Fiona Scoble was born in Kent and now lives in Galway, working as an artist and illustrator. She is a member of Java Writers group, which recently published a collection of short stories entitled Infusions. In 2012 she was an Over the Edge Featured Reader and was shortlisted for the Cúirt Festival / Over The Edge showcase reading.
Legacy
She dragged a flush of Naples Yellow across the paper and brought dawn to her freshly taped-down canvas. She’d laid down so many skies that her paintbrush moved around the colours instinctively. Light to dark, background to foreground. Whisking the brush around in her jar of water, she touched the pallet and pulled out a thin line of Cerulean Blue. She smoothed it over the higher areas of the sky and dabbed out a pattern of summer clouds with a scrunch of tissue.
She sat concentrating for a long time. Outside, the real sky gathered strength and ousted its rose petal dawn for a thick blue sheet. She began work on her field, building up blues and yellows and using some luscious Burnt Umber to pick out a path. In the semi-meditative state of bringing out the scene her mind floated along its own trails at whim. She half-felt the sensation of walking through a field as she painted, sensed how in reality she might satisfy her fingers by grabbing a tuft of grasses, or sniff deeper when passing a bank of wild flowers. ‘Strange how you can never be sure what a place smells like until you’re actually in it’, she mused. She doubted that anyone buying her paintings thought of the less delightful country smells when they looked at her idyllic scenes. Then, as ever with the merest nod of reminder, her nerves flicked to their instinctive subject and she thought: ‘Dad’.
Who could have known that the day they chose to hold his funeral would be the day every local farmer chose to spread muck over his fields. That acrid country smell had got in everywhere. Poor mum had been devastated, but she thought dad would have seen the funny side. It had been a really hot day too so it felt like they were wading through a wall of it. But it had been gorgeously sunny; if anyone had oddly decided to record the event with a photo it would have looked pretty.
It would be five weeks to the day tomorrow. Five weeks since a heart attack had suddenly carried him off; she could hardly believe it. Perhaps she still didn’t quite believe it, actually. Maybe he hadn’t been in the best of health, but he was still in his fifties; just. Well he always would be now. The night before his sixtieth birthday: all the gifts wrapped, the various children packed for their different journeys back to mum and dad’s house. 9pm clicked over as she sipped her tea – and then that phone call.
It had just been her mum with him when it happened. It had all been over so quickly that nothing could be done; it was one of those think he’s asleep and go to wake him, realisation deaths. She could picture it: her mum coming up behind dad with a cup of tea as he lay back in his preferred maroon chair, the dim light from the reading lamp glowing off his pronounced bald spot, she reaches out as she has done a hundred thousand times to rouse him, nudges his shoulder, and then that terrible frozen moment.
If only she’d been allowed to keep hold of her imagined version of that scene – and before it, the perpetual glow of snapshot expressions of him that had been engraved on her memory. But at the funeral home they’d convinced her to see him before the ceremony. She hadn’t wanted to but even her mum and sister urged her that she might regret it if she didn’t take this one last chance to see him. So she’d followed the lady through the doors and looked down to where her father had been laid out.
It wasn’t him. She reasoned they must have done their best to perk him up for show because all his features had been defined with a layer of makeup. In life he’d had a permanent tan from his time spent fighting out in Egypt; in death an oily bloom of pearly orange stain lay over a livid grey complexion. It wasn’t him. He had gone, but like overexposed film that terrible macabre image of what had been left was now colouring every other version of him she’d known.
She closed her eyes for a moment, and then scrunched them up tight so she got a pain in each temple. She washed the brush out again and went to her little sink to rinse out the jar and add fresh water.
She looked down at her pallet again. Sizing up her image she knew it was time for the sunny splashes of celandine; then it would be the final layering up of greens to texture the grasses and lastly the white lace of cow parsley.
It had really been her dad that pushed to get her into art as a profession. She’d always known that an artist was what she was supposed to be, but as she’d been considered one of the brighter students at school her teachers had tried to force her into the academic subjects. It had taken her dad in all his pot-bellied, chin-whiskered glory, marching down to the school and having it out with the deputy head that had forced the school’s hand. Though he’d never been ‘an arty type’ himself, as he termed them, he’d been devoted to his daughter’s work. He’d even bought her first A-level piece off her for a few bob.
Ten years into selling her work the thrill still hadn’t worn off. It was a curious delight to know that her paintings hung scattered across the country, there for the pleasure of hundreds of different eyes. One of her best memories was of walking the dog one night, occasionally turning to peep into uncurtained front rooms, and spotting one of her own paintings hanging in the centre of a warmly-lit wall. She had no idea who lived in that house but for a moment she felt like she was sitting in there with them.
She rinsed then smoothed down the slick squirrel hair of the wider brush, and turned to the thin springy rigger to provide the final enlivening touches of colour. She worked in shorter, sharper movements, and frequently paused to hold the brush poised ready to strike while she swept her eyes across the paper, gathering up its colours. This bit was always slightly trickier if she wasn’t working from a photo; she’d noticed long ago that you never realise nature’s perfect balance until you try to create it for yourself.
She dabbed in a flash of cow parsley then laid on some fine purplish depth to the grasses below. ‘Done’ she said aloud. She sat back and stretched out her arms and shoulders and rewarded herself with a final sip of tea. She blew gently over the painting’s surface, which was all-but dry anyway as the successive layers had become thicker and sparser.
She slowly peeled the picture and its surrounding brown tape off her painting table and rubbed the gum from her fingertips. Instinctively she looked around her to check no one was looking, then flipped the painting over, took a pencil and in tight, controlled writing, in the very bottom left hand corner, printed ‘For My Dad’.
Never one for show or ostentatious emotions, she wasn’t sure why she’d had this childish desire to dedicate each painting she’d produced since his death to her father. She sincerely hoped no one would ever come across her shy inscriptions; once they were framed up and taped in behind mounts the writing would be obscured anyway.
She eased herself off the chair and turned to pin the painting on the wall along with all the others waiting to be framed up for her next exhibition. Standing back, she eyed her collection of work. ‘Not bad’, she thought, though there was always room for improvement. Always a better or different or more unique way of capturing the world. She walked out and clicked the door shut behind her.
Outside the window the sky reached its full blue strength, and then began to ebb into softer hues. As the day laboured into evening the studio silted up with dusk, and the colours in the paintings on the wall shifted into their muted counterparts. The dusk thickened; scenes shown by the colours trickled out of focus and seeped steadily into each other, blurring to become a single suggestion of skies and fields and plants. Finally night came, and if anyone had walked in they would only have discovered the paintings by running their hand along the wall.
The Galway Review 