left me. It was Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Opera wasn’t really my thing but I listened to it anyway. Carried away by the waves of emotion, I sat staring at the blue and then I suddenly saw something.
Dampening a rag with water, I looked at the spot two-thirds of the way down and wiped the space. I picked up an ochre yellow from the floor and oozed a buttery mass onto the empty space. The bristles on the paintbrush swirled the pigment into two rotund shapes that resembled the shape of the boots. I didn’t feel as if I were the one who was painting as the strokes were rhythmic and disconnected me from all my thoughts.
Pockets of green came through where the blue paint hadn’t come off, and these were effortlessly worked into the painting. Confident red-iron laces were added and where the yellow met the red a hopeful orange shone, the same orange as the soles; the same orange as the sky I had envisaged while sitting at my office window.
The bright colours made the painting look vibrant and full of life. For the first time in a very long time, it made me feel optimistic. Is this what Matisse meant by seeing flowers when there were clearly none? If painting could create an illusion, if it could make you feel things or see things that weren’t there, then this was what I wanted. At that moment I was certain of only one thing; that this was what I wanted to do with my paintings. I wanted to see magic and paint it even if it couldn’t tangibly be seen. I wanted to put bold colours together, see colours that hadn’t been painted and bring inanimate objects back to life.
I took white paint, squirted some onto the palette, thinned it with water and in the left-hand corner I painted the words ‘For Ki’. Looking at the space in between the words and sensing that there was a great distance between them, a distance that shouldn’t have been there, I inserted the letter ‘u’ so it read, ‘Foruki’.
I cleaned the boots with a damp rag so that most of the grime disappeared. There was string in the cupboard along with brown paper, both of which I placed on the table. I cut two long pieces of string and put each of the strings through the lace holes, and when I had finished I packed them both in brown paper.
I washed my hands with soap and water but couldn’t get my nails clean and kept scrubbing my fingers until they felt raw. After my brushes were cleaned and the paints neatly organised on the table again, I got changed into my suit, sprayed myself with perfume, glanced at the canvas one last time and smiled. I picked up the boots, switched off the lights and locked up the studio.
The boots were left where I had found them and then I switched my phone back on. There were two messages from my mum and one from Raj asking how I was and to give him a call back whenever I could.
On the journey back home I prepared to condense my world back into Croydon, to squeeze it back into the semi. No sooner had I walked through the door than my mum cornered me.
I panicked, thinking that she could smell the paint or would spot the state of my fingernails, and so I tried to get away from her.
‘Where have you been, beta, you’re very late? Have lots of things to tell you,’ she beamed.
‘Let me have a shower first, Ma, I’ve had a really busy day,’ I said quickly.
She followed me upstairs and talked nonstop through the bathroom door but I didn’t want to hear a word of it.
‘So it’s OK, then? Two weeks’ time, so December twenty-sixth and second of April?’ she asked, shouting through the door.
‘What’s OK?’
‘The engagement and the wedding.’
I opened the bathroom door in disbelief. The second of April was less than four months away – what was she thinking. I hardly knew this man. ‘What?’
‘I spoke to the priest today and he said that was a good date and then I called up Raj’s mother and she too agreed. We’re all so happy.’
‘It’s too soon,’ I shouted.
‘Soon, soon,’ I heard my dad shout from downstairs. ‘We have waited twenty-seven years.’
‘But I’ve phoned people and made arrangements now, beta.’
‘Unmake them.’
She took out her sari-end from her midriff and before she even began sobbing, I left her there.
How could she just do that? Engagement, priest, wedding, all within four months.
There was nobody I could talk to about it except Raj so I returned his call.
‘Am I glad you called, Nina. I’ve just heard about the engagement and the wedding date, and I didn’t want you to think that it was me pushing you. Far from it, we don’t even really know each other.’
‘That’s exactly what I was thinking.’ This man was growing on me more and more.
‘Anyway, when you get to find out some of my really bad habits you might want to delay it indefinitely.’
‘And they are?’
‘Well you’ll just have to find out, won’t you?’ he flirted.
I giggled pathetically. This was what happened when you spent hours in a room full of paint and had no one to converse with.
We talked about his day at work, his colleagues, his friends, he asked me lots of questions but I diverted the conversation so we spoke mainly about him. I didn’t want to lie so I tried to find a way of broaching the painting-by-day subject.
‘Do you believe in magic?’
‘Black magic?’ he replied.
‘No, things like coincidences. Coincidences, and also when you take a leap of faith that other things happen almost as if you have no control over them, as if someone is helping out.’ I was thinking about my transition into the art world but he took it to mean us.
‘I never thought about it but I suppose in a way I do. I took a leap