Sit Still for Me

The machine had been running for four hours and Manny's whole world had narrowed to a hand's width of skin.

That was the trade. People thought it was art and it was, somewhere, in the drawing stage, on tracing paper at his kitchen table at one in the morning with a cold cup of tea going scummy beside him. In the chair it was not art. In the chair it was holding a hand steady inside a space the size of a postcard for as long as a body could take it, and knowing — this was the part nobody put on a flyer — exactly how long that was, and stopping first.

"Breathe out," he said.

Fran Attridge breathed out.

She did it well. She had learned to do it well, which was its own small fact he had noticed and filed and not examined: the first session she had held her breath through every pass like a woman going under water, and now she let it go on the word, slow, the ribs dropping under his forearm, and the line came out of the drop clean.

He worked with his left forearm braced across her hip. That was not affection and it was not liberty; it was the only way to shoot a rib panel on somebody with no padding, because ribs move whether their owner permits it or not, and if he did not own the movement the movement owned the line. His forearm across the jut of her hipbone. The heel of that same hand set against her ribs below the working area, stretching the skin flat with two fingers while the machine ran in his right, his dark brown knuckles against her, and her skin — pale, and freckled across the shoulder and the top of the arm in a scatter she had long since stopped arranging herself around — going white for a half-second where he pulled it and then pinking back.

Six weeks he had been looking at that. The contrast of his hand on her was simply the working conditions, the same as the lamp angle or the height of the chair. He told himself this at reliable intervals.

"How are we doing," he said. Not a question shaped like a question.

"Fine."

"That's the fourth fine."

"It's a very consistent fine."

He lifted the machine. The buzz cut out, and the shop got large and quiet around them the way it always did in the gap — the tick of the radiator, a bus grinding up Sixpenny Row outside, Roz's radio going low behind the partition at the back. He wiped the panel down with green soap, and the outline came up out of the swelling for a moment, clear and wet under the lamp, and he looked at it the way he had looked at it three times that evening.

It was good work. It was, in fact, the best linework he had done that month, and it was two inches too low.

The piece was a long vertical run on her left ribs, drawn as two panels: a spray of hawthorn, the branch running up out of the lower panel from the floating rib and on through the upper, thorn and blossom together, and a date in small Roman numerals set into the negative space near the top of the run. She had come in with the drawing on her phone and the placement already decided — that low, that vertical, that far forward. He had said, then, we could look at it on you first, and she had said, politely, that she had looked at it on herself for a year, and that had been that.

He knew what it wanted to do. He had known within thirty seconds of putting the stencil on her the first time, which was the trouble with knowing anything: it did not switch off to be agreeable. The branch wanted to travel. It wanted to break out of the flat plane of her ribs and follow the curve up and back, under her arm, into the soft hollow where the lat came down, so that it went round her instead of sitting on her — so that when she lifted her arm the thing moved, and when she put her arm down it disappeared, and it belonged to her body instead of being applied to it. Where she had asked for it, it would sit flat in a place that never moved and never turned, and it would be well drawn and well healed and correct in every measurable particular.

It would be fine. She would look at it for thirty years knowing it was fine.

Not his call. That was the whole of his working philosophy and it had eleven years of shop behind it. The client decides where; the artist decides how. He kept his hands clean. He had watched men in three studios talk women out of things they wanted and into things the man wanted to make, and had decided a long time ago that he would not be one of them, and had never once questioned whether not-being-one-of-them and staying-out-of-it were actually the same thing.

He dipped the needle, tapped off, and went back in.

"Ten more seconds," he said, "and then you can move."

She gave him ten more seconds. She did not shift, did not suck air, did not do the thing clients did where they made an amused noise to prove they were above it. She simply held, one arm folded up over her head and hooked behind her neck, her jaw set, her eyes on the ceiling tile she had chosen at the first session and used ever since; and at ten he lifted off and said, "Go on," and she let the arm come down and her whole side unlock, and blew a breath at the ceiling.

"God," she said. "That one."

"That one's on the bone. There's about a millimetre of you between me and your eighth rib and I'm using all of it."

"Charming."

"You asked what it was."

"I didn't, actually."

"You made the noise."

"I did not make a noise," said Fran, with enormous dignity, lying on his chair in a black sports bra and jeans with a paper towel under her arm.

Behind the partition the radio went off. Roz came out of the piercing room pulling the sleeves of her coat down over her wrists, silver hoops swinging against her brown neck, and stopped by the counter to look at the two of them over the top of the diary.

