The Persistence of Memory

Chapter Eight

She nods, biting on her pen as she stares at me intensely. I look away from her and back at the door. Maybe it wasn't Eloise.

"Sorry, and just lastly, how did this all start for you? When did you first realise you had this.... wealth of talent? Didn't you say once," she flicks through her notepad again, finds what she's looking for and looks back at me. "That you wandered into an art class one summer when you were eighteen and the rest was history. What happened in that class?" She smiles.

How the fuck do I answer that? I remember saying it. I said it at the Brixton show to a guy from The Telegraph. I said it because it was the truth. That class was a turning point in my life. One of several. Until that moment, leaving Belfast and moving to London to live with Auntie Roisin had been the biggest turning point in my life. Then later it was when I met Patrick and he harassed me into showing my work to people. And way before that, on a gloriously sunny day in July when my mother bled to death in front of my eyes on a cracked concrete pavement, was the beginning of it all.

But that class changed my life. That class gave me something I'd never had before. A vision of perfection.

I'd never seen anything so perfect, so completely untouched by the horrors of the world I knew. I wanted to strive to be worthy of that sort of perfection. As the years had gone on I'd never forgotten it. Or her. It hadn't faded over time or been washed away by bitterness, anger and self-loathing as many of my other memories had. She had become, as Pat had called her, 'a wet dream'. A fantasy.

But she was always much more than that.

Then, as if on cue, she comes walking through the door of the loft. She's wearing a white dress made of what looks like lace. It has three-quarter length sleeves and a round neck, which stops demurely just at the base of her throat. Her hair is pleated across her head like some kind of Viking bride, some loose strands falling about her face. She looks clean and pure — virginal almost. My chest tightens at the sight and the rush of need and want is almost suffocating.

The twisted part of me knows why I told her to wear white. Why in most fantasies where I'd subject her to every sordid desire imaginable, she was wearing pure virginal white. Eloise Airens was something untouched and almost holy to me. As I continue to stare at her my whole body begins to thrum with a weird sort of vibration. Anticipation. A rush of adrenaline straight to the heart.

She looks surprised at being greeted by Pat and not me, and I watch as he holds out his hand and introduces himself, looking a bit dazed as his eyes roam over her face and down over her body. She smiles in that perfectly innocent, yet utterly debilitating way she does, and reaches out to shake his hand.

He's staring at her too hard like he can't quite believe she's real and in front of him. I can't blame him. I'd talked about her to him enough over the years for her presence now not to seem surreal. I'm certain until this moment he probably thought that she was a figment of my imagination. A product of too much booze and too many late nights.

I want to tell him to close his fucking mouth and stop staring at her like that before she starts thinking he's some sort of weirdo pervert. They exchange a few words I can't hear from here before she turns her head and catches my eye and smiles warmly. I smile back, holding her eyes for as long as is socially acceptable given that we aren't alone. Suddenly I know how to answer the question the journalist just asked me.

"That class was life-changing," I say. "I knew my life. Knew it inside out. Knew who I was, what it had made me. I knew all of the ways in which it could turn out and all of the people I could become. Then, one day I saw something different. I saw a goal. The sheer peace I got from focusing that hard on something, on striving for that kind of perfection. I didn't know that sort of determination and desire to achieve something existed. I'd never felt anything like it." I nod. She probably thinks I'm talking about being an artist. That the goal I was striving for was to perfect my talent. But she's wrong. The goal I was striving for was staring at me from across the room dressed in a virginal white lace dress.