Picture This

*

Lati

sha didn’t need to announce her arrival. Still dressed in her Sunday best, hat and white gloves, she lumbered into the panel-beater shop, sat down heavily on an upturned oilcan and waited patiently, fanning herself with a pamphlet entitled Judgement Day Is Nigh, Repent All You Sinners or Die!!! that she’d picked up from a Jehovah’s Witness who’d been handing them out outside the church earlier.

Patiently she watched the men soldering and hammering, sweat beading on their foreheads and upper lips, an easy male camaraderie between them, sweet to observe. She watched the beauty of their young bodies moving with such purpose, and found a lack inside her filling with a sadness she didn’t care to put a name to.

Finally, Henry Firestone, wiping his face with a towel, sauntered over.

‘Miss Latisha?’

‘It’s a sin to be working on a Sunday.’

‘It’s a bigger sin to make your family want for money. But you ain’t here to preach.’

‘You right, Henry. I’m here to beg a favour.’

Now she had Henry Firestone’s full, grave attention, his face tightening in cautious anticipation, knowing as he did that she was not the sort to beg for anything. She leaned forward and the tall angular man, figuring she did not want to be heard even under the hammering and Erin’s boom box, bent down to catch her low whisper.

‘I need a man who understand forgery.’ She pulled him closer, her white gloved fingers gnawing at his wrist, the scent of her ‘Sunday’ perfume tickling the back of his throat. ‘You understand me, Henry Firestone? I’m not meaning your common forgery but the high stuff: paintings and such. I know you have the connections. Twenty years I’ve been living above your shop. And I have eyes. And I have a mouth. But I have always had respect for you and your boys. Now I need that respect back.’

‘You have it, Miss Latisha, you have it,’ he murmured solemnly. ‘Maybe I know a man. A Cuban brother, a big-noise scientist for Castro until he fell out of favour. I have a friend who uses him for his “antiques”. Knows about paint, wood; he the encyclopaedia on all that shit. I’ll get his details for you.’

‘Thank you, Henry. God bless you.’ She pushed down on her stick to get herself back on her feet, her church shoes red-hot tight across her bunions.

‘One last question, Miss Latisha: this anything to do with the redhead who was over here the other day?’ Henry ventured, unable to suppress his curiosity.

Latisha swung around, her curse finger pointing at Henry. ‘You got eyes, you got a mouth too. Now, if you want to sleep at night, best forget you got both. You understand me?’

Terrified, he nodded like a child, and could not drag his eyes away from her as she ambled heavily out of the shop entrance. Swinging back to the cars, he saw his workers staring across in amazement.

‘What? Y’all seen a ghost? Back to work, you lazy motherfuckers!’ he bellowed, drawing himself up to his full height.

*

It was windy on the bridge, but Susie, head bent against the breeze, her red hair streaming behind her, was determined. The passing cars flanking her were a roar that intermingled with her own confused thoughts. Beneath her the East River stretched blue-grey as a tug chugged a frothy path out to sea, comedically purposeful. The artist had given up thinking, surrendering to an instinct, or perhaps the promise of a colour, to draw her to the bridge like a magnet. At least, that’s what she had told herself.

The cab she’d taken from the beer garden drove back past her, heading over to Brooklyn, the anxious driver glancing across at her lone figure wonderingly. If she was a jumper, it was none of his business, he decided, happy just to have pocketed the generous tip. All the same, the eccentrically dressed English woman disturbed him and later he would find himself describing her to his girlfriend. But for now Susie barely noticed the cab or remembered the driver; it was the supports arching up to the central brick pillars, a metal cage that enclosed pedestrians, that fascinated her. Maxine would have had to climb out between the trellises, sit herself on the outer wall, then stare down before jumping. It would have taken some effort, planning; it would have been premeditated.

One, two, three… Susie counted the horizontal supports running like the armature in a butterfly wing, knowing that Maxine would have counted them too; she always sought meaning in numbers. She stopped walking at Maxine’s favourite number, 17; the date of her birthday, the date of their first date, the number of their flat in London, knowing this would have been the place Maxine would have chosen. Susie’s gaze followed the metal strut up to the top of the sandy-brown brick arch. She could almost feel her presence: Maxine’s fear, her excitement, her anticipation.

Ignoring a couple of car horns, she peered down at the top of the grid metal fence, the section running between the 16th and 17th struts. It was then that she found it, scratched with a coin into the enamel paint: a winged serpent with Maxine’s initials scrawled crudely underneath it; her lover’s last signature. Susie put her hand over it and closed her eyes.

*

Back in her apartment, Latisha settled in front of the television with a full pipe. The Bold and the Beautiful was playing with the sound off. The pretty faces soothed her somehow, as if there were a better world out there on another planet running parallel to her own. Then something sat in the empty space on the couch beside her, causing the cat to spit and run.

‘Maxine,’ Latisha said, happy to have company at last. Then she talked to the ghost, thinking out loud. ‘If I am to check this paint sample I’m going to need some of the original, isn’t that right, girl?’ She cocked her head as if she were listening to a note under the air, a whisper or the creaking of a floorboard, or perhaps hearing some meaning to the baby crying in the apartment behind hers. A second later she picked up the phone and dialled her nephew.

‘Theo, I’m remembering you had a friend who worked night security for the Whitney. He still there, baby?’

*

Later that afternoon, still dressed in Felix’s clothes – the T-shirt a blend of his scent and her own – Susie stood at her window staring up at the blue sky. Flat, brilliant, crisp, almost two-dimensional like a Hopper. A plane of air, minus history minus tragedy, somewhere she could imagine disappearing into – evaporating like scent. Maybe this was where the souls of the dead went to, maybe in this translucency Maxine was waiting for her. She breathed against the glass, making a mist, then drew Maxine’s serpent symbol in it.

Who do I believe? she wondered. On one side it felt like Maxine was calling her, trying to show her something about her death, something unresolved. On the other side there was Felix, alive and present in every cell of her body. And yet now she couldn’t trust him. Had Maxine spent those last weeks with him before her suicide? Had it been suicide?

Susie went back to the long worktable and stared into Winnie’s glass tank, sitting at one end amid a plethora of clippings, papers and unopened letters.