"Sterile's done," she said. "Bins are out. Toby went at seven, he'd finished the flash sheets, they're on your desk and two of them are actually good."

"Which two."

"The moth and the one that isn't a moth." She flipped the diary shut. "It's half eight, Manny."

"I can see the clock."

"You booked her four to seven."

"I know what I booked."

Roz looked at Fran, and Fran looked back at Roz with the particular flat composure of a woman being discussed, and Roz — who kept the diary, and therefore knew precisely how many times this appointment had been made and unmade, and did not pretend otherwise — said, "Big panel."

"It is," said Fran.

"Painful spot."

"It is that as well."

"Mm," said Roz, and let it sit there, and got her scarf off the hook.

Then, at the door, with the cold coming in around her: "The trains are going."

Manny looked up. "Going how?"

"Going as in going. Board's a mess at London Bridge, the southern stuff's all in yellow. It's been coming down since six and it's not the wet kind." She pulled the door in against the wind and the bell over it clattered. "It's over the kerb out there. Get her a cab if you're keeping her."

"Roz."

"I'm saying." She was already half out. "Night, Manny. Night, love."

"Night," said Fran, to the closing door.

The bell settled. The shop was theirs.

He should have stopped then. That was the honest accounting, made on the spot and no less honest for being ignored: he had had a clean exit at half eight, handed to him by the one person in his life who said true things out loud, and he had not taken it.

What he did instead was get up, cross to the front, turn the sign to CLOSED with two fingers, and kill the front lights.

The window went black. Sixpenny Row came through it properly for the first time all evening — sodium orange on the wet, the kebab shop's red sign three doors down burning in the slush, and the snow going across it all sideways, thick, not settling so much as arriving. The kerb was already gone. A man went past with his hood up and his shoulders round his ears and did not look in.

Behind him the chair creaked.

"You're not stopping," she said. It was not a question either.

"Do you want me to stop?"

"No."

"Then I'm not stopping." He came back into the pool of the lamp. Under it the shop was two square metres of white light and everything else was gone: the flash on the walls, the second chair standing empty with its arm rest folded, the desk at the back with a letter lying face up in the wire tray on it that he was not thinking about tonight. "Sit up a minute. Drink that."

She sat up on her good side, took the Lucozade off the tray, and drank a third of it in one go, which told him more than the fines had. Her hair had come out of its clip on one side. There was a red pressure line across her shoulder from lying on the towel, and the freckles ran down over it and out along the top of her arm, and the panel down her ribs was raised and hot and shining under the wrap of soap.

"How long do you need," he said.

"For what?"

"To finish it tonight."

"That's my question. I was going to ask you that."

"I know. I'm asking you first." He wiped his gloves, pulled them, snapped new ones on. "There's about half the linework open. Say ninety minutes if you hold like you've been holding. Two hours if you need the breaks, and you'll need the breaks, because hour five on ribs isn't hour two on ribs, whatever your face says."

"My face says nothing."

"Your face says a great deal, you've just decided it doesn't." He tipped the lamp a half-inch. "Ninety minutes puts us gone at ten. Two hours puts us gone at half ten, and by then, if she's right about the boards, you're not going anywhere south of the river on rails."

He watched her do the arithmetic. She did it fast — he had noticed that about her the first time she sat down, the speed, the way she priced a thing and then held the price behind her teeth until she had decided whether to say it. She was looking at the black window and the orange going across it.

"Finish it," she said.

"Fran."

"I've moved this four times." She set the bottle down. "Four. You know I have, she knows I have, it's written in that book in her handwriting. I'd like it done."

"Tonight specifically."

Something crossed her face and was gone before he could read it, and he noted the gap where it had been, the way he noted a client's flinch a beat before the needle got there.

"Tonight would suit me," she said.

He could have asked. He had, in his hands, four hours of information about this woman: how she breathed, where she braced, that she went still rather than tense, that she had held perfectly motionless under his hands without once asking him for anything except exactly what she had already ordered. He knew where the line wanted to go, and he knew she had asked for it two inches lower, and he knew that if he said so now she would have to decide something at half eight on a Wednesday with half a panel open on her ribs.

Staying out of it was how he kept his hands clean.

"Lie down," he said. "Arm up. Same as before."

She lay down. She put her arm up and hooked it behind her neck, and turned her face to the ceiling tile, and he set his forearm across her hip and the heel of his hand under her ribs and stretched the skin, dark against pale, and outside the snow came down over Sixpenny Row and buried the road.

"Breathe out," he said, and started the machine.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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