The Pattern

Kirsty stared at the tattoo on the naked old woman's thigh. It was
faded and distorted, clearly intended for a younger leg, but it was
beautiful. She wondered how the old woman had got it and why, what it
meant to her.

The woman sat in a strangely proud position, almost side on to Kirsty.
She was leaning forward with her bent back as straight as it would go,
her head held high. Her hands were on her knees with her arms straight
and her legs surprisingly far apart. Although the woman sat perfectly
still in that unnatural position, her eyes were twitching from side to
side, staring at everyone who was now scribbling away, examining them
as much as they were examining her. Her eyes stopped on Kirsty, now the
only one who didn't seem to be doing any work. They were startlingly
green. The old woman looked away and Kirsty felt relieved. She was sure
that her heart had begun to beat almost audibly.

Kirsty began to sketch an outline, but she kept getting it wrong. This
is stupid, she thought, I'm not meant to be a painter. And she
considered giving up. It would be her third failed evening class that
year, but that just seemed to be the way things were going at the
moment and Kirsty had got used to it. This was the pattern of her life,
how it would always be. She looked up at the old woman and saw that she
was looking at her again. Kirsty began to sketch. It was still wrong,
but she persevered this time. She got a vague outline and stuck with
it. The old woman's back was straighter than reality. Her body was
tighter, if anything she was drawing the old woman as younger than she
really was. It was an unintentional mistake, caused completely by
incompetence, but somehow it seemed appropriate. Kirsty continued and
the old woman kept looking at her, her eyes twisted to the side,
somehow the extreme position of her eyes making the stare more intense.
Kirsty stopped, picked up a green crayon and coloured in the old
woman's eyes.

There had been times, more intense days when she was younger and
certainly less nice, when Kirsty would have taken offence to the
staring. She might have said something like: `What you looking at?',
and left in disgust. But challenging a woman for looking at you when
you had been staring at her naked for the past quarter of an hour
seemed a little unfair. And in many ways now she felt honoured. She
felt terrible that she had once been such a brat, but her early teens
had been a confusing time. She had been influenced by people who she
could now see as morons, but for a while seemed the coolest people on
earth. The only people on earth. The fact that Kirsty's personality
seemed to inherently jump from thing to thing, the fact that she would
bore so easily, had actually saved her in this case. Had she not wanted
to move on then, she would have been stuck with them for life. And she
couldn't think of a much worse life than that.

She decided to try and draw the old woman's tattoo, but she got it
wrong immediately. The pattern was right, but she made a massive error
in the size, and it ended up looking like she was drawing the old woman
a pair of patterned stockings to hide her dignity. Then, for some
reason she still didn't give up. She let the tattoo rage out of
control, continuing its scroll past the boundaries of the old woman's
body and onto the white nothingness of Kirsty's pad. Then she began to
bend and twisted the tattoo around the page, not caring about getting
it perfect any more, concentrating only on the crisscross swirling
pattern that she was half copying half creating. She went on drawing,
continuing around the edges of the page again and again, slowly winding
her way around to the centre, realising that the pattern was becoming
simpler and simpler, easier and easier to draw.

"Given up Kirsty?" came a voice from behind and Kirsty felt as though
she'd been woken up by her alarm clock.

She looked around at her teacher, Mr Bowden. He was a chubby man who
wore tweed jackets and rolled up his shirt sleeves with elastic bands.
"Uh... No." said Kirsty. "No. I was just trying something."

She looked back at what she'd drawn and saw it for the first time.
There was something childlike about it, hard lines, with a sense of the
surreal that Kirsty thought she'd lost at about five. But it was almost
good. Good in the kind of way that things are only good if you don't
know what the artist was trying to do in the first place.

"It's very interesting. Exuberant!" Mr Bowden exclaimed, stating the
last word as though it were the only possible word appropriate.

"Thankyou." said Kirsty, well aware that she was receiving a back
handed compliment, now determined to finish the drawing because she was
too stubborn not to.

The old woman left ten minutes before they did, and she heard Mr
Bowden say, "Thankyou Ruby, you've been a great help". The old woman
nodded and walked out the door.

Kirsty walked home with her drawing pad under her arm, feeling quite
pleased with it. She was tired, and she couldn't get Ruby out of her
mind. She had never seen anyone quite like her before. She opened the
door to her flat and walked along the corridor and into the living
room. Paul didn't seem to be about. The room was a mess: at least five
cereal bowls were scattered around the room, accompanied by numerous
amounts of dirty tea mugs. A rain soaked jacket of Paul's lay on the
floor in the centre of the room, as though it were there to be admired:
a Paul skin rug. Kirsty let out a brief sigh. The mess exasperated her,
but she was too tired and in too good a mood to do anything about
it.

