We shared out the steaming red sheets of pasta and made awkward small talk. She watched me drink my wine, as though I’d never taken as much as a sip before. The night Jack met my parents, my mother cooked a large lasagne and opened a bottle of wine for us to share with our guest. I like walking down Carnaby Street without fear of seeing their faces moving through crowds under the tall office blocks at Embankment floating through Camden, and being nobody worth laying a hand on.
I moved to the city after college, and no longer see anyone from home. I felt like a kid making crafts with raw pasta and glitter-glue. I made him handmade cards with miniature oil paintings on the front. In the beginning, he bought me things: gifts, surprises, little bits of jewellery and meals out at cheap bistros, a bar and grill, the local pub. I spent any money I made selling my paintings at school fairs on more oil paints, vodka, or wine, so we could sit in parks and drink together. He had great big hands and money from working at the bar. Kisses and lipstick and the need to always be ready and damp. Jack held me and I gripped him as though I was going to die. Nia was an old school friend, and she started going out with Jack’s best friend Nathan, so we spent more and more time together during sixth form, dropping old friends and feasting on the secrets of the sex we were having, indulging in our new teenage coupledom. These figures had dark pubic triangles, folds, and hard parts. Sometimes they came in pairs and sometimes they were alone, staring at something in the background they floated on. My classmates painted landscapes and portraits and still life compositions, whilst I painted chest hair and nipples and fingers gripping other fingers. I drew the soft fat rolls of bellies and hard buttocks, long calves and toes. In my A-Level art classes I started painting nudes. Struggling to regain control, cool air rushed in to dry the sweat from my eyelids.
#Cobalt blue color roses wet tattoo windows
I grabbed onto the door handle in the dark, felt a button give, and unintentionally rolled the windows down. We had sex for the first time in that dusty car, parked in the middle of a field in the British countryside, surrounded by wildflowers at night. I was finishing school, but he’d dropped out and was working at a bar in town, had two tattoos and a cobalt blue car. I never expected to be reunited in a police station. We’re both visiting home it’s the first time Nia and I have met since before I’d gone to college, and she’d been at uni. She has a baby blue anklet on, and I have paint under my fingernails. They’re pastel-coloured trainers, with blocks of pink and pale yellow. Nia’s shoes have a tick on them, and I stare at the arc and the sharp point. My school uniform was always covered in paint. Art teachers love that shit, so she gave me the top grade in my class, and I took art for my GCSEs, and then for A-Level. I told my teacher it depicted memory the way our past is warped and dimmed by time. The final panel was the daisies, but now you could barely tell they were flowers, instead a white mess in the black. The second panel was the daisies again, in the same composition, but darker, blurred. The first depicted daisies in the grass, seen from above. When I was in year nine, my teacher showed my artwork to the class as an example.
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