Page 49 of Days You Were Mine

‘So we can leave each other notes,’ she said. ‘And I can buy stuff you need.’

Such a simple thing. So obvious, I wonder now how we livedwithout it. Alice bestows these gifts upon us with such ease and grace, it’s easy to accept.

I was right, they have turned into Woolworths, which is perfect. I always think it’s the kind of place I might easily pop into to pick up some pens or a notepad on the pretence of having left mine at the office.

As always, Alice wheels the pram towards the back of the shop. She is looking not at kitchen equipment or stationery but the selection of toys on the left-hand side of the store. From a distance I watch her pick up a glove puppet, an orange, yellow and brown chicken made of felt. She puts her hand inside it, snaps the beak at Samuel and gives a pretty perfect rendition of a cockerel. Cock-a-doodle-doo. The whole of Woolworths must catch Samuel’s hysteria, a joyful, infectious sound. I creep a little closer, addicted to the tableau between woman and child. I’m lurking three rows away, amidst a job lot of Caterpillar boots, taking a pair from its box, sliding my hand inside one and holding it out for closer examination.

The puppet routine continues. Alice has moved on to a furry alligator, emerald green with a lemon-yellow stomach and a crimson mouth. She snaps its jaw, hovering right in front of Samuel’s face until she swoops down and pecks his nose. More wild laughter and Alice is laughing too. There is no end to the fun these two can have together. I’m about to leave my post when a blonde girl with a toddler walks up to them.

‘Hi there,’ she says. ‘I’ve seen you at circle time in the library. How old is your baby? He’s gorgeous.’

‘Six months, almost seven,’ Alice says. ‘How about yours, he looks around a year older?’

‘Yes, he’s eighteen months. I’m Kirsty, by the way.’

‘Lovely to meet you. I’m Alice. And this—’

‘Would you like to try them on?’

The girl in front of me, green Woolies shirt of nylon, has a quizzical look on her face. Perhaps she’s been watching me. Perhaps she’s wondering why a young guy like myself is peeking over the shelf of boots to observe a middle-aged woman and a baby.

But my mind is heavy with new intelligence and it’s an effort to speak. Alice didn’t explain that Samuel wasn’t her baby, a child she looks after three days a week. She acted as if he was hers.

‘No, I don’t, thanks.’ I’m barging past the shop assistant, incapable of civility.

Outside on the pavement, I run down the street, realising after a minute or two that I am running away from the Tube, not towards it, so preoccupied am I with this latest development. Is Alice pretending Samuel is her baby? Or am I, increasingly paranoid freak that I am, jumping to conclusions? If I told Hannah, apart from thinking I was a lunatic for spying on my mother in my lunch hour –not spying, H, checking up– she’d tell me not to be so ridiculous. I can even hear the words she would choose.

‘Alice looks far younger than she is; she probably gets mistaken for Samuel’s mum the whole time. Sometimes it’s too boring to explain, that’s all.’

And she is probably right. But that doesn’t stem the cold spread of concern I feel in my lungs, my stomach, my heart. I’m your baby, Alice. Me. Not Samuel.

I’m walking down the steps into Clapham Common station when the truth strikes me: I am jealous of my own son.

Then

Alice

In the autumn, we are both working so hard we barely see each other. Jake is out most nights mixing the album; I might stay at college until ten or eleven, painting in a kind of fever. All those ideas and sketches from Italy now morphing into their colour-heightened reality, snapshot meets Renaissance, a style I am working and working on until I can perfect it.

If I was expecting favoured treatment at college – the girl with the make-or-break art show – the reality turns out to be different. The tutors are working me like a dog, even Rita Miller.

I now have sixteen drawings and five oils that I consider ready to show.

But Rita says, ‘Good. But good is not enough. You are capable of better.’

Gordon walks around the studio considering each work in silence.

‘Not there yet,’ he says, although he loves the mock pietà, Jake asleep on my lap.

‘This is sheer brilliance, Alice, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because I can see the layers in this painting. There’s an intensity here, and the feeling that you’re almost mothering this boy in your arms. It’s painted with sorrow, or at least that’s how I see it. I want to feel like this about every single painting. I want tolook at them, stare at them until the hidden meaning becomes apparent.’

I am learning to immerse myself in feeling before I begin to paint. Each day I take one of the drawings – today it’s Jake bare-chested, in flared jeans, lying back against the lacy, absurdly feminine pillows of our Italian bed, the wrought-iron bedstead framing his face – and think about what he meant to me in that moment. The drawings took a long time, sometimes a full hour, and you can see that he has forgotten I am here; he is lost in thought. Now, with intense scrutiny, I see I have caught his unguarded melancholy, an innate sadness he tries his best to hide. And I am on a journey of imagining. With his indisputable good looks, Jake has been portrayed as a sex object in the media. I see something different. I see a man on the brink of success if only his inner torment will allow it.

All of this goes into my painting. I’ve captured Jacob’s beauty, but also his darkness, the side of himself he refuses to show.

When Gordon King next comes into the studio, he stares at the painting in silence.

Finally he says, ‘Bravo, Alice. This is what will distinguish you. Viscerality. Emotion so potent you feel you can touch it.’

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