She walked into the bedroom where Paul's work clothes lay scattered
over the bed. There was a smell of after-shave in the room. Kirsty had
once loved that smell, it had been a lot to do with her initial
attraction to Paul, but now she was tired of it. It had wafted past her
on a number of occasions when she had walked through town and she had
turned around expecting to see Paul and had instead seen a greasy
mid-teenager who wore far too much gel.

She rested her pad against a wall and began to pick his things up,
folding them neatly and putting them away in his half of the cupboard.
She knew that she shouldn't do it for him because it made him even
lazier than he already was, but she couldn't not do it either. The one
constant in Kirsty's life up to that point had been her tidiness, she
found it incredibly therapeutic. At the moment she was trying
desperately hard not to tidy the living room, but that was proving
harder as the days went on and Paul didn't even have seemed to notice
the towers of bowls that were appearing in the room. She'd try to give
him another week, but somehow she doubted she would make it that long.
She noticed a pair of Paul's pants strewn over the bedside lamp. She
went to pick them off, but stopped herself. She had to draw the line
somewhere.

Once the rest of the bedroom was tidy, she picked up her pad and
settled on the bed to admire her picture once again. It looked strange
now, and she felt almost embarrassed at what she had done. She felt as
though she were just coming out of a spell that the old woman had put
her under. What on earth had possessed her? It was meant to be a life
drawing class and she had done this: swirls on a page with a woman
behind who only vaguely resembled the person she was meant to be. The
tattoo grew out from Ruby's body as though it was an out of control
weed.

"Strange." Kirsty said out loud. "Really strange."

She decided to try and forget about it, she felt embarrassed, not just
at what she had drawn, but also at the staring match that her and the
old woman had somehow got into. Kirsty was definitely attracted to her,
and that in itself was odd. She felt as though a magnet was pulling her
towards Ruby in a way that had only happened with a few handsome men
before. But with men the attraction could be explained easily as
sexual; when the magnet had pulled then she hadn't felt confused
because she knew what she was meant to do when she got to them. With
Ruby she knew she wanted to see her again, but she wasn't sure why. It
wasn't a sexual attraction at all, but Kirsty felt mortified because
that was all she could compare it to.

She put the picture face up on the floor beside the bed and switched
on the television. There was nothing she wanted to watch, but she kept
it on anyway, flicking between the channels, sometimes hitting teletext
to see if the news had changed. Now and again her eyes drifted back to
the picture, to Ruby's green eyes staring out at her again. Why
couldn't she stop looking? She picked the pair of pants from the
lampshade and dropped them over Ruby's face.

She was woken briefly by a hand on her breast and a kiss that smelt of
beer. She grunted, and turned over on to her side. What seemed like a
few moments later she realised she should check that it was Paul who
had kissed her. When she opened her eyes the light was off and she saw
Paul in bed beside her. She realised he was snoring now, which he
always did if he came back drunk. She glanced at the fluorescent arms
of the alarm clock and saw that it was three in the morning. She was
still lying on top of the duvet in her clothes, except Paul had taken
off her socks. She pushed her self up into a sitting position on the
side of the bed and vegetated there, wallowing in her grogginess,
knowing she couldn't go back to sleep until her bladder was empty and
her throat didn't itch from dryness.

She eventually forced herself up: undressing, going to the toilet and
drinking a glass of water without opening her eyelids past the halfway
point. She felt her foot on the painting as she got into bed and tried
to ignore it, but her mind was immediately taken with it. She shut her
eyes and tried to put it out of her thoughts, but it was too late. The
tattoo sprouting from Ruby's thigh was stuck behind her eyes now. It
filled her head and all she could think about was the way the pattern
spread back to Ruby. The plant was rooted inside her.

Kirsty was aware of being somewhere between awake and asleep; she
could feel her head on the pillow and she could still hear Paul's
snoring, but she also knew that her thoughts were more vivid than
normal, they were almost dreams but not quite. She imagined the tattoo
plant spreading back until it attached to the trunk of an elephant that
was sitting beside her bed, about the size of a dog. It was very cute,
inspired by Disney cartoons and picture books. It had a pair of Paul's
pants on its head.

