Offcomer (29 page)

There was a large rectangular mirror on the landing wall, she knew, just one flight down. And Gareth had told her to help herself to anything, to make herself at home. She heaved herself up from the floor, headed for the door. Passing the wastepaper basket, she paused to pick up the folded paper, and dropped it in.

The mirror was heavy, thickly framed in wood. She took its weight carefully in her arms, lifted it from the wall. As she turned to carry it back up to her room, she found herself imagining that her father was there, climbing the stairs beside her. He would have put a hand to the burden; he would have steadied her.

“I’d do that for you,” she could almost hear him say.

“That’s okay,” she thought. “I’ll manage.”

“You be careful. Don’t hurt yourself.”

“I won’t.”

She set the mirror down on the floor, angled it against the end of the mattress, then squatted back down on her cushion. She felt as though he was settling down near her, perching on the windowsill, looking at their twin reflections. She picked up her new-bought sketchpad, her old ink pen. She unscrewed the cap. She could almost feel the brush of his faded cords against her shoulder, his breathing in the concentrating silence.

“I haven’t done this in ages.”

He would have smiled at her.

“I know.”

She smoothed out the paper with a hand.

“D’you remember?”

“Of course. I always hoped you’d get started again. You get it from your mother, you know.”

“No …”

“You got the pen from her, didn’t you?”

She lifted the pen to look at it, then squinted at the nib. She picked off a strand of fluff, staining her thumbnail black with ink.

“Yeah, but …”

“All that stuff. You get it all from her.” His fingers moving, a ripple in the air.

“Like what?”

“Finding the right lines, putting the patterns together. Linking things. It’s like her mapmaking, back at college. It is a cartography pen, after all.”

Claire saw seamonsters and spouting whales blossom in the margins of her blank page,
here be dragons
calligraph itself neatly across the bottom. She paused, smiling, looking down, pen against her lips.

“And one more thing: once you’ve finished, send it to your mother. Show her what you’re up to.”

“I don’t know …” Claire said.

“It matters to her. She needs to know that you’re okay.”

“I am okay.”

“And Jen. Give Jen a call.”

“Yes.”

She looked up at her reflection. The sketchpad protruded above her knees. The mirror caught its edge, the narrow black pen in her right hand, the upturned palm and curling fingers of her left. It caught the soft pink bunch of her toes, spreading slightly on the carpet, the smooth slope of her shins and the curve of her knees. It showed the rounds of her shoulders,
the dips and hollows of her collarbone and the way the light seemed to curl around her throat. There wasn’t a black line limiting her, marking out the space she took up in the world, telling her where she stopped and everything else began. There couldn’t be. Her body curved away beyond its horizon.

Her hand descended, rested on the paper. She began again to draw.