Kirsty forced herself awake now and sat up quickly. She was overheated
and could feel that her hair was wet with sweat. She got out of bed,
picked up her painting and walked into the living room. Without much
thought she picked up a biro from beside the telephone in the hall. She
sat down on the sofa and put the painting beside her. Then she began to
draw the outline of the tattoo on her thigh. Kirsty was fit and her
legs didn't have any of Ruby's wobble. The pen glided easily and within
a minute she had finished drawing the outline of the tattoo as she
imagined it must have looked on Ruby when she was young.

She stared at it for a minute and then felt embarrassed again,
suddenly feeling ridiculous at what she was doing and aware that the
more she analysed it, told herself she was being stupid, the more it
was playing on her mind. She licked her fingers and rubbed the ink off.
She took a few deep breaths and stood up, walking back to the bedroom.
The light was on and Paul was awake. He was sitting up and reading a
science fiction novel.

He was a pleasant looking boy, too skinny to be called a man yet. At
the moment he had hair that stuck up wildly and for the last two weeks
she had been bugging him to get a hair cut.

"Hello boobs." he said, smiling cheekily, trying to be ironically
laddish charming, which he sometimes was, but in the strange mental
state that Kirsty was in only coming across as irritating, making her
feel uncomfortable that she was walking around in only her knickers.
"Can't sleep?"

Kirsty shook her head. "Don't know what's wrong with me."

"I wasn't snoring was I? I got pretty pissed."

"I know. You tried to cop off with me when I was asleep."

Paul smirked. "Sorry about that. What can I say? I was drunk! You know
I wouldn't normally... Well, I might, but I'd probably be more
subtle."

Kirsty knew she was being hard on him, but for some reason she
couldn't really stop herself. "You seem to be drunk most nights these
days."

Paul was silent for a moment, knowing he was about to say something
that would irritate Kirsty, but annoyed at her aside and unable to stop
himself. "Oh." he said. "You're grumpy."

Kirsty let out a sigh. "No I'm not."

"Well don't snap at me then." Paul was trying to sound calm,
failing.

"I wasn't snapping!" Kirsty shouted

"You're snapping now." Paul was getting self-righteous, believing he
was in the right because he hadn't raised his voice.

"Well, of course I'm snapping now. You always accuse me of snapping
when I'm not. I don't have to take it."

Paul looked at her and then picked up his book. He pretended to read,
but he was really just staring. He waited for Kirsty to return to bed,
which she did eventually, after going around and furiously tidying the
tiniest little things around the room. It irritated Paul because he
knew she was trying to make him feel guilty, which perhaps he should,
but there was no need to go around picking up underwear at four in the
morning. When Kirsty did get into bed she refused to get under the
covers with him and lay on top of the duvet, staring at the
ceiling.

Paul sighed and rolled over on to his side, resting his hand on his
head to support himself. He waited to check Kirsty wasn't going to say
anything although he knew that she wouldn't. "I'm sorry." he said,
knowing he wasn't sure what for, but aware that he had a lot of reasons
for Kirsty to be irritated with him.

"That's alright." said Kirsty, still not looking at him.

The room was stuffy and Paul felt hot under the duvet. He heaved
himself out of it and lay on top, still lying on his side. He put his
hand on Kirsty's stomach and spread his palm flat against it. Kirsty's
eyes were still wide open and he could see that she was far from
relaxed. He pulled himself closer to her, extending his arm and sliding
it underneath her neck, then rolling on to his back. Kirsty
instinctively rolled over to put her heads on his chest. They were in
their position now and Paul knew things were okay between them. Kirsty
raised a leg and placed it over him. He kissed the top of her
head.

"Your hair smells nice." he said, but Kirsty didn't reply. He wondered
if she were asleep. He place his hand gently on the leg that was
resting on his. He stroked it gently and was surprised when he heard
Kirsty gently weeping.

"Shhh." he said quietly, trying to be soothing. "It's okay." He wasn't
sure how he had managed to upset Kirsty so much, but he knew better
than to ask at the moment. "I'm sorry." he said again. Kirsty held him
tightly across his stomach.

"It's not you." Kirsty said, lifting her head and kissing him. Her
eyes were bleary. "Its... Its lots of stuff. Hormones probably. I'm
just tired."

"Okay." said Paul. He held Kirsty for a minute or so more and then she
rolled over on to her front.

"Goodnight" she said.

"Goodnight." said Paul. He saw the raised red pattern on her thigh and
was intrigued. He had often considered that Kirsty might be enchanted,
and her was more proof: she was a woman whose body summoned blood
patterns on her skin when her mood was strong. He watched the pattern
as it faded slowly, until he wasn't sure if he had just imagined it.
Kirsty was breathing deeply now, clearly asleep. He rolled over and
turned off the bedside lamp.